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Yearly Archives: 2019
Elizabeth Oppenheim [1907-1993]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
OPPENHEIM, Elizabeth (née Munk) [1907–1993; née Munk]
“Hyde Park Rooftops”
oil on canvas / 17.5 inches by 23.5 inches
ca1950
“Hyde Park Rooftops” was executed by holocaust survivor and artist Elizabeth Oppenheim, who was born in Austria in 1907 and passed away in Berkeley, California in 1993. “Lilly” as she was known to her friends, was married to A. Leo Oppenheim, a scholar and distinguished assyriologist at the University of Chicago and Oriental Institute in the mid twentieth century. It can be argued that her artistic ability, in particular with greeting cards, wrapping paper, and textiles, enabled her to survive after she fled Nazi occupied Austria to France, and subsequently Portugal before emigrating to the US. She continued to thrive as a textile designer during her first years in New York. When her husband Leo was offered a position at the University of Chicago in 1947, the economic pressure for creating art for economic purposes relented and she was able to pursue her long held passion for painting.
Oppenheim’s painting is one of two perspective views of Chicago rooftops in the collection. This is on loan from Temple Emanu-El.
Eliot Candee Clark [1883-1980]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
CLARK, Eliot Candee [1883–1980]
Country Road
oil on panel / 8.75 inches by 10.5 inches
ca1930
Son of landscape painter Walter Clark and Jennifer Woodruff Clark, a student of psychic phenomena, Eliot Clark was a precocious artist who became a landscape painter in the late American Impressionist style. Moving to Albemarle, Virginia in 1932, he was one of the few Impressionist* artists of the Southern states. Likely this was a result of his association with James Whistler and his painting in 1900 at Gloucester, Massachusetts with John Twachtman, a family friend. Showing his obvious interest in Impressionism, he wrote a book about its exponents including Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, Julian Weir, and Robert Vonnoh.
The lesser known Clark is in the good company of early giants in the American Impressionist style, John Henry Twachtman and Childe Hassam — though artists of that calibre are collected by major urban institutions.
Emil Pottner [1872-1942]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
POTTNER, Emil [1872-1942]
Farmyard Fowl
color woodcut on paper / 4.5 inches by 5.5 inches (image) / #37 of 200
undated
Swimming Ducks
color woodcut on paper / 6.75 inches by 11.5 inches (image) / unspecified edition
undated
Austrian Emil Pottner was born in Salzburg but trained as an artist in Munich and spent most of his shortened life in greater Berlin. From a likeside studio near Potsdam, Pottner created majolica ceramics and wrote self-illustrated books; animals were the predominant subject of his drawings and prints. But the rise of Fascism forced him to sell his property in 1938. Four years later he was deported to Theresienstadt, from there on September 26 to Treblinka, and finally to Maly Trestinez near Minsk for extermination. He was last seen on 28 September 1942. These two poignant works probably date from the ‘teens and twenties.
“Farmyard Fowl” and “Swimming Ducks” are on extended loan to the Community Collection from Temple Emanu-El.
Alfred Ward [born ca1847]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
WARD, Alfred [flourished 1873-1927]
“Mr Bedwell” / Portrait of Francis Benjamin Bedwell
gouache on panel / 4.3 inches by 3.1 inches
1918
“Mrs Bedwell” / Portrait of Sarah Woodyear Percival Bedwell
gouache on panel / 4.3 inches by 3.1 inches
1918
The provenance of these two delightful Georgian miniatures is complex to the point of obfuscation. The subjects are of the related Bedwell and Percival families, with trading connections in St Kitts, West Indies. Indeed, Mrs Bedwell was born on the island. Oral tradition in the Tennant family holds that the Percivals used the services of Gaudeamus Tennant and that the families may have been related by marriage; no evidence supporting such a connection has been found. The portraits themselves, however, date from a much later period—1918—than the lives of Mr and Mrs Bedwell:
- Francis Benjamin BEDWELL (1776-1835)
- Sarah Woodyear Percival BEDWELL (1779-1835)
She died 23 July and he on 31 October of the same year.
These were painted by artist Alfred Ward from photographs of earlier drawings (attested by labels on the reverse). Ward lived and worked in London and is known to have exhibited at the Royal Academy, as well as Grosvenor Gallery between 1873 and 1915. He was also a member of the Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street and showed paintings there until 1927. Martha Tennant purchased these works, intended as a birthday gift which her husband Augustus James Tennant never received. They were given in 2018 as a memorial on the centennial of his death.
Medical Arts (again)
Russell Guerne Delappe designed the 1938 Stanislaus County Hall of Records in Modesto, California in a robust Moderne style. It was a make-work WPA project intended to put employ Americans with relatively low technical abilities and tap the largest pool of workers many of whom were unskilled in the construction arts. I don’t know whether Agincourt’s Medial Arts building would have qualified as a WAP/PWA project but its motivation could have been similarly driven. In any event, the Modesto building inspired me to immerse myself in the design vocabulary of the 1930s when such a project might have been built.
