THE MONTANA MODERNISTS: REDEFINING WESTERN ART by Michele Corriel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY Bozeman, Montana November 2019 ©COPYRIGHT by Michele Corriel 2019 All Rights Reserved ii DEDICATION This work is dedicated to Terry Karson (1950 – 2017) whose footsteps I’ve followed all through this process. He was both a mentor and an inspiration. I only hope to have done his work justice iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project started before I wrote the first word. With the advice of my trusted committee, Dr. Mary Murphy, Dr. Harvey Hamburgh, Sara Mast, and Josh DeWeese, the project found its way home. I cannot thank them enough for their insights, time, and thoughtful consideration of my ideas. Thanks go out to Tina DeWeese for all of her help in allowing me to go through personal items, reading letters, and for all the visits we had together. My undying gratitude goes out to Gordon McConnell who carefully read every word of this and graciously offered his comments. In addition, I would like to thank my family, Patrick Redmond and Mackenzie Redmond, for putting up with me and for giving me the space to dedicate to this project. Lastly, I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to the Ivan Doig Center for awarding me the Dissertation Fellowship in order to finish this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE .......................................................................................................................... xi 1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1 2. SECTION ONE: PLACE ...............................................................................................16 A Sense of Place: Isabelle Johnson and Bill Stockton ...................................................16 Bill and Isabelle: Working the Land Through Their Art ...............................................18 Bill Stockton’s Portrayal of Place ..................................................................................41 3. SECTION TWO: TEACHING/ARTISTIC LINEAGE.................................................61 Growing Artists ..............................................................................................................61 Educational Lineage.......................................................................................................63 Experiencing Art in the Classroom ................................................................................80 Frances and Jessie: Changing Perceptions .....................................................................90 The Human Gaze ...........................................................................................................97 Making It Personal .......................................................................................................106 Frances Senska: From Her Roots and Back Again ......................................................110 Making Precedes Matching..........................................................................................120 From Bricks to Ceramic Arts: Archie Bray and Other Characters ..............................128 4. SECTION THREE: COMMUNITY............................................................................134 Patronage, Art Movements, and the G. I. Bill .............................................................134 The Democratization of Art .........................................................................................135 Politics and the Politics of Art .....................................................................................148 Bob and Gennie............................................................................................................152 Robert DeWeese: Responsibility is the Ability to Respond ........................................157 Gennie DeWeese: I Paint What I See ..........................................................................181 5. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................197 Redefining Western Art in Montana ............................................................................197 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................205 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Isabelle Johnson, Red Willows in Winter Landscape, 1958, oil on canvas board, 15.75 x 19.75 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .......................................................................26 2. Isabelle Johnson, East Fiddler’s Creek, 1967, oil on canvas, 36 x 46 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .......................................................................................................30 3. Isabelle Johnson, Trees Winter, 1952, oil on canvas board, 24 x 19.75 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .......................................................................................................32 4. Isabelle Johnson, Home Ranch, 1955, oil on canvas board, 24 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .......................................................................................................34 5. Isabelle Johnson, Calves, Winter, 1950, oil on canvas board, 15.5 x 19.5 inches, Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .......................................................................................................36 6. Isabelle Johnson, Autumn on the Stillwater, 1970, oil on linen, 38 x 42 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .......................................................................................................40 7. Bill Stockton, Snow Formation, 1955, oil on plywood, 18 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum ...............................48 8. Bill Stockton, Start of Spring, 1957, casein on canvas, 21.75 x 25.75 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .....................51 9. Bill Stockton, Faded Roses, 1992, livestock marker and graphite on paper, 22 x 28 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .......................................................................................................55 10. Bill Stockton, Dusk, 1984, livestock marker and graphite on paper, 9.25 x 17 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .................56 vi LIST OF FIGURES CONTINUED Figure Page 11. Bill Stockton, Village in Winter, 1983, livestock marker, graphite, oil pastel on paper, 10 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum ................................................................................58 12. Gennie DeWeese, Non-Objective Painting, n.d., oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family ...........................................72 13. Frances Senska, Hungarian Partridges, n.d., stoneware, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the Holter Musem of Art ............................90 14. Jessie Wilber, Huns, 1954, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum ................................................................................92 15. Jessie Wilber, Blackfeet Tipi, 1974, Serigraph. Courtesy of the Museum of the Rockies..............................................................................97 16. Jessie Wilber, Cats in a Garden, 1950, single-color woodblock print, 19 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art ..................................................................................................100 17. Jessie Wilber, Birds and Trees, n.d., two-color woodblock print, 17.25 x 22.75 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art ................................................................................102 18. Jessie Wilber, Huns (on a pond), 1956, single-color woodblock print on colored paper, 19 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art .......................................................................103 19. Jessie Wilber, The River (Don’t Dam It!), 1977, woodblock print on paper using Chine-colle technique. 44 x 13 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art .............................................104 20. Jessie Wilber, Owls, n.d., five-stage woodblock print, 30 x 15 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art ..................................................................................................105 vii LIST OF FIGURES CONTINUED Figure Page 21. Jessie Wilber, The Musicians, 1965, single-color woodblock print on fabric. 46 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art. ...............................................................................106 22. Jessie Wilber, Magpies in a Snowstorm, 1986, silkscreen print. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum ....................................................109 23. Frances Senska, YaBaBo Pot, n.d., stoneware, 9 x 7 inches diameter. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art ..........................................113 24. Frances Senska, Ring Necked Bottle, 1966, stoneware, 12 x 6 inches. Courtesy of Alfred University/Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, museum purchase, Rodger D. Corsaw Collection/ # 2015.16 .....................................................................................115 25. Frances Senska, Chicken Wine Set, n.d., stoneware, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Kelly and Roy Crosby ..............................116 26. Frances Senska, Branch Bottle Weed Pot, 1979, stoneware, 14 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the Senska/Wilber Collection .............................119 27. Frances Senska, Surf Figures (Pond Farm Vase), 1950, light stoneware, 7 7/8 x 4 3/8 inches. Courtesy of the Senska/Wilber Collection. ......................................................................................................123 28. Marguerite Wildenhain, Tall Footed Vase, n.d. Courtesy of the Luther Fine Arts Museum ..............................................................................124 29. Robert DeWeese, Western Painting, 1976, collage and mixed media, 15.5 x 12.25 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family .....................159 30. Robert DeWeese, Figure Dancing, n.d., drawings on paper. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art ..........................................................161 31. Robert DeWeese, Portland, 1980s, felt marker on paper, 12 x 17 inches. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art .................................163 viii LIST OF FIGURES CONTINUED Figure Page 32. Robert DeWeese, Between Three Forks and Toston, 1980s, felt marker on paper. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art .......................164 33. Robert DeWeese, Bill’s Lil Trees, 1970, felt marker on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art ................................165 34. Robert DeWeese, Flight (Red Boy), 1988, mixed media on paper, 62.5 x 80.5 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum .....................169 35. Robert DeWeese, VFW Studio Wall, 1973, mixed media. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum ....................................................171 36. Robert DeWeese, Nine Ties, Seven Chains, 1988, mixed media on canvas, 5 x 11 feet. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family .............................173 37. Robert DeWeese, Circus Ties, 1986, Caron D’Arch crayons on gessoed window shade, 73 x 47 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family ............................................................................................174 38. Robert DeWeese, Plains Sunset, 1963, oil on Masonite, 19 x 26.5 inches. Courtesy of Zak Zakovi .....................................................177 39. Robert DeWeese, Wolny’s Hill (One Cloud), 1984, gouache and enamel on paper, 9 x 23.25 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum ...................................................................................................178 40. Gennie DeWeese, Non-Objective Painting (Choral Composition), 1950s, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family................................186 41. Gennie DeWeese, Bare Trees, 1954, oil on Masonite. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family ..................................................................................187 42. Gennie DeWeese, Winter Willow Grove, 1971, oil on Masonite, 3 x 4 feet. Courtesy of Mary Langan and Wally Hansen...............................188 43. Gennie DeWeese, Clover Year, 1998, scroll, oil bar on canvas, 70 x 70 inches. Courtesy of Eric Overlie .......................................................189 ix LIST OF FIGURES CONTINUED Figure Page 44. Gennie DeWeese, Springtime in the Rockies, 2005, scroll, oil bar on canvas, 60 x 86.5 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family ....................191 45. Gennie DeWeese, Clear Cut, 1990, paint stick on paper, 39 x 47.5. Courtesy of the Missoula Art Museum .........................................192 x ABSTRACT Through an investigation of twentieth-century Montana postwar societal aspects, I examine the emergence of an avant-garde art movement in the state. The pioneers of this movement, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Bill Stockton, Isabelle Johnson, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese, nurtured, sustained, and promulgated an aesthetic philosophy that redefined Western art in Montana. Divided into three sections, the exploration of this avant-garde movement concentrates on place, teaching/artistic lineage, and community. Part one examines place. For some, place refers to the physical attributes of Montana in the postwar years, the isolation, the beauty, and the complexity of its landscape that not only served as a backdrop but also played center stage in the influences on life and art. For others in the group, place became a metaphor for the body politic, a personal evocation of space held within the boundaries of time. Part two charts each artist’s artistic lineage to further understand how they arrived at their particular artistic styles. Community, the third section, seeks to answer one of the larger questions within this work: how did six artists working in Montana in the late 1940s create a thriving art community that opposed the meta-narrative of the West and still resonates in contemporary Montana art. A thorough study of their teaching styles, art techniques, and social gatherings demonstrates the workings of a tight-knit community of like-minded artists (and writers, dancers, musicians, and philosophers) as they addressed the changing zeitgeist of a postwar America, cultivating fresh ideas through a modern lens, allowing Montanans a new option for viewing themselves. xi PREFACE After more than fifteen years writing about art in Montana, the same six names have been mentioned over and over. Artists of varying aesthetics and disciplines repeatedly spoke of these people as mentors and friends, I set forth to learn more about them. Through my research into Isabelle Johnson, Bill Stockton, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese I developed a very deep, personal connection. Why was I drawn to these artists? Why did their work speak to me so directly? Their visions that arose from a life in Montana opened a door for me to explore my own regional identity. In Wilber’s prints of the things she loved—her cats sunning themselves or a covey of Hungarian partridges scuttling across her yard—I found the same intimate moments I had experienced. Gennie DeWeese’s large pigment stick landscapes painted in lush colors connected me to the views I had seen traveling across the state. In Robert DeWeese’s sketches I felt as if I were sitting in the room with him, seeing the same moments he had observed. I had not one bone of ranching in my body, yet Bill Stockton made me feel as if I had just trudged across a muddy field or fought my way back home through a blizzard. Isabelle Johnson introduced me to her favorite hills and valleys on her Absarokee ranch, Frances Senska won my heart with her hand-sized ceramic partridges. Through each vision, these artists allowed me to see Montana in a new way. xii My passion for these six artists and their art is expressed in my descriptions of their work. The interpretations on the following pages of paintings and pots are the result of my own research and reflection. I am grateful to each of them for their enduring visions that gave birth to what I call Montana Modernism. Their work continues to give us new ways to see this unique place and its history through their eyes. Brief Artist Biographies Isabelle Johnson (1901 – 1992): Born and raised on a ranch in Absarokee, Montana, she attended the University of Montana where she graduated with a degree in history in 1922. She taught high school in Fromberg, Montana, for two years. She then went on to attend Los Angeles County Museum School, at the University of Southern California, the Otis Art Institute, and Columbia University where she attained a Master’s Degree in History. She then enrolled at the Columbia University School of Painting and Sculpture, to pursue further graduate work in art. While at Columbia she was selected by the artist Henry Varnum Poor in 1946 to participate in the first class of the experimental Skowhegan School of Painting and sculpture, in Maine. Intermittently, Johnson went back to Montana to teach art at the Billings High School when she needed money for tuition. After she finished her education she took a year off to go to Europe and visit the works of the masters. Upon her return she taught art at Eastern Montana College from 1949-1961. In 1983 she was awarded the Governor’s Award for the Arts. xiii Bill Stockton (1921 – 2002): Born in Winnett, Montana, Stockton moved to the family’s ranch at Grass Range in his teens. He joined the Army in World War II, and was stationed just outside of Paris at a hospital, where he learned about sign painting. After the war he attended the Minneapolis School of Art and then went back to France in 1947 to attend the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, in Paris. Upon returning to Montana with his French wife, Elvia Cirefice, he lived in Billings, but eventually came back to the ranch in Grass Range. There he raised (for the most part) sheep and painted. In 2003, a year after his death, he was awarded the Governor’s Award for the Arts. Jessie Spaulding Wilber (1912 – 1989): Born in Whitewater, Wisconsin, she moved frequently as a child. Her family traveled from Illinois to Ohio, from Oklahoma to Michigan before settling in Boulder, Colorado, when she was eight. She earned an B.A. and an M.A. at Colorado Teachers College, in Greeley, Colorado. She came to Montana State College, Bozeman, in 1941, and that same year was awarded a contract to paint a Post Office mural in Kingman, Kansas. Wilber taught in the art department until 1972. In 1988, she garnered the Governor’s Award for the Arts. Frances Senska (1914 – 2009): Born in Cameroon, Africa, Senska moved to the United States in 1929 when she attended the University High School in Iowa City, Iowa. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.A. and M.A. in 1939. She taught at Grinnell College, until in 1942 she joined the U.S. Navy, where she trained as a pilot. Senska took classes from Bauhaus artists László Moholy-Nagy and Marguerite xiv Wildenhain. She also studied with Edith Heath at the California Labor School and Maija Grotell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She came to Montana State College in 1946, where she taught until 1973. There she met Jessie Wilber and the two became constant friends. In 1988 she was awarded the Governor’s Award for the Arts. Robert DeWeese (1920 – 1990): Born in Troy, Ohio, he graduated from Ohio State University in 1942 with a B.S. degree in art. At Ohio State University he studied with the artist Walter Kuhn and the innovative art professor Hoyt Sherman. In 1942 he joined the U.S. Air Force and played flute in the Air Force Band, stationed in Hawaii. At the end of World War II he married Gennie Adams, and he attended the University of Iowa, earning an M.F.A. in 1948. After graduation he taught art at Ohio State University, Columbus, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, and in 1949 he took a position at Montana State College, Bozeman, where he remained until his retirement in 1977. DeWeese was given the Governor’s Award for the Arts, posthumously, in 1995. Gennie Adams DeWeese (1921 – 2007): Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, she spent her first five years before her family moved to St. Louis, then to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and finally settled in Columbus, Ohio. In 1938, she enrolled at Ohio State University, where she studied with artist Walter Kuhn, and art professor Hoyt Sherman, and where she met and became friends with Robert DeWeese. In 1943 she received her teaching certificate from the University of Michigan. At the end of World War II, she moved to Detroit, where she worked as a substitute teacher and painted. When Robert xv DeWeese returned from the war the two of them married. Gennie DeWeese accompanied Robert to Bozeman in 1949. They had five children. She kept up her art practice throughout her life, always demanding her own time in the studio. She taught at all levels of education, teaching as an adjunct at Montana State University in 1978. In 1995, after Robert DeWeese’s death in 1990, Gennie DeWeese earned the Governor’s Award for the Arts. That same year Gennie DeWeese was given an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from Montana State University. 1 MONTANA’S AVANT-GARDE Introduction After World War II, these six artists—Isabelle Johnson, Bill Stockton, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese—stood out as the first generation to bring Modernism to Montana. 1 Through their art, their teaching, and their camaraderie, they invited Montanans to see themselves in a different light. By bringing an illustrious artistic lineage, combined with observations of their ideas of place, they created a community that ultimately opened its arms to Modernism, and so doing brought a broader context to the Montanan identity. They spoke of themselves as Montana’s Avant-Garde because they knew their art operated out of the mainstream. Montana natives Isabelle Johnson and Bill Stockton, both ranchers and artists, portrayed their versions of place in a way that reframed the narrative of Montana from that of the “Wild West” to a more intimate relationship inherent in day-to-day living. Artist and curator Gordon McConnell said, “I love Montana more because of Isabelle’s paintings, seeing the landscape through her vision.”2 Frances Senska and Jessie Wilber, inspired each other as they discovered their voices. Their presence as teachers, enhanced by their own work invited students to become artists and artists to become teachers. Their influences can be seen in the artworld today, passed down through generations. Robert and Gennie DeWeese showed by example what it meant to live life as an artist. Their home, nearly always filled with creative people, inspired decades of young artists to 1 There were other artists around the state experimenting with Modernism including Val Knight and Jack Franjevic in Great Falls. 2 Gordon McConnell, phone interview with author, March, 21, 2019, transcript in possession of author. 2 pursue the truth of their work on their own terms. Together they offered an alternative to a state wrapped in an environment of Western art. To understand the development of the Montana Modernists, it may help to define Modernism. For the Modernist, aesthetic issues have primacy over all else. In the case of painting, the abstract shapes animate the surface so that the entire painting is equally expressive. Modernism also asserts personal, individual expression over idealism and religion. The first Modernist art movement, French Impressionism (1872–1892) was a reaction to a combination of new technology: the invention of photography (early 1800s), and the availability of portable paint tubes (1841). These inventions resulted in the artists seeking to express what they saw in ways that photography could not, and portable tubes allowed them to paint plein-air. Their quest for conveying the light coincided with the need to portray not only the physical attributes of their world, but the societal differences between the classes. The manner in which these artists reflected their worldview impacted the way people viewed themselves—as a growing middle class. Art stopped being about historical figures, religion, and mythology. Instead it began to question meaning beyond the subject matter, to bypass the subjects, and focus on the limits of the medium. Impressionist brought attention to the moment, the light, the air. A few years later, Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) used paint to examine the spaces between the objects, instead of the subject itself. Cezanne activated the entire canvas with the task of painting three-dimensional objects on a flat surface. In this way Modernism began to 3 embody the search for finding new forms adequate enough to portray and express their era. At the time Cezanne painted his iconic apples (1873-1898), the Third Paris World’s Fair opened in 1879 touting ice machines and electric lights. For Cezanne, these inventions may have signaled a world where a closer examination of what seemed to be understood—a bowl of apples—may not actually be so easily known. By observing the apples in relation to the tablecloth, the folds in relation to the light, Cezanne gave his still life paintings a sculptural element, opening up a fresh avenue for the act of seeing and relating that act to a two-dimensional surface. In the 1950s, art critic Clement Greenberg, looking back at the beginnings of the art movement, defined Modernism as a contrast to the artists who used “art to conceal art,” which refered to illusionistic painting. Modernists called referred to the materiality of their work, to the paint, the flat surfaces, and the limits of the illusions of space. 3 American Modernism includes the Abstract Expressionists, like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who according to curator and art historian Kirk Varnedoe, showed the world the promises that modern art could achieve. 4 The art historian Meyer Shapiro noted that the change from pictorial art to abstract art could be likened to exchanging Mark Twain for Ezra Pound. In other words, it expressed an increase in intellectual and spiritual integrity, not something to be taken at face value. In his 1957 essay, Modern Art, Shapiro said that the art of his time was not modern due to its contemporary setting, but because it indicated a challenge of new possibilities—artists incorporated these new possibilities into their work—questioning unexplored perceptions, ideas, and experiences. 3 Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 86. 4 Kirk Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 329–331. 4 During the period in America after World War II, as soldiers became veterans they searched for a way to express their experiences of fighting in a war within the context of peace. Atomic power, including the capacity for assured mutual destruction and a nuclear winter, preyed on many minds as schools taught children to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear attack. Couched in the Cold War terms of communism, the idea of a government social safety net became dangerous during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. How would artists translate the fears and hopes they shared into art? In a broad reaction to the basic elements of common experiences, Abstract Expressionism developed under these new conditions. Not only were artists in the United States asking what did it mean to be human, they also asked what did it mean to be American. Abstract Expressionism, a new arm of Modernism, symbolized an individual who realized a kind of freedom and deep engagement of the self within the work. 5 Postwar Montana, without art museums to show them artwork firsthand, lived with a second-hand understanding of Modernist art. This may have influenced the resistance to a new aesthetic. Experientially, unless a person traveled to New York or Europe, seeing an important painting happened through print media in a magazine, on a postcard, in a book, or even amongst the pages of a calendar hanging on a wall. Viewing them in a personal space, holding the book, touching the pages, perhaps tracing outlines with a finger, makes the images both more accessible and intimate. However, this experience deceives the viewer. Is it possible to have a truly intimate experience with a 5 Meyer Shapiro, Modern Art in the 19 th and 20 th Centuries, (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 2011), 213–232. 5 piece of artwork if it is only viewed as a copy, with all the inadequacies of reproduction? Lost is the actual experience of standing in front of a work of art. In 1935, Walter Benjamin, philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, put forward the idea that mechanical reproduction of art devalues it, reducing the artwork’s uniqueness as a singular work of art, claiming a loss of the “aura” of the original work.6 In 1972, art critic John Berger raised the idea again that culture and technology influence how people see the world and, through that lens, view art. He posited that different cultures, with the technologies available during their time, interpreted what they saw. Berger points to the invention of the camera as a mechanism for changing the way in which people saw painted images. Originally paintings were an integral part of the building for which they were designed. Sometimes in an early Renaissance church or chapel one has the feeling that the images on the wall are records of the building’s interior life that together make up the building’s memory—so much are they part of the particularity of the building. 7 He goes on to posit the consequences of reproduction: The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided…it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings. 8 Berger implies that the easier it is to access these images, the more it becomes part of the commonality of the culture. In so doing, the original meaning of the art changes from the intention of the artist to what it represents. With each copy, its meaning 6 Walter Benjamin, TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1968) 217-242. 7 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 19. 8 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 20. 6 degenerates. A painting meant to be a painting inherently changes when dispersed in multiples. As Bill Stockton put it when comparing Isabelle Johnson’s work before her trip to Europe to study the masters and after her return to Montana, She had been influenced by reproductions, as were most of us here in Montana and elsewhere who had little access to study original paintings up close. Reproductions might well show the effect of the painting, but to get but a hint of the effects of how atmosphere and light are accomplished by underpainting and over-glazes…after this [trip] her paintings took on a different surface and her dark areas became more translucent. 9 Stockton and Johnson, as well as the rest of the Montana Modernists, did see the original work of the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists as they traveled to Europe or to various American cities. Johnson and Stockton’s perspective, or way of seeing, stemmed in part from their personal point of view: chores and caring for livestock. For Frances Senska, Jessie Wilber, Gennie DeWeese, and to some extent, Robert DeWeese, their point of view encompassed what they saw from their window and in their homes. The land they interacted with each day, each season, with the minute variations and always changing light, availed itself to their artist’s eye and informed a personal statement that came through in paint and color, surface and texture, composition and form. Developing and redefining their art, perceived with a Modernist vision, into an environment exposed only to illustrative or mimetic artwork, indicated they felt the readiness of Montanans to accept this new visual language. Through the familiarity of print images, ideas of Modernism hovered in the minds of some around the state. People 9 Bill Stockton interview, transcript of interview conducted by Gordon McConnell after Johnson’s death in 1992, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum Archives, nd). 7 may have been familiar with Modernism, but at that point, Montanans still did not see themselves expressed in it. By the end of World War II Montana experienced a shift from a mostly rural, mining, and ranching state to a more city-centered economic platform. Veterans returned home and many took advantage of the G. I. Bill, attending college in ground-breaking numbers. Many colleges, including Montana State College (MSC) in Bozeman, started full-fledged art departments for the first time (at MSC, the art department came under the umbrella of Home Economics), which developed the need for artists-teachers willing to move to the state. The Montana Modernists all taught art and exposed their students to unfamiliar genres. They taught at Montana State College, Eastern Montana College, and Bill Stockton taught art classes in Lewistown’s Art Center. Their open-handed, generous pedagogy filtered into the lives of an exponentially growing number of artists, not just influenced by the art of their teachers, but by the egalitarian nature of the teacher-student relationship. Students, no longer treated as apprentices but as artists in their own right, shared their work, and showed their art at the same events, hanging side-by-side with their teachers. While this may not fall under the auspices of Modernism, per se, it is applicable to the Montana Modernists. Due to the nature of these veteran-students, the closeness in age between student and teacher with similar backgrounds and experiences, a more equal treatment of students became part of the character of Montana pedagogy. This wave of postwar artists needed to express themselves differently from the Western illustrative work that permeated the state at the time. Their experiences, their point of view, and the changing world they found themselves in required something 8 more. As Robert DeWeese noted in a catalog essay, “The art students in 1949 were a completely different lot. They’d been in the war all over the world, and they were hungry for all of it.”10 It’s not a leap to suggest that so many veterans who had seen the world, the war, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the devastation of Europe and the reckoning with fascism, needed a new way to communicate. In Montana, the regional experience and character of the land brought about the opportunity to speak through the language of nature and the unique perspective of place. 11 According to geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, a place is knowable through daily experiences over time. “The feel of a place is registered in one’s muscles and bones…Knowing a place…clearly takes time. It is a subconscious kind of knowing.”12 The Montana Modernists all showed a deep attachment to nature and to the particular places that enveloped their lives. They also understood that bringing Modernism to Montana meant they needed to take imagery already in art, the land, and translate that into a more expandable vocabulary that could include a broader context than that supplied by illustrative Western narratives, as told by men. Community also played a large role in connecting artists across the state. Montana is 630 miles wide and 255 miles from north to south: a big state by any standard. In 1948, a group of artists, writers, poets, and other creatives banded together to publish a quarterly magazine under the auspices of the Montana Institute of the Arts. They met 10 Robert DeWeese, Spirit of Modernism, (Kalispell: Paris Gibson Museum, 1987). Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title. 11 While not all regions experienced a similar art movement, some, like New Mexico, Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest had their own shifts in art styles. 12 Yi Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, (Minneopolis: Unversity of Minnesota Press, 2011), 184. 9 annually and convinced nearly everyone involved to contribute to their quarterly journal by writing about their work, sending in poetry, or essays. Some submitted thoughts regarding the creative process, others wrote about their experiences in the art world. Through this organization and other smaller gatherings, Montana artists created a sense of belonging. They knew most would not break out as stars in the art world, but that did not matter as much as encouraging each other to tend to their individual self-expression. The support created a tight-knit and compassionate community that grew to embrace artists from all over the state. It was the strength of their commonly held values in artmaking that enabled this steadfast community to withstand the pressures of a basically non-existent art market. The Montana Institute of the Arts helped to create that community, comprised of both students and other artists trying new things around Montana. As noted by former student, artist, and teacher Ray Campeau, Those were the people that were the glue that kept the arts alive in the state. There became a beauty [to it]—everybody in the arts was one big family. It was to the point where you went to a show—there were no art galleries in the state—so the Montana Institute of the Arts would put forth these shows. The leaders were the teachers, the people in higher education, they would exhibit too, not just the students, [everyone] became part of it. They’d give lectures, give demonstrations, share their beauty.13 Historically, the West provides the basis for numerous mythologies, creating villains and heroes, white hats and black hats, spread through storytelling, memories, and art. Before World War II, Montana’s art heroes consisted of those who told the best tales, namely men like Charles M. Russell, Edgar S. Paxton, and Joe DeYong. Other artists, 13 Ray Campeau, in-person interview with author in Bozeman, Montana, June 6, 2016. Transcript of interview in possession of author. 10 like O.C. Seltzer, Joseph Meany, Will James, and Ralph DeCamp, factored in, adding their work to the overall aesthetic representation of Montana. Above all, their work captured a nostalgic West harkening back to cowboys, Indians, buffalo herds, cattle drives, wildlife, pioneers, and campfires under the open night sky. In 1940, the Butte Public Library published a compliation of the artists in the state. The library listed over a hundred names, nearly all of them painted traditional Western scenes and scenery. None painted in an experimental or Modernist style, and the voices of women were but a whisper. As summed up by artist Dan Conway, When the annals of American art are conscientiously and honestly treated, Montana will stand high upon the role of fame, and there will be recorded on the historical pages the names of Edgar S. Paxson, Charles M. Russell, and Ralph E. DeCamp as a group of Montana painters who have not only done good work technically, but who have immortalized on canvas the Indian, the pioneer, the trapper, the ranchman, the cowboy, together with the fauna, the flora and the landscape peculiar to this section of the country…These three painters have had their homes in Montana, and they have proved themselves as much imbued with Montana’s atmospheric conditions and its topography. 14 It is not hard to see the attraction to these artists, spokesmen for the wild frontier, even if the frontier may not have been as wild as they claimed at that time. Montana still sold itself as rugged, a place where sturdy individuals could make a name for themselves. As the societal nature of the West began to change, the art that championed a nostalgic West became a force against change. Briefly reviewing the careers of a couple of those artists delineates their hold over Montana art and sets the stage for the disruption brought by the Montana Modernists. 14 Butte Public Library, Montana’s Art and Her Artists, (Butte: Butte Public Library, 1940), 39. 