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Walter Anderson and His American Contemporaries May 25 - September 16, 2001 |
Click on any image below to view enlarged
Two Men Fighting |
The Worker by Walter Anderson |
Amaryllis |
 Sitting and Rusting |
 Chesty Horse |
Boardwalk Beauties |
Row Houses |
A Country Lane |
Three Trees |
Four Horses by Walter Anderson |
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 Dancer Pot |
 Swimmer Pot |
 Zig Zag Pot |
   Lionesses, Wolves and Monkeys by Walter Anderson |
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 Zinnias |
 Florals by Charles Demuth |
 Water Hyacinth |
 Isadora by Abraham Walkowitz |
 Circus, Gloucester |
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| FOREWORD
The goal of this exhibition—A Modernist Spirit: Walter Anderson and His American Contemporaries – has been to identify the underlying and early commonalities and contrasts that Mississippi’s own Walter Anderson shares with some of the more well-known American modernists. Anderson, as all of his true admirers already know, is deservedly recognized for his huge artistic output, the superb quality of his efforts, and the Ocean Springs, MS, museum that is dedicated to collecting/exhibiting his work and that of his brothers. Yet Walter Anderson’s overall national reputation, the context of his art, and its critical relationship to the work of other important American artists has somewhat eluded us until now. With this exhibition, and on behalf of the Anderson Museum’s Board of Trustees, Executive Director and Staff, I invite you to join us in what we hope will be the first of a series of exhibitions devoted to these topics. The journey of this project has been delightful, yet frustrating, the latter because all the facts and materials are not yet fully amassed. We see this as only the beginning of the overall effort to establish Anderson in his rightful place in the critical history of American art.
‘The Eight,’ an artistic group led by the teacher/painter Robert Henri featured the work of several Philadelphia reporter/illustrators-turned-artists — George Luks, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and William Glackens (represented in the exhibition by the pencil drawing Two Men Fighting, to which Walter Anderson’s illustrative conte crayon drawing The Worker bears striking visual similarities. The Eight’s reporter/artists chose subjects drawn from their days of reportage, often using subjects that ‘were as common as ashcans,’ giving rise to the derisive term for them—‘The Ashcan School.’ The Eight’s artists aptly characterized the brashness and vitality of modern cities while some, like Maurice Prendergast and Gifford Beal, depicted the gaiety of city parks, leisurely pastimes, and/or circus activities (shown in the exhibition with Beal’s Circus, Gloucester). Still others such as Joseph Stella in his watercolor Study for Coney Island and Reginald Marsh in Boardwalk Beauties show us urban dwellers in somewhat less idyllic pastimes in the city. Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), somewhat younger, went a different way, choosing to move away from the city as subject matter and toward depictions of country life and cowboys. His A Country Lane represents his view of an American regionalist’s approach. Some artists—Charles Burchfield, Jane Peterson, and Walter Anderson himself—never embraced the city as subject to any extent. Instead these artists began early in their careers to chose nature’s bounty as subject, and continued this exploration for the rest of their careers. The modernist spirit that flows through Charles Burchfield’s Three Trees, shows itself through the formal elements of the work—the arrangements of color and the flattening of planes. Interestingly Burchfield, who was from Ohio, showed consistently in New York during this early modernist period, and was an exhibitor at the PAFA Annual on at least two occasions during the time that Anderson was a student there. Jane Peterson, whose work is represented in the PAFA collection, drew from life as she created such magnified Plant Forms. The PAFA was an important artistic center for primary exposure and training in the modernist vein – for Anderson and for many other artists as well. Instruction at the Academy followed a prescribed program. Classes were held in Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Illustration, and Mural Decoration. The use of a kind of boldness with color in the Philadelphia School gave rise to an American Fauvism that was a counterpart to French Fauvism. George Biddle captures the wonderful character of American Fauvism with a brilliant color intensity in his Landscape Cuba. In fact, the Philadelphia School of artists, as it was called, was firmly associated with the PAFA, either as students or as teachers or as both (in the cases of Henry McCarter and Arthur B. Carles. McCarter was a student at the PAFA from 1879 to 1885 and spent from 1887 to 1892 in Europe at the height of the Post Impressionist and modernist movements there. His students at the PAFA included Carles, Charles Demuth (shown here with the watercolor Florals), and Walter Anderson, among many others as McCarter taught there from 1902 to his death in 1942. Known for his unusual color juxtapositions and his attempts to paint sounds/music, McCarter