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| Edward Cucuel |
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| Leo Putz |
The American Edward Cucuel (1875-1954) and the Tyrolean Leo
Putz (1869-1940) must have been in ecstasy when they painted outdoors together in
Bavaria over several summers in
the early 20th Century. In
the environs of a secluded lake, Putz was a mentor to the younger painter as
they practiced their juicy, impasto brushwork on cheerful paintings of healthy
young women dressed in paint-friendly summer whites or dressed not at all. They
posed their models in rowboats or just lolling around on the shore or in the
surrounding forest.
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| Edward Cucuel |
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| Edward Cucuel |
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| Edward Cucuel |
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| Leo Putz |
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| Leo Putz |
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| Leo Putz |
The two men had very
similar art backgrounds and aesthetic principles. Both had studied academic painting and
drawing with Adolphe Bouguereau and Benjamin Constant at the Academie Julien in
Paris. Putz began his studies at the Munich Academy
of Fine Arts, while Cucuel added Jean-Leon Gerome at the École des Beaux-Arts
for good measure during his student days in Paris. But by 1901, Putz was already a confirmed
Impressionist. And when the two men
first met in Munich in 1907, Cucuel
was eager to kick over the traces of academia as well. And yet it was their solid training in
drawing and paint handling that enabled them to rapidly paint their figures boldly
and realistically in a direct attack on canvas. They knew color and values. And their figure drawing was excellent. Even when there is some exaggeration of the
pose or foreshortening problem, their figures remain convincingly human.
Cucuel was born in San Francisco. His father was a newspaper publisher. He enrolled at the age of 14 in the San
Francisco School of Design and worked as a newspaper illustrator before
traveling to Paris at the age of 17
to begin his academic training. By 1897
or so he had set up permanent residence on the Continent. He traveled around France,
Italy and Germany
and did some more newspaper illustration work in Berlin,
where he met his future wife, Clara Lotte von Marcard, a painter of florals,
whom he married in 1913. When he moved
to Munich in 1907 he found his true
home. He got involved with a group of
artists led by Putz called “Die Scholle,” which means something like “the soil”
or “tiller of the soil,” I guess. Seems
it’s hard to translate. Cucuel painted
with Putz from 1909 through 1914 during the summer months at the Hartmannsberg
Castle in Bavaria,
where the two comrades in art created their famous “rowing boat” and “bathing
girls” paintings. From 1914 to 1918
Cucuel lived in Holzhausen at the Ammersee (lake) in Bavaria
and later had studios in Munich and
Starnberg. He spent some winters in New
York, but he continued to paint pictures of ladies at
leisure in the summer months in Germany
until forced to leave Europe in 1939 when the war broke
out. There aren’t as many nudes in
Cucuel’s later paintings, probably because he preferred to paint his family and
friends, rather than professional models.
He returned to California
and reportedly lived a secluded life until his death at the age of 79.
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| Edward Cucuel, Self-Portrait |
I had been familiar with the work of Cucuel for many years,
often seeing it reproduced in the auction catalogs. But the work of Putz is a more recent
revelation. Putz, a leading force in the
German Art Nouveau and Impressionist movements, is said to have created more
than 2,700 works in his lifetime. The
“Scholle” group he co-founded in 1899 is credited with spurring the development
of German Expressionism. The group’s premise was based on a reverence for nature and individualism. The name was said to be a symbolic reference
to the idea that each member should tend his own patch of soil in an individual
way. A glance at the makeup of the group
can send you into some serious research about a whole bunch of interesting
artists you have probably never heard of, like Adolf Munzer (1870-1953).
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| Adolf Munzer, Self-Portrait |
Putz was said to have had a joyful, outgoing
personality that made him “good company” at any social gathering and helped him
on his path to great success as a painter.
“Earnest, industrious, and jovial, he radiates happiness with every
movement and from the gleaming surface of each canvas that leaves his easel,” a
reviewer wrote in the March 1914 issue of Cosmopolitan
Magazine after a visit to his Munich studio. “The
situation in summer merely comprises a change from indoors to the more
expansive freedom of sun, sky, and untrammeled nature. You must never disclose the whereabouts of
the secluded and sylvan retreat to which you have been suddenly
transported. Suffice to say, it is not
far distant from one of those lakes that sparkle, like eyelets of the sea, upon
the face of the South Bavarian landscape. In a wing, let us say the east, or
the west, of a rambling, irregular castle on the edge of a forest, Professor
Putz has his congenial quarters. Here he paints, rows upon the lake, reads a
bit, and, after a few salubrious months, hies back to town with a score or so
of canvases instinct with the feeling of the out-of-doors glimpses of summer
subtilized, intensified, harmonized, as only a born painter-poet can conceive
them.”
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| Leo Putz, Self-Portrait |
And Cucuel was alongside him for many such idyllic
summers of painting, creating a very similar body of work, but a bit more
refined, more tempered – slightly more restrained American than spirited
Tyrolean, in the final analysis.
After creating scores of internationally acclaimed paintings
of young women, Putz accepted an invitation to travel to South America in
1929, when he was already 60 years old.
He was fascinated by the new world of colors and people with a different
culture. He painted in Brazil and Argentina, creating a second body of work that was said to emphasize a
brighter, more tropical color scheme and simpler forms. He traveled on the back of mules to
study and paint the rain forest. He was made
a professor at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Rio and
was a celebrity guest of society. His
paintings from South America were the subject of a major exhibition upon his return to Munich in 1935, but I couldn’t find any examples in a cursory
search of the Internet. Putz’s work was
considered “degenerate art” by the Nazis. Perhaps most of the work in that exhibition was destroyed? The exhibition had focused attention on Cucuel’s
strong anti-Nazism views and he was forced to flee Munich for his hometown of Meran in South Tyrol,
where he met with similar repression in that largely German-speaking community. The death of this exceptional, highly
acclaimed painter in 1940, at the age of 71 after an operation, was officially
ignored in Italy and Germany.
You can ignore the man, but you can’t ignore the art. Happily for lovers of beautiful, exciting
figure painting, plenty of the passionate works created by Edward Cucuel and
Leo Putz during those golden summer days of rapture in Bavaria and for many years thereafter have survived for our visual
enjoyment.
