A Concise History Of American Painting And Sculpture by Matthew Baigell

Author:Matthew Baigell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

196. Robert Henri, West 57th Street, New York, 1902. Yale University Art Gallery.

197. Everett Shinn, The Docks, New York City, 1901. Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute.

[196]. Although he found the new skyscrapers to be excellent symbols of the nation’s modernity and virility, he never captured the staccato pulse of the modern metropolis. For an artist so intoxicated with life, he probably could not encompass the abstract dynamism of an entire city scene, but needed a particular focus upon which to concentrate. In both his landscapes and portraits, color brightened appreciably after 1909, when he adopted Hardesty Maratta’s color system. Maratta, an unsuccessful painter, developed a table of twelve basic colors, which could be used to find complementary shades as well as degrees of pigment saturation. Using this system flexibly, Henri applied it primarily to his portraits and figure studies, which, for the remaining twenty years of his life, were his preferred subject matter.

Among all the realists, Everett Shinn (1873–1953) painted slum life the most accurately—and bleakly—but only in a handful of paintings and sketches made just after 1900 [197]. By 1906, his preference for theater scenes reminiscent of Degas had replaced his earlier subject matter. By contrast, George Luks (1867–1933) remained closest to Henri’s early vision of humanity throughout his career. Intellectually undisciplined, Luks’s portraits vary wildly from the incisive to the saccharine, from the profoundly inciteful to the superficially anecdotal [201]. When he was good, he was probably the best portraitist of the group; when he was bad, he was awful.

Luks lived and studied in Paris and Düsseldorf between 1885 and the middle 1890s. His European experience probably countered his innate desire to let his brushes fly, at least until about 1910. Before that year, his rapid-fire delivery was usually contained within broad, flattened patterns. Afterward, broad swatches of color energized his figures. Regardless of the method he used, however, Luks remained the most loyal to the realists’ early attitudes. It was he who most consistently sought the sparkle of life in his sitters and who responded to it in a manner as uncomplicated as possible. In addition, he was perhaps the only one to paint specific incidents of the immigration process itself [202].

198. George Luks, The Spielers, 1905. Addison Gallery of American Art.

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