John Steuart Curry

There's an old, World War I vintage song with the line, "How ya gonna keep'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" Couched in humor, it bespoke a serious concern as prairie farm boys fled the family farms in droves to the cities (albeit poor imitations of Paris) and industrial jobs, jazz, bathtub gin, flappers, and families of too many kids crammed into too few rooms of a Chicago tenement. An artist typifying this stereotype was John Steuart Curry. Born in 1897 on a farm just outside Dunavant, Kansas, he grew up as much a part of the land as the corn, wheat, cows and chickens he grew up with. His art training began in Kansas City at the Art Institute there, then moved on to the Chicago Art Institute, Geneva College in New York, and though he didn't see France during the war, he did end up studying in Paris during the mid-1920s. He liked Rubens, Gustave Courbet, and Honore Daumier. Back in the U.S., having seen "Paree," there was no keeping him "down on the farm."

Tragic Prelude, 1938-40, John Steuart Curry

During the good times of the late 1920s, Steuart taught at the New York Art Students League and the Cooper Union. With the onset of the Depression, he traveled with Ringling Brothers Circus for a time before finally returning to the Midwest and an artist-in-residence position at the College of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin. There he came to know fellow Midwesterner, Grant Wood, and painted murals while turning out some of his best regionalist work. Later, his work included a mural in the Capitol building of his home state of Kansas. Tragic Prelude (above) depicted the fiery abolitionist, John Brown in a guise reminiscent of Moses leading his followers to rise up in rebellion against the scourge of slavery.  (Kansas was a hotbed of antislavery violence just before the Civil War.)

Tornado Over Kansas, 1929.
John Steuart Curry

Yet, as they say, you can take the boy from the country, but you can't take the country from the boy, which was largely the flavor of Curry's art career. His most famous painting, Tornado Over Kansas, done in 1929, combines the heroic painting style he found in Rubens with the realism of Courbet and the common decency of Daumier. It depicts a Kansas family fleeing to a storm shelter, mother with an infant in her arms, the children struggling to contain their pets, as a swirling funnel cloud bears down upon their prairie farm. The same year, Curry saw firsthand the devastation of another of nature's horrifying rampages, the Kaw River flood near Lawrence, Kansas, which inspired a series of paintings upon the theme "sanctuary."  The central image in each one was an island, either natural or manmade (usually in the form of a building roof top) completely surrounded by water upon which were stranded various farm animals seeking refuge from the flood.  His 1932 lithograph titled, Mississippi Noah, depicting an African-American family clinging bravely to the roof of a wooden shack, is perhaps the best work in this theme, which preoccupied him intermittently right up until his death in 1946.

Mississippi Noah, 1935, John Steuart Curry

John Ringling

The Ringling Estate, Sarasota, Florida

Except for the artists, no one in the art world is more important than the knowledgeable, cultured, art collector. It makes no difference whether that individual buys the work of living artists or those long dead, the likes and dislikes of this person, and the money represented by his or her tastes is what largely decides whether the work of a given artist is merely "good" or to be considered "great." What the collector is willing to pay at auction determines the "value" of an artist's work and indeed, whether that artist is, in fact, collectible. Sometimes that collector is not, in fact, an individual, but an institution--a museum, or academic organization. But even then, an individual, or group of them, makes the decision to buy and for how much, thus determining the standing of an artist. Quite often individual collectors are fabulously wealthy with more money than they know what to do with. That was certainly the case with one of the most interesting American art collectors of all time. For a while, during the early 1920s, he was reputed to be one of the ten wealthiest men in America. His name was John Ringling.

