Richard Andres: Selected Works 1950–1975

Richard Andres: Selected Works 1950-1975

Richard Andres: Selected Works 1950-1975 June 9 - August 20, 2022 Introduction

by Michael Wolf With an essay

by Henry Adams

23645 Merchantile Road, Cleveland, OH 44122 info@wolfsgallery.com | 216-721-6945 wolfsgallery.com

Cleveland Institute of Art, 1948 Richard Andres and Avis Hazel Johnson (Andres)

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Looking Back introduction by Michael Wolf

I knew Richard and Avis Andres and visited them in their wonderful home. They were older and wiser than me, I didn’t know them well but I knew I admired them, these smart ones that came before and gave us so much.

They were both real artists, the real thing. All you had to do was listen and look around.

The neat, full brush pots, the shelves packed with oftused books, big and small canvases above a beautifully clean, old paint-spattered floor; a family’s home, perhaps, but clearly a temple of artistic freedom.

It’s hard to believe today that in our gallery, I’m standing in the midst of Richard Andres’ big, amazing body of work. What he saw, felt and experienced is echoing and vibrating from each canvas, the gallery is transformed to another time.

Jung + Freud. Mickey Mouse + McCarthy. Kerouac, Castro, Ginsburg + Elvis. The Cedar Bar, Rosa Parks, Rothko, Pollack and the Polaroid. Jonas Salk, Sputnik and the hula hoop. The Bomb, Beatniks and the Boomers. Your mind is reeling with all the forces that drove the incredible social revolution of the 60s. These were the authentic forebearers of my generation.

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Andres at the easel, c. 1970

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Richard Andres: An Appreciation essay by Henry Adams

The discovery this catalogue celebrates, a trove of masterful abstract expressionist works by Richard Andres (1927-2013), is a rare and wondrous event, which both introduces us to a new artistic voice and evokes the heady times of the mid-century American art world.

Richard Andres was an odd combination of an artistic hermit and a figure on top of the latest developments on the contemporary scene. After graduating from the Cleveland School of Art, he spent most of his career as a high school art teacher, and while he won many honors and awards in local art shows such as the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show, he never seriously sought national recognition. He was content to quietly pursue his career as a painter in a secluded home of his own design, with big windows looking out on a forest setting, undistracted by the pursuit of fame. He seems to have taken pleasure in the fact that he did not need to sell his paintings, but could organize them chronologically, giving him the ability to review his artistic development.

His work harks back to the period very different from today when the “ideal artist” was not expected to be a master of business-deals and self-promotion but to focus on art alone in the contemplative quiet of his studio.

Artists were expected to pass something on to future generations rather than focusing on making money and becoming famous in the here and now.

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Yet interestingly, Andres’s work remained as closely in tune with the latest happenings in contemporary art as if he had lived in New York and been a regular on the gallery scene. While Andres’s training was largely in traditional representational styles, by figures such as the Cleveland landscapist Carl Gaertner, his mature work shows an awareness not only of foundational modernist figures like Picasso, Matisse and the German Expressionists, but of the controversial, cutting edge artists of the living moment such as Motherwell, De Kooning, Frans Kline, and Pierre Alechinsky.

Andres was a large man, rather quiet and solemn in demeanor, with large black spectacles. His wife, more diminutive and also an artist, and who painted hundreds of portraits, was livelier in company. Those who knew Richard Andres recall the intensity with which he looked at paintings in both exhibitions and museums, as if he was looking beneath and beyond the surface of the paintings to grasp the forces that brought them into being. Andres, himself, once remarked: Art is something that’s there, to look at, so words are very difficult.

Essentially, the closest I can come is to say I’m a 1950s painter. The ‘50s was sort of a new attitude toward art. It was going to be big. It was going to be strong. This great big group of painters had this attitude toward painting and it’s hard to pin it down because each painter was different.

Andres was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927, the son of two factory workers. His father, Raymond, had only a third-grade education; his mother, Clara, never attended high-school, and was one of only three of the thirteen children in her family who lived beyond childhood. The family lived above a tavern and the couple supplemented their income by working in the seedy bar downstairs, his mother serving drinks and his father playing ragtime on the piano.

For much of the time Richard and his two brothers were left to their own devices. Richard’s two brothers, Raymond and Russell, enjoyed stickball,

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boxing, and rough-and-tumble sports. From an early age, Richard liked to paint with the small sets of watercolors he received for Christmas each year.

