Eilshemius gets another chance at fame

NEW YORK, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- American painter Louis M. Eilshemius (1864-1941) always coveted membership in the prestigious National Academy of Design, which showed his paintings twice in the late 1880s but never invited him to join its ranks.

Now, 60 years after his death, the National Academy is giving the artist his first retrospective show in 20 years, "Louis M. Eilshemius: An Independent Artist," which will run through Dec. 30. Forty-five of his major oils are on view.

If you are not familiar with the work of this academically trained artist, who often painted in an awkward, amateur style generally referred to as "naïve," it is because he stopped painting in 1921 when he was 57 and was esteemed only by a small group of contemporaries.

Guest curator of the show, Steven Harvey, explained in an interview that the artist "was simply exhausted from exposing his work to rancor and neglect" and entered a twilight zone that mysteriously enhanced his reputation. When he died, the New York Herald Tribune ran his obituary with the headline: "Eilshemius, 77, Dies in Bellevue (Hospital), Penniless, Bitter, and Famous."

His admirers included artists Marcel Duchamp, Louise Nevelson, and Milton Avery, whose portrait of Eilshemius is included in the show; critic Henry McBride, author Gertrude Stein who owned the professorial 1915 self-portrait in the exhibition, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney who displayed works by the artist at her museum. They saw something in Eilshemius' work that many others did not.

Clement Greenberg, the eminent modern art critic who liked Eilshemius' "thin but intense" work, admitted that from 1909 on the artist became "too radical."

"His painting was at its best when it retained enough academicism to give it body, complication and control," he wrote after the artist's death.

"But despite this deranged period, this phantasmagorical character was one of the best artists we have ever produced."

Eilshemius' early career was marked by beautifully painted landscapes in the style of the French Barbizon School he came to admire when he was an art student in Paris in the late 1880s.

Within less than a decade he was painting nude women floating in these landscapes in arching diagonals as though propelled aloft by an invisible trampoline.

These imaginative but far from sexy paintings are Eilshemius' trademark and to appreciate them is at best an acquired taste. At least two of those on display are considered outstanding by the artist's advocates - the 1899 "Afternoon Wind" on loan from New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the 1908 "The Dream" from the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, N. Y.

"The Dream" depicts a ring of female dancers in midair over a lake in a moonlit valley. Eilshemius described these paintings as "visionary," but viewers today may find them contrived, awkward and silly, however interesting they may be from the viewpoint of American art history. They are as eccentric as the artist's penchant for enclosing his paintings in painted oval-cornered brown frames edged in dull gold in the style of the daguerreotype framing.

The artist was used to harsh criticism, although it may have contributed to repeated bouts of depression, and he had a handy retort for critics, declaring himself "the Mightiest Man and Wonder of the World" in one of his many published writings. But his paintings were rejected by the landmark 1913 Armory Show of avant-garde art in New York in spite of his experiments with anti-academic ideas.

Eilshemius met with some success in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists Exhibition which led to his sponsorship by Duchamp, an émigré avant-garde artist, several solo exhibitions, and representation by a dealer. But he always seemed to be living at the poverty level, even abandoning canvas for shirtboards to economize.

He had some family money early in his career that enabled him to travel extensively in the United States, Europe, and the South Pacific, but after his retirement and an automobile accident that invalided him in 1932, he lived meagerly and finally on the charity of fellow artists.

The show includes a number of his New York cityscapes, including a moonlit street scene and rooftops at sunrise that are truly poetic and far removed from the contemporary Ashcan School of painters who depicted the stark realities of city life without blinking. There also are several paintings inspired by his 1901 visit to Samoa, including a steamy tropical river scene with two bathers that recalls the subject matter of Paul Gauguin.

Eilshemius' work showed many influences other than that of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the Barbizon landscapist and figure painter. One of these was the American artist Albert Pinkham Ryder whose turbulent style is echoed in Eilshemius' 1908 "The Flying Dutchman," illustrating the legend of the ghost ship in a ranging storm, his most dramatic composition.

The possibility that Eilshemius influenced other artists is dismissed except in the case of the Swiss one-name artist Balthus, who saw one of his paintings title "The Prodigy" in the collection of a French friend in 1930 and was stuck by the strange character of the work. It shows a young girl at the piano, her overly large head turned away from the keyboard towards the viewer at an impossible angle.

Balthus had never painted pre-pubsecent girls until he saw "The Prodigy," and he often pictured them with he same sidelong glance, using it to give his paintings a sexual suggestiveness lacking in Eilshemius. Duchamp later recalled that when Pablo Picasso, who had also seen "The Prodigy," first saw a painting by Balthus he remarked, "You must have been looking at Eilshemius."

"The Prodigy" was recently rediscovered in a private collection and is a prominently displayed in the show, whose catalog includes an illustration of a very similar painting by Balthus, "Portrait of Sheila Pickering," painted in 1935.

The catalog with text by Harvey has been published by the National Academy (62 pages, $30).