Robert's Art History 101 - Robert Henri and Walter Keane

In my opinion, Robert Henri was the most pathetically overhyped American artist and the Ash Can School only possibly matched by the Oakland Society of Six in it's members lack of artistic merit and their overblown popularity. In fact, the latter day artist that most favorably compares to Henri is Walter (Margaret) Keane. They both liked to paint syrupy portraits of children with big eyes, however Keane was never under the illusion that he was creating great art. Like Keane, Henri's subjects always had the same rosy cheeks and monotonous and unwavering emotional palette. He used thick impasto and big sloppy brushwork.

From Wikipedia:

In Philadelphia, Henri began to attract a group of followers who met in his studio to discuss art and culture, including several illustrators for the Philadelphia Press newspaper who would become known as the 'Philadelphia Four': William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John French Sloan. The gatherings became known as the "Charcoal Club", featuring life drawing and readings in the social philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Émile Zola, and Henry David Thoreau. By 1895, Henri had come to reconsider Impressionism, calling it a new academicism. In 1906, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, but when painters in his circle were rejected for the Academy's 1907 exhibition, he accused fellow jurors of bias and walked off the jury, resolving to organize a show of his own. He would later refer to the Academy as "a cemetery of art."


In February 1908, Henri organized a landmark show entitled "The Eight" (after the eight painters displaying their works) at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. Besides his own works and those produced by the "Philadelphia Four" (who had followed Henri to New York by this time), there were paintings by Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur B. Davies. These painters and this exhibition would become associated with the Ashcan School, although the content of the show was diverse and that term was not coined until 1934. In May 1908, he married 22-year old Irish-born Marjorie Organ.


In 1910, Henri organized the Exhibition of Independent Artists, a no-jury, no-prize show modeled after the Salon des Independants in France. Works were hung alphabetically to emphasize the egalitarian philosophy. Walt Kuhn, who took part in this show, would come to play a key role in the Armory Show, an exhibition mounted in 1913 that introduced many American viewers to avant-garde European art. Five of Henri's paintings were included in the Armory Show.


Now the salient question is how the American public, exposed and nurtured on the brilliance of Hassam, Eakins, Whistler and Sargent, could fall for these bogus antecedents of 50's clown genre painting. I think the answer is the New York centricism that both then and now pervades the art market. You could have a blind chihuaha tap dancing on a canvas with paint on its paws and someone in the five boroughs would proclaim it an artistic tour de force. And the American public would buy it. The rest of the eight, with the possible exception of Glackens, were similar one trick pony nogoodniks, whose exalted status has been fraudulently foisted on the American public. Sloan lacked rudimentary drawing skills, Prendergrast's work was thin and repetitive, Luks and Shinn were interesting artists in a regional sense, sort of second rate corollaries to the European Schiele and Klimt, but not deserving of the acclaim they ultimately achieved. These painters were awarded the sobriquet "Apostles of Ugliness" by the public, based on their gritty representation of life during the time. That verite is well and good if the image is at least rendered well or imaginatively. Bellows and Hopper are sometimes associated with the Ash Can school but their work stands head and shoulders above the original eight in it's brilliance.

From Wikipedia:
Walter Keane was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Walter Keane became a highly-popular post World War II figure painter of wide-eyed "lost" children, waif-like and sympathy provoking. These images were reproduced throughout the world with originals in many collections including the United Nations, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, Spain, and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, Japan. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Los Angeles to live with an uncle, and as a young adult, seemed headed towards a business career, following in the footsteps of his father. However, he began painting on his own, and in 1938, abandoned the business idea to attend college in Berkeley from where he graduated three years laterHe became so torn emotionally between the pressure of his father to be practical and go into business and his own inner drive to be an artist that he developed ulcers. But late in 1943, he made the final decision to become an artist and painted full time for a year in Berkeley and then enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where he lived a raucous Bohemian-style life. In Paris, he painted street scenes and figures including nudes, and from 1946 to 1947, he went to Berlin where he began his signature theme of "Lost Children." These paintings were inspired by his shock at seeing the thousands of war-orphaned, poverty-stricken children. Wanting to capture the realism of these people, he abandoned the Abstract Expressionism he had flirted with and focused on a style that more closely resembled Realism with elements of Modernism. He stayed in Europe until 1949 and then returned to Berkeley where he worked from his Berlin drawings and did a lot of painting in Sausalito, living at North Beach. He married his wife, Margaret, also an artist, and they lived in Oakland, and became public personalities because his work was collected by so many movie stars. By 1956, he and Margaret opened a gallery at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and again his work got much attention. Shortly after, the couple returned to San Francisco where they had a gallery at 494 Broadway for two years and then opened a gallery in New York City. Again he had many collectors but also received criticism for being repetitious with every canvas having a "lost" child. In 1965, Walter and Margaret Keane divorced, and a judge ruled against him when he made claims that certain paintings of waif-like children signed Keane were by him. When the judge asked Margaret and Walter to each produce a painting in that style and subject matter, he declined and she readily performed. The conclusion, according to "Artnews" November, 2000 is that some of the paintings attributed to him are in fact by his former wife.

When I was taking art history in college, I dared to ask if these guys were in fact wearing clothes. Some of the abstractionists seemed to be lousy painters looking for an "easy" venue to hide their natural lack of talent. This would tend to enrage the professors, who said that of course they knew how to draw, but they had gone beyond the yeoman's craft of drawing and painting. The truth is that many never learned how to draw. Look at Selden Connor Gile and compare his draftsmanship to your average second grader and tell me honestly who has the superior skills? And you may want to find a couple of those neat Keane paintings. If Henri is such a big splash, they are bound to appreciate.