Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art at the Jewish Museum, New York

Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art 

Jewish Museum, New York City
October 18, 2019 - February 9, 2020

Reviewed by Ed Voves
Original Photography by Anne Lloyd

The walls of the special exhibition gallery at the Jewish Museum in New York City are currently hung with art works by many of the greatest American painters of the first half of the twentieth century. Major works by Charles Sheeler and John Marin are featured in the distinguished company of Arthur Dove, Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence. Displayed with these masterpieces of Modernism are equally extraordinary works of American folk art. 

                                                    
                                                       Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)                                               Gallery view of the Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art exhibition

Strolling through the exhibition, Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art, you will be greeted by the improbable company of an iron horse weather vane, a "key and saw" trade sign, one of the earliest American portraits, painted by the "Gansevoort Limner" around 1735, and other rare specimens of Americana. I was especially impressed by the hen pheasant weathervane, likely made in New England around 1875. This wondrous creature  seemed about to take flight in the exhibition gallery right before my eyes.

      Anne Lloyd, Photo 2019  

Unknown Artist, Hen Pheasant Weathervane, ca. 1875

These enchanting, hand-crafted objects were not works of "art" according to the tastes and definitions of the 1920's and 1930's when they were first featured at a trend-setting New York City gallery. Nor would you expect them to have been displayed in close proximity to paintings by Stuart Davis. Yet, on second thought, Davis struggled for acceptance during those years, so this gallery owner, who displayed America's folk art and modern art, was indeed a visionary.

The Gansevoort Limner (possibly Pieter Vanderlyn), Miss Van Alen, ca. 1735

Stuart Davis, Little Giant Still Life, 1950

The most notable feature of the Jewish Museum exhibition, however, is not the abundance or variety of major art works. Rather, it is the palpable sense of "presence" of the American businesswomen who bought, sold and treasured these talismans of American creative genius. Edith Gregor Halpert, owner of the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village from the 1920's to 1970, died a half century ago but she is very much a spiritual force at the Jewish Museum.

There is much more, however, than the resonance of Halpert's extraordinary life and career to experience at the Jewish Museum. Over 100 works of art are on view, including several sensational paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe. In the Patio, IX, a virtually abstract work by O'Keefe, was one of the favorite paintings of Halpert's personal collection. 

                                                   

                                                      Anne Lloyd, Photo 2019                                                View of the Edith Halpert exhibit, showing Georgia O’Keeffe's In the Patio, IX, 1950

With three weeks left to go, this intelligent, brilliantly curated - and long-overdue -  exhibition is a "must see" retrospective of Halpert and her era. 

Halpert was one of the first to grasp the deep links between the everyday artifacts and memorabilia of early America and sophisticated modern art. Contemporary museum practice places seemingly unrelated works of art, side-by-side, to promote "dialogue." Halpert, contrasting a flower-decorated baptismal certificate, created around 1805, with cutting-edge twentieth century paintings, pioneered that concept decades ago.

                                                    Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)                                                         Birth & baptismal certificate, attributed to Joseph Lochbaum, ca. 1805,                                                  and Georgia O’Keeffe's Poppies, 1950

Edith Halpert (1900-1970) is not a name most Americans - even art lovers - will recognize. The exhibition at the Jewish Museum will hopefully make her contribution better known.  Halpert championed American art and artists at a time when the eyes of the American art world were chiefly focused on the avant garde in Europe.

                                                Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)                                        
                    Samuel Halpert's Portrait of Edith Gregor Halpert,1928                 

Edith Halpert was born in Odessa, Russia, emigrating with her family to the U.S. to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms of Tsarist Russia. Halpert's life-story is a classic illustration of the contributions of immigrants to the American Story, especially her pivotal role as a champion of art created in the U.S.

Halpert opened the Downtown Gallery in 1926, in partnership with her friend, Berthe Kroll Goldsmith. Initially called Our Gallery, the name was changed a year later. With so much of the New York art scene situated in midtown Manhattan, Halpert and Goldsmith were swimming against the tide in more ways than one. The Downtown Gallery, from its start, was dedicated to American artists, both living and deceased exemplars of the culture of the United States.

The Downtown Gallery, ca. 1939, photo from the New York City Municipal Archives 

The Downtown Gallery was a pokey little place, located at 113 West 13th Street in the "Village." It was a very American-style, "do-it-yourself"  enterprise. 

