I didn't learn too much
about painting from Frank Mason, but I learned everything I needed to know
about becoming a painter in the one year I attended his classes at The Art
Students League 35 years ago. I often
saw him at the League through the years and am sorry I never told him what an
inspiring role model he had been for me.
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Frank
Mason, Margaree River Valley,Nova Scotia,1999,24x30",www.frankmason.org
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Frank Vincent Dumond,Margaree River Valley,Nova Scotia (n.d.),24x30",www.christies.com
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Mason, who died in 2009 at
the age of 88, was one of the most revered and influential instructors of
painting in America. He taught painting for 57 years
at the League, beginning in 1951 upon the death of his mentor, Frank Vincent
Dumond (1865–1951), an even more revered and influential instructor of painting,
who taught at the League for 59 years.
What a glorious marathon of tradition they provided for so many
career-minded students of painting.
When I began to study
painting for good in 1978, I was told there were only three painters in the
world that were worth studying with if you wanted to learn “the old ways.” They were R.H. Ives Gammell (1893-1981) in Boston, Pietro Annigoni (1910-1988) in Florence, Italy, and Frank Mason. In retrospect, the Cold War was
still on and we didn’t know much about all the followers of the great Ilya
Repin in St.
Petersburg, Moscow, Beijing
and Shanghai. And there
were some regional favorites out there as well, like Henry Hensche
(1899-1992), who was carrying on the tradition of Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, MA.
Gammell promoted the
refined, accurate drawing and Impressionist color of the Boston School of painters, as passed on to him by his mentor, William McGregor
Paxton. Annigoni, a world-famous artist
in his own right, emphasized Renaissance precision in drawing and taught the
ancient ways of oil tempera and fresco painting, all within a muted color
scheme.
But I was poor in New York City and already enrolled at the League, so Mason was an
obvious choice for me.
Mason had quite a
different approach than Gammell and Annigoni.
A big bear of a man at 6 ft. 3 in. tall, Mason was all theatrical
Baroque romanticism in his personal mannerisms and in his approach to
painting. He abandoned Dumond’s more
naturalistic, “tonal impressionist” style for a Rubens-like grandiose manner of
painting, in practice and theory, while preserving his mentor’s lucid studies
on color relationships and atmospheric perspective. An entry in one League catalog states, “Mr.
Mason is concerned with the illusion of subject matter in space and atmosphere,
revealed through light.” In short, it was chiaroscuro
that interested him. Getting a photo-like
copy of the model on canvas was the last thing on his mind.
He loved to relate the stories
Dumond had told of socializing with artists in Europe, including Whistler and Sargent.
A funny thing about those stories.
I was washing my brushes in a sink outside the studio one afternoon
alongside a woman from the class, who was probably in her late 60s. I said to her, “Boy, Mason really tells some
good stories.” The woman replied, “Yes,
but Dumond told them better.” Ah, well. Dumond’s students included Charles Hawthorne,
Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, John Carlson, Andrew Loomis, Norman Rockwell,
Frank J. Reilly, Paul Strisik, and, of course, Frank Mason.
Mason’s best students
spent up to 12 years with him, as he had with Dumond, and became excellent
painters by following his approach to painting the truth of nature – the light
and atmospheric effects. He also
emphasized seeing objects as simplified masses first, with weight and dimension. You had to consider the back of the head as
well as the front, before zeroing in on the contour lines and the details
within. But I wanted to paint portraits
with “speaking likenesses” right off the bat, so it was “one and done” for
me.
I studied with a couple of
other excellent painters at the League and ended up evaluating nature’s
effects purely by close observation, with no specific theories in my enfeebled
brain and no real clue about “the old ways of painting.”
A big hurdle to overcome
in following the Mason way was mastering the Dumond palette, with its highly
organized and seemingly useful pre-mixed values and hues. Such an orderly approach didn’t suit my impatient
nature. Many of the master painters from
the past that I admired used a limited palette, and that was more to my liking. As Sargent once said, “There are lots of ways
to paint.”
But it was inspirational
to observe the progress of work being created in the manner of the Old Masters
by the most committed “Masonites” when I was in the class that one year.
I remember one painter,
who had already been with Mason for about 8 years, dragging out a ratty old
stuffed pheasant every once in awhile to make a very beautiful and marketable
painting on a long horizontal panel in no time at all. That painter was Thomas Torak, who has
succeeded his mentor, so the tradition lives on. I was told recently that the
ratty old pheasant still inhabits one of the studios at the League.
And I remain in awe of a
big job created in five afternoons by one of the Sulkowski brothers, tall
identical twins from Pittsburgh who were co-monitors of the class and seemed to
communicate with each other in some kind of silent, secret code. This one twin stood at his easel in the back
of the largest fourth-floor skylight studio, where Dumond had begun teaching in
1892, and painted a full view of the studio on a large canvas. First he painted the studio itself, showing
the angled skylight with its glowing north light shining through. Then he painted the model stand and the
model. Then the first row of students,
with Tony seated hunched over on a stool at his easel closest to the
model. He worked his way back into the
room toward his easel position until, at the very end, he painted a portrait of
his twin brother standing facing him. It was for me a remarkable demonstration of how the Old Masters might
have achieved such palpable atmospheric depth in their work.