11 Charles M. Russell (1864–1926) ventured to the West from St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked on the open range, gaining his knowledge of the rugged life on horseback. He’s been described as a “man out of time” because he consistently depicted a Montana that no longer existed. As the 2017 PBS documentary C. M. Russell and the American West states, “Charlie Russell described Montana at its best—the Frontier Dream.” Russell assumed the role of preacher and progenitor for the myth of the West. Just as he was seduced by the idea of wildness, he eventually took on the role of seducer. “He lamented the West that was passed, then went on to convince us that the West, the mythic West, had been quite real,” the documentary’s narrator said. Russell’s painting, Waiting for a Chinook (1887), put him on the map. After a brutal winter, Russell’s small watercolor painting depicted a starving, rib-exposed steer barely standing in the white, white snow. Gray skies overhead loomed while wolves waited for an opportunity to take the steer. The title refers to the warm winds that come through in winter melting the snow and offering relief from an unrelenting season. “In the scope of a postcard, Russell had summed up the devastating winter of 1886-87, the end of the open-range cattle industry, and the commanding theme of all his work, ‘The West That Has Passed,’” wrote Brian Dippie in his introduction to Charles M. Russell: Word Painter. 15 Russell handed his torch to Joe DeYong (1894–1975) the first and only of his protégés. DeYong took on Russell’s philosophy of promoting a “vanishing West” mythology. His paintings and drawings depict bucking broncs and rodeos. Russell’s wife, Nancy, helped to promote his work and helped DeYong as much as she’d helped Russell 15 Brian Dippie, Charles M. Russell: Word Painter, Letters 1887–1926, (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1993), 3. 12 to gain renown. Both artists paid close attention to the finest details, being sure not to let the West of their memories die out. After Russell’s death, DeYong made his way to Hollywood as a film consultant, establishing the basis for much of the “Western” tradition seen on screen and television. 16 Financially, this romantic narrative of the West was reinforced through tourism’s support for dude ranches in Montana that relied heavily on the cowboy myth to sell a lifestyle to easterners looking to escape the urban setting for a few weeks’ vacation. Beginning in the 1920s, quite a few of Montana’s young people moved to cities within the state and out of state. Many of Montana’s traditional jobs in coal, lumber, mining, and agriculture became stagnant or declined. 17 Postwar Montana, compared to prewar Montana, dealt with a changing population as areas that housed colleges increased between twenty-nine percent in Bozeman, to thirty-six percent in Billings. Areas populated by mining, like Butte, saw a drop in population of eleven percent. 18 One industry claimed an uptick: tourism. In 1926, the Montana Dude Ranchers’ Association formed, with twenty-six ranches signing up that year. The number jumped to forty-seven dude ranches in 1927. By 1930, over 100 dude ranches developed across the state, mostly around the mountains and valleys near Yellowstone National Park. 19 According to a study of Montana’s economy at the time, “Rail-based tourism brought valuable dollars into the state, with tourists spending five hundred thousand dollars a year in Montana 16 C. M. Russell and the American West, directed by Gus Chambers, (Missoula: MontanaPBS ,2017) DVD. 17 Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, William Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 322. 18 United States Department of Commerce, 1950 Census of Population by Counties, Preliminary Counts, July 31, 1950. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/pc-02/pc-2-03.pdf 19 Dude ranches provided a place for well-off Easterners to experience riding horses and living in bunk houses, and trying on the lifestyle of cowboys and cowgirls. Meals, activities, and often transportation were provided. 13 from 1900 through 1910.” 20 Before the war, tourism ranked fourth among the state’s industries, ringing up 30 million dollars statewide in 1941 alone. In 1946, notices went out to the tourist industry to get ready for a “flood” of tourists. In the first three months of that year, the tourist bureau reported an unprecedented wave of over 28,000 requests for Montana information. Max Dean, Chairman of Montana’s advertising committee, noted, “Montana is in competition with other of the western states for tourists. Montana’s recreational advantages must be kept constantly before potential visitors, through the medium of advertising and publicity.”22 Branding the Montana experience started from the first group of dude ranches in the 1920s and continues today. The art of the Old West still promotes tourism. Voices of the Montana Modernists were hard to hear over the roar of tourism dollars. 23 Instead of adhering to the tropes already in place up until the 1940s, the Montana Modernists translated the experience of living in Montana through patterns, composition, and form. In other words, they tossed aside nostalgic imagery and instead related experiences to emotional and tactile responses that occurred in the moment: the notion of home and gardens, the feeling of a blizzard wiping out one’s sense of direction, and the hard work of tending to livestock on a daily basis. They opened up an option for Montanans to see themselves as something other than a mere trope, and they invited women to the conversation for the first time. At the end of World War II, the Montana Modernists fought against the wave of nostalgic illustrative art by getting jobs at colleges, 20 Malone, Montana: A History of Two Centuries, 340. 22 Associated Press News Service, “Record Season for Tourists in State Seen This Summer,” Bozeman Daily Chronicle, March 14, 1946. 23 But that did not keep Modernist painter Helen McAuslan from becoming seduced by ranch life, staying at a dude ranch in McLeod, Montana, in 1932, and moving to a ranch of her own in 1947. 14 forming life-long relationships with like-minded people, and by believing in and supporting each other. It is no small matter that out of these six artists, four of them are women. Donna Forbes, the executive director of the Yellowstone Art Center from 1974 to 1998 (later the Yellowstone Art Museum) thought the women Modernists outnumbered the men because living in Montana, makes women tough. “In Montana, you’ve got strong women. Nothing was too much for them,” Forbes said, which may seem a bit simplistic, but conveys Forbes’ sense of the fierce independence she saw in the artists Isabelle Johnson, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, and Gennie DeWeese. Johnson, a rancher by birth and by nature, headstrong and independent, would not have let anyone tell her what to paint. Jessie Wilber came to Montana in 1941 by herself, to teach art and explore that place with a sense of wonder, a feeling that comes across in nearly every one of her pieces. Frances Senska moved to Montana after serving in the Navy during the war. She brought with her a military exactness that paved the way for her students to find their own voices. Senska taught ceramics, but she learned ceramic art alongside her students. Both Wilber and Senska fought to get the art department out from under the auspices of the Women’s Home Economics Department and to lose the “lady-hobbyist” label that many women artists suffered. Gennie DeWeese became a force of nature, a comrade in arms, and a singular voice that called out to young artists, especially young women artists. In midcentury America, just stepping out of the constrictive role of mother and wife took bravery and tenacity. To claim the status of an artist, a professional, as these women did, could be considered an act of gender rebellion. Taken as a whole, these women’s bravery 15 rose above the male dominated culture. Thanks in no small part to these artists Western art in Montana now includes female voices. What holds these artists together is not their style, although all of them trace their lineage to Modernism, especially the work of Paul Cezanne. But rather it is their philosophy, their attention to the changing aesthetics buzzing throughout the country, and their discussions — political and academic — that would come across on the canvas and in the clay. The late nights, the conversations that lingered like so much smoke drifting across the room, bred a heady atmosphere. These artists shared a philosophical aesthetic clearly at the forefront of Montana at that time. They believed in expressing the essential nature of place, and winnowing objects down to the barest minimum needed to voice their perspectives. These artists pushed against Montana’s mythical past to come away with a style of Modernism that offered Montanans a viable alternative to recognize themselves, and form their own identity. In order to be a Montanan a person did not have to bushwhack in the wilderness or wrangle cattle on the open range. A Montanan could embrace an intellectual and academic freedom, love cats, or investigate the political landscape. Place, education, and community, individually and considered as a whole, contributed to developing a lasting impact on Montana and a way of seeing that had lasting effects on the struggle for an elastic yet authentic Montana narrative. 16 SECTION ONE: PLACE The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility. 24 Wendell Berry A Sense of Place: Isabelle Johnson and Bill Stockton As anyone who ever stood in the shadow of a mountain or stared face-first, exposed against a windswept prairie knows, the land itself becomes the backdrop to everything; it crackles the sun-dried skin and pulls like old muddied boots at pasture- flooded dreams. The power of place not only speaks to the present, but to the past and the future. Place conjures and it chides. For artists, place can act as inspiration or as constriction. In the period just after World War II, Montana’s landscape offered opportunity as well as isolation. Here the reference to place is not meant in a purely geographical sense, nor is it meant in a unifying, nationalistic way. Instead, this kind of locus speaks to time, space, and as geographical philosopher Edward S. Casey states, “the formidable presence of place in our lives.”25 He posits that people are distinguished by place. “You are in them not as a puppet stuffed in a box—as would be true on a strict container view of place— but as living in them, indeed, through them…To be somewhere is to be in place and there to be subject to its power, to be part of its action, acting on its scene.”26 24 Wendell Berry, A Vision, Selected Poems by Wendell Berry, (Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 1998), 102. 25 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 21. 26 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 23. 17 Looking at the landscape as a scenic text provides an understanding of not only a literal sense of place but a deeper understanding of what that place means in terms of personal identity. While examining the cultural context within which an individual lives (in a geographic place), geographer Edmunds Valdemars Bunkse commented on that individual’s “geographic life.” It was a life dependent on place and landscape. He noted, “Landscape is distinct from ideas of nature, ecology, environment, space, place, and so on…They can represent a thoroughly humanistic idea and action, provided that all the senses can be engaged in discourses about and realities of landscape.”27 Granted, there is a thin line separating place and landscape in terms of a geographic location. To geographer Karl Benediktsson, the landscape as scenery has devolved into a trope, being too simplistic to actually carry meaning. He revisits the notion of how a tourist sees a landscape to the different way a resident views it. “Even coach tourists can and sometimes do have quite profound experiences when confronted with unfamiliar and startling landscapes which they find moving.” He notes the original meaning of the German word Landschaft as “territorial polity, which entailed certain rights and duties for those living within its bounds, meaning which later took hold, especially in England, i.e. of a visual representation of a particular kind, or ‘way of seeing.” Crossing the Atlantic, Benediktsson elaborates on the idea of wildness and how that seeps into the nature of landscape. He concludes, “An aesthetic experience is moreover made up of many strands 27 Edmunds Valdemars Bunkse, “Feeling is Believing, or Landscape as a Way of Being in the World” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Juman Geography, Vol. 89, No. 3 (2007), 219–231, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621582 18 of sense and emotion…the aesthetic sense cannot be divorced from everyday life and practices.”28 As mentioned earlier, but important enough to note again, Yi-Fu Tuan acknowledges that place is knowable through daily experiences over time. This idea of daily experiences adds to the emotional and cultural landscape of Montana during the time of the first generation of Modernists. Unlike the tourists, those artists understood place on a daily basis, through the seasons, the tough times, and the joyous times. Bill and Isabelle: Working the Land Through Their Art Isabelle Johnson (1901–1992) and Bill Stockton (1921–2002) were friends and colleagues with a shared sense of place, the knowledge of hard-earned calluses from working with the land, and something more. Rooted in the tangled gullies and stretching hills of central Montana, Stockton’s work, imbued with fragility and stamina, speaks to the impending threats of winter and the anticipated orchestra of spring. Stockton’s home, a sheep ranch in Grass Range, Montana, marked his physical place on the land, but his art decodes his own experience in reflecting the power of place. Johnson was born and raised on a ranch in Absarokee, Montana, her family’s homestead, which sat along the Stillwater River, near the Beartooth Mountains, and became the framework for her body of work. The geographical strength of her life matched the power of her paintings, centering on the landscape that shaped her. Donna Forbes, who knew both of them as friends and in her position as Executive Director of the Yellowstone Art Center/Museum, 28 Karl Benediktsson, “’Scenophobia’, Geography and the Aesthetic Politics of Landscape”, Geografiska Annaler, Vol. 89, No. 3 (2007), 203–217, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621581 19 stated, “Bill had a wonderful art mind. He and Isabelle were very close. Bill and she were on another level.” Forbes noted that Stockton would visit Johnson at Rocky Mountain College when she finished teaching for the day. “They would talk by the hour. They had a meeting of the minds about making art, who was doing important work and so on.”29 Stockton notes that Johnson, like himself, was a rural person. Her life, or that part of it which is really meaningful, is her limited world from the house to the barn to the river and an occasional jaunt up the coulee. I’m a rural person, and I know how important that is to her, because this is home…so many [artists] will never consider that home and self are one and the same…There were artists who painted drunken cowboys of an 1890 vintage, and there are artists who are painting drunken cowboys of the 1971 vintage. 27 Continuing to discuss what made Johnson’s work powerful he said, There are artists that paint pretty little lakes bordered by pretty little Christmas trees, and there are artists who are only concerned with high, wide and handsome Montana. And there is Isabelle. She is about the only artist I know who has really painted Montana, because she has exposed to us a way of life and the very things that attach human beings to the land. 30 From the willowy outlines of Johnson’s distant mountain silhouettes to Stockton’s patterned impressions of his surroundings, art enabled them to translate the power of place. Both traveled to Europe to learn at the knee of the Modernists. Neither of them conceded to the commercial aspects of the art world. Their voices spoke in terms of the formal aspects of painting, which reflected their training. Both experimented with their own strand of Modernism that held fast to an intimate relationship with the land through abstract portrayals of nature, to which they gave concrete expression. 29 Donna Forbes, in-person interview with author in Billings, October, 7, 2017. Transcript in possession of author. 30 Bill Stockton, Isabelle Johnson: A Retrospective, Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 1986. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 20 Isabelle Johnson, born at the turn of the twentieth century, grew up ranching with her two sisters and her brother, which meant hard work hauling rocks, cutting and baling hay, caring for sick animals or birthing cattle and sheep, taking livestock to the butcher, dehorning and branding steers, taking horses to pasture, shearing sheep, irrigating fields, and fixing fences and machinery. Her work ethic continued when Johnson graduated from the University of Montana in 1922 with a degree in history at a time when very few women earned bachelor’s degrees. She taught history at Fromberg High School, in Fromberg, Montana, south of Billings for two years before heading off to Columbia University for a master’s degree in history. While at Columbia, Johnson took an art history course that pivoted her from history to art. She then enrolled at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and even began working toward a doctoral degree in political science at the University of Southern California. 31 She had a deep love of learning and, before finding art, seemed to be attracted to disciplines explaining the past, and how, perhaps, to influence the future. With art she could discern her individual point of view about Montana and her beloved ranch in Stillwater, which seemed to draw her back time and time again. 32 She said in an interview, “I got interested enough [in art] that I went on later and enrolled for one year at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. I’d go to school until I was broke then I’d come back to Billings and teach until I got enough money for more school—and then I’d repeat the process.”33 She took classes at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center in 1938 and the next year studied at the Arts Students’ League in New York 31 Robyn G. Peterson, A Lonely Business, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 2015), 23. 32 Once retired, she dedicated time to researching and writing the history of Stillwater County. 33 Addison Bragg, “Western? Who—Me?” Billings Gazette, December, 5, 1971. 21 under the tutelage of artist George Bridgeman who taught anatomy and figure drawing. Johnson said of that time, I had my first lesson in art during that year. I was doing very well in drawing…Bridgeman worked very mechanically and I was drawing exactly as he was and doing exactly what he did, when one day he came in and went over my work and was very appraising. 34 Then she heard someone behind say, “It’s no wonder he thinks she’s good, she’s not trying to learn to draw, she’s trying to do like he does.” That comment cut through her like a knife. “And I suddenly realized that [being an artist meant] you weren’t working for somebody else, that it was something you developed yourself.”35 From 1945 to 1946, she returned to Columbia University, attending the Painting and Sculpture school. While at Columbia, in 1948, a professor invited her to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, the first year of the famous experimental art school. She accepted the invitation and, while at Skowhegan, she studied under the artist Henry Varnum Poor, who chose her as one of the twenty-five students in the country to attend Skowhegan. There, she found her own voice and established a significant style and aesthetic that would carry her forward. Johnson remembered an important moment at Skowhegan: [Painter] Karl Zerbe 36 asked why I didn’t slice this way and that way and modernize my canvas. And so I was having a real good time after he left, making all the lines that were in the Maine landscape into slices this way and that way and so forth down to the canvas, when for some unknown reason Mr. Poor appeared and he asked me why was doing this and I said because Karl Zerbe told me to. And he proceeded then with a lecture 34 Isabelle Johnson, interview with Terry Melton for Montana Media Productions, nd. Transcript in Yellowstone Art Museum archives. 35 Johnson, interview with Melton. 36 Karl Zerbe was a German-American expressionist painter noted for his revival of encaustic paint. 22 telling me that in any art, whether it was modern or any good art, there was no such thing as exaggeration. 37 Poor told her that painters dramatized, simplified, maybe emphasized. Then he told her to study Cezanne. Cezanne followed completely the lines that were in nature, as did any of the great painters. And suddenly with that, he spent the whole afternoon with me, talking about various painters and the difference between real art and what you might call pseudo art, it was as though someone had pulled up a blind, and I suddenly knew I saw what I had thought I had seen many times and that was the difference between real art and that which was seemingly art. And I think that did more for me than anything else in all the years that I spent studying or in school because I still have that really as my principal precept. 38 Poor’s own work concentrated on the natural world of landscapes. His lines and style inspired by the French Post-Modernists, incorporated strong lines and graceful movement. The lineage from Poor to Johnson can be observed in comparing Johnson’s portraits of her bare winter trees and Poor’s Willows and Mountains. Even the color palette retains similarities with dark colors and deep earthy tones. Poor also advised Johnson to return to Montana, a place he said was a desert for art and a setting where her paintings would make Montana bloom. 39 Once she finished her formal schooling, Johnson took a year off to travel to Europe and study the masters. During an interview at the age of 70, Johnson noted that she did not feel comfortable calling herself an artist. “But I’ll never forget that I’m trying to become one.”40 She taught both art and art history at Eastern Montana College from 1949 until 1961, when she returned to her ranch on the Stillwater. During those years, some of 37 Johnson, interview with Melton. 38 Johnson, interview with Melton. 39 Gordon McConnell, The Montana Collection, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Collection, 1998), 28. 40 Bragg, “Western? Who—Me?” 23 which she spent as the department head, students found courage in her relentlessness and inspiration in her example. Artist Ted Waddell credits Johnson for his painting career. “I met Isabelle Johnson in [my] first painting class and within three or four weeks of knowing her, I decided that I didn’t want to be alive and not make art. I don’t think there is any way to over-estimate the influence of Isabelle on all of us.”41 Johnson, in turn, cites Waddell as one her students of whom she felt most proud. Waddell held Johnson up as a model for women during a time when it may not have been considered appropriate for women to travel and to study abroad. Waddell added, “She not only did that, but she brought it back to us. Isabelle bridged a gap between the Impressionists and Charlie Russell, and brought us into modern times. It’s an amazing sort of circumstance when you think about it.” Waddell, close to both Johnson and Stockton, noted their courage to paint during a time when, at best, there was a lack of attention to modern art. “She was fiercely independent yet wonderfully formal, and fiercely private. In all the years I’d known her I’d only been in her parlor once. The rest of the time we’d sit in her kitchen.”42 In a 1952 essay Johnson wrote for the Montana Institute of the Arts, she started out with a quote by the philosopher George Santayana: “The subject matter of art is life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.”43 In the essay, she speaks to the amateur artist and, through this short article, her ability to inspire shines through. With constant drawing and painting, with keen observation of surroundings, the acquisitiveness born of increased knowledge, only form, design, beauty can result. If the desire is to paint realistically, the painter 41 Yellowstone Art Museum, A Lonely Business, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 2015) 40–41. 42 Theodore Waddell, telephone interview with author, January 5, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 43 George Santayana, Reason in Art. (New York City: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905), 66. 24 will simplify, clarify, invent new means of making his painting more real. If the desire is to express feeling, the feeling will be greater. 44 One could imagine her in a classroom studio accepting her students’ abilities and yet pushing them to their limits and beyond. “If the desire is to express relationships, dynamics, to symbolize, to abstract, to become more contemporary than the latest innovator, the door is open and the amateur may pass through.”45 Johnson considered the role of the artist as a way to connect with humanity. When asked what she learned by being an artist, Johnson answered: First of all you learn to see the way things really are instead of the way the photograph tells you they are because the photograph takes one view whereas the artist takes many views…I think all art is really primarily religious, not religious in the sense of Christianity necessarily, but that you have to rise above yourself and connect yourself with humanity as a whole if you’re going to be successful or really do something as an artist.46 For her that meant to connect the viewer to her sense of place and what it meant to bond with the land in a meaningful way. This included her idea of the artist’s multiple viewpoints and relationships within a painting stemming from the Cubists’ perspective of portraying an object from all possible sides onto a flat surface. Cezanne with his groundbreaking work depicting not only different perspectives but relating the spaces between the objects as well, influenced her work on many levels, especially in her use of sinewy lines that spoke to nature and, although decidedly not a cubist, she did play with the idea of a personal perspective that did not necessarily reflect a mimetic illustration of place. For Johnson the lines in nature acted as a topography, guiding her in and around 44 Santayana, Reason. 45 Isabelle Johnson, For What is the Amateur Painter Working? (Missoula: Montana Institute of the Arts, 1952), 170–172. 46 Terry Melton, Montana Portraits, (Montana Media Productions, interview with Isabelle Johnson, Yellowstone Art Museum, nd.) 25 the foothills and creeks that expressed a wild and infinite dedication to her interior sense of self meshing perfectly with her exterior surroundings. In her 1958 oil painting, Red Willows in Winter Landscape (Figure 1), a hint of denim blue works its way along the top of the piece, a thread of sky laid bare. Mountain tips obscured by snow-laden clouds frame the horizon. Deliberate, hard-edged cliffs stagger across the piece, black and smoothed by erosion. Along the foothills, a rolling, tumble of grays shows the viewer the ox-bowed creek bottom, silvered in frost, buffered by snow. Although the title refers to red willows, instead their salmon-pink bodies bend in the inferred wind. Johnson’s use of colors, like the violet shadows and ocher banks, express a season known for its colorless limits, yet convey a hidden abundance. 26 Figure 1. Isabelle Johnson, Red Willows in Winter Landscape, 1958, oil on canvas board, 15.75 x 19.75 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Founding Director of the Yellowstone Art Center (now Yellowstone Art Museum) Terry Melton wrote: She has never been diverted from her sense of place. To say that she was a well-schooled painter who ranched might have only a slight edge over a well-informed rancher who painted. Therein lies the real essence of Isabelle Johnson’s work. Her drawings and paintings are essences of Absarokee, the home ranch and magnificent Stillwater country of southern Montana. 47 47 Yellowstone Art Museum, Isabelle Johnson: A Retrospective, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 1986), 3. 27 Melton saw her pictures as the totalities of fragments of her beloved Stillwater County. “Smells of cattle, grassland, sheep and river; sounds of the North and the Chinook; documents expressive and factual of living, growing things, knowing all is tempered by the coming of winter of the land but never the winter of the spirit.”48 He wrote later that Johnson was so skilled in her seeing that she never had time to merely copy the landscape. For her, painting has become an organic growth out of the land. A genuine observer of nature, she has used objects only to lead her to the process of painting. A painter’s painter, it’s my guess that Isabelle thought no more than a moment about what to paint. 49 When he thought further about the type of artist Johnson was and how to cast her work he wrote: Why should one make this attempt? Isabelle remained a painter of her own making, her own visionary, her own seer, her own self, and she was great enough to handle that extraordinary task. Her work is straightforward and independent of those pervasive (and oft-times attractive) influences, which beguile and turn heads of lesser painters. 50 After Melton left Montana, he carried Johnson’s artwork with him in his heart. During his service on the Oregon Arts Commission, he wrote a letter to the Smithsonian Institute enclosing the catalog from Johnson’s retrospective show he curated. Melton wrote to the director, Dennis Gould, in 1971: Isabelle is a portion of that small slice of life which represents extremely competent people who have devoted more time to being competent than sounding public relations horns. She’s a hellova painter. Montana has paid little attention to her because of their paranoia devoted to [Charles M.] Russell. 51 48 Yellowstone Art Museum, Isabelle Johnson: A Retrospective. 49 Yellowstone Art Museum, Isabelle Johnson: A Retrospective. 50 Terry Melton, personal correspondence with author, March 29, 2019. 51 Terry Melton, personal correspondence with Dennis Gould, 1971. Yellowstone Art Museum archives. 28 Melton refers here to the overwhelming public dedication to Russell and his belief that limited appreciation for any other genre of art becomes detrimental to all genres. To Melton and Forbes, it felt like Montana’s art-viewing public gave the Modernists like Johnson and Stockton short shrift. Melton spoke about Johnson in a 1986 catalog essay: “In 1965 as director of the YAC, I purchased one of her small paintings for a new collection at that new institution. We had no funds for purchases; I cut back on other funds to buy it.” He’d hoped his purchase would provide a spark for the continuing purchase of important artists’ work from the region. “Isabelle was by no means a new painter but was, as often the case, under-sung. Well before her exhibition at the art center she had established a personal, painterly style and has never strayed from it.” In 1961, Johnson returned to her ranch for good. As Melton said, ranching was in her nature. He noted how she …wrestled with many winters as well as celebrating those rare summers in the sweet grasslands of the north side of the Absarokee Mountains. The meadowlark calls, ‘Ab-sa-ro-ka’ each morning, and the high country smells remind us that there are places to live beyond the gridlock. 52 Forbes recalled that, in 1970, Mitch Wilder, director of the Amon Carter Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas, came to view Johnson’s work. After staying for hours, he asked her to participate in an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum. “Finally, recognition from a renowned expert. Validation. Isabelle was sixty-nine,” Forbes said. Then she quoted Johnson’s own words, “You are always becoming an artist.”53 52 Terry Melton, personal correspondence with author, March, 29, 2019. 53 Yellowstone Art Museum, Isabelle Johnson: A Retrospective. 29 In her 1967 painting, East Fiddler’s Creek (Figure 2), Johnson evokes her own biography in the contoured brushstrokes of the foothills. Uncomplicated lines communicate a wary but open trust. This painting conveys the constant scratch of sagebrush against her legs, the familiar cry of a rough-legged hawk as it dives into the tufted hairgrass for prey. Above all, her work displays a tonal undulation of browns with sparks of green and yellow. No depiction of the landscape can stand without the inclusion of sky and for this Johnson hints at the storm in the distance. Johnson found more inspiration from Cezanne than from Paxson or Russell. As Stockton once said, Paul Cezanne was her teacher and her influence. “As her teachers, Cezanne didn’t explain how to apply paint, how to design or how to draw…NO…he taught her only how to look with the eyes of a poet at the very things she loved. She learned on her own how to transfer that love into the images we see now.”54 As art historian and critic, Meyer Shapiro said of Cezanne, “His still-life objects bring an awareness of the complexity of the phenomenal and the subtle interplay of perception and artifice in representation.”55 Johnson continued to explore her own perceptions of the land by incorporating her own ideas about the complexity of Montana, her appreciation of the beauty and the awareness of her experiences. Her ability to translate the lines of nature into lines on the canvas provide an alternative to the raspy, quick draws of Charlie Russell. Johnson, a woman rancher, offered a new voice in the rugged landscape. 54 Gordon McConnell, Making Connections, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 2005), 20. 55 Meyer Shapiro, Modern Art 19 th and 20 th Centuries, (New York: George Braziller, 1979) 19. 30 Figure 2. Isabelle Johnson, East Fiddler’s Creek, 1967, oil on canvas, 36 x 46 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum Not enmeshed in the traditional “cowboy” romance of place, Johnson wished only to portray her own sense of what it meant to live in Montana. This is most evident in Johnson’s Trees, Winter (Figure 3), a 1952 oil painting depicting a tangle of cottonwoods vying for attention. Some trees bend in dancing grace, others stand with branches upward, echoing the trees Cezanne painted later in his career. Johnson gives her trees a heavy outline, as many of the Post-Impressionists did, to evoke feelings through form and line, space and structure. Her use of broken color feels more like a quick sketched line than the fluid brushwork of Cezanne’s, but the connection to Post-Impressionism still exists. Former Yellowstone Art Museum curator and artist, Gordon McConnell, who 31 helped with accessioning her work for the museum, considered Johnson one of the first Modernist artists in the state. “She filtered her experiences of the ranch, the river, the mountains through her training and her study of the masters, above all, Cezanne. Johnson looked for the essentials of her subjects.”56 Melton also saw Cezanne’s influence on Johnson’s work, pushing and challenging the possiblities of her land as it was filtered through her personal vision and the way she saw the world. Melton said of Johnson’s work, “[She] emphasized seeing, not merely looking, and never allowing one’s work to be overtaken by the wiles of a facile hand or a false emotion.”57 56 Gordon McConnell, Isabelle Johnson: Life and Legacy, Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, n.d. Published in conjunction with exhibition of the same title. 57 Yellowstone Art Museum, Theodore Waddell: Into the Horizon, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001) 18. 32 Figure 3. Isabelle Johnson, Trees Winter, 1952, oil on canvas board, 24 x 19.75 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Johnson explains the essence of her 1955 painting, Home Ranch (Figure 4): It was in the winter and probably ten below zero or so. But the reason I did it in oil is that one summer when I didn’t have very much to do I did a picture out the window of the sheep shed with the stock and the field. It 33 wasn’t very colorful, but a friend of ours came from Argentina and when he left, he picked the painting up and said, ‘I’m going to take this home with me and you have nothing to say about it. 58 A few months later he sent her a photograph of it framed, in his office. He worked for the embassy in Buenos Aires. And I thought, well, if that subject is good enough for an embassy office, it’s good enough for me to paint. So when winter came, I started getting interested in the sheep shed and the cattle and so forth, and when it was really too cold to go outside and the cattle were fed and standing around still hungry looking, but satisfied and full, I started to work on what I call my home ranch series or sheep shed series, because I have three of these…it was in the winter when it was too cold to get out and work and that seems to be when I get the most inspiration and like to work the best. 59 58 Melton, Montana Portraits. 59 Melton, Montana Portraits. 34 Figure 4. Isabelle Johnson, Home Ranch, 1955, oil on canvas board, 24 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Many of Johnson’s paintings depict winter. She’s been noted as saying it’s a time she liked to paint. Perhaps, being a rancher, the winter season came with the most downtime, which facilitated her ability to paint more often. In the 1950 oil painting, Calves, Winter (Figure 5), Johnson portrays nine white-faced calves deep in snow. All recognizable yet none distinct. Johnson’s deep understanding of color and tone come through in the vast array of stolen moments where she enables the viewer to see hints of spring through seemingly endless winter snow. Peeking out beneath the hooves, a 35 sprinkling of vibrant early season grass in bright greens with a smudge of yellow can be detected. Her loose brushwork brings movement to the piece, as do the blurred faces that echo her colors adapted from the snow. Many of her paintings, embued with her love of winter, reflect a deep affection for that forced isolation apparent in her many-hued intepretations of snow. In fact she stated: It’s winter I love the most. I don’t know whether I like the muted colors that come with winter or I like the ice and things like that. I used to sit out when it was seventeen below zero and paint; I also liked the fact that if you were doing a watercolor, the paint froze, and I liked the effect it gave. 60 After her years of teaching, she settled into her ranch life to paint full time and, in 1983, she garnered the Governor’s Award for Art. At this point in her life she found no reason to leave the homestead as everything important to her could be found in her surroundings. A lifelong student of nature and of livestock, inspiration lingered around every bend in the creek and in the shadows of every grove. Of course, most of paintings have to do here with the ranch. I think ever since I started painting, I have painted more at home than I have gone places to seek things to paint…because we’ve always had cattle; we’ve always had the river; we’ve always had trees; and we’ve always had mountains…so why go some place else when you’ve got everything right here? 61 60 Melton, Montana Portraits. 61 Melton, Montana Portraits. 36 Figure 5. Isabelle Johnson, Calves, Winter, 1950, oil on canvas board, 15.5 x 19.5 inches, Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Upon Johnson’s death she stipulated three people qualified to go through her work and decide which paintings and drawings should be accessioned by the Yellowstone Art Museum. Those people were Gordon McConnell, Bill Stockton, and her closest friend, Donna Forbes. Forbes’s relationship with Johnson paved the way for the Yellowstone Art Museum’s acquistion of Johnson’s entire studio collection, including 71 oil paintings, 240 watercolors, 317 drawings, and 40 sketchbooks. Stockton understood Johnson as a fellow artist; Forbes understood her as a painter and a friend. “I remember 37 her hands. Tough, gnarled, arthritic. She was fond of looking at them.”62 Forbes saw the quintessence of Johnson’s art embedded in those hands. They seemed to represent the embodiment of her art; the means of making that nervous line that marked on canvas or paper this place she loved so well…She saw this hard, rocky, handsome land with a painter’s eye, and a rancher’s sensiblity.63 Isabelle had been warned, while studying at Columbia, that if she returned to her home, there would be no one to understand the artist’s struggle, no one to discuss those intriguing complexities found within a canvas. As Forbes said, “It was a lonely business, being a painer in Montana back in the 50s and 60s. She would have to be her own critic. Few rewards. Obscurity.”64 Although she did not stray far from her ranch or travel much after 1961, she managed to create her own community through the visits of former students like Ted Waddell and peers like Bill Stockton and Donna Forbes. She also kept up with colleagues through letters and postcards. In a letter to founding director of the YAC, Terry Melton, she informed him on her own comings and goings. “What makes you think I won’t make the New York Scene?