You don’t even have to squint to see the Bauhaus awareness, if not actual influence, exhibited here. In fact, one or two photos of the building [it was photographed often but not terribly well] have been photo-shopped, with the word “BAUHAUS” running up its stair tower. So I’m certainly not the first to make that observation.
Though it was built somewhat later, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1956 hybrid residential-office tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma also seems appropriate for inspiration. And, of course, it too was conceived at the beginning of the Great Depression as another project altogether: a housing complex on the south end of Manhattan Island called “St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery”, but unbuilt then and re-purposed several times prior to its appearance in Oklahoma. It comes to mind because the Modesto building was executed without sun control on all that glass, an issue which was resolved years later with genuinely awful louvers. Wright, on the other hand, dealt with sun in a louvered sort of way, but designed them according to the kind of light that would fall on them, depending on orientation and time of day. You can see vertical louvers on the left (here in the color image) and horizontal barely showing on the right. What mongrel might emerge from the fusion of these two buildings?
[#1309; I’m behind schedule]
PS: On the plot plan, please notice the long rectangular building on the lower right corner: that’s another of Agincourt’s early business ventures, Equus & Co., a livery with harness maker and blacksmith. You can find out about them at another entry by using that title or this link.
John Beddowes
John Beddowes, in his Civil War uniform. Agincourt’s first war casualty.
Iowans played no small part in the Civil War. The state provided over 76,000 troops, of which 13,000 died. Iowa troops included 48 infantry regiments, 8 cavalry regiments, 4 artillery regiments, and one unassigned volunteer regiment. Somewhere among those hallowed dead must be the name of John Beddowes, son of Amos and Sissy. We believe this tintype is his image taken on the eve of battle. As Agincourt’s first casualty, he received a hero’s burial at The Shades, but since the family had no other surviving members (John’s sister Mary was a casualty of typhoid many years before), his story has faded from public memory. I hope some day soon to retrieve that story and restore his place of honor in the Agincourt narrative.
The World is too much with me
The World Is Too Much With Us
by William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;The winds that will be howling at all hours,And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
The World
Świat is a collection of poems by Czesław Miłosz. They were written in the author’s native Polish, which I regret not being able to enjoy; they were at least translated by him. Poetry, like narrative story-telling or the contract you signed to get a mortgage, is a form of language, but as far as I’m concerned it’s no more artificial than the notarized legal document which committed you to three hundred and sixty monthly installment until that house is really yours (though it’s likely to be owned by your kids, who will feel vastly different about it than you do).
Portrait of Czesław Miłosz by Jim Dine
I should probably have mentioned that świat derives from the proto-Slavic word for light or world. That pairing offers unexpected comfort, doesn’t it: the association of the world with light, a far cry from our experience lately. I wonder what Miłosz was up to; he translates it as “the world”.
Cyrus Leroy Baldridge [1889-1977]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
BALDRIDGE, Cyrus Leroy [1889-1977]
“Peking ’25”
color woodcut / 9 7/8 inches by 14 5/16 inches (image)
1925
This ukiyo-e or floating world woodcut is typical of Japan, while the subject is Chinese. It is also representative of Japanese influence in Western art at the turn of the 20th century, especially on art from Britain and the United States.
One of several woodcut prints from the 1920s by Cyrus Baldridge, Midwestern artist and illustrator. According to an on-line source:
Cyrus Leroy Baldridge (1889–1977) was a noted illustrator, painter, printmaker, and writer. At the age of 10, he became the youngest student at Frank Holme’s Chicago School of Illustration. In 1907, he was accepted at the University of Chicago where he continued his art education and graduated in 1911. Following graduation Baldridge worked as an illustrator, later becoming a war correspondent on the battlefront during WWI. After the war, he settled in upstate New York and continued to work as a writer and illustrator while traveling the world with his wife Caroline Singer who was also a writer. The couple traveled from Africa to India, and to Japan in the 1920s. Japanese art had a profound influence on his Baldridge’s work—during his time in Japan, he met the famed Shin Hanga print publisher Watanabe Shozaburo in Tokyo. He produced a number of woodblock prints for Watanabe during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1952, he and his wife retired to Santa Fe, where he found inspiration hiking the mountains of New Mexico and painting the landscape in oil and watercolor.
Quite aside from its qualities as an example of period, style, and a challenging print technique, “Peking” has close personal ties with the Tennant family: twins Ella Rose and Phyllis Tabor were great-granddaughters of Agincourt founder Horace Tennant. Though their story is told elsewhere in greater detail, Ella Rose became a pilot who flew in China during the Revolution and acquired this print some time before her disappearance in the 1930s. The print has been given in her memory.