THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 – AN ARTIST OF MANY TALENTS
Thursday, September 10, 2020
OUR 153rd ISSUE
OF
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WILLIAM C. PALMER
ARTIST
William Charles Palmer was born in 1906, in Des Moines, Iowa. He studied at the Art Students League under Boardman Robinson, Thomas Hart Benton, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and studied fresco painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France. During the depression he was taken on at 24 dollars a week to paint murals funded by the Public Works of Art Project.
He was a member of the American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, and the Audubon Society. He was also a vice-president of the National Society of Mural Painters. He was director emeritus of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute School of Art in Utica, New York.[3]
Artist William Palmer working on large drawing for History of Medicine murals for Queens General Hospital in his studio. (Photo by Rex Hardy Jr./The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
Archives of American Art – William C. Palmer
DESCRIPTION
As of 2009, this 1938 WPA mural by William Palmer entitled “The Development of Medicine” is located in the Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. It may have originally been installed in the Queens General Hospital (now the Queens Hospital Center).
According to a 1964 interview with the artist:
“It was stated in a recent book on the WPA – that the panel Controlled Medicine was in effect a plea for and propaganda for socialized medicine. This statement is without any basis of fact, and the author never contacted me for my analysis panel. To put the record straight – the mural Development of Medicine was painted to show the ignorance, superstition and fear of “uncontrolled medicine” – the great historical contributions and discoveries which lead up to the scientific and enlightened medicine and hospital care of the 30s, as shown in Controlled Medicine. The theme of this panel shows the equipment, etc., used by the hospital in prevention of disease and the treatment of the patient. Socialized medicine was not in my vocabulary in 1936, and certainly in doing my research for the work it was never considered or mentioned by any hospital authority. The real purpose of the murals at Queens was to serve two main purposes – one, to give the waiting patients in the “in-coming and out-going patients rooms” something to look at and to inform them of the history and background of treatment – and two, Dr. Kogel, the Superintendent of Queens used the panels in this lectures to student nurses on the history of medicine.”
HAMILTON COLLEGE EXHIBITION
2009-2010
William Palmer (1906-87) was the first member of the Hamilton College studio art faculty, and founding director of the Munson-Williams-Proctor School of Art. He studied at the Art Students League with Boardman Robinson, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Thomas Hart Benton, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau where he learned the art of fresco painting. Before coming to Clinton in 1941, Palmer achieved national recognition as a WPA/FAP muralist. William Palmer: Drawing from Life features Depression- and WPA-era figure studies, landscapes, and mural studies from the William C. Palmer collection housed at the Emerson Gallery.
Artist William Charles Palmer was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1906. At eighteen he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York where he studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Boardman Robinson, and Thomas Hart Benton. Palmer described Miller as his “great teacher” but it was Benton who instilled in him a sense of individualism and whose interest in mural painting led him to enroll at École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau to study fresco painting. Painted rooms were fashionable when Palmer returned from France in 1927, and the aspiring designer received several private commissions only to have them unravel when the market crashed two years later. Unable to find work, he went to live with his sister in Canada and brought with him sketches from his annual visits to Iowa. To keep busy he turned to them for inspiration and as a basis for exploring new mediums, which sparked his interest in landscape painting, a subject matter that until then he had not taken seriously but thereafter defined his career.
In 1932 Palmer was invited to participate in the New York division of the Public Works Art Project. He produced easel paintings and murals for the program with some success;* President Franklin Roosevelt chose an oil, Manhattan from the Jersey Meadows, for the White House Collection, and a mural, Function of a Hospital, was selected for the elevator waiting room of the new Queens General Hospital. From 1935-40, Palmer received three more WPA mural commissions for post offices in Washington, D.C., Arlington, Massachusetts, and Monticello, Iowa. Palmer’s last years in New York were spent teaching at the Art Students League and as supervisor of the Mural Department of the City of New York, a WPA/FAP program that employed hundreds of artists, including Arshile Gorky, Edward Laning, Balcomb Greene, Philip Guston, and Ilya Bolotowsky.
In 1941 he was invited to Utica to found the School of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. During the Institute’s fledgling years, he held a joint appointment as Hamilton College’s first member of the art faculty and Artist-in-Residence. He left Hamilton in 1948 to devote himself full time to the Institute where he remained until his retirement in 1971.
Since his earliest days as an artist, Palmer made a daily sketch from memory. Time and again, he turned to these for new ideas. On view in this exhibition are a selection of his sketches and studies, ranging from quick compositional sketches to final studies for prints, paintings and murals from the late ’20s to the early ’40s. It was during this period that, through the circumstances of the times and a personal penchant for change, Palmer began to define himself as an artist. In these early works, echoes of his teachers, especially Miller and Benton, can be found in the faces of the men and women crowding streets and barn dances, and within his lyrical landscapes. One also sees experiments with different mediums, subject matter, and the picture plane that illustrate the beginnings of his unique voice as an artist.
William Palmer died in 1987. Nine years later, Hamilton College received the William C. Palmer Papers from the bequest of his widow, Catherine. The collection, which contains of a lifetime of sketches and sketchbooks, studies, photographs, letters, catalogs, and lecture notes, is jointly housed at the Emerson Gallery and the Burke Library where it is made available for study.
William C. Palmer, Innumerable Shoppers, 1931, Pen and ink on paper. Collection of Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College. Bequest of Catherine W. Palmer
WORKS BY WILLIAM C. PALMER
William C. Palmer, Manhattan Island from the Jersey Meadows, 1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service , 1965.18.34 *This painting was chosen by FDR for exhibition in the White House.
William C. Palmer, Iowa Landscape (mural study, right panel of triptych for Monticello, Iowa Post Office), 1940, watercolor and ink on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, 1974.28.322
William C. Palmer, The Last Snow, 1956, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1985.30.57
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
IDENTIFY THIS
SEND SUBMISSION TO ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM
WINNER GETS A KIOSK TRINKET
WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
New Sign Outside Octagon
Stone and Design to Replicate Octagon Staircase
JOAN BROOKS WAS THE EARLY BIRD AN SHE GETS THE TRINKET
Nina Lublin, Alexis Villefane and Jay Jacobson also got it.
ITEMS OF THE DAY
FROM THE KIOSK
GREAT STUFF FOR ALL OCCASIONS
PATCH UP YOUR LIFE WITH A PATCH
$4-
KIOSK IS OPEN SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 12 NOON TO 5 P.M.
ORDER ON-LINE BY CHARGE CARD AT ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM
EDITORIAL
This edition features another artist who worked on WPA murals in New York Hospitals. Previous edition featured art works in post offices.
The amazing amount of wonderful work produced in the 1930’s show that government can work to produce a great product and works that have lasted for almost a century.
When reading the biographies I have seen that many of the artists studied at the Art Students League. We will discover the Art Students League in the near future.
Today I was at the Board of Elections at 200 Varick Street at train-the-trainer. Yes, trainers get trained. They I go to train the Coordinator. This morning we learned of all the cleaning and sanitizing that will be in place and we have to do to keep the voters and poll workers safe.
Stay tuned for an announcement of a more convenient Upper East Side Early Voting Site. Early voting is from October 24 to November 1st.
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
All image are copyrighted (c)
Roosevelt Island Historical Society
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM.
NEW YORK HEALTH + HOSPITALS
WIKIPEDIA
HAMILTON COLLEGE
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS
CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Copyright © 2020 Roosevelt Island Historical Society, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
Leave a comment