Alas, Poor McEvoy

Ambrose McEvoy (1878-1927), Madame (Mary Spencer Edwards McEvoy, the Artist’s Wife), 1915, Oil on Canvas, approx. 56 by 46 in., Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.

Ambrose McEvoy, Silver and Grey (Mrs. Charles McEvoy, wife of artist's brother), 1915, Oil on Canvas, approx. 34 by 29 in., Manchester City Galleries, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Mrs. S.S. Howland, Oil on Canvas, approx. 40 by 30 in., Bradford Museums and Galleries, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Portrait of an American Lady with Pearls,1924, Oil on Canvas, approx. 40 by 30 in., Bolton Library & Museum Services, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Miss Teddy Gerrard, 1921, approx. 30 by 25 in., Manchester City Galleries, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Mrs. Cecil Baring, 1917, Oil on Canvas, Approx. 50 by 40 in., Tate Gallery, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Gwen John (1876–1939), 1900, Oil on Canvas, approx. 27 by 20 in., National Museum, Wales

Ambrose McEvoy (1875-1929), Miss Helen Morris – a Study, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 30x25 in., Private Collection

Ambrose McEvoy, Self-Portrait, circa 1900, Oil on Canvas, 30.3 by 20.5 in., Private Collection

Everybody’s been asking me, in point of fact begging me, to write about Ambrose McEvoy.  “When are you going to write about Ambrose,” they ask.  “Don’t keep us in suspense like this.”  But maybe I’m just hearing the uncharacteristically nagging voices of my usually compliant multiple personalities, the ones I have depended upon throughout my life for the requisite role playing to avoid any kind of serious responsibility and the stress that goes with it.

At any rate, I am now writing my long overdue tribute to Ambrose McEvoy, his life and career.  I don’t know why I’ve been so derelict in fulfilling my obligation to Ambrose.  That duty was assigned to me when I came across his name in a biography of Walter Sickert many years ago.  And Ambrose McEvoy was one of the first subjects I jotted down when I began planning for this transient blog of mine a couple of years ago.

Arthur Ambrose McEvoy (1878-1927) was an English artist who made his reputation as a painter of seemingly sketchy but exquisite portraits of fashionable society ladies in oil and in watercolor.  His father, a Scots-Irish engineer and mercenary soldier who served as an officer with the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, was a friend of James McNeil Whistler.  Both of them encouraged Ambrose to pursue his ambition to become a painter. 

Now I don’t really enjoy going off on tangents, honest, but McEvoy’s father, Charles Ambrose McEvoy (1827-1905), is definitely worth a little mention here.  He was some piece of work.  He was born in Glasgow to Irish parents, but his family immigrated to America when he was just one year old.  He remained in America as a British subject for 40 years before returning to England, where he died in 1905 in his 78^th year.  After many wacky twists and turns during his early years, the elder McEvoy became a Captain in the Confederate Army, a friend of Generals Lee and Jackson, a member of the force that captured the abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry, and the celebrated inventor of torpedoes and submarine mines for the Confederate Navy.  He got to know Whistler through his friendship with Whistler’s brother, William McNeil Whistler, a Confederate Army physician.  I’m not making this up.  It’s on the website of the American Civil War Round Table (UK).  Now I must get back to the son, Arthur Ambrose McEvoy, who was only a mere portrait painter.

At the age of 15, McEvoy enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and studied there for three years. Upon his arrival, McEvoy already had a reputation for a fine technical skill in oils acquired from his study with Whistler.  His classmates included William Orpen and Augustus John.  Ambrose and John became fast friends, and McEvoy shared studio space with John for awhile. 

Familiarity often bred romance in those days, and when Ambrose was 20 he entered into a brief and stormy affair with John’s sister, the painter Gwen John, who was reportedly devastated when he announced his engagement to Mary Spencer Edwards (1870-1941), a fellow student at the Slade who was eight years older than him.  They married in 1901.  Mary McEvoy was an excellent painter of portraits, flowers and interiors with figures in a quiet style after the Dutch masters and similar to the interiors painted by her husband and Gwen John. 