At eight years old he discovered the Albright Art Gallery (now the AlbrightKnox) and generally spent a few hours every week wandering around inside.

He was particularly interested in the watercolors of Charles Burchfield, which while more freely painted than the art of magazines and calendars that he was familiar with, also somehow seemed more alive and visually exciting.

When he was ten, he asked for and was given for Christmas Eliot O’Hara’s “how to” book on watercolor painting, and over the next few years he carefully studied it. It provided technical guidance and an artistic model for the success that decisively turned him towards an artistic career. As a junior in high school he was encouraged to submit a watercolor, Two Barns, to the national 1944-45 Ingersoll Art Contest and was one of twelves Grand Prize winners—each one of whom was awarded a hundred dollars, a lot of money for a high school student at this time. The painting was also exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he sold it, and it was reproduced on a calendar. Perhaps most significant, due to this award, he was granted a Henry Keller scholarship to attend the Cleveland School of Art. His great mentor there was Carl Gaertner, a master of landscapes and industrial scenes, somewhat reminiscent of George Bellows, and his description of Gaertner is like a journey to the art world of another era. The training Gartner provided was in many regards traditional, but he was not a dogmatist, and he was respectful of new artistic directions, such as Surrealism and Cubism. Perhaps his principle artistic gift was that of careful attention to the personalities of his students, and encouragement of their special gifts. As Andres recalled: Carl Gaertner was quiet, soft-spoken, and dapper in his bow tie, tweed jacket, and plain trousers. He never wore a smock, the regular dress of most of the faculty of the Cleveland School of Art. How he managed to avoid the paint that was on almost every chair in his sophomore painting studio is a mystery. He believed that an artist should be a stable member of society and shunned any “arty” or bohemian attitudes.

Carl was the most renowned of the Cleveland artists of the time; appearing in national exhibitions and with regular shows at the

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Babcock, and Macbeth Galleries in New York, favorable reviews in Art News, and the subject of an article in American Artist.

Gaertner’s teaching style was subdued, he did not lecture but did give a few demonstrations--how to preserve the white of the paper in watercolor and how to stretch canvases are two that I remember.

He demonstrated the use of gouache, working on the best-quality Whatman Board…

Carl would go quietly from student to student, offering his comments on what they were doing. To me he was extremely encouraging and surprisingly open to experimentation. His comment might be, “I see you’ve been looking at the Degas Show;” “I see you’re interested in texture--remind me to show you something next week”; and “You didn’t hit it this time.” He spoke about national art events and declared that Braque’s controversial first-place award (Carnegie show) was “justly deserved.” It took time before I appreciated the role Carl Gaertner played in my life. He was not so much a mentor as an advocate and champion. If Paul Travis was “Uncle Paul,” Carl became “Father Carl.”

Mostly portrait drawings seem to survive from Andres’s student years, including some rather moving self-portraits. They show a good deal of technical skill in capturing the anatomy, the closely-observed topography of

Battle of the Sea Gods after Mantegna, c. 1950, acrylic on paper, 23.5 x 35.5 inches 10

the human face, and have a bit of a German expressionist quality that lifts them out of the realm of rendering that’s simply mechanical and academic.

At this point Andres’s artistic pathway was disrupted for several years, when he was drafted during the Korean War. By good fortune he avoided combat, and was eventually assigned to work that was somewhat artistic in nature, first painting signs and billboards, and later murals for army bases, both in the United States and Panama. By the time he returned to art-making he was a different person, and the art world had changed substantially as well. He took on a high-school teaching job that provided enough income to survive, and to support a wife and family. It also allowed him time to paint on his own.

“I’m a 1950s painter. The ‘50s was sort of an attitude toward art. It was going to be big. It was going to be strong.

This great big group of painters had this attitude toward painting and it’s hard to pin it down because each painter was different. It really is a style that’s hard to define but the term ‘abstract expressionism’ is often used.”

-Andres Given his traditional training, it’s surprising that Andres was so quick to respond to the dramatic changes in the art world of the 1950s and the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. And it’s also remarkable, given that his first training was as a watercolorist, that as a mature artist he was so comfortable working big, and was a virtuoso of managing shapes and patterns on a large scale. In this regard, it’s interesting that, as mentioned, when serving in the army during the Korean War, he was assigned to paint signs, billboards and murals. While much of the work was fairly routine in nature, it provided him with an almost unconscious ability to grasp how brushstrokes will look from a distance.

