I 1' ) j, 1 ' 1 1 1 ■ 1 1 .1 ! 1 . i \V ! p . - - i X i . I (_ 1 A 1 r m, ■ ■kHI Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/roberthenrihisliOOhenr ROBERT HENRI A\vy, ROBERT HENRI HIS LIFE AND WORKS WITH FORTY REPRODUCTIONS EDITED BY WILLIAM YARROW AND LOUIS BOUCHE PRIVATELY PRINTED FCR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY BONI & LIVERIGHT : : : : : : NEW YORK 1921 ROBERT H ENRI COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY BONI 8C LIVERIGHT, INC. Printed in the U. S. of America I iONKANI > at I -1VERIGH r THIS EDITION IS STRICTLY LIMITED TO NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY NUMBERED COPIES, OF WHICH THIS IS COPY NUMBER 6 O THE GETTY RL. 1 INSTITUTE LIBRARY FOREWORD The literature engendered by recent art has been abundant and often brilliant, but it has been concerned with psychology and technique; and its specialized dispersions have confused the general movement. The American public, bewildered by so much theorizing, has come to regard its own art as an unintelligible imitation of the French, and its artists as an inhuman class of men blind to the life surrounding them. This condition has led to the belief that an American Art Library would be not less welcome than instructive. In preparing the monographs no pains will be spared to make them attractive in letterpress and reproductions; to make the text within the grasp of the average reader, and at the same time consistent with the highest critical thought. Artists of unquestionable accomplishment will first be represented, followed by the younger men as their work takes maturity. 1 am convinced that a succession of monographs will show that modern American art, while inferior in magnitude, is equal to the European in variety and interest. Thomas Jewell Craven. [ 7 ] L ROBERT HENRI ■ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece Opposite Page The Segovia Girl 36 Gypsy with Cigarette 38 The Red Top Collection of Amos Pinchot 40 The Fish Market Man Collection of Barr McCutcheon 42 Lady in Black 44 The Shave Head Collection of G. A. Stephens 46 Hawaii and Navaho 48 Irish Lass 50 Portrait of “Pat” Roberts Collection of Lloyd Roberts 52 Cecilia 54 Betalo Rubino Collection of City Museum, St. Louis 56 Mary O’D. Collection of H. L. Warner 58 Mary of Connemara 60 Dutch Joe Collection of Art Institute of Milwaukee 62 Beatrice Collection of Cincinnati Museum 64 Roshanara Collection of Cincinnati Museum 66 Portrait of Fayette Smith Collection of Clyde M. Carr 68 Spanish Gypsy Collection of Metropolitan Museum, N. Y. 70 La Neige Collection of MuseedeLuxembourgh, Paris 72 Willie Gee Collection of Corcoran Gallery 74 Ruth St. Denis in “The Peacock Dance” 76 Tony 78 Head of a Man 80 Laughing Gypsy Girl Collection of Mrs. Marshall Field 82 Ballet Dancer in White Collection of Dr. A. C. Barnes 84 The Beach Hat Collection of Detroit Institute of Art 86 Portrait of Jean Collection of Albert E. McVitty 88 Josee Collection of Dr. George Woodward 90 Fay Bainter as the Image in “The Willow Tree” 92 Irish Lad 94 Cinco Centimo 96 Sis Collection of Miss Julia E. Peck 98 Young Woman in Black Collection of Art Institute of Chicago 100 Manus Collection of Paul Schulze 102 Catherine Collection of W. J. Johnson 104 The Red Shawl Collection of Dr. A. R. L. Dohme 106 The Guide to Croaghan Collection of Miss Julia E. Peck 108 Miss Mary Patterson Collection of Mrs. H. G. Carnell 1 10 The Working Man 112 Imaginative Boy Collection of Mrs. Marshall Field 114 ROBERT HENRI ROBERT HENRI D URING the last thirty years American painting has approached a national significance. Derived from continental sources, it has taken gradually the individual stamp of a young and acquisitive people. Transformed by the eagerness of the American intellect, the great traditions have received a new accent, although, in many cases, neither a wise nor a lasting one, our faculties of as= similation out=weighing our powers of creation. American painting is still engaged in amplifying rather than originating artistic beliefs, hence the common assertion that we have made academic the ideas of Europe. Such a fact is distressing only when superficially considered, for as a race we are European and therein lies our strength as well as our weakness. It would have been impossible for a nation so lacking in aesthetic tradition to disregard completely the accumulated knowledge of other countries. If we had, as a people, sprung from native soil, our art history would be far different. We would then have centuries of ancestral precedent, and our present art would be the product of a direct racial experience. But to regret the lack of this experience is to remain blind to the diverse and splendid qualities of our accomplishments. Too often have we borrowed and wrung dry the idiom of Europe and the result has been the lifeless effigy of a vital [ 13 ] — ROBERT HENRI thought. We have imitated the trick of technique; seized the inflection rather than the content. As evidence of this it is only necessary to note the conclusive manner in which each group or movement has turned from one preceding it and sought its inspiration afresh in the latest European manner. Instinctively we have realized that American art is very often but a semblance of the genuine thing. To many the American artist is a paradox, with his