Jerome Myers

Source: Grant Holcomb III, Kraushaar Galleries, 1994

Born in Petersburg, Virginia in 1867, Myers lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans before he established residence in New York City in 1886. Within a year, he had enrolled in his first formal art courses at Cooper Union and, shortly thereafter, the Art Students League, where he studied with George de Forest Brush and Kenyon Cox. ...the young artist questioned the highly structured, conservative nature of the institutions. According to Myers, his instructors frowned upon his interest in city life.Travels to Europe in 1896 and 1914 reaffirmed the artist's conviction that only the city life of New York could furnish the material for his life's work. [the artist] always preferred the immigrant life of New York City. ... "Others saw ugliness and degradation there," he wrote, "I saw poetry and beauty."(http://go-oto.com/ques.com/myers/index.html 6-4-2010)Jerome Myers - Artist In Manhattan 1867 - 1940 Best known for his paintings and drawings of New York's Lower East Side, Myers was one of the originators of the historic 1913 New York Armory ShowHis works can be seen in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Smithsonian, The Phillips Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, among others. The estate collection is represented by the Kraushaar Galleries in New York.THE FORGOTTEN LEGACY OF JEROME MYERS (1867-1940): PAINTER OF NEW YORK'S LOWER EAST SIDE by GRANT HOLCOMB Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn are well-known figures in the history of American art, for they boldly turned away from studio themes to the urban environment for their subject matter during the early years of the twentieth century. Less familiar, however, are the poetic observations of life on New York's Lower East Side which were painted by their contemporary, Jerome Myers, over a fifty-year period. He, like the other city realists, adhered to the Emersonian ideal of painting the familiar and the commonplace. Indeed, Myers was one of the first artists who intuitively embraced such a philosophy in the twentieth century. His early paintings of unglamorous city scenes directly defied the doctrines of academic art, while his active participation in several progressive art organizations helped challenge the narrow exhibition policies of the National Academy of Design. Myers, along with his fellow painters of city life, became one of the progressive forces in American art during the first decade of this century. Jerome Myers was born in Petersburg, Virginia on March 20, 1867, one of five children born to Abram and Julia Hillman Myers. The early years of the Myers family were ones of “desperate poverty.” Abram Myers provided little paternal guidance and, apparently, even less financial security for his family. Possessing what one son termed “an incorrigible roving spirit,” the elder Myers traveled to many foreign countries and, later, journeyed to California where, as a 'Forty-Niner,' he acquired a gold mine which he subsequently lost. Jerome remembered little of a father who disappeared for years at a time. Julia Myers, an invalid, was left with the responsibility of rearing the five children and found herself unable to provide a secure and stable environment. Upon her hospitalization in 1877, the children were placed in foster homes. Jerome was sent to an orphanage where he remained until his mother recuperated. His brother, Gustavus, corroborated the fact of family displacement when he stated that he had not lived with either one of his parents from the age of seven to the age of sixteen. This unstable and, at times, oppressive childhood affected the creative development of at least two of the Myers children. Gustavus, later to become a noted historian, felt that his early years had a profound influence in shaping his sympathy for theunderdog? Repulsed by the plight of the poor, he became convinced of the necessity for social and economic change. These convictions resulted in his penetrating histories of American political and social institutions. Similarly, Jerome's outlook on life was affected by his childhood years. According to the artist Harry Wickey, Jerome's own temperament demanded direct contact with the common people in the city because he "was one with them from the beginning and enjoyed nothing so much as being in their midst.'' Unlike his brother, however, Jerome had none of the social reformer in him. His vision of the city's poor was not one which evoked a sense of wretchedness he queried, "Why catch humanity by the shirt-tail when I could ... see more pleasant things?'' Jerome looked beyond the depressed external conditions that plagued the inhabitants of New York's ghettos. Although they lived in the slums, the lives of these men and women seemed nourished by an immense hope and spiritual happiness. That is what Myers sought and subsequently recorded on his canvases. Myers began his formal art education in 1887, one year after his arrival in New York. He enrolled in evening courses at Cooper Union while he earned his living as a painter of signs and interior scenes during the day. Backyard (Figure 1), dated 1887, indicates that Myers spent his few spare hours painting local scenes. The painting represents a view of the Myers' backyard in New York and apparently is one of the earliest examples of an unidealized urban scene