At the opening moment of Richard Andres’s career, just after the Korean War, there were two modern artists who had already reached the stature of unquestioned master: Picasso and Matisse. It’s important to recognize that both artists were still very much alive and producing important work. And it was natural to look at the work that both were producing at the time to get a

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sense of where it stood at what was then “the present moment,” and of how it might be pushed forward. Picasso’s work of the 1930s and the period of World War II, has an anguished quality. His landmark painting of this time Guernica, which memorializes the bombing of a civilian village, transforms human figures into distorted balloon-like shapes. Matisse on the other hand, was producing some of his most joyous work, such as his silkscreens for Jazz and his paper cutouts.

Andres focused on mastering both these approaches. A painting such as Battle of the Sea Gods (after Mantegna) dismembers and rearranges a classic composition in a manner very similar to Picasso—who made parodies and variations on the old masters throughout his career, and whose fascination with reworking the old masters reached a kind of peak in 1957, when, in the space of a few months, he created 58 paintings that were variations on The Maids of Honor by Velasquez.

But concurrently, Andres was creating paintings inspired by Matisse, such as the two lovely untitled paintings of 1949, with their colorful, playful shapes that resemble cutouts. Both suggest sources in nature—one seems to be a landscape, the other a still-life—though they are a little more abstract than Bridges II, c. 1975, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 21 x 25 inches 12

the work of Matisse, in a way which brings to mind the biomorphic shapes of Joan Miro.

In subsequent years, Andres was stimulated to create designs that were bolder, freer, and more abstract in a fashion similar to that of the Abstract Expressionists, and one can occasionally find echoes of the painters of that group. White and Yellow of 1953-55 brings to mind the work of Arshile Gorky and the early De Kooning; Black Line, circa 1958, and Blue Wall, circa 1959, the work of Robert Motherwell, particularly his elegies to the Spanish Republic; paintings such as Dark, while quite different in design, suggest that he was moved and influenced by the deep mysterious color harmonies of Mark Rothko.

Increasingly the forms in his paintings began to float, as in Circus Lights and Shadows of 1964, in which the forms have the quality of floating balloons. Essentially, by this time he had started to abandon the traditional triangular Renaissance approach to composition, in which the forms rest on a broad flat base and then get smaller and lighter as you move upwards. Instead, the forms are weightless and dispersed loosely over the entire expanse of the picture—what is sometimes termed an “all-over” composition.

During this period Andres also explored a new motif, the aerial view, in paintings such as Shore IV and V; Erie Shore; and Bridges, all most likely painted circa 1975. And this new sort of viewpoint influenced his work more broadly. In some fashion, the practice of viewing landscapes from the air encouraged a way of looking at right-side-up scenes as if they were aerial views, and could be broken up into jig-saw puzzles of abstract shapes.

The painter Stuart Davis liked to speak of “A Sequences” and “B Sequences.”

The “A Sequences” were the broad divisions of the design. The “B Sequences” were the jazzy patterns and brushwork that fit inside these boxes, which worked in counterpoint with each other, and endowed the design with visual excitement. In early writings on the subject, critics and art historians maintained that the work of the so-called “Abstract Expressionists” was nonfigurative, that it did not contain any representational references, that it was

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“abstract.” Increasingly, however, it has become apparent that underlying the work of all or nearly all of them is some sort of figurative reference.

Close analysis of Jackson Pollock’s so-called “drip paintings,” for example, clearly demonstrates that they developed from initial renderings of biomorphic figures. The same can be said of Richard Andres’s paintings, which in their final form are often difficult to translate into recognizable figure or scene, but which generally seem to have started off with imagery of this sort. Interestingly, even when the final effect is “abstract,” something about the organization and balance of shapes makes us sense that there’s an order of some sort that’s responsive to the forces of nature.

“You try to achieve something and you overachieve it but it’s still not good enough. I finally did a painting and looked at it and said, ‘That is good enough.’ From that point on, the older paintings got better in my own mind.”

-Andres In short, Andres’s paintings are the result of a progressive, careful reshaping of real scenes into “an artistic organization.” As 60’s critic Helen Borsick observed for Andres’s work: “Technically his paintings are abstractions, but that is only part of the story. Andres’ complex style of composition – strong in design and drawing – involves compartmentalizing the canvas with favorite signs, figurative allusions and symbols. Any degree of familiarity with his canvases develops recognition of his painting language and repeated forms as well as of the endless nuances of color tints and overpaint and underpainting methods.”