As noted earlier, Halpert had plenty of business smarts. She started working at age sixteen, with remarkable success in the marketing department at Macy's, as an efficiency expert for several New York garment firms and then at S.W. Straus Bank, where she was appointed to the firm's board of directors.

This sensational string of achievements all took place before Halpert was twenty-five years old. However, she had nurtured a love of art since childhood, taking art lessons as a young teen. She married an artist, Samuel Halpert, who strongly encouraged her to focus on art at the expense of her business career. 

Against all expectation, given her dazzling rise in corporate America, Halpert took the plunge into the risky world of fine art sales. From the start, her insight into creative talent was astute, "on-target." Indeed, it might appear that Halpert marketed safe, conventional artists. When we see works by Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis today, it is easy to forget the revolutionary aspects of their work during the early years of the Downtown Gallery.

                                                   Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)                                                       Gallery view of the Edith Halpert & the Rise of American Art exhibition,                                           showing Charles Sheeler's Americana, 1931

Samuel Halpert died in 1930 and Edith Halpert bought-out her partner, Berthe Goldsmith, in 1935. Except for her beloved dachsund assistant, Adam, Halpert was now the sole guiding force of her enterprise. This enabled her to continue to focus on American art and artists.

Despite her independent status, Edith Halpert, remained a team player. In 1931, she somehow found room in the same small building to open the American Folk Art Gallery, collaborating with Holger Cahill. Only a few short years later, Cahill was to play a major role in American cultural history as the head of the Federal Art Project during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

Halpert supported and marketed major, but struggling, artists during the decade of the Great Depression. One of Halpert's major clients was Abby Rockefeller. Halpert used her "in" with Mrs. Rockefeller to secure commissions for Charles Sheeler at Colonial Williamsburg, under construction during the 1930's with financial support from the Rockefeller family.

Halpert also mentored emerging talent. She dedicated considerable effort - and belief - in championing African American artists, decades before it became a fashionable social-justice cause. 

Jacob Lawrence, The Music Lesson, 1943

Horace Pippin, Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1943 

Both the modernist style of Jacob Lawrence and the folk-art conventions of the paintings by Horace Pippin won Halpert's support, thus validating the premise of her marketing strategy, but more importantly of her social conscience.

“Our gallery has no special prejudice for any school," Halpert declared. "Its selection is directed by what’s enduring—not by what is in vogue.”

Halpert's eye for talent enabled her to judge artists without regard to "race, creed or color" long before that became a socially-correct phrase. For Halpert, it was a call to action and in 1941, she organized a major exhibition, American Negro Art, 19th and 20th Centuries. Held at the Downtown Gallery, this was the first show devoted to African-American art at a commercial gallery. Halpert donated funds raised by the exhibit to the Negro Art Fund.

It is noteworthy, however, that there are few masterpieces by post-World War II artists on view in the Jewish Museum exhibition. Halpert, like other great owners such as Alfred Stieglitz and Ambrose Vollard,  pioneered a revolution in the arts but, later in life, experienced difficulty in making the transition to the ongoing, ever-changing scenario of Modernism. Halpert certainly understood and appreciated abstract art but her focus as a gallery owner remained rooted in the art of 1920's and 30's

The remarkable 1952 photo of Halpert, taken by Life Magazine's Louis Faurer, shows her in the foreground like a commanding general. A group of "proteges," who look more like loyal retainers, maintain a discreet interval behind her. None of the artists - Charles Oscar, Robert Knipschild, Jonah Kinigstein, Wallace Reiss, Carroll Cloar, and Herbert Katzman - are "household" names today.

Louis Faurer, for Life Magazine, Edith Halpert at the Downtown Gallery, 1952

Halpert did plan her moves on the art scene like a bold commander. In 1927, with tactical flair, she launched an annual sale of modestly priced prints to entice new collectors into the art market. The print sales were held in December, for those in the gift-giving mode. The works of major print makers, Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton, were featured along with talented, but underappreciated figures like Louis Lozowick and Wanda Gag.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)

 Thomas Hart Benton's Going West (Express Train), 1934

It says a great deal about Edith Halpert's vision of American art and American society that one of the artists she did make into a famous name was Edward Hicks (1780–1849). The Pennsylvania Quaker had painted the now universally acclaimed Peaceable Kingdom series during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Sixty-two versions of Peaceable Kingdom are known to exist today.

