Rex Slinkard

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 art with William Lees Judson in Los Angeles.^[3]

Slinkard was one of the first students at the Art Students League of Los Angeles, which had been organized in April 1906, and modeled after the Art Students League of New York.^[1] He studied under Walter Hedges at the school, and won a 1908 League 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. A cameo 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 and inspirational 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 was romantically involved with artist's model Jessie Daisy Augsbury. When she became pregnant, he married her, and she moved in with him at his parents' house in Los Angeles. After the birth of their son, the couple divorced. The scandal led to his resignation 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. It was there that he broke away from the influence of Henri, and developed the Symbolist style for which he became famous.^[1] He wrote to Sprinchorn about his enthusiasm for Symbolist painters: "Botticelli I love … Puvis de Chavannes, I love, and Arthur Davies. … Imagination—that's the thing I can paint with. I am lost without it."^[9]

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 [Marsden] Hartley's erotically charged description of Slinkard's method, written to accompany the Los Angeles Museum's 1919 memorial exhibition.^[10]

In Young Rivers (c.1915-1916), perhaps Slinkard's most famous painting, he turned the arid hills of Saugus into an idyllic landscape, populated by ethereal nude figures and animals.

Slinkard was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War I.^[11]: 53 He contracted Spanish flu while waiting to be shipped overseas to Europe, and 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.^[12]: 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 posthumous exhibition of Slinkard's work in July 1919. Marsden Hartley, who had never met the artist, but was shown his paintings and learned about his life from Carl Sprinchorn,^[12]: 98 penned a sensual eulogy for the exhibition's catalogue.^[13] Hartley's essay was titled: "Rex Slinkard: Ranchman and Poet-Painter,"^[12] and 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]

Another 1919 memorial exhibition was mounted at the Exhibition Hall of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.^[3]

The Knoedler Gallery in New York City mounted a memorial exhibition in February 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.^[11]: 143

Ten of Slinkard's paintings 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 McDowell Club, Taos Building, Los Angeles.^[1]

The Los Angeles Museum mounted a second posthumous exhibition in 1929, and reprinted Hartley's essay in its catalogue.^[1]

Slinkard continued to have an influence over his friends and students. Carl Sprinchorn made a drawing of his grave, done in the style of his friend.^[1] Former-student Nicholas Brigante did a series of drawings in Slinkard's style, and included miniature versions of his teacher's paintings in some of his Surrealist works.^[1]

Florence A. Williams, sister of Slinkard's finacee Gladys, bequeathed a large collection of his works to Stanford University in 1955.^[14]

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.^[15]

The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University mounted a 2011 retrospective exhibition of Slinkard's works: The Legend of Rex Slinkard.^[14]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rex Slinkard.

• Rex Slinkard at Find a Grave