Abraham Receiving Bread and Wine from Melchizedek, c. 1625, Peter Paul Rubens

When you hear the Ringling name, art probably isn't the first thing that comes to your mind.  Still today, just as it did a hundred years ago, it means first and foremost, the circus. But John Ringling was no crass, exploitative P. T. Barnum. He was a consummate business entrepreneur, and cultured gentleman. He and his wife, Mable, traveled yearly to Europe, not just to recruit new circus acts, but to visit all the great museums on the continent, immersing themselves totally in the great pool of world art. What he didn't know about art collecting, John Ringling learned the hard way, or through the art books he devoured nightly in place of sleep. As one might expect, given his background as a showman, he gravitated toward the Baroque era and especially the work of Peter Paul Rubens. He bought four of the largest paintings Rubens ever created including the massive Abraham Receiving Bread and Wine from Melchizedek (above). Painted in the 1620s at the height of Rubens' career, they were, in fact, cartoons for a series of enormous tapestries commissioned by the sister of the King of Spain. His favorites also included work by Van Dyck, Velazquez, Frans Hals, Poussin, Veronese, and Tiepolo.

The courtyard of the Ringling Museum

John Ringling was born to immigrant parents in 1866, in McGregor Iowa, the sixth of nine children, five of whom became the famous Ringling brothers. Through shrewd management and mergers with other, smaller circuses, including Barnum & Bailey's, the "Greatest Show on Earth" became no idle boast. His personal holdings in real estate, mining, and petroleum gave him the money, during the boom years of the 1920s, to indulge his collecting genius. In just over four years, he purchased over 500 paintings intended from the very beginning to form the bulk of a great museum. Today, that museum exists next to his fabulous $1.5 million mansion (top photo) near the winter home of the Ringling Brothers Circus in Sarasota, Florida overlooking Tampa Bay. The complex also includes an Italian opera theater, imported and reconstructed from Asolo, Italy, and a circus museum, both added by the state of Florida after World War II. The museum itself is a work of art, an Italian style villa with a large sculpture courtyard (above) dominated by a life-size replica of Michelangelo's David.  Ironically however, it was Ringling's passion for art collecting which led directly to his economic downfall. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the circus suffered as did his personal finances, which he'd stretched to the limit in pursuing his dream of creating a great museum. He died virtually penniless in 1936. But despite dire, economic straits during his declining years, contributions from a devoted household staff and circus employees allowed this beloved showman to continue to live in his usual Baroque splendor.

Interior of the Ringling Art Museum, displaying two of the four Rubens paintings.

John Marin

John Marin, 1940

If one were to make a list of famous oil painters from the 20th century, it would be as long as your arm...probably both of them. By the same token, if one were to make up a similar list of famous watercolor painters...well, the fingers of one hand, two at the most, would suffice. Probably at the top of that list would be Winslow Homer, second, or at least not very far down the list, would be the name of John Marin. Though popular among artists for his painterly technique and intimate feeling for nature, Homer is popular with the general public mostly for his basically realistic style. John Marin is comparable in most other ways to Homer, except for a persistent aversion to realism, which would explain why most people have never  heard of him. Yet, back in the late 1940s, Look magazine reported that Marin had been voted by other artists and museum directors as the most important working artist in the United States. A list of honorary degrees, retrospectives, and print reproductions from shortly before his death in 1953 would tend to support this thesis.

Schooner Yachts, Deer Island, Maine, 1932,
watercolor, John Marin

John Marin acutely felt this dichotomy with regard to his appeal.  Alfred Stieglitz, who for all intents and purposes, "discovered" his fellow-American artist during the five years Marin bummed around Europe ostensibly studying art, once confided to Marin, "The reason people don't like your work is it's over their heads." While probably true, in fact, the same could be said, of course, for dozens of other artists working at the time. However, Marin's work was "over the heads" of many of these same artists as well. As abstract as many of Marin's paintings tend to be, the artist had no patience with his peers whose work came strictly "out of their heads." Everything he did was grounded in "seeing." Many of his paintings have a sort of "montage" quality, as if the artist could not for long concentrate on a single aspect of his surroundings but instead, painted first one thing then another, a landscape of cascading details, not unlike a cubist approach, trying to paint one subject from many different viewpoints. In fact, though a contemporary of Picasso, there is much Cubism in Marin's work...this mixed with a hefty dose of Impressionism.