Almost every major American art museum has a Hicks Peaceable Kingdom in its collection. The example below, from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, was a gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, 3rd. It was one of several versions of Peaceable Kingdom which Halpert listed on her inventory at the Downtown Gallery.

Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, ca.1846

What makes this otherwise standard gallery transaction worthy of note? Halpert was the first person in the American art world to realize the "enduring value" of Hicks and his now iconic paintings. In December 1931, she presented an exhibition entitled American Ancestors which prominently displayed Peaceable Kingdom. Prior to this landmark exhibition, Hicks was virtually unknown. 

Halpert had been introduced to American folk art by the great Polish-born sculptor, Elie Nadelman, who had built up a private collection of these American "primitives." Several of Nadelman's own works are on view in the Jewish Museum exhibition, which is only fitting as Halpert featured his sculptures at the Downtown Gallery.

                                                 Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)                                              Gallery view of the Edith Halpert exhibit, showing Elie Nadelman's Circus Performer, 1920–25 (left) and John Storrs' Study in Architectural Forms, 1927

If Halpert played a pivotal role in establishing the reputation of Edward Hicks and supporting Elie Nadelman, she performed similar acts of recognition for other artists as well. African-American artists, American women artists, American print-makers - all received powerful support from Edith Halpert at the Downtown Gallery.

Halpert died in 1970. Her niece tried unavailingly to continue operating the Downtown Galley.. In 1973, almost a half-century after it opened, the Downtown Gallery (by then relocated to midtown Manhattan) closed its doors forever.

A moving - and entirely accurate testimonial for Edith Halpert was delivered by sculptor, William Zorach:

Edith Halpert was always full of ideas and projects. She didn’t have to depend on anyone. She did not follow in the footsteps of others; she did not take the easy way of promoting and selling European art where the path was clear and well trodden. She set out to promote American art because she believed in it and realized that if this country was ever to have an American art it had to come out of American artists.... This she made her goal and she has stuck to it with a single-minded devotion. American art owes her a great debt. 


***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 
Original photos, copyright of Anne Lloyd, all rights reserved                                                                                          
Images courtesy of the  Jewish Museum, New York City 

Introductory Image:

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019) Gallery view of Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art, showing Henry Leach's Liberty weathervane pattern, 1879. Shelburne Museum, Vermont, museum purchase, acquired from Edith Halpert, the Downtown Gallery

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019) Gallery view of the Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art exhibition, Jewish Museum, New York City

The Gansevoort Limner (Possibly Pieter Vanderlyn, ca. 1687 - 1778) Miss Van Alen, cs. 1735,  Oil on canvas: 79.2 x 66.4 cm (31 3/16 x 26 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art. Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch

Stuart Davis, Little Giant Still Life, 1950. Oil on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, John Barton Payne Fund Artwork © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photograph by Katherine Wetzel.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)  View of the Edith Halpert exhibition, showing Georgia O’Keeffe's In the Patio, IX, 1950.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)  Birth & baptismal certificate of Jacob Bosshaar, attributed to Joseph Lochbaum, ca. 1805 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, promised gift of Joan and Victor Johnson) and Georgia O’Keeffe's Poppies, 1950. (Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley)

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019) Samuel Halpert's Portrait of Edith Gregor Halpert, 1928. (Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, gift of Joseph M. Erdelac)

The Downtown Gallery at 113 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village, ca. 1939. Photo from the New York City Municipal Archives. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)  Gallery view of the Edith Halpert & the Rise of American Art exhibition, showing Charles Sheeler's Americana, 1931. (Metropolitan Museum of Art,  Edith & Milton Lowenthal Collection, bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal)

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2001) The Music Lesson, 1943, from The Harlem Series. Gouache on paper New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, gift of the Association for the Arts of the New Jersey State Museum

Horace Pippin (1888-1946) Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1943. Oil on fabric Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, museum funds; Friends Fund; bequest of Marie Setz Hertslet, museum purchase, Eliza McMillan Trust, and gift of Mrs. Carll Tucker, by exchange. 

