Alder's Accounts
Around the Block: A.B. Wright
by Tom Alder
Why this insatiable interest in the work and lives of early Utah artists? Perhaps because my office is now located on the 10th floor of the Zions Bank Tower I am receiving some sort of vibe from its predecessor, the Templeton Building, home to the studios of dozens of early Utah artists. Many of these artists lived and worked in a small area of the Avenues east of Virginia Street on Third Avenue that has come to be called "The Block." Since my residence is in the same vicinity, perhaps I have been caught in some sort of triangulation of artist vibes. Indeed, my son, Nick, who drank the water in Federal Heights for some years, became an artist and now lives in New York. For whatever reasons, I look forward, beginning with this first column of the new year, to offer profiles of some of the "Block" artists. Not only will I examine the careers of such venerable artists as Lee Greene Richards, Mahonri Young, Waldo Midgely, and Roscoe Grover (remember "Uncle Roscoe" in the early days of KSL TV kiddie shows?), but by slightly expanding "the Block," I'll also be able to pull in the habitations of Florence Ware and her architect father, Walter Ware (U Street), the eccentric but talented Mabel Frazer (yes, she really slept in a piano) of University Street, Ranch Kimball and Bill Crawford from the Capitol Hill-City Creek area, Taylor Woolley (a student of Frank Lloyd Wright), John Held, Jr., and Clyde Squires.
One of the many talented of the Block was Alma Brockerman Wright. Known more commonly as A.B. Wright (1875-1952), this brilliant landscapist took his early lessons at the feet of George M. Ottinger (also of City Creek residence) in the 1880s, and later studied under master artist and University of Utah art department chair, J.T. Harwood. Wright received classical academic training, as did many early Utah artists, in Paris at the Academie Julian (favored among Utahans), the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Colarossi, where other artists from Utah including Henri Moser studied. Those, including Wright, who trained in Utah before making the pilgrimage to Paris, became uniquely known as "pioneers in reverse." Wright exhibited in Paris with his neighborhood chums from the old 20th Ward, Richards and Young, and received suitable honors in the French salons as well as other domestic competitions.
As a talented muralist and landscapist, Wright occupied a time in the mid to late 19th-century when landscape paintings were increasingly popular with patrons. The late Dr. Robert Olpin included Wright in a large group of like artists that he called "The Rocky Mountain School," whose works were celebrated in Olpin's last work, Painters of the Wasatch Mountains. Olpin offered that the Rocky Mountain School was "the romantic realist Hudson River School gone west."
Wright had additional talents -- in fencing -- and held several intermountain fencing titles beginning in 1897. He was described as a remarkable conversationalist and as a well-groomed, attractive man with a trimmed mustache who projected a gentlemanly manner.
Wright distinguished himself as a muralist with large commissions by the LDS church -- in 1915 at the LDS Hawaiian Temple, at the Cardston, Alberta, Canada Temple during the years 1920-24, and shortly thereafter at the Mesa, Arizona Temple. By this time, Wright had abandoned his darker, academic style in favor of the brighter, secondary colors of the fauvist palette, derived, no doubt, from his experiences with his fellow artists in Logan (Moser, in particular) where fauvism had acquired respect in the art curriculum at the Utah Agricultural College (predecessor to Utah State University) and also from his exposure in Paris to the developments of modernism. For the next few years, Wright received further training in Paris, and then returned to his easel in Utah producing exquisite artworks. In 1931 he was appointed as the art department chair at the University of Utah, succeeding his former teacher and mentor, J.T. Harwood. The ensuing years at the U were productive for Wright and his respected faculty, which numbered among them Jack Sears and Mabel Frazer. It would be Frazer in 1937, according to Robert S. Olpin, Utah Art, who would be "instrumental in the departure of Chairman Wright for France -- for the rest of his life -- after a secret campus investigation of Wright's conduct around departmental models, and just preceding the appearance on campus of an irate, life-threatening Salt Lake City husband." Olpin further suggested, "See Myrtle: the Artist's Model, c. 1937," an oil on board painting of his fully exposed nude model, Myrtle. You do the math.