As noted, one of the things that’s remarkable about Andres’s work is that he did not sink into provincial isolation, but carefully kept up with the contemporary scene. A major influence of Andres’s artistic growth seems to have been the Carnegie International, which showcased the best and most daring work of the contemporary art world every year.

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At some point, probably early in the 1970s, Andres made a “top ten” list of his favorite painters which went as follows: Edvard Munch Emil Nolde Picasso Matisse Kirchner Beckman De Kooning Eugene Delacroix Rubens Mantegna Notably, along with compiling the list, he jotted down in some detail when he first actually encountered work by these painters, and his favorite paintings by them, sometimes with brief commentary. The list, in short, serves in part as a sort of biography of his artistic development and it tells a good deal about Andres’s achievement as an artist—specifically that his paintings were based on very close examination at the work of his favorite artists, and that in many instances, motifs by them may well be buried unrecognized in his work, waiting to be discovered.

The list is a curious one which to a large degree can be broken into three categories: German Expressionists (Munch, Nolde, Kirchner, and Beckman) which take up nearly half the list; Celebrated masters of Modern Art (Picasso, Matisse and De Kooning); and masters of complex figural composition (Mantegna, Rubens and Delacroix).

It’s not clear whether he organized the list in order of preference; my sense is that it mixed together the question of ranking with the chronological sequence in which he discovered different figures. Essentially, it suggests that the German expressionists were his major sources of inspiration when he was a young student doing figurative work at the Cleveland School of Art. They provide a model for how drawings and paintings of the human figure could go beyond the mechanics of representation and express deeper values. First loves have a special kind of intensity. There’s not a whole lot that’s derived from these figures in Andres’s mature paintings, but they served as models of artistic passion and integrity, and his home was filled with prints by them, in part because their work was still affordable to someone on a middle-class income.

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Picasso, Matisse, and De Kooning were figures he probably discovered just after World War II, when he was just starting his professional career, having just become aware of modernism as a force he needed to reckon with, and was setting out to find a place for himself in the contemporary world.

Oddly, I suspect that Mantegna, Rubens and Delacroix were figures he learned to admire later in life, as his work matured, and he learned to appreciate, as a result of his own struggles, their extraordinary mastery of design and composition. He also surely recognized that figures like Picasso, Matisse, and De Kooning, while courageously original, were not just foolhardy anarchists but had built their achievement on careful study of the great masters of the past.

Andres’s paintings, in short, were not just dashed off but were based on very careful study and thinking about what made a great work of art, and a sustained, disciplined process of self-education. Some of these borrowings may have been based on postcards or reproductions in books, but to a large degree my impression is that he worked from life, from memory, or from imagination. In other words, he synthesized what he looked at in his head, until it emerged as a new statement. One of the things that’s surprising about the list is that De Kooning is the only Abstract Expressionist included, although there are many obvious references in Andres’s paintings to other figures of the group such as Kline and Motherwell. This makes sense, however, if we suppose that while Andres recognized these figures as an L. S. F. 8-74, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 48.5 x 70.5 inches 16

influence, they played a smaller foundational role in the development of his overall procedures of picture-making. One of the fascinating aspects of looking at Andres’s work is that it stimulates us to think about how the modernists and abstract expressionists he admired, from Picasso to De Kooning, went about constructing their paintings, and the degree to which he correctly identified their methods.

To my way of thinking, Andres’s work reached a sort of peak in the 1970s, in paintings such as “L. S. F.” (which exists in two versions), which at first glance have an Abstract Expressionist quality, but which on close-looking turn out to be built upon earlier sources, particularly the work of Picasso.

Both compositions can be conceived as still-life arrangements laid out on a table, somewhat in the fashion of Picasso’s grand Cubist still-life paintings of the 1920s, with their mandolins and classical heads. But what’s laid out on the table, unlike what Picasso did in the twenties, are not traditional still-life objects but an agitated figure composition, reminiscent of Picasso’s anguished figure compositions of the 1930s, such as Guernica, but more pulled-apart, in a fashion more reminiscent of early De Kooning. What’s impressive is that this feat of visual organization is pulled off on such a grand scale and without visual fumbling. The brushwork is assured and the shapes are emotionally expressive but also interlock with each other with the precision of a welldesigned machine. The emotion is hard to translate into words but is an interesting combination of restlessness and anguish and classical order, the fundamental tension of daily life. Not many painters know how to pull off paintings of this scale that don’t have weak spots. Perhaps the essence of Richard Andres’s achievement is that he made paintings that reward careful study, and that don’t disclose all their secrets at first glance. They’re fun to look at on one’s first encounter: they’re even more interesting when you return to them.