Louis Faurer, (Life Magazine) Edith Halpert at the Downtown Gallery, 1952. Photograph © Estate of Louis Faurer.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019)  Thomas Hart Benton's Going West (Express Train), 1934. (New York Public Library)

Attributed to Edward Hicks (1780-1849), Peaceable Kingdom, ca.1846  Oil on canvas. De Young/Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, 3rd.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019) Gallery view of the Edith Halpert exhibition, showing, at left, Elie Nadelman 's Circus Performer, 1920–25 (Colby Museum of Art)  Colby College, Waterville, Maine) and John Storrs' Study in Architectural Forms (Forms in Space), 1927,(Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas

Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950

Philadelphia Museum of Art

April 18—September 3, 2018

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Modern art in the United States came of age between 1913 and 1951. These two years were highlighted by art exhibitions of seminal importance, both held in New York City.  The controversial Armory Show of February 1913 shocked an America still clinging to the moral certitudes of the Victorian Age. Nearly four decades later, the Ninth Street Show, held between May 21-June 10, 1951, marked the triumph of the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School.

A great deal of American art was created in between these two red-letter dates. The range and variety of art produced during those crowded decades is truly impressive, as can be seen in the  recently-opened exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 

The works of art on view in Modern Times are almost entirely drawn from the collection of the  Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). A few come from a private collection which has been promised to the PMA, but there can be little doubt about the exceptional caliber of the museum's holdings of American art. 

Many of these works came to the PMA during the cash-strapped 1930's and 1940's. The head of the PMA at that time, Fiske Kimball (1888-1955), used his limited resources to buy or to encourage donations of then contemporary art. The payoff for Kimball's astute collection strategy can be seen in this excellent exhibit.

Modern Times is a comprehensive and thoroughly enjoyable examination of how American art reflected, rejected  and retooled the accepted ideals of society in "these United States." It is brilliantly curated by Jessica Todd Smith. As an added touch, period clothing and artifacts, such as flapper dresses and Prohibition-era cocktail shakers, are used to complement the art on display.  

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Jessica Todd Smith, Curator of the Modern Times exhibit

A key work of the exhibit is Georgia O’Keeffe's Red and Orange Streak. Painted in 1919, shortly O’Keeffe moved to New York City, it is both an abstract and a realist work of art. O'Keeffe painted it as an homage to the Texas plains where she had lived prior to moving to the East Coast. O'Keeffe took nocturnal walks, observing the dazzling displays of lighting above the darkened expanse of the prairie. 

Such "special effects" in nature are impossible to depict in terms of absolute realism. In fact, no such state exists is nature because the real impact is felt, indeed co-created, in the imagination of the viewer. 

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red and Orange Streak, 1919

O’Keeffe acknowledged this in letter to a friend, noting that “the whole thing—lit up—first in one place—then in another with flashes of lightning—sometimes just sheet lightning—and sometimes sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across—I . . . sat on the fence for a long time—just looking at the lightning.”

Here we can see the process at work that informed O'Keeffe's often-quoted belief that, "nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things."

O’Keeffe's Red and Orange Streak came to the PMA in 1949, part of her generous endowment of art works by herself and by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, who had died in 1946. The PMA is rich in works by both artists and this no doubt helped the museum recently secure a vast archive of photos by Paul Strand, Stieglitz' versatile colleague.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of the Modern Times exhibit, showing works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Hills and Bones (1943) and From the Lake, No. 3 (1924)

With several of her works on view, we are able to appreciate O'Keeffe's trajectory as an artist and that of twentieth century American art as a whole. More famous for her landscapes of New Mexico, such as Red Hills and Bones (1943), O'Keeffe also painted works evoking the backwoods feel of Stieglitz' summer home at Lake George, New York. What makes this 1924 painting, From the Lake, No. 3, so significant is that O'Keeffe pointed in the direction that American mainstream art would take, leading to the Ab-Ex paintings at the Ninth Street Show of 1951.

The transition from realism to abstraction was but one of the seismic shifts which occurred in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. The Armory Show certainly led to the efforts of Stuart Davis during the 1930's to "strip a subject down to the real physical source of its stimulus" and then to the 1950's abstraction of Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock.

Stuart Davis, Something on the Eight Ball, 1953-1954

Realism, however, never entirely lost out to Abstraction. Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and O'Keeffe herself maintained figurative art as a force to be reckoned with. The truth about America's search for an answer to the challenges of the twentieth century, in art and in society, is that there was no one solution, no defining creed of Modernism. Rather, there were many.

During this period of bewildering change, American society crossed the divide from regionalism to a nationalistic identity, from a solidly White Protestant moral code to an acceptance of diversified ethnic ideals. For the first time, the creative talents of African Americans and women secured a beachhead on the New York-East Coast art scene.