native habits and his veneer of European training so he has been considered too lightly by those insensible of his difficult position. The fact that he has depended so largely on bor- rowed material has severely handicapped him in the eyes of an unthinking public who have failed to realize that, probably, the arts of only Holland and Italy stand firmly entrenched in a tradition extending back through the centuries. It is of course useless to deny that every country furnishes that peculiarly national flavor to its art productions that evades analysis. And we, too, have seen that element which we call American growing steadily in the art of this country. It does not seem so much to lie in the method employed in the presenta- tion of ideas or in the use of a new composition, as in youthful curiosity and experimentation. Immaturity and uncalculated enthusiasm, as often as not, indicate their presence as certainly as the superb poise of a Ryder, a Homer, or an Eakins. Since the passing of this great triumvirate, no man has been a more important factor in the forming of a national RO BERT HENRI [ 14 ] tradition than Robert Henri. As painter, teacher and human being he holds a unique position in America today. The debt to him is a large one, and no one familiar with his remarkably lucid expression, with his courageous fight in all matters per= taining to his profession and with his profoundly human qualities can question his position as one of the big figures in American painting. Trained in the French academies he turned his back on their cut=and=dried formulas and found his incentives, first, in the old masters and later in the revolutionary painters of the last century. With such a background of experience, for the past twenty years he has held an undisputed place among those whose work has had a powerful effect on modern paint- ing in this country. Time has apparently not decreased the stimulating effect of his personality and he is constantly developing with the enthusiasm one associates with youth alone. By nature a leader, in spite of his modesty, his influ- ence has been felt in every movement for the freedom of plastic expression. His spirit is not confined to mere liber- ality, but is a mixture of passionate eagerness and wisdom and in the strictest connotation of the word, it is intensely American. [ 15 ] ROBERT HENRI X T has been said that Henri is not a Modern. Though his art stands solidly on its own merits, the truth or falsity of this statement should be well considered. If he is not a Modern, then neither is Courbet nor Manet. Not that there is any close resemblance between their work and his, aside from the same fluent notation of facts clearly perceived. Nor did they utilize those technical methods ordinarily associated with the term Modern. The belief that Henri is not a Modern is largely due to the fallacy, so popular among writers on recent art, that modern art is merely a matter of technical procedure. Again we find the usual con= fusion of means and content. The important contribution of modern painting has been the enforcement of the formal foundation of a picture; the development of the abstract organization underlying every work of art. But this is an intellectual fact and not a technical one. There is no doubt that this search for the basic order of a picture, as an end in itself, has been productive of a somewhat new mechanics in the use of the medium but this mechanics of itself, does not result in art. Too often it is but the unintelligent aping of some particular phraseology. In consequence modern art is unfortunately linked with this phraseology rather than with the spiritual need that prompted it. The use of new instru= ments of expression is of value only when it is commensurate with the embellishment of an idea; hence the uselessness of so much of the experimentation in present day painting. The truly significant modern artists are they who are mining [ 16 ] ROBERT HENRI 1“' 1 "" i . « the possibilities of form, not those who are merely attempting to invest their work with novel technical effects. This is why it is impossible to classify an artist by the manner in which he handles his implements. It is his use of plastic forms and their construction alone that stamps him. Even the development of a wide color gamut is the outcome of an ever=broadening spiritual need, not of the desire to astonish by a brilliancy of surface. Henri is modern, therefore, in this respect he is contin= ually searching for the abstract basis on which his picture is to be built. He does not always succeed, and his failures like all such failures arise from his inability to grasp that abstraction. But on the other hand when he does succeed the result is not proclaimed by the manner of his painting but by the completeness of his conception, which is purely a formal one. He was born of American parents in 1865. His family, of French, English and Irish origin, had lived for several genera= tions in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. As a boy he traveled through the West, and the youthful impressions arising from the vivid contrast between the primitive life of Colorado, and his experiences in Cincinnati and New York, first stimulated his interest in these different phases of American civilization. He early decided to be a writer and almost