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1. Untitled, 1949 oil on canvas, 27 x 40 inches

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2. Untitled, c. 1949 oil on canvas, 18 x 32 inches

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3. Battle of the Sea Gods after Mantegna, c. 1950 acrylic on paper, 23.5 x 35.5 inches

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4. Untitled, c. 1950 oil on canvas, 26 x 34 inches

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5. Untitled, 1950 oil on canvas, 69.5 x 40 inches

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6. Untitled, c. 1950 oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches

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7. White & Yellow, c. 1953 oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches

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8. Untitled, c. 1955 oil on canvas, 42 x 34 inches

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9. Untitled, c. 1955 oil on canvas, 42 x 36 inches

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10. S. F. L., 1955 oil on canvas, 42 x 70 inches

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11. Untitled, c. 1958 gouache on paper, 16.5 x 12.5 inches

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12. Fragment, c. 1958 gouache on paper, 16.5 x 13.5 inches

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13. Untitled, c. 1958 oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

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14. Blue Wall, c. 1958 oil on canvas, 42.5 x 60 inches

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15. Black Image, c. 1958 oil on canvas, 50 x 44 inches

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“The artist cannot help but be a product of his time, and the discerning viewer can always notice the differences which time impresses upon works of art. There is no sincere painter today whose paintings could be confused with the paintings of an artist of a different period.”

- Richard and Avis Andres Exhibit at Hudson Library and Historical Society, June 1960

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16. Untitled, c. 1958 collage and ink on paper, 17 x 14 inches

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17. Untitled, c. 1960 oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

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18. Untitled, c. 1960 ink and watercolor on paper, 13 x 10 inches

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19. Head, 1959 watercolor and tempera on paper, 18.5 x 25.5 inches Exhibited: Cleveland Museum of Art, May Show 1959 39

20. Dark Ground, 1961 oil on canvas. 48 x 36 inches Exhibited: The Cleveland Museum of Art’s 33rd traveling exhibition of oils by artists of the Western Reserve, 1961-62 40

21. The Grey Wall, c. 1962 oil on canvas, 54 x 48 inches

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22. Corps Emblem, c. 1962 oil on canvas, 32.5 x 28.5 inches

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23. Untitled, c. 1962 oil on canvas, 32 x 20 inches

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24. Delaware II, c. 1962 oil on canvas, 48.5 x 39.5 inches

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“Andres belongs to that special breed of painter that tumbled on to abstraction in the glory days of the New York School and never since wavered about what 20th century painting should be. He’s one of the stalwarts who never gave in to trendy pop, op and minimalist movements or the return to the figure.”

- Helen Cullinan, Art Critic “Abstract endures as his style”

25. Magic Garden, c. 1962 oil on canvas, 50 x 42 inches

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26. Naval Occurrence, c. 1963 oil on canvas, 24 x 32 inches

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27. Purity and the Wall, c. 1964 oil on canvas, 54 x 41 inches Exhibited: The Canton Art Institute’s 20th Annual Fall Show 48

28. Shore V, c. 1964 acrylic on canvas, 54 x 44 inches

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29. Panama Garden, c. 1964 acrylic on canvas, 46 x 38 inches

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30. Circus Lights and Shadows, c. 1964 gouache on paper, 37.5 x 28 inches

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31. Green Walking, c. 1965 oil on canvas, 52 x 46 inches

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32. Red Walking, c. 1965 gouache on paper, 29 x 23 inches

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Andres’ complex style of composition — strong in design and drawing — involves compartmentalizing the canvas with favorite signs, figurative allusions and symbols. Any degree of familiarity with his canvases develops recognition of his painting language and repeated forms as well as of the endless nuances of color tints and overpaint and underpainting methods.”