Horace Pippin, The Getaway, 1939

Major African American artists like Beauford Delaney, Dox Thrash and Horace Pippin figure prominently in Modern Times. These pioneering artists were literally heroic figures. Pippin, crippled in his right arm by a wound suffered in World War I, taught himself to paint in a vigorous folk style. His works, evoking the rural atmosphere of West Chester in the Philadelphia suburbs, offer an interesting counterpoint to a very different painter from that area, Andrew Wyeth, who is represented in the exhibit by farm scene as well.

Dox Thrash, likewise wounded in World War I, was a gifted painter and a superlative print maker. His powerful images, especially in this latter medium, celebrated African American life at a time when it was all but marginalized by the dominant White culture .

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Beauford Delaney's Portrait of James Baldwin, 1945

Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) was possibly the most talented of the African American artists on view in the PMA exhibit, as his striking portrait of the writer James Baldwin testifies. Delaney however had the bad luck to begin his career just as the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance were cut short by the Wall Street Crash. After years of struggle and hardship, he eventually emigrated to France in the 1950's.        

The role of women in the visual arts is also surveyed in Modern Times. However, the numerous works by Georgia O'Keeffe dominate this aspect of the exhibit and the absence of talented female photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Berenice Abbott is a further weak point. 

A more questionable feature of Modern Times is the lack of art related to the World Wars and the economic collapse of the 1930's. In terms of the impact on the lives of America's people between 1910 to 1950, the global conflicts had powerful and enduring effects. So too did the Great Depression. Yet, there are few direct references to these events.

Man Ray, A.D. 1914, 1914

World War I does figure in two major paintings in the exhibit. Both, however, require considerable effort to interpret before their allusions to the horrors of 1914-1918 can be appreciated. In A.D. 1914, Man Ray posed the combatants, men and horses, in a cubist style which directly acknowledges works from the 1913 Armory Show, especially Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

More indirectly - and ultimately more emotionally affecting - is Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), created by Marsden Hartley in 1915.

Marsden Hartley, Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), 1915

Hartley lived in Berlin at the outbreak of 1914-1918 war. Berlin was both the capital of the militaristic German Empire and the leading city of Gay culture in Europe. Hartley's lover, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, was killed in the opening campaign of World War I. In homage to his fallen companion, Hartley created a series of brightly-hued works, masterpieces of human sentiment and of skillful layering of meaning. 

These paintings are essentially painted colleges, grouping examples of German military insignia, patriotic memorabilia, cult-like symbols and cryptic allusions to von Freyberg's identity. The toy horse for instance refers to von Freyberg's branch of the army, the cavalry. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse)

Von Freyberg was killed on October 7, 1914 at a small French town called Gommecourt, not far from the English Channel. The German and Allied forces were engaged in an attempt to outflank each other called the "Race to the Sea." Neither won and both armies, upon reaching the Channel, began digging trenches. The horror of the Western Front had begun.

This excursion into military history is significant because it reminds us how all of the trappings of military glory, which were held to be important before 1914, were now utterly useless. The medals and insignia, which Hartley painted with such vibrant energy, served no purpose except as talismans to cherish the memory of the dead.  

Hartley's Painting No. 4 did exactly that, offering a testament to the Lost Generation of World War I - and II. The lack of similar examples of art from World War II is not such a great omission after all. In fact, World War II produced few great works of visual art, just as the poetry of the 1939-1945 conflict never equaled the verse of 1914-1918.

The theme of Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 transcends the specific events of the twentieth century, even such an important one as World War II. How the people of the United States conceptualized the industrialized, urban culture which increasingly pervaded every aspect of their lives is the theme of this provocative exhibit.

Wharton H. Esherick, Of a Great City, 1923

The Philadelphia artist Wharton Esherick created a memorable expression of the challenges posed by the sensory overload of modern life. In the wood engraving, Of a Great City, Esherick shows the novelist Theodore Dreiser almost buried by an avalanche of cultural objects, books, music, works of modern art. Below in the concrete canyon is an ant-like stream of humanity. How can we preserve our individuality under such circumstances?

In political terms, the answer was provided by the title of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression-fighting program, the New Deal. Bold legislative and economic initiatives were tried, but never a fundamental realignment of political power. 

Art in the United States emphasized similar concepts, ideals that espoused the "new", the "efficient," the "visionary."  When you look at the PSFS Building in Philadelphia, the first International-style "skyscraper" built in the U.S., you see all these Modernist attributes in place.

