Victor Higgins

Nineteenth-century landscape artist Victor Higgins has been credited with merging modernism with realism, a great revolution in American art. Throughout the first decade of his career, Higgins had the advantage of being sponsored by one wealthy patron who funded his travels and studies in Europe and across the United States. He brought his unique work to Chicago, in which he applied abstraction to landscape; introducing Chicagoans to the vivid beauty of the American Southwest. His works were coveted by Chicago natives from the very beginning of his career.

Born in Indiana in 1884, Higgins left his farming community at the age of 15 for Chicago to pursue his dreams of being an artist. He was inspired at the early age of nine by a young artist named John Cornelius who told him of the Art Institute of Chicago and the existence of museums in general, a concept he was not familiar with. Cornelius traveled the countryside painting advertisements on barns and inspired Higgins to purchase his own paints and brushes. He was self-taught, learning to paint on his father’s barn.

With his family’s encouragement, the young Higgins saved his allowance and left to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. He supported himself by working at a sign shop and painting theater decorations. After a brief period of study at the Art Institute, Higgins’ work caught the eye of former Chicago mayor and avid art collector Carter H. Harrison. Realizing Higgins’ talent, he sponsored a four-year trip to Europe for him and another young artist by the name of Walter Ulfer. During his studies at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere in Paris, Higgins was exposed to the work of the Modern masters of the time. While abroad, he realized that America needed its own style of art, not reproductions of the classical work he was studying in school.

Immediately after Europe, Higgins traveled to New York in 1913 where he was fortunate enough to see the Armory Show and the work of minimalist Marcel Duchamp, both of which affected him greatly. Upon is return to Chicago, Higgins was commissioned by his patron Carter H. Harrison to travel to New Mexico to paint landscapes for him.

From his very first trip to New Mexico, Higgins was greatly inspired by his surroundings. Later in his career he would go on to create his own style by combining the styles of the Modernists in Paris with that of his studies under Robert Henri. Henri taught him the importance of capturing spirit and sense of place, even in the most common everyday scenes. As an artist, he needed to go beyond just physical appearance, and learned how to translate the spirit of a subject into form and color. The American Southwest could not have provided a better subject matter for Higgins to apply his studies and artistic inspirations.

This commissioned trip to New Mexico lasted one year, during which time he helped form an art colony and founded the Taos Society of Artists in 1915, located about 12 hours from Santa Fe. During this time he would become familiar with the landscape of New Mexico and develop a personal passion for this part of the country. It was his later work in New Mexico that allowed him to develop a unique style that would be deemed a revolution in modern American art.

After his scheduled year in New Mexico was over, Higgins returned to the Midwest and taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art from 1917-1923. He was commissioned to paint murals for the Missouri State Capitol in 1919 and a mural at the Herington post office in 1923. By this time, Higgins had made a name for himself and his work was collected by businessmen and industrialists of Chicago. He was finally able to return to the Southwest where he would paint the works that made him the important American artist he is today.

Higgins had always been inspired by the distinct light and colors of the Southwest. By the 1920s his subject matter focused on the pueblo people of the area and the rapidly changing moods of the sky. As he progressed, the hues used in his landscapes shifted from ocher and earthy colors to brighter and richer hues which helped him capture the spirit of his surroundings. By the 1930s his brush strokes had turned from bold and broad into lighter strokes that allowed for more simplified forms.

Higgins’ work was different from the others of the Taos artistic community in that he spontaneously reacted to his subject instead of working from preliminary drawings. In the 1930s he developed geometric and cubist tendencies as he focused strictly on landscapes and nudes of Native Americans, instead of the pueblo community as a whole. He had rejected all of his formal training and eventually reduced his combination of Impressionism and cubism into almost pure cubism, producing scenes of basic shapes and, through the geometric relationships of the form and design, created a colorful visual rhythm. Higgins is also known for his experimentation with multi-point perspective and interlocking planes, thought to be inspired by Cézanne. As a cubist he also experimented with the layering of fore, middle, and backgrounds.

