Chapter 3: The Emerging Artist
There was little in Carl Holty’s background to inspire him toward a profession in art. If he had succumbed to family pressures, they would have led him to either medicine or business. There was some aesthetic sensitivity at home, emanating from both mother and father, but the void in his early education is implicit in this section from his descriptions of public school:
We were not much gifted with visual culture. The pictures on the walls of the school reflected only patriotism and virtue. There was the flag of the United States, the portraits of Lincoln, Washington, and Teddy Roosevelt, and later, William Howard Taft. There was an ugly chromo of a boy kneeling before a camp fire, under which was printed a poem called, “I’d like to live a thousand years and always be a boy.” I remember our Class purchased this, contributing 79 pennies to the cost. Perhaps the underpaid teacher or principal made up the difference. At any rate, we identified with it and we liked’ it. To the right of the classroom door in the 8th grade room was a reproduction of Sir Cedric by James Watts or Burne-Jones, so a Knight in shining armor was the last impression we took with us as we left the room at the end of the day. I don’t know whether we were supposed to take along this constant reminder of chivalry into the snow-ball fights and rough and tumble of the late afternoons.
I doubt it. (IV, 15)
That a few vivid events in Holty’s childhood propelled him toward his eventual absorption into life as an artist can be seen in these accounts:
I cannot recall the exact time pictorial art became my reality of life, but I do remember the event that revealed this as clearly as if it were now. I may have been 10 since it was at that time that I used to accompany my beloved grandfather on his customary two Sunday-morning errands.
At about 11 a.m. on those days we would walk some six or seven blocks from our house to the Central Milwaukee Post Office to pick up grandfather’s Monday morning office mail. The old gentleman was most anxious to get his hands on this, probably because of the enclosed money orders or checks. These were precarious years in the business and indeed in the national economy itself. I was not really aware of all that was at stake and my childhood years were not burdened by a knowledge of the family’s worries or problems in this respect.
We would leave the Post Office which was on the southeast corner of Wisconsin and Jefferson streets and repair to the Turkish bath at the Hotel Pfister, located on the northwest corner of the same intersection. There my grandfather took heat baths, both in the steamroom and in the electric cabinet, while I played around in the small swimming pool of the establishment or chatted amiably with Sam, the bath’s administrator and attendant. I tried the heat rooms once but was repelled by the temperature and the air. The swimming pool was my attraction; the rest of the activities I gladly ceded to others. There was a certain fascination for me to see a number of naked men walking about but they did not arouse any art interest. What attracted my attention were the grotesque aspects of these middle aged and older men, their skinniness or obesity, the bow legs and knock knees, and last but by no means least, the gigantic proportions of some of these bathers’ genitals, only partially hidden by the turkish towel wrapped around their bellies.
After the bath as grandfather and I set out for home and Sunday dinner, he would entertain me with critical remarks about some of the loafers that sat in the Hotel lobby chairs facing the windows. There they sat smoking cigars and looking more or less at nothing.
On one particular Sunday when he had more than the usual time to get to our house for the hot soup course, my grandfather took me into the Layton Art Gallery which was on our way home and only a block from the Hotel and the Post Office. I can’t remember whether I asked my grandfather to take me into the gallery or not. If I did, it could only have been because the low, rather elegant building so different from all others I had seen, had aroused my curiosity. I had no idea whatsoever of what I would find inside. Of this I am sure because I was totally unprepared for the experience that awaited me.
Behind the entrance doors of this building was a sort of atrium, with marble floor and pillars, which contained less than a dozen pieces of sculpture, all very white and grouped around an oversized dying man. Prone he was, and a deep sword wound could be seen in his left middle. The dying man, head thrown back and eyes blank was propped upon one arm. The other arm was outstretched and rigid. The pointer finger of the hand led the eye to the lettering on the shield under his partially uplifted breast. The word was “Sparta” and that was the story.
