Rex Slinkard: Difference between revisions

Rex Ruby Slinkard (June 5, 1887, Edwardsport, Indiana – October 18, 1918, Manhattan, New York City) was an American painter and teacher. He is best remembered for his Symbolist paintings, most of which were unknown until after his premature death at age 31.^[1]

He was the younger son of rancher Stephen Wall Slinkard and Laura Simonson Slinkard. He had an elder brother named Donald. The family moved in the 1890s from Knox County, Indiana to the Saugus section of Los Angeles County, California. He grew up on a horse-and-cattle ranch in the Tehachapi Hills, north of the city.^[2] As a teenager, he studied painting under William Lees Judson in Los Angeles.^[3]

The Art Students League of Los Angeles was organized in April 1906, and modeled after the Art Students League of New York.^[1] Slinkard was one of the school's first students, and studied under Hanson Puthuff and Walter Hedges. The League awarded Slinkard a 1908 scholarship to study further in New York City under Robert Henri.^[4]

Slinkard and fellow Henri student George Wesley Bellows roomed together in New York City. A cameo portrait of Slinkard appears in the foreground of Bellows's early fight painting, Stag at Sharkey's (1909).^[5]

Hedges died in January 1910, and when Slinkard returned to California the following summer, he was offered the position of chief instructor at the League.^[4] The school organized an exhibition of works by Slinkard and League student Pruett Carter in the fall, which received a highly favorable review in The Los Angeles Times. In early 1911, at age 23, Slinkard was named director of the League.^[4] His friend Carl "Sprink" Sprinchorn, a League alumnus and fellow student of Henri, joined him as an instructor at the school.^[6]

"For the present, instructors of the ASL of LA are pupils of Robert Henri of NY—and you know what that means! You know, at once, that they are strictly up-to-date in their artistic ideas, that they are the most modern of the moderns, and that they are smashing academic traditions with every vigorous stroke of charcoal stick or paintbrush." — Antony Anderson, The Los Angeles Times^[7]

In addition to being a prodigious artistic talent, Slinkard was a charismatic teacher.^[8] But his adherence to teaching Henri's painting method alienated experienced students such as Conrad Buff and Frank Curran, who had already established their own personal styles.^[1] The League provided a morning life class for women and men, an evening life class for men, with afternoons open for individual work in the studio.^[4] Slinkard regularly socialized with the students, and their Saturday night pot-luck dinners were held at the school.^[1]

Slinkard became romantically involved with artist's model Jessie Daisy Augsbury, and married her after she became pregnant. A couple months after the birth of their son, he deserted them, forcing her to divorce him.^[a] The ensuing scandal led to his removal as director of the League in early 1913.^[4] Sprinchorn succeeded him as director.^[4]

Slinkard retreated into self-imposed exile at the family ranch in Saugus. There he painted a series of moody self-portraits^[1]—Acolyte–Self-Portrait (c.1914-1916),^[10] Rex (c.1915),^[11] Self-Portrait (undated).^[12] But it was also there that he broke away from the influence of Henri, and developed the Symbolist style for which he would be remembered.^[1]

Hello! S.[Sprink], I wish you were here to see what I am painting. … I'm trying for rich colour, and trying to keep the painter out of it. That is, the brushwork, that attracts so many. And to get to the facts in a simple way. … Am not painting along the lines of our old school. That is, the brush of the old school. Dear Mr. _ _ _. I like him as well as I used to but his pictures are not for me. I mean they don't hold me long enough. I'll paint different. I wish he could come on the ranch. I wish he could lie back and look into the sky till he became sleepy—and lie there and sleep. I wish he could see the Polish boy. Kiss this little calf, and his moist hand touch its wet nose. And grab it and almost strangle it with love. Oh! S.—love is the strongest thing. It makes one beautiful, and all things beautiful. Botticelli I love—and another—Teppo Tiffi—that's not right, but maybe you will know who I mean. I'll send you a print of his. Puvis de Chavannes, I love, and Arthur Davies.^[13]

In Young Rivers (1916), perhaps Slinkard's most famous painting, he transformed the irrigation ditches of Saugus into an idyllic landscape populated by ethereal youths and animals.^[2] Curiously, Young Rivers was painted in the basement of his parents' house on Wright Street in Los Angeles.^[4]