Though vivid depictions of the Southwest painted by Higgins’ Taos peers were wildly popular as well, Higgins stands out from the crowd by the unique lyricism of his paintings produced by vivid colors and the combination of Modern styles. He succeeding in capturing the feeling and spirit of the Southwest, not just painting what was directly in front of him. He rejected the sentimentality and romanticism that was present in the work of his peers and painted in both oil and watercolor. His work was exhibited throughout the United States and Europe where he won awards in France, Luxembourg, and Venice. Higgins passed away in 1949.




Works cited:

www.askart.com
http://www.cdaartauction.com/index.html
http://raginguniverse.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html


Researched and written by Alexandra Nilles.


MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814-8510

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc., is located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Charles Deas

Charles Deas (pronounced “days”) was born in Philadelphia to a prominent South Carolinian family in 1818. As a young man, he attempted and failed to obtain appointment at West Point Military Academy, and from there followed his natural artistic talents and enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York. Though his career was very short, barely lasting a decade, Charles Deas is credited with changing the world’s view of the American West through his paintings; transforming the image of the Western man from a humble, rustic individual into a heroic, national icon of adventure and independence on the wild frontier, in other words, the “mountain man”. The influential images of his rugged frontiersmen and depictions of the intermingling of American Indian and European cultures in the West, in addition to his tragic story, make his work extremely valuable today.

After entering the Academy of Design, Deas’ talents were quickly recognized and his paintings were regularly featured at annual exhibitions. Deas emerged professionally in the 1830s as a portraitist and painter of literary subjects and was elected an associate member of the Academy in 1839. When artistic patronage in New York all but disappeared due to economic downturn, Deas chose to venture west. He traveled to Fort Crawford in Wisconsin, located on the Mississippi River, where his brother was stationed. There he came into contact with Sioux, Winnebago, and other American Indian tribes. These encounters would manifest themselves in Deas’ later work.

In 1841, Deas continued west and established a studio in St. Louis where he worked until the end of his career in 1847. The artist painted many scenes of the fur trade, the dominant industry of St. Louis. He also occasionally tagged along on military expeditions to the Great Lakes and what is now Nebraska. From his travels and experiences in Wisconsin and Missouri, Deas created colorful, multi-layered scenes depicting life on the frontier, especially the intermingling of Indian and European cultures. Through these works, particularly his paintings depicting fur traders, he established a new idea of the “mountain man”, capturing the romantic idea of an independent life in the wilderness. His painting Long Jakes, “the Rocky Mountain Man” is one of his most famous works and is an image many would recognize today, perfectly depicting this new rugged frontiersman.

Exhibited in New York in 1844, Long Jakes received great acclaim and drew massive crowds as the painting was described as a “Western work by an authentic Westerner”. Unfortunately, Deas’ career did not last much longer. At the age of 29, Deas was declared insane and lived the rest of his life in mental institutions. It is believed that his sanity had been declining for many years, but it cannot be known for sure as he lived so independently in such a remote area of the country. Deas died soon after the end of the Civil War at the age of 48.

The combination of Deas’ wildly successful career during his lifetime, his tragic fall, and the credit given to him for creating the iconic frontiersman account for the high value of his paintings today. Deas died without descendents to keep is name and career alive, and by the end of the 19th century, Deas was all but forgotten. His paintings scattered throughout the United States and have begun to be recovered over the past few years, many of them gathered for a retrospective exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in Winter 2010. A perfect example of this is one of his most famous paintings, Long Jakes, which was found under a bed.

The work of Charles Deas is the perfect example of an artist whose work may have been passed down through generations, unidentified and regarded only as a beautiful picture. In reality, the work of this important American painter is valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars, some pieces having even been appraised upwards of a million dollars.







Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/arts/design/25artist.html?_r=1&hp
http://www.denverartmuseum.org
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=2451964


Researched and written by Alexandra Nilles.


MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814-8510

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc., is located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Ivan Albright

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright is one of the most original, and perhaps most odd, artists of the 20th century. As an artist he considered himself to be an individualist, uninfluenced by the waves of Impressionism, abstract art, and later pop art that evolved during his life. His work is all his own, incomparable to his contemporaries. Though the well known styles used to categorize the work of other artists of Albright’s time are not be applicable to his art, all of his work is linked by the constant representation of the passage of time. This theme is presented in the most morbid and detailed images of aging and decaying flesh, using dark and sickly shades of yellow, as well as an abundance of grays, white, and black. Hyper-realism and magic realism are the two styles most often used to describe his work.

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright began his artistic training at a very young age. His father began to teach him and his identical twin brother, Malvin, to draw at the age of eight. Born outside of Chicago in 1897, Ivan stayed in the Midwest to study architecture at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois. In 1918 one of his paintings was displayed at a watercolor exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. During WWI, Albright was stationed in an army hospital in Nantes, France from 1918-1919. While there, his duty was to paint detailed watercolors of soldier’s wounds. He was also exposed to and became fascinated with X-rays; no doubt this was a very influential experience for the work he would become famous for.

Upon his return home, Albright was granted three scholarships to the Art Institute of Chicago and had decided that painting was what he really wanted to do. In 1927, he set up a studio with his brother and father, and his unique style began to emerge after many years under art instruction that ultimately had no personal effect on him or his style. In 1931, Albright had his first solo museum show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Even if the public found his subject matter disturbing, his work was still universally revered for his technical mastery and microscopic detail.

In 1941, Albright won the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy, and then received the 1942 prize for best picture at the Artists for Victory show at the New York Metropolitan Museum. Albright gained major public recognition in 1939 when he and his twin brother were hired by MGM studios to paint the portraits for their production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. For his work, Albright was paid $75,000, and, even more importantly, his uniquely morbid and grotesque work became well known.

Albright is known best for his still lifes and portraiture. Only in his portraits and self-portraits are traces of outside influence, as his formats are similar to those of Rembrandt and Goya. His work overall, beyond the grotesque subject matter, is also defined by his use of multiple light sources, warped perspectives, and highly praised attention to detail. From his paintings of still lifes and models, Albright sought to create feelings of tension, conflict, and constant movement, usually using his background to create this effect. In addition to his model portraits and still lifes, Albright is also well known for the self-portraits that he painted consistently throughout his career, continuously studying and painting the aging in his face.

As the pop art and minimalist movements came into being in the 1950s, Albright began to be seen as somewhat of a traditionalist, if only for his subject matters. In 1964, the Art Institute of Chicago held a very successful retrospective exhibition of Albright’s work, celebrating his fascinating interpretation and forward presentation of aging in a style that no one had done before and has not been copied since. At one point in his career, Albright stated, "I hope to control the observer, … to make him feel tossed around in every direction, to make him realize that objects are at war. Everything in the canvas is fighting. I want to give a feeling of frustration." It is from this unique intention in combination with uncensored images of mortification that has solidified Ivan Le Lorraine Albright’s place in the history of art.




Researched and written by Alexandra Nilles.

Works cited:

http://www.butlerart.com/pc_book/pages/ivan_le_lorraine_albright_1897.htm
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=637&tabview=bio
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/13106/Ivan-Albright
http://collection.wmuseumaa.org:8080/Art534$6084
http://www.cegur.com/html/frameAlbright.html


Photos:

Self Portrait in Georgia, 1967
Oil on panel; 20 x 16”

Poor Room--There Is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever without End (The Window)
1942-43, 1948-55, 1957-63
Oil on canvas; 48 x 37 in.

That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door)
1931-41
Oil on canvas; 97 x 36 in

Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida
1929-30
Oil on canvas; 55 x 46 in.

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814-8510

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc., is located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Warner Sallman

Chicago native Warner Sallman is the twentieth century religious artist responsible for perhaps one of the most widely recognized and reproduced images in the world, The Head of Christ. This painting, as well as many of his other religious works, have epitomized and solidified the West’s idea of a beautiful, idealized, and physically Westernized Jesus and other Biblical figures; images that have come to be known throughout the world.