Lloyd Ullberg, PSFS Building, Philadelphia, c.1932 - 1933

Yet, when you reflect upon the clean, austere lines and the soaring reach of the PSFS building, you realize that this treasure of American architecture has more in common with the wide-open prairie sky that Georgia O'Keeffe saw than with the European ideals of the Bauhaus.

This is the great lesson of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's superb exhibit. No matter how "thoroughly modern" America became during the first decades of the twentieth century, it remained America First.

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Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                Photos courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Anne Lloyd

Introductory Image
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883 - 1965) Pertaining to Yachts and Yachting, 1922. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 1/16 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Margaretta S. Hinchman, 1955-96-9.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887 - 1986) Red and Orange Streak, 1919. Oil on canvas, 27 x 23 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe for the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987-70-3. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of Modern Times exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, showing works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Hills and Bones (1943) and From the Lake, No. 3 (1924)

Stuart Davis (American, 1892 - 1964) Something on the Eight Ball, 1953-1954. Oil on canvas, 56 × 45 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Adele Haas Turner and Beatrice Pastorius Turner Memorial Fund, 1954-30-1. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York

Horace Pippin (American, 1888 - 1946) The Getaway, 1939. Oil on canvas, 24 5/8 x 36 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Daniel W. Dietrich II, 2016-3-3.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Beauford Delaney's Portrait of James Baldwin, 1945. Oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased with funds contributed by The Daniel W. Dietrich Foundation in memory of Joseph C. Bailey and with a grant from The Judith Rothschild Foundation, 1998-3-1

Man Ray (American, 1890 - 1976) A.D. 1914, 1914. Oil on linen: 36 7/8 × 69 3/4 inches (93.7 × 177.2 cm) © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Philadelephia Museum of Art # 1944-90-1 A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1944

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877 -1943) Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), 1915. Oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 31 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949-18-8

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), 1915.

Wharton H. Esherick (American, 1887 - 1970), Of a Great City, 1923. Wood engraving, image: 9 15/16 x 6 5/16 inches, sheet: 11 7/16 x 7 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund from the Carl and Laura Zigrosser Collection, 1979-12-11.

Lloyd Ullberg (American, 1904-1996) PSFS Building, Philadelphia, c.1932 - 1933. Gelatin silver print, image and sheet:10 x 7 3/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1999-121-3.

World War I and American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

World War I and American Art 

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 

 November 4, 2016–April 9, 2017 

New-York Historical Society, New York, NY 

May 26, 2017–September 3, 2017 

Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN

October 6, 2017–January 21, 2018 

Reviewed by Ed Voves

For the United States, the First World War began in April 1917 with flags and banners waving. The corpse-strewn conflict ended in November 1918 with the Stars and Stripes covering the coffins of countless Americans killed in battle.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia has just opened a major exhibition, World War I and American Art. This revealing display of paintings, sculpture and propaganda posters investigates the role of art - and advertising - in wartime. The exhibit will later travel to the New York Historical Society and to the Frist Center in Nashville, Tennesee. 

Art played a huge and controversial part in the war efforts of all the major belligerents between 1914 and 1918. The American experience of World War I followed in the footsteps of Great Britain, France, Germany and the rest of embattled Europe. What occurred in August 1914 was repeated in April 1917.

Childe Hassam, Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, 1918, 1918

Images of drums and bugles, marching bands and inflammatory propaganda fill the opening galleries of the PAFA exhibit. And there are flags. Lots of flags, as in the brightly-hued, monotonous paintings of Childe Hassam. 

The "Big Parade" was followed by massive, industrial-age slaughter. A little-known painting, The Devil's Vineyard, presents a view of "No Man's Land." This was the killing ground between the rival lines of trenches where futile, anonymous death befell millions.

Harvey Dunn, The Devil’s Vineyard

The British poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in one of the last battles of the war, described the carnage in his unforgettable Anthem for Doomed Youth:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?                                                                    Only the monstrous anger of the guns.                                                                           Olympic the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle                                                                               Can patter out their hasty orisons.                                                                                       No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;                                                             Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—                                                                     The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;                                                                     And bugles calling for them from sad shires.  

Under conditions like these, it took a lot of prodding to get the American people to join the Allied war effort. The key event in the propaganda campaign took place in May 1915 when a German submarine sank the British passenger liner, Lusitania, without warning. The death toll included 128 Americans, many being women and children.