Small Point, Maine, 1932, oil, John Marin

Born in 1870, Marin's mother died when he was nine days old. Raised by his material grandparents in Weehawken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson from New York City, Marin began working with watercolors at the age of eight, and was taking extensive, hunting, fishing, and painting trips to the mountains by the time he was a teenager. However he chose architecture as a career, and worked at it for eleven years before deciding to devote himself to painting. Studies at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Art Student's League, and in Europe developed his talent for painting modest, intimate watercolors of nature...not landscapes in the usual sense...but more like "nature sketches." After a struggle, he came to oil painting, but his real love was watercolor, though many of them displayed a strongly opaque quality, with brilliant, intense, undiluted hues, making them not that unlike oil paintings. Today, no American art museum's collection is complete without examples of Marin's work in both mediums. And, it is to our discredit that some eighty years after Stieglitz proclaimed it "over (our) heads," and some 58 years after the artist's death, much of Marin's work still retains that lofty status.

John La Farge

It is not uncommon in studying the lives of artists to find stories of men and women who became artists against all odds, and then had to struggle with all the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to achieve greatness. Sometimes we even find that the struggle was as much within themselves as with the harsh world in which they lived. It's therefore refreshing to study the life of an outstanding American artists who flies in the face of this stereotype. His name was John La Farge and, as they saying goes, he had everything going for him. There are very few artist of whom I have ever written with whom I would gladly change places, but this man knew what he wanted and worked hard to get it. This man's life was seemingly as flawless as was his art.

Athens, 1894, John La Farge

La Farge was born in 1835 in New York City. He was the oldest of several children in an affluent, well-educated family French immigrants. His education was impeccable, with special attention to literature, French, and his Roman Catholic religion. Drawing lessons came from his grandfather. Initially at least, his art was seen as merely a hobby. He entered college as a law student, only to find, that painting was much more enthralling than torts and contracts. In 1856, he jumped at a chance to quit school and go to Paris where family connections gained him acceptance in the city's literary and artistic circles. There he studied and copied the old masters until his father's death forced his return to the U.S. and another brief bout with law school. By 1859, under the influence of Newport painter, William Morris Hunt, he had decided upon a career in art.

Boston's Trinity Church, interior,
1880s, John La Farge

Even though he was an accomplished easel painter, La Farge is best known for his murals, his art career coming at the height of mural painting in public buildings in this country. His 1894 oil on canvas mural, Athens (above) for Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, is perhaps his most famous. However La Farge's talents also extended to designing stained glass windows (another artistic rage at the time) as well as large-scale interior design projects such as the interior for H. H.  Richardson's Boston Trinity Church (right). This led to commissions for murals and interiors for many other public and private spaces. Having conquered nearly every art at which he tried his hand, in the 1890s, La Farge set off for Japan and the South Pacific to absorb a balance of oriental culture as well. Many Japanese influences colored his work in the latter part of his career. His Polynesian painting (below) is often compared to Gauguin's, who had escaped to Tahiti about the same time. Someone once questioned me, wondering if all great artists led  unhappy, turbulent, often traumatic lives. I told them, no, it just seems that way. Here's one who didn't.

Portrait of Faase the Taupo, 1881.
John La Farge

The Great Statue of Amida Buddha
at Kamakura, 1886, John La Farge

John Frederick Peto

After the Hunt, W. M. Harnett

One of the major differences between art of the 20th century and that of the 19th was not so much an indifference to subject matter, but that it was not the all-consuming element in art that it was during the 1800s. There is a reason for this, of course. In more recent times, we have so many different styles and reasons for painting that often we care more for them than for what the painting depicts. Especially in the major art markets, if the colors, the composition, the texture, the size, and emotional impact of the painting appeals to the art lover, sometimes the subject matter is all but irrelevant. Especially during the second half of the nineteenth century the exact opposite was true. Particularly in that country, there was only one valid style of painting--realism. And, while scale varied a great deal, colors tended to be "true-to-life" and subjects had to be uplifting and pleasant. Pity the poor artist with a dour outlook, a dark palette, and eccentric tastes. Today, it is these qualities we often find quite interesting while looking with contempt upon the "pretty" pictures our ancestors fell in love with.

