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About Robert Henri
Robert Henry Cozad was the son of John and Theresa Gatewood Cozad. Members of the family all took on different surnames following a family scandal: John Sr. had fled Nebraska, the family’s second home, after killing a man in self defense. Homer (1969, pp. 7, 17) relates how he was later exonerated of wrongdoing. While still in school, Henri drew in the margins and endsheets of his textbooks, which led to the designing of greeting cards. In 1883, the family moved to New York, then to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Recognizing his art talents, his parents convinced him to enroll in the *Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886, the year in which *Thomas Eakins shocked the establishment by presenting a completely nude male model to a women’s drawing class. By the time Henri entered the Academy, Eakins had been replaced by *Thomas Anshutz, who had sided with the conservative forces for Eakins’ dismissal. The spirit of *naturalism of Eakins reached Henri through Anshutz: in fact, many future members of the Eight received training from Anshutz, who allowed each student to pursue her or his personal inclinations. He advocated a home-grown American art based on scenes of everyday life. Henri’s other teachers were James P. Kelly (1854-1893) and Thomas Hovenden (1840-1895). During the summer recess, Henri made sketches en *plein air around his home in Atlantic City.
Henri studied at the *Académie Julian, and in the Louvre he had his first encounter with the Spanish masters: *Velázquez, Ribera, and Murillo; he also had praise for Rembrandt. At the 1889 *Paris Universal Exposition, he admired *Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc (Metropolitan Museum). Later in June, he left for *Concarneau, where he resided in the Pension Gloanec. His stay included some plein-air painting, and the experience pulled him away from the academic point of view. By the winter, Henri was involved in discussions on impressionism and later he made "essays" in painting directly from nature in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Henri was exposed to impressionism, *neo-impressionism, and Symbolism, movements and styles that were all thriving in the early 1890s. He was still vague about his direction as an artist, but he was more attracted to impressionism than to the many decadent Salon paintings. On the other hand, *post-impressionism he regarded as too radical.
After a sojourn along the Mediterranean, Henri traveled to Italy (November 1890). For two weeks, he saw all of the old masters that he could. Highlights include Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (Galleria Borghese). He preferred Quattrocento simplicity to Baroque architecture, though he appreciated the beauty of Baciccio’s illusionistic, late Baroque ceiling in Il Gesù. Florence, Venice, and Milan were Henri’s final stops. Back in Paris, *Bouguereau was criticizing Henri’s abundant use of violets, as the student veered more and more toward impressionism. Henri had already realized that an artist must follow his or her own temperament: to be "free and follow only what nature dictates to his peculiar sensibilities" (Henri, letter, 27 April 1891). To his surprise, he passed the *Ecole des Beaux-Arts’ examination, which considerably helped his morale. Yet the rejection of his paintings by both Paris Salons was an unfortunate blow. We know that at this time (spring 1891), Henri expressed admiration for *Monet’s series of haystacks (Homer, 1969, p. 62), yet he was still torn between academic and impressionist aesthetics. He had established, however, a naturalist credo, to paint contemporary life while applying a personal interpretation to the raw materials of nature.
After three years in Europe, Henri decided to live in Philadelphia, where he believed he would benefit from further studies; he chose to study under the impressionist *Robert Vonnoh. Henri took part in the student exhibition of 1892, where he was categorized as an impressionist, still a controversial stylistic label in Philadelphia. That summer, he taught classes at the *Philadelphia School of Design for Women, and in 1893, he offered summer sessions at Darby, Pennsylvania, where he stressed impressionist techniques in outdoor painting. Then he discovered Avalon, New Jersey’s summer program in which he was offered the position of instructor in plein air sketching. Even in the early 1890s, Henri was not a true impressionist. Girl Seated by the Sea (Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz, New York), from 1893 is perhaps his most striking impressionist work. Executed at Avalon, the canvas shows broken, spontaneous brushwork, a high-keyed palette and freely placed highlights applied to an everyday subject on a sunny coastline. The Hunter Museum of Art (Chattanooga, Tennessee) has another example of Henri’s impressionism, also from Avalon, a canvas entitled Woman in Pink on Beach. Impressionism was for Henri a step in his development toward a progressive style, away from academic art. With more teaching responsibilities, Henri found less time to paint, so he returned to Concarneau in the summer of 1894.
Critics were still displeased by Henri’s impressionist style when he exhibited his canvases back in Philadelphia. But by this time, Henri had a group of followers who met in his studio to discuss art, literature, music, cultural history, or whatever stimulating intellectual topic came up. This group included *William Glackens, *John Sloan, *Everett Shinn, Charles Grafly, *Hugh Breckenridge, *Elmer Schofield, and others, some of whom were newspaper illustrators who would form the *Philadelphia Artist-Reporters Group. Sloan remarked of the "salon": "We had one cause, art – and life, and were thinking about painting more than we had time to practice it" (Homer, 1969, p. 78).
