THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020 MORE WONDERFUL ART

By admin

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6,  2020

The

123rd Edition

From Our Archives

Discovering 1934:

The Stories Behind

the Paintings

Part 2
INTRODUCTION

“What kind of highway signs did they have in Minnesota in 1934?” was just one of the questions Ann Prentice Wagner, guest curator of the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, needed to answer to place the paintings in context. “I was asking and answering questions of the kind that I hadn’t had previously,” Wagner told an enthusiastic audience who attended her lecture the other night at American Art. Artwork Image Media – 1975.

The exhibition marks the seventh-fifth anniversary of the Public Works of Art Project, a short-lived New Deal program that began in December 1933 and shut its doors the following June. (The Federal Works Project—same idea, different program–began in 1935 and ended in 1943.)

Artists were employed to create artworks that would adorn public buildings and received weekly paychecks to help keep them going during the Great Depression. In December 1933, thousands of artists became workers. They were free to riff on the theme of “the American Scene.” What’s amazing to me is that artists joined the ranks of everyday workers, and their efforts were valued, and helping them was considered vital to reviving the nation’s soul.

“Artists were proud to be American workers, practical workers who produced something valuable for the country,” Wagner said. “America could have lost a generation of artists, a grim prospect.” And what did they produce? Mostly scenes of American life in the city as well as in the countryside. You get Manhattan but you also get Minnesota. “They were showing you where they came from and where they worked. They were showing you what they knew best,” added Wagner. But they didn’t just document, they often reinterpreted the scene.

They were artists first. With the help of Berenice Abbott’s black-and-white photographs taken in the mid-1930s in New York, for example, Wagner was able to show the actual setting for John Cunning’s Manhattan Skyline. Not only did Cunning remove some coffee-factory signs from the sides of the warehouses and replace them with red brick, he also moved the Brooklyn Bridge to better fit his composition. Cunning, indeed!

In April 1934, five hundred works from the Public Works of Art Project were displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in an event hosted by President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Government agencies could choose artworks for their buildings. The Roosevelts chose thirty-two paintings for the White House, seven of which are on view in the exhibition, including the New York scene Christopher Street, Greenwich Village by Beulah Bettersworth.

KENNETH M. ADAMS   JUAN DURAN  1933-1934

Kenneth Adams grew up the youngest of five children and spent his time copying pictures from books in the public library. After art school and military duty, he moved to Taos, New Mexico, where he opened a studio and joined the Taos Society of Artists, a group of painters from Chicago and New York in search of an ​“authentic” America. Adams became an Associate of the National Academy of Design by the time he was twenty eight and worked for the Federal Art Project in the 1930s. Over the course of his career he completed murals in Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico and held teaching positions at several schools. (Coke, Kenneth M. Adams: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1964)

Charles Goeller would often have passed the dramatic Manhattan vista looking north from East 19th Street along 3rd Avenue to the soaring Chrysler Building. The artist lived just a few doors east of this corner, yet his rendition of the familiar scene is strangely dreamlike.

Like his fellow painters in the precisionist movement, Goeller stressed the clean geometry of the modern city. All elements of his painting direct attention to the rising spire of the Chrysler Building, a vision of an ideal future shaped by American engineering. Such foreground details as trash lying by the curb and scarred red paint where a sign has been removed from a wall seem deliberately introduced to contrast with the flawless edifice in the distance.

Trained in engineering and architecture, Goeller crisply rendered the elevated rail tracks and building facades in precisely receding perspective. He neatly situated pedestrians, like the structures around them, to lead the viewer’s eye back to where the white and silver tower rises against the blue sky. Goeller perfected the shapes in his painting, even removing the gargoyles from the Chrysler Building itself to avoid breaking its sleek outline. 1934: A New Deal for Artists exhibition label Charles Goeller completed several easel paintings while working for the Public Works of Art Project, including this painting of Third Avenue with the Chrysler Building visible in the distance. To enliven the image he included details such as a crumpled newspaper page on the street and a conversation in front of the Laundromat between two New Yorkers, one of whom energetically waves his hands, as if to make a point.

HARRY W. SCHEUCH 
FINISHING THE CATHEDRAL OF LEARNING  1934

Harry W. Scheuch moved from New Jersey to Pittsburgh in 1928 to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He described his new home as a painters town and stayed there his entire life, leaving only once to visit Paris in the summer of 1952. Scheuch created murals for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, and painted many scenes of outdoor life in and around Pittsburgh. (Gigler, Humble Artist in A Painter’s Town, The Pittsburgh Press, April 5, 1981)

CARL REDIN 
   A  MADRID COAL MINE NEW MEXICO   1934
 

Carl Redin fell in love with the vibrant New Mexico landscape and began to paint southwestern scenes. He was part of Albuquerque’s first community of artists that included Ben Turner, Nils Hogner and Carl Von Hassler. Of all of these artists, Redin was the only one who has had a one-man show at the Albuquerque Museum. The Museum featured his work in a show from September 1984 until January 1985. Redin remained in Albuquerque, painting the Sandias, the volcanoes and New Mexican scenes for most of his life. A heart condition forced him to leave New Mexico in 1940. He moved to California and died 4 years later. To quote an article from the Christian Science Monitor written in 1926: Redin’s work has always a happy mood. Whether in the vivid colors of Jemez Canyon or A Mountain Village, he seems to pick with unerring instinct the moods that only an artist could find. Mountains, trees, seasons, adobe houses, Indians—all these are truly a part of the New Mexican life, and these he paints.