Still Life with Candlestick, Book,
and Pipe, 1892, John Frederick Peto

The perfect example of this is John Frederick Peto. He was born in 1854 in Philadelphia where he began his art studies in 1878 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. There he studied under the exacting tutelage of Thomas Eakins and the influence of the hometown art icons, the Peale's, most notably Raphaelle and James Peale. It was there also, that he met and became friends with William M. Harnett. Harnett was a fellow student, and it seems to have been his work which set the direction of Peto's painting career, what was known at the time as the "deception still-life," what we could call today by the French term, trompe l'oeil. Early on, Peto began to imitate Harnett's exacting, fool-the-eye still-lifes as both men sought to make their careers, entering competitions, maintaining studios, meeting the right people, and vigorously promoting themselves. Harnett went off to study in Europe and more importantly, learned that pleasant, pleasurable, interesting, objects with positive, uplifting narrative potential made very "likable" paintings. Peto stayed home and never learned this lesson.

Job Lot Cheap, 1892, John Frederick Peto

Consequently after a decade of trying to make the grade, Peto decided that if his work was not to be appreciated by the public, then he would withdraw from the art world and paint what he pleased. In his defiance, his subject matter became, in nineteenth century eyes, even more ugly and pessimistic. However, it is this torn, tattered, discarded, tragic pathos in his work that modern artists and collectors find intriguing. With a resurgence of interest in deception still-lifes during the early years of the 20th century, Peto's work became something of a nightmare for art authenticators due to the man's penchant for nearly finishing a given work, signing it on the back, then abandoning it, or in some case painting over it without re-titling it on the back. Add to this the fact that a large number or Peto's paintings were consigned to an unscrupulous art dealer who faked Harnett's signature upon them (thus enhancing their value), and a whole generation of art experts were implanted with a confused idea of both artists work. Today, the mess has been largely straightened out, and surprisingly, it's now Peto's work which is often the more highly valued of the two.

John Everett Millais

Every painter has horror stories regarding his or her desperate efforts to put down on canvas precisely the image they've imagined in their minds. They range from minor annoyances such as getting the light just right, or the model to cooperate, or the flies to leave the rotting fruit alone in the cantankerous still-life; to major disasters such as the wind blowing over ones easel with it's wet landscape masterpiece. The Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais records the trials and tribulations of just such difficulties while working on one of his best known masterpieces, Ophelia.  Before going on I should note that the Pre-Raphaelites, as a group, were a rather anal-retentive brotherhood of Mid-nineteenth century English painters often more prone to romanticizing the past than painting it. Some of the group's members could count on the fingers of one hand the number of works actually completed during their entire lifetimes. In general, it could be said they were sticklers for detail; and rather the type to give perfection a bad name. Millais was no less so, though on the whole, more talented than most of them; and eventually (once he married and had a growing family to support), broke free from their precisionist style into one more in keeping with earning a living at his trade.

Ophelia, 1851-52, John Everett Millais

Ophelia was painted over the course of approximately nine months beginning around June of 1851 with preliminary sketches which, by July had proceeded to working on location beside a stream known as the Hogsmill River (other sources list it as the River Erwell in Surrey). The painting depicts a fully dressed Ophelia lying beneath the water staring up at the viewer. The background was painted on location over the course of several months with the artist sitting right next to the stream, in the midday sun, under an umbrella. Early on he was presented with a magistrate's summons for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay. Later, after the hay was cut, he received yet another summons for admitting a bull into said field. Further adding to his travails were assorted flies and a couple of pesky swans who insisted upon watching him from exactly the area he wished to paint and going beyond that, eating the very water weeds he was struggling to depict. In chasing them off, he apparently dislodged his easel, painting, and palette from it's precarious position next to the stream, and though his account, in letters to a friend, doesn't spell out the consequences, the young artist seems to have had a thoroughly unpleasant time of it. He noted that "...painting under such circumstances would be a greater punishment for murder than hanging."