My Dear C[arl]: –It's in September. The day of the month I don't know. I'm working in a cement room 14X20 [ft] underneath the house—the ceiling of rafters. …
On my easel I have a canvass 48X40 [in]. This canvass I've been working on for six or seven days. … My intention in this canvass is far from my surroundings. For a long time I've realized that I am working on a flat surface. This painting is a decoration. Its background—top is of green bushes, waterfalls and pools, and rock. Then coming on down, more rocks, water between the water-smoothed rocks which are oval-shaped everywhere—with pools of cold clear water, some above some below one another. And all coming down and moving to the right. In the center of the canvass, moving up and down, and to the right are two white boys on two white boy-horses, then two boys moving across, and a little up. And then a white deer with long glistening horns, and he is listening, hesitating, and moving down, one foot in a pool of purple water, which is hesitating, but running. And then a little up, and down, a girlish boy—a back view, arms folded above and in back of head. Head is turned sideways and looking directly out of canvass, to the right. The legs and back are stretched up and forward. Then moving on down, there are rocks and water that are of the same quality as all above. Then comes a large pool of clear blue water and at the left a goat running and jumping into the pool. And the pool has the same movement as the figures and water above. And then at the extreme left is a 3-stemmed, stripped bush which takes the gesture of the girlish boy above, at the extreme right. And, you have the picture.^[14] [NOTE: The misspellings of "canvas" are Slinkard's.]

Slinkard was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1917.^[15]: 53 He was part of the 91st Infantry Division and would have been deployed to Europe in Summer 1918, but he contracted scarlet fever.^[b] He recovered, but while waiting to be shipped overseas, he contracted Spanish flu. He died of pneumonia at St. Vincent's Hospital, Manhattan, on October 18, 1918.^[2] Carl Sprinchorn accompanied his body on the train ride from New York City to Los Angeles, for funeral and burial.^[17]: 98 At the time of his death, Slinkard was engaged to Gladys Whitney Williams, who inherited most of his paintings and drawings.^[2]: 98

The Los Angeles Museum mounted a memorial exhibition of Slinkard's work, June 3–30, 1919. Marsden Hartley, who never met the artist, but had been shown his paintings and letters by Carl Sprinchorn,^[17]: 98 penned an effusive essay for the catalogue.^[18] Titled: "Rex Slinkard: Ranchman and Poet-Painter,"^[17] Hartley asked: "How many are there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming visionary person?"^[2]: 211

There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as is would have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard was a genius of first quality.

He was a young boy of light walking on a man's strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He walked straight-forwardly toward the elysium of his own personal fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him, rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had, this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and soul of Rex Slinkard.^[2]

The Los Angeles Museum's memorial exhibition traveled to the Exhibition Hall of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, October 3–27, 1919.^[3] Knoedler Gallery in New York City mounted a memorial exhibition, January 19–31, 1920, and reprinted Hartley's essay in its catalogue.^[2]: 211 Spurred by Hartley, poet William Carlos Williams published letters by Slinkard in the first three issues of the literary magazine Contact—December 1920, January 1921, and Spring 1921.^[15]: 143 The Los Angeles Museum mounted a second memorial exhibition in November 1929, and reprinted Hartley's essay in its catalogue.^[1]

• Four paintings by Slinkard were part of an exhibition of Ashcan School painters at the MacDowell Club in New York City, February – March 2, 1919.^[19]
• Ten paintings by Slinkard were hung alongside works by Thomas Hart Benton, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Morgan Russell and others, in a January 1923 exhibition by the Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles, at the Taos Building in Los Angeles.^[1]
• Slinkard's works were part of a 1964 exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art: Arts of California—XVI: Early Moderns.^[3]
• Slinkard's works were part of a 2008 exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art: A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953.^[20]
• The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University mounted a 2011 retrospective exhibition: The Legend of Rex Slinkard.^[21]

Slinkard, who had trained with Robert Henri, developed a lyrical, semiabstract form of symbolist painting in which he blended suggestions of music and dance into figural compositions. In Slinkard's paintings volume and outline alternately separated and blended to accentuate Wagnerian episodes of libinal yearning. The highly original visual qualities of these works were effectively captured in Hartley's erotically charged description of Slinkard's method, written to accompany the Los Angeles Museum's 1919 memorial exhibition.^[22]

Slinkard continued to influence his friends and students. Carl Sprinchorn made a 1920s drawing of his grave, done in the style of his friend.^[1] Former-student Nicholas Brigante made a series of 1920s drawings in Slinkard's style, and inserted miniature versions of his teacher's paintings into some of his 1940s Surrealist works.^[1] Mabel Alvarez's Symbolist paintings of the late 1920s seem to have been influenced by Slinkard.^[23]

Florence A. Williams, sister of Slinkard's finacee Gladys, bequeathed a large collection of his works to Stanford University in 1955.^[21] This forms the core of the Cantor Art Center's 268 works by Slinkard.^[21]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rex Slinkard.

• Rex Slinkard at Find a Grave
• Rex Slinkard at SIRIS