Mary Spencer Edwards McEvoy (1870-1941), Girl Reading, 1901, Oil on Canvas, 20.9 by 17.2 in., Tate Gallery, England

During her husband’s career, Mary McEvoy put her own painting on hold to raise their son and daughter, but resumed painting and exhibiting after McEvoy’s death from pneumonia in his 49^th year, caused, they say, by overwork and “over-indulgence.”

While a student at the Slade, McEvoy was keen on copying Titian and Watteau at the National Gallery. You can perceive a little of the latter’s wispy approach to form and color in McEvoy’s paintings. And like Whistler’s work, McEvoy’s paintings convey a delicate, vaporous sense of form, color and atmosphere.

Unlike most early 20^th Century portrait painters, McEvoy liked to experiment with compositions and paint handling techniques, incorporating impasto and washes in the backgrounds, draperies and other secondary elements of his portraits.   And he mixed natural and artificial light in some portraits for a “footlight effect,” just as Orpen did on occasion.  According to an account in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, McEvoy “painted landscapes throughout his career, and watercolours which he would draw and paint solidly, then put under running water, and then scrub and scrape, adding accents in chalk or ink and floating on colours which fused into delicate opalescent harmonies.”  I couldn’t readily locate any satisfying watercolor images to reproduce here.

Early in his career, McEvoy also painted moody landscapes and dim interiors with figures before focusing on portraiture after 1915, when he exhibited to great success a portrait of his wife, Mary, at the National Portrait Society in London.  Although McEvoy was best known for his female portraits, he painted a number of fine portraits of officers and enlisted men during the First World War.  In the opinion of one contemporary reviewer, however, McEvoy’s aesthetic interests were not perfectly suited to capturing the kind of “vivid interpretation of character…we want of male portraiture today in England.”

A slender monograph on McEvoy’s work, with 34 black and white illustrations, was published in 1924 when the artist was 46  and had been painting for 31 years.  Sadly, as fate would have it, he only had three more years to paint.  The author wrote that McEvoy was “an unabashed romantic” whose “adventures are in the aesthetic world alone,” where grappling with “tones and qualities of surface” were his primary concerns.  After much grandiose analytical praise of McEvoy’s work in oil, watercolor and drawing, the author of this monograph, identified therein only by the initials R.M.Y.G. (That’s Reginald Morier Yorke Gleadowe, in case you might be wondering, as I certainly was) concludes that a painter with the “fine-wrought delicacies” of an Ambrose McEvoy sees “the things eternally worth seeing.” 

The author concludes his encomium to McEvoy with words that so perfectly describe my own work that I plan to use them for my next Artist’s Statement: “You must go to the flowers, the clouds, the waves to match his faultless rhythms, his pure fantasies.  Untouched by theory or faction, trusting his eye, practicing untiringly his hand, he will enrich the world with inventions, born of his taste, and patiently wrought in the image of God.” 

On the other hand, the Oxford Index has this to say about McEvoy’s work:  “His most characteristic pictures are of beautiful society women, often painted in watercolour in a rapid, sketchy style. They can be merely flashy or cloyingly sweet (during the First World War one critic joked that at a time of sugar shortage, McEvoy was ‘a positive asset to the nation’), but the finest have something of the romantic air of refinement of Gainsborough, an artist he greatly admired.”

After the Slade, Ambrose worked with Walter Sickert in Dieppe, France, and that association is the reason I got interested in McEvoy in the first place, and for a very silly reason.  By the way, you can spot Sickert’s influence in some early interiors Ambrose painted.

Anyway, I was reading that biography of Sickert, and in the recounting of an evening get-together, the subject of McEvoy came up.  A women artist who was part of the Sickert camp was quoted as saying something like, “Alas, Poor McEvoy.  He sets his palette and waits patiently for the sitters who never come.”  I don’t remember the exact quote.

I had just finished my painting studies in art school and was hoping to follow in the giant footsteps of one of my instructors, a noted  portrait painter.   But I was encountering obstacles that McEvoy most certainly had to overcome to become successful.  McEvoy persevered, and at the height of his career, he was painting up to twenty-five oil portraits a year.   I laughed so hard when I read that “Alas, poor McEvoy” quote. But then the years flew by and left me alone, waiting patiently myself for the sitters that never came.

