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WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE:
Modern American Landscapes

September 9-October 26, 2000
Mon, Wed, Thurs, Fri: 10:30-4:30 PM;
Tues 10:30-8:00 PM; Sat 10-5 PM;
Sunday 12-5 PM.

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6110
Telephone: 312/ 443-3600
http://www.artic.edu

Among his proteges were Georgia O'Keeffe, Rockwell Kent, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Joseph Stella. Even where the students went on to Cubism, Futurism, Precisionism, they kept their mentor's commitment to technical sophistication and quality. He was a driving force toward forging a specifically American art; he was, as his biographer, Keith L. Bryant, Jr., called him, A Genteel Bohemian. And after it all, for a time, he was branded an 'academicist,' and remained unassessed and poorly appreciated. The label, 'academicist,' would have distressed William Merritt Chase deeply:

Throughout his career Chase had led or been supportive of insurrectionists in art, that is, until the rise of postimpressionism. He deeply resented being considered conservative or academic, for his lack of sentimentality and idealism had caused the true academics to reject his style. He refused to paint pictures that simply told stories.

Keith L. Bryant, Jr., in A Genteel Bohemian
(University of Missouri Press: 1991)

Among so much else, William Merritt Chase did paint modern American landscapes. And he not only painted them, he helped to bring them into being, both as a geography and as a modern vision. "William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes, 1886-1890" is both an exhibition of Chase's achievements in art, and an exploration of how urban parks reflected a change in public life. It is a change particularly evident in this artist's landscapes. This showing will run until October 26th at the Art Institute of Chicago.

As an American artist in the latter half of the 19th century, William Merritt Chase did have to look towards Europe for guidance and technique, models and a mature patrimony. Keith L. Bryant commented:

The consummate technician, Chase avoided symbolism and romanticism to paint realistic pictures that did not slavishly follow the impressionists. He never apologized for borrowing from the old masters or the impressionists, and he later declared, 'I have been a thief; I have stolen all my life -- I have never been so foolish and foolhardy as to refrain from stealing for fear I should be considered as not "original."'

Chase did study the European legacies, as well as his contemporaries abroad, but one need only examine a work such as Boat House, Prospect Park (c.1888) to see the artist asserting his own formulations and approaches -- a style distinctly his, and arguably American in attitude and taste. The Yankee temperament by then was neither insurrectional nor even overly familiar, at least not among any rank or order Chase was likely to encounter. It is hard to think of Chase as an Impressionist, although he did study and learn from them. A close examination of old masters reveals that at times many did place unmixed colors together on canvas, so that the viewing eye might blend them. That practice gave vibrancy: it avoided dull or muddy tones -- but it was discreet: a means, and not an end in itself. Impressionism focused on it -- it mimicked light -- elaborated it; flaunted it as a New Art. Chase, with a certain American reticence, ameliorated it... a somewhat naturalistic Impressionism. America could toy with iconoclasts; but suitably domesticated. Chase didn't accommodate: he shared in that frame of mind. Boat House, Prospect Park is thus bright, clear, shimmering, and yet visually coherent. This is true of much of the work in "William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes."

Chase remained in the U.S., whatever his excursions and contacts abroad, and he did nurture important new currents in American art. One thinks of the grand vistas of the Luminists, Hudson River artists, the romanticists of the New World and wild nature; and then of the urban public spaces, and leisure resorts so often presented in Chase's landscapes. America, much like Europe in that century, was learning to be public without familiarity, a new way to be out among strangers. Many of his landscape paintings create a sense of public locales as personal terrain, parks as large backyard gardens, with ambient fellow citizens as both setting and audience. Chase's American landscapes are very modern in this; he helped to encourage the park and promenade as an essential, urban amenity. A work such as The Lake for Miniature Yachts (c.1888) illustrates how much of that sensibility pervades Chase's sight. The artist composes the image so that the wide, lakeside walkway occupies much of the lower half of the painting, a cordon sanitaire for the viewer, which places him outside of and apart from the activity at mid-canvas. Although Chase includes no explicit elements, one presumes by the shadows on the walk that there are trees at the left, off-canvas. (The catalogue to this exhibition offers a 1999 photograph of the site, Conservatory Water, Central Park, New York. Trees are there.) Composition and subtle effects of illumination in the painting lend a feeling of observing the public scene from a comfortable seclusion. A viewer, together with the artist, stands aside privately in public.

