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"The White Bridge" by John Henry Twachtman
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"I feel encouraged," wrote John Twachtman from Gloucester, Mass., in a letter to his wife during the first week of August 1902. He had rediscovered a new sense of the possibilities in the paintings he was working on that summer. For perhaps the first time, he knew his work was beginning to break new ground and reveal a modern sense of looking at the world through landscape painting. But, within a few days, at the age of 49, John Henry Twachtman was dead.
The High Museum in Atlanta has organized an exhibition of the work of Cincinnati native Twachtman that opened its national tour at the Cincinnati Art Museum and will remain on view through Sept. 5, 1999. It is accompanied by a thorough catalogue with an insightful text by Lisa N. Peters.
As I walked through the exhibition the other day, I couldn't help thinking about what might have been had Twachtman lived another 20 years and participated fully in the modern revolution. After all, he was 14 years younger than Paul Cézanne, born the same year as Vincent van Gogh, only 13 years older than Henri Matisse. He came of age at a time when painting no longer had to mimic the world -- photography would see to that -- and was free to be a medium of expression.
It is dangerous for me to assume too much of Twachtman's potential while playing a rosy, bright-eyed game of 20/20 hindsight. I will never fully comprehend the circumstances or the context in which those magnificent late paintings were realized, yet I flirt with the conjecture that they are significant works in their contribution to the major developments in painting in the first half of the 20th century. Perhaps it is because as a painter myself, not too far distant from my 49th year, now wondering if the current painting will be my last, that I have regained an appreciation for his struggles and admiration of his successes.
Twachtman's gains were always incremental. Never was there the giant breakthrough that would propel him onto the world's stage. He became widely known as an American impressionist, though his demeanor and teaching philosophy eschewed labels and rebelled against fashion as well as the traditional academy. "To be truly artistic, have an original way of seeing an original subject. ... What we want is an original mind. ... See with your own eyes. Be your own self and save your self-respect. We must always seek the unusual."
Twachtman grew up on Race Street in Over-the-Rhine, the third child of Frederick and Sophia Twachtman, natives of Hanover, when German was the common language and the streets were as crowded as the beer gardens. Art and artists played a major role in the culture of the city, and Twachtman was probably exposed to the works of many of Cincinnati's early masters, such as William Sonntag and Robert Duncanson, among others. For a time his father worked at painting still lifes and landscapes on window shades (very popular in Victorian homes), and Twachtman (at age 14) was known to have worked for the same firm as his father. At 15, Twachtman studied draughtsmanship at the Ohio Mechanics Institute and, at 18, enrolled at the McMicken School of Design (later to become the Art Academy of Cincinnati), where he met many young students who would go on to have remarkable careers of their own: Robert Blum, Kenyon Cox, Joseph DeCamp, Thomas Noble, Elizabeth Nourse and Louis Ritter. Nearly all the promising students eventually left Cincinnati to pursue serious careers elsewhere, a trend that continues to this day.
In the beginning of his career John Twachtman had operated in a manner that kept his work fresh and alive, but within the historical constraints of mid-19th century landscape painting. (He had, on occasion, tried to include figure painting in his repertory, but I believe he knew these works did not approach the strength of his best landscapes, and in truth, his figures are overworked and stiff.) Greatly under the influence of local art guru Frank Duveneck (who was, in turn, under the influence of the German realist Wilhelm Leibl), Twachtman accepted the Munich school of painting as his own and traveled with Duveneck, only five years his senior, to Munich and Venice in 1875. This trip began a life of learning and traveling that had extraordinary consequences for Twachtman and his art.
Although he would later deride the Munich school for its darkness and limited palette, Twachtman learned to paint freely and spontaneously with quick descriptive brush strokes and an engaged vitality that he attributed to a spiritual link with nature. From Wilhelm Leibl he adopted the alla prima ("all at once") process that would influence his working methods for the rest of his life. At the foundation of his early success was his extraordinary ability to draw. Twachtman had a natural knack for translating the three-dimensional world to the flat canvas with a crisp and seemingly effortless manner. Because his skills were so sharp, he would eventually be able to leave them behind in pursuit of the unseen.
It was Twachtman's adventures with Duveneck in Europe that helped to put his Cincinnati training into perspective. By traveling and painting through Germany and Italy, he had been exposed to a bigger world and was beginning to understand the opportunities being presented to him. But money problems and family circumstances would bring him back to Cincinnati in 1879. He managed to secure a teaching position at the Woman's Art Museum Association, and he began to court Martha Scudder, the daughter of a prominent Cincinnati physician he had met at an artist's party in Munich. Scudder was a trained artist herself, and after their marriage in 1881, would provide both monetary and moral support for Twachtman.