Paintings that Inspire

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), Still Life with Flowers, Bowl of Fruit and Pitcher, 1865, Oil on Canvas, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

Georges Daniel de Monfreid (1856-1929), Still Life with Oranges, 1903, Oil on Board, 23 by 32 1/4 in., Private Collection

If you are forced to primarily focus on painting still lifes for one reason or another, you’ve got a big inspiration problem to deal with.  I’ve met many painters over the years who just won’t paint still lifes on a regular basis.  Some just keep enrolling in art school classes so they can paint portrait and figure models year after year at relatively low cost.

It is innately more interesting and exciting to paint the human figure or a babbling brook in a sylvan landscape than a coffee pot and two apples.  And after a couple of years of painting mostly still lifes, you get pretty sick of your own setups.  Attempting to arrange the same pots and pans and fruits and vegetables and dreary flowers from the local markets in a novel way can make you physically ill, if not suicidal.  Of course, if you enjoy painting photographically every tile on the wall of a subway station or every detail of an old sewing machine, I guess inspiration is of no great concern to you.

Fortunately, there were many fabulous still life painters from past generations whose work is so inspiring that it gives me the strength to carry on within the genre that fate has cruelly thrust upon me.  I know of one guy who paints retro Dutch Old Master still lifes with a fair amount of precision, but without the astounding brushwork finesse of his 17th and 18th century role models.  He gets big bucks for his carefully composed paintings, which include rare and expensive objects that he has the chutzpah to borrow from the owners.   I can’t imagine anyone loaning me anything of value or of interest to put in my still lifes.

Now, for my own amusement and absolution, I’m going to fasten my seat belt to describe a little series of paintings I’ve created over the past couple of weeks that were based on elements in two still life paintings that I think are masterpieces.  One is by Fantin-Latour and the other is by Georges Daniel de Monfreid (1856-1929), a friend and follower of Gauguin. 

Both paintings include a wine decanter similar to one I have in my possession.  Mine has an etched fruit design that I was unable to discern from my vantage point.  Fantin painted his decanter without its stopper and de Monfreid with it.  I did versions both ways, but I preferred painting my decanter with its stopper, even though its muted transparency presented many rendering problems.

Fantin included in his still life a beautiful red-lacquer tray that looks like it would be far more interesting to paint than any trays I have.  I used a tray overlaid with a Carl Larsson picnic scene for my first painting.  I was disappointed that my setup prevented me from identifying it as such.  For my second painting I included a silver-plated art deco tray that I had been using for years as a base for some jars of turpentine and painting mediums.  I had to clean the tray and touch up with oil paint (crudely) some of the chipped off-white enamel on the handles.  I’m sorry now I didn’t take better care of this lovely tray.  Both paintings were based solely on Fantin’s painting.   

I loved the way Fantin arranged his orange segments and a cut open pomegranate.  He sensitively captured the exact same juicy fullness that one observes in atmospheric space when painting from life by natural light, something I’ve never quite been able to accomplish.  I did a mediocre job on my orange slices and didn’t know how to cut open my pomegranate, so just used it whole in the pedestal bowl a couple of times.  However, I was competent enough to slice a red grapefruit the long way and used it in a few of my paintings because I felt that the halves were interesting and lovely in both color and design.

Fantin’s potted plant, with its irregularly spaced small white blossoms and fulsome leaves, anchors his composition so perfectly.  I went out and bought some really boring mums for $5 from a local shop for my second painting.  There are millions of people living in New York City and hundreds of flower shops, but you can’t find the flowers that Fantin painted anywhere.  And as one of Fantin’s female students told him, “I already know how to paint.  I came here to learn how to arrange flowers,” or words to that effect.  I used the mums in a couple of rather insipid ways and bought some wilted, out-of-season sunflowers from Trader Joe’s for one painting.

