But seven years later, in Mencken`s own American Mercury magazine, local critic Samuel Putnam wrote an essay entitled, ”Chicago: An Obituary.”
There had been by then an exodus of such Chicago talents as Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim. Putnam called the city a ”burned-out crater of a once quite lively young Vesuvius . . . Chicago is now just about as thrilling, poetically, as Tucson, Ariz.”
World War I and the advent of the Jazz Age and the Flapper Era brought a renewed liberalism to Chicago, but as Harris pointed out, artists were leaving as fast as writers. In 1921 Chicago painter Ralph Clarkson noted more than 70 colleagues of merit who had fled the city. One observer put it this way: ”As soon as a Chicago artist won his spurs, he packed his paint kit and took a fast train to New York.”
Still, the freer spirits persevered. The Chicago Arts Club, founded in 1918, established a tradition of exhibiting provocative new art that lingers on to this day. A Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists was formed to circumvent the conservative exhibition policies of the Art Institute. Though it never occupied a place on the cutting edge comparable to that of, say, today`s Museum of Modern Art or Whitney Museum in New York, even the Art Institute became more tolerant and supportive of ”the strange and heretical.”
By 1924, the Chicago Evening Post was publishing a weekly art supplement so popular it was bought separately by thousands of people who didn`t particularly want to read the paper. It had, in fact, a larger circulation than any weekly or monthly arts publication in the United States at that time and had a far more influential voice in the arts than either the rival Chicago Daily News or the Chicago Tribune, with the stridently anti-Modernist Eleanor Jewett.
The principal voice of the Evening Post`s Magazine of the Art World-which on Oct. 7, 1924, carried the banner headline ”Chicago as the Art Center of America”-was Clarence Bulliet, who allowed that New York probably would reign supreme but that Chicago remained ”a possibility.”
As Prince noted in an earlier published biographical sketch of Bulliet, he was an unlikely candidate to become Chicago`s preeminent art critic.
The son of a southern Indiana fertilizer packager, he was born Clarence Bulleit-changing the name to the French sounding Bulliet during World War I because of the intense anti-German feelings sweeping the country. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Indiana University, he worked on newspapers in Louisville and Indianapolis and for eight years traveled the country as a theatrical press agent, at one point handling publicity for the film ”Birth of a Nation.”
HE TOOK OVER THE Evening Post`s arts magazine at the age of 41 with next to no experience as an art critic. A voracious reader, he made up for this lack by consuming a vast number of books on artistic subjects, and throughout his long career he strove to be comprehensible and entertaining in his writing, in marked contrast to the general run of art critics.
He was outspoken and courageous, expansive and tolerant, intelligent and prodigious. He authored 11 books, most of them on art, including the best-selling ”Apples and Madonnas,” in which he outraged purists by writing,
”An apple by Paul Cezanne is of more consequence artistically than the head of a Madonna by Raphael.” He had a copy sent to the Tribune`s Mrs. Jewett, who sent it back, unread, with a nasty note.
Bulliet considered sex and sensuality the driving forces in artistic inspiration, describing ”frail, fair women who have unclothed their bodies as models but who, more important, have had the eager feminine vitality-the vitality that burns, the eagerness that bites-to inspire creative energy.”
He championed the works of artist and friend Marcena Barton, whose bloodthirsty nude ”Salome” scandalized prim Chicagoans even in the 1930s.
Sending his wife and children off to live in Indiana, he himself lived most of the time in a Chicago hotel and counted among his friends not just artists and intellectuals but some of the city`s most notorious sexual deviants. As with New York`s Alexander Woolcott, whom he much resembled, Bulliet had a lifelong fascination with murder and other crimes.
”Homely, overweight and eventually toothless-a condition he refused to correct with false teeth-Bulliet nevertheless attracted women with ease,”
Prince wrote. ”One mistress turned to alcohol after he broke off an amorous relationship with her. And despite long-term complications resulting from typhoid fever, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, he was married for the second time in 1949 at the age of 66, to a woman 20 years his junior. Although Bulliet never voted, he was an outspoken champion of liberal causes such as the rights of illegitimate children, anti-Prohibitionism, anti-fascism and, whenever endangered, the rights of all people to live as they please. In his later years he spoke out vehemently against communism, believing it to be as restrictive as fascism.”
