William Morris Hunt: A Poetic Mood

William Morris Hunt - La Marguerite - 1853 - Oil on canvas - 46 x 35.5 in. - Museum of Fine Arts - Boston, MAAmerican artist William Morris Hunt (1824-1879) ( After leaving Paris, Hunt painted and used his family connections to establish art schools ) was born in Brattleboro, Vermont into a wealthy, well-positioned family. After three years at Harvard College, he left to join the wave of American artists who traveled to Europe during the nineteenth century. Cities like Munich, Düsseldorf, and Paris offered young artists superior teachers and examples of classical art as well as the latest trends. In Paris, Hunt studied with the influential Thomas Couture, who stressed the importance of sketching and preserving the freshness of one's first impressions. However, Hunt's most important encounter in Europe was with the French painter Jean-François Millet. Living near the village of Barbizon, Millet and several other artists painted rural landscapes infused with a poetic mood. These artists came to be known as the Barbizon School. In his painting and teaching, Hunt brought the Barbizon style back to America when he returned in 1856. His own work included portraits, murals, and scenes of everyday life.

The companionship of Millet had a lasting influence on Hunt's character and style, and his work grew in strength, in beauty and in seriousness. He was among the biggest proponents of the Barbizon school in America, and he more than any other turned the rising generation of American painters towards Paris. After leaving Paris, Hunt painted and used his family connections to establish several art schools.

Preston’s Precisionism

Preston Dickinson - Factory - c. 1920 - Oil on canvas - Height: 75.88 cm (29.88 in.), Width: 64.14 cm (25.25 in.) Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (click photo for larger image)American artist Preston Dickinson (1891-1930) was among those modern artists known as Precisionists. Dickinson grew up in New York, where he worked as an office boy in a marine architect’s firm. One of the partners of the company was so impressed by the young boy’s sketches that he offered to pay for his tuition at the Art Students League. Dickinson studied there for four years, then traveled to France, where he sketched at the Louvre and exhibited at the Salons. On his return to New York, he painted images of Manhattan and the Harlem River while selling socks door-to-door to support himself. He moved to Spain in 1930 but died a few months later from pneumonia, at the age of forty-one.

Precisionism is a smooth, sharply defined painting style used by several American artists in representational canvases executed primarily during the 1920s. While Precisionism can be seen as a tendency present in American art since the colonial period, the style of 20th-century Precisionist painters had its origins in Cubism, Futurism and Orphism. Unlike the artists affiliated with the latter movements, the Precisionists did not issue manifestos. They were not a school or movement with a formal program. During the 1920s, however, many of them exhibited their works together, particularly at the Daniel Gallery in New York City.

Ilya Bolotowsky: An Advocate of Abstraction

Ilya Bolotowsky - Large Blue Horizontal - 1975 - Acrylic on canvas - 28 x 90 in. - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (click photo for larger image)Neo-Plasticism is a Dutch movement founded (and named) by artist Piet Mondrian. It flourished from 1920 to 1940. It is a rigid form of abstraction, whose rules allow only for a canvas sub-sected into rectangles by horizontal and vertical lines, and colored using a very limited palette.

The Russian born American painter Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981) was heavily influenced by the Neo-Plasticism. Bolotowsky was born in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg. After the Russian Revolution, his family moved to Istanbul in 1921, then to New York in 1923. The Neoplastic style of abstraction as defined by Mondrian would prove to be the greatest influence on Bolotowsky's work. He began producing his own strictly abstract art in the early 1930s, and his admiration for Mondrian's approach is evident even in such late works as the one featured here, Large Blue Horizontal. Like Mondrian, Bolotowsky strove to establish a balance of horizontals and verticals that would be simultaneously harmonious and dynamic.

Bolotowsky was a constant and strong advocate of abstract art. He was a founding member of American Abstract Artists, which included American artists as well as European artists living in America, among them Fernand Léger, Joseph Albers, Jean Hélion, and Mondrian himself. Bolotowsky was also a member of The Ten, an artists' group that included Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. (All of these artists are discussed elsewhere on What About Art?)

During the Great Depression, Bolowtowsky created a number of abstract murals for buildings in New York, as part of the WPA’s Fine Arts Project. In 1946, he was appointed head of the art department at Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC, which ceased operations in 1957. This was the first of many teaching positions Bolowtowsky would hold throughout his career.

Paul Cadmus: Pushing the Envelope

Paul Cadmus - Gilding the Acrobats - 1935 - Oil and tempera on masonite - 36 3/4 × 18 3/8 in. - Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York, NYMagic Realism is an American style of art with Surrealist overtones. The art is anchored in everyday reality, but contains elements of fantasy and wonder. The term was later also applied to the literary works of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez.

One of the artists associated with this movement was Paul Cadmus (1904-1999). A native New Yorker, Cadmus began his art studies at age 15, at New York City’s National Academy of Design and then later at the Art Students League. He landed work at an advertising agency, and later traveled with his partner, artist Jared French, to Majorca, in Spain where he created two of his better known paintings, Shore Leave and YMCA Locker Room (both 1933). Upon returning, Cadmus painted for the Public Works of Art project. It was during this time that he created The Fleet’s In! (1934). This was one of a number of works by the artist that were controversial. A work of social satire, it depicts sailors on shore leave and contains elements of prostitution, homoeroticism, and drunkenness. The work infuriated navy officials, and was pulled from an exhibition in Washington, D.C., in 1934. It was not displayed publicly again until 1981.  

The work featured here, Gilding the Acrobats, “reenacts literally the experience of painting the figure with thinly veiled homoeroticism. In an era when homosexual behavior was criminalized and homoerotic imagery was intensely policed, gay artists like Cadmus turned frequently to circus performers and athletes as the few socially permissible subjects that offered the opportunity to lavish attention on the male body.”

Winold Reiss: A Unique Understanding of America

Winold Reiss - Portrait of Langston Hughes - c. 1925 - Pastel on illustration board - 30 1/16 x 21 5/8 in. - National Portrait Gallery - Smithsonian Art Museum - Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)German born American artist Winold Reiss (1888- 1953) was primarily known for his portraits of Native Americans and African Americans.

He attended art school in Munich, where he learned to work in the style known as Jugendstil (a German version of Art Nouveau). He left for the United States in 1913 filled with romantic idealism about Native Americans and the vast Western frontier.

In 1924, Reiss was commissioned by Survey Graphic magazine to capture the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance (discussed elsewhere on What About Art?) with portraits of the residents of Harlem in New York City. Among his many subjects was the poet, Langston Hughes.

Hughes was a trailblazer, not only for black writers but also for his ability to force his way into mainstream American literature. Although white intellectuals projected their racial fantasies and preconceptions onto African Americans, seeing them as a way of revitalizing a sterile culture by injecting a dose of the "primitive," Hughes focused on a deep commitment to African American history, treating the subject with the framework of modernist poetry.  

Viewing and studying the work of Winold Reiss presents a series of challenges. To understand this remarkable artist, who came to America with a unique sense of what this country was, is to challenge our own preconceptions about what American art is and should be.