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| Harold Wolpoff, Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas, 23 x 35 in. framed, Dawson &Nye Auctioneers and Appraisers |
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Harold Wolpoff, A Marsh Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 28 x 32
in. Framed, The Boulder Art
Gallery, Fitchburg,
MA
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Although I didn’t know him well, I’ve sometimes wondered
what happened to Harold “Hal” Wolpoff. I could be wrong, but I heard many years ago
that he had been living in a trailer in Gloucester,
MA, where he had settled to paint seascapes
and village scenes like many other artists have done over the years.
Some of the finest plein air painters of the 20th
Century were headquartered in Gloucester
and neighboring Rockport, two famous artists’ colonies on Cape Ann. Their boldly painted, superbly designed and
accurately drawn work stole the show at many auctions of American paintings in New
York City, in my humble opinion. Their paintings were usually hung side by
side in a stunning demonstration of how terrific a sunlight effect on canvas can
look when interpreted by painters who know what they are doing. I haven’t seen such superb groupings in
recent years. Maybe collectors are
actually holding on to these plein air masterpieces instead of trying to cash
in on their “investments.” Three of the
finest painters were Emile Gruppe, Anthony Thieme and Aldro T. Hibbard, the
greatest painter of snow I’ve ever seen.
Somebody said the snow other artists paint is just white paint, but Hibbard
paints snow, or words to that effect. Hibbard, who
studied with Joaquim y Sorolla y Bastida, the greatest painter of sunlight effects the world has ever known, produced hundreds of beautifully designed and colored sunlit snow scenes. It required a superhuman effort to create them
directly from nature in sub-freezing temperatures.
Hal Wolpoff was not in their class, but I’m sure he thought
otherwise. Hal was one of many artists
who passed through the Saturday members’ painting class I’ve attended at The
Art Students League for the past 30-plus years.
He worked in pastels the few times he attended the class in the 1980s and
really knew how to produce clouds of pastel dust with his bravura technique. I still fondly recall his complimenting me on
an oil painting sketch I had worked on one morning with some degree of
success. Hal wasn’t very free with
praise for artists, so I was pleased to accept his compliment. In an earlier blog post about another artist
who was also somewhat amusingly self-centered, I recalled the time they both
showed up at lunchtime in the League cafeteria and sat far apart so they had
plenty of room to elaborate on their respective careers without risking a clash
of personalities.
After a career in radio broadcasting, Hal decided to quit
and become a painter – but not until he was in his early 40’s, I believe. He studied portrait painting with Everett
Raymond Kinstler, and maybe William Draper, at the League and soon sailed out
on his own, with considerable confidence in his ability to make a living
as an artist.
I don’t have much information about Hal stored in my porous
memory bank. I’ve forgotten most of the
stories I heard from him and about him. But
if you have the November 1982 issue of American
Artist magazine, you can get a pretty good impression of the man from one
of those interviews that the artist and writer Charles Movalli produced frequently
for that magazine in the 1970s and 80s.
Some library website gives you a bit of a tease on that interview
with Hal, but no more: “The article
features painter Harold Wolpoff. His
studio, over The Framery on School Street,
and the orderliness of his palette are described. He explains his inability to
paint by numbers as he finds color arbitrary, with the relationship of colors
making color. He labels his "Self-Portrait with Felt Hat" as an
impressionistic-expressionistic work and recalls the story behind the painting.
He believes that there is no way to teach a person how to paint since a good
artist only suggests things to open the eyes and the mind.” I believe Hal won some award for that portrait,
which I recall as being a wonderful job of painting.
I apparently tossed my copy of that issue of the magazine,
so the interview wherein Hal “discusses how he captures his sitter’s character
in his oils” is just a dim memory for me. “I'm a people painter,” he told
Movalli. “I don’t do the ‘standard’
portrait.’” As I recall, Hal was not afraid
to voice his candid opinions about art and other artists.
Hal gets another Internet mention in The New York Times on May
30, 1983 when he was doing the Washington Square Outdoor Art
Exhibit that Memorial Day weekend. The
show’s organizer had said the artists would be screened again by a jury for the Labor Day show. “On lower Fifth
Avenue, Harold Wolpoff of Maplewood,
N.J., and his paintings were snug in a
homemade shelter of chicken wire and plastic. He said the second screening
would be fine with him ''as long as it's our peers - other artists, not just
academics.''