However, once the background was done, there still remained the bulk of the painting to complete. Another artist, under such circumstances, would have had his work cut out for him in painting a fully dressed woman lying underwater. Presumably the woman and the water would have been painted pretty much separately. But Millais was a Pre-Raphaelite (at this juncture in his carreer) so nothing would do but that his model, Elizabeth Siddel, should lie out flat on her back, fully dressed, in a shallow tub with only her face and bosom protruding from the water. The water was kept warm by the use of oil lamps placed beneath the tub (probably burning smelly whale oil). This ordeal went on several hours a day for more than four months during the winter of 1851-52. The artist's progress often amounted to little more than a square inch of canvas per day. The agony seems to have been worth the effort however. At a time when critics were pounding all the Pre-Raphaelites, numero uno art critic of the day, John Ruskin, praised the work profusely while fellow Pre-Raphaelite, William Rossetti deemed it the best likeness of Elizabeth Siddel ever painted. Millais went on to a long and distinguished career, eventually becoming president of England's Royal Academy, the same organization that had awarded him a silver medal at age nine.

William Rosetti, photo
by Julia Margaret Cameron

John Ruskin, 1853-54, John Everett Millais

Jean Arp

There isn't much of this type of art work being done anymore, and what little is produced, gets very little respect. But then, neither did it get much respect back in the early 1920s when most of it was produced, except from a loose group of Zurich artists who had fled to Switzerland near the end of the war to escape its trench slaughter madness. They were the dictionary image of what we'd call today a "motley crew" (or perhaps draft-dogers). They included effete young intellectuals such as writers, Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck, the Romanian poet, Tristan Tzara, and the German painter, Jean Arp. There were dozens of others, including musicians, philosophers, sculptors, but most were miscellaneous, bohemian hangers-on who served little function in the group except as enthusiastic, and sometime rancorous audience members. They met in homes, apartments, and cabarets where they made up nonsensical poetry of sounds rather than words, made random noises they passed off as music, argued, sometimes fought, even to the point of a few bloody noses. They called themselves Dadaists.

Mountain Table Anchors Navel , 1925,
Jean Arp

Dada quickly passed with the decade of the 20s. It had, after all, contained the seeds of it's own destruction in its anti-art, antiestablishment, anti-nearly-everything-else dogma. By far the most talented individual in this group was the painter, Arp. He was born in 1887 in Strasbourg (now Austria, but then a German city). The story is told that he discovered his true calling as an artist when he tossed pieces of a torn drawing onto the floor and discovered he'd accidentally created an interesting, even exciting composition. He began making random, as well as carefully arranged to look random collages at roughly the same time his friend, Tzara was doing the same with newspaper words and phrases to create random poetry. It was Dada, but it was also a constructive, positive form of expression.

Torso, 1953, Jean Arp

Today, the Museum of Modern Art in New York displays Arp's Mountain Table Anchors Navel (above) created in 1925 using oil on cardboard with cutouts. Mixing media and blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, Arp moved on to free form pieces of wood cut out on a band saw. They were vaguely biomorphic in shape, glued to cardboard to create compositions somewhat resembling nature as transposed by swirling water or dimly perceived through distorted glass. They were whimsical, attractive, sometimes even stunningly beautiful. As he grew older (he died as late as 1966) he moved into sculpture, carving and polishing his trademark free form shapes into white or black marble. His Torso (right), dating from 1953, today found in the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, is one of his best. There was good reason Dada art got little respect in its time, and good reason it was long ago pronounced dead as an art movement, but Arp and his art sprung from it, and even now, long after his death, his work continues to gain the respect it richly deserves.