Wright traveled to Europe following his forced departure from the respected position at the U, never to return to Utah. Tragically, the senior painter was captured by the Germans shortly after the occupation of France and spent several years in a prison camp "under deplorable conditions." Although he was supplied with food, clothes and art materials, Wright endured hardship and was not released until 1945, at war's end. A.B. Wright died at the age of seventy-seven in Dordogne, France, and although at one time disgraced, left an impressive legacy of artworks, supportive colleagues, and hundreds of Utah students who received from him the equivalent of a French academic education. Anyone who has priced an original A.B. Wright work in recent years will attest to the quality and appeal of such art, as the prices for his work continue to increase.
|
|
The dominant imagery in Warrick's pieces are the simplistic line drawings, like a school child's sketches on a slate chalkboard, which frequently appear in one square of an individual work. Warrick mines archetypal imagery -- a boat, a house, a kettle, a cup, a branching tree -- to serve as the basis for her "chalkboard" calligraphy. |0 -5| The remembered childhood evoked by these drawings is called up by other elements in the paintings. A repeating landscape of earth, water, and sky, brushed in thin and loose, brings to mind remembered summers at a grandparent's cabin. Despite my knowledge of her New England heritage (Warrick is a native of New York) Warrick's painting brought to my mind the South; not the actual South, but the literary South, the South I know from the novels of Faulkner or the poems of Robert Penn Warren. Maybe it is the nostalgia of the pieces, the yearning for a time when cup or boat were emblems for our existence rather than iPods and Blackberries.
Next door to Meyer, the Terzian Gallery has mounted a joint exhibition featuring two talented Utah painters, Patricia Kimball and Emily McPhie. Whenever I see Kimball's work, I am reminded of my first encounter with it at Phillips Gallery some years ago. Her landscapes depicting Salt Lake's east bench were rendered with a restricted, subdued palette, giving the scenes the sense of early morning, before the sun has pulled out the landscape's brighter colors. A color enthusiast, I felt an urge to see these colors break forth but was intrigued by Kimball's ability to imply their emergence without actually showing them.
Though I have seen Kimball scrape some pure colors onto canvas over the years, her work has continued to be characterized by a subdued palette. It has also been characterized by an interest in the depiction of figures (in paint, or quite effectively in monoprints as well), notably her series of Winter Olympic scenes from 2002. Though peppered with figures, I wouldn't call these "figurative works," as little attention was paid to the depiction of the intricacies of the human body. The figures, wrapped in winter attire, were hulking masses spread across the surface of the paintings. A couple of pieces in the Terzian exhibit are similar to these 2002 works. They are square, with almost non-descript backgrounds upon which Kimball has placed a number of figures, floating or falling in the air. In "Apocalypse" figures are falling from the sky, accompanied by frogs, reminding me of that jolting scene from the film Magnolia, as well as the biblical passage that served as the movie's source. Kimball's sly wit is displayed in "Pursuit," where a businessman, also falling through the sky, reaches out to grasp a floating high-heeled shoe while a more casually dressed man attempts to do the same. As if mocking these men's attempts, Kimball has painted a dog, midair, stretching to catch a Frisbee.
The majority of Kimball's works in this exhibition are figure paintings of a different sort: the figures are larger, one or two filling the whole canvas, and concentrate more on the details of the individuals. Still, these seem not to be figure studies. These female figures are shown in states of stylized motions, transparent ghost images depicting movement. The artist clothes her figures in shorts and tank tops so that only their appendages, shooting out sometimes at right angles, are completely visible. The viewer, it seems, is meant to pay more attention to the gesture of the form than to details of human anatomy. Like those first landscapes I saw, Kimball doesn't let the paintings get away with coloristic fireworks: beiges, tans and umbers dominate, though they can be offset with particularly effective hints of blue tones or streaks of pink in the underpainting. |5| What attracts me about these paintings is that Kimball seems to be able to create that same tension she did with those first landscapes. These figures are in intense and energetic action, but Kimball frames them in a subdued setting, juxtaposing the energy of form with the stillness of her color in a visually delightful tension.