Cincinnati was expanding dramatically in the 1880s, and anyone who could get out of the inner city moved up the hillsides into the surrounding countryside. The Twachtmans settled in the wooded suburb of Avondale where the landscape was still serene with uninterrupted views of trees and fields. Twachtman took up etching as a way of merging his desires to both paint and draw spontaneously. He often carried several prepared etching plates in his pockets and would stop for a few minutes to record a scene. The prints included in this venue of the exhibition demonstrate the immediacy and efficiency with which he worked. His careful selection of forms and shapes can be interpreted as a conscience abstracting from the landscape that lay before him. As with etching, and later with pastels, Twachtman changed his medium in order to challenge his vision. By radically changing the tools, he began to question his rules. He was asking questions about his own creative process and, most importantly, what he wanted to see in his art.
Twachtman would look back at this time in Cincinnati as unremarkable and unproductive. But I believe the familiarity of his hometown gave him the freedom to examine his motives and forge a strong and ever questioning creative process. Without the resolve to follow his own voice, Twachtman would have stayed mired in the darkness of the Munich school and may never have been willing to explore the possibilities of abstraction.
Twachtman never seemed to like Cincinnati. In a letter to his friend J. Alden Weir in 1882 he wrote, " ... very old foggied place ... only one kind of art is considered good. The old Dusseldorf school comes in for its full share of honor. There is no good art influence here and I shall be glad to leave."
Twachtman did leave Cincinnati several times before settling for good in Greenwich, Conn., in 1889. In the years prior, he traveled to Europe quite often to paint and study in France and Holland. He spent some time at the Academy Julien where many Americans gathered to learn the basics from the French academicians. The interval he spent in Paris turned out to be a starting-over period for him. He emerged with a clarity of intention, lighter palette and improved discipline. His French period is crowned by the exquisite Arques-la-Bataille of 1895, an exploration of atmospheric perspective, large broad shapes, subdued light and color. Twachtman left Paris with fresh intensity and many new friends, mostly Americans.
It seemed Twachtman's luck to surround himself with exceptional talent. When he moved to New York in the late 1870s, he rekindled his friendship with William Merrit Chase, whom he had known in Munich. And he met J. Alden Weir and Theodore Robinson, with whom he would maintain deep, lifelong friendships. Joining the Tile Club, he probably met Winslow Homer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Edwin Austin Abby. Twachtman had a keen sense for sniffing out the artist's groups that might provide the intellectual debates he thrived on during his days in Munich.
In the 1880s Twachtman joined the Society of American Artists in New York, formed in reaction to the much more formal Academy groups. Here he met Childe Hassam, Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell. Over the years however, the Society began to lose its vigor and Twachtman continued to insist on a more modern approach to the artists who were shown.
Discontented with the backward-looking selections of the Society, Twachtman helped organize a small rebellion that led to the resignation of 10 members who went on to form the infamous Ten American Artists. The group, including Hassam, Weir, Dewing, Benson, DeCamp, Metcalf, Tarbell, Reid and Simmons, became known for mounting exhibitions of what today is considered to be the finest collections of American impressionism. It was no small honor that after Twachtman's death, his place was taken by William Merrit Chase.
Beginning in the late 1880s Twachtman began drawing with pastel on toned or colored paper. Even though highly influenced by Whistler's pastels, Twachtman produced works of exceptional power and delicacy. To my eye, I cannot help but sense a strong similarity to works by many abstract expressionists that would occur 60 years later. Among Twachtman's admirers were early modernists John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Milton Avery.
During the last two years of his life, Twachtman was working to greatly expand the notion of what painting could do. The late works he produced -- around his home in Greenwich, the nearby village of Cos Cob and during his summers in Gloucester -- reflect a desire to continue to break the image down to essentials, to discard unnecessary visual information in pursuit of an image that would maintain an equivalent visual experience of the moment. Although the scene he chose to work from was the impetus, his primary concern was directed toward the transformative emotional qualities to which the paint was capable. He had long ago abandoned the sense of his paintings being strictly windows through which to see the landscape. Instead, Twachtman wanted a much more modern sense and appreciation for the artist's interpretation of nature, an abstraction from the world to create a new sense of knowing.
In his essay that accompanied a 1966 Twachtman exhibition in Cincinnati, Richard Bolye wrote, "John Henry Twachtman was not an innovator, yet when the inevitable comparisons are finally dispensed with, it is clearly apparent that he was a lyric artist who created many memorable images; a painter who possessed a quiet originality, quietly achieved."
I do not believe an artist's place in history or the merit of his accomplishments should be contingent solely on the level of innovation. The reason we persist in looking at Twachtman and talking about his images lies in his work's ability to continue to influence our desires. After all, making something different isn't as difficult as creating something people will still be talking about in a hundred years.
John Twachtman: An American Impressionist will be on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum through Sept. 5.
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