Introduction FRANK NELSON WILCOX: DEAN OF CLEVELAND SCHOOL PAINTERS
This exhibition of watercolors by Frank Nelson Wilcox (1887-1964) provides an opportunity to view fresh, perfectly preserved examples of an array of remarkable work by one of the most highly regarded watercolorists of his generation. A notable feature of the Cleveland School is the excellence of work produced in watercolor, by figures such as Charles Burchfield, William Sommer, Henry Keller, Paul Travis, Viktor Schreckengost and others. Frank Wilcox, who like Burchfield was a protégé of the charismatic teacher Henry Keller, fits into this pattern. While he produced some excellent specimens in oil, watercolor dominates his oeuvre. In his lifetime, Wilcox was celebrated not only for the excellence of his work, which often won national prizes, but for the speed and easy confidence with which he could produce a watercolor on the spot. He always used simple tools—just three paint brushes, and a chair for an easel, with the watercolor block propped up at a slight angle. Perhaps what’s most remarkable about Wilcox’s work was his grasp of weather and atmosphere in the composition as a whole. His paintings never look as though they were pieced together inch-by-inch but grasp the scene as a totality, with all its complex variations of color and light. As he once wrote of the watercolor medium:
“Many instructive books on watercolor have specific rules for painting objects and effects. The chief difficulty in following these is that they seldom allow for varying distance and are planned as if for stilllife painting. Owing to all its qualities, the medium requires actually more free exercise than others to acquaint the worker with all its possibilities.” ilcox was born and grew up in Cleveland, but his family W also owned a farm in Brecksville, where he experienced simple rural life of the sort that later became the subject of many of his watercolors. He came of age in a period when magazines and newspapers were expanding rapidly, and journalism and illustration were quickly developing into remunerative fields. His father, who was a prominent lawyer, also wrote poetry and had many friends who were writers or illustrators for the Cleveland newspapers. As a consequence, he strongly encouraged his son’s artistic interests. After graduating from Central High School, where he illustrated the High School Yearbook, Wilcox went on to the Cleveland School of Art, where studied from 1906 to 1910, chiefly with Frederick Gottwald and Henry Keller. Some of his student work is included in this
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exhibition, including a striking watercolor of the gaunt model Antonio Corsi, who also posed in this period for the famous portraitist John Singer Sargent. ilcox went on to spend the better part of two years in W Paris, where, untypically for a young artist, he did not enroll in regular classes or a school, but worked on his own. However, he would sometimes drop by Colarossi’s in the evening to sketch the model or the other students at their easels. A diligent worker, he made sketches and watercolors every day, producing well over one hundred in the course of his stay. As a group these works provide an amazing record of the life of Paris and its environs in the final years of La Belle Époque, when Paris was the world’s unquestioned artistic center: barges on the Seine; figures strolling in the parks and on the streets; the laundries and mattress stuffers along the Seine; the flower sellers; the horses and carts which hauled dirt, and trash, and cargo for the river boats; the monumental vistas of the Invalides and Notre Dame. Part of the discipline of Wilcox’s approach is that he did not fuss or belabor what he did, but worked directly and relatively quickly. His pencil under-drawing in these watercolors is wonderfully accurate without ever becoming stiff; his application of watercolor delicate and suggestive. On his return, to his chagrin and surprise, his old teacher Henry Keller, who had become an advocate of new theories of brilliant, Post-Impressionist color, was severely critical of what he had done, viewing it as oldfashioned. But when Wilcox staged an exhibition of the works at the Taylor Galleries they sold well and were praised in the newspapers. It seems to have been largely on the basis of this success that he was hired as an instructor at the Cleveland School of Art, where he would remain as a teacher for an unbroken stint of 44 years. By all accounts, Wilcox was an extraordinary teacher. Over the course of his career he taught design, figure drawing, anatomy, illustration, and landscape, as well as etching, lithography, and other techniques of printmaking. Each subject he taught he studied intensively, often devoting his summers to self-instruction, and developing a range of arcane knowledge about such subjects as weather, archaeology, botany, zoology, and kindred subjects. His notion was that to make a good painting, you needed a scientist’s grasp of what you were looking at. To get a better grasp of anatomy he constructed a jointed manikin with rubber bands to play the role of muscles; to