The United States avoided war in 1915 when the Germans briefly suspended further submarine attacks made without prior warning. The damage to Germany's reputation was already done as can be see in the military recruitment poster which shows a Madonna-like mother and child drowning in the depths of the sea, victims of a U-Boat attack.

 Fred Spears, Enlist,1915

This poster by Fred Spears was commissioned, not by the United Stated government, but by a group called the Boston Committee of Public Safety. Where Americans were to enlist, given the continuing U.S. neutrality, the poster does not say. Many Americans did serve in France before 1917, some in the famed French flying squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille.

There was a strong counter-current of opinion against rushing to war, despite the Lusitania incident. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who who helped engineer the war against Spain in 1898, opposed the U.S. joining the Allied camp in 1915 and tried to undermine support for Britain. Hearst's most talented cartoonist, Winsor McCay, was forbidden to publish anti-German illustrations in the Hearst publications.

McCay found a way to outmaneuver Hearst. McCay had created the pioneering animated cartoon, Gertie the Dinosaur, in 1914. On his own initiative and expense, McCay drew and produced an animated depiction of the sinking of the Lusitania. One of the most vivid images in McCay's account of the tragic disaster showed Spear's mother and child sinking to the bottom of the sea.

McCay's 12-minute animated film is on view in the PAFA exhibit. It is a sensational work, years of painstaking effort in the making. The Sinking of the Lusitania did not appear until 1918, after the U.S. had entered the war. Yet, it was a landmark in modern art and media culture. 

Warfare, as experienced by American troops in France during 1917 and 1918, bore little resemblance to the jingoistic propaganda that had sounded the drumbeat to war.

Some of the most compelling images of combat were created by a battle-tested officer, Claggett Wilson (1887–1952). Wilson's graphic (and accurate) depictions of battle were later donated to the Smithsonian and forgotten until recently. With paintings like Flower of Death (the introductory image to this essay), Wilson depicted the war "Not as It Looks, but as It Feels and Sounds and Smells."

As powerful as Wilson's images of the war undoubtedly are, no work on view in the PAFA exhibit can compete with John Singer Sargent's Gassed. Sargent was an eyewitness to the terrible aftermath of an attack with deadly "mustard gas" on a British unit in 1918. Gassed is a tremendous painting, having lost none of its power.

Though some of victims of poison gas were only temporarily blinded, few ever recovered completely. Mustard gas burned the lungs and mucous membranes of its victims, as well as their eyes. Almost all who survived a gas attack suffered permanent - and painful - health problems. The brother of Georgia O'Keeffe never fully recovered from the effects of poison gas, which contributed to his death from Influenza after the war.                                                                                                               

John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919

Sargent's Gassed, which was generously loaned by Britain's Imperial War Museum, is one of the great paintings of the Twentieth Century. Because Sargent worked in the time-honored tradition of Realism, Gassed has been somewhat undervalued in comparison with Picasso's Surrealist masterpiece, Guernica. But if you spend some time before this vast evocation of suffering and hope - the sun in Gassed is rising, rather than setting - you will experience a sense of transcendence and empathy that only comes from truly great art.

Sargent initially tried to remain aloof from the war, though he lived in England. In the spring of 1918, he went to France as an official War Artist, but struggled to find a theme worthy of his genius. Then, on Good Friday, March 29, 1918, a German atrocity claimed the life of Sargent's beloved niece. Rose-Marie Michel was killed by long-range German siege artillery which bombarded Paris. Rose-Marie Michel was a nurse tending blind soldiers, so her death found a resonance in the plight of the blinded soldiers in Gassed. 

The story of how Sargent came to paint Gassed is wonderfully told in a recent book, published in 2014, John Singer Sargent and His Muse, written by Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano.

This brings us to one of the important themes of World War I and American Art.There has long been a theory that World War I made only a passing impact on American society, at least in comparison with the Civil War and the Second World War. The PAFA exhibit and the superb catalog that accompanies it completely dispels this falsehood.

By looking at the letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and the art work she created in reference to World War I, it is clear that she was emotionally consumed by interest in the war. O'Keeffe's well-founded anxiety about her brother, Alexis, and frustration about doing something meaningful in wartime energized her art.

Georgia O'Keeffe, The Flag, 1918

The blood red, midnight blue and cloudy white hues of O'Keeffe's The Flag are symbolical. Yet O'Keeffe's painting reaches a deeper level of reality than many purportedly realist 
works could possibly achieve.