…I HAVE JUST BEGUN!” she wrote in 1971, at the age of seventy. “Hard to tell about the next ten years, I may degenerate to the level of the New York Scene—or—I may reach its heights.” She went on to update Melton on Stockton, 62 Forbes,Donna, Isabelle Johnson: A Retrospective, Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 1992. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 63 Forbes, Isabelle. 64 Forbes, Isabelle. 38 noting he was too busy to make it to Great Falls for the annual Auction of Original Western Art Show. 65 He is too busy sounding off at the anti-coyote ecologists to attend openings…this summer there was a long article in the [Billings] Gazette about the saving of the coyote. A very sentimental and silly article written by somone who was unknowing of the animal (the coyote is my favorite wild animal, etc..). 66 She went on to say that Stockton responded “by packing two of his lambs killed by the coyote the night before the paper came out [and] he…mailed them, postage collect, to the Gazette.”67 After Johnson’s death, Stockton spoke about their relationship and his admiration for her work. Her paintings of the Stillwater River and the Beartooth Mountains and my paintings of my rock hillsides and brush coulees and images of our neighbors—we shared them—being Montanans and that was what it was all about, really. As an artist, Isabelle insisted on growth, not only for her students but for herself. She proved this in the 1950s. 68 He admired her audacity to travel to Europe at that point in her life, not as a tourist but as a student of art. She went as an artist, still searching, still curious, still learning. I remember when she returned, she mentioned to me that she had learned that Cezanne, her master, actually painted in layers of thin paint. Most of us have not sufficient humility to learn in our later years and this might be why Isabelle is a great artist. 69 65 Beginning in 1969, the C. M. Russell Museum began its annual Auction of Original Western Art. Many artists from around the state attended the auction. 66 Isabelle Johnson, personal correspondence with Terry Melton, 1971. Yellowstone Art Museum archives. 67 Johnson, personal correspondence. 68 Stockton, Montana Impressions. 69 Stockton, Montana Impressions. 39 Former Yellowstone Art Museum Curator Gordon McConnell described her as crusty, authoritative, firm in her convictions, and able to justify any of her judgements very eloquently. His respect for her work grew the longer he knew her and the more he visited her ranch on the Stillwater River. She truly captures the experience of being in that country, the grandeur and the enveloping quality of it, in a way that a more realistic painter absolutely could not do. Her work is so tied to the place and she interprets the place on a high level of artistic expression. She was a true artist who changed my perceptions—I love Montana more because of her paintings, seeing the landscape through her vision. 70 One of her later paintings done in 1970, Autumn on Stillwater (Figure 6), envelops the viewer in the fauna of life as if standing on a bridge overlooking the dynamic Stillwater River. The muted fall tones frame the piece, but the thick application of oil paint textures a surface pulsing with movement. The composition, although likely thought through, feels spontaneous. The river’s edge, rustling with color, speaks to Johnson’s relationship with place. McConnell notes, Johnson, like Paul Cezanne, looked for the essentials of her subjects. “She strove not to over-describe. Her work is direct, strongly composed and harmonious, free of predigested rules and clichés.”71 70 Gordon McConnell, telephone interview with author, March 21, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 71 McConnell, The Montana Collection, 27. 40 Figure 6. Isabelle Johnson, Autumn on the Stillwater, 1970, oil on linen, 38 x 42 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Johnson took the lessons of Cezanne, of color and form, line and an almost sculptural composition that connected her to her beloved Stillwater County. The creeks and valleys she knew and loved became a foundation for understanding herself through place. Throughout her life she sought to understand the nature of art, the history of place, and, in her own way, created a body of work embedded in Montana. The land might have appeared the same in the postwar period as it did before World War II, but she had changed, matured, and became more confident in her work. In the end, the way she 41 depicted her cattle, her sheep, and her home became embedded with the light of Modernism. Bill Stockton’s Portrayal of Place Bill Stockton’s paintings also speak to an attachment to place. His own experiences blend to portray central Montana’s hard edge and soft underbelly. Just before Stockton’s birth in 1921, his father died and left his mother with a homestead in Winnett, Montana, as well as three daughters and a baby on the way. He was born in Minneapolis, where Stockton’s mother moved to be with her sister for the baby’s birth. Shortly after his birth, they returned to Winnett, Montana. During the early years of the Depression, Stockton’s mother lost the homestead in Winnett and they moved to Grass Range, when Stockton was about thirteen. 72 According to Stockton’s son, Gilles, Bill’s mother met “a guy named Davies, a well driller. My grandmother always had cows, even though she lost her homestead. She and Davies entered some kind of relationship and together they moved to Grass Range, but he died from cancer immediately afterward.” Upon his death, Davies left Stockton’s mother the land, which became the Stockton family ranch. “I asked my dad what kind of guy Davies was and he said he was a really great guy.” Right after the move to Grass Range in 1934, Stockton’s sister, older by one year, went blind 72 A farm accident as a teenager broke Stockton’s jaw and even after reconstructive surgery in Minneapolis, his crooked jaw stayed with him throughout his life. 42 and died. “That period had a lot of tragedy, the weather, the move, his sister and Davies’s death. It really colored his childhood.”73 While in grade school, Stockton tried to get out of attending school any way he could, including skinning skunks in the mornings before class. “I knew that young boys smelled bad naturally, but add to that the smell of a skunk and the teacher wouldn’t allow you in the classroom. I used this technique of skipping school several times. I had that figured out.”74 Still, Stockton graduated from high school either in 1938 or 1939. Sometime after graduation, Stockton worked in Yellowstone National Park, where he met other young people from around the country, put on skits, and got introduced to the arts in a way that, according to Gilles, seeded his natural artistic tendencies. When he returned from Yellowstone, his interest in art peaked. Before getting the opportunity to follow his interest in art, World War II broke out and he joined the army. Traveling from Salt Lake City to California as a Military Policeman guarding the troop trains, he sketched the African American porters in exchange for the “good food.”75 According to his wife, Elvia Stockton, Bill “was the luckiest solder in the whole American Army.” Because he showed acuity with math, the Army thought he’d serve best as a refrigerator repair mechanic and sent him to a school in Texas to learn the trade. When he arrived in Texas, the Army never sent an instructor to teach refrigeration repair. “But it was on his papers, so when he got to France they said, ‘Oh we need you in this 73 Gilles Stockton, telephone interview with author, July 2, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 74 Terry Karson, Oral history with Bill Stockton, 1994. Interview recordings in possession of Gilles Stockton. 75 Karson, Oral history. 43 hospital.’”76 They asked Stockton what he could do and he replied that he could paint signs. The luck came into play when, during the Battle of the Bulge, orders from Army headquarters demanded every able-bodied man be sent to the front. Stockton showed up to report for duty, but because his papers still stated his position as a refrigerator repair man, he was told he was too important to the hospital and ordered to remain in the town just outside of Paris. Although he did not fight during the Battle of the Bulge, he did see the results. They sent casualties from the Bulge, it’s not what the average person thinks, a lot of those kids were from Florida and California, a lot of them never had seen snow, so there would be lines and lines of them out there on stretchers and their feet would be frozen. They amputated an awful lot of feet and legs. 77 In the hospital, Stockton worked as a sign painter, skills he learned from French and German sign painters. In a 1999 artist statement accompanying a traveling exhibit, he wrote, “It was [a sign painter] who taught me the right use of brushes, and how to apply paint. I use that knowledge to this day.”78 The sign painters took him to a dinner party, where he met Elvia Cirefice, whose family’s farm was just outside of Paris. “It was the first time I saw her. The second time I saw her was at a dance at the hospital. We got married at the hospital.”79 They married on June 30, 1945. Gilles Stockton notes that his mother grew up between the farm and the city of Paris. 76 Seena B. Kohl, Oral history with Elvia Stockton, Montana Historical Society, 2001. 77 Karson, Oral history with Bill Stockton, 1994. 78 Bill Stockton, Montana Impressions, Missoula: University of Montana, nd. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 79 Karson, Oral History with Bill Stockton, 1994. 44 They had a house with a garden in the Ville Guif, it looks like it’s called Jew Town but it dates back to a name of [a] Roman Villa 4 A.D. It also was a center for Communist Politics…she talked about the girls going to Catholic School but they’d sneak into the communist school because they had better treats. 80 Gilles Stockton noted that his mother was used to the struggle of feeding yourself through the war. They had a garden, and chickens, so she wasn’t a total greenhorn [when she came to Grass Range]. On the other hand there was a culture of self- sufficiency in the women of Grass Range that she had to learn, all the canning, the cream, all of the things farm women did and they had to do it by themselves. 81 After the war, when Stockton was discharged from the Army, he took Elvia and his one-year-old son, Gilles, to Billings, Montana, where he worked as a sign painter. Elvia remembered not wanting to leave France and her own family for Montana, but she wanted to be with Stockton. “I felt terrible, terrible, but I was really too full of Bill. He never promised me anything because he didn’t have anything. He didn’t have a notion about the French.” She knew he was a student and he liked art. “And that’s all I knew about him.”82 In 1947, he enrolled in the Minneapolis School of Art on the G. I. Bill, and the next year, went back to Paris with Elvia and his one-year-old son to attend the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, a school previously attended by Hans Hofmann during the 1910s and Alexander Calder in 1926. He studied the Cubists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. But it was not until he returned to Montana that he found his milieu. In an artist statement he said, “It would be a few years later [after art school] that I would see 80 Gilles Stockton, telephone interview with author, July 2, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 81 Stockton, telephone interview. 82 Seena B. Kohl, Oral History with Elvia Stockton, Montana Historical Society, 2001. 45 the Jackson Pollock paintings for their worth; he was composing patterns instead of objects.”83 Underlying Stockton’s work is a veil of a hard life scarred by living through the Great Depression among other things. It was a time Stockton (and others who lived through the Depression) called “The Dirty Thirties” referring to the dust storms. To Stockton, the phrase became shorthand for the hard winters, the dry summers, and the death of his sister. These impactful and formative years laid down a foundation from which Stockton based a majority of his work and were the reason he never painted a clear, blue sky. I don’t like blue skies. I go back to the [Great] Depression. The blue sky and the hot sun and the grasshoppers ate up everything. Even the worms came in and ate everything, then the Mormon crickets came in and they ate everything. Because of the hot sun we couldn’t raise any crops, there’s the Dirty Thirties on top of it. The Depression on top of it. All of it combined, I blamed it on the blue sky. 84 When he returned from Paris and then moved from Billings to Grass Range, Stockton remembered his epiphany about Pollock. While looking around his ranch, he noticed the intimate details of ranch life and said: It made me see things on that hillside out there that never dawned on me before, why the hell do I need to paint a panoramic? Why can’t I paint the things that are very close to us? I started looking at the textures, the patterns, the tones…I started to paint that hillside, rearrange it, and compose it, put it in different rhythms. 85 His internalization of place embedded in his life lived in Grass Range comes across as the essence of his work, the tone of his paintings, and the compositions he envisioned. He 83 Seena B. Kohl, Oral History with Elvia Stockton, Montana Historical Society, 2001. 84 Karson, Oral history with Bill Stockton, 1994. 85 Marie-Laure Pellose, Bill Stockton, video available through the Stockton Family Archive. 46 noted that, because he lived in that terrain, walked out of his door to a horizon of hillsides, bushes, a few pine trees on the hill, snowstorms, and the bitter, dry weather of August, each day became a constant fascination to him. “These forms, I was born and raised in these forms, and thank god, Jackson Pollock came along and exposed me to them,” he said.86 It took him a long time to understand that this was art, his art, his sense of place, and he could not help but paint it. In the way of someone who knows every step of his property, every acre and every ewe, he stopped trying to relate the pictorial scene onto the canvas and instead relayed what he experienced, something he called the “uncommonness of life.” As he wrote in the preface of his book, Today I Baled Some Hay to Feed The Sheep The Coyotes Eat: The snow is a foot deep; the wind continues to blow, and the sheep have given no sign that the weather will break soon. The storm is not unusual for April; it, like death, is part of the sheep business. Lambs…Lambs…Lambs…that is what it is all about: first, lives to be saved, then to be wasted. A paradox for a conscious carnivore—a natural procedure for the insensitive—I have so many memories of cold, miserable little lambs with stiff, clammy bodies—some so near death I had to hold a cigarette paper to their mouths to see if they were breathing…I have carried armloads of them into the house and warmed them by submerging them in basins of hot water. I have fed them for hours, drop by drop, before I could discern a slight movement in their prostrate bodies. 87 Stockton’s distinct voice called out from Grange Range like the baleful coyotes he tirelessly kept from his sheep. His paintings divulge the sudden blooms of winter’s snow, the boot-sucking mud of defrosting springs, and the dry, brittle grasses of blinding 86 Karson, Oral history with Bill Stockton, 1994 87 Bill Stockton, Today I Baled Some Hay to Feed The Sheep The Coyotes Eat, (Helena: Sky House Publisher, 1983), 41. 47 summers, where blue skies meant nothing but cracked soil in want of rain. It was Pollock’s philosophy to portray the patterns of his daily life, the rocks, the field, the weather, and the ground itself, that enabled Stockton’s work to evolve and embrace the abstractness of nature. As in Snow Formation (Figure 7) (1955), the angles of driving snow appear across the piece like a battleground with flying, jagged swipes of color. A blue background spans the painting without a clue to the horizon line, foreground, or background. Like a ground blizzard, Snow Formation steals the certitude of safety, of surefootedness. Wild brushstrokes slash black, grey, and white, while the blue underpainting speaks to the below-cold drifts, oblivious of any life it may smother. Grass Range sits right in the middle of Montana. In 2010 it had a head count of 110 people and a population in steady decline since 1920. 88 For Stockton, that meant few neighbors and even fewer artists to share his ideas and his work. He notes in his artist’s statement from 1999 that his wife, Elvia, “knows more about art than, sometimes, even I would believe,”89 which may have indicated just how much Elvia was involved in Stockton’s art world. 88 Department of Commerce, United States Census, 2010. https://www.census.gov/programs- surveys/decennial-census/decade.2010.html 89 Karson, Oral history with Bill Stockton, 1994. 48 Figure 7. Bill Stockton, Snow Formation, 1955, oil on plywood, 18 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Stockton wrote a 1966 letter to Johnson sending his regrets about not making it to Johnson’s opening at the Yellowstone Art Center, but he did get to see her show. “It was certainly one of [the] best I had seen there. In fact, there were three or four I would like to own. It was such a relief to see someone paint with a little style.” He noted, “I’m frankly very bored with all the arbitrary, pretty designs that the Center likes to call art.” At the end of the letter, Elvia invited Johnson to dinner ending it with, “We are anxious to hear from you.”90 Since they sent the letter together, most likely Stockton shared his thoughts with Elvia and Elvia with him. When Elvia Stockton relocated to Grass Range, she said: It was a shock! There was really the shock! This place was just an old shack. [Stockton’s mother] had a little house in town, but this place, I mean, Bill had told me that’s the one thing where he didn’t keep his promise. He said I would never be cold again. By Gosh, the winter of 1949-50 was the worst. I think it was forty-five below, and we had just a little old shack, and no water in the house. It was very cold. 91 90 Bill Stockton, personal correspondence with Isabelle Johnson, October 10, 1966. Yellowstone Art Museum archives. 91 Seena B. Kohl, Oral History with Elvia Stockton, Montana Historical Society, 2001. 49 The hardships of Grass Range never became severe enough for Elvia Stockton to want to leave. “I liked physical work,” she said. “We didn’t have a cent to our name. We didn’t have any livestock.” The tough circumstances may have helped to form a closer relationship. Elvia said her husband never promised her riches or comfort. He never told me that I would get this or that, never, so everything we done, we done together…I am not going to say that everything was rosy, rosy because the first ten years, anyway, really were very difficult. Bill was torn between all the work to be done at the ranch and his desire to paint. 92 For both Elvia and Bill Stockton, not only was there the isolation of a small community, but an isolation of accessible culture, which may have added to the honest bareness of his work. The only contemporary museum in the state was the Yellowstone Art Center in Billings. In the winter, roads became hard to travel upon, although, when they could, the Stocktons would visit Bozeman, or the DeWeeses would visit Grass Range. While Terry Melton lived in Billings, Stockton would visit him on occasion. Melton remembered him as: ...an old friend and an authentic original. Bill was a painter, sculptor, rancher, curmudgeon of the highest order, sheep-raiser, pea-planter, and champion antagonist toward the US military ICBM silos being drilled into his prairie to the east of his hardscrabble ranch in Grass Range. 93 Melton described Stockton’s paintings as resembling the Abstract Expressionists, “but codified with his views of his prairie-ranch country. I really couldn’t tell if his painting marks were Pollock drips or abstractions of prairie and riverside weeds and willows… 92 Kohl, Oral. 93 Terry Melton, notes from his unpublished memoir, emailed to author March, 2019. 50 Bill Stockton was a one-of-a-kind individual, a friend for all seasons, and a knockout painter.”94 Through Stockton’s abstracted observations of the seasons, the added joy of spring can be seen in his 1957 painting, Start of Spring (Figure 8). In this piece, Stockton’s pure elation at the first nibs of grass, the swirl of the meadowlark’s call to spring, and the complication of longer days, which meant more work, all fight for space on the canvas. Throughout, sounds of the season permeate the piece. By depicting the individual forms, Stockton conveys the feeling of the soft earth thawing through a tough frost. “I’ve always been fascinated by the ugliness of it, the hardness of it. That’s me. I’m not dainty,” he noted in a documentary video. “I suppose my lifestyle had something to do with my temperament and my mental processes. Why would I consider a bunch of dead Russian [thistle in a] coulee beautiful? I don’t know why. It says something to me.”95 This reflects the way Stockton internalized his place in the world, not just in his backyard. The physical isolation he felt comes through in the starkness of a limited palette and the frenzied motion of his brushstrokes. McConnell noted Stockton’s intellectual acuity regarding art, “Just observing life, being very present in his experiences, he loved the remoteness, being immersed in nature and struggling to make a living—which gives his work real power.” 96 94 Terry Melton, notes from his unpublished memoir, emailed 2019. 95 Karson, Oral History with Bill Stockton, 1994. 96 Gordon McConnell, telephone interview with author, March 21, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 51 Figure 8. Bill Stockton, Start of Spring, 1957, casein on canvas, 21.75 x 25.75 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. In 1958, Stockton’s work was accepted into four important shows, including Art USA in New York and the annual art shows in Denver and Spokane. 97 But it was a show in San Francisco that soured his attitude on the larger “art world.” Leaving Grass Range with his wife, two sons, their dog, and the promise of a gallery show, he headed west. Once there, he lost his confidence when standing in the gallery and heard someone say, “By God, people in Montana think they’re artists?” Oddly enough, the show opened the 97 Gordon McConnell, The Rural Avant-Garde, Clearmount, WY: Ucross Foundation Art Gallery, 2002. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 52 door to invitations to the New York City, Denver, and Spokane shows, but for Stockton, it was too late, the dream was shattered. Looking back on that incident in 1994, Stockton said, “I came home and said to hell with it. I’m happy to become a Montana artist, a regional artist, and I’m happy the Yellowstone Art Museum has my stuff.”98 In Montana, he felt his work could be understood as part of the language of a shared landscape. Theodore Waddell, who knew him well, described Stockton as a “wonderful curmudgeon who could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,”99 summing up Stockton’s shying away from a burgeoning international art career. After Stockton decided he wanted no part of the bigger art world, but preferred to keep to the places he knew firsthand, his audience and potential collectors shrunk. For a time he was not sure he would survive, making a living off his sheep alone. By 1961, Stockton, fed up with the art world, wrote, “I realize that easel painting was the artist’s greatest downfall. If he were lucky it gave him a place among the middle class, it also offered the middle class the expensive, snobbish hobby of collecting.”100 In saying this, he also spoke to the state of art collecting, by this time spread from the elite to the middle class. Then in 1993, art patron Miriam Sample arranged for the purchase of seventy-seven of his paintings to be held in the permanent collection at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana. When Miriam and Joe Sample sold their chain of television stations across Montana in 1984, they started their careers as philanthropists. Miriam Sample’s project, the Meadowlark Fund, purchased the work of Montana artists. At first she bought art strictly for the YAM but later expanded to museums across the state, and for the Buffalo 98 Marie-Laure Pelosse, Bill Stockton, 2017. 99 Theodore Waddell, telephone interview with author, January 5, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 100 Bill Stockton, Paris 1948—the End of an Era, (Missoula: The Arts in Montana, 1961), 8. 53 Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming, which developed a contemporary collection based in part on the Yellowstone Art Museum’s permanent Montana Collection. According to Gordon McConnell, Yellowstone Art Museum curator at the time, “Miriam wanted to help Montana artists and Bill was the one she most bonded with, she felt like he was living in squalor, had a bad back and a broken down bed. Her heart went out to him.” She paid him $10,000 a year for ten years for the works she acquired. McConnell recalled that Stockton had built a kind of root cellar in the back yard where he buried his paintings. “We were all just worried to death they would be ruined. His early work was as good as anyone was doing in the country at the time.”101 For Stockton, the sale to the Yellowstone Art Museum became another turning point in his career. With a major museum purchase, Stockton could stop hiding his paintings in the metal vault he kept under his bed or in the underground root cellar. He knew the best of his paintings, or what he called the “keepers,” remained in safe hands.102 Another aspect of Stockton’s work refers to his emotional past and is revealed in his wallpaper series. The series speaks to the role of memory in creating the formidable markers of life that resonate within the artist through his work. It is a kind of interior sense of place, one that feels more intimate than his pattern-impressions of the land. One such piece from his wallpaper series, Faded Roses (Figure 9), painted in 1992, consists of the repeating pattern of ghosted flowers, disappearing petal by petal into the yellowed and uneven background. Although the pattern gives the viewer an impression that each repeated rose appears identical, the maker’s hand clearly stands out. 101 Gordon McConnell, telephone interview with author, March 21, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 102 Karson, Oral History, 1994. 54 Like so many days gone by, differences gradually dissipate. Deviations from each rose denote not only a wistful regret, but the countdown of the calendar. Included in this piece is Stockton’s own bent figure with a downward glance as seen from behind. His white hair and aging face, delicately defined, echo the self-portraits of Rembrandt. He includes himself because this wallpaper reflects his own memory of growing up in small houses, in small towns, where the bare cobbled walls offered little distraction from the hard farm life in central Montana. Stockton said, “In an attempt to bring some art into our crummy little houses [my mother would] look in Sears and Roebuck and buy some wallpaper. And then they’d try to paste it. It came with instructions, but you really need a professional, they [made] a hell of a mess.” For Stockton, the wallpaper represented a way to think about home and hearth, and an avenue to access the individual’s struggle for beauty under even the most dire of circumstances. There is a certain strength in the recollection of a place when that place cradles hard memories and deep-seated emotions. 103 And those damn things, roses or some kind of flower, things never matched, they never got it quite right, they even show up sometimes in an abandoned old farmhouse and you still see wallpaper stuck to it. That’s my memory of wallpaper—it’s a repeat design. It slid here and it slid there, even Cezanne would drop one end of a table top to give it motion, they did that and created something. 104 103 Karson, Oral History, 1994. 104 Karson, Oral History, 1994. 55 Figure 9. Bill Stockton, Faded Roses, 1992, livestock marker and graphite on paper, 22 x 28 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Working in oil, water colors, tempera, and oil stick cattle markers, Stockton’s interest in the surface and texture of the piece, no matter the medium, beautifully complicates his art. Observing each aspect of his ranch, from the coulees to the hillsides, from the sheep he tended to the interior of his home, he never forgot the formal aspects of his art. For him it was about creating tension through, “the push and pull of color, line, texture, and form, as Hans Hofmann taught. “Opposing directions…it takes your eye one way and then the other,” Stockton said, talking about the way he thought about 56 composition. “I got very fascinated with the brush, more than the rocks. What I had to learn in painting was to create the surface.”105 In Dusk (Figure 10), painted in 1984, his surface confronts the viewer with a thick and wild demeanor. Color fairly dances with the drawing down of light. Blues, greens, and yellows each swirl and shove as a single orange line across the top of the painting implies the horizon dipping toward evening. His use of graphite pencil enables him to detail the brush amongst abstracted shadows of deep blue and black. The forms interact with a singularity that allows the viewer to participate with the painting. The rich hues and almost dreamlike colors demonstrate Stockton’s ability to show depth and composition without giving in to traditional forms. . Figure 10. Bill Stockton, Dusk, 1984, livestock marker and graphite on paper, 9.25 x 17 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum 105 Terry Karson, Oral history with Bill Stockton, 1994. 57 In Stockton’s 1983 Village in Winter (Figure 11), the isolation contributes to the tension in the painting, concentrated on a few windswept trees with hardly a leaf between them. Titled Village in Winter, the village is barely visible. The painting consists of a grouping of rocks, a swell of earth, and a few outbuildings capturing the center of the canvas. The bluish white sky blends almost completely with the ash-like rendering of a snow-covered land. Swirling brushstrokes conjure frigid temperatures. This painting reveals Stockton’s own experiential language as told through landscape as well as location. The bareness of the Montana prairie caught in the enveloping weather. Stockton’s intimate relationship with chores comes through in an unfiltered and unromanticized expectation of the day. 58 Figure 11. Bill Stockton, Village in Winter, 1983, livestock marker, graphite, oil pastel on paper, 10 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Given the Governor’s Award for Visual Arts posthumously in 2003, a year after he died of lung cancer at the age of 81, Bill Stockton’s notion of place became part of Montana’s artistic history. He was quoted in the Governor’s Award program as having said: I can get interested in almost anything: welded sculpture, hand-made felt, old photographs, stuff pasted to an abandoned farmhouse, and realistic portraits of my neighbors. But my main interest has been and always will be the harsh, abstract, semi-wilderness qualities of central Montana. Why? Because I was born and raised here, I guess. 106 Donna Forbes observed that isolation became part of Stockton’s process as well as his work. “He grew up in Grass Range, dirt poor. He took art classes in Paris, that’s 106 Montana Arts Council, 2003 Governor’s Awards for the Arts, 2003. 59 when he found his voice. But isolation is important to him and you can see it in his work.”107 She thought that it may be due to both his and Isabelle Johnson’s shared sense of place, an acknowledgment of their Montana beginnings, and a need to put that on canvas. Although twenty years apart in age, both Johnson and Stockton experienced a particular sense of their relationship to the land and sought to express that personal perspective through a Modernist lens. Both traveled to Europe, went to art schools in larger urban areas—Johnson in New York City at the Art Students’ League and Columbia, and later in Maine at the experimental Skowhegan school, Stockton traveled ti Minneapolis and to Paris—then both returned to Montana with a new way to talk about who they were as artists and how they defined that. Johnson and Stockton eschewed the commercially viable romantic scenarios of Montana for something else. For them, place as portrayed through their art embraced something more substantial, something they could stand behind. Both ranchers, their deep connection and understanding of the land and animals brought them together and gave them a voice as strong as March winds across the prairie. As Donna Forbes stated of Johnson, “She was a rancher and tough as nails. Essentially her ranch and this Montana land here was her inspiration.”108 Stockton and Johnson did not paint replicas of majestic mountains. They painted what they saw, exactly as they saw it, acknowledging the grandeur and the harsh conditions under which they toiled daily with equal measure. They brought their formal 107 Donna Forbes, in person interview with author, Billings, October 7, 2017. Transcript in possession of author. 108 Forbes, in person interview with author. 60 training to a place unfamiliar with the modern art world and, working on the vanguard of Montana’s art scene, expanded the vocabulary of the day. In so doing, they influenced the artists to come after they were gone. Their shared perspective on where they lived and how they lived defined their art. It was a language that invited the viewer to understand place in the same intimate way they lived it. Bill Stockton and Isabelle Johnson offered up a landscape complex and gritty, helping us to understand their place, and in some way allowed viewers to make it theirs. 61 SECTION TWO: TEACHING/ARTISTIC LINEAGE Providing leadership by teachers and support of developing artists is a national duty, an insurance of spiritual solidarity. What we do for art, we do for ourselves and for our children and the future. 109 Hans Hofmann Growing Artists Growing an artist is less like grafting than planting seeds. When grafting trees, the aim is to exactly reproduce the fruit grown. When planting seeds variety and happenstance become part of the process. The first generation of Montana Modernists did not seek out students who would copy their techniques and concepts. Instead the Montana Modernists’ students grew into their own styles, creating the next generation of artists who passed on their knowledge, a knowledge culled from the generations before them. Historically, artists worked with apprentices who watched and learned at the elbow of the master. A change came in the student/teacher relationship in the postwar years due in part to the teachings of John Dewey, and his methodology of teaching art as an experience rather than in a lecture setting. The art teachers at Montana State College adhered to Dewey’s pedagogical principles and altered the traditional hierarchy of the classroom. Modernism came to Montana through the Post-Impressionism of Cezanne, the communal Bauhaus 110 philosophy, and the freedom of Abstract Expressionism. Frances Senska often said that the way she held her hands is the same as her teacher, and that is further reflected in the way her own student, Peter Voulkos, held his 109 Hans Hofmann, Search For The Real and Other Essays, (New York: Addison Gallery, 1948), 64. 110 The Bauhaus Movement started in Germany in the 1920s and combined fine arts with arts and crafts. It moved to America during World War II. 62 hands. It feels more direct in ceramics due to the imprint of hands on clay that follows from its maker to its beholder, from the artist to the person picking up the vase, the cup, the bowl. However, the same can be said for printmaking, sculpture, and painting, as far as technique and aesthetics. Robert DeWeese’s students learned how to see and, with his mentor Hoyt Sherman’s interpretation of vision. Jessie Wilber encouraged her students to experiment, to try something, as Otis Dozier suggested to her, and they did. Isabelle Johnson’s round-backed horses merged with her student Theodore Waddell’s cattle on a hillside imagery. Through the filter of place and of their own times, these artists passed on a unique aspect of their work, just as their influences informed their own work. Among those who took the baton of the Montana Modernists and passed it forward are those who also took on the role of teaching. The passing down of artistic legacy is as direct as the genetic inheritance of daughters and sons, but as diverse as a high mountain field of wildflowers. The list of artists whose work began with these six Montana Modernists is long, its reach far. (This short list is very incomplete, but somewhat necessary to understand the depth and weft the first Montana Modernists had and continue to have on artists.) Pete Voulkos taught at the Otis Art Institute for five years and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, to establish the Ceramics Department where he worked until his retirement in 1985. Rudy Autio, together with Voulkos, was the first director of the Archie Bray Foundation and founded the ceramics program at the University of Montana in 1957. He continued teaching there for twenty-eight years. Ray Campeau, Butte born and bred, taught at Bozeman High School until his retirement and inspired many young 63 artists. Sculptor James Reineking, a student of Robert DeWeese, became an internationally recognized minimalist sculptor, left Montana, and ended up in Germany. Pat Zentz, a student of Isabelle Johnson and friend of Bill Stockton, became a rancher and well-known sculptor who incorporates the environment and the language of science into his work. Theodore Waddell, painter, sculptor, and rancher was deeply influenced by Bill Stockton and Isabelle Johnson. His work integrates the land and art, perception and regard for place. Painter Jerry Rankin, a student of Senska, Wilber, and Robert DeWeese, constantly explores sound in his works. The DeWeese’s son, Josh DeWeese, carries on the legacy both directly by teaching art at Montana State University and indirectly through his directorship of the Archie Bray Foundation from 1992 through 2006. Although not a visual artist, Mary Overlie, an internationally acclaimed choreographer, credits her innovative modern/contemporary dance style to watching Gennie DeWeese paint. Educational Lineage Hans Hofmann, one of the first artist-teachers in the Abstract Expressionist movement, referred to legacy as a gift from the past to the future. Teachers who form future artists, like alchemists, take the raw talent and turn it into something greater than mere gold. By conferring their own experiences yet allowing for individualism and experimentation, the best teachers enable students to create their own rules and then figure out how to break those rules. 