The recording of achievements by painters in Chicago is still so haphazard that recognition of them can be delayed for as much as a half-century.
We see it with Herman Menzel and Willard Grayson Smythe, gifted painters with diametrically opposed ideas who worked in Chicago beginning in the 1920s but only now are being remembered.
Menzel is the lesser known of the two, making his exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society the more surprising and the more welcome.
But Smythe seems to have had a key place in early Chicago abstract painting, and his show at the Pastorelli-Kippax gallery indicates how well abstraction could be practiced when it was practiced here at all.
The case of Menzel is curious. In the early 1920s, he studied at the Chicago Academy of Design, the National Academy of Art and, finally, the Studio School, where he met his most significant teachers, John Warner Norton and William Bishop Owen.
Menzel’s work was representational and reflected popular styles such as Art Deco and, later, American Scene painting. But he felt himself an outsider and avoided contact with artists, dealers, collectors and critics.
His wife, Willa, was a successful commercial artist, so he could devote himself to painting without any consideration of selling. Apart from a few works given to family members and friends, all his pieces remained in the artist’s possession and stayed with his wife after his death six years ago at age 83.
Part of the reason for Menzel’s isolation was apparently his feeling of inferiority at not having attended the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, which in the 1930s helped establish American Scene painting through works of its students Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry.
But Menzel also was deaf by the time he was 30, and no doubt that factor contributed to the withdrawal that, as decades passed, became more extreme. After he moved from Chicago to the North Shore’s Hubbard Woods, his descent into reclusiveness accelerated.
Whatever the causes of Menzel’s distance form others, the expression of it lay at the heart of his best pictures. He practiced all categories of painting except portraiture. The paintings in which his plump, rounded forms (reminiscent of Guy Pene du Bois) and seductive linear patterns (indebted to Oriental art) became more than decoration are generally of figures who do not communicate and seem locked in perpetual stillness.
Menzel’s earliest successes date from the late 1920s, in a series on South Side Mexican pool rooms. Angular forms there combine with cool, flat color to create a world of unusual quiet, reflecting perhaps the artist’s status as a racial intruder as well as the onset of his deafness.
Menzel gave such silence a menacing edge in “Walking the Dog,” which could not have a more innocent subject but conveys unease through its shadows and dark color. Quiet is present, too, in a subject of turmoil, “The Fallen Child,” and various more tranquil pictures of men fishing, especially the one called “The Great White Father,” which shows a melancholy scene at the base of a lighthouse.
The exhibition is thematic rather than strictly chronological, so viewers might not always be aware of how the theme extends over decades, underlying shifts in technique and subject matter. During the ’40s and ’50s, for example, Menzel give separateness and silence almost a humorous twist in pieties depicting visitors to the Shedd Aquarium.
There is a poetry in all of this that goes beyond the homespun pieces of better known regionalist painters, suggesting an artist with depth to his vision. We may feel Menzel achieved some of his atmosphere a little too easily, through pictorial formulas that seem to have become second nature. But much of the work on view is poignant despite lapses in the mechanical, and the show proves a lovely little tribute.
Smythe’s work at Pastorelli-Kippax gives a different experience entirely. For one thing, it is more a gathering than a formal exhibition, and its commercial setting most generously might be called casual.
Then, too, Smythe’s non-objective art is stern by nature, though if viewers see enough of it-don’t miss looking through the unframed gouaches-a kind of playfulness gradually emerges.
Smythe studied at the school of the Art Institute and became an instructor there in 1929. He was, then, from the second generation of abstract artists in Chicago, following painter Manierre Dawson and sculptor John Storrs.
Storrs apparently wanted him to go to Europe, but Smythe did not, less because of any wish to develop a pure strain of American abstraction than because he liked teaching at the Institute and, early on, had established himself as a graphic designer, as well.
Smythe exhibited frequently at many museums in the United States and Canada, and the December 1947 Bulletin from the Art Institute listed him as one of the most successful American abstract painters, in the company of Man Ray and Alexander Calder.
It’s difficult to know precisely how Smythe fell into neglect, though his remaining in Chicago was doubtless a factor, especially after World War II, when New York became capital of the art world and proceeded to turn its back on abstract art showing “European” influences.
Smythe, of course, had little direct contact with European work, though first-hand experience was not necessary, as any hard-edged geometric or biomorphic painting that seemed to descend from Cubism or the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky met with the disapproval of America-first critics.
Smythe seems to have been caught between two camps, for Baroness Hilla von Rebay, who ran the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York, first accepted his work for exhibition, then apparently decided it was not “European” enough and denied him even one show, whereas his Chicago colleague, Medard Klein, received many.
In any event, the works currently on view date from the ’30s and ’40s, when Smythe developed a theory of composition he called “scattered balance design,” which combined both geometric and organic elements with various flat and textured patterns.
Some of the pieces are real grab bags, bringing together hard-edged forms engulfed by biomorphs on fields of uninflected electric color. Others play with space, setting seemingly sculptural objects next to silhouettes that themselves are in counterpoint with fine, speckled, almost airbrushed passages.
Smythe’s playfulness comes from such unexpected combinations and the way they sometimes suggest a jazzy, freewheeling attitude.
Somewhere behind it all you feel the influence of Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism, but the ways in which the artist built upon that style shows the best of American confidence.
Smythe still lives in Chicago and will be 88 on Feb. 12. Long may the vitality of his spirit continue.
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“A Rediscovered Regionalist: Herman Menzel” continues at the Chicago Historical Society, Clark Street at North Avenue, through April 17. Paintings and gouaches by Willard Grayson Smythe will be at Pastorelli-Kippax, 3430 N. Lincoln Ave., through Feb. 15.