Carl Redin was born in Sweden in 1892. As a youngster, he was fascinated with the American west. His talent was recognized at a young age and he was afforded the opportunity to study art for a short period of time in Stockholm when he was 14. He was drafted into the Swedish Navy and when he had 3 years left to serve, he immigrated to the US and settled in Chicago. In 1916, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and, like many others of the time period, decided to “take the cure” at Albuquerque’s Methodist Deaconess Sanitorium. He passed away in 1944.

Born in Russia, brought to the United States in 1906, lived in New York City. Painter who explored futurism, Cubism, and other styles as alternatives to the realism that characterizes his best-known work. Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993)

Russian-born Morris Kantor learned to support himself at a very young age when he came to the United States, in 1906. By the time he was twenty, he had saved enough money working in the garment district to enroll at the Independent School of Art in New York. Kantor went on to become a prominent artist and teacher in New York City, where he taught at the Art Students League for thirty years. He continued to travel and study, and in 1928 married fellow artist Martha Ryther, a recognized master of the difficult medium of painting on glass. A prolific artist, Kantor produced a diverse body of work. He explored many different styles, ranging from abstraction to realism, as seen in Synthetic Arrangement (1922) and Baseball at Night (1934), both in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Ray Strong began painting as a high school student, and following graduation in 1924, Strong entered the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and later studied at the Art Students League in New York City. In the early 1930s Strong returned to San Francisco and, along with Maynard Dixon, Van Sloun, and George Post, formed an Art Students League there in 1934. That same year he became a W.P.A. artist and later executed murals for the 1939 World’s Fair. Strong’s first solo exhibition took place at the Stanford University Art Gallery in 1941. In addition to teaching at the Art Students League that he co-founded, he has taught at Marin Community College and the Art Institute of Santa Barbara. Strong’s paintings usually depict the California landscape. He resides in Santa Barbara, where he has completed mural commissions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and other sites.

Figure and portrait painter. He held portrait commissions from the du Ponts, Helen Morgan and the Lindberghs. His work characteristically combined still lifes with portraiture. Robert Brackman came from Russia to the United States with his family when he was eleven years old. He studied art with Robert Henri and George Bellows in New York, and went on to specialize in portraiture and figure painting. Brackman taught at a number of schools including the Art Students League and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and he lectured widely about art education. He was very conservative in his opinions about art and disdained abstraction, warning his students that ​“it is for the dilettante and good conversationalist, and not for a student who wishes to become a professional artist.” (Bates, Brackman, His Art and Teaching, 1951)

Born in Egypt, brought to New York City in 1914. Artist who worked as a WPA muralist in the 1930s, compassionately portrayed the poor in his own paintings, but later adopted a much more abstract style. Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993)

Guglielmi’s early childhood was spent in Milan and Geneva. When he was eight his parents (his father was a musician) brought him to the United States. They settled in Harlem. Guglielmi began to attend night classes at the National Academy of Design in 1920, while still attending high school. By 1923 he was a full-time student at the Academy, where he remained until 1926.

He met Gregorio Prestopino in a life drawing class and the two first shared an unheated studio, and later moved into better accommodations. The years after he left school were financially difficult, but the depression proved to be an ideological watershed for him; he found its economic devastation a great stimulus to art. Guglielmi went to New England in 1932, the first of eleven summers he spent at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Because of his new commitment to social causes, he viewed this year as the beginning of his life as an artist. During summers in New Hampshire, he found both the solitude and social interaction that ​“helps to form and give direction to our rising native culture,” a characterization that echoed the MacDowell’s stated purpose when establishing their colony in the first decade of the century. They hoped to unite New England’s inspirational beauty with an understanding of the region as the foundation of American culture. He worked for the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s and spent many summers in New Hampshire, where he found the peace and solitude necessary for his painting. Guglielmi’s images of city life expressed the harsh realities of the Depression, showing desolate streets and haggard people. People often viewed his work as unpatriotic, however, and one image caused controversy in 1947 when Look magazine published it with the headline: ​“Your Money Bought These Paintings.”

J. Theodore Johnson is best known for the four murals he created for the Oak Park Post Office in Chicago while working for the Works Progress Administration. The United States government called him in New York and commissioned him to depict a series of historically significant moments in Oak Park’s history. Having studied at the Chicago Art Institute, Johnson saw this as a homecoming, but some community leaders expressed concern that he had not lived in Chicago long enough to depict its history effectively. The murals ultimately won praise, and Johnson exhibited his work widely during his lifetime. Later in his career he taught at the Minneapolis School of Art and the San José College in California.

