Art: Patience & Firmness

Ogden Minton Pleissner seems born to the tweed. He has the cool eyes and calm hands of the sportsman, and he puffs a pipe as if it were part of himself. Duck, trout and partridge are Pleissner’s meat; bourbon-on-the-rocks is his drink. He is equally at home in the uplands of Wyoming, in the Vermont hills, where he mainly vacations nowadays—and in his Manhattan studio. When Pleissner is not hunting or fishing, he paints pictures of a highly successful kind. This week 24 of his latest, including the watercolors opposite, went on view at Manhattan’s Milch Galleries.

Portraits of Places. As usual, advance-guard gallerygoers thought Pleissner’s new efforts completely uninspiring and dismissed them as so many picture postcards. Just as predictably, conservatives found the pictures worthy of comparison with Winslow Homer’s and bought them up fast. What the buyers got were neither picture postcards nor Winslow Homers, but portraits of places, seen in various kinds of weather and rendered with immense technical skill.

Pleissner’s artistic career was decided in 1916, when he was eleven and a friend gave him a paintbox “filled with all the colors in the world.” After high school in his native Brooklyn, Pleissner spent four years studying figure painting and portraiture at Manhattan’s Art Students League—and wishing he were out of doors. He has painted open-air pictures ever since. During World War II. Pleissner painted pictures of Aleutian bases for the Air Force and, later, of the Normandy breakthrough for LIFE, and developed the wanderlust that goads him today. Most of the watercolors in this week’s show were first sketched on a recent tour of France.

Old-Fashioned Virtues. Pleissner explains his own art in primer-simple terms: “I get a big kick out of nature, the moods and changes of the year and the weather. Effects of light have a great deal to do with the mood, so I make small (7 in. by 10 in.) watercolor sketches on the spot, before the light changes too much. The full-size painting I make afterwards in my studio. Drawing is very difficult for me—I don’t know a thing about perspective—and I draw on tracing paper first so as not to mess up the texture of the watercolor paper. I like the transparency of watercolor, the way the light hits the white paper and then bounces back at you through the paint. To keep that glowing effect I may have to start over on a painting two or three times.”

Pleissner’s main strengths as a painter are the same that make him an able sportsman: patience and firmness. These old-fashioned virtues, combined with a lively feeling for landscape, have made Pleissner one of the nation’s bestselling artists and won his work wall space in no less than 33 public collections. Pleissner may never mount Olympus, but he roams a respectable foothill.