professed admiration for the great Europeans Picasso and Matisse. Carles studied at the PAFA from 1900 to 1907 under such outstanding artists as Cecelia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, and McCarter. He won the PAFA’s Cresson Traveling Scholarship in 1907, and lived in Paris from 1907 to 1910 and again in 1912. In 1908, he formed with Steiglitz’ 291 Gallery artists John Marin and Alfred Maurer the New Society of American Artists in Paris. Returning to Philadelphia to teach at the PAFA from 1917 until his dismissal in 1925, Carles was known as a passionate man who “changed addresses frequently, leaving his admirers and the women who doted on him searching for his whereabouts.” Carles (represented in the exhibition by Nude with Red Hair) was known not only as a unique personality, but also as a brilliant colorist. As both a student and friend of Henry McCarter, Carles often competed and cooperated. Both taught Walter Anderson. Though both Carles and McCarter used color magnificently, but McCarter was said to have been in awe of Carles’ facility with color. Carles, McCarter, and another PAFA faculty member Hugh Breckenridge joined together to bring exhibitions of modern art to the PAFA, including Representative Modern Artists in 1920 and Later Tendencies in Art in 1921. These exposures to early European and American modernism created a lasting interest in such art at the PAFA, a situation from which the young Walter Anderson clearly benefited on his arrival in 1924. He used, it seems, his student days in Philadelphia and his European study to do what students have always done—explore, learn, and assimilate, attending the PAFA from 1924 through 1929 except for the year 1927. In that year, he traveled abroad, paid for with his award from the Cresson Traveling Scholarship. The Cresson scholarship was a prestigious honor that had, as its intended purpose, to pay for students’ travel abroad to see artists’ work in galleries and museums. It generally opened Academy students’ eyes to European art, and required that they return to the PAFA the next fall. Anderson saw the most current artistic production of the European moderns (among other things), as he began to build his own unique and personal visual vocabulary. Walter Anderson, while at the PAFA, was an avid draughtsman, reportedly drawing the interior elements of the great 1890s Frank Furness building of the PAFA while sitting on the stairs. Much of his design work and his preference for rows or registers of repetitious designs (see his Four Horses, a blockprint, wall paper designs, and several decorated ceramic pieces in the exhibition) might derive from this exposure. Numerous drawings made from life as Anderson visited the Philadelphia Zoo are shown here—lionesses, wolves, and monkeys. Some of the years following Walter Anderson’s time at the PAFA were spent in New Orleans where he presumably met and knew the work of Will Henry Stevens. Stevens taught art at Newcomb College there for over twenty-five years, lived from 1921 on the MS Gulf Coast, and is represented here at his most modern in an untitled work that depicts Mardi Gras New Orleans. Using the layering of color that is somewhat reminiscent of Synchromism and a kind of Cubistic angular imagemaking, Stevens aptly captured his unique home city. Andree Ruellen’s Clown, New Orleans shows also the richness of that city’s subject matter, though Anderson didn’t seem to embrace that city’s vistas either. Ruellen was one of the Woodstock artists, among whom were the Synchromists Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald Wright. The city of New York, of course, has always nourished ‘the current and the new’ in American art, and this was never more true than in the first three decades of the Twentieth Century. One ‘prime mover’ (by his own estimation and that of others) was the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz. With his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue that he operated from 1905 until 1917, Steiglitz gathered and showed the work of an important group of American modernists that included Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keefe, and Joseph Stella. Even after 291 closed, Alfred Steiglitz continued to have exhibitions in other spaces, to open other galleries, and in short to be an important force of advocacy and support for modernist work, both American and European, until his death in 1946. The bands of color arranged abstractly in Arthur Dove’s watercolor Landscape evoke a comparison with Anderson’s oil Black Skimmer, while John Marin’s fractured Maine Landscape exhibits his unique vision. Charles Demuth (shown here with his still life Florals), was a student of the PAFA from 1905 to 1911, and was influenced by Art Nouveau and the French writer Marcel Proust. Though he exhibited at 291, Demuth was a ‘member’ of several groups as a close friend of Marcel Duchamp of the Arensberg Circle, as a pivotal figure with Steiglitz; and later labeled as a Precisionist. Though not a Steiglitz artist, William Zorach was a longtime friend of Marin’s. Zorach, a native of Cleveland, had come to NYC to study at the National Academy of Design. He also visited Europe where he was taken with the important Post Impressionist work of Paul Gauguin. His Landscape watercolor shows a delicate, yet