64 By taking a step back and examining educational lineage, the teaching philosophies of Isabelle Johnson, Bill Stockton, Robert and Gennie DeWeese, Frances Senska, and Jessie Wilber begin to gel. The Montana Modernists’ educational lineage combines Bauhaus aesthetics, the teachings of abstractionists Hans Hofmann and Wasilly Kandinsky, innovating artist-teacher Hoyt Sherman, and Texas mentor-artist Otis Dozier. Culled from these various disciplines and art philosophies is a common thread that can be traced back to Cezanne, “the father of us all,” as noted by Pablo Picasso many times, due to his reckoning with the flat surface and his use of color to produce dimensionality. With the exception of Bill Stockton, these Montana Modernists all taught art at the college level. Their work began in distinctly different disciplines, from Bauhaus and Abstract Expressionism, from abstraction and the science of seeing. Yet, they all thought of the classroom as a kind of laboratory where encouragement for students to embrace their curiosity germinated. The big experiment, often used in reference to American democracy, found its place in the arts as well as the classroom. Combined with the social aspect of a shared studio environment the collegial attitude fostered a communal perspective. From Bauhaus to Abstraction Frances Senska (1914–2009) attended Lazlo Maholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus school in Chicago in 1940. Then in 1944, while still in the Navy, Senska enrolled at the California Labor School with Modernist ceramicist Edith Heath. Senska also took classes at the Cranbrook Academy under the tutelage of Maija Grotell, often noted as the 65 “Mother of American Ceramics,” in the summer of 1946. Marguerite Wildenhain also heavily influenced Senska’s style in art and teaching. Wildenhain’s Farm Pond classes in California during in the summer of 1950 culminated Senska’s tutelage. The Bauhaus Movement started in Germany (1919–1933) and moved to the United States under pressure from the growing Nazi regime. In 1937, Moholy-Nagy came to Chicago to be the director of the New Bauhaus: American School of Design, which reopened as the School of Design in 1939. It was later renamed the Institute of Design, and is currently encompassed within the Illinois Institute of Technology. The following year, 1940, Senska became one of his students. The main idea of Bauhaus combined fine art and function. Bauhaus ethics argued for taking the whole person into consideration. As the artist Maholy-Nagy said, “the healthy function of the man’s body, his social performance and welfare, his nutrition, clothing and housing needs, his intellectual pursuits and emotional requirements, his recreation and leisure, should be the center of endeavors.”111 By integrating all conceivable aspects of the student, Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, along with Walter Gropius and Joseph Albers, envisioned an education of this magnitude producing “the genius” of the new technological age. Aside from learning methods for instilling aesthetics, they wanted students to experience the “organic and evolutionary” function of materials. The basic first year course included technology, art, and science. The art component covered life drawing, color work, photography, mechanical drawing, lettering, modeling, and group 111 Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, (Chicago: Chicago Institute of Design, 1947), 64. 66 poetry. “In all fields we would have the key to our age—seeing everything in relationship.”112 When addressing the discipline of painting, Maholy-Nagy pointed first to Cezanne and then to the Cubists as beacons of forward motion in the arts. “Beginning in the last century a remarkable change took place in painting.” Maholy-Nagy saw a new space-consciousness emerging. Movement, and capturing movement in art, held the interest of many artists and Maholy-Nagy saw it in the emergence of Cubism. “Speeding on the roads and circling in the skies has given modern man the opportunity to see more than his renaissance predecessor. The man at the wheel sees persons and objects in quick succession, in permanent motion.”113 At this point Maholy-Nagy developed his core idea of a flexible perspective or a “vision in motion,” which became a “vision of relationships,” thus encompassing all the disciplines taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago. As part of the curriculum, Maholy-Nagy included the analysis of contemporary painting, which presented several benefits to the student artist: through understanding new and perhaps unintelligible concepts, the student overcomes his or her fear of the unknown. Maholy-Nagy states that fear is destructive to the artistic process as it creates hostility and detracts from the pleasure of making art, “A school’s duty is to sensitize the student to advanced thought and artistic expression.”114 Cubism, through the examination of Cezanne, played a large role in the new Bauhaus teachings of modern art. Maholy- Nagy stated, “Cubism, without being entirely conscious of its role, became a potent 112 Maholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 68. 113 Maholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 113. 114 Maholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 113-116. 67 instrument in this process of indoctrination. Like Einstein in physics, and Freud in psychoanalysis, the cubist painters had tremendous impact. Their work introduced a whole new outlook.”115 Cubists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque came to the apex of the art world in 1907–1922 as they explored ways to present the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. Paul Cezanne examined the spaces between objects, especially in his landscapes and still life paintings. For Maholy-Nagy, fascinated with movement, this idea of concentrating on the spaces between objects keyed in on his larger thesis of vision in motion. Cezanne studied how the eye tracked shadows and light in respect to other objects. Maholy-Nagy saw it as a space-time problem. For Senska, participation in Maholy-Nagy’s class meant taking various objects and trying to solve the problem of putting the objects together in a way that answered the time-space question. Senska had not yet discovered ceramics, but once she did, she brought the idea of problem solving to the core of her practice. She kept meticulous records of her glazes, of what temperatures they fired at for the best results. The notion of problem solving spread across the MSC art department. Moholy-Nagy encouraged his students to try all kinds of materials and techniques, while teaching them that design is basically a problem-solving act. “You weren’t here to make art, but you’re here to solve this design problem. If it turns out to be art, that’s a dividend.”116 Hans Hofmann taught at the Art Students’ League in New York City, from 1930 to 1933 before opening his own art school. Although none of the Montana Modernists took classes directly from him, his philosophy advanced quickly. For the Montana 115 Maholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 116. 116 Frances Senska, interview by Chere Juisto and Rick Newby, Bozeman, June 9, 1998. The Archie Bray Foundation Archived Interviews. 68 Modernists, Hans Hofmann’s painting philosophy spread throughout the world of Modernism through his published lectures. A ripple effect from New York City to Grass Range, Montana, showed in the works of Bill Stockton, who often referred to Hofmann’s “push and pull” theory of depth and perspective, as did Gennie DeWeese. Isabelle Johnson took classes at the Art Students’ League in 1939, at a time when many of the Abstract Expressionists attended lectures there. In no way did Johnson’s work reflect Abstract Expressionists, but her color combinations reflect an acute awareness of Hofmann’s theories. For each of the Montana Modernists, the social aspect of a shared studio environment meant all of these artist-teachers’ impacted each other’s work. Each brought with them the lessons they had absorbed and filtered through their own work. In the tight- knit community of the art world in Montana, these lessons seeped from artist to artist, intentionally and unintentionally. Hofmann’s theories of the picture plane, which refers to the actual surface of the painting as well as its illusion of depth, spread quickly as more and more artists picked up on his ideas. Art historian Michael Schreyach explained Hofmann’s theory: Hofmann’s distinction between literal flatness (‘meaningless’) and pictorial flatness (‘the highest expression of life’) is fundamental to his account of how material is made over into an expressive medium to convey the artist’s meaning. For a painter, having the picture plane in mind as the basis of creation involves acknowledging the fact that the actually flat canvas is the condition that might enable the activity of marking and covering it with pigment to become a medium for expression, instead of a mere surface…We might say that flatness restored is mere flatness made meaningful by artistic intention. 117 117 Michael Schreyach, “Re-created Flatness: Hans Hofmann's Concept of the Picture Plane as a Medium of Expression”, The Aesthetic Journal (2015), 44–67. 69 This awareness of the surface and commitment to discussing the flat nature of painting (and not trying to “fool” the viewer with a contrived perspective) comes across in much of Stockton’s early abstract work and in Gennie DeWeese’s non-objective paintings, flattened landscapes. The other side of the picture-plane coin is depth, by which Hofmann means a creation of depth without sacrificing the picture’s two-dimensionality. Here he is trying to get a metaphysical notion of imagined depth rather than perspective depth as put forth in Renaissance paintings, one where the color stimulates tension on the surface. His famous “push-pull” color theory meant instilling a painting with active tension, with shifts back and forth, in and out of the picture plane. In Hofmann’s eyes, Modernists’ primary philosophy, to acknowledge the flat surface of a painting, goes beyond that flatness to recreate a surface engaged and reimagined. In other words, Hofmann taught his students to overcome the limitations of flatness in order to transcend that two- dimensional container and delve into pure expression. Your paper is limited…Within its confines is the complete creative message. Everything you do is definitely related to the paper…The more the work progresses, the more it becomes defined or qualified. It increasingly limits itself. Your paper is a world in itself…The work of art is firmly established as an independent object: this [is what] makes it a picture. Outside of it is the outer world. Inside of it, the world of an artist. 118 By embracing the flat surface, Modernist painters accepted the limitations of the painting. For Hofmann, accepting the limitations of a two-dimensional format meant exposing the finiteness of being human. 118 Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real and other Essays, (Boston: MIT Press, 1967) 60 -74. 70 He further explained the “push and pull” theory as movement and countermovement or force and counterforce. The picture surface answers every plastic animation automatically with an aesthetic equivalent in the opposite direction of the received impulse…A plastic animation into the depth is answered with a radar-like echo out of the depth and vice versa. Impulse and echo establish two-dimensionality with an added dynamic enlivenment of created breathing depth. 119 The theory of push and pull was also described as a kind of plasticity, a spacial tension to create movement between points, pulsating the planes back and forth, which also engaged spacial relationships. According to art historian Tina Dickey, “Hofmann himself observed this phenomenon as the moment when the surface works like a steam engine. Colors move in and out of depth like pistons.” She quoted Hofmann’s comparison that a flat image felt empty of energy, empty of meaning. “You must have an inside to your picture—this is the creation of a cosmos. If you have no inside, it is only decorative.”120 For Hofmann, the difference between a painting with a spiritual aspect, and thus creating meaning, and something merely pretty was evidenced in the organic relationship between the formal elements of the marks and colors on the paper or canvas. Referencing Cezanne in one of his lectures, he conveyed the importance of noting the relationship between the objects, not just the objects portrayed themselves. “Cezanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting, through his use of color. In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates the light,” Hofmann said in talking about 119 Tina Dickey, Color Creates Light, (Canada: Trillistar Books, 2011), 30. 120 Dickey, Color Creates Light, 31. 71 how color creates light through contrasts. “Teaching his students that color relationships develop through the act of painting, he encouraged them to discover the emotional nuances of color. He called it experiential color.”121 Gennie DeWeese illustrates this most clearly in her piece Non-Objective Painting (nd.) (Figure 12). Here DeWeese speaks to both of these aesthetic philosophies by incorporating geometric forms and floral-like biomorphic shapes. Delicate lines stand out from the squared-up reds and oranges. While the yellow pushes the image to the forefront, the darker reds recede. 121 Dickey, Color Creates Light, 275. 72 Figure 12. Gennie DeWeese, Non-Objective Painting, n.d., oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family. 73 As a teacher, Hofmann realized the importance of his position in relation to encouraging younger artists. It is essential that the teacher himself have the power of quick sympathy and understanding of the unsure student. Such power should be developed like every other human attribute. The problem of art teaching is not limited to the problem of artistic development itself, but includes the problems of how to produce artists, comprehending teachers, art understanding in general, and art enjoyment in particular. 122 Hoyt Sherman taught art at Ohio State University during the years Robert and Gennie DeWeese attended the school from 1938 to 1942. 123 His new method for teaching drawing placed students in darkness while abstract patterns projected onto a screen, flashing each image for a tenth of a second. With no verbal instructions, only music playing, the students drew the image they “saw” in the darkness of his Flash Lab. This idea of “Perceptual Unity,” created a center of focus and trained his students not how to draw, although drawing happened during the entire exercise, but how to see. He trained his students in seeing the whole at a glance and, in drawing bold, broad patterns, delineating the whole field. Teaching people to see with perceptual unity is as much an unlearning process as it is a learning one. Most objects in our adult environment have become familiar through many associations. Rather than being seen for themselves, these objects serve merely as symbols for still other things with which our minds become occupied. 124 Sherman claimed that people do not pay attention to objects in the background. “Training students so that they can become attentive to visual qualities and relationships is a matter 122 Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real and Other Essays, (Andover: Addison Gallery, 1948), 62. 123 A few years later, the artist Roy Lichtenstein attended Ohio State University. Years later he donated the money to keep the lab open due the influence it had on his work. 124 Hoyt Sherman, Drawing By Seeing, (New York: Hinds, Hayden, & Eldridge, 1947), 9. 74 of breaking these crusts of conventional reaction and introducing a fresh approach to the seeing act.”125 Sherman believed that by breaking the images into unfamiliar forms and then later introducing objects such as chairs or a wastepaper basket, the students’ old visual language would change, enabling them to see landscapes or nudes without the old habits creeping into their work. The flashing aspect of the Flash Lab provided urgency, an important aspect Sherman tried to introduce in his students. By getting students prepared for a momentary image to appear, he began to instill “aggressive learning” as opposed to passive or inattentive seeing. As that attitude deepened, these new found responses became habitual and enabled students to produce work “without loss of a dynamic quality.”126 Sherman also strove to bring out each student’s individuality and felt uniformity resulted in undesirable qualities. However, a teacher could go too far by requiring individuality. For a student to try to be different is, for him, to make as much of a mistake as he would make if he tried to get a product which met some standard of uniformity. The student's individuality should appear in his drawing as an incidental aspect of his work rather than as a conscious aim. 127 Sherman noted that grades should be based on motivation rather than how well a teacher likes a student’s end product. Sherman devotes the last chapter of his book, Drawing By Seeing, to Cezanne. Not only could he use his theory of perceptual unity to analyze Cezanne’s work in a new way, but he felt Cezanne modeled his theory perfectly. Painting, Sherman noted, used the 125 Hoyt Sherman, Drawing By Seeing, (New York: Hinds, Hayden, & Eldridge, 1947), 9. 126 Sherman, Drawing By Seeing, 10. 127 Sherman, Drawing By Seeing, 75–76. 75 eye and the brain together, “direct recognition of the fact that the process of seeing is embedded in the process of painting.”128 Seeing did not just mean observing. For Sherman, seeing meant perceiving minute differences of perspective, of relations to space, and understanding the significance of a focal point. He used Cezanne to show the fundamentals of perception. “He sees a focal point; this point is determined by its position in a space relative to the observer; and it is not affected by color or brightness, but is a function of position. Position is primary over color and brightness.”129 During her time at Bauhaus, ceramic artist Marguerite Wildenhain (1896–1985) studied alongside painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky from 1919 to 1926, when she left to head up a ceramic workshop. She also worked closely with figurative sculptor Gerhard Marcks (her Form Master) and potter Max Krehan (her Crafts Master). In 1925, Wildenhain became the first woman to earn the Master Potter certification in Germany. Upon the Nazi regime’s takeover, Wildenhain fled Germany and eventually ended up in California. There she established Pond Farm on land owned by Gordon and Jane Herr from 1949 to 1952. Pond Farm incorporated the egalitarian aspects of the Bauhaus art movement. Similar to the Joseph Albers who founded Black Mountain College (1933–1957), Pond Farm retained its teaching aspect while also incorporating communal ideals. 130 Wildenhain brought to Pond Farm the Bauhaus philosophy of uniting art with industry in order to create objects that possessed both an aesthetic of the artist and the function of utilitarian forms. In her teaching, she sought to go beyond mere technique and help develop a generation “which believes in the value of humanities, 128 Sherman, Drawing By Seeing, 75–76. 129 Sherman, Drawing, 75-76. 130 Jenni Sorkin, Live Form, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 73–85. 76 which will face the problems of our time honestly and without fear, with the deep will to understand other men and to learn to build a better future.”131 This statement reflects her hardships under the Nazis, watching a stable, art-filled world of the Bauhaus in Germany fall apart around her. As a Jew, she ran to escape the death camps, as an artist, her work remained forbidden. Her philosophy at Pond Farm approached the epitome of Utopianism in the face of McCarthyism and fought a residual anti-Semitic attitude in the United States. The atmosphere at Pond Farm provided a safe place for artists to experiment with clay. In the arts community, the inclination to found schools located outside of cities spurred the formation of several well-known art schools located in rural settings, incluing Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Cranbook Academy in Michigan where Senska enrolled in 1946. Wildenhain’s lessons to students emphasized the ability of potters to be receptive to their curiosity, to explore, and to open themselves up to the possibilities of their process. Once a student learns the basics, then the student must “develop those forms that you would make if you had never seen a pot before, those that are your conception of what a pot should look like.”132 She understood the importance of knowing all the basics of building ceramic objects, but she also instilled the notion of expression in regards to the potters’ artistic form. She eschewed a “know the rules before you break them” perspective. She asked her students to not be afraid to fail. Mistakes should be treated as opportunities to learn. Wildenhain’s emphasis on potters understanding the relationship between hand and form was key. “The experimental relation of the hand to the form is 131 Marguerite Wildenhain, Pottery: Form and Expression, (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1959), 9. 132 Marguerite Wildenhain, Pottery: Form and Expression, (Palo Alto: American Crafts Council, 1959) 50. 77 not essential only during the beginning period; it is in no sense merely a trial period that one must quickly get through,” she said of her methodology. On the contrary, it is a very fundamental part of the whole potting process. The more the potter is able to carry into his maturity his initial alert sensitivity of the hand to the form, the better potter he is. For it is necessary for the creative potter to burst the limitations of tradition and the restrictions of convention to shatter the limitation of his own routine. 133 For Jessie Wilber, her cleft from Cubism came in 1949, when she spent her summer in Dallas, Texas, studying under the painter Otis Dozier. Dozier had been a guest instructor at Montana State College in 1946, where he and Wilber became acquainted. For Wilber, Dozier’s abstract, loose brushwork with saturated colors left a deep impression on Wilber. She credits him with luring her away from cubism or any other kind of “ism.”134 Dozier himself searched to find his voice, but once he did, he rose to the heights of Texas’s and Colorado’s regional artists. Dozier taught for seven years at Colorado Springs’s Fine Arts Center as an assistant to Boardman Robinson, director of the Broadmoor Art Academy, 135 before returning to Dallas to teach at the Fine Arts Center. Dozier’s early work reflects the hard, dark, natural lines used by the Post- Modernist artists like Cezanne. Growing up in North Texas, Dozier’s early work portrays the life of a tenant farmer picking cotton and portraits of old farmhouses with deep, seemingly bottomless fields ready for planting. Jerry Bywaters noted in an article about Dozier, “The earthy mysteries and dark tragedies of farm life were of logical concern to 133 Wildenhain, Pottery: Form and Expression, 58. 134 “Wilber Exhibits Art Works,” Montana Exponent, April 14, 1949, 5. 135 In 1936, The Broadmoor Art Academy rebranded itself and became The Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs. 78 the younger artists—and have remained so to the mature artist.”136 In later years, Dozier drew on surrealism as well as abstraction to portray his surroundings. He drew upon experiential, personal observations, climbing 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado to understand the mountains from above or wandering from ghost towns to mining operations in order to delve into the native landscapes. By the time he taught at the Dallas Museum of Fine Art School in the 1960s, Dozier’s paintings evolved to near complete abstraction using complicated color palettes and imaginative symbols. Paul Cezanne was important to all these teachers, although each used Cezanne to express a perspective or a viewpoint a bit different from the others. As noted by art historian and critic Meyer Shapiro in his 1959 essay, Cezanne felt “fresh and stimulating to young painters of our time.”137 What about Cezanne’s work spoke to all these various aspects of art? Shapiro points to Cezanne’s wide berth of color theory, drawing, expression, and elemental style. Looking at the first artist to understand the limits and thereby the multitude of solutions of the two-dimensional canvas one might have foreseen the Cubist movement to come. By peeling back the layers, artists could delve into one aspect at a time. Hoyt Sherman latched onto the idea of observation and perception while Hans Hofmann’s work with the picture plane as a two-dimensional surface played into the referential work of Cezanne’s Post-Impressionistic paintings. Bauhaus artists like Maholy-Nagy and even Marguerite Wildenhain, looked to Cezanne as a space-conscious artist, the first to portray a kind of forward movement. Isabelle Johnson used Cezanne as 136 Bywaters, Jerry. “Otis Dozier: Growth and Maturity of a Texas Artist.” Southwest Review, Volume 42, Issue number 1, Winter 1957, 35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43464260. Accessed 07-04-2019. 137 Shapiro, Modern Art 19 th and 20 th Centuries, 39–42. 79 a personal inspiration, studying his line and composition intensely. It was during her time at Skowhegan that she took Cezanne to heart in her pursuit of the lines of nature. Montana Modernists trained in a variety of schools during their early years, prior to World War II, bringing their diverse vision and techniques with them when they came or returned to Montana. Through the combination of place and the various methods for expressing new ideas, the Montana Modernists acquired their own classroom experiences and translated them for a generation of young artists seeking their own voices in the art world. 80 Experiencing Art in the Classroom One important component in the emergence of the Montana Modernists was their ability to introduce the idea of equality in the classroom. As these artist-teachers opened up the door to an alternate way to be a Montana artist, to portray a more personal notion of what it meant to be a Montanan in the postwar society of the moment, their way of conducting classes became as important as what they taught in those classes. Isabelle Johnson’s teaching style, described in a 1963 essay, implores artists to forget how other people use color, “use the colors you feel in your mind’s eye and your imagination. This canvas you are doing [is] not for husband, wife, or neighbor, but for yourself, so have courage to fail if necessary.”138 One of her students, painter Theodore Waddell notes, “She would take several of us to her house for hot chocolate and talk about art…She was a figurative painter but she had this loose, graphic way of applying the paint that drew me to her.”139 Missoula painter Donna Loos, who studied with Johnson from 1960 to 1961 at Eastern Montana College, Billings, said one piece of advice she recalled from Johnson was: Go your way instead of following current fashion. She was willing to go out on a limb in a city and at a time when nobody else was thinking modern…she felt it was a requirement of her job that she push us and lead us to look in other directions that were not traditional, and she did it without saying a mean word about Russell or any other traditional painter…she opened up minds until we did it by ourselves.140 138 Isabelle Johnson, The Wonderful World of Color, (Missoula: Montana Institute for the Arts, 1963). 139 Theodore Waddell, My Montana, (Helena: Drumlummon Institute, 2016) 40. 140 Yellowstone Art Museum, A Lonely Business, 3. 81 The Montana Modernists artists teaching at MSC in the late 1940s and 1950s— Frances Senksa, Jessie Wilber, Robert DeWeese, and occasionally Gennie DeWeese 141— approached their work and their teaching as reflected in the unified theory of education outlined by John Dewey, whose underlying philosophy in teaching art best comes through in the experience of art itself. The answers cannot be found, unless we are willing to find the germs and roots in matters of experience that we do not currently regard as esthetic. Having discovered these active seeds, we may follow the course of their growth into the highest forms of finished and refined art. 142 These art professors took the notion of art as an experience, to learn by doing, and incorporated Dewey’s democratically inspired classroom that consisted of students and teachers learning together. Frances Senska’s teaching style, patterned after her own teachers, Maholy-Nagy and Wildenhain, evolved into a hands-on, side-by-side environment. Senska’s similar teaching style embodied the lessons of Wildenhain, without encouraging students to make pots that looked like hers. Senska physically placed her hands on her students’ hands to give them the right direction while sitting at the potter’s wheel.143 Two of her most famous students, Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio, speak to her teaching style. Voulkos, whose iconic abstract and dynamic forms ushered in Abstract Expressionism in ceramics and Autio’s lyrical and figurative style make it hard to believe their training derived from the same pair of hands. However, in an interview Senska did after receiving a lifetime membership to the National Committee on Education in the Ceramic Arts, 141 Gennie DeWeese taught at all levels of education and was an adjunct at MSC as needed. 142 John Dewey, Art as Experience, (New York: Penguin Group, 1934) 11. 143 Neil Jussila, telephone interview with author, June 23, 2016. Transcript in possession of author. 82 Senska noted that someone approached her after seeing a student-made video she had shown instead of giving a speech. “You hold your hands just the way I do, but I learned from Peter Voulkos.” To which Senska replied, “Well, it figures. He learned from me and I learned from Marguerite Wildenhain. That's what education in the ceramic arts is all about. You learn from somebody who does it.”144 Senska noted she instructed in a similar style to Wildenhain’s style, giving instruction when needed without forcing any style on her students. She did recall telling Pete Voulkos that his work looked like something from “high school industrial arts, and I said, ‘you know, it’s been done. Come into the twentieth century.’ He did!”145 When World War II broke out, Senska joined the United States Navy. While stationed in San Francisco, she took evening classes with ceramist Edith Heath at the California Labor School. From Heath she learned to throw clay on a potter’s wheel. “Well, having discovered clay, I stayed with it,” she said.146 After the war, using her G. I. Bill benefits for education, Senska attended ceramic classes at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, with Maija Grotell. Somewhere along the way I took a course in design taught by Lazlo Maholy-Nagy and that was a lot of fun, and I got a lot of ideas about how to teach from him, because he was one of these people who—he gave us all the material to work with and tools to learn…You know somebody would say, ‘Well, I’d like to do thus and so,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, try it and see whether it works. See what you get.’ He’d never say, ‘Well, you can’t do that.’ He’d say, ‘Well, try it.’ And so I thought that’s the way to go, so that’s the technique I used on my students, too.147 144 KUSM-TV, Art. 145 KUSM-TV, Art. 146 KUSM-TV, Art 147 KUSM-TV, Art. 83 Jessie Wilber took the side-by-side philosophy to heart by drawing when her students drew, painting when her students painted, and at the end of class sharing her work along with the rest of her students, without putting herself or her work above them, thus creating a safe and encouraging atmosphere for learning. Wilber’s generosity of spirit gave her students the leeway to explore various materials regardless of the outcome. Ray Campeau, one of her early students, described Wilber’s teaching method as working beside her students, not in front of them. She’d ask the students to set up their painting projects and then set her easel up in the classroom studio with them. Students and teacher painted or printed together, each working on their own pieces. 148 Wilber explained her process but never performed a “demonstration” for students to emulate her work. Instead she asked each student to talk about their work, making each feel as important as the rest. “They [Senska and Wilber] never made anyone feel like they were less than them. They did things communally.”149 By not setting herself apart from her painting students, Wilber created a safe environment where students learned by doing and, at the same time, they learned how to respect each other’s work as modeled by Wilber. Wilber herself found inspiration in her students. I learned more from them than they learned from me, or, at most, we were all getting hold of something that was at the heart of—to use a term in vogue at that time—the creative process. My students—some in small ways, some in major ways—gave me insights and confidence in my work and I no longer wanted to go out and study under another artist. 150 148 The printing studio working environment is similar to the ceramic studio in its sharing of equipment. 149 Campeau, interview. 150 Jessie Wilber, Jessie Wilber: Retrospective, Bozeman: Montana State University, 1983. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 84 Robert DeWeese took the other side of Dewey’s coin, emphasizing the experience portion by exposing his students to art as much as possible. In 1960, Montana native and New York commodity broker Everton Gentry “George” Poindexter began donating his collection of abstract expressionist art to the Montana Historical Society’s museum collection and the Yellowstone Art Center. 151 Eventually, he donated 382 works to the Yellowstone Art Center alone. 152 The Poindexter Collection, a curated selection of Abstract Expressionist paintings, including work by Willem de Kooning, Robert DeNiro Sr., Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, Earl Kerkam, Franz Kline, and Jack Tworkov, among others, encompassed the largest abstract expressionist art collection west of the Mississippi at that time. 153 When Robert DeWeese heard about the Poindexter Collection and the nature and quality of the abstract expressionist art in the state, he drove to Helena and borrowed a few pieces. George Poindexter donated his collection for educational institutions to have access to them and DeWeese took that idea literally. 154 DeWeese did not think to bring the students to the art but instead brought the art to the students. For weeks, Willem de Kooning’s Woman, 1948, as well as some other paintings from the collection, hung in the Student Union Building at Montana State College, available for anyone to observe. For Neil Jussila, an art student in the 1960s, the Poindexter Collection changed everything for him. It changed the way he thought about art and the way he connected to 151 The Yellowstone Art Center would later become the Yellowstone Art Museum. 152 Half of the collection consists of paintings and the rest are works on paper. 153 Ben Mitchell, The Most Difficult Journey. (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 2002). 154 Mitchell, The Most Difficult Journey, 16 85 his own artistic expression. For DeWeese, it was a way, the only way, to communicate what was going on in New York City’s art scene to his students. As Jussila remembered: [Robert DeWeese] had received an invitation from the Montana Historical Society—they had served notification that they had an exhibit, the Poindexter Exhibit. He got a state truck or something because the paintings were pretty big and took two or three students with him to Helena and picked up as many of those paintings as they could and they brought them back to Bozeman. 155 Jussila said the students helped install paintings from the Poindexter Collection in the lounge of the Student Union Building. DeWeese brought a copy of George Poindexter’s essay and had the department secretary transcribe it and mimeograph it, then he distributed it to all the students in his classes. He talked about the paintings and we went over and looked at the exhibit and talked about abstract expressionism. The upshot—it was during my sophomore year in 1962—I would go over to the SUB and read the essay and look at the paintings and it really made a lot of sense to me. It had a large impact on my work. 156 Jusilla spoke of Robert DeWeese’s teaching as something new and different, something he’d never encountered in his hometown of Butte, Montana. [Robert DeWeese] liked the idea of the quick sketch. Bob excelled as an impeccably fine draftsman. It seems to me when I think about it he was involved with this idea that the word draw means to bring forth, like drawing water from a well…His purpose was to teach people the value of spontaneity. 157 In a rare essay by DeWeese about painting, he explained this theory. “A teacher- student relationship in the field of painting is artificial and false. They should be considered as equal participants in the excitement of painting; the one with the greater 155 Jussila, interview. 156 Jussila, interview. 157 Jussila, interview. 86 experience which the other draws upon.”158 He continued to state that there must be a philosophy, not merely a pedagogic methodology, of painting or there is no painting. There must be equal earnestness and drive; there must be hard work. A teacher must stimulate by fair means or foul. But don’t ask him to spoon feed or hold your hand…the language of painting—size, shape, position, and color—is simple, but it takes many paintings to learn the language—to feel and sense it—to make it part of you. Don’t be precious with your painting—you must gradually learn to see and operate in these terms.159 Yet, former students distinctly recall their teachers as pivotal in forming the basis for not only their understanding of art, but of establishing a different way of conceiving the world of art in their own lives. As his student, Jerry Rankin said of DeWeese, “His simple statements embodied huge ideas. He kept us busy with the job of seeing.”160 Senska’s student, Al Tennant, spoke about her ability to be tough while allowing each student complete freedom to discover their voice. He noted that “It’s difficult to explain, she suggested as she talked ‘look over here’ or ‘think about something other than that’s a piece of clay, what is it?’ She’d go on for five or ten minutes. And then she would walk away. I’d sit there kind of bewildered.”161 Tennant stated that her walking away actually enabled him to consider his work. But then I’d think oh, she’s saying that I should explore things on my own but take these basics [with me]. If I don’t my own work will be totally goofy. That’s how she talked. Years later…she still had the same attitude about what I was doing, what everybody else was doing. She’d said, “I just let everyone go.”162 158 Jerry Rankin, in-person interview with author, Belgrade, August 19, 2017. Transcript in possession of author. 159 Rankin, interview. 160 Rankin, interview. 161 Al Tennant attended Montana State College from 1966 through 1969. 162 Al Tennant, telephone interview with author, June 11, 2016. Transcript in possession of author. 87 Senska grew with her students. When she first started teaching, she actually did not know much about ceramics. It was only after spending a summer with Wildenhain did she begin to understand clay. As she taught, she grew as a teacher and as an artist. Tennant described her as a gregarious, kind person who talked gently about clay, romantically perhaps, but she inspired her students enough for most of them to stay with the arts for the rest of their lives. “Fifty years later, I’m still making clay because I had a teacher like Frances Senska who never discouraged me, and made me kind of think about the whole process.”163 Tennant described DeWeese, Senska, and Jessie Wilber as quintessential instructors. “They did not teach you how to do something, but instead they taught you what to think about when you’re doing the art.” Tennant defined a good teacher as someone who could make him pay attention. “If you have the capability, and you have the imagination, you have the desire you will take this and run. If not, go drive a truck. That’s kind of what they said. They were just three of the most amazing people.” 164 When asked about the most memorable aspect of Wilber’s teaching practice, Tennant answered that she spoke about freedom, a very fine technique, and then she implored her students to experiment, experiment, experiment. Tennant’s memories of Robert DeWeese capture the DeWeese classroom. “He always said, Tennant if you don’t understand what a line is, then you can’t draw. And I thought, what the fuck is this guy talking about. Then one day he walked by and said, 163 Tennant, interview. 164 Tennant, interview. 88 ‘that’s a line.’” 165 The story rounded out in a printmaking class. “I kept doing the same drawing and he said, ‘Tennant, these are really ugly. You can’t print anymore in my class until you come up with an image that has some substance about it.’” At that point he thought he would never pass that class. I thought I was going to flunk out and everyone will be so disappointed in me. And then one day I was sitting near the college and next to me was an old Chevy pickup with an advertisement on the side that was faded. I looked over and thought, oh wow, look at this door, it has the most beautiful image. 166 With his sketchbook tucked close by, because that was what DeWeese taught them, he drew this image. “I went back to Bob and said this is what I want to print. And he said, ‘Okay, Tennant, you can print it. Those lines are important.’ He was making me pay attention.”167 DeWeese, Senska, and Wilber taught in what John Dewey called a pragmatic environment where reality is experienced. Every one of their students learned their art by doing the art. In nearly every case the credo of the teacher/student relationship reflected Dewey’s view of learning art experientially.168 For example, Senska discovered her famous ceramic partridges while demonstrating how to make a bottle on the pottery wheel. When she was done, she closed the top and in her mind perceived the shape of the Hungarian partridge (Figure 13). That “learning by doing” philosophy ran deep within the entire department at the time. 169 Pete Voulkos, one of her more famous students, was 165 Tennant, interview. 