The paintings by Fantin and de Monfreid both feature a pedestal bowl holding some fruit.  Fantin’s finely crafted bowl is quite elegant and he painted it superbly.  I saw the de Monfreid painting in a Sotheby’s London auction catalog some years ago and loved the bowl shape so much that I actually commissioned a potter exhibiting at the local flea market to make a somewhat similar one for me.

I’m in love with de Monfried’s design, color scheme and the way he captured the truth to nature, just as Fantin did, in the objects he included in his painting, especially the empty wine glass and decanter.  I didn’t have a red plate to place under my decanter, so I had to make do with the white plate, which I normally use to hold the varnish when I varnish my paintings.  De Monfried’s draped table inspired me to add a lady’s scarf in my last four paintings in this series.  The scarf is not nearly as beautiful as his blue cloth, which complements his oranges so well.  But I had fun analyzing the squares of the scarf in perspective and mixing its colors, which were attractive combinations of raw umber, yellow ochre, a touch of alizarin, white and black.

I really love Fantin’s warm, dusty yellow ochre background and charcoal gray foreground.   A couple of drapes I possess matched those colors and I’ll use them more in the future because the colors are so easy to mix and so harmonious – yellow ochre, raw umber, maybe a little cadmium red light or alizarin, white and black.  Happy is the painter who hits on a harmonious color combination for his still lifes that is easy to mix and pleasing to look at.

Both paintings I used for inspiration were painted from a vantage point well below eye level.  I normally paint my still life setups from a vantage point just a little below eye level while standing at my easel, so this was an interesting departure for me, and I hope to be doing more paintings with this viewpoint in the future.  One advantage to this approach is I can lower my window shades to get more light into my dreary home studio and still get a fairly decent high angle of light on the objects I’m painting. 

Now, about those ellipses or ovals.  Ellipses are always challenging to paint, but fun as well.  Some painters paint almost all their cylindrical objects at eye level to avoid dealing with the ellipses.   Some always obscure one outside curve of the rim or base of a pot or bowl by placing another object in front of it.  And looking down on bowls and things accentuates these ellipses.  This leaves you with a curious illusion to deal with when painting them in a still life from a fixed vantage point, because unless you are standing directly in front of a bowl, for example, the ellipses always look a little lopsided.  Painting all the objects with ellipses in your still life wherever they are located as if they are perfectly symmetrical as seen from directly in front of them is one way to solve the problem, I guess.  But that's not being true to nature.  Maybe ellipses are not as big a problem for traditional painters as you might think when the entire painting is otherwise close to the truth in color and atmospheric effects.  Most of my ellipses exhibit lopsidedness to some degree, I’m afraid.  I’ve never been good at painting perfectly symmetrical objects.  It takes quite a bit of concentration on these lopsided ovals for me to get them to look right in space from their respective positions across the picture plane.  You know what – I’m giving myself the impression that I don’t know what I’m talking about.  And I may be right!  Let’s move on.

Some of my paintings in this series were done over old ones, so they didn’t photograph very well.  They look so much better in real life, trust me.  But my paintings, and those of all painters working today in the realist tradition, seem to lack the comfortable certainty of human vision shown in the two paintings created by Fantin and de Monfreid.  We no longer trust our eyes alone to analyze and interpret nature.  Our view of the natural world has been corrupted by constant exposure to high-definition digital tomfoolery.  There is no turning back to those days of visual innocence enjoyed by all the great painters of the past whose work inspires us to paint the same things they did.

So that’s more than enough “texting” on this low-budget painting excursion inspired by my two friends, Fantin and de Monfreid.  They got me started.  All I had to do was move things around a bit.  Now I can throw away all the rotting fruit and think about what to paint next.  I believe I narrowly escaped going to the dark side of the old adage, “To borrow from one painter is stealing; to borrow from many is research.”  But I'm wrong about a lot of things and I may be wrong about that, too.

Couldn't resist adding one more to the series.  Now I'm free again!

No Exit

Peonies in  Large Snifter, Oil on Canvas, 25 by 24 in.

Happy Moo Year, Oil on Canvas, 12 by 14 in.