fauvist color palette. William Sommer, also a native of Cleveland, like Anderson chose to remain outside of New York or Philadelphia. Consequently he is not as well known, but his Nude in a Landscape exhibits a heightened color sense employed in a somewhat cubistic mode. The other pivotal group that coalesced around many modernist painters in New York was the so-called Arensberg Circle. The collector Walter Arensberg held salons and lavish parties at his apartment on West 67th Street in New York, where he brought together artists, poets like William Carlos Williams, and performers like Isadora Duncan (here shown is Abraham Walkowitz’ three pen/ink/watercolor drawings of Isadora). Unofficially headed by Marcel Duchamp from 1915, the Arensberg Circle often included Demuth, Dove, and Stella from the Steiglitz group as well as many more. The tenets of this ‘group’ were centered around the ‘new’ and the ‘modern.’ Other galleries in New York like the Daniel Gallery and the early Macbeth Gallery were also showcases for American modern art of the period. The important aspect to remember was that this work was quite varied, unified only by its departures from the American Art of the nineteenth century. The modernists experimented with the subject matter chosen, with the abstraction of that subject matter, with the layering of color, with the association of all the art forms (i.e. art, poetry, and music), with the fracturing of images, and ultimately with all media that could be used for artistic expression. Many elements that we today take absolutely for granted were initiated at this time. Mabel Dodge, a philanthropist and artists’ patron, held salons in New York in this period as well, and also hosted many of the artists of Steiglitz’ stable at her home in Santa Fe, NM, which she shared with her husband, artist Maurice Sterne (represented in the exhibition by Head of a Checchina and A Native Dancer). The artist Jan Matulka knew and visited Dodge in both New York and Santa Fe. Czech born, Matulka studied at the National Academy of Design in NYC from 1911 to 1916 and traveled to Mexico and New Mexico in 1917 where he painted color memories of the southwest (Pueblos). Even Anderson’s actual cityscapes like his watercolor Row Houses or the black and white drawings of Philadelphia Rooftops or Ducks Over Philadelphia City Hall (all presumably done in Philadelphia when he was a student at the PAFA) have the quiet solemnity of formal still life works without much of the teeming urbanity or back street alleys of New York or Philadelphia. Such gritty depictions of northeastern cities (like C. Bertram Hartmann’s New York Canyons) were favorite subject matter choices for painters of ‘The Eight’ and the Precisionists but not generally for Anderson. One Precisionist work that does have elements in common with Anderson’s Cityscape is George Ault’s Number One Fifth Avenue (Study), a quietly evocative ink drawing of 1933. Most if not all of these artists named are now seen as leaders of early modernism in America during the decade immediately preceding World War I and between the Wars. Even now, Anderson (and perhaps William Sommer and Will Henry Stevens) are not known well enough to be included in surveys of modern art in America. Yet, on the strength of the work alone and not coming from some misplaced local or regional chauvinism, the work of Walter Anderson, Sommer, and Stevens stand up very well. The explorations here in this exhibition show that, except for his personal and family choices and some measure of media bias (even present today), Anderson should and would be on every list of America’s artistic leaders of modern art. He was truly a modernist spirit. – Katherine Lochridge, Guest Curator
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The art of Walter Anderson is a gem containing endless facets to study and appreciate. The more deeply we look, the greater our appreciation for his technical skills, depth of imagination and poetic vision. On May 4, 2001 the Walter Anderson Museum of Art reached its tenth birthday, an exciting decade of nearly fifty exhibitions delving into his artistic legacy. It is fitting that as we begin the Museum’s second decade, we launch an ambitious exhibition series which will place Anderson’s work in context with his creative peers. First in this series, A Modernist Spirit focuses on Anderson’s early years and brings together works on loan from four museums and two private collections. Generous thanks are due to Mary Anderson Pickard, Joan Gilley, and the Family of Walter Anderson for helping to strengthen the exhibition’s thesis and lending works. For her unbridled enthusiasm and passion for the subject matter, heartfelt thanks are due to Katherine Lochridge, Guest Curator, and gracious appreciation to Patricia Pinson, Staff Curator, for her steady hand and insights. We also thank Paul Ehrenfest and D. Frederic Baker for their generous support. Thanks to the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, and private lenders for sharing works from their collections. A Modernist Spirit also features works from the Walter Anderson Museum of Art Permanent Collection. – Clayton Bass, Executive Director Generous thanks to the following exhibition sponsors for providing vital support throughout the year. Mrs. Arthemise Blossman |