Hal did the show for a few years, and I used to stop by his
display and listen to him talk – and talk -- about his work and the art world. I did the show one year myself, in 1982. I put together a big folding screen in
ramshackle fashion with laths, chicken wire and burlap to display my paintings,
which I hung by drapery hooks. What a
lousy mess! I somehow wheeled all the
stuff by foot on a big, borrowed hand truck some 60 blocks from my Upper
Westside apartment to the Village on opening day of the Spring and
Fall shows and stored everything in rented space in a basement nearby, which
had stairs so narrow and low that you could barely maneuver walking down them. Now the outdoor shows all force you to have expensive,
uniform aluminum display racks. No more
chicken wire. And that’s a good thing.
These outdoor art shows aren’t for city dwellers like me,
without vans and companions to help with the heavy lifting. I remember getting furious when one woman lured
me in with praise for my work and then told me about “pentimento” she “noticed”
in one of my paintings! I got off easy,
considering what some other exhibiting artists have heard from sidewalk kibitzers.
I hate selling paintings directly to the
public. I sold my first-prize painting
for a crisp $100 bill on the first day of the Spring show and the buyer walked
off with it so I didn’t even have it to display the following days of the show
– just the ribbon, which was made better than the painting. No, I wasn’t cut out to do outdoor art shows
to pay the rent.
So the other day I was thinking of Hal and looked for him on
the Internet. There wasn’t much more
than what I’ve discussed above about his painting career. But I was surprised and saddened to come across something more telling about him.
In a June 17, 2013 Letter to the Editor of the Ocala (FL) Star Banner, a reader remembers Hal touchingly in response to that
newspaper’s Memorial Day tribute to veterans of the Armed Forces. Ruth McIntyre of Silver
Springs, FL, knew Hal for only
a short time, but it was long enough for her to get a pretty good handle on the
man.
“I’d like to tell you about one such veteran I was honored to
meet not too long ago,” Ms. McIntyre wrote.
“He lived alone and was a very private person. He refused to have a
phone because his privacy might be invaded through it. He had very few friends
for that same reason. And some said he was grouchy and rude. At nearly 90, I
figure he had the right to be grouchy and rude if he wanted to. He’s been
through enough to make him that way. He was not only a WWII veteran and proudly
wore his “WWII Vet” hat saying so, but he was a world-renowned artist as well.
“He had held one-man shows in galleries all over Europe
and in the northeast United States.
His paintings sold for many dollars because they were quite good. I had known
Harold Wolpoff only three weeks when he was found near death in his humble home.
He was taken to a local hospital where he eventually died, alone, just like he
lived.
“My heart was so sad and the tears continued to fall because I
saw nothing of his death in the Ocala
Star-Banner — no death notice or funeral plans. Didn’t anybody at the
hospital know who he was? Didn’t anybody know he was to be honored with a
military burial service? Somehow it was made known who he was and he got the
military burial he so justly deserved.
“Look him up on Google and read his story. We’ll all be old and
possibly grumpy someday, but nobody I know deserved to be the way he was, dead
and buried without any notice at all. May God rest his soul.” http://www.ocala.com/article/20130617/OPINION02/130619766
Thanks to Ms. McIntyre's sympathetic and moving letter of tribute, I now know what happened to Hal, and that he was himself right up until the end. Sadly, however, you won’t find much about Hal’s
artwork or art career on the Internet if you Google his name -- just a few
images of paintings that were put up for auction over the years. I’m sorry I couldn’t find the self-portrait
that was reproduced in American Artist
magazine, but I did find the self-portrait shown above.
Hal was born in 1924 and died on May 6, 2013, just short of his 89th
birthday. He was a technician for the
Army Air Force in World War II and is buried at the Veterans
Administration Florida
National Cemetery
in Bushnell. I’ll bet some of the older
painters up around Rockport and Gloucester
could tell you some good stories about him. Maybe they know how he chanced to relocate to Florida. He was quite a character. But he loved painting. I know that much about Hal.