before he had finished reading his first book had started writing one of his own. [ 17 ] “ ROB£RT HENRI These youthful literary aspirations continued for several years until, on seeing some one paint for the first time, he abandoned the pen for the brush, with a mingling of reluctance and yet intense interest in the new medium. In 1886 he entered the schools of the Pennsylvania Acad= emy of the Fine Arts. At that time the instructors were Thomas Anshutz, James B. Kelly, and Thomas Hovenden. It was in Anshutz that he found an artist, learned and broad= minded, and he established a friendship with him which lasted until the older man’s death. Thomas Eakins had recently left the Academy as instructor but the influence of his personality was still strong and Henri was one of the first to recognize in him the great painter we now know him to have been. At the school Henri worked diligently for two years, undergoing the usual routine of drawing from the antique and painting from life, besides devoting considerable time to modeling. In this modeling class Alexander Sterling Calder and Charles Grafly were members. In 1888 he went to Paris in the company of Grafly, J. R. Fisher, Harry Finney and William Hoefeker, to enroll himself at Julien’s under Bougereau and Fleury. He also studied for a period at the Beaux=Arts. He divided his days between the schools, endeavoring to force his rebellious spirit into the rigid mold of their prescribed principles. He struggled with the tight painting then in vogue, only to realize that he was ROBERT HENRI | ' t 18 ] temperamentally unfitted for the role of academician. He revolted against their meticulous and arid drawings; and in his inability to clarify his own mind, turned in desperation to the old masters. Discouraged over his failure he spent long days in the Louvre, wandering from gallery to gallery and there it was he discovered Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Hals. His comprehension of El Greco did not follow until much later. In Rembrandt particularly, he found that “livingness” for which he had sought in vain at Julien’s. Day after day he returned to his newly found master, his dissatisfaction filling him with a resolve to free himself from the bondage of dogma. He understood how wrong was the manner in which he had been taught to draw and he vaguely felt, when following the sinuous lines of the human figure, the existence of an elusive quality of form that his cold efforts did not encompass. Although unable to reason out the cause of his failure he doggedly continued his search. The Impressionists were then enduring a storm of abuse and their work, anathema at the Salon, won first his curiosity and finally his allegiance. He matched their revolutionary spirit with his own enthusiasm, finding his raison d’etre in this world of radicals. In the academy he was severely warned against their insidious influence, but in spite of his independ= ence, was favorably mentioned by Bourgereau at the end of his first year. [ 19 ] ROBERT HENRI The first modern painter to interest him was Courbet and in the work of both men is the somewhat similar directness and uncompromising vision. Necessarily Manet also left an imprint on his work and then Whistler, although the latter’s influence is felt, not so much in Henri’s later work as in those low=toned portraits painted on his return from Paris. In them is much of the same subtle juxtaposition of neutral greys and the use of a palette purposely restricted. To=day his color has become fuller and the change from value to value a more rapid one. Instead of the former flat treatment of broad plaques of color his painting is now modulated by many gradations of form. One finds in American painting no human documents more convincing than those early portraits, notably “The Young Woman in Black,’’ “The Woman in White’’ and the studies of Spanish peasants. He seems to have developed less vigorously at this stage and some of the canvases of his youth have a finality about them which his later work lacks. They mark a complete summary of that period of his artistic evolu= tion, whereas his more recent paintings bear evidence of a maturer intelligence and a continual and successful search for his own way of seeing nature. His work then, like the work of all younger men, could more readily be catalogued as the product of a specific tendency, while the pictures he is producing to=day could only be the work of Robert Henri. His growth has been a logical one. He is, first of all, tensely [ 20 ] ROBERT HENRI I alive to the character of people, and perhaps no painter has ever portrayed that character more convincingly. Taken feature for feature, his portraits do not give the minute ac= curacy of statement demanded of the popular portrait painter but they are far more alive than such stereotyped delineations. One receives from them the impression that they are the truth about the persons while Henri was observing them. Perhaps another day they would appear totally different but the actual conformation, texture and color of their features would remain the same. One feels, despite Henri’s past experience, the entire absence of a set formula and an aston= ishing capacity to note his sitter’s appearance at a given moment. It may be the grin on a child’s face, the surly side= glance of a