166 Tennant, interview. 167 Tennant, interview 168 John Dewey, Art as Experience, (Berkeley: Berkeley Publishing, 1934), 18. 169 She was teaching students how to pull a bottle on the wheel and, when she was done, she pinched the top. 89 constantly breaking into the ceramics studio after the school closed to work on his very big pieces. When she found out, Senska gave him a key. 170 Most students attending MSC in the 1950s experienced all three professors during their years in the art department. Together, these teachers not only introduced their students to contemporary art at the time—the Modernist movements and the avant- garde—the teachers also enabled their students to discover what pushing the envelope of current art in their own hands meant. 170 KUSM-TV, Art All the Time, 1997. 90 Figure 13. Frances Senska, Hungarian Partridges, n.d., stoneware, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the Holter Musem of Art. Frances and Jessie: Changing Perceptions Montana State College hired Jessie Wilber in 1941 as part of a very small art department. Five years later, Frances Senska joined the department. Their friendship and partnership remained a steadfast aspect of the Montana art community until their deaths. They shared their work, both in teaching and in art, and they shared a home they built together, each with their own studio overlooking the Gallatin Valley. It would be hard to talk about one without the other. Wilber began her art career as a painter, but became well-known for her printmaking. Senska began with ideas of becoming an industrial designer, but her ceramics grew to international fame. Each embodied the traits they taught their students: try something and see if it works, as Maholy-Nagy advised and, as Wilber often said, experiment, experiment, experiment. While their work may seem vastly different at first glance, similarities emerge. Senska’s partridges and the birds in Wilber’s painting, Huns (Figure14), show a like- 91 mindedness in the shape and outline of the Hungarian Partridges shown in each work. It is as if the two artists, speaking the same language, created an intimate dialogue about space, nature, and Modernism. Wilber’s painting, awash in red, portrays a two- dimensional image with the Modernist claim to a flat surface and a shunning of illusionism. Senska’s partridges show the small birds in a full three-dimensional space, the glazes used as shorthand for the plumage, not as an exact replica of the huns but as way to mark them. Showing Senska’s perception of a partridge without resorting to an overly realistic conveyance, she relates the birds, seen commonly from the window of her home, to one of the few pieces she made that were non-utilitarian. Since the partridges are not dated, which came first, the painting or the sculpture remains an open-ended question. 92 Figure 14. Jessie Wilber, Huns, 1954, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Jessie Wilber (1912–1989) took a position to teach art at Montana State College in 1941. That same year, Wilber’s PWA (Public Works of Art) commission to paint a mural in the post office at Kingman, Kansas, came through. She finished the piece in 1942, after moving to Montana. The painting, The Days of the Cattlemen’s Picnic, depicts a Western scene with fenced cattle, ranchers on horseback, and a young boy on a bicycle riding by. Slightly curved and abstracted figures perch on a jack-leg fence, watching bull riders as part of the picnic’s entertainment. The colors, primarily dusty 93 beige, burnt sienna, and green convey a sense of late summer or early fall. 171 Even in Wilber’s early work, she picked up the mantel of Modernism by claiming a flat surface and a skewed, cubist perspective. Each of the figures enhances their three-dimensionality. Cubism, the style she used in her mural painting, rubbed off on Wilber when she met Estelle Stinchfield. Wilber described Stinchfield as “a fiery little Cubist whose mission in life was to bring Modern Art to Colorado in no uncertain terms.”172 At 21, Wilber enrolled in Colorado State Teachers’ College as a junior. While working in the art department, she took classes from Stinchfield whose passion for Modernism slightly outweighed her “sharp tongue.” Wilber adored Stinchfield because she: …deplored the reluctance and cowardice of people in the face of a new idea, she brought us the world of Paris, where she had studied for several years. She filled us with information about all the painters who were working there while she was studying—Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and the rest—and she made good Cubists of everyone!173 In light of the Great Depression sweeping the nation at the time, the notion of passion and art, change and promise elated and inspired Wilber to find meaning in her own work. “Stinchfield was not a person you could ever forget; even today, in a strange quirk of reminiscence, I smile at what she would probably say when I am working on a drawing or a print.”174 While Wilber’s cubist tendencies did not stay with her throughout her life, she carried Modernism with her when she moved to Montana. 171 U. S. Interior, National Register Of Historic Places. (1989, February 27). Retrieved From Www.Kshs.Org: https://www.kshs.org/resource/national_register/mps/kansas_post_offices_artwork_mps.pdf 172 Wilber, Retrospective, 1983. 173 Stinchfield studied with Andre Lhote and O. Friesz in Paris. 174 Wilber, Retrospective, 1983. 94 During World War II, Wilber taught geography to airmen on the campus of Montana State College. 175 But she also continued to explore her own art. While working on the Kingman mural in her painting class at MSC during her first year, Wilber noticed the students taking a “polite” interest in the work. Seeing that spark in her students spurred her to take on the project of the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever Mural that still hangs in Lewis Hall at Montana State University, Bozeman. Wilber contacted the Rocky Mountain Fever Lab in Hamilton, Montana, and the scientists there traveled to MSC in order to tell the students about the lab and the research on insect-borne diseases. For the mural in Lewis Hall, she used tempera directly on the wall, after preparing the area using “the traditional pre-Renaissance method” of gesso, whiting, zinc white, and water soluble hide glue. She then asked her students to create drawings to scale, using their own ideas of composition. Each student’s work was presented and the class as a whole chose the ones “we felt were the most likely to succeed as big mural paintings.”176 This demonstrates Wilber’s inclusive and democratic teaching methods, how she grasped the smallest spark of interest and turned it into a project in which all her students participated and felt ownership. This methodology, started by Wilber, spread throughout the School of Art as a community in the coming years as a few more artist/teachers and students began to take advantage of the GI Bill. 175 Montana State College is now Montana State University. Founded in 1893 as a land-grant college, it was named the Agricultural College of the State of Montana. In the 1920s, it was renamed Montana State College and, on July 1, 1965, it was again renamed Montana State University in recognition of its science and humanistic research. 176 Jessie Wilber, interview by Dr. William Walter, Session 03001, Box 8—transcript, (October 24, 1985). Montana State University Special Collections. 95 In 1943, Wilber accompanied watercolorist Olga Ross Hannon to the Blackfeet Reservation east of Glacier National Park to witness the Sun Dance ceremonies. 177 She and Hannon sketched and took notes. The simplified depictions of bears, beavers, snakes, buffalo, elk, deer, and mountain sheep on tipis, as well as the geometric renderings of the landscape, piqued Wilber’s interest, but Hannon’s interest stayed with her as she produced a number of watercolor paintings based on the tipis. Wilber did notice how the upper and lower portions of the painted lodges darkened due to outside weather and smoke from within the tipis, leaving the central area free for the painting of sacred animals particular to the tipi owner. 178 When Hannon died in 1947, Wilber kept Hannon’s tipi project alive. John C. Ewers described the project: [Hannon] proposed to record faithfully, in a series of silk-screened plates, the colorful murals painted on the exterior surfaces of Blackfeet Indian tipis…Another dimension was brought to the project by the researches of Cecile Black Boy, a full blood Blackfeet Indian, who, during the 1940s, collected Blackfeet legends under the sponsorship of the Museum of the Plains Indian for the Montana Writers’ Project of the Public Works of Art. 179 Wilber had kept Hannon’s project close to her heart and, when she retired in 1974, she decided to honor her friend and colleague by finishing the Blackfeet Tipis with a grant awarded to her by the Montana Arts Council in 1976 for a series of the silkscreened Blackfeet Indian Tipi Designs (Figure 15). The decision to use the medium of serigraphs to portray the tipis enabled the conveyance of the object while adhering to the images by singling out the individual differences of each person’s tipi in a respectful 177 Olga Ross Hannon (1890–1947) was chair of the MSC art department from 1921 to 1947. 178 Wilber, (D. W. Walter, Interviewer, October 24, 1985). 179 J. C. Ewers, Blackfeet Indian Tipis: Design and Legend, (Bozeman, Museum of the Rockies, 1976). 96 way. 180 Wilber extracted the essence of the object while setting it up as a specimen, removing any kind of naturalism associated with its use. There is no sign of the smoke stains noted from her experience of seeing the tipis in person, or of the weather that should have left its mark on the fabric. Instead her flat, clean images eschew a sense of place. Under the hand of Wilber, the forms took on a smooth, unweathered character. The prints, without a traditional realist ground line, seem to float in space, caught in a web of time. Wilber’s use of the silkscreen printing process elevated the bold colors, symbols, and geometric shapes used by the Blackfeet while also bringing attention to the medium. Two of Wilber’s former students, Stacy Hamm and Sage (Sigerson) Walden, graduates of the fine art program at Montana State University, helped Wilber to create the silk-screen works. Hamm and Sage established the Jessie Wilber and Frances Senska Individual Artist Award in Ceramics after Senska died in 2009. In 1973, the Montana Institute of the Arts named Wilber Artist of the Year. In 1988, she was honored with the Montana Governor’s Arts Award.181 All of these awards attest to the importance of her art around the state as well as her influence on younger artists. 180 Ewers, Blackfeet Indian Tipis: Design and Legend, noted on p. 6, each clan’s tent depicted different animals and geometric designs. 181 According to the website www.mt.gov the Governor's Arts Awards program honors outstanding citizens and organizations in Montana whose achievements in the arts, or on behalf of the arts, benefit all Montanans. 97 Figure 15. Jessie Wilber, Blackfeet Tipi, 1974, Serigraph. Courtesy of the Museum of the Rockies. The Human Gaze In looking at Huns (seen in Figure 14) from 1954, Wilber’s interest in painting birds comes through in her abstraction of the figural form. Using a reddish-orange wash, she gives the painting a feeling of birds under a heat lamp, like domesticated chickens in winter. Her deep, saturated color announces itself before composition, line, or subject matter. A conscious use of a monochromatic theme was an aspect of Modernism, explained a 1943 letter to The New York Times written by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb. They stated, “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought…we wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because 98 they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”182 Within the formal aspects of Wilber’s Huns, illusion is destroyed. There is no illusion. This is a painting. The lines are drawn: first we see red, we feel red, the heat, like a curtain drawn across the canvas, a curtain meant to reveal, not hide, the two-dimensionality of the painting. Wilber depicts the scene with a minimalist view of the landscape, only a single line delineating the horizon, as an oval stands in for a pond. Single brushstrokes create bare foliage. Of the four huns, two of them stare directly ahead, challenging the viewer’s gaze. It is as if Wilber used the huns as Manet used the barmaid in A Bar at the Folies Bergere, creating an inverse perspective on birdwatching. Thematically, Wilber used the huns, as well as other birds commonly found in her backyard, again and again. Since Matisse, the use of the window as a view from inside the studio to the outer world, or from the outer world to the subconscious world, became a well-known trope for artists. Wilber consistently explored her view from her studio, within yards of her surroundings, including her cats and her garden, in her paintings and prints. During an examination of her works archived in the Montana State University’s School of Art collection, it became clear Wilber used whatever resources she found. Whether it was crepe paper, linoleum, or pieces of scrap wood, she created an array of prints; archival quality was not the topmost component of her process. Wilber responded to the materials on hand and, by picking up that piece of scrap wood, she thought about 182 Transcribed from Mark Rothko’s papers at the Smithsonian Museum’s Archives of American Art. 99 the wood itself, throwing out any preconception of what to do with scrap wood. Rather she looked at the material itself, resulting in her woodblock prints. 183 In her ca.1950 woodblock print, Cats in a Garden (Figure 16), Wilber created a unique sense of space, the circles of cats and garden each stand their own ground. In this print she used a monochromatic theme, so the brown of the paper—earth and soil— became a changing background to the black ink as the viewer’s eye moves from one delineated area to the next. The gouged wood creates rich texture in both the background of the cat and the leaves of the foliage. In a partial break from the circle theme, Wilber acknowledged the horizon line, but only in passing, not in an illusionistic sense. Instead she emphasized the flatness of the paper. Wilber also used shallow depths to explore space and the divisions of spaces. With each circle, she draws our attention to the importance of things: this, this, this, expounding with intent each aspect of her personal world while interlacing the indoors with the outdoors, leaving only simple lines as thresholds. 183 Woodblock printing was used by the Chinese and Japanese then reinvigorated by the Impressionists as well as the German Expressionists. 100 Figure 16. Jessie Wilber, Cats in a Garden, 1950, single-color woodblock print, 19 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art. This woodblock is indicative of Jessie Wilber's style. Her work isolated and at the same time united her subjects, a personal documentation on the way she viewed the world. As the viewer, we see it as one vision, and we also choose to look upon one thing at a time. Here she allows the viewer to do both, to be in the moment and to take the long view. In 1949, after bringing Dozier in for several workshops at MSC between 1946 and 1949, she was invited to Texas to study with him and his wife, metalsmith Velma Davis, over the course of a summer. That mentorship changed her style though not her subject matter. At that time, she discontinued her cubist style and freed up her hand. No longer concerned with the idea of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface, 101 instead she embraced the flatness of the surface. She still tended to look out her window, engaging with the birds, cats, and garden. However, Wilber also brought in artworks from traveling shows, including work from Surrealist Eugene Berman, California Modernist Dan Lutz, California watercolorist Millard Sheets, and abstract painter Morris Graves, as much for her students as for herself as an artist. All of Wilber’s work modeled behavior, style, discipline, and the life of an artist. In the art department, not just at that time but continuing to present day, art professors are actively encouraged to follow their own creative paths and make art to show in the professional and academic areas of their lives. The following works by Wilber embody her studio practice, but they also stand as an example of her pedagogy. When she worked, she worked at the school with students surrounding her. After she retired, she worked at home, with students surrounding and helping her there. Birds and Trees (Figure 17) (n.d.), a two-color print on paper, invites the viewer to an intimate look at how Wilber saw her world. Modernists were tasked with showing the world in a more immediate and, especially for Wilber, a more personal way. She singles out the various parts of her backyard—the birds and the trees—and again allows the viewer to consider each one individually and, after that, the composition as a whole. In using two colors somewhat offset from each other the eye moves around the images in a continuous narrative: a flock of birds in flight, others on the ground. While the gold- haloed trees may be bare, they tower like sturdy bystanders against the horizon. 102 Figure 17. Jessie Wilber, Birds and Trees, n.d., two-color woodblock print, 17.25 x 22.75 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art. In Huns (Figure 18) (n.d.), Wilber used construction paper to create her print. It must have been the right size and right tone, giving the huns an evening feeling. Wilber tried the same images with black and white. Hungarian partridges commonly flush in coveys and stay in Montana year-round. Wilber elegantly used line to embrace the idea of the hun without the need to include every feather and feature. Again, her perception of a hun, not an anatomically correct bird, speaks to her shorthand descriptions of her environment. In doing this, she allows the viewer to connect with the scene in a more personal way, to fill in their own ideas of huns. 103 Figure 18. Jessie Wilber, Huns (on a pond), 1956, single-color woodblock print on colored paper, 19 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art. The River (Don’t Dam It!) (Figure 19) (1977), a woodblock print, incorporated the chine-colle process of using (in this case) colored paper placed directly on the black ink of the woodblock and then applying the wood blocks to the paper creating areas of color within the print. Wilber’s choice of colors—orange, green and grays—overlap to enrich the image. In the MSU art archives, the woodblock she cut and gouged for this print is available, as is a test print in only black and white, as well as the exquisite color print with the chine-colle technique. The evaluation of all three steps in the process reveals Wilber’s precision as well as her experimental philosophy of trying something to see if it works. In this case, the end result retains the landscape nature of the piece, but 104 additionally, it speaks to the continuous attention to current issues involving dams and rivers. This print commemorated a trip down the Missouri River after she attended the Montana Institute of the Arts festival in Havre in 1954 and today stands as a reminder of the battles fought to preserve free-flowing rivers. 184 Between 1962 and 1963, the Yellowstone River community made their voices heard with a huge outcry as the prospect of damming the free-flowing river got serious. There were meetings and protests, editorials and letters to the newspapers. 185 Wilber, as well as many of her fellow artists, musicians, and writers deeply involved in politics, both local and national, used their art to contribute to the ongoing dialogue. Figure 19. Jessie Wilber, The River (Don’t Dam It!), 1977, woodblock print on paper using Chine-colle technique. 44 x 13 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art. Owls (Figure 20) (n.d.) consists of a five-stage woodblock print. She carved several layers of woodblocks and, using earth tones, she again played with the idea of the flat surface. Within the formal aspects of Wilber’s Owls, she openly acknowledged the two-dimensional surface with a minimalist view of the landscape. Considering the owls 184 Frances Senska, Jessie Wilber, (Missoula: The Arts in Montana, 1977) 110. 185 There’s a local rumor of a rancher walking into a Bureau of Reclamation office with a box of dynamite assuring those in the office he would not hesitate to use the contents of the box on any dam built on the Yellowstone. 105 themselves, of the two owls, one of them stares brazenly and directly ahead, directly at the viewer, challenging the viewer’s gaze, turning the idea of birdwatching on its head. Figure 20. Jessie Wilber, Owls, n.d., five-stage woodblock print, 30 x 15 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art. The Musicians (Figure 21), her 1965 single-color woodblock print on fabric, speaks to the strength of her community and the people in it. The material she utilized, a paper picnic tablecloth, was probably just the right size for her very large print. She created three separate woodblocks, one for each musician, and then printed them onto a single image. She depicted the evenings spent with other artists, dancers, writers, and, of course, musicians, as shown here. These get-togethers, one way in which the Modernists in Montana could share their work and their ideas, became instrumental in forming the kind of community that could stand up against the pushback of the Modernist aesthetic and the lack of the sales. 106 Figure 21. Jessie Wilber, The Musicians, 1965, single-color woodblock print on fabric. 46 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Montana State University School of Art. Making It Personal According to Clement Greenberg’s 1960 essay, Modernist Painting, “The immediate aims of the Modernists remained personal before anything else, and the truth and success of their works remained personal before anything else.”186 Jessie Wilber’s truth reflected Greenberg’s analysis of Modernism: birds, flowers, cats, landscapes, all represented an essential aspect of her own personal environment. Each print she made spoke to the things she loved, her own experiences, and her memories. Wilber said in a 1983 186 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays And Criticism, (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1960), 85. 107 interview, “Everything revolved around what I could see out of my back window.”187 In the Bozeman home she shared with Senska, they created a garden which they tended with care. Their personal joy derived in part from nature, from their garden, and from their work. Wilber’s work evolved but never became derivative. Her experiences with the land, with the isolation of Montana, combined with the community of artists she surrounded herself with, resulted in uniquely fresh and innovative Modernist concepts. By keeping to the personal, she constantly referred to her own environment. By keeping to the aesthetics of the materials at hand she responded to that environment with immediacy. “Both Jessie and Frances were immersed in their garden,” said Tina DeWeese in 2019. “Jessie and Frances always gardened and that beautifully tended space was inspiration for much of Jessie’s imagery in prints and collages.”188 Senska, too, included florals and other foliage in the decorations on her pottery. The two artists’ connections ran deep. Frances Senska wrote about her 1986 Magpies in a Snowstorm (Figure 22), “The subject matter is treated with obvious affection but without sentimentality.”189 Magpies in a Snowstorm, one of the last prints Wilber made before her death, includes over twenty shades of white. She incorporated a technique of sketching to create a spontaneous feeling in a complicated composition. The multicolored print consists of numerous steps, each one adding to the one before to complete a winter scene. A return to the olive greens of earlier prints establishes a dialogue with her past, but her lines are no longer simple. Magpies in a Snowstorm is a return to her silkscreen work, a tactile, unforgiving, and 187 Wilber, (D. W. Walter, Interviewer, October 24, 1985). 188 Tina DeWeese, email correspondence with author, September 23, 2019. 189 McConnell, The Montana Collection, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 1998). 108 work-intensive method. The result is tumultuous, the magpies frantic, the snow relentless. The viewer can almost hear the cacophony of clipped calls, slightly muffled and tamped. No longer concerned with the “isms” of her youth, Wilber ended her body of work completely devoted to the process itself. Connie Lange, a printmaker who helped Wilber in her later years noted: She fed the magpies regularly all winter on a stump in the garden and made many, many drawings of their flight. She enjoyed the way they swooped in, courteously waited their turn, thriftily picked up pieces they dropped in the snow, and was particularly tickled by one who discovered the suet he got was a frozen chunk too big for him manage, and brought it back and picked up another! 190 190 Connie Lange, Annotated List of Prints, Jessie Wilber Retrospective, 1991. 109 Figure 22. Jessie Wilber, Magpies in a Snowstorm, 1986, silkscreen print. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Wilber’s unique voice comes through as recognizable as the caws of the magpies, loud, clear, and distinguishable from any other sound. Her work is as indigenous to the Montana landscape as the birds in her yard. The strength of her work relies on her personal world, told through a lifetime of Montana Modernist aesthetics. Above all, her voice as a teacher and as a mentor echoes across time. Her students who knew her keep her in their hearts as she kept the lessons of Stinchfield and Dozier in hers. Her natural kindness and generosity, as well as her art, were handed down from student to teacher 110 across the generations, taking the personal approach while addressing the tenets of Modernism. Frances Senska: From Her Roots and Back Again Ceramic artist Frances Senska’s (1914–2009) deep interest in local materials contributed to her role as a pioneering Modernist. By drawing on her early years spent in Cameroon, the daughter of missionaries, Senska learned to value place and locality, which she applied in the creation of her gouged and painted pots, as well as the figures she modeled from native Montana clay. Senska’s direct connection to Bauhaus artists Marguerite Wildenhain and László Moholy-Nagy helped bring her studio practice into the Modernist realm. Senska’s father, a medical missionary station doctor, and her mother, a teacher at the mission station in the grasslands of Cameroon, contributed to her sense of community. 191 Her father, also a craftsman, earned his way through medical school as a cabinetmaker and a construction foreman. Senska learned how to use those tools standing by her father’s side. Through her father’s abilities to build and the lifestyle of Cameroon, Senska’s aesthetic formed, specifically her lifelong dedication to functional objects. Everything that was used there was made by the people for the purposes they were going to use it for…you know, big vats and jugs to make the beer, and smaller pots to cook the vegetables, and smaller ones to serve the peanuts…it was all clay work. And it was all for function, a use, a human use, and so that still seems important to me. I’m not the bric-a-brac type. 192 191 In 1929, she moved to Iowa City, Iowa, when her parents were transferred back to the states. She attended the University of Iowa for both her undergraduate and Master’s degrees. 192 Senska, interview. 111 At ten years old, Senska and her family visited Paris, France, on their way back from Africa. At the time, the Exposition de l’Art Moderne, conceived by the French Government, introduced new avant-garde styles in architecture, interior design, furniture, jewelry, and the decorative arts to the rest of the world. The experience stayed with Senka throughout her life. “I really got interested in art and design and what you might call industrial design and so forth at that exposition. So I sort of headed in that direction when I went [to school].”193 She began teaching at Montana State College in 1946, where she met Jessie Wilber. Their relationship deepened as they shared a love for gardening, nature, and an aesthetic derived from the Montana landscape. In a retrospective for Senska, curator Brandon Reintjes noted: [Senska’s and Wilber’s] shared subjects repeated throughout their respective careers, including a series of Siamese cats, floral décor, and garden motifs…[Wilber’s] presence and proficiency with printmaking may have been the determining factor that influenced the entire suite of [Senska’s] lithographs, which emerged between 1946 and 1952.194 The lithographs enabled Senska to explore imagery and color which, at times, showed up on her pots. The etching in the lithographs came through in the sgraffito technique on her YaBaBo pots (Figure 23) (n.d.), a form of decoration made by scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of a contrasting color, reflected both her early life in Cameroon and Wilber’s exploration in printmaking. These pots developed after Senska took a trip back to Africa as an adult in 1966. They bring to mind 193 Senska, Interview. 194 Brandon Reintjes, Frances Senska: A life art, Helena: Holter Museum of Art, 2004. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 112 Cameroon water pots, not only in approximate shape, but in their use of the sgraffito technique. According to an interview conducted for her retrospective at the Holter Museum of Art in 2004, the names of her African-influenced “good luck” pots, named “YaBaBo,” comes from the Cameroonian saying “it will be nine,” which is a good luck chant in the Basa/Bantu culture. Senska stylistically divides the space into nine segments, each depicting part of her natural environment: a turtle, two people in a canoe, birds, etc. 195 Senska’s foray into printmaking became an extension of the scratch-making technique she often used in her ceramic work. The subjects of these prints and lithographs reflected her environment and embodied the African aesthetics that played a part in her own thinking about place. 195 Steve Jackson, Frances Senska: A life in art, (Helena: Holter Museum of Art, 2004), 5–13. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 113 Figure 23. Frances Senska, YaBaBo Pot, n.d., stoneware, 9 x 7 inches diameter. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art. Senska’s use of the sgraffito technique not only connected her to Cameroonian ceramics, but also grew into her existing studio practice. In a video made in her studio in 1978, Senska said, “I am a compulsive decorator. I always draw on the pots, something specific, something mine.”196 This way of seeing reflects Greenberg’s assertion that Modernism stems from the personal. 197 For Senska, the personal encompassed everything she did, from collecting local clay to the designs she gouged onto the sides of her pots. Decoration showed not only in her scored designs as in the YaBaBo pots and on her 1966 Ring Necked Bottle (Figure 24), but in her Chicken Wine Set (Figure 25) (n.d.) where she drew with glazes. In this set, the pitcher took on the guise of a chicken with a beak/spout, simple feather images drawn on the body as well as on the offset mouth of the pitcher continued to portray the chicken anatomy. This way of depicting birds shows another aspect of her work, a sense of play. Her referential drawings of birds and abstract 196 Tim Schwab, Evolving Forms [Motion Picture] (1978). 197 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, 1957–1969, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85. 114 foliage recur as a motif throughout her work. Looking at Senska’s 1979 Branch Bottle Weedpot (Figure 26), the dark outer slip allows her figures of birds and abstracted foliage to stand out through her sgraffito technique. In Cameroon pottery, beer and water containers display complex decorations, mixing a range of ornamental techniques and images. 198 The 14-inch-tall vase with its five spouts on top speaks to a flower or “weed” vessel, animated by the birds and leaves on the body of the pot. Although utilitarian in theory it is doubtful anyone actually put flowers in it. Senska’s appreciation of shape, color, and size of an object for its own sake overrides the utilitarian uses, although those functions played a part in the overall design. 198 Nyame Akuma, “The Ceramic and Society Project,” The Society of African Archeaologists, No. 46, (December 1996), 11–17. 115 Figure 24. Frances Senska, Ring Necked Bottle, 1966, stoneware, 12 x 6 inches. Courtesy of Alfred University/Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, museum purchase, Rodger D. Corsaw Collection/ # 2015.16. 116 Figure 25. Frances Senska, Chicken Wine Set, n.d., stoneware, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Kelly and Roy Crosby. Senska preferred dark slips, which in the case of the YaBaBo pots, gave this body of work an appearance in common with the clay objects of Cameroon. She likened her style of living to the dark slips she worked with by saying, “I prefer brown rice, brown sugar—all things not overly refined. I like elegance only in the sense the scientists use the term, meaning the most economically precise solution to a given problem.”199 The communal activity surrounding pottery speaks to a more intentional connection. Part of an exchange network in Cameroon was also important to Senska. Pottery from one area often showed up in other areas of Cameroon, playing a large role in defining regional identity. These utilitarian objects of daily life, including ritual objects, often remain prestige items in families’ possessions. A pot that originated in one region 199 W. H. Wilson, “Eleven Montana Potters,” Studio Potter, Vol. 8, Issue 1 (1979), 33–46. 117 of the Grasslands easily ended up in another. This exchange compares to the gifting practice of American pottery, where a wine set is given as a wedding present or, more specifically, where Senska’s partridges (see in Figure 13) (various dates) were often given as small presents to celebrate personal achievements. Montana State University History Professor Mary Murphy said she often gave the small ceramic birds as gifts to female colleagues who earned tenure or some other notable achievement. Exchanged or gifted pots may have been a part of Senska’s early life and it may explain her deep connection to the pottery of Cameroon as well as her preference for the dark colored pots she lived with in her youth. Babessi culture (the people of the Grasslands) held potters in high esteem. Babessi pots, often described as the “wombs of women,” were an important component of the community’s life. The bottom of the pot, with its symmetry, balance, and regularity, relates to the center of a person and needs to be done well because it contains the potential for life. 200 In Cameroon, clay is generally collected near the potter’s home. Methods of processing the clay for modeling vary from potter to potter and remain integral for the integrity of the clay itself. Senska’s methods came from her own tests and trials. She demonstrated to students how to process the clay from dug raw earth, making it part of her classroom work. These elements of clay, decoration, utility, and nature embody her African aesthetics combined with a consciousness of the Bauhaus movement. Nothing exists in 200 Silvia Forni, Containers Of Life: Pottery And Social Relations In The Grassfields (Cameroon), Retrieved From Www.Academia.Edu. (Spring, 2007). 118 isolation. Senska’s work in Montana, rooted in Africa, through the schools of the Bauhaus movement add a different aspect to the idea of what it meant to be a potter in Montana. Her combined background and education, practice and pedagogy, informed her aesthetic. As artist and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius stated, “Every piece of work is a manifestation of our innermost selves,”201 clearly a reference to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic work as well, most specifically the Ego. As Gropius states when speaking of the analysis of the design process: The objective of all creative effort in the visual arts is to give form to space…but what is space, how can it be understood and given a form?…Although we may achieve an awareness of the infinite we can give form to space only with finite means. We become aware of space through our undivided Ego, through the simultaneous activity of soul, mind and body. 202 201 Wood, Art in Theory, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992), 311. 202 Wood, Art. 119 Figure 26. Frances Senska, Branch Bottle Weed Pot, 1979, stoneware, 14 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the Senska/Wilber Collection. 120 A close look at Senska’s ceramic work reveals the fundamental characteristics of her materials, the utilitarian forms (and non-utilitarian forms) as well as processes that reflect her personal perspective. Inherent in her work, as well as her teaching, is the Bauhaus theory that a basic, craft-based training was a prerequisite to being an artist. A producer of artistic work had to know everything about its production. For Senska, this philosophy, reflected in her collection and processing of her own clay, became the common thread between African potters and her Bauhaus beliefs. While Senska never called herself a Bauhaus artist, the movement clearly impacted her work. 203 Making Precedes Matching The culmination of Senska’s work firmly positions her as an important transitional artist whose art forms a bridge between American studio ceramics of 1940– 1950 and contemporary ceramic sculpture. 204 A modernist relationship to nature, reflective of its subject rather than naturalistic detail, characterizes Senska’s work. For example, in her chicken form she referenced the natural structure of a chicken, but did not describe it. The art historian Ernest Gombrich wrote about the idea of “making precedes matching,” which is shown through Senska’s bird imagery that stands in as a summation of her own idea of a bird, not depicted by the actual bird’s anatomy. Gombrich’s account of the art of painting as the consideration and condition of perception takes into account not only the look of things but the hidden 203 Dean and Geraldine Schwarz, Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus: An Eye Witness Anthology, (Decora: South Bear Press, 2007). 204 Thomas Folk, “Frances Senska: Studio Potter”, American Ceramics, Volume 8, Issue 2, (1990), 34–39. 121 essence of things. Senska’s process, while incorporating the utilitarian side of ceramics also feels like an intuitive process expressed through form and composition. 205 Senska’s ability to portray several strands of artistic lineage speaks to her ability to find common threads in her work and in her life. It can be traced back to the underlying principle of problem-solving. This she does by taking what she needs from each of her mentors, starting with Maholy-Nagy. Senska, quoted from Vision in Motion, repeats a nonsensical tongue twister in the Basa dialect of Cameroon: “Koki umbale gogo/tenge kule milondo/kokroko miyombroko/mbondo tos.”206 The idea of her knowing this and sharing it reveals Senska’s connection to both Cameroon and the teachings of Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy uses this kind of tongue twister word play to put a tic in the ear of the artist, to open the artist up to other kinds of inspiration and encourage a kind of sound abstraction that leads to outside-the-box creativity. Senska said she often listened to African music in her studio while she worked, Moholy-Nagy’s “tic in the ear” influencing her practice. 207 Senska’s collage work, published in Vision in Motion, depicts a visual demonstration of art in a solution-based form. 208 Senska said her early instructors stayed with her, especially in her approach to clay. “It was important then to learn to use the technology and the materials which were available to solve the problem—and that seems even more valid today.”209 While Moholy-Nagy brought the ideas of function and form, as well as creative ways to solve 205 Ernest Gombrich, Art and Illusion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 186. 206 Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 327. Senska notes this was a rhyme and made up of nonsense words. 207 KUSM-TV, Art All the Time, 1997. 208 Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 131, Fig. 173 a, b. 209 Wilson, Eleven Potters, 33-46. 