I was mildly astonished by this display of strange works but when we turned to our right and entered the first painting gallery my emotional reaction was almost frightening. I believe that my hand reached out for that of my grandfather’s because he asked me if something were wrong. Nothing was wrong. But everything about the day and all other days had been transformed as if I had had my first glimpse of the world that was to be mine.
When Whistler took the witness stand in his famous legal contest with Ruskin, he was formally asked by the court to answer certain personal questions. When he was asked to give his place of birth, he answered that he was born in the Hermitage of St. Petersburg. It was true that Whistler, son of an engineer employed by the Russian government as a railroad designer and engineer, spent some years of his childhood at St. Petersburg. But the records show that he was born in Massachusetts. Whistler was, of course, making the point that his life began when he first looked upon the masterpieces of one of the greatest collections in the world. I dare say my response in the Layton Gallery and what I sensed there was akin to what Whistler experienced. I, too, was born in a picture gallery, although the paintings that awakened me were largely mediocre and a far cry from those superior works that brought to life and consciousness this great master. (IV, 7-8)
By the time I was twelve I had already covered innumerable sheets of paper with drawings. I certainly suffered no material fear about the quantity of paper used, and my lack of economy in this respect was criticized repeatedly. My increasing interest in drawing did not, as might be supposed, mark the end of my lead- soldier play. On the contrary, the tableaux I set up were the models for my art work. There occurred one of those weddings of diverse interests that seem to be of the very essence where the creative process is concerned.
When quite young, I had gone to St. John’s Cathedral to attend the wedding of the sister of my grandmother’s hairdresser. This Cathedral was one of the few churches of our city that wasn’t an architectural disgrace. I drew a picture of the ceremony; the arches receded properly, so did the pews, and the people got smaller in the picture distance and that was supposed to prove that I had a great feeling for depth. Undoubtedly I had a greater feeling for depth than for hands and feet. I avoided depicting these, and in my drawings of battle pictures I always had the smoke of battle draped around where the horses’ hooves and soldiers’ feet should have been because I could not draw them.
I was perhaps 14 when slowly I became estranged from the lead soldiers, the castle with a drawbridge, the little wooden animals, the poison green trees made of hardened sponges. Then the cellar and the attic became my domains: the cellar ·for the cruder joys of billiards and ten pins from a Christmas set; the attic for adventure, rummaging in trunks, theatricals, and painting. (IV, 6-7)
We didn’t live in a part of the United States which enjoyed the softest climate. The only beautiful season we ever had was autumn. Winter and spring wore on into the month of June and were just disagreeable, cold, and wet, and, as everyone said, “unseasonable.” We knew that on Easter one was supposed to hunt for eggs in the grass. There was never any grass and it usually rained and, besides, it was far too cold. So egg hunts were put off year after year, just as they had been for the last fifty years. We never lost faith in spring, however, and greeted every errant blade of grass or precocious bud on the tree with singular optimism. We would leave windows open by the calendar until we were frozen stiff. And we lived in eternal hope of really enjoying four seasons a year.
I don’t know why I happened to think of this, but I suppose the spring in sight had something to do with the peculiar experience of a Palm Sunday when I was 16.
We lived in a wonderful steamboat Gothic house. While it wasn’t esthetically gratifying, the enormous attic with its many trunks, steamer trunks made of wicker baskets and covered with canvas, and iron-bound metal trunks that banged your fingers when you dropped the lid, no matter how carefully, was a great land of exploration for me and those few chosen companions of my age whom I permitted to visit there.