- Helen Borsick, Art Editor

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33. Pieces Collage, c. 1965 collage on paper, 14 x 18 inches

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34. Circus 10, c. 1965 oil on canvas, 28 x 44 inches

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35. Untitled, c. 1967 watercolor and acrylic on paper, 22 x 17 inches

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36. Untitled, c. 1968 watercolor and gouche on paper, 22 x 17 inches

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37. Untitled, 1968 acrylic on canvas, 88.5 x 50.5 inches

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38. Untitled, c. 1967 watercolor and acrylic on paper, 17.5 x 22.5 inches

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39. Crusader, c. 1969 acrylic on canvas, 48.5 X 62.5 inches

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40. Reading, 1970 oil on canvas, 40 x 60.5 inches

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41. Garden, 1972 acrylic on canvas, 59.5 x 50 inches

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42. Interior, c. 1972 acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 inches

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43. Sailing, 1973 oil on canvas, 58 x 72 inches Exhibited: Cleveland Museum of Art, May Show 1973 68

44. Shore IV, c. 1974 acrylic on canvas, 48 x 54 inches

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45. L. S. F. 74, 1974 acrylic on canvas, 53 x 72 inches

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46. L. S. F. 8-74, 1974 acrylic on canvas, 48.5 x 70.5 inches Exhibited: Cleveland Museum of Art, May Show 1975 73

47. L. S. F., c. 1975 ink and gouache on paper, 23.5 x 35.5 inches

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48. Bridges II, c. 1975 acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 21 x 25 inches

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49. Untitled, c. 1975 acrylic on canvas, 46 x 40 inches

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50. Untitled, c. 1975 oil on canvas, 40 x 38 inches

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51. Erie Shore, c. 1975 acrylic on canvas, 50 x 72 inches

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“One would be hard put to recognize Andres’ portrait of his wife or paintings of the Lake Erie Shore by their titles.

At the same time, his arrangements of space and shapes (organic rather than geometric) grow stronger all the while.”

- Helen Cullinan, Art Editor The Plain Dealer, October 20, 1975 “Alumnus returns with distinction”

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52. Saturday on Wednesday, c. 1975 acrylic on canvas, 48.5 x 62.5 inches

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53. Quarters, 1975 acrylic on paper, 32 x 32 inches

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54. Interior, 1976 acrylic on canvas, 50 x 59.5 inches

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Richard and Avis, one man show, Canton Art Institute, 1964

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Richard Andres 1927-2013 Richard Andres was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927.

A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1949, he was immediately drafted and served for two years in the army as a mural painter. He received his Master of Arts from Kent State in 1961. A frequent exhibitor at galleries and museums and winner of multiple May Show prizes, Andres taught art in the Cleveland Public Schools for 28 years, as well as teaching the University of Buffalo, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Western Reserve University.

Very little in Richard Andres’ childhood would have predicted his love of classical music, mid-century modern architecture and certainly not his lifelong passion for art and in particular abstract art. Richard’s father, Raymond, had no more than a third-grade education, and his mother, Clara, was one of thirteen children — only three of whom lived into adulthood and none of whom attended highschool.

They lived, when Richard was a boy, in a dingy area of Buffalo, NY in a walk-up apartment situated above a tavern. Raymond and Clara supplemented the income from their factory jobs in the bar downstairs with Raymond playing ragtime on the piano and Clara serving drinks. This often left Richard and his two older brothers at home alone to fend for themselves. The two older boys, Raymond and Russell, were — unlike Richard — rather rough and tumble and entertained themselves with stickball, boxing and the like. Richard, on the other hand, from a very young age liked to draw, or better yet even, to paint with the small set of watercolors he received for Christmas one year. Paper, however, at the height of the depression, was hard to come by. Luckily, Clara used paper doilies as decoration for the apartment and Richard would contentedly paint and then cut up doilies, gluing the pieces together to create collages.

Peter, Max and Mark Andres, Kent State University, 1961

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At eight-years-old, he discovered the Albright-Knox Museum (then known as the Albright Art Gallery) and spent several hours a week there studying the paintings.

He was particularly fond of Charles Burchfield‘s landscapes, enamored with their ‘messiness’ and thinking that they somehow captured more ‘feeling’ than works he was previously familiar with. For his tenth Christmas, he asked for and received a ‘how-to’ paint book by Elliot O’Hare. Through this self teaching, he assembled the portfolio needed for acceptance to Buffalo Technical High School where he studied Advertising Arts. In his Junior year, he was encouraged to enter a watercolor painting, “Two Barns,” in the national 1944-45 Ingersoll Art Award Contest and was one of twelve grand prize winners — each one winning one hundred dollars. More importantly the painting was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute Galleries, which resulted in his winning a national scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (The Cleveland Art Institute).