122 problems through intuition instead of planning. In Moholy-Nagy’s own words, “The problem of our generation is to bring the intellectual and emotional, the social, and technological components into balanced play; to learn to see and feel them in handling human affairs, a rigidly stifling biological and social impulse; a memorized, not a lived life.”210 Yet another teacher was instrumental in introducing Senska to the life of a potter. Marguerite Wildenhain believed that the best teacher was nature itself, but a ceramic artist needed a strong foundation in technique. Looking at Senska’s 1950 Surf Fishers (Figure 27) and Wildenhain’s Tall Footed Vase (Figure 28) (n.d.), the impact of Wildenhain’s work becomes clear. Wildenhain, the Bauhaus-trained potter who taught at Pond Farm, promoted a community-based potter’s school in Gurneyville, California, where, in 1950, Senska spent a summer under her tutelage. 211 Wildenhain said in the book, The Invisible Core, “Pond Farm is not a ‘school’ it is actually a way of life.”212 This kind of atmosphere, as well as the back-to-land philosophies of Pond Farm, contributed to Senska’s overall teaching and life style. According to Senska, Wildenhain’s lessons stayed with her throughout her teaching career. “Marguerite wasn’t into high-tech at all, it was just sort of a shed with some wheels and there was clay and we mixed our clay, and made our things and fired them. It was the way she’d been taught.”213 210 Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 12. 211 Dean Schwarz, Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus: An Eye Witness Anthology, (Decorah: South Bear Press, 2007). 212 Sonoma County Museum, Marguerite Wildenhain: Bauhaus to Pond Farm, Educator Guide, (Santa Rosa, California: Sonoma Country Museum, exhibition ran January 20-April 15, 2007). 213 Senska, interview. 123 Figure 27. Frances Senska, Surf Figures (Pond Farm Vase), 1950, light stoneware, 7 7/8 x 4 3/8 inches. Courtesy of the Senska/Wilber Collection. 124 Figure 28. Marguerite Wildenhain, Tall Footed Vase, n.d. Courtesy of the Luther Fine Arts Museum. Senska recalled how different Wildenhain was from Grotell. [Grotell’s] students were just as devoted to her, or more so, than [Wildenhain]’s students, but it was a completely different thing, because she wasn’t there. [Wildenhain] was there all the time and she was giving you instruction and she was telling you stories about this, that, and the other thing, if it would help you out and you know, she was just a teacher from the word go. 214 Comparing Wildenhain’s Three Necked Vase to Senska’s Branch Bottle Weedpot, its resemblance comes through in design and coloration. According to ceramic artist and Professor at Montana State University Josh DeWeese, who knew Senska, Wildenhain remained an important figure to Senska throughout her life. Once at Montana State College Senska fully appreciated the land and the environment where she lived and worked. The art department, called the Department of 214 Senska, interview. 125 Applied Art, was part of the Home Economics curriculum and not split off to form its own department. At the time, Senska said, “I started teaching ceramics with the merest little scrap of knowledge. I had had just two quarters of ceramics when I started teaching. I just learned it right along with the class.”215 Senska cleaned out an old storage room in the basement of Herrick Hall where she and her students built a ceramics studio, which included several small electric kilns, and a few kick wheels she bought with a grant of $300 from the department. “I managed to change the curriculum,” Senska said. “They hadn’t tumbled to the fact that ceramics was going to be a big deal.” 216 Due to the purpose-built spaces, the culture of ceramic studio art (as well as printmaking) is more communal than a painting studio. 217 Because of the cost of building such spaces, sharing it becomes a necessity. In additional to the convivial atmosphere of working together, Senska added field trips with her students to collect clay and process it. The clay, dug from a railroad line cut near Lewistown where an outcropping of the Kootenai formation lays exposed to the elements, offered up some of the best stoneware available in the state, according to Josh DeWeese, who, in later years, once accompanied Senska on the trip. She also found, along with Voulkos, a closer source in Bear Canyon, where she took students. One of Senska’s favorite stories about Voulkos is how he stood guard beside a filthy, mud-covered, pickup truck parked on Bozeman’s Main Street until the owner returned. “’Where did you get stuck?’ he demanded, 215 Jackson, Frances Senska: A Biography, 2004. 216 Jackson, Frances Senska: A Biography, 2004. 217 Jenni Sorkin, “Craft-in-Residence”, The Open Studio Network (academia.edu, 2013), 25–29. 126 intrigued by the clots of good red clay clinging to the vehicle. And so Peter discovered Bear Canyon clay.”218 For Senska, there was no question of ordering clay, even one of her glazes, her Trail Creek Glaze, came from a nearby drainage, while others came from all over the state. Her deep connection to the land grew to become as important as the forms she used to create the vessels and objects. For Senska, digging the clay and processing it for use in the studio embodied the experience of being a potter. It contributed to developing an awareness of surface and materials. It also helped to create a tighter knit ceramic community, as she invited her students to experiment alongside her in the studio. Senska’s life as a potter and her life as a teacher often intertwined. In a video of her taken in her studio she said, “You have to be patient when you're dealing with some inanimate objects. You can't hurry a pot…you have to coax it and assist it and direct it where you want it to go…and if you make a sudden move, the pot just goes.”219 She likened pots to people and by extension revealed her attitude toward her students. “What you're doing is passing on what you have gotten to someone else so that they can use it. Sometimes they use it in very original ways, not ways you had anticipated—but which appeal to you.”220 A 1978 video of Senska shows her at the potter’s wheel, disk spinning as she sits with her elbows tight to her sides. Her hands cradle a solid block of clay as she presses down on it. “I’m a maker. I make things with my hands,” she says, her voice light and 218 Marjorie Smith, “Frances Senska” Ceramics Monthly, September 2002, 50-53. 219 KUSM-TV, All Art All the Time, 1997 220 KUSM-TV, All Art All the Time, 1997. 127 smooth. 221 “Pottery is something you can do yourself, from collecting the clay to forming it, to [choosing] the glazes and firing it…the whole works.” She impels the clay downward as her fingers apply pressure coaxing a shape upward, pulling gently. “There’s a sympathy, an empathy for the natural. What [the clay] wants to do and it does what you want it to do.” One hand reaches deep inside the nascent vessel while the other matches it on the outside, pinching, shaping, almost without effort, as a spout forms. As she lays her vessels and sculptures—bowls, pitchers, small partridges—into the kiln, like a mother putting a near-sleeping child to bed, she closes the lid on the electric oven. “Glazing is your last choice and you have to make that decision, and that’s hard. I’m a compulsive decorator—that may be part of the African influence. In Cameroun I don’t think I ever saw an undecorated pot. I always draw on the pots…make it something special, something mine.”222 Upon opening the kiln, a larger one, she turns to her notebooks to make a notation of the glaze finishes, the firing temperatures, and times. “[Pottery] shows an actual living person…you can reach out and shake hands with it and know there was someone else who had their hands on it, too.”223 Senska’s work embodies the Montana Modernist aesthetic from its reflection of the land in the clay and glazes she made, to her playful partridges and wine sets. Her ability to place making before matching incorporates Gombrich’s notion of what makes Modernism more than a mimetic practice to recreate the world. Instead her work, as part of the Montana Modernists, showed students how to express themselves in ways that did not imitate the landscape but instead revealed it in a more personal way. 221 Evolving Forms, Schwab, 1978. 222 Evolving Forms, Schwab, 1978. 223 Evolving Forms, Schwab, 1978. 128 Senska’s work and life crossed the frontiers of ceramics. She learned from those who taught her how to live the life of an artist and how to become a teacher. Senska passed both of those qualities down through the generations of ceramic artists that followed her. The life she instilled into her ceramics speaks to the culture of Cameroonian exchange traditions as well as the Modernist attention to materials. A potter’s life may seem simple, but the strands that create an artist are not. Each piece Senska made holds tight to the experiences of her life: her childhood in Africa, the teachings of the Bauhaus’s form and function, Wildenhain’s demands for mastering the technique, and her own years of generosity through teaching. For Senska, even if she never made a dime from her art, her happiness derived from a life with her hands in clay. From Bricks to Ceramic Arts: Archie Bray and Other Characters Although the Archie Bray Foundation did not begin as a school, it served as another sort of learning institution stemming from the work done at MSC. An extension of both the power of community and the strengths of the teachers connected to the foundation, the Archie Bray’s origin story contains both legend and truth. Archie Bray, Branson Stevenson, Henry and Pete Meloy, Sister Mary Trinitas Morin, Frances Senska, and Jessie Wilber all had a hand in turning the dying brick manufacturing business into a world-renowned incubator for ceramic artists. The Archie Bray Foundation became a significant part of Montana’s artistic legacy, bringing in ceramic artists from the world over, helping to change the paradigm for ceramics. 129 The Archie Bray Foundation began after the Great Depression and Helena’s three earthquakes in 1935, the largest of which registered a 6.3 magnitude, contributed to the shrinking brick business in Helena. 224 After World War II, with the advent of new technologies for building structures, brick manufacturing fell on even harder times. During this time, the upward surge in American-made ceramics, helped by the scarcity of pottery and porcelain from China, Korea, and Japan due to the devastation of the war on those countries, created a viable ceramic market. For Bray, this became an opportunity to use the brick yard and to encourage art in Helena. According to Senska, happenstance played a large role in the creation of the Archie Bray Foundation. Pete Meloy and Branson [Stevenson] and Archie were all good friends because Archie ran the Community Concert and local theater…they were all interested in the same thing. Then came along Hank [Meloy] who would come down and visit [Montana State College], and sort of got acquainted with Pete [Voulkos] and Rudy [Autio], and the other students, and we had a nephew and niece of Pete Meloy’s here…the way it all got pulled together and started was the summer between Pete and Rudy’s two years in graduate school, they came out here looking for a place to have a studio.”225 The short stride from brickyard to ceramic artist incubator happened when Voulkos and Autio teamed up to work at the Bray and create art there, when not working on brick business. Author Janet Koplos states: Rudy Autio and Peter Voulkos were brothers in spirit in the early days of the Bray, although their careers diverged strikingly. They were both Montana boys, both sons of immigrants, both attended Montana State College (now University), both were in the art department, where they 224 People no longer trusted a brick-built home, as the mortar crumbles under the stress of an earthquake. 225 Senska, interview. 130 discovered clay with Frances Senska, and together they became the first artists in residence at the Bray.”226 During that summer of 1951, Senska and Wilber brought Voulkos and Autio to Helena to meet Archie Bray. Once Senska’s group arrived in Helena, Pete Meloy took Voulkos and Autio out to the brickyard. As long as they “nipped brick” to help with the brick business, Autio and Voulkos could use the studio at the brickyard as needed. They had all night to work in the drying shed where there was a lot of room, and they had all the clay they wanted…then they went back to their graduate schools and finished up their degrees and came back out to a job at the Bray and you know, sort of became the first directors there.”227 That summer, Senska and Wilber made several trips to Helena to help lay brick for the pottery. She also noted that “so many amateurs laid brick for those walls, it’s a wonder they remain standing.”228 The idea was to sell the pottery made at the brickyard to help fund the artistic endeavor. But the artists disagreed with the factory-mentality of stamping everything with the Archie Bray Foundation mark, ABF, and wanted their own work to have their own marks. Regardless of these differences, the Archie Bray Foundation opened its doors on October 13, 1951. Viola Lindley, a Helena resident, wrote in 1951: The Foundation is the answer to the lifelong dream of Bray, who as a boy tried to construct a potter’s wheel—although he had never seen one—a dream that persisted even after he worked his way through Ohio State College to receive a degree as a graduate ceramicist and after he had traveled in the Midwest and had seen the small man-made wheels driven by waterfalls. 229 226 Rick Newby, Chere Juisto, Patricia Failing, Janet Koplos A Ceramic Continuum, (Helena: Holter Museum of Art, 2001) 64. 227 Senska interview. 228 Jackson, Frances Senska: A biography. 229 H.G. Merriam, The Arts in Montana, (Missoula: Mountain Press Publishing, 1977) 68. 131 But the Bray Foundation also answered Branson Stevenson’s dreams. Both Bray and Stevenson envisioned the pottery, beginning in 1947, as a place for people to “leave the cares of the day outside the pottery while they examined the potter’s work or watched the throwing of pots,” as Stevenson once said.230 Bray strove to create a place of art for everyone. Also in 1947, Stevenson took a ceramics class from Sister Mary Trinitas Marin from the College of Great Falls. Sister Trinitas was the art department head. She and Stevenson bonded over the importance of art in people’s lives. For Trinitas, as for Stevenson, experimentation played a big role in their work. Stevenson tried using native Montana minerals for his glazes and created new ways to decorate his pots. He worked for the Socony Vacuum Oil Company alongside his brothers, but in his heart he lived for art. While maintaining his full time job as district manager for the oil company, he served as Vice Chairman for the American Artist Professional League. 231 Former Yellowstone Art Museum director Terry Melton remembered Stevenson as “suave and elegantly complimentary” when he was a visiting artist at the College of Great Falls. He wowed the nuns, of course, with his savoir-faire he slid his way into the librarian’s best graces and convinced her that the unprinted fly leaves in these very old books would be wonderful to print on. Elegant papers they were. So, the nuns with razor blades extracted certain front and back leaves, and they would present them to Branson. 232 230 Herbert C. Anderson, The Life, the Times, and the Art of Branson Graves Stevenson, (Great Falls: Janher Publishing, 1979) 231 Anderson, The Life, the Times. 232 Terry Melton, Personal Notes, March 29, 2019. 132 Melton noted that many of the papers bore watermarks. “It’s always delighted me to think of archivists and historians in years to come, examining a contemporary print of Branson’s on a paper with a watermark of the eighteenth or nineteenth century.”233 In 1952, Branson Stevenson convinced world-famous potters Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, and Soetsu Yanagi to come to Montana. He asked Time magazine to put him in touch with Leach after reading an article in 1950. Stevenson had invented a new kind of emulsion wax that “can be readily and easily brushed on the cold pot without hardening immediately.” 234That wax resist method caught on and changed the way potters around the world applied their glazes. When he first met with Leach in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1950, to convince him to visit the Bray Foundation, Stevenson introduced Leach to his wax resist. Leach was delighted with its use in place of the cumbersome and fire- hazardous melted wax method and, of course, found it ideally suited to brush decoration because it applied fluidly without congealing, just like painting with oil or water color, unlike the melted wax, which congealed the moment the hot fluid contracted the cold pot. 235 Impressed by Stevenson’s wax resist method, the famous potters were convinced to make a two-week stop in Montana. After visiting the Bray, Leach, Hamada, and Yanagi took Stevenson’s wax resist and introduced it in Japan.236 The workshops they conducted put the Archie Bray Foundation on the world map. 233 Melton, Personal Notes. 234 Rick Newby, Chere Juisto, Patricia Failing, Janet Koplos, A Ceramic Continuum, (Helena: Holter Museum of Art, 2001) 26-28. 235 Newby, Juisto, Failing, Koplos, A Ceramic Continuum, 27. 236 Merriam, The Arts in Montana, 144. 133 By following the various strands of Modernism, and by taking a look at the combination of aesthetics that form the Montana Modernists, stemming back to Cezanne himself, the lineage of these artists aligns with their pedagogy. From the egalitarian nature of their teaching style and the atmosphere of learning in the classroom, they modeled a behavior conducive to forming bonds with their students. Yet they also took on the mantel of creating an avenue for Montanans to see themselves in the their work. Through Wilber’s prints and paintings and Senska’s playful pottery inspired by her African roots, they invite people to see themselves as gardeners, as women, and as thinkers. As art professors and women they also modeled a professional behavior not prevalent in the 1940s. Women in Montana may have been tough, but few taught art at the college level. This became another way for women to see themselves, not only in the art but in the lives of these artists. 134 SECTION THREE: COMMUNITY Reading culture as text is, in many very ordinary respects, what each of us does every day in order to live in the world. Anne Norton 237 Patronage, Art Movements, and the G. I. Bill From the Renaissance forward, patronage played a large role in the survival and recognition of artists. Historically, patronage opened possibilities for artists to explore their own voices and mediums without worry of survival as long as the work did not stray too far from the patron’s taste and requests. Patronage in the sense of financial stability offers a metaphor for the financial security delivered by colleges after World War II. The G.I. Bill sent a flood of students to college, including art students. Colleges needed teachers to work in the expanding academia. This new influx provided financial security for artist-teachers, if not directly for their art, it gave them a paycheck, allowing them the freedom to create art without worrying about a steady income. Even before the G.I. Bill, another federal initiative, at the peak of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the Federal Art Project as part of a national work relief program. The Federal Art Project, in 1935, under the authority of the Works Progress Administration, instituted the idea that artists produced work, like the bricklayer or the shoemaker. By putting artists to work, the program redefined the role of the artist in American society. It also offered artists a way to gain the financial stability of a patron. The government paid the artists and the artists produced work for cities or 237 Anne Norton, 95 Theses on Politics, Culture & Method, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 23. 135 towns. After the war, the G. I. Bill impacted the Modernist art movement in a similar way with a similar effect, without direct payment to artists for their art. Instead, the G. I. Bill, by offering government-paid tuition, encouraged a burgeoning veteran population to enroll in colleges. In turn, this produced the need for more college teachers, especially in areas where before the war there were few. Through the hiring of artists with Masters of Fine Arts diplomas (the terminal degree for art) they found steady work, which in turn enabled artists to continue their exploration of Modernism. While they taught they also made work, explored genres, and themselves learned through visiting artists. In an extended way, the college took on the role of patron. The Democratization of Art Support for art in America prior to 1930 fell into the purview of the social elite. 238 The Federal Art Project shuffled the position of artists and art by making it more accessible to the population as a whole. Through the employment of artists tasked with creating art for public buildings, including post offices where all classes could be exposed to art on a regular basis, the idea of viewing art became an egalitarian experience, not confined to private residences or museums. The US Treasury’s Section of Fine Arts hired or commissioned artists to paint murals for Post Offices across the country. In Montana, it took until 1937 for murals to be funded. The state’s the sole congressman, Jerry O’Connell, felt Montana had been neglected in the process and so went about procuring funding public art in the state. The Montana jury, including Montana State College art department chair, Olga Ross Hannon, met in Dillon where they decided upon the artists. 238 Joan Saab, For the Millions, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) 15. 136 In the end, six post offices were awarded their own murals: Billings, Deer Lodge, Dillon, Glasgow, Hamilton, and Sidney. Most of the art depicted not only a historical perspective, but tied the mural to the places in which they were displayed. 239 While the murals may not have furthered the idea of Modernism—it was too early for that—they did expose people to public art, adding to that on display in churches, bars, and courthouses. In New York, the Federal Art Project set up an “art caravan” that carried a complete art exhibit, touring communities around the state. In New York City, exhibits spontaneously set up in alleys drew the public’s interest in art. Artists around the country visited schools and guided the creation of student art projects. “By recognizing the American artist as a legitimate worker, Federal Art Project programs challenged the idea of art as a sacred object and the notion of the artist as a social outsider,” art historian Joan Saab states. 240 The Federal Art Project operated from August 1935 until June 1943, costing 35 million dollars and employing over five thousand artists. According to art historian Irving Sandler, the FAP played a vital role in the development of a purely American art, in part because it was paying artists to work, not only on public art but on their individual art. As part of the FAP, in communities where many artists were employed, artists met once a week to organize the work for the upcoming period. In New York City, this enabled the New York School artists to collaborate. Many met after work to discuss their direction, visiting the Museum of Modern Art, and critiquing each other’s work in relation to the work shown at the museum. As Sandler said: 239 Elizabeth Mentzer. "Made in Montana: Montana's Post Office Murals", Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 53, no. 3 (2003) 44–53. http://www.jstor.org.proxybz.lib.montana.edu/stable/4520536 240 Joan Saab, For the Millions, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) 17. 137 A by-product of the Project experience, and that which proved its most lasting legacy, was the art community it gave rise to, particularly in New York. Unlike earlier American artists, who tended to be loners, the WPA employees were thrown together of necessity. Daily meetings on the job encouraged contacts that cut across aesthetic positions and produced a constant exchange of ideas, generating a sense of community similar to that in the Paris cafes. 241 Just as the WPA/FAP contributed to the formation of art communities in New York City, for example that of the Abstract Expressionists in the pre-war 1930s and 1940s, the G. I. Bill’s combined effects on student enrollment paved the way for the formation of Montana Modernists in the postwar years. After World War II, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G. I. Bill, enabled veterans to get an education. The Bill paid tuition and living expenses while going to college, high school, or a vocational school. In the years following the end of the war, land-grant universities across the country saw a significant increase in enrollment due to the attendance by veterans. While the G. I. Bill did not provide money for art projects, per se, it did enable soldiers to enter colleges in order obtain art degrees, which required artists to teach them. Art education historian Frederick M. Logan found, in the aftermath of World War II, veterans returned to college in droves. “Art departments and art education areas expanded overnite (sic) and never did settle back down to the enrollments of 1945.”242 He stated colleges where only two or three people had taught a few art classes suddenly began to offer art degrees, including the new expanded areas of Masters of Fine Art (MFA) degrees as well as Masters of Art degrees. He linked the benefits of the G. I. Bill 241 Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970) 7. 242 Frederick M. Logan, Up Date '75, Growth in American Art Education, Studies in Art Education (1975), 17:1, 7–16, DOI: 10.1080/00393541.1975.11651359 138 to the growth in the number of art associations for art teachers, including those of high schools, and the creation of the National Art Education Association in 1950. For artists, an MFA opened up the job market for teaching, which guaranteed artists a salary while they worked on their own art while teaching. In Montana, the consequences of the G. I. Bill also included attracting young artists to teach art. These artists came not only from Montana, but from other areas where modern art and avant- garde thought influenced their own work as well as their teaching style. In 1946, the year the G. I. Bill went into effect, Montana State College found itself bursting at its seams. It also saw an increase in enrollment in the art school, as did many other land-grant universities around the country. Eastern Montana College, Billings, began its Fine Arts Department in 1950 and, in 1967–68, the Department of Fine Arts moved to the Division of Humanities where a student could major in art. 243 The New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts instituted its art department during the 1949–50 academic year. 244 Colorado State University’s art department developed fully in 1950.245 Montana State College’s art department originally fell under the Division of Household and Industrial Arts with courses available to graduate students beginning in 1939, but those courses were suspended due to the war and did not reopen until 1946. 246 Not every college became the seed for a new art movement. The chemistry between the incoming professors needed to be one of camaraderie, inclusivity, and 243 Eastern Montana College of Education Bulletin, 1949–50. 244 New Mexico State College, College Record, 1949–50. 245 Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College, General Home Economics, Child Development, Home Management and Family Economics, Occupational Therapy and Related Art, Textiles, and Clothing Course catalog, 1940–1950. 246 Montana State College Course Catalogs 1939–41, 1941–43, 1944–45, 1946–47, 1949–50. 139 sharing in order to create an atmosphere where students and teachers felt a kinship through their self-expression and were confident enough to expose themselves to new ideas and experiments in style. It also helped when the Bauhaus philosophy of combined disciplines enabled artists to work together, thus encouraging the growth of new ideas. MSC expanded its roster of art teachers hiring Frances Senska and Robert DeWeese. Robert DeWeese came to MSC accompanied by his wife Gennie DeWeese, who also taught as an adjunct as needed. Isabelle Johnson had begun teaching at Eastern Montana College in 1949. Jessie Wilber came to Montana in 1941 and became instrumental in the expansion of the art program at MSC. This atmosphere of new voices and new ideas became fertile ground for the development of Modernism in Montana. 247 The New Deal legislated programs that put artists to work and, in so doing, allowed them to continue working on their own artwork, and led to the Abstract Expressionist movement, or the New York School. In a like manner, the G. I. Bill expanded art education . Both federal initiatives helped form the foundation for a new art movement in rural areas of the country, like Billings and Bozeman. Community: Strength in Numbers Up until the 1940s, the isolation of Montana contributed to the abutment placed before Modernism, keeping the status quo of illustrative nostalgic Western imagery in art. 247 According to Martha Andrews at New Mexico State University, correspondence with the author, “The New Mexico State University Archivist, suggested that art classes began quite early, but Hiram Hadley, the first NMSU president, conceived a dislike for the woman teaching them, fired her, and then later resumed them as a means of attracting female students. She indicated that the war years were quiet at NMSU, with returning students and the GI bill rapidly expanding the population and curriculum at their ending.” November 18, 2018. 140 But after 1949, the awareness of artists’ isolation from the art world became a factor in creating art communities. Knowing their small numbers did not deter the artists from seeking each other out, but formed the opposite effect: it united them. Due to the fact of their isolation they intentionally sought out other like-minded artists, no matter how far flung. The Modernists in postwar Montana fought against the illustrative and romanticized Western paintings typical in the Rocky Mountain region. To keep to the tenets of Wilber’s “experiment, experiment, experiment” philosophy meant rejecting the dominant cultural stereotypes as well as much hoped for commercial success. Just as teaching offered these artists the monetary security of a steady art patron, an “art colony” climate offered by a community of artists, dancers, musicians, and dramatists drew on each other’s commitment to push back against the prevailing conservative meta-narrative of the West. The community, especially at Montana State College, played the role of an art colony in that artists, musicians, dancers, and writers could interact, supporting each other’s forays into the edges of modern art. No local art market existed at that time.248 In solidarity and support of each other’s work, trade between artists became the norm. The act of bartering for art served an important purpose: it validated their continued work and helped to create a bond between the artists. These factors allowed Modernism a foothold in Bozeman and Billings as well as in other parts of the state. 248 In the late 1960s, Ray Campeau and Rand Honadel opened the Ketterer Art Center in Bozeman. The Center offered classes and occasionally held art shows. 141 Teachers such as Wilber, Senska, DeWeese, and Johnson added another dimension to the aspect of community. Each one encouraged their students to create expressive art and supported their art by inviting them to show their work to the public and to each other. Moreover, they worked together to form a fertile artistic environment unique to that place and time. Together they created a paradigm in which an art movement could thrive, despite the fact that there was no patronage or market for their work. Eventually this community encompassed both students and other artists cropping up around Montana. Artist and teacher Ray Campeau noted, “Those were the people that were the glue that kept the arts alive in the state. There became a beauty [to it]— everybody in the arts was one big family.”249 Due to the scarcity of art galleries in Montana, the only venues where Modernist art showed were directly connected to Montana Institute of the Arts or on the campus of MSC. 250 “The leaders were the teachers, the people in higher education, and they would exhibit too, not just the students…[everyone] became part of it. They’d give lectures, give demonstrations, share their beauty.”251 Campeau, who was closest to Senska and Wilber, spoke of them as tough and loving. He also described the kind of nurturing community created by all of them allowed their students to feel safe enough to explore new ways of expressing themselves. 249 Campeau, interview. 250 The MIA was the Montana Institute of the Arts, an organization founded in 1948. It issued a magazine on a quarterly basis. Both Frances Senska and Jessie Wilber served as board members. 251 Campeau, interview. 142 Campeau described the time he bought his first painting, while still a student: Jessie Wilber’s portrait of the DeWeese family. “[My wife] Kay and I had an agreement that anything we made in art we’d spend in art. During the first student show at Herrick Hall somebody bought a few of my lithographs.”252 He continued, “Jessie painted a painting of the DeWeese kids and Kay and I fell in love with it, but we couldn’t afford it. We saw it in a couple of shows, one of the MIA shows, and we wished we could have had it.” Campeau and his wife left their kids in Bozeman one year and hitchhiked to see the World’s Fair in Seattle. “And there was Jessie’s painting again, in the Northwest Pavilion, and we thought, oh god we really want that painting. Everywhere we went that painting would appear.” He remembered the day he came running home and told his wife he had sold a couple of those prints. “Then I had to find the phone to call Jessie and tell her I could make a down payment on that painting.” When Wilber answered the phone she told Campeau she had just sold the painting…to his wife! “We both made the same decision only she got to it before I did. That’s the way we felt about both Jessie and Frances. I would have run through a wall if they told me I could run through a wall.”253 The idea that Campeau, still a student without much money, spent his savings on a painting whose subject is Robert and Gennie DeWeese’s two children, speaks to the power of the painting as well as the strength of community. To hang a painting of someone else’s children in their home reflects the closeness of the artists. Campeau recalled the time in his life when he and his wife struggled to make ends meet. “We had this association with teachers that a lot of people don’t have anymore. They helped us. 252 Campeau, interview. 253 Campeau, interview. 143 Not just with our art, but with our lives.”254 Senska and Wilber actually lent the Campeaus the down payment on their Bozeman home. “Frances and Jessie knew we were going to get [the house] before we did. I was going crazy working on my masters. I bought that place for $9,000 but I didn’t have $9,000. I asked them if I could get a loan and they said, ‘certainly.’”255 Campeau paid them back almost immediately, but the situation had needed instant action and without that loan, the Campeaus would have lost the house. Frances and Jessie were the catalyst for so many things happening. It’s like the Archie Bray Foundation, Frances was one of the founding members there. They had this connection all through the state with people; they were an inspiration, not just teachers, and they did their own work. 256 Senska, Wilber, and the DeWeeses all understood their role in creating a strong art community. “They said ‘I’m a teacher, an instructor at the university and I instruct art and I make art,’ but they knew how to work with people. There are a lot of people doing art out there because of them.”257 When Robert DeWeese applied for the position of art professor at Montana State College, he corresponded first with Cyril Conrad, Head of the Department of Applied Art, and later with Jessie Wilber. Over the course of three months, as DeWeese considered the position, he inquired about the housing situation, the weather conditions in Montana, and his expected teaching load. The letters, beginning June 4, 1949, started with DeWeese’s qualifications and ended August 19, 1949, with his resignation at the Texas Technological College, Lubbock. They reveal an open back and forth between 254 Campeau, interview 255 Campeau, interview 256 Campeau, interview 257 Campeau, interview 144 DeWeese and Wilber. DeWeese worried about an array of logistics from moving his family from Texas to Montana in an old car, to the precarious nature of owning a gas stove and bringing it with them if gas hook ups were available. Wilber warned DeWeese about living on the main floor of the student housing units (very cold in winter), the high cost of good tires in Bozeman, and the “strip-house” apartments in the Veteran’s Village: “There might possibly be some other apartment or house in town…my students are all trying to keep their ears to the ground too.”258 In July 1949, a Western Union telegram from DeWeese to Montana State College stated, “Happy to accept offer of position,” followed by a telegram from Wilber acknowledging his acceptance. Wilber then sent him a “hurrah” letter where she stated that she and “Miss Senska had difficulty wording the telegram to you this morning because what we really wanted to say was ‘Three Cheers!’ I am so glad you decided to come to Bozeman and I hope that it will turn out to be a fortunate decision for you.”259 Wilber, in subsequent letters, reported that she had called a car dealership, got a quote on good tires, and included a newspaper article warning them about ticks and Rocky Mountain Fever. She then told DeWeese, “You won’t have to go over many mountains getting here—in fact I believe the only really high grade is the last 25 miles, and if necessary you can call us up from Livingston and we will come over and pull you over the hill.”260 Preparing themselves for the worst, the DeWeeses inquired about the availability of antifreeze, surplus furniture, and warm coats. Again, Wilber offered her services in getting the DeWeeses settled and answered any questions large and small. The 258 Jessie Wilber, letter dated July 14, 1949. DeWeese Family Archives. 259 Jessie Wilber/Robert DeWeese correspondence, July 1–14, 1949. DeWeese Family Archives. 260 Jessie Wilber/Robert DeWeese correspondence, July 1–14, 1949. DeWeese Family Archives. 145 correspondence reveals the gentle beginnings of what would become a lifelong friendship, but more than that, they offer insight into Wilber’s generosity of spirit and the DeWeeses’ acceptance of an unknown future. Once ensconced at MSC, the DeWeeses quickly found themselves with likeminded artists and creatives. They soon became central figures in the circle of artist gatherings. Every artist in the state would show up at the DeWeeses’, especially at the Fourth of July parties at their Cottonwood Canyon home. Joel Jahnke, hired in 1976, recalled, “I remember pockets of artists talking about what they were doing, sharing, not their art so much, but their love of each other. I don’t think there was a standard artist in the group, they were all of the avant-garde.”261 Jahnke, who taught theater design and later spent 36 years as artistic director for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, came to the group before he realized what he was getting into. Ben Tone, Charlie Payne, the DeWeeses, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Ken and Mary (Tata) Bryson got together weekly. They were always doing some wacky bohemian thing: they would read a play together, discuss some philosopher, some artist. And it became a drunken brawl, but it always started with a theme. I think really, in those moments, they were globally shaping art in this valley and then that ultimately spread throughout Montana and became huge. 262 Added to that group were a few students, but mostly people from the university. “But then Bill Stockton would show up, and all these people—whoever was in Montana around the Fourth would show up. It was so much fun to be a part of that wackiness.”263 Tone, a good friend of the DeWeeses, who ran the theater department at the time, brought 261 Joel Jahnke, in-person interview with author, June 7, 2019. Transcripts in possession of author. 262 Jahnke, interview. 263 Jahnke, interview. 