It was to this attic that my artistic life and activities shifted. My water color box, which in itself calls for description, was taken into the upper regions of the “castle.” When I opened the lid of that watercolor box, I could pull out two trays affixed to the bottom by a sort of metal grill which opened up like an accordion to expose (display) two dozen watercolor blocks. These were made of distilled rock and defied water as a solvent. There were some small pieces of charcoal daintily gripped in a metal holder, three or four pieces of rolled blotter paper with which to smudge the charcoal, and two round pans, one filled with silver, the other with gold. These two colors were the only ones that were soluble, consequently there was very little of them left. Yawning pits in the midst of each cake caused dismay everytime the contents of the box were revealed, reminding me of the rapid disappearance of what seemed a priceless commodity. The brushes, though they were small, had the profile of an elm tree; no two hairs were in line, nor could they ever be brought into line, and the brush was propelled across the paper on its wooden base, scratching the surface with the hairs delicately moving upon it at a safe distance. That box was a gift received as a small boy, and I kept it in the hope that someday I would find a way of using the things in it, and besides, it made my equipment more massive in its appearance.
The remainder of supplies consisted of some bottles of creosote paint which I purloined from the school and which stank to high heaven. They were square bottles of ultramarine blue, pompeian red, and the butteriest of Indian yellow. Trying to get paint out of the upper four corners of those bottle was a project in itself. In addition there were some tubes of opaque watercolors and these were the colors that I really used.
It was on this Palm Sunday that I was sitting by one of the prematurely opened windows, looking into that little hollow which generations of souls had called “the Valley.” Through the silver gray of the elm trees, which had a curtain of green haze about them, I could see the Lutheran Church with its Gothic rose window, and a· few blocks of houses and yards between the Church and me, I decided to paint a landscape.
I had mixed a considerable amount of gray and had developed some affinity with that most precious color of all—blue, and somehow or other I had managed to have a range of colors with which I could approximate, at least in color, what my inner eye thought it saw. I didn’ t notice the cold. I had never before been so thoroughly absorbed in anything I did. I moved with some ease within my limited means and my equally limited abilities and I had that peculiar sensation, so satisfactory, which I was to know again for brief moments from time to time in the next 50 years, the feeling of “here I am and here is my painting and we are together.”
One might say that everything I felt then was real, probably the first spiritual reality I ever had, and it made dream-life seem sadly inadequate. I have thought of many things in the past, many things to which one dedicates anniversaries, people I had known whom I no longer know, those that are no longer here. But if I try to see my own: experience as a whole, I think more of that morning to which I paid little attention at the time beyond enjoying it. . . .
I imagine that if I had been taken as seriously in my intentions as I took myself there might have been a good deal more said about the drawing and the painting and the love of play no matter how genially that play was directed. But I was a child in a child’s world and children dream of many things and these dreams are rarely appraised for their possible menace to the child’s future. My grandfather hoped I would enter his business, a plan which was agreeable to my father. My father’s suggestion that I study medicine, thereby assuring myself of a solid and respectable existence came much later, but the die was cast.
But if memory serves me correctly the whole family stood somewhat in awe of this self-assured and precocious child that in his personality resembled none of them. There might even have been some faint hope in both parents and grandparents that I would develop into something extraordinary having nothing to do with being in commerce or in medicine. The only one in the family who might have sensed what lay ahead was my father, for he had once been an actor and a good one. Art was not foreign to him. In this instance, however, there lay between him and me, the greatest divergence in the quality and character of the artistic side of our personalities. My father was one of those brilliantly talented young men whose artistic tastes and aesthetic values crystallized early in life. Thus any true understanding between us was frustrated by time as well as by opinion and philosophy.
Though no one objected to my choice, I was indulged in my bent rather than encouraged and little if any direction was given toward educating me in what I was to become. Considering the general cultural level of our house, this might have been different, but alas it wasn’t.
