Note: The story below is based on
research currently being conducted by Thomas and Margaret West for a future
book on Charles Massey West, Jr., and Anne Warner West, their lives and their
art.
The Narrows, 1942
by Thomas G. West
It wasn’t the top prize. But it
was major recognition in a major show.
In the fall of 1942, it was a show
and catalogue that mainly honored Grant Wood, who had died earlier that same
year. Wood had already become an icon of American painting. With images such as
“American Gothic,” “Daughters of
Revolution” and “Good Influence” he had linked humor and satire with pride in
the simplicity of middle America, using a flat, almost plastic palate, with
smooth forms, high contrast and deep shadows -- not commonly seen again until
the Pixar computer animation films some 70 years later.
The top prize at the Fifty-Third
Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of
Chicago had gone to Edward Hopper for “Nighthawks,” a canvas that was to become
itself another icon of American painting. Lonely people in a bright diner in a
dark cityscape -- familiar in numerous magazine articles, satirical imitations
and young persons’ wall posters -- culminating as the central focus of the
major show on Hopper in the East Wing of the National Gallery, Washington, DC,
that closed January 21, 2008.
Art historian and commentator
Robert Hughes called Hopper the most important painter of the period and it is
noteworthy that “Nighthawks” is the lone image that spans the backs of his
multi-tape video history of American painting.
It is also notable how
pivotal “Nighthawks” was in
Hopper’s professional life. One writer notes in the National Gallery show
catalogue: “In May 1945, having become famous and successful after his triumph
with ‘Nighthawks,’ Hopper was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and
Letters.” (Barter, 2007, p. 211.)
For West in 1942, it was not the
top prize, but there he was, shoulder to shoulder with the top prizewinners --
prizewinners who have come to represent, over time, the very best of distinctly
American art.
West’s short biographical sketch
was listed in facing pages with other short sketches of the top prizewinners.
Hopper’s bio noted that his “early work aroused so little interest that he gave
up painting for several years.” In
West’s bio, his hometown is spelled incorrectly but his study at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (PAFA, attended
1931-1934; the oldest and most prestigious art school in America) is noted along
with his then current teaching position and his award in 1934 of the Cresson
Memorial Traveling Scholarship for 4 to 6 months of study in Europe.
It is true that the year before
the “The Narrows” had already been shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington,
DC, and published in Art Magazine. But
this was somehow different.
In the Chicago show catalogue,
there are black and white photographs of the winning paintings. Hopper’s
“Nighthawks” is in the middle of the booklet, Plate VII, “Awarded the Ada S.
Garrett Prize.” One page leaf away
is “The Narrows” by Charles M. West, Jr., Plate IX, “Awarded the Honorable
Mention for Landscape.”
Also listed in the show catalogue
were paintings by well-known and not so well known artists of the period whose
work was shown but did not win any prize at that exhibition. (The full
catalogue listing is quoted below, indented (without quotation marks); comments
from this writer are in brackets.) Some of those listed were associated with
the Pennsylvania Academy (many now known as Pennsylvania Impressionists) or
with the Brandywine School of painters near Wilmington, Delaware.
Henriette
Wyeth, born Wilmington, Delaware, 1907; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 233
[ref. number for paintings exhibited in this show], Portrait of N.C. Wyeth.
[Daughter of N.C. Wyeth, sister of Andrew Wyeth.]
Peter
Hurd, born Roswell, New Mexico, 1904; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 133,
Prairie Shower. [Husband of Henriette Wyeth; much later famously commissioned
to do portrait of LBJ.]
Walter
Stuempfig, Jr., born Philadelphia, 1914; lives in Collegeville, Pennsylvania,
218, Family Reunion. [West’s classmate at the PAFA]
Francis
Speight, born Windsor, North Carolina, 1896; lives in Roxborough, Pennsylvania,
217, Scene in West Manayunk. [West’s teacher at the PAFA; both were students of
Daniel Garber. Speight and his wife Sarah were long time close friends of
Charles and Anne West (Sarah was their classmate). Sarah Speight painted a
portrait of the young Charles West (at art school) that now hangs in the West
Gallery in Centreville. The West family also owns a painting of a Manayunk
scene by Francis Speight. ]
Donald M.
Mattison, born Beloit, Wisconsin, 1905; lives in Indianapolis, 167, Good-by.
[West’s boss at the time. As director of the John Herron Art Institute in
Indianapolis, Indiana, Mattison had recruited West, at the University of Iowa,
as raising young star teacher.]
Thomas
[Hart] Benton, born Neosho, Missouri, 1889; lives in Kansas City, 59, Negro
Soldier.
Georgia
O’Keefe, born Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887; lives in New York, 180, Red Hills
and Bones.
It was not the top prize. But it
was a long way to have traveled for the boy from Centreville -- a small river
town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that had been in many ways unchanged for
more than a century. The town of 2000 on the Corsica River in a timeless rural
area of farmers and watermen on the Delmarva Peninsula, had long been a virtual
island between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean (reachable from Baltimore
or Annapolis on the Western Shore only by slow ferry boat or ancient steamer;
the two bridges across the bay were not built until the 1950s and the 1970s).
Born in 1907, the young Charlie
West had spent his boyhood mostly in the town’s nearby wharf area (not far from
the family home on Chesterfield Avenue) -- not unlike Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer
and Huck Finn -- following the river traffic, absorbing outrageous local
superstitions from the cooks, deck hands and travelers, seeing melodramas at
Ford’s Floating Theater -- escaping his four older sisters and his no-nonsense,
small-town businessman father.