Chase's landscapes encouraged and confirmed the 19th century transition from public discourse and participation to public observation and private leisure. Historian Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man details the history of the change and, citing Baudelaire's "The painter of Modern Life," interestingly notes what often seems the character of both Chase and his subjects:

...the flaneur, the man of the boulevard who "dresses to be observed," whose very life depends on his arousing the interest of others in the street: the flaneur is a person of leisure who is not an aristocrat at ease. The flaneur Baudelaire takes to be the ideal of middle-class Parisians, just as Poe, in "The Man of the Crowd," takes him to be the ideal of middle-class Londoners, just as Walter Benjamin later took him as the emblem for the 19th Century bourgeois who imagined what it would be like to be interesting.

Sennett also notes that the intrusion of personality into the public realm in this manner contributed greatly to the developing stereotype of artist as 'bohemian.' Chase was known for his opulent studio, complete with props, curios and unconventional decor: A Genteel Bohemian. In viewing Chase's modern American landscapes, the content of the paintings and the composition of view they exhibit do lead one to consider to what degree Chase was aware of the assumptions and 'givens' in his treatment of public locales, and in his polite bohemianisms. William Merritt Chase perhaps did as much to form them as he did in intuiting them. As the exhibition texts point out, Chase not only painted Central Park, New York City -- his work promoted its institution as a favored landmark.

One observation arises out of many of Chase's urban landscapes, and it touches upon the artist's sense of personal terrain. There is often a noticeable inclination to choose images in which lawns and parkland, public venues, are accepted as outdoor parlor or living room. This exhibition includes the pastel, I Am Going to See Grandma (c.1889): a portrait of the artist's wife, Alice, and child, Cosy. It is an excellent treatment of luminous indoor radiance which suffuses the room from bright sunlight entering at the full-length window at right. Here, broken errant rays dapple the back wall and couch; the deeper shadow of the wife's black dress draws attention to the off-center focus -- wife and child -- and the view is presumably from a still darker corner in the room. A viewer is not drawn into the image, but positioned as outside observer... but the very same pose might well equally suit a Chase landscape. People are seen in his parks and boulevards as if they were at home and yet they pass among a public of strangers.

At the time people did indeed set up formal table service on lawns, and dress 'to the nines' for al fresco soirees; a practice today reserved for exceptional celebrations or very private estates. Barbara Dayer Gallati in the exhibition catalogue notes the phenomenon of "bourgeois gentility" and biographer Keith Bryant discusses in length Chase's basic affirmation of it. This current exhibition affords an opportunity to study that class and time and Chase's handling of it. Paintings such as Afternoon by the Sea (c.1888), The Open Air Breakfast (1887), A Bit of the Terrace (c.1890) (in Central Park) share the walls with I Am Going to See Grandma. Chase's interiors are often personal, politely domestic, face-to-face: one recalls A Friendly Call (1895:30 1/8"x48 1/4"), or Hide and Seek (1888: 27 5/8"x35 7/8"), and many more not in this showing. In this exhibition, one views Women under Trellis (c.1886) and Afternoon in the Park (c.1887), and the artist's 'outdoors' seem like interiors. (In a work such as Sunlight and Shadow (1884: 65 1/4"x77 3/4"), not in this showing, Chase achieves a sense of kitchen/bedroom/patio.) Public as personal space was a trend of the time, but Chase does appear to endorse it as an aesthetic and a vision. Whatever the rationalizations in the name of health or recreation, Chase's American landscapes participate in a milieu of observer among fellow observers.