Recent Drawings, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Recent Drawings, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Birth of a Model, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Well, it was another rough year for this old traditional realist painter and obligatory starving artist, who at this particularly dreary time of the year is really bored painting mediocre still lifes under the lousy natural light entering the two adjacent but insufficient windows in his home studio in his fashionable neighborhood on the Upper West Side of the borough of Manhattan in the city of New York in the state of New York in the northeast quadrant of the country still known as The United States of America, unless I didn’t get the memo.  

I’m bored with this blog as well.  Anything I write about the visual arts and its practitioners has already been written by someone else – and much better, too, especially when it comes to musing about the process of oil painting, something I’m particularly obtuse about, although it has occupied much of my time in the past 30 or so years.  I dream of moving to the High Desert to get some sunlight into my canvases, but that’s a move that seems way too decisive at this late stage in the game of life. 

I tell myself and anybody who is willing to listen that the main reason I remain in New York is because my social club, The Art Students League of New York, provides a free figure drawing sketch class for members from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday during the regular school year, and an inexpensive sketch class for members during the summer months.  I paint most mornings by that abysmal natural light in my home studio I’m always complaining about, eat a slice of pizza and drink a can of soda for lunch, take a nap and then head a short 18 city blocks to the League for the sketch class and a smidgeon of camaraderie.  That’s a pretty full accounting of my day-to-day existence, and this seemingly irrelevant information might be useful if you are considering following in my footsteps on the path to an exciting and lucrative art career.  

You have to go real slow if you want to succeed.  I believe that the Tuscan painter Cennino Cennini (1370-1440), a follower of Giotto, got it right when he advised young artists in his Book of the Art to take it easy, live moderately and drink only  "thin wines."  Thanks to his advice, I don’t get worn out “heaving stones, crowbars, and many other things which are bad for your hand” before I begin a painting.   He offered another sage bit of advice that all you young men with designs on an art career should pay special attention to:  “There is another cause which, if you indulge it, can make your hand so unsteady that it will waver more, and flutter far more, than leaves do in the wind, and this is indulging too much in the company of women.”  I’m only guessing, you understand, but I think he’s right on that score, as well!

To get back on track, something that’s never been easy for me, I was drawing the figure better 20 years ago, but this passionate visual exercise to train the hand and eye remains the only consistently enjoyable activity I have ever participated in throughout my rather long and, without exaggeration, comically wretched existence.

I’ve posted a couple of collages above with images of a few of my recent drawings in charcoal pencil on newsprint.  I’ve never had much interest in drawing with other media.   Why should I?  I’ve been drawing with these pencils on smooth newsprint for 30 years and I still get so much pleasure out of this practice that I’m loathe to experiment with any other medium.  I go through maybe 30 or more 100-sheet, 14 by17 inch newsprint pads in the course of a year and throw away thousands of sheets of drawings.  And so do the hundreds of other artists who draw at the League in various media on a regular basis.  But fear not, Rain Forest preservationists, the League does recycle.  I keep a few of my sketches, but I don’t have a very critical eye, so I probably throw away far better drawings than I save, if truth be told, at least I hope so! 

I’m not much interested in marketing these drawings.    Some years ago, a distant cousin from Norway professed to liking them and bought a few, but that seemed like such a fluke that I never tried to sell any drawings to anybody else.  Besides, they are on newsprint, which is an anathema to many artists because it is not “archival.”  Promoting drawing papers as “archival” seems like such phony nonsense to me.  It’s really nothing more than an annoying advertising pitch to get artists to buy expensive, chemically treated papers that aren’t sympathetic surfaces for charcoal.  Papers with 100 percent rag content are great for drawing, but just too expensive for all these quick sketches I do.

Part of my fascination for this time-honored figure drawing exercise is, most assuredly, the nonjudgmental intimacy permitted in a communal gathering of artists raptly engaged in drawing the nude model.  In this nurturing environment, I can make believe that I am in the company of Van Dyke, Rubens, Sargent and other great masters of the art of figure drawing.  I can always tell when I’m going to have a pretty good drawing session when I start thinking, after a couple of poses, about what I’m going to eat for dinner after the class is over.