Mexican or the stolid stare of a Chinese girl, but it always convinces. The grin is slashed across the face, seemingly with carelessness, actually with remarkably ac= curacy; the surly face of the Mexican is heavy and sodden in treatment and the Chinese girl is broadly and suavely painted, the resultant effect of which is a technical handling perfectly adapted to the character of his subject. [21 ] ROBERT HENRI "• HE summer of 1889 Henri spent at Concarneau, f| ^ j Finisterre, painting the landscape, drawing from the model and laboring to determine the direction his future should take. He was still puzzled over the cold precision of his results, until a strange experience made clear to him the path that he has followed ever since. One day while returning from work he passed a large granary. His eye was attracted by a crack in one of the walls which revealed an illumination. Surprised and curious, knowing that such buildings were usually kept dark, and seeing neither door nor window through which such a light might enter, he approached and placing his eye to the aperture saw that it was occasioned by a direct ray of the sun streaming through a small hole high up in the western wall. His atten= tion, however, was immediately focused on a canvas leaning against a box. It was the study of a nude, crouching woman. He watched excitedly, for in it he seemed to see the solution of all his problems; the simple yet complete sequence of lines, the ever=changing modulation of ruddy flesh=tones, the whole painted apparently with a single broad brush=stroke which developed the form in all its details. As he stared the light gradually faded and the picture disappeared, but what he had witnessed remained with him many days. Later he had access to the granary and viewing the canvas under normal conditions, found it strangely lacking in all those qualities it had seemed to possess but it had served his purpose, for in [22 ] ROBERT HENRI it, achieved and definite, he had found the truth for which he had vainly sought. He attacked his work with a new confidence, the subsequent ideas formed during the summer establishing his point of view. His new aim was an exceed= ingly simple one; to achieve the glow of life, and to restrict himself only to that means which best expressed it. And this sense of vitality of his people is one of the most notable virtues of his art. On his return to Paris he found himself more disheartened than ever over his school studies, but he put forth every effort to do the orthodox sort of thing. Needless to say he failed and finally abandoned the school. He never again studied in an academy. Whatever might be the result, he was re= solved henceforth, right or wrong, to set down what he saw, in his own way. In several other men of his own age he found fellowship and a feeling of common boredom with all they had been taught, and they spent their days and most of the nights discussing and criticizing each other’s work. During a trip to Italy in 1890, he first grasped the sig= nificance of the Renaissance and found himself swayed equally by the primitives and the complex luxuriance of the Venetians. He passed several months in travel and study and the following year on returning to America settled in Philadelphia where he resumed his friendship with Thomas Anshutz. At the instigation of Henry McCarter he became an instructor at the Women’s School of Design and taught [ 23 ] ROBERT HENRI there for several years. He had a studio at 806 Walnut Street and in this workshop the men who later were to be recognized as a famous group, first assembled. It included the painter John Sloan, also an etcher and lithographer of the first rank; W. J. Glackens, to=day one of our most important figures and landscape painters; that astonishing man, George Luks; Everett Shinn, noted for his studies of the theatre; James Preston, the illustrator; the landscape painter, Elmer W. Schofield; A. S. Calder, Charles Grafly and E. W. Redfield. It was a group intensely alive to the shifting aspects of the actual life of their time, searching for the particular gesture that best exemplified the character of their subjects. They had assimilated the work of Daumier, Gavarni, Toulouse= Lautrec and John Leech. They stripped the vestments of conventionality from life, and what appeared they tried to record, directly and spontaneously. Their lack of knowledge was atoned for by their trenchant characterizations. They were alive and that was their salvation, and their work con= tained amazing records of all they saw and felt; cafes, the= atres, the streets, tenements, prize=fights, everything in fact that contained the movement of human beings. They dis= cussed life, art, books, music and held fiery and none too polite debates on politics and ethics. The plays of C. N. Williamson, which they acted before crowds of students, are still recalled by many of the artists then studying at the academy. ROBERT HENRI [ 24 ] In 1894 Henri and Glackens shared a studio at 1919 Chest= nut Street. Two years in Paris followed. Henri opened a class attended by students from all parts of the world, which proved to be one of his most interesting ventures as a teacher. In 1907 he again exposed at the Salon, and on returning to America in the same year, gave his first “one=man” exhibi= tion. It was held at the