I remember that Mason loved
painting in the late afternoon as the daylight was fading into twilight, a time
when most artists would have already cleaned their palettes and washed their
brushes. It was at this twilight hour,
given up to children and painters, that the model’s flesh would positively glow
in the surround of the skylit studio’s dusky light. Mason often kept the afternoon class running
late to demonstrate this beautiful light effect on a student’s canvas.
A number of Mason’s
devoted students drew from the model in his private studio in Little Italy on Tuesday evenings
and received critiques from him. For 40
years, the Mason faithful descended upon Stowe, Vt. in the month of June to attend the popular landscape
painting workshops he led with great enthusiasm. To my regret, I could never scrape together
the cash to attend any of those workshops.
Dumond had conducted similar summer landscape workshops in Old Lyme, CT, and Torak, the
current instructor, is continuing to hold them in Vermont.
Mason was well connected
to the traditional art sector of the outside art world through campaigns he led
to save Old Master paintings from the ravaging effects of over-cleaning by
restorers and museum conservators. He
took his students to the barricades at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the
1970s when “Juan de Pareja,” a Velazquez masterpiece, was first stripped of its
golden glow. Further such efforts
included railing unsuccessfully against the cleaning of Michelangelo’s frescoes
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
He had other significant connections
as well. He was once married to the late
landscape painter Phyllis Harriman Mason, whose father was a financier, whose uncle
was Averell Harriman, a former Governor of New York and whose paternal
grandfather was a railroad baron in the late 19th Century. Their one child, Arden, was named after the magnificent
estate built by the grandfather outside Harriman, NY. The
second-floor gallery at The Art Students League is named in her memory. And one afternoon in the studio I heard someone
say “Hi, Mary,” to a long-time Mason student seated on the floor. I turned to see who had spoken and it was the
writer Tom Wolfe, in his patented white suit.
Wolfe was a staunch supporter of Mason’s traditional views on art and
probably spoke with him while writing his 1975 book “The Painted Word,” which
attacks some powerful critics who were quite obviously shaping the direction of
modern art with their theories.
But his many adoring
students and admirers like me truthfully didn’t care much about all that other
stuff. It was Mason’s fervent love of
Old Master painting and his charismatic ability to express that love in word
and deed that inspired scores of students to flock to his sold-out classes each
year.
Mason had no time for
abstract expressionism. I remember him
once saying something to the effect that “the students come in here eager to
learn figure painting until they find out that’s pretty hard. Then they try landscape painting and find
that’s pretty hard, too. Then they try
still life painting, and even that’s pretty hard. The next thing you know they are in the abstract
class!”
I didn’t stay with Mason long
enough to learn any of the secrets of the Old Masters, one of them being the
use of maroger, a lead-based medium boiled on the kitchen stove that was concocted by
Jacques Maroger, a former conservator at the Louvre. I heard that Mason himself eventually gave
up the medium after getting a lead-poisoning scare.
But the spiritual,
reverent way he spoke about painting was exactly what I needed to hear. In that regard, he had fulfilled a number of
important commissions on religious themes, including a cycle on the life of St.
Anthony of Padua, which has hung in the Church of San Giovanni di
Malta in Venice since its completion in the early 1960s. For that job he was awarded the Order of
Malta’s Cross of Merit, the first painter to receive the honor since Caravaggio.
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Frank
Mason,Little Italy,72x108",1977,www.frankmason.org
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When I went with friends and visitors to Little Italy, I used to show them paintings by Mason that were hanging in two establishments on
Mulberry Street, the Caffe Roma pastry shop and the Mare Chiaro
tavern, which was established in 1908 and is now called the Mulberry Street Bar. Mason’s 6x9 foot painting of
the tavern interior, with notable bar patrons among the 22 figures depicted, was on
display in the tavern for more than 30 years. The painting is
now in the collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, a gift of Mason’s estate that came about as a result of his far-reaching
campaigns against the over-cleaning of Old Master paintings.
For myself, I recall only
a few brief comments from the master during his critiques at my easel. On one occasion, Mason loomed over me, looked
at my painting and boomed, “Do you like music?”
“Sure,” I said (thinking to myself, hey, I’m no kid, you know). A trained pianist himself, he then proceeded
to liken a painting to the progression of a symphony, starting off slow and
leading to a crescendo. I liked that
analogy but wasn’t sure how it applied to my own painting. But I later learned to see a beautiful
symphony of light passing down and across a figure posed in that fourth-floor
studio of ours, with its high ceilings, big north light skylight and grayish
atmosphere. No other kind of indoor
lighting arrangement for painting can create such a beautiful light effect.
Mason once told the class he
kicked out a prospective buyer from his studio in Little Italy, out of utter
frustration, after showing the guy painting after painting after painting and
getting tepid responses each time. I
think a few experiences like that, which I am all too familiar with myself, led
him to say once that the public couldn’t care less about your paintings, but just
go on painting them anyway, implying that painting was its own reward. That kind of thinking from a well-regarded
painter and a great teacher of painting, while it may seem insignificant, was
all l needed to hear to keep me happily swimming at the bottom of the pond all
these years.
And for some unknown
reason, I feel that with his passing, I finally gained his permission to solve
a riddle he left me with so long ago. While examining my painting and my palette one
afternoon, he asked, in his commanding way, “When are you going to learn to
use the medium?” After more than 30
years of painting, I still cannot answer him.
“But I’m working on it, Mr. Mason, I really am!”