The paintings of Kimball's exhibition mate, Emily McPhie, operate with a similar subtle tension. McPhie's small paintings are very still, straightforward and detailed depictions of children. Her doll-like children (usually girls) dressed in late 19th-century clothes, have a measured passivity about them even when they are involved in implausible settings, such as riding a tortoise or taking a crocodile for a walk.|9| Almost every painting depicts a child in some relation to an animal or, in the case of a trio of works, beast. In "Tethered," a young child in a wallpapered room impassively staring out at the viewer is actually tied to a wholly, black creature. The same creature appears in “Tea Party” having just that.|10| And in "Addie" a young girl holds a birdcage containing a smaller version of the same beast. The settings are all late Victorian, from the preponderance of wallpaper to the circuses motifs (one girl performs with an elephant) and hot-air balloons. The artist has given the paintings a crackle glaze to evoke a sense of datedness and nostalgia. McPhie's works have an unsettling charm, the caged or tethered animals posing no danger to the children, though they should; the children showing no expression, though they should. It is an imaginary world that teeters between the playful and the precarious and, thankfully, the artist does not dictate our response to it.
McPhie's sister, Cassandra Barney, opened an exhibition at Coda Gallery the same night. I must have arrived at the bottom of Main Street and walked into the gallery just as the family reunion began, because I was surrounded by small children, weaving their way (more successfully than myself) through the beaded skirts of Stacy Phillips, also on display. Barney and McPhie are the daughters of Jim Christensen, long-time BYU professor and well-known fantasy painter. His daughters take from him an interest in the childlike world, stylized figures and propped settings. Seeing the two sisters works on the same night brought to the fore their similarities and differences. Barney's figures are also female, though they are a decade or more older. Animals make frequent appearances in her works, as do trees and flowers. |12-14| Barney has also applied the crackle glaze in places, though it seems less appropriate on these pieces because they are neither stylistically nor contextually very nostalgic. Barney's figures are stylized, smooth featured, with ovaline faces perched awkwardly on long necks. In comparison to her sister's work, I found Barney's painting somewhat disappointing. Maybe it is because my responses to them were more overtly dictated. In "Freefalling," a recumbent figure with an exposed chest has a small fire burning on it. In "It's delicate, it's my heart" the handle of a kitchen blade comes out of the figure's blouse. Barney's women don't have the same intriguing unease as McPhie's little girls, maybe because they are older, possibly because they are painted differently. All the pieces have a melancholic, dreamy look about them while being somehow quirky and fun, all of which wasn't to my particular taste. Maybe it's a man thing.
If you like quirky and fun, and haven't yet had your fill of quadrupeds, then you'll want to stop by the Kimball Art Center where their main gallery has been devoted to man's best friend. William Wegman, a painter and photographer well known for his images of canines in costume, presents a suite of photographs showing the Cinderella story with dogs as his models. Also on display are the hot-sculpted glass figurines of Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen, three-dimensional counterparts to Wegman's photographs, that show dogs in various vignettes and settings: a hoedown, a honkey tonk, the circus. |15| Along the perimeter of the exhibition space, "funk" artist David Gilhooly fills out the homage to the dogs in our lives with his junk-inspired art. |16| "Funk" is described by the Center as work that is "between painting and sculpture, features deliberate bad taste and often makes use of unusual materials and found objects." To give you an idea, Gilhooly's "Old Dog: New Trix" is a canine cutout filled with the breakfast cereal and "My Dog Spot Wearing Arcimboldi's Fast Food Shirt" uses children's meals figurines to create a three-dimensional shirt resembling the 16th century mannerist's unique style of painting.
There is much more to see this month along Main Street, as well as outside historic Park City proper (such as the Julie Nester gallery) and in the couple of months to come there will be even more. So even if you don't go there to ski or stargaze, make it to Park City to see what kind of activity the autumnal hibernation has produced.
|
