“Walt Whitman” by John W. Alexander.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Therein lies a marked feature of Alexander’s work. It is art that can be lived with. It takes its place in the household and accommodates itself to almost any color scheme because of its neutral tone and lack of glittering notes. How many modern easel pictures are keyed up to the shrieking point, and are planned to outshriek their neighbors in an exhibition! They are Salon pictures—“machines” that make a clatter and having served their purpose go back to the studio and are faced against the wainscoting. But Alexander’s pictures could be taken home without danger of a family quarrel. They are delicate enough in pattern to go in the drawing-room and refined enough in manner to be seen and not heard.
Perhaps this very quality of refinement, so acceptable in his easel pictures, was something of a defect in his mural decorations. The greatly enlarged wall space of a public building called for more intensity of color, more sharp contrast of angle lines, more loftiness and elaborateness of composition than the painter dreamt of in his art philosophy. His attempts at mural painting were somewhat sporadic. It was not exactly his métier, and though he took it up with energy when asked to do so, he succeeded in producing little more than an enlargement of his easel pictures. The same tone, light, and color of his portraits and single figures went into the groupings in the Congressional Library, the Harrisburg Capitol, and the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh. The Library decorations gave the “Evolution of the Book” in six lunettes that illustrated the stages of book-making rather than symbolized or epitomized them. At Harrisburg the theme was the “Evolution of the State,” another set of fourteen lunettes. The decoration at Pittsburgh was the most ambitious performance of the three and sought to tell the story of Pittsburgh—the story of steel and labor. It is called the “Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” with the city personified by a knight in armor with a flaming sword in his hand instead of the large female figure of conventional decoration. The panels carry over three stories of the entrance-hall of the Carnegie Institute and some five hundred figures are used. The first floor shows the half-naked furnacemen at work amid smoke, steam, and fire glare. The smoke and steam rise up and envelop, make an atmospheric setting for, the allegorical figures of the second floor that from all sides are bringing tributes to the mailed figure of Pittsburgh. The allegorical figures are winged, robed in long trailing garments, and drift lightly through the air or upon clouds. The third floor contains lunettes typifying the arts and sciences.
The whole decoration is well thought out, and is put together, within its framings of yellowish marble, with a distinctly decorative effect. The tone of it is quiet, subdued, restful—perhaps too much so. The figures are graceful, even the men—again, perhaps too much so. One is not sorry that Labor is shown with cheerful face and normal body rather than sad-browed, nerve-racked, and body-wrecked, after the Zola-Meunier formula. That exaggeration has become just as conventional and wearisome as the prettiness of Bouguereau, or the pettiness of Meissonier. But Alexander’s workers are perhaps too elegant for reality as his floating figures are too graceful for allegory. There is a feeling that there is not enough mental grip about them. It is paradoxical to say that the decoration is too decorative, but that states the case quite rightly. The pattern and the color that set off an easel picture appropriately fail to carry when employed on so vast a scale of wall decoration—fail to carry from sheer attenuation of motive and design. The Pittsburgh decoration has not enough strength behind it to spread over five thousand feet of painted surface. Strength was never a quality of Alexander’s art. He had skill, grace, refinement, charm, style, but he never attempted to win by force or power.
After his return from Paris in 1901 he took up his permanent residence in New York and immediately entered into the art life of the city and the country. He had received gold medals at Paris and St. Louis and the Legion of Honor from France, had placed his pictures in public galleries all the way from St. Petersburg and Odessa to Chicago, and had become a member of some twenty art societies. In addition to the McDowell Club and the School Art League he was the head of the Federation of Fine Arts, the Society of Mural Painters, and from 1909 the president of the National Academy of Design. His interest in art movements was great and the energy he gave to them was at the expense not only of his painting but his health. As president of the Academy of Design his devotion was unflagging even though it met with almost everything but encouragement and success. During his presidency he took up anew the problem of a building site which had been dragging along for years. There had been failure in Fifty-seventh Street in 1896, and over the Lenox Library plot in 1904, but Alexander failed four further times with the sites of the Arsenal, the Central Park, Bryant Park, and the Railroad Yard.
This with many other burdens he was carrying helped to wear him out. He had never been robust. On the contrary, he was of delicate, refined physique and possessed of a mental energy that far outran his bodily strength. Moreover, he never knew how to spare himself. In his last years with many overhead burdens to carry he could still take on new enterprises. At Onteora, where he had a summer home, he became much interested in costuming and decorative settings for the theatre, and later, with Mrs. Alexander, made many designs for Miss Maude Adams’s productions of “Jeanne d’Arc,” “Peter Pan,” “Chantecler,” and “The Little Minister.” In New York he presided over the National Institute of Arts and Letters, spoke at every gathering of art people, and was at the beck and call of society whenever anything of an artistic nature was desired. At the last—that is, in 1915—death came to him quite suddenly.
Both socially and artistically Alexander had become a man of distinction. Every one liked his refined, gentlemanly personality, admired his art, and listened to his counsel. For these reasons and because of his commanding position he came to have a strong influence in all art matters. He had set a pattern that many of the younger painters followed, and, like Chase, had helped to establish the latter-day tradition of craftsmanship here in America. It was not the exact craftsmanship of Chase or Alexander or Sargent that was established, though each of them has had his imitators. The movement for sound technical education in American art was of no one painter’s devising. The three were typical of the movement, but there were others—Weir, Twachtman, Beckwith, Blum, Brush, Thayer, Dewing, Cox, Blashfield—who were of the same faith and who added their quota of strength. All of them working together, with a common energy and enthusiasm, have created a body of belief as to what constitutes style and skill in art. They have established a tradition based in sound craftsmanship than which nothing could be safer or better for the future of American art. It was Alexander’s part to help lay the foundation-stones. War or national madness or economic change may prevent any splendid palace of art arising therefrom, but at least Alexander and his contemporaries builded the firm foundation—builded perhaps better than they knew.
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