Agnes Tait was born in New York City in 1894. She enrolled at the National Academy of Design in 1908, leaving in 1913 after the death of her mother. A year later she returned to the academy and took a life drawing class taught by Leon Kroll, whose emphasis on craftsmanship and balanced design was a major influence on Tait’s own work. She finished her training at the academy in 1916. During this time she searched for whatever art-related employment she could find, eventually modeling for the illustrator Tenny Johnson and for George Bellows.

In 1927 she traveled to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, where she learned lithography. The following year she returned to New York, where she had her first exhibition at the Dudensing Galleries. She traveled to Europe a second time in the early 1930s and returned via Haiti and Jamaica, which fostered an interest in tropical scenes. Her first solo exhibition, of portraits, took place in 1932 at the Ferargil Galleries. In early 1934 Tait was employed by the Public Works of Art Project, for which she executed what is considered her most famous work, Skating in Central Park [SAAM, 1964.1.15].

Throughout the 1930s Tait worked on small lithographic editions and mural work. In 1941 she and her husband moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She continued to travel extensively in Mexico, France, Spain, Ireland, and Italy and worked on portrait commissions, book illustrations, mural commissions, and her own paintings and lithographs. In the late 1960s and 1970s Tait limited her output to smaller works depicting mostly cats and flowers.

Painter, printmaker. After graduating from high school, Hennings left his native Pennsgrove, New Jersey, for five years of study at the Art Institute of Chicago. His training continued with two years at the Royal Academy in Munich. Fellow art students in Munich included Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Hennings returned to Chicago, where he made his living as a muralist and commercial artist.

At the urging of former Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, Hennings spent a few months in Taos in 1917. Four years later, he made Taos his permanent home, joining the Taos Society of Artists in 1924. Hennings’s favorite subject was the Indian, whom he often posed singly or in groups against a bright foliage curtain. His compositions, featuring stylized line, decorative patterns, and warm colors, won him twelve national prizes between 1916 and 1938.

THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
NYC FERRY PARKING LOT FOR BOATS 
AT THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD
WINNERS ARE ALEXIS VILLAFANE AND JAY JACOBSON

THIS CAME FROM OUR LOYAL READER JAY JACOBSON….

I just couldn’t pass up the chance to recognize this home of the NYC Ferry in what I recall as the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

When I was a youngster (say, about 1943 or so), Rear Admiral Cowdrey came to command the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then engaged full tilt in building and outfitting vessels for the U.S. Navy during World War II. Admiral Cowdrey and his wife moved into the Commanding Officer’s Quarters at the Yard.

Coming into New York, and the various social events to which the Cowdrey family was invited, was a new experience for them. The Admiral, of course, could always appear in his formal uniform, but Mrs. Cowdrey had lived a more modest life, and felt that she needed to to upgrade her wardrobe to be an active participant with the Admiral at events, many of which involved the sale of War Bonds.

Encore Dresses was the name of a firm owned by my dad, Seymour Jacobson. It sold women’s fashions as “dressy dresses”. These were clothes that could be worn by women who did not have personal dressmakers, and who did their purchasing at Bergdorf’s, at Saks, and, in smaller cities across the country, from the “fine clothing” shops for women.

They were designed, and manufactured in New York City in the “Garment Center”. Different locations in the Garment Center had tenants who sold sports and leisure clothing, and working dresses, skirts and blouses for women who worked then as teachers and as secretaries in offices; dressy dresses were displayed in “showrooms” located in 525 and 530 Seventh Avenue. There, the garments were sold to professional buyers who represented the stores that sold the dresses at retail to women around the country.

I don’t know how it happened, but Mrs. Cowdrey was introduced to my dad, who invited her to the Encore Dresses showroom. Mrs. Cowdrey chose a few dresses; they were altered while Mrs. Cowdrey waited by one of the dressmakers who worked for Encore Dresses, and packed up for her to take with her back to the Navy Yard. When Mrs. Cowdrey asked for the invoice, SJ said that there was no charge, that it was his honor to provide the dresses to her. Mrs. Cowdrey explained to my dad that while she was grateful for the gesture, she could not accept the dresses as a gift.

She told him that Navy Regulations would not permit her, as the spouse of a Base Commander, to accept such an expensive gift. As I have heard the story from my dad, there was an awkward silence. Then, he asked if it were possible to arrange for a trade for the dresses. Mrs.Cowdrey pondered the issue for a bit, and then she said that she thought such a thing could be arranged. And that’s how my parents, my brother and I got to visit the Brooklyn Navy Yard during 1943 (?) as the guests of Admiral and Mrs. Cowdrey. The trip included tea at their home (with ice cream for my brother and me).

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EDITORIAL

After shopping at Macy’s this morning  I decided it was a perfect day to take a cruise. I caught the Soundview Ferry from the NYC Ferry pier on East 34th Street and had a lovely sail up the west channel of the East River, past our island, past  Ward’s Island, Randall’s Island, North Brother and South Brother Islands with great view of Riker’s Island and then the Bronx Whitestone Bridge.  On the return trip, the views were in reverse but a great way to socially distance from the world and admire tour city from afar.

REMINDER: GO TO STORES TO SHOP. THEY NEED YOUR SUPPORT!!!

Judith Berdy

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff


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