146 Jahnke into the group. “Ben was always lighting off fireworks with the children. He would create toys, he was a woodworker, and he’d created a cannon with a cork in the end. You’d put a firecracker in one end and it shoot the cork out and spend most of the day trying to find the cork.”264 Jahnke immediately felt a part of their community. “It was beyond belief.” He recalled one Fourth of July party when the actor Bill Pullman attended. “All the kids had decided to do a little play and a parade to commemorate the holiday. They made their own costumes. Frances and Jessie were there. Pulllman loved them.” Pullman spent two years on the faculty and three years in Montana’s Shakespeare in the Parks. “We just all became part of this group of people who shared each other’s work. There was always a party going on at the DeWeeses. It was a grassroots movement.”265 Jahnke did not remember any one particular person taking the lead. “They were all just doing their work, talking and sharing, and all was well. There was equality between students, teachers, and artists in the community no one was above anyone else.”266 Jahnke recalled everyone talking about their production of Three Penny Opera, although it had taken place in the early 1960s before Jahnke came to Bozeman. “Bob had a studio at the end of Main Street and I know they did it there at his studio.”267 Bob’s studio was located in the old Moose Lodge above the VFW. “Gennie played the lead, Ben played the lead, Ken was in the play, [Charlie Payne played the piano, Bob did the set design and he was the Street Singer in the play]. They talked about it from the time I 264 Jahnke, interview. 265 Jahnke ,interview. 266 Jahnke, interview. 267 Jahnke, interview. 147 met them to the time they took their last breath.”268 Theater became a collaborative effort where they could all contribute to the piece. “I was never part of those bohemian parties but they talked about it a lot, about how it made them all broader thinkers in their field. Jessie and Frances were a part of it. They ended up being the greatest audience for that bunch of yahoos.”269 Upstairs in the attic of Gennie DeWeese’s old studio in Cottonwood Canyon, a cardboard box packed with postcards and invitations to art openings around the state, covering decades, evidenced the strength of the community the DeWeeses and others created in Montana. All the artists in the state attended each other’s openings even when the weather seemed prohibitive. 270 The DeWeeses, Senska, Wilber, and others created an environment of artists supporting artists, a comradery, a profound indication of their dedication to the careers of their friends, colleagues, and students. Another string pulling the pockets of artists around the state together was Branson Stevenson, who traveled around the state for the Saxony Oil Company. As he traveled from town to town, he brought new artwork with him, his own ceramic art and pieces he would borrow from people like Senska and Wilber, presenting them to the far-flung Montana art community during a lecture or slide show. Aside from spreading art news, in his role as Vice Chairman of the American Artists’ Professional League, he invited artists to Montana to speak and give demonstrations as in the time, in 1952, when internationally renowned potters Bernard Leach and Hamada Yanagi conducted 268 Jahnke, interview. 269 Jahnke, interview. 270 Art openings in the early years were not at galleries but at the Montana Institute of the Arts shows and art fairs held across the state, held in community centers and other public spaces. 148 workshops at the Archie Bray Foundation. As Senska said years later in a 1998 interview, “That was a good boost and we’ve been reaping publicity from it ever since.”271 Word of art doings from around the world also came to Montana through people like groundbreaking ceramic artist Pete Voulkos who spent time teaching at Black Mountain College, occasionally returning to Montana after interactions with artist Robert Rauschenberg, musician John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and poet Charles Olson. Artist Henry Meloy, an art professor at Columbia University in New York City, originally from Townsend, Montana, visited with the DeWeeses, Senska and Wilber as well as other Montana artists on his trips west. This was evidenced in the booklets (Figures, Notes, and Portraits) by Meloy the DeWeeses kept. When Meloy came back to Montana in the summers, conversations among all of these artists often spurred all- nighters. Ideas of Modernism and politics stirred the pot. 272 Politics and the Politics of Art Much of the literature, films, and television shows surfacing during the postwar years sought out the white hat/black hat scenarios reflected in classic westerns and comic books. The need for creating heroes, whether they wore cowboy hats or capes, reflected a search for an American identity where the rules were easy to follow. It took Montana until the 1970s, when the environmental movement took hold, to break out of that genre, as stated by historian Michael Malone. “The simple frontier nostalgia of previous 271 Senska, interview. 272 These nights were documented in Robert DeWeese’s sketches. 149 generations has given way to a subtle reflection on the land and its people and their doubtful future in a society dominated by consumer individualism.”273 In Montana, artists were very aware of the status quo and did not rely on selling art, whether Modernist or otherwise, to make ends meet. In 1953, Robert McCraig explained the Montana Institute of the Arts’ goal of not bucking the status quo, but conceded artists needed to make art for art’s sake, since commercial success was unlikely. He said: It would be smug and ridiculous to assume that from our efforts will come any great and world-striking results. Few of our writers will ever find a place in the world’s libraries, few of our painters will receive recognition by famous museums; but we can give to many people the chance to round out their lives to a greater fullness by providing them with the opportunity to create something themselves, perhaps unique, perhaps beautiful, but in any case, no matter how crude or amateurish the product, something that is their very own, with the resultant satisfying uplift to soul and ego. 274 He noted that life is often a compromise, but the role of the organization did not depend on the commercial success of its members. “If we in the MIA can approach or even make a start toward any of our high objectives, we will have done something in which we can feel satisfaction.”275 The underlying tone of McCraig’s essay implies a kind of pessimism about the arts in Montana. He states the low odds of anyone making it beyond Montana’s borders, or even within its borders. His voice permeates with undertones of nihilism. The same year McCraig wrote this piece, the C. M. Russell Museum opened its doors, celebrating the romantic, illustrative art usually associated with Montana and the Old West. While 273 Michael P. Malone, Montana: A History of Two Centuries, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976) 377. 274 Merriam, The Arts in Montana, vii. 275 Merriam, The Arts in Montana, vii. 150 raising money for the C. M. Russell Museum, organizations asked for money from donors “who have enough interest in our state” to contribute a thousand dollars. The plea included a lightly veiled threat that if the museum did not succeed, Charlie Russell paintings would begin to leave the state. The plea insinuated that the way Montanans looked at themselves through the lens of Western paintings would be lost as well. 276 In 1951, James Dew, a founding member of the MIA and art professor at the University of Montana, Missoula, felt it necessary to write an essay explaining modern art to the people of Montana. As the membership of the MIA consisted of artists, writers, and musicians, it is even more important to note that Dew felt the need to explain Modern art to the readers of their own quarterly magazine. In other words, to the artists themselves, he stated: It is common knowledge that the majority of people will react favorably to factual paintings, paintings which are close copies of nature. However, if we begin with the idea that art is a copy of nature and is created with the single purpose of decorating a living room, we are using a false premise. Pictures should be observed as entities, things in themselves. 277 Almost a decade later, the art critic Clement Greenberg said, “Modernism used art to call attention to art.”278 Dew and Greenberg voiced the philosophical difference between Modernism and Naturalism or Realism. Modern art, in particular Abstract Expressionism, asks the viewer to consider the painting as an object not as a picture of an object. For people in Montana at the time, a population drawn to the paintings of C. M. Russell and Edgar S. Paxson, this required explanation. Dew went on to say, “Without an open- 276,“Russell Memorial,” Bozeman Daily Chronicle, January 16, 1949, 4. 277 Merriam, The Arts in Montana, 160. 278 Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, 86. 151 minded attitude or an honest desire to enjoy modern paintings, this source of enrichment of life will never be ours. The process takes time.”279 The influx of print media and the content of newspapers, up until 1959, came from the Anaconda Company headquartered in Montana. The company controlled nearly all the newspapers in the state. Starting in the 1920s, the Anaconda Company bought up newspapers including: The Anaconda Standard, The Butte Daily Post, The Montana Standard, The Billings Gazette, The Missoulian, The Missoula Sentinel, The Helena Independent Record, and the Livingston Enterprise. Through this heavy-handed method of controlling the political dialogue, objectivity took a backseat, especially in politics. 280 Aside from conservative power brokers, the state also boasted a considerable population of laborers and union members from the mining and timber industries to the railroad and farm workers. Montana teetered between conservatives and liberal perspectives. 281 As far as voting history in presidential elections, Montana voted Democrat from 1940–1948, Republican from 1952–1960, Democrat in 1964, and Republican from 1968–1988.282 The conservative trend began in the 1950s with the “Eisenhower Equilibrium,” a balance between war hawks and peace doves, a philosophy that brought a balance to politics. In Montana the state voted for a Republican Governor, J. Hugo Aronson, and Democratic Senator, Mike Mansfield. In 1941, the Malmstrom Military Base served as the first B-17 279 Merriam, The Arts in Montana, 163. 280 John Thomas McNay, "Breaking the Copper Collar: The Sale of the Anaconda Newspapers and the Professionalization of Journalism in Montana", (Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers, University of Montana, 1991). 281 Michael P. Malone, Montana: A History of Two Centuries, University of Washington Press, 1976, 380. 282 Braha, Dan, Marcus A. M. De Aguiar, and Lidia Adriana Braunstein. "Voting Contagion: Modeling and Analysis of a Century of U.S. Presidential Elections." PLoS ONE 12, no. 5 (2017): E0177970. 152 bomber base and continued to serve through the Cold War. The influx of military personnel created a steady flow of conservative ideology in Great Falls. During the 1960s Gennie DeWeese attended political rallies, holding signs and protesting the use of nuclear weapons. According to her daughter, Tina DeWeese, “Gennie was a feminist before the word was really used. She was not going to go quietly into the role of a quiet faculty wife.”283 Tina also said that not many people in Montana spoke the language of art in the way that her parents understood Modernism. “They always recognized they were outside the mainstream, but they didn’t care. That’s why those connections with other artists were so powerful.”284 Bill Stockton, with a permanent attitude of anti-government interference, often groused about the number and placement of missile silos situated near Grass Range. Jessie Wilber was concerned with conservation and misuse of natural resources, as evidenced by her print, The River (Don’t Dam It!). Politics often undergirds art. In Montana, the Modernists understood that their politics were not always popular, but that made the community they created even more important. The gatherings became a safe place to express opinions, popular or not, and be guaranteed a robust exchange of ideas. Bob and Gennie When Bob met Gennie, the relationship began as two artists fascinated with the creative process, struggling to find their individual voices. The notion of anything more 283 Tina DeWeese, in-person interview with author, February 7, 2019. Transcript in possession of author. 284 DeWeese, interview. 153 than a friendship, albeit, a deep-connecting friendship, did not occur to either of them until, separated by World War II, their correspondences built up over time and revealed something that might be long lasting. First and foremost, Bob and Gennie were artists, and from that seminal position became the basis for the rest of their lives. Robert “Bob” DeWeese (1920–1990) and Gennie Adams (1921–2007) met at Ohio State University where both attained art degrees. Bob, president of the Art Club and Gennie, president of Art Honorary graduated in 1942. Both Bob and Gennie took classes from Hoyt Sherman and experienced his unique classroom, which he called the Flash Lab. Bob’s exchanges with Sherman’s theory of “perceptual unity” would later enable him to further explore his own idea of “responsibility equals the ability to respond.” Gennie’s experiences with the Flash Lab took the path of experimentation with depth and perception in her non-objective paintings. Hoyt Sherman’s Flash Lab285 at Ohio State University, conceived to mediate the “schism” between thought and feeling and between science and art, asked his students to draw what they saw. 286 The Flash Lab implemented his theory of “perceptual unity,” a way to interpret how the mind sees images through the human eye in an effort to help students see the whole field of vision simultaneously in relation to a single focal point. 287 It was not only the flash art, but the notion of introducing exciting new ideas in a classroom environment that both Bob and Gennie carried over into their own work. Sherman also influenced Bob as an art teacher, and once at MSC Bob adapted some of Sherman’s techniques in his practice and in his classes. 285 See p 55 for an in-depth description of the Flash Lab. 286 Aside from DeWeese, Sherman’s teachings influenced many of his students including Roy Lichtenstein. 287 Hoyt Sherman, Drawing by Seeing. (New York: Hinds, Hayden & Eldredge, 1947). 154 After college, Bob enlisted in the Air Force where he held a position of flutist in the Air Force Band, stationed in Hawaii. He kept up his art practice, completing a large mural in a church in Hawaii as well as several paintings. Gennie went on to receive her teaching certificate from the University of Michigan in Detroit. She moved to Wilmington, Delaware, to help her sister when her brother-in-law joined the Navy. There she worked as a junior high school and high school teacher, but it took much of the time and energy she preferred to spend on art. She briefly moved to New York City. With few prospects at that time, she decided to enroll in an occupational training course offered to artists by the Army, working with head and nerve trauma patients at the Army hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. As the war ended, she moved to Detroit so she could substitute- teach three days a week, which enabled her to paint the other four days. Throughout the war, Bob and Gennie, though not yet romantically involved, corresponded regularly. 288 They shared a need to take what they learned in school and apply it to life, or as Gennie would often write in those letters: LIFE! In one of Gennie’s letters to Bob, she wrote about art and its ability to reflect on the times. “No wonder they speak of chaos, nearly every generalized subject which comes to my mind—I can think of 10,000 variations pertaining to it—all in conflict with each other—so it all becomes jumbled—no wonder so many have turned to symbols.”289 As an artist trying to be true to herself and yet also record a response to her surroundings she said: 288 Gennie Adams’ letters date from 1942–1946, although many of them are not dated. DeWeese Family Archives. 289 Gennie Adams, letters date from 1942–1946. DeWeese Family Archives. 155 When something tries to center itself in the form of an honest reaction to a given thing it’s lost in a maze. Sometimes I think trying to somehow record that confusion would be the most honest. It seems that this present is more marred by hatred and indifference than love of any kind. 290 In another letter, her struggle to tap into her own creative process clearly comes across. “The amount of time I have to spend seeing to make the entire thing is a farce.” Here she references Hoyt Sherman’s lessons on seeing. “The realization that it is defeated by time makes the task seem too gigantic to undertake in spare moments.”291 She expressed concerns for friends and family, but more than that, a desperation about her own place in the art world. You can’t do 10 things and worry about 10,000 and get results. I defeat myself at every turn—unfortunately I can’t get it all in—actually it’s such an infinitesimal part of the original conception I feel contempt for it—and myself—physically—and emotionally. I’m not up to it.292 Her voice cries with frustration to make art while at the same time survive during the war without any financial support from her family. Over the course of three years and more than fifty letters, their platonic relationship deepened and, although hard to pinpoint, something more happened. His voice comes across as a mentor, friend, and later, a hint of something more. The tone of their letters seems confessional, not love notes so much as expressing artistic tendencies, frustrations, and experiments. In the beginning, Bob played the part of mentor assigning books and movies for Gennie to read or watch, as he too struggled with his creative direction. Once, clearly missing the camaraderie of his fellow art students, he wrote: 290 Gennie Adams, letters date from 1942–1946. DeWeese Family Archives. 291 Letter from Gennie Adams to Robert DeWeese, undated. DeWeese Family Archives. 292 Letter from Gennie Adams to Robert DeWeese, undated. DeWeese Family Archives. 156 Tonight I met an infantryman outside the big post’s library who had been looking through the art books also…outside we got into a discussion that lasted about two hours. It was strange for both of us at first to be talking art, and at first my usual guard was up but eventually we had a very good time…nothing destroys my confidence so much as talking (usually unsuccessfully) about art to only mildly interested (or politely interested) persons of another field.”293 Although seemingly well situated in the visual arts, Bob often considered a future in writing, not to mention his professional position as a flautist in the Air Force band. DeWeese discussed his attempt to write stories and even in one letter stated, “I am a writer.”294 In another letter, he wrote about the success of his watercolor paintings, trying different instruments aside from the flute (the oboe, for example), and the feeling that his future, somewhat unclear, brimmed with possibilities. However, in another letter he cried with desperation: I got your letter today and again it mirrors what has been going on with me. I think it quite [unsatisfying] that thinking is a damnable part of us. Now and then it might come out in imagination, and then it is good; but all too often it is that damnable eliminative destructive analysis that one by one picks off the hopes, talents, and gives way to despair. 295 The end of war on September 2, 1945 brought about a change in the tone of the letters. Whereas in earlier letters Bob seemed the more pragmatic and stable of the two, later letters show Gennie taking the reins. She advised Bob to take advantage of the G. I. Bill and to apply for unemployment the minute his discharge came through. His letters betray a bit of nervousness about coming home as her letters take on the tone of planning 293 Robert DeWeese letter to Gennie Adams, April 19. No year is on the letter. DeWeese Family Archives. 294 Robert DeWeese letter to Gennie Adams, April 19. No year is on the letter. DeWeese Family Archives. 295 Robert DeWeese letter to Gennie Adams, May 22, 1945. DeWeese Family Archives. 157 for the future. “I’m keyed up enough to do something—complacency is out the window,” she wrote. 296 They married in 1946, the same year Bob returned home from the war. Bob joined Gennie in her apartment across the street from the Detroit Institute of the Arts until he attended the University of Iowa, Iowa City, on the G. I. Bill, earning his Masters of Fine Arts degree. 297 Through the births and upbringing of their five children, both Bob and Gennie pursued their own artistic processes with equal perseverance: Bob taking the position of art professor at Montana State College and Gennie eventually taking on the role of matriarch in the Montana Modernist movement. Robert DeWeese: Responsibility is the Ability to Respond Making art is problem solving. The entire process involves taking an idea and making it concrete. Problems of the flat surface in two-dimensional art concerns the materials, the space, and the formal aspects of creating art such as line, form, and composition occur at every stage of art making. Art historian Michael Baxandall addresses the painter’s goals and situational conditions beyond the initial creation of art in his 1985 book, Patterns of Intention. Baxandall described the expectations from the artist, what the artist wants from the work, markets, the artist’s relationship to other painters, and how to make use of contemporary philosophical and/or scientific ideas of the era. In other words; what problems are artists trying to solve. Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus philosophy also addressed art as a set of self-generated problems the artist must 296 Gennie Adams letter to Robert DeWeese, no date. DeWeese Family Archives. 297 Terry Karson, Gennie DeWeese Retrospective, Missoula: Art Museum of Missoula, 1996. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 158 solve and was utilized by Robert DeWeese as well. DeWeese’s investigations into the honesty of a line and how a painting can resolve the artist’s responsibility to respond to his surroundings, with an emphasis on cultural and societal barriers, was his “problem” and came across in many of his works. In DeWeese’s 1976 Western Painting (Figure 29), he included a series of sketches and drawings of buffalo, moose, and elk with the barest outlines of a natural environment. As discussed earlier, the art market during this period in Montana consisted mostly of traditional Western paintings, replications of wildlife in paint as well as bronzes, depictions of Native Americans and cowboys on horseback or historical portraits of Native Americans, subjects and style carried forward from the late nineteenth century. Western Painting feels like a comment on the art market at the time. Rarely did DeWeese sell a painting to anyone outside his circle of friends and peers. As far as expectations, DeWeese did not expect his work to sell. He did expect it to be seen, and as a statement, a political and even a cultural statement, his use of the present moment enveloped much of his work. Here, especially with this piece, he exposed a new way that Montanans could identify themselves. By using images of buffalo in an ironic context he freed Montanans from the image that seemed to hang like an albatross around the necks of commercial artists. 159 Figure 29. Robert DeWeese, Western Painting, 1976, collage and mixed media, 15.5 x 12.25 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family. Most Montana artists taught for a living and, for them as for DeWeese, teaching and making art became one and the same. “My paintings and teaching were inseparable, and like the growth of everything in those years, kept a focus. Excitement piled up in the corners, and Gen and I ran out of space three times before anyone bought a painting.”298 298 Robert DeWeese, Spirit of Modernism Paris Gibson Art Center catalog, 1987. 160 Western Painting comments on the culture at the time, the mythology of living in the West, and how art needed to heed the status quo in order to be accepted by art buyers. However, rather than conforming to that genre, DeWeese combined sketches that were not of a piece. In this case, DeWeese used his sense of irony to relay a truth about art in Montana at that time. The non-archival materials DeWeese used in this painting and many of his works barely stood up against the elements of his home/studio. Fragile crepe paper, markers, sketches with frayed edges, and paint peeling reflect a tendency to use whatever he happened upon at that moment. These actions indicate an immediate response to the artist’s responsibility as he saw it and a purely instinctual action.299 He merely grabbed whatever materials were at hand and sketched, painted, or collaged his responses. A look at his multitude of drawings shows an intentional language of line and gestural responses to his environment, including his family and colleagues, road trips and, underlying much of his work, the Montana landscape where he lived. Through these sketches DeWeese translated the world. Through these drawings he drew in a close circle of friends, colleagues, students, and fellow artists. The underpinning of DeWeese’s “Responsibility to Respond” philosophy can be seen in his sketches, and reflects his training in Sherman’s Flash Lab. For example, DeWeese’s series of sketches from the 1960s showing his daughter dancing may be related to a specific class exercise executed by Sherman (Figure 30). As 299 Ludvig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 1953), 36. 161 Elizabeth Clymer Okerbloom, in her essay on Sherman, wrote, “The end of the course includes drawing a dancer flashed in action.”300 Figure 30. Robert DeWeese, Figure Dancing, n.d., drawings on paper. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art. By the time DeWeese created this series, his sketches continuously portrayed the instantaneous imprints of reactions that inferred a rapid execution of a drawing to convey the moment, an idea, or an object. 301 Even in social situations, he responded by sketching. In every situation, he drew. His sketchbook is a window to his world. His sketching, like that of Wilber’s prints, reflects an interpretation of the things and the people he saw every day. Moving the trope of a window into the metaphor of his life, he only leaves out the frame of the glass. Portland (Figure 31), Between Three Forks and Toston (Figure 32), 300 Elizabeth Clymer Okerbloom, “Hoyt Sherman's Experimental Work in the Field of Visual Form,” College Art Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4 (1944), 143–147. 301 Hoyt Sherman, Drawing By Seeing, (New York: Hinds, Hayden & Eldredge, 1947), 31. 162 and Bill’s Lil’ Trees (Figure 33) from the 1980s are examples of his immediate responses to his environment. Artist and curator Terry Karson wrote in a 1991 exhibition catalog, “[DeWeese] was always drawing: in a car flying down the highway; at a family gathering; on a subway in Paris; at the dinner table.” He notes that his peers envied his devotion to drawing as well as his devotion to being a teacher. “[He] inspired his students to higher levels than they had ever reached.” Karson called attention to DeWeese as a prolific artist, “producing over 500 known paintings and constructions, some 1600 formal drawings and many hundreds of impressions from many dozens of printing plates.” After DeWeese’s death Karson went through his entire body of work and came away inspired. “He was always exploring, always pushing his own personal boundaries, always renewing himself.”302 302 Terry Karson, Robert DeWeese, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Center, 1991). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 163 Figure 31. Robert DeWeese, Portland, 1980s, felt marker on paper, 12 x 17 inches. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art. 164 Figure 32. Robert DeWeese, Between Three Forks and Toston, 1980s, felt marker on paper. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art. 165 Figure 33. Robert DeWeese, Bill’s Lil Trees, 1970, felt marker on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the Holter Museum of Art. For DeWeese, every day brought new opportunities to record his children, his wife, music, trees, and the road. Sketch after sketch shows a development of a language without words, his quick marks of impressions. DeWeese’s drawings depict honest 166 portrayals, connecting the artist to the world, connecting being in time with being in place. Artist and former gallery manager at Montana State University Dennis O’Leary said, “Bob’s art over these thirty years is about his life. Portraits of family, friends and localities describe his surroundings. With these, in combination with his non- representational works, we clearly see his conceptual attitudes.”303 O’Leary saw DeWeese’s work through the lens of an artist’s quest for fulfillment. “For Bob, [these responsibilities for spiritual fulfillment] are within himself, his family, friends and environment. For Bob DeWeese, art and life are most certainly one and the same experience.”304 Some of his sketches, simple and clear, later became paintings. Other artists influenced his own work as much as his work may have influenced them, evidenced by the painting, About Wiley, 1972, mixed media on masonite, included in a catalogue Robert DeWeese: Work since 1949. DeWeese pasted the typed words of visiting artist Bill Wiley on the cover, as one of his many homages to other artists. It stated, “What we will attempt to learn though we may not know it is to learn that we are who we are and that it is all right to be who and what we are.”305 Robert DeWeese not only created art, but the openness of his studio helped to create an art community. Just as Senska’s ceramics practice embraced a natural, communal environment with the group collection and production of clay and nights spent over a kiln, DeWeese brought artists, friends, colleagues, and family into the fold that he 303 McConnell, A Montana Collection. 304 McConnell, A Montana Collection. 305 Denise O’Leary, Robert DeWeese: Work Since 1949, Bozeman: Montana State University, 1979. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 167 called “art” through his constant sketching. According to the curator’s statement in DeWeese’s Legacy, a 2006 catalog, including his student’s work and their student’s work, Terry Karson said: DeWeese was more than a teacher he was also a progressive thinker, a beguiling provocateur, and a seminal figure in the spread of modern art and philosophy in Montana. It was a new day for art, and a new teacher/student relationship was dawning with it. The master/pupil approach was being abandoned for a more egalitarian style. 306 He noted that, in 1949, DeWeese brought with him a stream of steady, new and exciting ideas as well as exuberance for teaching. “As fate and fortune would have it, here would thrive fertile, eager minds responsive to his teachings, hungry for new ways of thinking and seeing.”307 It is clear from DeWeese’s work, his connection to the art history, past artists, and art movements influenced his work. In his paintings, which are a step away from the immediacy of his sketches, he takes the time to explore more deeply the issues, not only of line, color, and composition, but also to nod to the classics and leap forward with current commentary. DeWeese’s fascination with art history can be seen in his complex 1988 painting, Flight (Red Boy) (Figure 34), where the figures rise in joy, sail across the sky, and fall from grace. In the center stands “red boy,” represented as a placid faceless embodiment made of lines. Here DeWeese points to the classics, referencing Atlas, using a female figure holding up her “world” (a child on her shoulders) as a Greek chorus huddles in the background. His use of muddled colors activates the images. Within the painting, DeWeese recalls Titian’s The Rape of Europa with his contemporary use of 306 Terry Karson, DeWeese’s Legacy, Helena: Holter Museum of Art, 2006. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 307 Karson, DeWeese’s Legacy. 168 mythological images to modernize the legend. 308 In the foreground, all the figures remain nudes, another nod to classical painting, while all the figures in the background appear blanketed in clothes. This delineation causes a separation between them, again similar to actors in a play and the off-stage chorus. The figure flying overhead like a zephyr adds to the overall feeling of a mythological allegory. In this way DeWeese takes the ever- timeless nature of Greek/Roman mythology and translates it into a modern day interpretation. As some of his work is more abstract, this painting offers a deeper reading of representational images. The brushstrokes, clear and active, support the multiple narratives going on in the piece. The eye moves from the “red boy” to the other figures and back around again, constantly supporting the motion of the work. In some of his works, DeWeese underlines the contemporary philosophical ideas of the era. Painted in 1988, when George H. W. Bush won the presidential election after eight years of Ronald Reagan and then the Iran-Contra investigations and televised hearings, DeWeese’s politics come into play in the piece. Politically, it was a dark time for liberal-minded artists. DeWeese died in 1990, and this painting is autobiographical. Red Boy may be a version of DeWeese himself. DeWeese loved the theater and this painting reflects on his life as a Greek play. 308 Many Renaissance painters, like Titian, used mythology as subjects of the work. 169 Figure 34. Robert DeWeese, Flight (Red Boy), 1988, mixed media on paper, 62.5 x 80.5 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Other pieces employ the collage technique made relevant by the Dadaists, such as Hannah Hoch and Max Ernst, whose work spoke to the changed relationship between objects and humans. 309 These issues still held relevance to the Modernists in Montana. Dadaists focused on creating artwork that questioned the societal roles, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art. DeWeese also questioned the role of the artist in relation to current events and the politics of the day. By the time of DeWeese’s VFW Studio Wall (Figure 35) in 1973, the total emergence of mass media ran rampant. The large, mixed media on canvas work included advertisements, newspaper headlines, Matisse-like cut- 309 Dadaism was a literary and visual art movement that preceded Surrealism. The Dadaists felt that chance played a large role in accessing the subconscious and thus a universal truth. 170 outs, school photographs of his children, and pages seemingly torn from notebooks. The piece, localized with Bozeman-based headlines and nationalized with images of well- known figures, includes colors and lines for the sake of composition. It stands as a portrait of his studio and as an artist statement for his work. The openness of the piece conveys the presence of painted walls, suggesting limits to the openness. With greys and offset lines, he creates a sense of place, a place where anything goes. 171 Figure 35. Robert DeWeese, VFW Studio Wall, 1973, mixed media. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Another aspect of DeWeese’s collage work appears in the series of paintings he devoted to the men’s tie. He said, “The last few years I have been doing that old unoriginal icon of uniformity, the necktie. Why? Well, I felt some kind of need for such an outrageously simple form no matter if it becomes an interpreter’s delight.”310 The visual fact of the tie and its symbolic meaning became an object for DeWeese to draw upon. As DeWeese stated: It is something to count on, something to play upon, something really there. But then there are things that seem not to be there (in the visible world) at all—dream, fantasy, myth, allegory, symbol…Idea…Made 310 D.M. Forbes, Robert DeWeese: A Retrospective, Yellowstone Art Center, 1991. 172 Visible. The thereness and the not thereness all part of the same thing, eh? 311 Curator Elizabeth Guheen noted of his tie series: DeWeese was not looking to surprise his audience, but to surprise himself. For him art was an adventure, from beginning to end, and the journey was one and the same with his family and friends and students—who were also his friends, because that was unavoidable—the travels, crisscrossing the state to attend every art opening, the teaching, sharing meals, talking over coffee—[he’d said], ‘Actually it is all the same thing.’”312 In Nine Ties, Seven Chains, 1988, (Figure 36) and Circus Ties, 1986, (Figure 37), DeWeese uses this everyday symbol of what it means to be a man, the man made visible, for a series he cannot break away from. It occurs in dozens of pieces in which some contain actual ties, some use tie chains, others, as in Circus Ties, the objects appear within the painting bigger than life. Here he mixes his figural abstraction with a symbol of a tie as a tree that humans enslaved by society must climb. DeWeese often used humor and irony in his work. In this instance, the ties stand in for the flags of a circus, but they bring to mind crucifixes, hung with sides outstretched like Christ on the cross. Putting the ties so high the figures use ladders to adhere the ties to their stands, DeWeese replaces the Romans with the Ringmaster. The connection to art historical references and the Passion of Christ jump out. How many men in suits and ties have been sacrificed to the god of status quo or felt like they worked in a three-ring circus? 311 D. M. Forbes, Robert DeWeese: A Retrospective, Yellowstone Art Center, 1991. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 312 Elizabeth Guheen, A Look Ahead, (Helena: Holter Museum of Art, 2006). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 173 Figure 36. Robert DeWeese, Nine Ties, Seven Chains, 1988, mixed media on canvas, 5 x 11 feet. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family. 174 Figure 37. Robert DeWeese, Circus Ties, 1986, Caron D’Arch crayons on gessoed window shade, 73 x 47 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family. 175 Written in DeWeese’s University of Iowa notebook from 1946, “Anyway of seeing is abstraction—to make any sense we select—thus abstract…keep clear Naturalism is abstraction. Modern art paints things we know about, [whether we] do or do not see.”313 These graduate school notes provide some insight into his later works. The naturalism he refers to shows up again and again in his sketches as well as his paintings. Flight (Red Boy) gives a nod to Renaissance naturalism, but it is also combined with the abstract expressionist style of a distressed figure, especially those of Willem de Kooning, Matisse, and Picasso. “Modernism is philosophy,” DeWeese wrote in his notebooks, and the word “eloquence” appears again and again. It seemed, in order to understand his place as a modern artist and as a graduate student, he looked to the differences between Impressionism, Realism, and Surrealism. Later, he would also look at the New York School for ways to express contemporary issues within the context of painting. As in many of DeWeese’s paintings, he brings with him the history of art. He is a painter and a teacher. His paintings tell the story of the past as they point to the future. By bringing other art references into his work, his Modernism presented a two-fold purpose to create art and to teach. In the 1970 essay he wrote titled On Painting, he stated the importance of art students to know and understand the masters of the past because “they are your teachers and mine, too.” He spoke further about non-objective paintings and how they use the qualities of nature, but the source is “within the artist or in the painting- action itself…it is pure painting—and in this sense the most realistic painting. It makes 313 Robert DeWeese, University of Iowa notebook, 1946. DeWeese Family Archives. 