Pennsylvania Academy, the director, Harrison S. Morris, having arranged the matter at the sug= gestion of Alexander Harrison. The exhibition was an im= portant event in Philadelphia and did much to enhance Henri’s already growing reputation. In 1898 he had married Miss Linda Craige of Philadelphia, and the succeeding year found him again in Paris, painting the same type of subject he had chosen in America. At that period he did not confine himself to portraits, or “people” as he prefers to call them, as much as he does to=day, and was first represented in the Salon by a street scene. It was called “La Neige” and much to his astonishment was purchased by the Luxembourg Museum, where it hangs to=day. Another summer in Concarneau and he returned to America, this time to settle in New York, which was rapidly becoming the art center of the country. He rented a studio in an old house at the extreme end of Fifty=eighth Street overlooking the East River and Blackwell’s Island. The neighborhood attracted him, with its bleak tenements and swarming streets and the towering bridges and the river crowded with [ 25 ] ROBERT HENRI boats. After the placid vistas of Paris he was dazed by the gigantic expanse of steel and stone and the throngs of surging humanity. But he could not rid himself of his memories of the French city and found it so difficult to absorb the spirit of his new environment that he was never satisfied with the results of his work. At this time he was teaching at the Veltin School but in 1903 transferred his attention to The New York School of Art then known as the Chase School. It was at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty=seventh Street and later at Eightieth and Broadway. He taught there until 1907. In 1905 Mrs. Henri had died, and shortly after this he started the Henri School of Art which continued in existence until 1912, when he relinquished his classes and turned the school over to certain of his former students. Since then he has restricted his activities as a teacher to the Art Students’ League, with the exception of the years from 1912 to 1918, during which he also instructed at the Ferrar School. From 1906 to the outbreak of the war he travelled exten= sively, painting his inimitable studies of people in many parts of the world. To these years belong some of the finest things he has painted, notably his Irish and Gypsy types, his Maine natives and those remarkable portraits of the Indians of California and New Mexico. ROBERT HENRI [ 26 ] In 1908 he was married to Miss Marjorie Organ, herself an artist of discernment. She was well known as a caricat- urist on the staffs of the N. Y. Journal and the N. Y. World. In this same year the group known as the “Eight” was formed. It consisted of Robert Henri, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, William J. Glackens, George Luks and Arthur B. Davies. An exhibition of their work was hung in New York and later throughout the larger cities. The “Eight” was in no sense a society, but simply a group of men, with the common purpose of exposing their work and of stimulating the founding of similar organizations outside the dictates of the established societies. They frankly es= poused the cause of the “No Jury” exhibition, and their advocacy of the open forum has had much to do with develop- ing the means whereby artists of all tendencies are given an opportunity to exhibit their paintings. Either separately or as a body they have been affiliated with many movements preceding and following their original showing. They played an important part in the first “Independent,” in 1910, and they are still among the most enthusiastic adherents of the present society of Independent Artists. Another plan, orig= inated by Henri was the policy of the McDowell Club, which permitted of selective group exhibitions without the inter- ventions of any jury. [ 27 ] ROBERT HENRI & k OBERT HENRI’S eminence as a teacher is second only to his fame as a painter. These two activities have been closely allied and they have been dis= tinguished by the absence of dogmatic tenets, and by in= citing free growth and expression. His teaching is exactly what teaching should be. It is never an attempt to impress upon the student the preceptor’s personality so that weak imita= tion results, nor is it the hard and fast routine of an academic formula. It is rather as a guide to self education that Henri has proven himself so exceptional. He soon discovered that to find realization in any art an intense consciousness of all experience is a necessary element and that the best way of helping a student is to direct his mind to the nurturing of that consciousness. The artist is not merely one who knows his craft or manipulates his materials with a love for the material itself, but is he who best understands the relation= ship between the various manifestations of intellectual activ= ity. He must be a student; he must comprehend whatever analogy exists between the various arts; he must grasp the working of the aesthetic intuition and be capable of fixing on his canvas those essentials of life best suited to the plastic demands of his picture. Consequently Henri does not teach — he guides — and therein lies his success. He never tells his student how he should paint, but tries rather to help him see through his own