WITH THE MINIStrations of Bulliet and other progressives, Modernism finally took root in Chicago and was in a sense enshrined in the city`s 1933
”Century of Progress” exposition. One of the most popular attractions of that extravaganza was a huge show at the Art Institute full of the kind of Modern paintings that had been so ridiculed 20 years before. One critic crowed: ”There has never been in the history of the country so rapid an advance of taste in so short a time. We can begin to be proud of ourselves.” But the conservatives were prepared to put up one big last fight. The Tribune`s Jewett became increasingly hostile to Modern art.
”By the mid-`20s her dislike of Modernism had turned to indignation, and her pronouncements of incompetence had turned to judgments of immorality,”
Prince says in her book. ”She labeled Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh `brutal, primitive and childish.` Matisse`s works were `atrocities,` the work by locals was the result of `variously diseased schools of art thought.` ”
She was no match, however, for Bulliet, whose wit and brilliant commentary made her seem narrow-minded and stupid and whose popular commentaries and books gave him a much wider following. But she found a powerful ally and eventual mentor in Art Institute trustee and longtime arts patron Josephine Logan, who, with her husband, had been awarding an annual $500 prize to worthy artists and had been appalled by those that Art Institute juries selected as winners.
In 1936, again irked by the work the Institute had picked as best picture of the year, Mrs. Logan exploded, founding a movement and authoring a book called ”Sanity in Art.” Her purpose, she said, was to bring back
”rationalism, sanity and soundness” to art and work toward ”the restoration of real art and a resumption of progress along the line of established and universal principles . . .to help rid our museums of modernistic, moronic grotesqueries . . . masquerading as art.”
Bulliet responded by saying, ”Mrs. Logan would turn back the art clock in Chicago to about the time it ticks out in Berlin and Munich and lately in Vienna . . . Hitler has an axeman; Mrs. Logan only has her little book.”
Local artists reacted to Mrs. Logan much as their counterparts of today have to Sen. Jesse Helms. One depicted her savagely in a vicious satirical painting titled ”Horsefeathers.” But her movement spread, establishing branches in St. Louis, among other Midwestern cities, and as far away as San Francisco, where a vestige of it functions today. In a sense, the intensity of Jewett`s and Logan`s opposition to Modern art was even stronger than that which had greeted it in Chicago a generation before. Because of Logan`s wealth, social position and influence as a major arts patron and the large circulation of Mrs. Jewett in the Tribune, it was hard to dismiss them as mere cranks.
”Mrs. Jewett`s ideas were tied up with her image of herself as a civic-minded guardian of virtue,” Prince says. ”And she had the money to put forth those causes she felt important. One of those was art, but it was art as SHE wanted to define it. In that sense, it was like Jesse Helms.”
In the end, the battle petered out in a draw. Upset with local artists who had taken to repeating the ideas of Picasso and others, Bulliet himself declared Modernism dead. The onset of the Depression and the looming threat of war turned American artistic tastes to works embodying traditional values. The avant garde gave way to the regional Social Realism of Midwestern artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood-art that came under considerable government censorship because so much of it was commissioned for WPA and Treasury Department public works projects.
IN 1932 BULLIET`S PAPER was absorbed by the Daily News, which inexorably began to decrease the size of his presence in its pages until he was reduced to a tiny column appearing on the women`s page by the time of his death in 1952.
By then, the art world throughout the country had been bowled over by the drip-slop-and-splatter abstract expressionist movement that sprang forth from New York and engulfed the globe after World War II. A small group of near-surrealist Chicago painters called ”the Imagists” attempted a small rebellion but were washed aside in the flood. It was not until the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, Peter Max and others in the 1960s that abstract expressionism was successfully resisted, and that was a New York, not a Chicago, phenomenon.
Prince says she`s not quite sure the battle is over in Chicago. ”You still get people marching into the Art Institute when they have Mayor Washington dressed up in (women`s) underwear,” she says. ”That sort of policing still goes on. I think you can compare that to the Helms-NEA controversy.”
The NEA fight erupted when the Corcoran Gallery in Washington cancelled an NEA-sponsored exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe because of political objections to the homoerotic images and studies of nude children they included.
Ironically, the show originally opened in Philadelphia without controversy and then played at Chicago`s Museum of Contemporary Art without causing a stir either.
”The MCA could get by with it,” Prince says. ”You get a different crowd there, a crowd more art-world-oriented. You don`t get so many of the general public. That kind of audience was more likely to be accepting of it than if it had been displayed at the Art Institute. The Art Institute is still the civic art institution in Chicago.”