176 concrete such ambiguous, non-objective terms as delicate, heavy, slow, fast, hot, cool.”314 He reminds the reader, “A painting is a visual statement—no more—no less. Like a verbal statement, it can be clear, concise, and to the point; or it can be muddled, befuddled, wandering, weak, and beside the point.” He notes the university did not hire a Charlie Russell painter. This is because the State of Montana saw fit to hire teachers from all over the country and from many different schools and universities and traditions. Charlie Russell was a good story teller and in his younger days, a pretty fair painter. He was authentic, but he’s dead and his era is over.315 He added that there is no such thing as a realistic painting. “The only way to get a realistic painting is to hang an empty frame on a wall.” DeWeese continued to note that even a photograph is not realistic, but only a mechanical way of recording the infinite value range in nature. “All painting is abstract or non-objective…non-objective painting uses the qualities of nature—space, color, movement, and space relationships.”316 In his painting Plains Sunset, 1963 (Figure 38), one of his earlier and more abstract pieces, he taught even as he created. His thick brushstrokes evoke the horizon, although the dark blues, gray, black, and bit of blood red negate the typical “inspiring” vista that would come to mind in a painting of a sunset. Instead, it is heavy with dripping paint, the viewer’s eye, while being pulled across the plane, drops into pockets of timelessness, areas of gray, and, like a game of Chutes and Ladders, zips the viewer up again. The piece is more of a journey than an exercise, more of a dialogue than a 314 DeWeese’s Legacy, (Bozeman: Montana State University, 2006). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title 315 DeWeese, On Painting. 316 DeWeese, On Painting. 177 meditation. DeWeese taught his students to see. “Seeing” eventually progressed to include the landscape. Figure 38. Robert DeWeese, Plains Sunset, 1963, oil on Masonite, 19 x 26.5 inches. Courtesy of Zak Zakovi. In a 1983 essay he wrote about his introduction to landscape painting, he said, “It took a long, long time for the Montana landscape to imprint on me enough for me to be hooked on one shot. But in the last year or so it seemed to happen with Wolny’s Hill, at the entrance to South Cottonwood Canyon where we live.”317 He goes on to say that he sat in the back of his pickup truck painting while the postman and the neighbors drove by bemused. “Well what I’m doing is trying to turn de Kooning’s famous ‘glimpse’ into a ‘stare’. Not in an exact way, but in a way that will show my gratitude for the hill being 317 Terry Karson, Robert DeWeese: A Retrospective, (Billings: Yellowstone Art Center, 1991). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 178 there and allowing me to ‘take off’ from it so many times.”318 Illustrative of this stare, the painting, Wolny’s Hill (One Cloud) (1984) (Figure39), takes the notion of de Kooning’s “content is a glimpse” and moves it forward. DeWeese’s content contains a series of place-markings, quick lines of indication, short strokes making an acronym of water, rock, and pasture, to be decoded at leisure in the future. The one cloud hovering above the horizon is barely there, the thin, white brushwork is not white enough to cover the blue behind it. This painting reminds the viewer that a scene observed every day is new each time. Figure 39. Robert DeWeese, Wolny’s Hill (One Cloud), 1984, gouache and enamel on paper, 9 x 23.25 inches. Courtesy of the Yellowstone Art Museum. Circled twice in one of his notebooks is a quote from Kenneth Burke. “We cannot call a man illogical for acting on the basis of what he feels to be true.”319 Burke was a literary theorist and, from his notebooks, it appears DeWeese regarded art as a kind of language to be understood through the literary theorists of the time. DeWeese added in 318 Karson, Robert DeWeese: A Retrospective. 319 The DeWeese family gave me access to Robert DeWeese’s University of Iowa graduate school notebooks. DeWeese Family Archives. 179 his own words underneath the quote from Burke, “Both poet’s metaphors and the scientist’s abstractions discuss something in terms of something else—and the course of analogical extension is determined by the particular kind of interest uppermost at the time.”320 His reference to art (and science) is a kind of metaphor and hence an arm of language that allows a direct line into Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of “family” relationships. 321 As DeWeese’s artwork glides from sketching to painting and assemblages, underlying all of them rests the unique hand of a Modernist artist. Wittgenstein looks at the definition of games to show that not all things can be strictly defined. In his 1953 book, Wittgenstein suggests games are a kind of unspoken language with unwritten rules. Yet, the logic persists beneath the seemingly randomness of playground antics. The rules of art in modernity, as practiced by DeWeese, on the surface may seem to some to be without logic, but in looking deeper into his work, it becomes clearer where the lines of reason are laid down. DeWeese’s work falls into the open concept of Modernism in a variety of ways and forms. Foremost, there is always an acknowledgement of the surface, the character of the paint, and the impact of mixed media and his political comments on society. As a teacher, especially a teacher in Montana, dealing with students who had little contact or knowledge of anything other than the art that romantically portrayed the West, DeWeese brought in notes from other Modernist painters to inform his work and to show his students the extent of Arthur Danto’s “artworld,” which referred to the ongoing 320 Ibid. 321 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 1953), 36. 180 conversation of past artists with present artists. But he did so with consciousness of geographical context and an understanding of his students. Without the prior knowledge of theory and practice, it is nearly impossible to go forward in dialogue with art. In another notebook, DeWeese wrote, “There isn’t any one right way to paint—if so it could be standardized…Must be true to yourself—learn through study of similar.”322 Former student and internationally renowned ceramic artist Rudy Autio summed up DeWeese in a 1991 retrospective catalog. “He was an artist’s artist. He was past the need for fame or fortune. Each day was a new event for him. A day for painting, worrying about things, great or small, but which fit into his heart and imagination.”323 He went on to note the thousands of drawings DeWeese left behind. “People will pass on. But Bob will fill our hearts with warmth whenever we think of him.”324 DeWeese’s paintings, sketches, and assemblages, like the overlapping of many fibers twisted together, strengthen his body of work and combine to create the tapestry of life and art. In 1983, Newsweek published an article called Art Under the Big Sky, naming Rudy Autio, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese as older artists “who never succumbed to the clichés of Western art or the allure of the city.”325 DeWeese, when asked about the usual fare of Western art depicting cowboys said, “It isn’t like that out here.” And this remark, above all else, denotes DeWeese as a Modernist whose concerns of his current everyday make up the spine of his work. 322 Robert DeWeese’s University of Iowa graduate school notebooks. 323 Robert DeWeese: Retrospective (Billings: Yellowstone Art Museum, 1991). Published in conjunction with an exhibition with the same title. 324 Robert DeWeese, Yellowstone Art Museum. 325 Mark Stevens, “Art Under the Big Sky,” Newsweek, October 31, 1983, 98. 181 After DeWeese retired from teaching, he and Gennie opened GB DeWeese Gallery in their Cottonwood Canyon home. For two years they showed the works of nearly every artist they knew and some they got to know through their work. Gallery openings pulled in over 200 people, crowding the space with intense conversation and avidly contemporary artists. Gennie explained why they opened the gallery, “We decided we wanted to show artists who were good, who lived in Gallatin County, and who didn’t teach at the University, so couldn’t exhibit there. We sat down and made a list, and in no time, we thought of several dozen artists we felt should be seen.”326 In 1995, after Robert DeWeese’s death in 1990, both Robert and Gennie DeWeese garnered the Governor’s Award for the Arts. That same year Gennie DeWeese was awarded an honorary PhD in Fine Art from Montana State University. Gennie DeWeese: I Paint What I See Gennie Adams DeWeese (1921–2007) was born between World War I and the Great Depression when jazz, unfettered expression in literature, and a number of “isms” in art dominated the culture in both America and Europe. It was a time when art and philosophy, politics, and the power of primitive expression filled the heads of artists. Starting art school in 1938 meant opportunity, a wide open, anything goes kind of opportunity. “Hoyt Sherman kept us coming back, we couldn’t wait to get to the next 326 Marjorie Smith, “A Life in Art,” Yokoi, 1991, 40. 182 class,” Gennie DeWeese said in a 2001 interview. “He was a Cezanne guy, everything went back to Cezanne. He was an influential teacher.”327 As Gennie wrote in a letter to Bob during the war, it was a chaotic time. These times, Gennie began to see, might best be expressed through abstraction and non- objective art. Non-objective art defines a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity. It was initially inspired by Plato, who believed that geometry was the highest form of beauty. Yet, Gennie struggled to make art that felt right to her. She fought with herself over the work she created, and strived to find time between teaching and living to paint. As she came into her own, after moving to Bozeman and having a family, she recognized the importance of continuing along her artistic path. Raising five children on Bob’s professor’s salary at MSC, Gennie DeWeese persevered to carve out time in her studio and follow her innate need to create art. In 1949, when she first arrived in Montana, she brought with her the spontaneous yet complicated ideas of the Abstract Expressionists—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline—but she also carried the lessons Post-Impressionist Cezanne, fauvist Henri Matisse, even the Impressionists like Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Included in the mix were the influences of abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman, Nicholas de Stael, known for his thick impastoed landscapes, and the teachings of Hoyt Sherman, who combined the idea of using the flat surface to convey dimensionality without resorting to shadows, lighting, or traditional perspective. “It was fresh and new 327 Gennie DeWeese radio interview with Susan DeCamp, August 1, 2001. Yellowstone Public Radio Archives. Cassette tape in author’s possession. 183 and it was all right to look at things in a different way,” she said in a 1996 interview.328 Once settled in Montana her impetus to reach beyond the traditional lines and composition of landscape came from other artists in her circle. Being out here in Montana, we were so isolated from what was going on we didn’t feel the impact [of the art world] as much as those people [in larger cities] did. I don’t know. There were so few of us in the state that were working in a contemporary vein. That’s where our excitement came—being in contact with those people, rather than keeping up with what was going on in New York or the coast. 329 Her non-objective paintings, a consistent part of her body of work, were sparked by her reading of the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1913) explaining his series of paintings based on musical compositions. “I liked what [Kandinsky] said, the idea of it being like music. That [a painting] didn’t have to be about something. It could just be a response of some kind.”330 In her undated, untitled, non-objective painting (Figure 40), DeWeese speaks to both Kandinsky’s philosophy and Hofmann’s ideas on color by incorporating geometric forms and floral-like biomorphic shapes. Delicate lines stand out from the squared-up reds and oranges. While the yellow pushes the image to the forefront, the darker reds recede. Inspired by Carl Orff’s 1936 epic choral composition, Carmina Burana, it is part of a series. The spectacular opus by Orff becomes the perfect vehicle for DeWeese’s interpretation of Kandinsky’s theory of visual music. The brushstrokes, as well as the colors, create movement. The black underpainting pulls the eye around the canvas. DeWeese reveals the character of the paint with a sweeping irregularity that 328 Gennie DeWeese Retrospective, Missoula: Art Museum of Missoula, 1996. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 329 Gennie DeWeese, Gennie DeWeese Retrospective. 330 Gennie DeWeese, Gennie DeWeese Retrospective. 184 enables the spaces to move back and forth, in and out. This painting also conveys a sense of intimacy, like the whispering of a growing chorus. A hint of chaos depicts a dialog between lusting angels and spiritual demons, thus creating a kind of transcendent tension. Bare Trees (1954) (Figure 41) continues the geometric aesthetic bridging DeWeese’s non-objective work with that of her physical surroundings. In this painting, DeWeese integrates Hoyt Sherman’s idea of “Perceptual Unity” as taught in his flash lab. In Bare Trees, DeWeese put herself back in Sherman’s Flash Lab. The broad patterns play the lead in this piece. Fundamentally, the elements of line span across the canvas. Again, using Hofmann’s push-pull in regards to color, her palette reveals a space between the lines of the trees, while the steady tones of the foreground become foundational. The linen blue and violet of sky fit like puzzle pieces across the top of the painting. However, as DeWeese noted of her landscapes, you could turn it upside down and it would be a non-objective painting. She said in a 1998 interview, “To me there is only one line of requirement for the visual arts…all the parts are related…that’s it, period. Subject matter is personal. If you care about it the parts will fall into place.”331 Ten years of painting only non-objective pieces enabled her to see the world through shape, line, and composition, no matter the subject. “I’m convinced they opened up avenues of visual awareness in the landscapes I returned to when I moved to the mountains and was daily confronted with visual feasts. What became important was to try to transmit that impact.”332 331 McConnell, The Montana Collection, 1998, 37. 332 McConnell, The Montana Collection, 1998, 37. 185 In a documentary made in 2000, DeWeese said, “I think the non-objective painting was a very, very strong influence on me. So that when I work now I’m almost as close to that as I am to painting what I see out there, but I still paint what I see.”333 When she said she paints what she sees, she did not paint plein air, trying to capture the light of the moment or the shadows as they lingered in the late summer afternoon. First she sketched, and then she sketched some more. After each sketch, she remembered what she called the “essentials,” the parts she believed to be important to what she wanted to say. It is this idea of getting to the bare essentials that speaks to her painting philosophy. When she painted objects, they were the essential parts of the objects, what she needed: the line, the form, the color, the texture. Details faded and the final painting resonated with her voice. Painting non-objectively, she said she got to a place that expressed her idea that “what was going on inside was more important than what was going on outside.”334 333 Dada Documentaries, Gennie DeWeese, Missoula: Missoula Art Museum, 2000. 334 Dada Documentaries, I Just Paint What I See, Missoula: Missoula Art Museum, 1996. 186 Figure 40. Gennie DeWeese, Non-Objective Painting (Choral Composition), 1950s, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family. 187 Figure 41. Gennie DeWeese, Bare Trees, 1954, oil on Masonite. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family. In Winter Willow Grove (1971) (Figure 42) the all-over pattern, like a maze, carries the viewer from edge to edge. The influence of her non-objective work clearly comes through. The abstracted forms coalesce to bring the viewer to a conversation about place, about time, and about confluence. Her graceful lines intersect, snaking branches mingle. Like a spell-bound garden, the entangled limbs entwine as we watch. The present dances with the past, and winter’s weight accumulates. In this piece, a cross between landscape and non-objective painting, she examines a flattened perspective, as the viewer travels through the trees, between the branches, and maps the unseen undergrowth. This 188 image speaks to a continual sense of place, one considered and explored, yet forbidding and infinite. It is a wandering piece, a painting that speaks to time as place. Figure 42. Gennie DeWeese, Winter Willow Grove, 1971, oil on Masonite, 3 x 4 feet. Courtesy of Mary Langan and Wally Hansen. Beginning in the 1970s, DeWeese’s work on the Montana landscape deepened. Later, when she began to paint on extremely large scrolled canvases, incorporating lush, sensuous colors, she fully embraced the genre. In Clover Year (1998) (Figure 43), she portrays a bit of playfulness with each lone leaf-like pine tree amid a flood of yellow clover. The three trees bring to mind children in a field, each casting a shadow uniquely their own. The clouds overhead keep watch as a mustache of forestry lines the horizon. This level of interior space extends beyond the threshold of the home and into the wild, open outdoors. It speaks of freedom and responsibility, of nurture and nature, of play and of work, combined strikingly in a single scene. 189 Figure 43. Gennie DeWeese, Clover Year, 1998, scroll, oil bar on canvas, 70 x 70 inches. Courtesy of Eric Overlie. Like all Modernists, DeWeese did not try to create the illusion of real-time space. Instead, through the use of sumptuous color, texture, and, especially with her scrolls, the mere size of them, she unearths the truth of the work by opening up space through her attention to line, shape, and composition, which in turn convey distance, scale, and structure. DeWeese said of her transition to scrolls: 190 Because I tend to work on as large a scale as my space allows, I became intrigued with the idea of doing scrolls rather than framed paintings both from the practical standpoint of ease of storage but more importantly to introduce the Japanese tradition of changing displays according to seasons, moods, or whims. It allows more personal contact and decisions from the observer. 335 In Springtime in the Rockies (2005) (Figure 44), the sky envelopes the viewer and somehow evokes both sunshine and evening. In the same way the promise of spring pulls at that loose string of hope, DeWeese pulls the viewer into a sense of calm, a feeling of assurance. DeWeese’s colors repeatedly range from the natural to the exceptional. She used oil pigment sticks to express the Montana nature of her work, giving it a soft edge. Springtime in the Rockies presents the view from her studio in Cottonwood Canyon showing evidence of the verdant undergrowth saturated in deep blue shadows, the stretch of willows and aspen reaching for spring. The experience, the location, and her personal dialogue delineate her work. Terry Karson noted: Her paintings are not tentative, cool observations of a detached person looking at the landscape from a distance, nor are they renderings of personal sentiment. These are paintings of a person knee-deep in mud, thorns and thicket. These are paintings of a person who loves the land, who perceives a oneness with it and expresses her sense of place with lusty grit. 336 335 Gennie DeWeese, Yellowstone Art Center, 1992. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 336 Terry Karson, Gennie DeWeese Retrospective, (Missoula: Art Museum of Missoula, 1996). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 191 Figure 44. Gennie DeWeese, Springtime in the Rockies, 2005, scroll, oil bar on canvas, 60 x 86.5 inches. Courtesy of the DeWeese Family. In Clear Cut (1990) (Figure 45), DeWeese’s voice deepens with the patterned stumps set against the dreary, cloud-darkened horizon. The complete devastation depicted here speaks to her non-objective style in a way that substantiates the overtones of the piece. The distance instilled by the pattern feels almost cautionary, like protective armor. DeWeese portrays a place invaded, violated, a place no longer imbued with purpose. Upon considering the land as “mother nature” the expanse of defilement rings with the voices of women, of betrayal, and loss. 192 Figure 45. Gennie DeWeese, Clear Cut, 1990, paint stick on paper, 39 x 47.5. Courtesy of the Missoula Art Museum. In 1989, DeWeese curated the show Women’s Work. That show traveled around museums in Montana from 1989 to 1991. The show’s purpose was to create a collection of the work of women artists from around the state to celebrate the Montana Centennial. At the onset of the project she thought it would be difficult to find enough women artists to fill the show, but as she said in her curator’s statement, “After several phone calls…I found myself inundated with lists of names and consequently the difficult task of 193 selecting.”337 This show, Women’s Work: The Montana Women’s Centennial Art Survey Exhibition, while revealing how many women artists were working at that time, also exposed how little recognition they had received. When the call went out, DeWeese said she found a “remarkable” number of women who stayed in Montana and remained productive. DeWeese, by 1990, thought she was well aware of most artists, so how was it possible so many women stayed under the radar? Of course the idea that women often went unheard and unseen was nothing new to her. She’d spent her life creating her own voice while raising five children. The question instilled the motivation to get those women’s works seen by the public. DeWeese self-identified as an artist who stood up for women. Through her paintings and through her role as the matriarch of Montana’s artistic community, DeWeese pulled back the curtain on women in the arts. She wrote about the women artists who came and left, the few who stayed and raised families, and those who managed to remain in Montana. I can only guess that it is not only the natural beauty that surrounds us that holds [these women] here. There is a kind of camaraderie and mutual respect among the artist community that persists in spite of the vast distances that prevent frequent contact. And, of course, there is a kind of isolation that allows time for observation and reflection not so easily attainable in the major art centers. 338 DeWeese included Isabelle Johnson in the show and noted that Westerners needed exposure to Modernism. Besides work by Frances Senska, Jessie Wilber, sculptor Deborah Butterfield, ceramic artist Beth Lo, and painter/sculptor Lela Autio, DeWeese 337 Gennie DeWeese, Women’s Work (Miles City: Custer County Art Center, 1989). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. 338 DeWeese, Women’s Work. 194 included the artist Helen McAuslan (1895–1970). For DeWeese, McAuslan offered something that no one else did. McAuslan, nearly twenty-five years older than she was, had seen the world. She studied in New York City, Paris, and Mexico. She traveled internationally as often as she could, bought and sold a ranch in Springdale, Montana, built a cabin in McLeod, Montana, and built a Modernist house in Bozeman. McAuslan, independently wealthy, politically active, and prolifically creative, became someone DeWeese respected and considered a friend and fellow Modernist. McAuslan’s success in the art world did not dissuade her from living in Montana. Perhaps that attitude and her unabashedly political perspective attracted DeWeese as well. A reviewer of a McAuslan show in 1985 at the Beall Art Center in Bozeman remarked, “Much of McAuslan’s best work here, including the abstractions, is a testament to the high quality available to artists who develop an awareness of Cezanne’s ordering of perception.”339 The reviewer went on to say that the strongest works in the show were the paintings she did in 1970 after the Kent State riots, showing the slain bodies of protesters. “This painting is one of McAuslan’s strongest, a vivid response to an unexpected political intrusion.”340 Rafael Chacon stated of the Kent State paintings: They have a sense of moral outrage and indignation and depth of content…Painted in a dark palette, these paintings are both horrifying and somber. The recumbent figures are not casual models lounging in a studio, but rather fallen innocents clutching their breasts, uttering their final pleas, and pouring out their blood like rivers across the canvas. They not only represent her mature, modernist style, but also reveal the ideas of freedom and civility that she most valued in life. 341 339 Harvey Hamburgh, “McAuslan Works Shown,” Bozeman Daily Chronicle, April 19, 1985, A7. 340 Hamburgh, “McAuslan Works Shown.” 341 Rafael Chacon, Rediscovering Helen McAuslan: Montana Modernist, (Missoula: University of Montana, 2001). 195 In an essay McAuslan wrote for the Montana Institute of the Arts magazine in 1955, she explained: Painting is an attempt to create forms and colors on the canvas with a life and relationship of their own, without reference to the material world; to divest the picture of anecdote or illustration to the point where the emotions of the spectator will be wholly aesthetic, as when listening to music. Since I have lived in Montana I have an enriched awareness of space and time—caused by the mountains, the space, the great distances around us. This quality I attempt to indicate in my paintings and sculpture. 342 She concluded the article with the idea that artists must use their inner eye, rather than their outer eye, or they will return to the pre-modernist mimetic art. “With this vision we may then see that the present day artist is searching for an order and faith in life, and perhaps expresses as an individual that for which the collective human mind is also searching.”343 After McAuslan’s death, Helen Conrad, whose husband directed the art department at MSC, worked tirelessly to convince the Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana, to accession all of McAuslan’s paintings, sketches, and art collection, consisting of over 545 pieces. As a memorial to her, a group of friends including the DeWeeses, published a portfolio of her drawings covering forty years. The seventy-four cardstock drawings were accompanied by a short biography, a note from a cousin, and free-form poem by Gennie DeWeese evoking imagery indicative of McAuslan’s life. It starts: Slow, unhurried movements, sparse conversation, sketch book and inks, red-visored hat to ward off the sun, comfortable walking shoes, well-worn wool plaid shirt and loose-fitting pants…The cabin on the Boulder River. 342 Mirriam, The Arts in Montana, 40–42. 343 Mirriam, The Arts in Montana, 40–42. 196 Shelves of books with the newest ones on the table in the process of being read. 344 The herculean effort Gennie DeWeese put forth to keep McAuslan’s legacy alive and to intermittently curate shows of her work speaks not only to the significance of McAuslan’s friendship with DeWeese, but it also speaks to DeWeese herself and her continual fight for women artists to be recognized. For Gennie DeWeese, a woman’s place was in the studio and in the gallery. She came to art at a time when women were scarcely heard. Museums and galleries routinely dismissed female artists. It became vital to break the “glass” frame, so to speak. Not only did she curate the traveling show, Women’s Work, but in 1995, she served on a panel for the National Museum of Women’s Art. DeWeese showed extensively in the Northwest and, just as important for her, she championed female artists whenever and however she could. The art community she was instrumental in forming not only sustained her, but it became her legacy. When considering the idea of community, the DeWeeses built that community based on their experiences in art school where they enjoyed deeply connected friendships, long days in the studio, and long nights talking about art. They kept up those friendships with frequent correspondence over many years. In Montana, they sought out that type of camaraderie and found it in an environment filled with young men and women just out of the military, going to college on the G. I. Bill, looking for new ways to see themselves in a world constantly in flux. 344 Gennie DeWeese, Images, Memories and a Few Comments, (Bozeman: Museum of the Rockies, 1972). Published in conjunction with an exhibition of Helen McAuslan’s works. 197 CONCLUSION Redefining Western Art in Montana Modernism in postwar Montana, by its very definition, implied a forward motion, a new direction, an innovative perspective of contemporary ideas, a new way of seeing. Modern art focused on the present as compared to the prior art in Montana that focused on the past. As art historian Philip DeLoria noted, “Modernism is the slippery kind of object that one makes sense of by surrounding it on all sides.”345 Making sense of Modernism in Montana is exactly that, to see it from all sides: the mountains, the gullies, the rivers, the pastures, the soft hillsides, an increase in population, the newly built highways, and the backyards. The Montana Modernists painted, sculpted, and printed. They taught, shared, and joined together as a community. By redefining Western art in Montana, they offered a new way for Montanans to view themselves, and they revealed a broader perspective that engaged the viewer with the common aspects of daily life. To fully understand the significance of Isabelle Johnson, Bill Stockton, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese is to appreciate the lack of Modern art in the state prior to the presence of their vision. These six artists persisted in challenging themselves and their students to overcome the status quo and to adhere to their individual principles, their training, and their unique perspective. The Montana Modernists lifted Montanans out of the past and introduced a new vocabulary as read through the language of art, and through that, an alternate lens for understanding. Mimetic portraits of mountains and the nostalgic illustrative work of the pre-war era no 345 Philip Deloria, Becoming Mary Sully, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 148. 198 longer spoke to all Montanans. Modernism reflected the drastic changes of a postwar America and, in particular, a state that was outgrowing its own mythology. Through the exploration of place, artistic lineage, and community, the Montana Modernists developed a deep-seated aesthetic that felt true to themselves and true to Montana. They set forth a new paradigm for artists to feel the density and full range of human expression without having to resort to historical tropes. The sense of place put forth by Isabelle Johnson, Bill Stockton, Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese included the articulation of Modernism, but also encompassed the landscape, which made their work more accessible to those not familiar with the art world outside of Montana. They understood place as a source of sustenance and production, of home and hearth. Out of the six artists mentioned here, four of them were women who used their role as teachers and artists to shine a light on what it meant to be a woman in Montana. They challenged gender roles in Montana through their art and through their lives. Senska used clay from the land itself to create her pots and glazes. She expressed an independence and identity directly through the Modernistic imagery she put on her work. Translated into words, her work says, not everything is as it seems: a bottle may become a partridge, and a wine set may be portrayed as a chicken. She also added the language of African to Montana art, the “primitive power” of sgraffito scratched into the dark glazes. Johnson told the world that she could do what she wanted, however she wanted, without regard for expectations. She stepped out of the role of a traditional rancher-woman and became an independent artist who also ranched. Wilber took the simple step of 199 disregarding the lady-hobbyist reputation of women artists in Montana and modeled the value of professionalism, elevating the role of teacher to art professor. Gennie DeWeese, although a mother of five children, carved out her own space and by doing so, established her voice. By brushing off the traditional view of college professors’ wives, she instead showed Montanans the power women committed themselves to their art, without distraction. Robert DeWeese, most strongly through his tie constructions and collages, made social and political comments on postwar America. He asked what it meant to be a man in a commodity-driven society. He blasted print media and television’s intrusion into people’s lives through the form of advertising. Bill Stockton also spoke to the mistrust of the mainstream artworld through his life lived in Grass Range, rather than close to the art markets of New York or Denver, although he could have taken part in them. All of these artists took the further step of expanding the parameters of Montanans, leading by example. Embedded in the lexicon of the land, they translated and transformed the understanding of the Western landscape into something more than an advertisement for dude ranches. For Johnson and Stockton, their direct relationship to the land they worked, as expressed through visual language, moved beyond the landscape format produced in the 1800s. They painted with a tenderness and, at times, conveyed the hardness of what it meant to find frozen livestock in the dead of winter and the struggle to survive in lean times. Through their use of color, line, and form they exposed a life lived off the land. 200 Although not ranchers, Jessie Wilber and Frances Senska adopted Montana as their lifelong home. Senska connected to the land in a visceral way through the raw materials she utilized and through her excursions into the field to collect clay with her students in tow. Wilber’s references to nature through her prints about her garden, the magpies she watched in winter, and her cats as they sunned themselves outdoors brought the modernist aesthetic of the personal into her classroom and into her studio. Like Wilber, Gennie DeWeese portrayed the landscape through her deeply personal experience of nature. Her daughter, Tina DeWeese noted: Even from her early years at Pentwater, Michigan, where she spent a great deal of time with her sisters on the beach, she was connected to nature. In Montana, there were many years of camping every summer at Flathead Lake with the Autios, and later at Cliff Lake with their circle of friends, and many trips to the West Coast. 346 Tina added that Cottonwood Canyon became a personal excursion into the heart of the mountain woods down at the creek “and through the seasons on the land where she had her tipi. [Gennie DeWeese] did not live in her tipi but it was her stake in the ground of having made her way to nature.”347 This sentiment harkens back to the letters she wrote to Bob pining for a life closer to nature. Tina said, “The studio was where she made the paintings, but she gathered sensual information from all of these spaces in the heart of nature.”348 Tina, who also knew Senska and Wilber very well, noted that they had nature in “their blood and bones and heart and soul. Nature was the source of so much inspiration for all of their work. In this way life and art were not separate.”349 346 Tina DeWeese, in email with author, 2019. 347 DeWeese, email. 348 DeWeese, email. 349 DeWeese, email. 201 Stockton and Robert DeWeese devised a visual shorthand while concerning themselves with the formal aspects that defined Modernism. Each one confronted the truth through the limitations of a flat surface, the conveyance of line, and the overall balancing/unbalancing/rebalancing of composition and color. They brought their mentors with them, from Johnson’s time at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, to Stockton’s semesters at Montmartre, from Gennie DeWeese’s adherence to abstraction, to Senska’s experience in the Bauhaus, and they made it their own. The lessons of Hans Hofmann, the forms of Paul Cezanne, the Fauvist colors of Henri Matisse, and the energy of Willem de Kooning can be perceived beneath their work like a pentimento. After World War II, colleges served as a springboard for a new zeitgeist, a kind of collective consciousness that spread from newly formed and invigorated art departments. In Montana, art professors found themselves teaching their peers, as many of their students were of the same age and had served in the war as well. These veterans returning to civilian life began to question the notion of their American identity, which contrasted with a view of themselves before the war. Big questions about the power of the atom bomb, the role of America in the world, the pros and cons of a capitalistic society versus a socialist society, the failure of Communism as a worker’s utopia, the onset of McCarthyism, and the Cold War against the Soviet Union all led to many intellectuals and artists debating not only the fate of the world, but the role of the artist within that world. In Montana, this questioning could not be answered with the art of the 202 past, with the language of C. M. Russell or Edgar S. Paxton. It needed to be rethought, reframed, redefined. This herculean redefinition what it meant to make art in Montana fell to the art teachers as they allowed their students to experiment, to break into the studios afterhours in order to pursue answers to their questions. They threw away the old master/apprentice pedagogy and equalized the classroom, creating validation for young artists. The process of lifting students from pupils to peers helped them to find a footing in Modernism, and beyond. Modernism in Montana became possible through the unequaled, lifelong friendships and ties to a community they created, much of which germinated at the DeWeese home. As Rudy Autio pointed out in his memoir, It Comes Around Again, the DeWeeses were like a “truth farm and everybody in Bozeman gathered there.” Autio summed up the experience of the DeWeese salon-like atmosphere as, “Everyone was welcome and felt at home. People from all walks of life came to visit. Art was constantly in the air being discussed and made and talked about.”350 Montana presented both a challenge and an opportunity in its vastness. The population during these postwar, formative years was sparse in most areas, but burgeoned in college towns. The challenges included connecting one community to the next. Through sheer willpower, facing bad roads on long journeys in old cars, the rewards of connecting Bozeman to Helena to Billings to Great Falls enabled the strengthening of and building upon artistic ideals. A small group in the right place could make an indelible 350 Rudy Autio, It Comes Around Again, (Missoula: Rattlesnake Valley Press, 2019), 18. 203 mark. The landscape of Montana, as the backdrop for artists and a common undercurrent, became a language comprehensible to nearly everyone. The task of redefining art in Montana fell on their shoulders as artists and as art teachers. By redefining the language of art in Montana they also redefined what it meant to be a Montanan: by changing the palette of art they began the journey addressing a new identity -- of what it meant to live and work and create art in a state beguiled by its own past. To come away with a critical understanding of the Montana Modernists is to acknowledge the cultural rift between tradition and change in the form of artistic expression. The Old West was represented by illustrative paintings and tall-tale narratives, conveyed through a mythological past while the Montana Modernists presented a new way to see the West. The first Montana Modernists fought hard to get their art in front of people other than each other. Senska made a point of pricing her work at affordable rates so anyone could buy her pots. It took time, but today many museums and private collectors display the work of these artists. Identity is strongly tied to storytelling. Personal narratives, the bombastic style of advertising, media, and historical factors often morph into mythologies. The Montana Modernists began to deconstruct the mythology they encountered all around them. It is only by providing a broader context for establishing a narrative that people can begin to understand their place within that story. The Montana Modernists did that through their art, by providing a fresh canvas for all Montanans to see themselves portrayed there. To re-envision the Montana identity they needed to redefine the nature of art in the state. 204 The tension between commercially viable art and artistically independent art still exists. The question of whether to furnish the market with redundant iconography or to create art that speaks to the experience of understanding place, from white-out January nights to summer-glorious, star-drenched skies still preoccupies studios and galleries all over the state. What is the role of the artist in contemporary Montana? This was the question the Montana Modernists asked themselves and their students. 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