Chase vs. Henri in a Gilded Cage!
New York's many art schools face off at the turn of the century.
William Merritt Chase, Keying Up, 1875, oil on canvas, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
A few readers told me I was being too hard on the National Academy, and they have a good point: this really isn’t the story of heroes and villains, but of vying institutional strategies that played out over decades. And although I left it in a footnote, more needs be made of the fact that Lemuel Wilmarth left the Art Students League of New York after just two seasons—to run back into the open arms of the National Academy. This proved a seminal gesture: the faculty rotated between the two schools for decades. And that revolving door never spun so fatefully as when it rotated its most famous teacher of the Gilded Age: William Merritt Chase.
II. The Chase is On.
Chase escaped his native Indiana with a brief stint in the navy, but soon determined to pursue artistic training in New York over life at sea. His first teacher was the Munich-trained Lemuel Wilmarth, then still a satisfied faculty member of the National Academy. After a brief sequester in St. Louis, Chase followed his teacher’s footsteps to Munich. At Munich’s Royal Academy of Art, he painted a scene of a court jester “keying up” with a drink before he begins his puppet show. It’s a comic scene, but when Chase sent it back to the States, it struck a chord. A behind-the-scenes view of an artist self-medicating away the suffering of his craft—Keying Up turned heads at the Boston Art Club in 1876 and won a medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition a few months later.1 By the time he set up a studio in the opulent Tenth Street Studio Building2 in New York in 1878, William Merritt Chase was already a household name.
It was a great time to arrive: Lemuel Wilmarth had just returned to the National Academy, and his replacement at the Art Students League, Walter Shirlaw, had a problem. The National Academy was giving courses again after a two-year hiatus; worse, the League was charging $5 for enrollment, and that was a lot more than the Academy’s classes cost. Why would students pay more cash when the star instructor had just gone back to the institution with all the cachet? Shirlaw’s answer was twofold: 1)—because the League was adding entrance requirements to demonstrate merit and show how serious the school was; and, 2)—because the League was hiring the most exciting faculty—starting with rockstar William Merritt Chase.
Here’s where lineage gets tangled. Chase studied in the traditional manner in Munich, and he studied at the Academy under Wilmarth—so you might think that he was all-in on the pedagogy in which he was raised. As it turned out, it was quite the opposite: Chase resented his days jumping through hoops, copying plaster casts and jockeying for easel station near the model. He recoiled from running his classroom at the League in that manner—and eventually things came to a head. The League wouldn’t back down on heightened admissions standards, and Chase wouldn’t back down—so he set off and started his own school.
Chase was by every account a great teacher, and his school was a success in every way—but he hated his administrative duties as much as he hated drawing from the plaster. In two years, he sold his ownership stake in the school and stayed on as a teacher as it changed its name to the New York School of Art. Future masters Marsden Hartley and Edward Hopper studied at the New York School, but as the school grew it required additional faculty, and Chase was soon just one of many teachers there. By 1907, Chase was feuding desperately with one of these, the muckraker from Philadelphia, Robert Henri.3 They were the two most charismatic teachers of the day, and it may seem like splitting hairs, but Chase was all about art for art’s sake, while Henri preached art for life’s sake, so obviously it could be nothing but acid and scorched earth between them.4
By 1907, the Art Students League had gotten rid of its rigorous entrance requirements once and for all. Chase abandoned the school he had founded and returned to the League. Chase educated a rising generation of modernists in those years—not least Georgia O’Keeffe5—and was warmly remembered by a generation of artists that entirely evaded the stamp of Chase’s style. Chase’s studio was by all accounts a place for serious, relentless, swear-at-the-canvas-and-repaint-it-a-hundredth-time art-making. Anyone willing to draw blood was welcome in Chase’s studio, and for many years, his classes were dominated by women.
III. The Changing of the Guard.
As for Robert Henri, so bitter was his feud with Chase that he stayed at the New York School until Chase retired from the League in 1911. Only after 1915 did Henri take over as the most storied teacher at the League—but we’ll save some of those stories for another day.
And as for the New York School of Art—how well did it fair without either of its star teachers? Surprisingly well, as it turns out. Another Chase-era hire at the New York School was Frank Parsons, who introduced fashion design classes in 1904 and completed the school’s makeover into a design school by the time of his death in 1930. A few years later it was renamed for him as the Parsons School of Design.
What’s most surprising about Chase’s contact with the League is that he didn’t inspire a cult of personality. If Chase has a legacy, it isn’t the transmission of the Munich style, although a glance at O’Keeffe’s work there confirms that he succeeded in that—it’s that he arrived at an art school on shaky feet and left it as a cornerstone institution.
Be sure to check out 150 Years of Influential Instructors at Graham | Shay & Lincoln Glenn Galleries, featuring a stunning array of teachers from the Art Students League of New York. Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com
Chase’s turn in the building was but one chapter in the legendary story of the Tenth Street Studio Building—read more here.
Most recently of Philadelphia—his checkered past out west was chronicled in “Robert Henri’s Brush with Death!”
Ronald Pisano gives a delightful and breezy account in his essay “A Brief History of the Art Students League,” in The Art Students League: Selections from the Permanent Collection (1987), pp. 11-12.
O’Keeffe’s time in Chase’s class was surprisingly meaningful—a window into it here.