My rapidly evolving ability to draw likenesses of people was the one talent in art which did impress them. It is a magical gift to be able to see into the subject. Expression here is not directly indebted to generally good or correct drawing. To draw a likeness means to invent rather than to copy, to exaggerate rather than to be faithful to the model, to be, in essence, a poet rather than a master of the prosaic truth. Few laymen can resist the magic of a telling likeness, and my ability to produce these counterfeits was my strongest artistic argument in the family circle; the stronger because it required no word of explanation. (IV, 9-10)
When Holty confided his dreams of becoming an artist to his mother, she was “intrigued,” but his father “took a much dimmer view of the future glory and grandeur to come.” Not only did the father wish him to be a doctor, he was afraid that his son’s head would be turned by his “adoring” grandmother and his “at least very hopeful” mother; being a natural pessimist, too, the father “probably believed matters would turn out bad1y anyway because he believed that of all things that came under discussion.” (II, 19) The father did not object to private lessons for his son, however, so long as he took them during what would normally be play hours. Holty suspected that this was a subtle, but ineffectual, attempt to discourage him.
I was given as a student to an old German artist who had come to America to paint panoramas—those forerunners of the motion picture. When I knew him, he was engaged in painting murals for the German beer saloons and restaurants. He was a man of humble origin, born in Saxony, whose original ambition it was to become a drawing teacher in German secondary schools. After 10 years of academic training, he became a war correspondent artist during the Franco-Prussian War. As a reward for his illustrations of the War, he was commissioned to paint a scene commemorating the Royal House of Sacony’s participation in this conflict which unified Germany. After having painted that picture, which I believe is still to be found in the National Gallery in Dresden, he felt he no longer wanted to be “just” a drawing teacher. Be told me this story many times, always looking me in the eye, clenching his fist against his chest, and saying, “After all, my pride was aroused and I wanted to go on to greater things.” Well, “greater things” brought him to that little studio in which I was to have my first instruction in drawing. I remember the sweet smell of his corncob pipes, mingling so pleasantly with the odor of turpentine and paint. I don’t know how much I learned from Wilhelm Heine. But as I think back, he was an excellent teacher, though it took me years to understand what he meant. Be wasn’t really interested in his 12 or 13 year old pupil and was probably more interested in the tuition fee, because he was horribly poor at the time. I think also that my father acquiesced in my taking lessons because he wanted to help the old gentleman. I didn’t realize at that time how much charity is mixed with patronage in the arts.
When I say he was an excellent teacher, I mean that he had objective recognition of his pupils’ possibilities at first glance. My first problem was to copy a bust of Napoleon from a lithograph after a drawing by Ingres. It was a bad lithograph, very pale, but there was light and shade on it which I failed to perceive completely, I simply tried to copy the lines that I saw. The twisted cords of the epaulets were braided downward, but I drew them braided upward. Mr. Heine took one look at the drawing and said: “The lines have rhythmic character, and you are a bad observer. The drawing looks as though you had poured milk over it. It is dead1y white. You have no feeling for shading, however considerable ability in design. Paper is not paper. Paper is space. Study the perspective of it well, because the object exists only within it. (IV, 18-19)
Heine was the product of academic training and, although he was sensitive to composition combined with observation, he taught almost entirely by the copy method, having his students piece together their products from the prints and reproductions of drawings which he kept in portfolios. If they painted at all, it was only to tint drawings. Holty admired this teacher—and his “exquisite old-fashioned watercolors” (IV, 19) that became collectors’ items after his death—but left him to transfer from private back to public school. There, the young man decided to put his advanced standing in scholastic credits to use and persuaded the school board to allow him to attend school proper in the morning sessions and art classes at the Milwaukee Art School in the afternoons. This school had fused with the Milwaukee Normal School, a teacher’s college that was affiliated with the state university, but the art classes were not part of the regular college curriculum and were run much as they had been in the old professional art school. As Holty described his instruction in a studio that had been arranged (and painted black so as to control the one source of light) by the school’s director, Alexander Mueller:
Whatever the art student hoped his specialty in life might be, his first instructions were given him in the “Cast” class. This had been the tradition for centuries, though the internal aims of these exercises had altered considerably. In my time study from the casts of sculpture, Renaissance and Classic, was no longer supposed to infect the student with a particular love and appreciation for those schools of beauty. He was not to cull from these studies the wisdom and secrets and desires calculated to prolong the ancient tradition. We drew from the cast mainly because our models wouldn’t confuse us by moving and changing positions, as living models do. The stylized hair on the head of Hermes or in the beard of Jove, were just so many worms or avalanches of taffy candy, and did not appear to us as adventures in rhythm. We knew that real hair didn’t look like that and we approached the study of these as we did the study of drapery, another jawbreaker for the beginner. . . .