in American art. Jerome spent approximately one year at Cooper Union before entering the Art Students League where he once again studied at night while working during the day as a photo-engraver at the Moss Engraving Company. At the League, Myers studied under George de Forest Brush, a popular and competent academician. Brush's preference for form over color and his idealization of form in imitation of classical art were typical academic characteristics. He found artistic experimentation faulty and, in an appropriately conservative vein, maintained: "We must not run after new things. We must find out what the masters know." At first, Jerome's performance at the league was somewhat erratic. Henry McBride, art critic for the New York Sun, related how the young artist would begin his life-study each week at the League "only to abandon it, after the second day's study, to constantly begin anew." It seemed that Myers was unable to discipline himself to the point of completing any one drawing; the mere presence of a model tended to be disconcerting. Myers eventually obtained the confidence necessary to pursue a career in art when he produced a series of self-portraits (Fig. 2) which earned the praise of his instructors. As McBride stated, "It was through these self-portraits that he found himself.'' Myers attended classes at the League over an eight-year period. Certainly, the technical training was invaluable for a young artist. However, Jerome apparently felt that the general course of study was not enriching. He wrote: "the art taught during my time was either the academic French of the day or the academic painting of the Munich school. I believe that drawing from the antique Greek sculpture and, still more, studying the drawings of the old masters that hung in the hall, made me dissatisfied. Basically, the drawing and painting then taught were too imitative. The accepted dictum was to know your grammar first and then to interpret. I questioned the wisdom of this procedure for myself. " The French academic tradition referred to by Myers was expounded by Brush and Kenyon Cox, also an instructor of Myers at the League. Like Brush, Cox was an exacting technician who emphasized classical canons of art. In fact, before studying anatomy under Cox, "the student must have previously studied elementary antique, the antique, finally the advanced antique.'' In such an atmosphere, it was not long before Myers realized that his ideas concerning art were opposed to those proclaimed by his instructors at the League. He was more interested in character than in pose and responded to life rather than technique. According to Myers, his instructors frowned upon his realistic renderings of life in the New York tenements. "Brush did not believe in doing the crowd," Myers wrote, "but to me the impression of group life became a guiding star.'' His deep sympathy for the realities of contemporary urban life gradually led him away from the classical inhibitions and pretensions of the League. Responding to his personal impulses, Jerome set out to interpret the life of the city for himself: "If ever I was to create beauty I knew that it would not be by imitating the classical Greeks or Michael Angelo but by expressing what was in me, as they had expressed themselves.'' Myers often abandoned his studies at the League in order to sketch the city and its environs. One such sketching trip resulted in his first sale of an oil painting: "I found myself one pleasant day on the Morris and Essex (Canal, near Jersey city. Seeing a picturesque canal boat in the foreground, I took it as a subject. There was a family living on the boat, and a woman stood in the doorway, evidently willing to pose. After I had been working for some time, she came over and looked at my work. She seemed pleased with it, for she remarked that if I would put one of her children in the picture, she would buy it for two dollars. I accepted her offer-and there on the banks of that waterway I sold my first picture, unframed and without the payment of a commission, to adorn a canal houseboat." An extant river scene (Fig. 3), dated 1893 on the verso of the panel, is probably similar to the painting of the houseboat described by Myers. Indeed, they may have been painted on the very same sketching trip. In any case, these small, atmospheric pictures indicate Myers' awareness of the Impressionist manner in their use of an unmodulated light and its reflection from the surface of the composition. Here, as in his 1887 painting, Backyard, Myers has omitted the human element which, in later years, became the dominant motif in his paintings. The drawings of the nineties are, perhaps, more significant than the early paintings in revealing the artist's method of working and his aesthetic viewpoint. They indicate Myers' spontaneous method of capturing a moment observed by the artist. This method contrasts to the more labored, academic approach to drawing. Also, the drawings, more than the early oil paintings, indicate the extent to which Myers responded to the life around him. Jerome carried a nine-by-eleven inch sketch pad as he walked the streets of New York. Invariably, he would stand and sketch people without attracting their attention; many times he would hide in a doorway in order to remain inconspicuous. Guy Pene du Bois wrote that Myers had "always been a sort of day and night prowler, a phantom in the