AUGUST 2009 » book review

Classicism Overhead

Edwin Howland Blashfield: Master American Muralist
edited by Mina Rieur Weiner
W.W. Norton/Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, New York, NY; 2009
160 pp.; 110 color illustrations; $49.95
ISBN 978-0-393-73281-8

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936) never wavered in his commitment to painting Classical scenes inside private and public buildings. While running a small mural studio in New York from the 1880s to the 1930s, he traveled to install his canvases as far afield as Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and South Dakota. The images glorify Americans, ranging from athletes to Revolutionary War heroes to pioneers of electromagnets, and often portray them as toga-clad ancients.

His sober, reverential allegories have been accused of elitism – that is, at least by contemporary critics who prefer abstract patterns on their drywall, or else ham-fisted protests against obvious social scourges like poverty or racism. Blashfield, however, never wanted to preach, or confuse anyone, or sneer at their lack of erudition.

His artworks, he insisted in an 1892 speech, "dignify and illustrate the history" of their locales, while enobling the masses and boosting tourism. "Good national art is a good national asset" that must "speak to the people – to the man in the street," he declared. But when wall paintings perplex the public, he warned, "there may be an influence nothing short of deplorable" and possibly even "an incitement to violence."

Idealized realism, he believed, was the most communicative, uplifting approach to art. So when Modernist painters took center stage in the 1920s, he did appreciate the art scene’s newfound "experiment of effects produced by broken color and the novel manipulation of material." He regarded the rejection of Classical composition and discipline, though, as "oh so misdirected," and advised artists to try "getting back our invaluable baggage, and the heads full of technique and tradition."

Since he stepped so deliberately out of the mainstream around 1920, his work has been largely forgotten. A Blashfield monograph has not appeared since 1937, and that Scribner title was "austere, color-free, and architecturally illiterate," writes Paul Gunther, the president of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, in the foreword to this important, overdue volume. Since 1968, Classical America (which merged with the ICA in 2002) has been commissioning or reprinting important books about Classical art and architecture, on topics as varied as moldings, brownstones, the U.S. Capitol and Versailles. This is the series’ first study of a single artist’s oeuvre, and an extraordinarily promising debut. (Future volumes, Gunther reports, will cover the likes of the Vatican and Napoleon-era French design team Percier et Fontaine.)

The book’s four essays come from two art historians, Mina Rieur Weiner and Anne E. Samuel, and two conservators, Gillian Britta Randell and Jeff Greene. Weiner and Samuel’s somewhat overlapping essays explore how the Brooklyn-born Blashfield studied at MIT for a year or so around 1866 but never graduated. Instead, after inheriting $10,000 from his godfather, he packed off for the atelier of Léon Bonnat in Paris. "Go abroad at once," Blashfield’s Boston mentor, the Barbizon-inspired painter William Morris Hunt, had told the young muralist. "There are no schools here."

While learning bold brushstrokes from Bonnat, Blashfield also studied with the passionate historicist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, and made sketching trips around Europe and the Middle East. (His wife Evangeline’s father was the prominent Egyptologist Charles Wilbour, and the young couple followed him to archaeological digs.) Blashfield was modest about his youthful accomplishments – as late as the 1890s, he still described himself as "a very green hand" – but critics were wowed early on by his gladiators, goddesses and cupids. In 1880, the Daily Evening Transcript raved about his "wonderful talent in depicting the luxurious life of the Caesarian epoch." The New York Times praised his "clever painting" and "most commendable knowledge of archaeology," but found the work sometimes heavy-handed and too derivative of his mentor Gérôme.

Perhaps in response to such critiques of his more plodding, academic tendencies, Blashfield started painting almost surreal juxtapositions of reality and fantasy. His first major mural commission, for architect George B. Post’s Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was a dreamy quartet of winged metalworkers on a domed backdrop of blue sky and birds in flight. Within a few years of that high-profile success – "the United States on a large scale had recognized art for the first time," he later wrote about the fair – Blashfield was busily juggling the likes of tableaus of musicians and dancers for tycoons’ townhouses, robed magistrates and frontier explorers for courthouses, allegorical figures of scholars for the Library of Congress, and industrialists in togas for banks.

His rather conservative clients asked him to cast local history in a favorable light. The results can now seem politically incorrect – South Dakota’s Capitol has put up a false wall to hide Blashfield’s scenes of whites trampling benighted Native Americans – or entertainingly over the top: for a public library in Kansas City, Blashfield painted a helmeted female Missouri watching soldiers play trumpets over rolling wheat fields.

A surprising amount of high tech also crops up in these images. A cupid wears telegraph headphones; women in billowing drapery carry steam-powered or electric motors. And the murals themselves resulted from high tech: Blashfield used stereopticons to project sketches onto huge canvases in his studio, and then his assistants clambered around movable stairs to finalize the tracings and paint between the outlines. The sophisticated paint formulas, according to conservator Gillian Britta Randell, included "barium sulphate, calcium carbonate, zinc white," organic red and brown pigments, "lead white, iron oxide yellow, and ultramarine."

All four of this book’s authors regard Blashfield as a heroic force for good on America’s walls. There’s a downside to the hagiography, though. The authors do not evaluate the quality of the varied compositions, and no one delves into the artist’s personality or private life. We only learn that he was a generous, hard-working, respected, "meticulous, urbane, disciplined intellectual," who was sometimes distracted from his work by his wife’s unspecified illnesses. We also know he collaborated enthusiastically with architects; he believed that the constraints of working within someone else’s room designs brought out his best. "Mutuality of effort pushed and perfected," he wrote in a 1913 essay, leads to "the highest individuality of expression in decoration."

This collaborative volume, despite minor lapses, is a triumph. Its catalog raisonné of extant works will be invaluable for Blashfield tourism, and its well-reproduced photos may well inspire percent-for-art seekers in the Obama Stimulus Era. A great mural, as Blashfield demonstrated, complements rather than overshadows the surroundings.

A great mural can also convey respect for government and patronage, without toadying, proselytizing or pseudo-intellectualizing. May some stimulus funds end up financing painters willing to consider dignified drapery and meaningful hand props for their human figures. Just in case busy passersby care to look up – Blashfield described his own works as so intelligible that "he who runs may read" – at scenes that are deep but never impenetrable. TB

WEB EXTRA: Click here for additional photos from Classicism Overhead

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