The morgue-like atmosphere of the Cast room was depressing. Our instructors were as aware of that as we were, but they thought of these exercises somewhat as my father’s country patients felt about medicine. If it wasn’t bitter and hard to swallow, it could not do the patient any good. In a way our teachers regarded our willingness to work at this tasteless task as a testing of our characters and of our profound interest in art, i.e., we were to put up with anything so that we would learn. Like swimmers or divers caught in the deep water, we were to claw our way upward to the surface. We were repeatedly told that there was no royal road to art . . . . I stuck it out for about a month. After a noonday lunchbreak I went to a pool room near the high school building and there I was to loaf in hiding until I was caught. I wasn’t really interested in pool or billiards but I didn’t know where to go or where to keep myself to put it succinctly. The only place I wouldn’t be missed immediately was the Art School. I couldn’t hang around High School or go home because I would have been asked questions and so the poolroom, dark but for the table lamps, was the ideal sanctuary. Had I been able to right my ship in a week’s time or even somewhat longer, no one would have known, but the delinquent usually doesn’t find his own way back to law and order, hates himself, but can do nothing about it. He is sure he will be caught, perhaps even wishes to be caught, and I was found out the following year.
Someone was looking for me one afternoon and telephoned the art school. The art school said they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of me for 14 months. How the principal of my high school found out about this, I don’t know. But he phoned my father to find out where I was and when my father suggested I was at the art school, the principal challenged him in his usual authoritarian manner and said “I am surprised, Doctor, that you don’t know where your son is keeping himself.”
My father was very much as I was, in that he was always delighted in making a point, the point in this instance being to have found the proof that I wasn’t really serious about studying art. He wasn’t very angry. He realized that he now had a great advantage he could use at a later date, and, besides, he didn’t believe that sparing the rod would be spoiling the child. . . .
In certain matters my father had a great deal of understanding. He understood that going to school every day was a horrible bore, for anyone of a nervous and introspective disposition. I think that his own monotonous years in a Monastery school and the relentless discipline his father subjected him to had created an understanding for my need for relaxation from routine.
The latter years of my high school life ware spent in a world of sudden· changes. The World War had, of course, been going on from my freshman days, but the junior and senior years were those in which the United States had become increasingly involved. Some of the more adventurous boys ran away to join the services, some were permitted to do so by their parents, and it was with feelings of pride mixed with envy that at commencement exercises in those last two years we would see appearing on the platform of the auditorium a sailor or a soldier just come home to take his diploma—a diploma awarded for patriotism rather than scholarship.
My family was pro-German during most of that War and the teachers and students at school were pro-Ally which left me sort of in the middle of opinions. I made war posters for the Red Cross, posters for war saving stamps and liberty bonds. We took up collections for a thousand and one things, and we had conservation lunches which consisted of American flags, lettuce sandwiches, and speeches.