I like to start a figure drawing with the head, when the pose presents that opportunity, because I’m drawing a live human being, not a manikin, and I want to capture the spirit of the individual model first and foremost.  The quality of an open pose for me is wedded to the carriage of the head and the expression on the model’s face.  In addition, the model’s pose is usually more graceful and balanced at the beginning, before the position of the head changes, as it invariably does, sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically.  The body is usually held in the same attitude throughout the pose, so work on the torso and limbs can wait a bit. 

But sometimes it’s so difficult to get a satisfactory likeness that I don’t have time to do justice to the rest of the figure.  And that is one of my better rationalizations for why my figure drawings aren’t so great.  Lots of artists who love drawing the figure are as good as or better than I am, so why should I consider my own work worthy of exploitation.  Why,  just the other day I sharpened a black pastel pencil for a 13-year old kid attending the sketch class, and in return for this favor, at the end of the class she gave me a notebook-size sheet of paper with a drawing of the model and a profile sketch of me that was pretty darn good!  How demoralizing is that for an aging artist headed out to pasture! 

This entire blog post seems like déjà vu all over again, but it doesn’t much matter to my phantom audience, so I’ll go through the routine again, even if I may have done so before.  The League sets aside three studios for drawing during this open sketch class, giving artists a choice of three models to draw from.  Non-members can draw for a very reasonable $7 per session.  Two of the studios are dedicated to quick poses -- traditionally 10 one-minute poses and three five-minute poses, then a five-minute break, then a 10 and a 15, another break and then a 20 or 25 minute pose at the end.  Some models at the League will only work in 20-minute segments nowadays, so the timing of the poses is less consistent.  One studio is reserved for a long pose for the duration of the class, but most of the regulars prefer drawing short poses.

There are more female artists’ models in this world than male models, and, in general, the artists, men and women, prefer drawing the female figure for a variety of reasons, including one I used to hear often from Sal, one of the sketch class regulars from years past.  “I never sold a drawing of a male model,” Sal would say, as he dashed from a studio with a male model to one with a female model.  If by some unfortunate coincidence there were three male models for the day, Sal just went home.

It bears repeating that there are no schools for artists’ models, so the training is all on the job.  And it’s gratifying to witness a novice model develop skill and confidence as the weeks and months go by.  I’ve posted five drawings of a League model in one of the collages above that are a case in point.  When this model began posing at the school two years ago, we all found her natural figure a delight to draw.  But she seemed very shy and never fully revealed her face to the artists, typified in the first two drawings of her.  But as time went on, she grew in confidence and is now very relaxed and comfortable on the posing stand.  And she is no longer reluctant to show her expressive face.

So as the new year approaches, I remain in this great city of assisted living because of the figure drawing opportunities, the rent-stabilized apartment and all the public amenities that make going from place to place and acquiring the necessities of life so convenient.  Heck, I’ve got a Starbucks and a Duane Reade/Walgreens drugstore right around the corner.  You can’t beat that in Grover’s Corners, I reckon.  No exit for me, it appears.  But it could be worse.  Out west where the sun always shines I’d need a car again and would have to learn how to deal with black bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions and two-legged evildoers armed with hunting rifles who wouldn’t mind taking dead aim on a city slicker from a mile away.  Or so I’m told.

Walter Ufer's Journey

Walter Ufer (1876-1936),  Indian Corn-Taos, Oil on Canvas, 40 by 50 in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Callers, ca. 1926, Oil on Canvas, 50 1/2 x 50 1/2 in, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Walter Ufer, Bob Abbott and Assistant, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 50 1/4 x 50 1/2 in, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Walter Ufer, Where the Desert Meets the Mountain, Oil on Canvas, 36 ½ by 40 ¼ in., American Museum of Western Art - the Anschutz Collection - Denver 

On August 2, 1936, Walter Ufer died at the age of 60 in the Santa Fe hospital where he had been transported three days earlier by motor car from Taos some 70 miles away for treatment of a ruptured appendix. 