Born in Chicago on April 30, 1892, Sallman was impacted by religious art at a very young age, particularly by the religious prints of Gustave Doré. After completing high school, Sallman apprenticed at many local studios while attending the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating, the young man began a career as a commercial artist, until he was encouraged by a business associate to enroll at the Moody Bible Institute.

Sallman became deeply involved with the Evangelist Covenant Church of Chicago and contributed his artistic talents to many of their publications. While there, the dean of the institute, Dr. E.O. Sellers, made a great impact on Sallman’s future religious images, asking him to create a more masculine image of Christ, as many other images of his day depicted Him in a very effeminate manner. It was the year 1924 that would change Sallman’s life as an artist, as well as, the way the world would view Christ.

The young man illustrated regularly for the Salvation Army’s publication War Cry and his Evangelist community’s Covenant Companion. It was for an issue of the youth publication Mission Covenant that this famous image of Christ first came to be when he was asked to create a cover illustration. Uninspired and frustrated, the artist waited until the night before the deadline to design the cover, only to wake up in the middle of the night with the perfect image of Christ’s face. He quickly sketched his image in simple charcoal and titled it Son of Man. At publication time the work was well received, and Sallman continued to draw and paint religious themes. By 1940, his original charcoal sketch had become so popular that he was motivated to turn it into an oil painting. This was birth of the blond haired, blue-eyed Christ that is present today in millions of homes, churches, and other institutions around the world. It was titled The Head of Christ.

The painting’s image began to spread rapidly after its creation, first among the Southern Baptist community and then to other Christian denominations. It was even used by the Protestant church, known for their general disapproval of religious imagery. The Head of Christ began to appear on church bulletins, posters, calendars, prayer cards, clocks, lamps, and, perhaps most importantly, wallet-sized images distributed by the Salvation Army to thousands of servicemen during WWII. Sallman continued to paint as The Head of Christ’s popularity steadily grew, his most popular works painted between 1942 and 1950.

Today, the image of The Head of Christ can be found throughout the world, including Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. The painting was also featured on the cover of the July 9, 2007 issue of Newsweek where it was stated that the image had been reproduced over one billion times, making it the most reproduced image in history. The image, as well as many other images from Sallman’s 500 original works, comprised of landscapes, portraits, and other religious paintings, is owned by Warner Press and Anderson University. The original works themselves, including sketches and drawings, are scattered across the United States and various other countries in churches, homes, schools, hospitals, and the private collection of the Sallman family.

At one point in his career, Sallman stated that he gave God “the glory for whatever has been accomplished by [his] efforts to bring joy and happiness to people throughout the world.” While this serene yet strong image of Christ, as well as figures in his other religious works, bring joy and inspiration to many people, it can be said that his art is the epitome of the West’s view of Christ and the saints. The light skin and blond hair of Jesus, as well as that of Mary and Joseph and other worshiped figures of the Bible, illustrates the spread of Christianity as far back as medieval Europe when negative figures like Judas and King Herod were depicted with darker skin, consistent with the skin tones of the Jewish population who were then strongly blamed for the crucifixion of Christ.

Sallman’s religious paintings, particularly The Head of Christ and its light tones, capture the saintly, Christian ideal and consistent view of Christ and other Biblical figures throughout the West and many other parts of the world. It is these ideals so masterfully illustrated in The Head of Christ that has made it one of the most popular and well-known images of the 20th century.







Works cited:

http://www.anderson.edu/w/news/2009/warner-sallmans-head-of-christ-to-be-featured-on-postage-stamp
http://www.warnersallman.com/about/the-artist/
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/2006/issue91/11.11.html
http://sallmanart.org/
http://www.newsweek.com/2006/12/08/how-white-was-my-savior.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/12/arts/the-man-who-rendered-jesus-for-the-age-of-duplication.html
http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html


Written and researched by Alexandra Nilles.


MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814-8510

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc., is located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.