By the mid 1890s, Henri did an about-face with impressionism, which now seemed to him to be a "new academicism" (Homer, 1969, p. 82). Responding to the works of *Hassam and other established American impressionists, Henri declared that their use of color did not respond to actual naturalistic observation. The group around Henri reverted to a "truer realism," that of Hals, Velázquez, Goya, and *Manet. Besides being pioneers, these were the masters of painterly realism, known for dark, powerful and expressive brushwork. Henri summed it up later (Henri, 1923, p. 71) by stating: "Velazquez and Franz [sic] Hals made a dozen strokes reveal more than most other painters could accomplish in a thousand." He saw Velázquez as a sympathetic portrait painter who revealed the dignity of his sitter: "he painted with large, easy movements . . . . His forms make beautiful rhythm" (p. 280). For Henri, "every bit of Frans Hals’ painting is sheer invention. . . . [he] was a man of wonderful judgement" (p. 193). Henri seemed even closer to Manet and Goya, whose used black substantially. The dark palette of Henri marked a conscious break with impressionism, though he would continue to seek vitality and spontaneity as did Monet and his colleagues.
By the time Henri made his third trip to Europe, in 1895, he had essentially relinquished the *high-keyed impressionist palette. It is beyond our scope to relate the rest of Henri’s story. Suffice it to say that he would become one of America’s greatest and most beloved teachers and the leader of an inspirational new school, called the *Ash Can School. He will be best remembered as the standard-bearer of early twentieth-century urban realism in American painting, and an anti-genteel force in
the cultural arena between 1900 and 1930. To reiterate, what Henri’s group did share with the impressionists, besides choosing ordinary life as *subject matter, was the rendering of momentary impressions, but they favored broad masses over *broken color as a means to do so.
When Henri finally found himself, he discovered that impressionism was not the right path for him to follow, especially the genteel, sentimental kind of impressionism associated with the *Boston School. Hoopes (1976) surmised that Henri rejected impressionism because it appealed "primarily to the eye, rather than to the intellect." Thus with impressionism he could not achieve the union of art and life, which he so desired. Henri needed a different aesthetic to express himself, and his art would culminate in a dark *tonalism, a bold, painterly, expressive, and rapidly brushed technique, which was his means to convey what he thought was most important: the vital, raw material of contemporary American life. When Henri said "we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life’s experience," he was rejecting the more finished impressionist canvas, which was to him, a piece of virtuoso technique – a bright cheerful view of modern life, which usually lacked, however, any hint of human emotion.
Henri finished his career as an outstanding teacher: at the Veltin School in New York (1900-02), at the New York School of Art (1902-08), at his own Henri School of Art (1909-12), and at the *Art Students League (1915-27). Sloan wrote in the Memorial exhibition catalogue in 1931, "Robert Henri gave as much of his life to helping others to free self-expression as he gave to his own work. His thirty years of teaching were devoted to the emancipation of the art spirit in the United States."
REF.
Huneker, 1907-I; Yarrow and Bouché, 1921; Cortissoz, 1923-A, pp. 179-180; Henri, 1923; Henderson, 1930-A; Morris, 1930, pp. 199-200; Pagano, 1946, cat. no. 56; Art Students League, 1951, p. 21; Art Students League, 1967, p. 66; Homer, 1969; Valente, 1969; Howat and Pilgrim, 1973, pp. 124-125; Fink and Taylor, 1975, cat. no. 134; National Academy of Design, 1975, pp. 73-74; Hoopes, 1976; Wilmerding, 1976, pp. 169-171; Mandel, 1977, pp. 138-139; Brown et al, 1979, pp. 351-353; Perlman, 1979; David W. Scott, in Encyclopedia of American Art, 1981, p. 277; Quick, 1983, pp. 134-135; Delaware Art Museum, 1984; Sims, 1984, pp. 116-117; Preato, Langer, and Cox, 1988, pp. 35, 54, 98; A. Gerdts, 1990, pp. 112-113; Milroy, 1991; Perlman, 1991; Gerdts, 1992-A, pp. 270-271; Strazdes, et al, 1992, pp. 242-244; Weinberg, Bolger and Curry, 1992; Gerdts, 1994, pp. 35-36, 157, 161; Keny and Maciejunes, 1994, pp. 63, 112-113, 147-148; Leeds, Homer, and Quick, 1994; Leeds, 1995; Zurier, Snyder, and Mecklenburg, 1995, pp. 6, 14, 36, 228, 351; Perlman and Leeds, 1998; Boone, 1998-99, pp. 74-79; M. Sue Kendall, in Encyclopedia of American Art before 1914, 2000, p. 223; Vure, 2000, p. 181; Siedell, 2002; Sobieski, n.d., pp. 78-79. |
Paintings by Robert Henri
| Isadora Duncan |
| watercolor on paper: 12 x 8 inches |
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