The tragic and premature death of this outstanding figurative painter must have greatly shocked the storied and tight-knit Taos art colony of the early 20^th Century.  Ufer was a terrific draughtsman and fantastic colorist, who is said to have been influenced by John Singer Sargent’s treatment of hands, faces and garments.

In my opinion, Ufer could draw and paint faster and better than any of the other members of the Taos Society of Artists, although he had stiff competition from E. Irving Couse, Victor Higgins and Ernest L. Blumenschein.  And as good as they all were, none of the 11 other full members of the Society could quite match the brilliant sunlight effect he captured on canvas, a remarkable gift that is bestowed on very few painters -- Sorolla, Zorn, Frank Benson and Aldro T. Hibbard are in the company as well. 

“Walter Ufer has two large canvases that are miracles of painting, in one of which the desert sunlight almost gives off warmth from the canvas,” wrote the reviewer of the 30^th Annual American Art Exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute in the December 1917 issue of Fine Arts Journal.

Ufer also painted some of the most amazing and entertaining self-portraits I’ve ever seen.

Self-Portrait, Paint and Indians, 1923, Oil on Canvas, American Museum of Western Art–Anschutz Collection, Denver

An exhibition titled "Walter Ufer; Rise, Fall, Resurrection" was on display from February 7 to May 11 of this year at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.  It featured 60 works by Ufer and his peers.  I would have loved to see that exhibit, but Oklahoma City is a long bus ride from my fashionable neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Ufer was trained as an academic realist in Germany and worked as an illustrator and portrait painter in Chicago before settling in Taos in 1917 for the rest of his life.  Like all the European-trained artists who colonized Taos, he was immediately attracted to the high desert landscape.  But Ufer was primarily a bravura figure painter, and he focused on creating dazzling paintings of contemporary Pueblo Indians posed outdoors, in the clear light of the New Mexican day.  This focus earned him a fair amount of national recognition during his lifetime. 

While some of his Taos colleagues held firm to depicting a somewhat romantic notion of Indians from the Old West, Ufer painted Indians of the New West.  "I paint the Indian as he is. In the garden digging--in the field working--riding amongst the sage--meeting his woman in the desert--angling for trout--in meditation,” he told the author of a 1928 gallery exhibition catalog.  His words echo the advice given 10 years earlier by a wealthy patron, Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison, Jr., who used similar language to suggest that Ufer paint “the Indians as they are today.”  Harrison had encouraged Ufer and several other Chicago artists to migrate to the Southwest, and he subsidized their travel expenses.

Ufer was a devoted socialist and supporter of individual freedoms.  One critic thought the painter must have been “struck by the irony of the Indian's lot in this artistic paradise, and he used the language of paint to argue more eloquently than he could have done with words.”   Ufer believed the Taos Indians had lost their “race pride” and wanted only to be Americans.  “Our civilization has terrific power,” he said. “We don't feel it, but that man out there in the mountains feels it, and he cannot cope with such pressure."

Coping wasn’t so easy for the charismatic and enigmatic Ufer either.  He is remembered as a chronic alcoholic, a depressive, and a heavy gambler, who occasionally got bailed out by friends who were never paid back.  But he is also recalled as a generous man with a strong social conscience.  During the 1919 flu pandemic, he worked day and night tending to the sick alongside the town’s only doctor.  Ufer was outspoken about his socialist beliefs, joined protest groups and picket lines of striking workers, and reportedly was a close friend and drinking buddy of Leon Trotsky, the Socialist leader.

Ufer is said to have been warm and personable and had many friends, but he apparently tried the patience of a lot of people, often saying harsh things about his patrons and colleagues behind their backs. Harrison was moved to write Ufer, “Up to the present time you have received $327 of my money, but from your conversations about town, one would suppose you had been very harshly treated.”  Ufer called his good friend Blumenschein, who founded the Taos art colony with Bert Geer Phillips in 1898, a “bald-headed S.O.B.” at a meeting of the Taos artists that Blumenschein did not attend.  And “Blumy” wasn’t even bald, although his hair was thinning. 