(Ford’s Floating Theater was a
tiny theater on a barge towed from river town to river town around the
Chesapeake Bay. It is said to be the actual basis for the stories later used in
the musical “Showboat.” Charles did several watercolors and paintings of this
floating theater.)
(Among Charlie’s close boyhood
friends in Centreville was the African American Bush Gaines. They remained good
friends throughout their adult years. On at least one occasion, Bush took
Charlie to the “Colored-Only” dance hall in Centreville’s “Sandy Bottom” area
(the location, near the intersection of South Commerce and Little Kidwell, is
now empty). Long gone, the dance hall, called the “Paladoria Inn,” became the
subject of one of West’s most loved but least-seen paintings (of the same
name). The painting is clearly patterned (in many respects) on the painting “La
Danse Au Moulin-Rouge” and especially the “Moulin Rouge -- La Goulue” poster
both by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec -- the latter with distant audience, lively
dancer in the middle ground and cartoon-like characterization of a man in the
near foreground.)
It wasn’t the top prize. But in
the fall of 1942, at the age of 35, the recognition received at the Chicago
show was special indeed -- a kind of watershed, a balance point in his life as
a painter and artist, one generation off the farm.
It was only 11 years before that
he had won a full scholarship to attend art school in Philadelphia and the
Pennsylvania Academy Country School at Chester Springs, PA.
It was only 8 years before that he
had been awarded the top art school prize to travel and study and paint in
Europe -- almost losing his life from appendicitis as the grand ship steamed
toward France.
At the hospital in Paris, after
his operation, he was befriended by a Hungarian Countess and her rich American
husband -- and was invited to recuperate at their grand chateau near Paris. In
so doing, he saw, first hand, the last days of a style of life -- with lush
gardens, expensive cars, grand estates and grander parties -- that was to end
forever only five years later.
In his painting, West loved the
dash and freshness and vitality of the French Impressionists of the 1870s, 1880s
and 1890s. He saw it as a style well suited to the rural landscapes and river
scenes that he had known all of his life.
Two years before he had married a
fellow art school student, Anne Dickie Warner. Their first son had been born in
March of 1941. A second would follow in August of 1943.
The man who later became the head
of the Pennsylvania Academy sent a note to the former student: “Dear Charlie: I
can only take time for the merest word this morning, but the Chicago Art
Institute catalogue has just come to my desk and I see that you have crashed
through again. Heartiest congratulations and best wishes for all the Wests!
Sincerely Yours, Joseph T. Fraser, November 11, 1942.”
When the Chicago show closed
December 10, 1942, America had been at war for its first full year. The art
school closed. West was retrained to become a draftsman in the local war
industries in Indianapolis.
Thirty years later -- after
teaching painting, sculpture and history of art at several schools and
colleges, eventually resettling his young family in his own hometown -- at the
end of December 1972, at the age of 65, West’s life was at an end. He was
buried, with a small family service, along side his parents in the family plot
in Centreville, as geese flew overhead in the cold of early January.
His wife Anne turned a small
building, former law offices on Lawyer’s Row in the center of the town, into a
gallery to honor her husband's paintings and those of others.
West’s father’s dream was that his
son would become a lawyer, the top of the social scale of the small
agricultural town and county, a northern-most outpost of very Southern rural
attitudes and traditions.
It is no small irony that West’s
paintings -- his art and his career so much a puzzle to his father and virtually
everyone else in this essentially provincial town and rural county -- finally
ended up at the center of the law offices that face the old Queen Anne’s County
Courthouse. There, property deeds had been exchanged and fought over for
hundreds of years -- land
ownership long having been in the area the main path to wealth and social
position.
Anne Dickie Warner West --
descended from an old Quaker family of artists and engineers from Wilmington,
Delaware, and, previously, Philadelphia (years before the arrival of William
Penn) -- lived on for another 34 years of painting and travel and grandchildren
and family visits in Centreville and then Chestertown -- passing away in her
sleep in the afternoon of November 10, 2006, at the age of 97, just a month short
of her 98th birthday.
References
Art Institute of Chicago, 1942.
Catalogue of the Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and
Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Barter, Judith A., 2007. “Travels
and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures” in Edward Hopper, Boston,
MA: MFA Publications, pp. 211-225. The book was published in conjunction with
the exhibition “Edward Hopper,” organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Other sections of this book were written by Carol Troyen, Janet L. Comey,
Elliot Bostwick Davis and Ellen E. Roberts.
Huisman, P., and M.G. Dortu, 1964.
Lautrec by Lautrec. A Studio Book, The
Viking Press. New York, NY. (The Moulin Rouge poster and paintings are
reproduced on p. 67 and pp.
80-81.)
__________________________________
Note: A series of photographs of
paintings by Anne and Charles West, Jr., is available on the web. Instructions:
Go to Google, click on images, picasa, request “Charles M. West, Jr.,” then
click on this image to bring up the full set of 38 images, request slide show
with full screen and commentary text below.
Contact: thomasgwest@gmail.com,
thomasgwest@aol.com, mobile 202-262-1266.
Blog: http://inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com. (See also “Dyslexia: The Unwrapped Gift” on
YouTube and Thinking Like Einstein
on the website “AT&T Tech Channel.”)
New version, revised, August 2011.