In World War I, there was a good deal of sentiment against Americans of German descent and they were referred to pejoratively as the hyphenated-Americans. Injustice was done to some perfectly harmless people of German descent, most1y among the older generation, who couldn’t understand why they were granted freedom to express their personal opinions one day and the next day were considered guilty of seditious remarks. At school I parroted what I heard at home, and I must say that the attitude of my instructors, many of whom ware violently pro-British, was reasonable, intelligent, and that they discounted a good many things said, because a boy said them. By the time I graduated from high school in 1918, I had caught the war fever myself and was all for getting into it. I missed a commission at officer’s training school because I had not reached my 18th birthday, and I was advised to get into military service through induction into the students Army Training Corps at college. How the devil anyone is supposed to begin a college career and a military career at the same time is still a mystery to me. Had this duality not existed in my life, I probably would have become a physician first and a painter afterwards. Seeing army life as easier than pre-medical life, I put all my conscious thoughts and efforts into the military, cutting classes as I was permitted to do. No one knew in the early fall of 1918 when the war would be over. Indeed the French Marshal Petain proposed that the American Army should not go into battle until 1919. If I can remember my state of mind with any accuracy, I would say that at the time I thought of nothing but of getting out of that cadet school, back into officers’ training, and then gradually going to the wars. Shortsighted as we were, we were convinced that he war would last ad infinitum. We actually envisioned boys in short trousers as still having time to grow up and join our ranks. We lived in barracks and we tried to keep up some kind of discipline, that is, those of us who realized that a reasonable amount of discipline was the only way 250 men could exist side by side and not go positively mad. It was difficult, however, because the Battalion to which I belonged, was a combination of student-aged men and older ones who thought they would be better off in a school army than a real army. We were a fine combination of lumberjacks, ex-high school boys, and railroad firemen. While we younger ones had no trouble adjusting to each other, we never did get along very well with the other half. Then came the Armistice, and I was supposed to turn my mind to medicine again. (IV, 23-26)
To please his father, Holty enrolled in the pre-med program at Marquette University but was unhappy from the beginning. Be denounced the teachers as dullards who taught from textbooks held before their chests, pointing out details that could not be seen from any distance. His fellow students were uninteresting and uninterested in anything that went on save their gruesome pranks with parts of the dissected cadavers.
An incident in the dissecting room helped the young man make a final decision toward art:
One autumn afternoon, I went upstairs and found myself alone. I walked the length of the room and looked to the right and left of me, at the bodies on the slabs. Immediately under the window there lay before me an embalmed, not yet dissected body of a handsome young Negro. I didn’t know the cause of his death, but he was very beautiful to look at and very sad to see for he was very young. I looked at him and then I looked out of the window at the sky and at the reddened trees that I longed to paint. My father had talked me into studying medicine because he said every man should have a trade or profession by which he could earn a decent living. He had no objection to my becoming a painter once I qualified as an M.D. In the presence of this young dead man life appeared foreshortened. Its practical considerations were unimportant, but the joys of art seemed endless. Usually I shy from any resolve or any resolution. I hate to sign leases, and am terrified at making contracts. I can almost always see both sides of a matter, which certainly weakens the purpose. Galvanized by the rush of my feelings, I recognized my commitment and with firm resolve I packed myself down those stairs, walked a block, took a street car, and rode right down to my father’s office and told him I intended to throw up the whole business and that I was going to study art. He said, “Well, if your grandfather is willing to support you while you do that, it’s all right with me. I have no money for foolishness. I can give you a good education. That is all I can do.” I know that he understood, and was not unprepared to be resigned. After all, in his youth he had interrupted his own medical career to go chasing around as an actor for quite a number of years.
So back I went to the room with the black walls and the white death masks and the plaque with the plaster groups and the Dancing Fawn by Michelangelo in one-third life size. There I was to sit for almost two years before I was admitted to the life class. (IV, 26-27)
Holty finally came under the influence of an important teacher in his renewed studies in the Fine Arts Division of the State Teacher’s College. This was Gustav Moeller, who had studied both at the old Milwaukee Art School and in Munich. Holty felt that Moeller’s competent painting style, in a late form of Impressionism, might have kept him in Europe or taken him to some city more favorable to an art career than Mi1waukee, but he was a hemophiliac with all the health and economic problems that disease entails. This teacher did open a path to future study in Europe for the young Holty, and he introduced him to modern art.
Moeller was the only one of our teachers to recognize virtue and beauty in the modern artists. For us the moderns were restricted to the painters, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and a few of the neo-Impressionists. Cubism was too much of a puzzle though we had been exposed to an exhibition of one hundred pictures of this type at the Milwaukee Art Institute some years earlier. We couldn’t cope with this new style and the lame and incomplete explanations of those fractured surfaces only served to complicate matters and made as little sense to us as the pictures themselves . . . .
Whenever we did get into arguments about the modern movement the most recalcitrant of all the students was myself. This particularly vexed Moeller who probably recognized in my compositions an affinity with the moderns which I was too obtuse to recognize. Actually, I had no valid point of view to defend but argued and disputed fervently just the same. I had no knowledge and little experience, rather a collection of random habits and notions acquired in that last half dozen years of my art interest. My head was filled with an assortment of notions that were hardly consistent. Many ideas I carried with me at the time stemmed from an inborn though not admitted theatricality, others out of a romanticism already perverted by false models I had chosen to emulate, to whit: the decorative, pseudo moderns reproduced in the Art Nouveau Journal, Jugend, my artistic bible in those years and for years still to come.
I was stubborn and disputatious and rare1y relinquished a point in an argument and that juveni1e side of the precocious young man must have irritated Moeller no end. He finally found a way to blunt my incredib1y persistent assault by suddenly saying, “Never you mind, you—you will come back from Europe some day the most modern of them all.” I knew that Gustav, unlike myself, never said anything but what he really thought and I never returned to my futile gasconade again. He had puzzled me by sowing the seed of doubt.
I was finally promoted or graduated to the life class. By that time I had already suspected that this step upward was not the complete release of which I had dreamed. Having ground out work done from the immovable object I was now faced with more of the same work from a movable one. The little skill acquired had not brought me to the threshold of a new conception of drawing and form and I was again depressed and also perplexed. When the full realization of the dilemma finally dawned upon me I asked Gustav Moeller where all this “torture” wou1d lead. He answered simply and directly and without a note of consolation, “You will have three or four years where you will be making rotten life drawings and then you will be a painter.” He did not hint that painting was something more than a change of medium but I found that it was.
I have said that the method of teaching was psychologically wrong and that the goals we were directed towards were impossible to attain in the name of art. I should like to explain those rather flat statements of condemnation.
The error of the psychology was the absence of its application. It is true that methods of study are required to obtain orderly results, but to apply any one of these methods rigidly without considering the individual student is wrong. This 19th Century Beaux Arts type of school approach had become a habit developed out of a tradition of aesthetic values which had long ceased to exist.
The objectives had become thorough1y confused. Drawing was reduced to copying from nature somewhat as the one eyed lens of the camera sees the object. An art class of students seen enface appeared to be a collection of one eyed squinters hunting out lines and failing to see the Forest because of the trees. To make matters worse the object drawn was extracted from its surroundings and became a silhouette not in space, but in a sea of white paper. Abstraction was combined with verisimilitude. It is a miracle that anything was accomplished by such methods. Our masters spoke of the Renaissance and appeared to accept its masters but they did not really care for them nor understand them. Their tradition was that of their own teachers and contemporaries—the real or masked academicians of the European Academies.
It is true that all art students of my age and the older generations suffered this ordeal and if they were good enough, survived it. The time that they invested in those school years could have been put to better use.
Painting was a different matter. Excepting in pure character sketches, the objects were not removed from their surroundings and there was no need to outline the subject. There was color and light and shade and a new color appeared where another one terminated. If a new mental concept was not in evidence in our studies the physical vision unperverted by preconceived notions of the form was given freer rein. The most gifted student had a glimpse of the totality of nature if not yet of the totality of the work of art itself.
I spent about two years at three Milwaukee art schools. There were also two summers of outdoor painting, the first one in Wisconsin, the second one in Michigan.
The latter summer was a sort of farewell to my life and study in the midwest though I returned for visits and even long spells of work at home after I had established residence in New York. (IV, 28-29)