eyes, believing that when personal vision is sufficiently developed expression will follow of itself. Al= though he is certain that the technical processes used in pro= [ 28 ] ROBERT HENRI | jecting a work of art must be under perfect control, he has never placed undue emphasis on those processes. Like every thinking artist he has understood that they are useful only as a means to an end and that the fascination which comes from technical facility is a grave danger. In this respect his teach= ing is a perfect summing up of the fundamental qualities of his own work. Many people, seeing only the ease with which he has achieved his results are blinded to the deeper signifi= cance of his art. They have failed to see the logic of his thought underlying his ease of technique. As has been shown, Henri is not a teacher in the popular acceptance of that word, but a leader of acute powers of suggestion. Very often he finds it possible to stimulate the student’s mind by methods other than the implements of his work. It may be some philosophic concept, the fantasy of a book or some apparently unimportant event that will offer a cue for the accomplishment of his purpose. If so, he utilizes it with all his acumen, and of course this keenness is conta= gious. His pupils are kept constantly alert. They learn to paint, not with Henri’s eyes but with their own. He simply indicates the infinite possibilities and they adapt them to their own ends. His students number in the thousands but one never sees any imitation in the most gifted of them, or any similarity, other than a mental wakefulness. In the works of those who have imitated him is the best proof of the failure of the slower minds to grasp the most important [ 29 ] ROBERT HENRI principle of his instruction. Studying with Henri is never a monotonous affair. He believes that life=class is for the gaining of information only, whereas the study of composi= tion enables one to use this information in the creation of pictures. This is why his more talented students have shown such decided compositional ingenuity. From time to time he has been persuaded to express him= self in print, with the result that he has exhibited the same capacity to get to the heart of his subject in his writing that he has in his painting. In 1915 the Conservator re=printed a portion of his article “My People” and in this single para= graph he presented a complete outline of his aims: “I find, as I go out from one land to another seeking ‘my people,’ that I have none of that cruel, fearful possession known as patriotism; no blind intense devotion for an insti= tution that has stiffened in chains of its own making. My love of mankind is individual, not national, and always I find the race expressed in the individual. And so I am ‘patriotic’ only about what I admire, and my devotion to humanity burns up as brightly for Europe as for America. . . . This thing that I call dignity in a human being is inevitably the result of an established order in the universe. Everything that is beautiful is orderly, and there can be no order unless things are in their right relation to each other. Of this right relation, throughout the world, beauty is born. . . . It is not too much to say that art is the noting of the existence of ROBERT HENRI | ‘ [ 30 ] order throughout the world, and so order stirs imagination and inspires one to reproduce this beautiful relationship existing in the universe as best one can. Everywhere I find that the moment order in Nature is understood and freely shown, the result is nobility — the Irish peasant has nobility of language and facial expression; the North American Indian has nobility of poise, of gesture; nearly all children have nobility of impulse. This orderliness must exist or the world would not hold together, and it is a vision of orderliness that enables the artist along any line, whatsoever, to capture and present through his imagination the wonder that stimulates life.” The principles contained in his Method of Instruction he sets forth thus: ‘‘Development of a strong personal art in America through stimulating in students a more profound study of life, the purpose of art, a real understanding of Con- struction, Proportion, Drawing — stimulating activity, mental and physical, moral courage, invention in expression to fit the idea to be expressed; the study, therefore, of specific technic, not stock technic. Impressing the importance of the Idea, that it must have weight, value, be well worth putting forth and in such permanent medium. The devel- opment, therefore, of individuality, search for the just means of expressing the same, simply and fully. The development, therefore, of artists of mind, philosophy, sympathy, courage* invention.” [ 31 ] ROBERT HENRI In the Craftsman of February, 1915, his article entitled “My People’’ contains much of the love he feels for the sub= jects of his pictures. Among other things he says, “Always we would try to tie down the great to our little nationalism; whereas every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Everyone who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, ‘a universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere, a man whom all the world recognizes, accepts, whether he speaks through music, paint= ing, words or form. Each genius differs only from the mass in that he has found freedom for his greatness; the greatness is everywhere, in every man, in every child. What our civili= zation is doing mainly is smothering greatness. It is a strange anomaly; we destroy what we love and we reverence what we destroy. The genius who is great enough to cut through our restraint wins our applause; yet if we have our own way we restrain him. . . . Fortunately, however, the great, sig= nificant, splendid impulse for beauty can force its way through every boundary.’’ And in speaking of his own work, he says: “I have but one intention and that is to make my language as clear and simple and sincere as is humanly possible. . . . All my life I have refused to be for or against parties, for or against nations, for or against people. I never seek novelty or the eccentric; I do not go from land to land to contrast civilization. I seek wherever I go only for symbols of great= ness, and as I have already said they may be found in the eyes ROBERT HENRI f [ 32 ] of a child, in the movement of a gladiator, in the heart of a gypsy, in twilight in Ireland, or in the moon=rise over the desert. Since my return from the Southwest, where I saw many great things in a variety of human forms: a little Chinese=American girl, who has found coquetry in new free= dom; the peon, a symbol of a destroyed civilization in Mexico, and the Indian who works as one in slavery and dreams as a man in still places — I have been reproached with not adding to my study of these people the background of their lives. This has astonished me because all their lives are in their expressions, in their eyes, in their moods, or they are not worth translating into art. I was not interested in these people to sentimentalize over them, to mourn over the fact that we have destroyed the Indian; that we are changing the shy Chinese girl into a soubrette; that our progress through Mexico leaves a demoralized race like the peons. That is not what I’m on the outlook for. ... I do not wish to explain these people, I do not wish to preach through them. I only want to find whatever of the great spirit there is in the South= west. . . . Every nation in the world, in spite of itself, pro= duces the occasional individual that does express in some sense this beauty, with enough freedom for natural growth. . . . Each man must seek for himself the people who hold the essential beauty, and each man must eventually say to himself as I do, ‘These are my people, and all that I have I owe to them.’ ” [ 33 ] 1 ROBERT HENRI It can be seen from Henri’s own words, that his message is so uncompromisingly direct, that its human aspect can be seized by even those unaware of the more abstract essentials of his work. Like so much of the great art of the past, the illustrative element in his painting will always assure him of popular appreciation and an important position among the chroniclers of his age. And so we find in this man, cosmopoli= tan though he is, the simplicity of purpose that sets apart the American artist from his more cerebral colleague of Europe. The sensitively human aspect of his painting will carry his name into the future and succeeding generations will see in it a definite advance in the development of our aesthetic ideals. Paintings by Robert Henri are owned by the following museums: Luxembourg Gallery, Paris Chicago Art Institute Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences Gallery of Spartanburg, S. C. Art Association of Texas, Dallas, Texas Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Columbus, O. Art Association of New Orleans Carolina Art Association, Charleston, S. C. Art Institute of Kansas City San Francisco Institute of Art Metropolitan Museum, New York National Arts Club, New York ROBERT HENRI [ 34 ] Museum of Art and Archaeology, Santa Fe, N. M. Minneapolis Museum Buffalo Fine Arts Gallery, Buffalo, N. Y. Gallery of Oberlin College, Oberlin, O. Memphis Museum Detroit Institute of Art Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, O. Milwaukee Art Institute Telfair Academy of Arts and Science, Savannah, Ga. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. City Art Museum, Saint Louis Wilmington Society of Fine Arts, Wilmington, Del. Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, O. Cincinnati Museum AWARDS RECEIVED BY ROBERT HENRI Silver Medal, Pan American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901 Silver Medal, Universal Exposition, Saint Louis, 1904 Norman W. Harris Medal and Prize of $500.00, Chicago Art Institute, 1905 Gold Medal, Art Club of Philadelphia, 1909 Silver Medal, International Fine Arts Expn., Buenos Ayres, S. A., 1910 Carol H. Beck Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1914 Silver Medal, Panama Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, 1115 Silver Medal for best Portrait, Wilmington Society of Fine Arts, 1920 [ 35 ] I ROBERT HENRI [ 38 ] IRISH LASS 3 If* ^tJcakr: ^MPlPaiSjl ." ..'Mfe^. ^ vi ig ytmt ^ \ PORTRAIT OF “PAT” ROBERTS COLLECTION OF LLOYD ROBERTS CECILIA MARY O’D. MARY OF CONNEMARA WILLIE GEE RUTH ST. DENIS IN “THE PEACOCK DANCE” HEAD OF A MAN LAUGHING GYPSY GIRL . . ■ . ■ [86 J ~r..~ PORTRAIT OF JEAN FAY BAINTER AS THE IMAGE IN “THE WILLOW TREE CINCO CENTIMO [ 96 ] SIS [ 98 ] MANUS . CATHERINE > t 104 J THE GUIDE TO CROAGHAN THE WORKING MAN IMAGINATIVE BOY