Ufer fibbed all his life about being born in Louisville, Kentucky, when he was actually raised there by immigrant parents from the age of one, having been born in Huckeswagen, Germany on July 22, 1876. Maybe it was because it was not wise to claim German heritage during World War I.  And in 1921 and 1926, Ufer won the prestigious Altman Prize at the National Academy of Design in New York City, a prize that is awarded only to American-born artists.

One writer summarized Ufer's career in the following manner:  “When suffering, he was moody and unproductive, and his entire body of work is the product of his better days, as drinking and gambling occupied him during his dark spells.”  It always strikes me that painters in the old days had a lot more fun and personality, as well as raw talent, than today’s realist painters, who are primarily obsessed with creating marketing ploys to sell their computer-enhanced photographic images.

Despite his dysfunctional personal life, Ufer sold many paintings at high prices during the 1920s and achieved national recognition for his art.  His paintings were acquired by several museums and he was made a member of the National Academy of Design.  Once he had a bit of a setback when he adopted an agent’s idea to create a number of paintings featuring the same Indian figure on a white horse against a background of the iconic Taos Mountain.  That series of paintings was a marketing disaster.  But Ufer was generally successful until the Stock Market crash of 1929, which caused his art and investment income to evaporate.  Fortunately, Walter Henry Klauer, a wealthy businessman from Dubuque, Iowa provided some critical financial support to allow Ufer to continue painting.

Ufer’s father was a master engraver of gunstocks and a political radical himself.  Both parents strongly supported their child’s early interest in art.  After an apprenticeship in the printing plant of a Louisville commercial lithographer, Ufer traveled to Dresden, Germany to study at the Royal Applied Art Schools and the Royal Academy.  Following his study abroad, Ufer moved back to Louisville and then to Chicago, where he eventually attracted the notice of Harrison and his friend and partner, Oscar Mayer, the meat-packing tycoon.  The two men sponsored Ufer’s first painting trip to Taos -- in 1914.

Ufer met his future wife, Mary Monrad Frederikson (1869-1947), in Chicago at the J. Francis Smith Academy, described as a division of the Academy Julian in Paris, where the Danish born Mary had previously studied.  John Francis Smith (1868-1941), a Chicago native, was a painter and illustrator who had studied in Paris with Boulanger and Lefebvre and taught in Chicago from 1905 to 1914 before moving to California.  

Mary Ufer, who was seven years older than Walter, encouraged her husband to leave illustration and take up portrait painting, which led to his being noticed by Harrison.  After the couple settled in Taos, Mary continued to paint, but “Walter’s alcoholism, increasingly poor health, debts and the low demand for his paintings put a strain on their marriage,” according to one online biographical account. “To help with finances, Mary delivered lantern-slide lectures on artists both at the Art Institute of Chicago and on a traveling lecture circuit.”

After Ufer’s untimely death, the family was left destitute, but Blumenschein helped raise money to ease the burden on Mary, who was a pretty good artist with an interesting life story as well.  But this blog post is getting out of hand, so if you want to know what happened to Mary, the story is here: http://mabeldodgeluhan.blogspot.com/2012/04/mabel-dodge-luhan-and-early-women.html   

When Ufer fell ill, the other Taos artists raised several hundred dollars to pay his medical expenses and to buy gas for the Taos painter Martin Hennings’ Ford, which was used to transport him to St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe in a futile attempt to save his life.   

I think I read somewhere that Blumenschein went along on that ill-fated journey.  Blumenschein had been particularly close to Ufer, despite their often spirited rivalry, as recounted in Ernest L. Blumenschein: The Life of an American Artist, by Robert W. Larson and Carole B. Larson.  The two pals had shared many confidences on art and other matters in conversation and in correspondence.   

So it was “Blumy,” that “bald-headed S.O.B.,” who conducted Ufer’s memorial service at the end of the road.  Wasn’t that a time.

Walter Ufer, Coming from the Spring, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 24 by 30 in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Builders in the Desert, Oil on Canvas on Aluminum, 50 ¼ by 50 ¼ in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Summer in Taos

Walter Ufer, Their Audience, 1917, Oil on Canvas, 40 by 50 in., Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame