Art: U.S. Hals

Manhattan’s Witney Museum, assiduous in keeping tabs on the dead as well as the living, last week performed another of its noted reanimations. The subject was U.S. Artist Frank Duveneck, who died a silvery grand old man in Cincinnati in 1919. When the average citizen thinks of first-rate U.S. painters of half a century ago he remembers John Singer sargent, but he is not likely to remember that Sargent once remarked: “After all’s said, Frank Duveneck is the greatest talent of the brush of this generation.”

Nearly half of the 45 canvases exhibited at the Witney were from the Cincinnati Art Museum and most have not in 60 years been seen in the east. All but two were from Duveneck’s best period, the 1870s and 1880s. During those years Duveneck was a famous expatriate with one of the largest followings among young painters that any U.S. artist has ever had. A big, Viking-bearded Bohemian who took the Munich Academy by storm at 21, then opened his own school in definace of it, Duveneck painted in the spirit of Frans Hals. In such paintings as The Bohemian (see cut, p. 36) he showed an almost equal mastery of brush modeling.

Great Duveneck authority is Woodstock Artist Norbert Heermann, a onetime pupil, who wrote in his introduction to last week’s exhibition: “The Painting of our first forgotten master realists, with their courageous technique and their rich, serious tonal quality of simple earth colors, have come into their own again

It is paradox, however, that Duveneck’s paintings seem more native to the “brown decades” in the U.S. than the paintings of some fo his stay-at-home contemporaries. he loved the brown pigment, bitumen, and it not only dulled his canvases but cracked extensively after a few years. His magnificently drawn and sometimes vivid portraits have the air of life in a darkened parlor, not the sunny tavern-and-haystack life which Duveneck and his pupils actually led. Artist Duveneck entered parlor society briefly in 1886 through his marriage to Elizabeth Boott, a refined Bostonian traveler straight out of Henry James. After her death in 1888 his painting became uncertain, yielded to impressionist influences, infrequently showed his old spontaneity.