Which is not to deny that the landscapes range beyond that sight. It may be a mere impression, but towards the late 1880s and 90s, Chase's landscapes tend away from a private demeanor in public space: there are fewer people, figures seen ever more at a distance, and landscape views in which image simplifies and empties. In viewing such paintings as Wind Swept Sands, Shinnecock, Long Island (1984: 34 1/4"x39 3/4") or The Common, Central Park (c.1889: 10 3/8"x16"), Chase shows an increased interest in color fields, division into large color areas. The Common, Central Park is particularly impressive in the visibly bold brushwork of the foreground which occupies almost three-fourths of the panel. Such strategy in composition is particularly noticeable in this exhibition's waterscapes by Chase. In Harbor Scene, Brooklyn Docks (1886), the harborline, piers and storehouses, cut the upper third of canvas image as a modest ribbon of detail, but the gentle grey-blue water occupies most of the panel; and the sky, close in hue and only slightly lighter in tone, augments the major color field below. In Seashore (originally A Gray Day: c.1888), Sailboat at Anchor (c.1888), even the park scene, Prospect Park (possibly Croquet Lawn, Prospect Park: 1886), and in many other paintings, large, subtly modulated, but essentially single hue areas form the major visual interest, albeit counterbalanced by a modest figurative element.

Many such paintings were executed prior to Chase's summers at Shinnecock, Long Island, and his preferences in composition and looser brush seem inherent in the natural evolution of the artist's vision, but perhaps there is here an awareness of still newer trends developing abroad. Either way, as with his domesticated landscapes, potentials may have lain within the subject, but the selection was Chase's. It is a commonplace that Chase himself never really accepted Post-Impressionism. Many of his proteges embraced the later developments in art: Cubism, Futurism, Precisionism, etc. But, just as William Merritt Chase found a personal and American expression from Impressionism, his reticent, Yankee temperament may very well have given side-glances to modernist innovations, gentrifying them into his personal idiom. The younger wave he mentored proved far more insurrectional. Chase gave them that. "William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes," a pleasure in itself, suggests even more for consideration -- in light of his legacy, and in comparison with his contemporaries. (One is grateful for the inclusion in this exhibition of Winslow Homer's painting, Croquet Scene, which highlights a similar subject, but a different attitude.)

The art in "Modern American Landscapes" also suggests that William Merritt Chase was not as bohemian as contemporaries held, nor as genteel as later critics complained. This showing does include Wash Day--A Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn (1886: 22"x25"), and while not typical of Chase's main themes and interests, one agrees with the critic who in 1887 pronounced it "one good thing that has come out of Brooklyn." (Cited in the exhibition catalogue.)

"William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes" presents an excellent selection of paintings by an artist who brought much to American art, and who fostered new generations of artists. It reveals an artist who both focused on new public life -- private faces in public places; and nurtured a contemporary urban milieu still with us. The paintings in this exhibition display luminous, engaging work executed with skill, sensitivity and high technique. There is variety in content, and Chase's work is accompanied by well-researched and selected context and commentary. But above all, "William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes" is a visual pleasure.

"William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes" will be on exhibit at The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Avenue, from September 9th through October 26th, 2000. A catalogue is available through the Art Institute of Chicago Bookstore. It is copiously illustrated and documented, all 192 pages.

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: Many of the books noted in www.artscope.net reviews are in print and may be purchased through this site's Barnes & Noble link. Of particular interest is the biography, William Merritt Chase: A Genteel Bohemian, by Keith L. Bryant, Jr. (University of Missouri Press: 1991). The Terra Museum of American Art, together with the National Gallery of Art in 1987 and 1988, co-sponsored "William Merritt Chase: Summers at Shinnecock, 1891-1902," a showing of the artist's landscapes. Also worth investigating is Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man (W.W. Norton & Company: 1992).