He flourished at the art school under the tutelage of faculty members such as Carl Gaertner, as well as that of visiting artists such as William Sommer and Henry George Keller. He would say in later years that Gaertner, in particular, influenced his attitude toward life as well as art. “Gaertner,” Andres said, “believed that there was no need to be a ‘tortured artist’, that an artist should rather enjoy beauty, family, and life in general.” Free to spend his days as he chose, he wandered the Cleveland Art Museum for most of the hours he was not attending classes or painting; the remaining time was spent drinking coffee at a local hangout with art school friends — which is where he met fellow Henry Keller scholarship winner, Avis Johnson. Richard was immediately smitten with Avis, but being rather shy, it took him the entire summer

of 1948 to build up his courage to ask her out. Over that summer he ‘thought about Avis’ and worked in a diner to save money. He also used the hundred dollar prize money won in High School to visit the first Max Beckmann retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in St. Louis. Over a half century later he spoke of that exhibit with a reverence usually reserved for spiritual matters, “I walked in and it was like nothing I had ever seen before… the color..

It just glowed.”

Returning to campus in the Fall, the first thing he did was go to the coffee shop in hopes of finding Avis. He did, and she, upon seeing him, realized that she was also smitten with him. They quickly became known as ‘the couple’ on campus, and a year later, with Richard being drafted for the Korean war, they were quickly married by a Justice of the Peace, celebrating after with family at Avis’s Cleveland home. As a gift, faculty member John Paul Miller designed and made the simple gold wedding ring Avis wore for their 65 years of marriage. During those 65 years neither wavered in their mutual love, nor in the respect they shared for one anothers’ art.

The couple lived in a converted chicken coop in Missouri while Richard was in boot camp. At the camp, he would volunteer for any job offered and one of those jobs ended up being painting road signs. His commander noticed how quickly and neatly he worked and gave him more painting work to do - eventually recommending him for a position painting murals for Army offices in Panama. Until her dying day, Avis remained angry that “The army got to keep those fabulous murals and they probably didn’t even know how wonderful they were.” In Panama, their first son, Mark, was born.

After Richard’s discharge in 1953, they moved back to the Cleveland area and used the GI bill to attend Kent State gaining his BA in education. The small family then moved briefly to Buffalo, where Richard taught at the Albright Art School and the University of Buffalo — and their second son, Peter, was born. Richard had exhibited work in the Cleveland May Show and the Butler Art Museum during his art school years, and during the years in Buffalo, his work was exhibited at the gallery he had so loved as a child, the Albright Art Gallery.

School during the day while working toward his MA in art at Kent State in the evenings. Avis and Richard, with the help of an architect, designed their first home - a saltbox style house in Hudson, Ohio, and in 1958, their third son, Max (after Max Beckmann) was born.

Richard enjoyed the consistency of teaching highschool as well as the time it gave him to paint on the weekends and during the summer months. In 1961, he received his MA and his daughter, Claire, was born. With a fourth child, the house was much too small, and Avis and Richard began designing their second home. An admirer of MCM architecture, Richard’s favorite example of the style was the Farnsworth house – he often spoke of how the concepts behind this architectural style, particularly that of Mies van der Rohe, influenced his painting.

Andres described himself as a 1950’s painter, not fully accepting the designation of ‘Abstract Expressionist’ or ‘Abstract’ he saw his work as an extension of those styles, but rooted in the wider mid-century architectural concept of immersing the individual with nature, and the breakdown of the barrier between interior and exterior spaces. The house Avis and Richard built in 1967, with its open concept, and large glass curtainless windows reflected that concept, and the influence of living in that type of space can be seen in his later works. As Avis liked to say, “The idea is to have the walls be glass, but you need some real walls to have somewhere to hang paintings.”

In this house, Richard developed a style of painting that harkened back to his early years. In his studio, a room in the house with a large window, he would roll out large thin paper - the type used for architectural blueprints on the floor and paint on it. The large rolls of paintings would then be cut into pieces and then glued onto canvas, creating that ‘glow’ of color he admired in Beckmann’s exhibit. These paintings, often with titles such as “Windows” or “Gardens” have transparency that reflects the breaking of interior/ exterior boundaries of mid-century architecture as well as a joy realized in those early words of Carl Gaertner.

In his late life Andres was fond of saying, “I am the wealthiest man in the world, look around, I have everything anybody could want. Look at my wife, my house, and all this art.”