Another American artist of the period who was  molded by his experience of the war was Charles Burchfield. After graduating from art school in 1916, Burchfield faced the prospect of being drafted and sent to the Western Front. Like O'Keeffe, Burchfield was deeply affected with stress and anxiety. 

 Charles Burchfield, The First Hepaticas, 1917

The emotional toll upon Burchfield is reflected in his classic landscape, The First Hepaticas. Painted in 1917, Burchfield makes a forest near his home look as though it had been hit by an artillery barrage. Flowers, the hepaticas of the title, wilt as if stricken by poison gas. World War I had come to America's doorstep.

Burchfield eventually was assigned to a unit designing camouflage for armored tanks. The the fighting ended before he was sent to the front. Yet, the haunted, brooding cloud of war never quite departed from Burchfield's art. We can trace the mystical elements in his later work back to the state of mind that influenced the creation of The First Hepaticas.

World War I and American Art is an outstanding exhibit which commendably includes numerous works dealing with the African-American experience during the conflict. Black soldiers like Horace Pippin fought a two-front war, against the Germans on the other side of No Man's Land and against racial intolerance at home.

Horace Pippin, Dog Fight over the Trenches, 1935

Pippin, Burchfield and Wilson survived the war but American fatalities were heavy. There were 53,402 combat deaths and 63,114 from disease, many from the dreaded Spanish Influenza epidemic. This occurred during the last months of the war and into 1919. An estimate of civilian deaths in the U.S. from the Spanish Influenza is around 500,000. Worldwide, the (misnamed) Spanish Influenza killed nearly 50 million people. This was far in excess of the estimated 17 million war dead. Many of the Spanish Influenza victims died because of wounds or privation caused by the war.

World War I and American Art ends on a somber note, as indeed it should. Despite heroic self-sacrifice, the War to End all Wars failed to bring peace. A sense of futility, a feeling that war would resume as soon as a new generation of cannon fodder came of age, pervaded the world during the 1920's and 1930's.

In 1928, John Steuart Curry began a painting to memorialize a friend, killed in the war ten years before. By the time he finished The Return of Private Davis from the Argonne in 1940, war had broken out again in Europe. Hitler was on the march and U-boats were sinking ships at a faster rate than during the First World War.

John Steuart Curry, The Return of Private Davis from the Argonne, 1928–40

The oil paint barely had time to dry on Curry's elegiac painting before American industry began to retool for arms production. A year later, on December 8, 1941, James Montgomery Flagg's famous "I Want YOU for the U.S. Army" poster was dusted-off to encourage Americans to fight a second War to End all Wars. 

World War I and American Art at PAFA makes no overt effort to editorialize or extend the scope of the exhibition theme. But the maimed and the wounded, the gassed and shell-shocked look down on us from their picture frames. Their silent verdict is deafening.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 
Images courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Introductory Image:
Claggett Wilson (1887–1952) Flower of Death—The Bursting of a Heavy Shell—Not as It Looks, but as It Feels and Sounds and Smells, c. 1919 Watercolor and pencil on paperboard, 16 ½ × 22 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Alice H. Rossin, 1981.163.18 Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY

Childe Hassam (1859–1935) Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, 1918, 1918. Oil on canvas, 36 × 28 3/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967, 67.187.127  Photo: ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY 

Harvey Dunn (1884–1952) The Devil’s Vineyard, n.d. Oil on canvas, 34 × 44 in. South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, 1970.01.14 

Fred Spear, Enlist, 1915 Poster, 32 × 23 in. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Princeton University Poster 

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) Gassed, 1919 Oil on canvas  231 x 611.1 cm (91 x 240 1/2 in.) Imperial War Museum, London  Art. IWM ART 1460

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) The Flag, 1918 Watercolor on paper, 11 15/16 × 8 3/16 in. 
Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, M1977.132 © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: Larry Sanders 

Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) The First Hepaticas, 1917–18. Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper, 21 ½ × 27 ½ in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1935, 43.1935

Horace Pippin (1888–1946) Dog Fight over the Trenches, 1935 Oil on canvas, 18 × 33 1/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966, 66.4071 

John Steuart Curry (1897–1946) The Return of Private Davis from the Argonne, 1928–40. 
Oil on canvas, 38 ¼ × 52 ¼ in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.