In 1956, the family moved back to the Cleveland area and Richard began teaching art at Lincoln West High 85

Education

Kent State University, M.A. (Art) 1961 Kent State University, B.S. Ed., 1954, Magna Cum Laude U.S. Army, March 1951 to March 1953 Cleveland Institute of Art, B.F.A., 1950 Buffalo Technical High School, 1945, Honors

Teaching

The Cleveland Public Schools, 1955-1983 The Albright Art School of the University of Buffalo, 1954-1955 Classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Western Reserve University and Western Reserve Academy

Awards

Kaleidoscope, Akron, Ohio First Place, Acrylic, 2004 Honorable Mention, 2005 Cleveland Museum of Art - May Shows Special Jury Mention - 1967, 1968, 1974, 1979, 1981, 1984 Ohio State Fair, Columbus, Ohio Fine Arts Exhibition - 1982 Canton Art Institute, All Ohio Shows Second Prize, Painting - 1979 Honorable Mention, Painting - 1977 Canton Art Institute, Fall Shows Honorable Mention, Oil - 1969 Best in Show, Oil - 1968 Honorable Mention, Water Color - 1968 Honorable Mention, Water Color - 1967 Honorable Mention, Oil, Water Color, Drawing - 1965 Best in Show - 1961 Honorable Mention, Prints - 1961 Massillon Museum Purchase Award - 1969 Canton Jewish Community Center Best in Show - 1967 Chesterfield Purchase Award - 1967 Honorable Mention, Graphics - 1960 Akron Art Institute, Spring Shows Two Honor Awards - 1966 Three Honor Awards - 1965

Student Awards

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Kent State University, Independent Student Show Purchase Prize, Oil - 1953 Third Prize, Drawing - 1953 Cleveland Institute of Art Henry G. Keller Award for Excellence in Drawing - 1949 Cleveland Institute of Art, Student Independent Shows First Prize - 1948 Second Prize - 1947 National Scholastic Scholarship Award, 1945 Ingersol Award - 1945

Shows

12th Annual Juried Exhibition Double Exposure, Pleiades Gallery, New York, NY - 1994 **Avante Gallery, Cleveland - 1990 Andres–A Family Show, The Cain Park Art Gallery, Cleveland Heights - 1986 Cleveland Museum of Art May Shows - 1947-1954, 1956, 1957, 1959-1961, 1964, 1967-1977, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1984 Cleveland Museum of Art, The Cleveland Institute of Art 100 Years - 1982 Erie Fine Art Center, Spring Show - 1982 Canton Art Institute, All Ohio - 1977, 1979, 1981 Beck Center, Lakewood, Ohio, Work by the Andres Family - 1981 Canton Art Institute, The Andres Family Show - 1980 ** Staircase Gallery, Hudson, Ohio - 1976 Blossom Music Center - 1976 ** Dobama Theater, Cleveland, 1972, 1974 * Cleveland Institute of Art, Distinguished Alumnus - 1974 Cleveland Institute of Art Alumni Invitational - 1973 Kent State Alumni Invitational - 1973 Arts International, Cleveland - 1971 Cuyahoga Community College Invitational - 1970 Akron Area Artists Invitational, Massillon Museum - 1970 Cleveland Museum of Art Traveling Shows - 1947-1951, 1960-1961, 1966-1969 * Intown Club, Cleveland - 1967 * Maione College, Canton - 1966 Akron Art Institute - 1965, 1966 * Canton Art Institute - 1964 Contemporary American Water Color Invitational, Grand Rapids, Michigan - 1963 *Kent State University - 1961 Cleveland Institute of Art Faculty Shows - 1956-1958 Albright Art Gallery, 21st Western N.Y. Exhibition - 1955 Albright Art School Faculty Exhibit, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo - 1954 Butler Art Institute, New York Show, Youngstown, Ohio - 1950 **Karamu Theater, Cleveland - 1950 *0ne Man Shows **Two Person Shows

Works Represented in the Following Collections Cleveland Museum of Art Massillon Art Museum ARTneo: The Museum of Northeast Ohio Art Kent State University Western Reserve Academy Central National Bank of Cleveland Cleveland Trust Company U.S. Time Corporation Ferro Corporation The Chesterfield of Cleveland Samuel Moore & Company - Eaton Corporation Hiram College

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Acknowledments WOLFS

The Andres family Professor Henry Adams, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University WOLFS staff: Megan Arner Arianne Flick Kristen Newell Christopher Richards, Context Fine Art Clara Wolverton, Cerulean Conservation, LLC Matthew Nunes, Videographer Art Etc. Picture Framing To all those, anonymous and otherwise, who have selflessly contributed to this worthy endeavor – thank you.

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Claire Andres, 1962

“There are people who do art, but [Andres] was an artist in his being. His entire persona was that…”

- Claire Andres