city streets, passing in and out of crowds .... " Fellow travelers on the elevated lines might elicit a quick sketch from the young artist, as would the moments of leisure enjoyed by the inhabitants of the city (Figs. 4, 5). In 1895 Myers went to work in the art department of the New York Tribune. Within a year, the frugal artist was able to save enough money to travel to Paris in order to see "the reputedly wonderful Mecca of art for students of the whole world.'' He purchased a new pair of shoes for the pilgrimage and headed for the French capital by steamer. He settled in the Latin Quarter where he shared an attic room with the American sculptor, Solon Borglum. Jerome met old friends he had known in New York and observed the effects of Parisian life on young, aspiring American artists: "Some were becoming boulevard artists, to strut on Montparnasse and meet the celebrities at the famous Cafe du Dome. Others were in their element, with a career right ahead of them. Still others were the pathetic ruins of American students who had lingered too long, artists in limbo, a tattered fringe of derelicts to whom a new American was a godsend because he meant a meal." Myers visited the renowned museums and galleries of Paris. At the Louvre, he studied the masterpieces which, to him, "were not revelations-just other examples of masters I had already known in New York.'' He enjoyed his brief Paris sojourn and respected the city's heritage and national glory. Yet, he preferred "the quiet little brook to the mighty river" and returned to America convinced that his destiny as an artist lay with the people for whom he cared most-the immigrants of the Lower East Side. Myers arrived back in New York and, once again, began sketching and painting the life of the city. In 1902 he occupied his first studio, a small top floor atelier located at 232 West 14th Street. Here Jerome met the noted art dealer William Macbeth, one of the first New York dealers to encourage and promote the work of living American artists. Macbeth bought two of the artist's city pictures and, shortly thereafter, Myers was selling other paintings through the Macbeth Gallery on Fifth Avenue. These were exhilarating moments in the life of the artist: "... almost overnight, I had become a professional artist. Whenever I now squeezed my tubes of paint, it was to mean bread and butter, rent, a new responsibility, a new dignity in the life work I had chosen, a new pleasure in the delightful game of chance that getting a reputation involved." Established as part of the New York art scene, Myers was soon exhibiting in a number of group exhibitions. In 1904, for example, his work could be seen at the Society of American Artists (where four of his pictures were hung 'on the line'), the Municipal Art Society, the Lotos Club, the Colonial Club, and at the Universal Exposition in St. Louis where his painting Night Concert was awarded the Bronze Medal. Jerome also had eight works selected for exhibition at the National Academy of Design between 1902 and 1910. Perhaps it was this initial success that gave Myers the confidence to propose marriage to Ethel Klinck, the assistant director of the Chase School of Art in New York. 1908 was a momentous year for Jerome Myers and for American art. Myers received his first one-man exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in January of that year. His twenty-five paintings and his group of drawings received favorable commentary from the critics, one reviewer describing Myers as "an artist of genuine power..." Macbeth followed the Myers show with an exhibition entitled "The Eight" which marked a signal moment in the battle against academic art. Because conditions were unfavorable for the general exhibition of works by newer artists, a group of eight American painters, led by Robert Henri, challenged the "pink and white painters'' of the National Academy of Design. In addition to Henri, the group consisted of John Sloan, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, George Luks, Ernest Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, and Maurice Prendergast. The inclusion of the last three painters indicates that the group had not been organized on the basis of style but rather on the common feeling among the artists that an alternative to academic exhibitions was needed. The work of Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Shinn, and Luks paralleled in style and technique the work of Jerome Myers. Like Myers, they looked to the contemporary scene for their thematic statements and based their muted palettes on the restricted color schemes of Velasquez, Rembrandt, Hals, Goya, and the early Manet. Henri was solely responsible for selecting the Eight and, as he was a friend of Jerome's, it is difficult to understand the exclusion of Myers from the group. There are several interpretations of Henri's action. Bennard Perlman believes that the exclusion of Myers was due to the fact that neither Henri nor Myers knew each other very well at the time the decision was made. On the other hand, Bruce St. John contends that "The fact that Myers was exhibited by Macbeth made his omission from The Eight almost a deliberate rejection On the part of Henri ...." This view is supported by William I. Homer in his definitive study of Robert Henri. Homer stated that Henri's exclusion of Myers was a conscious decision based primarily upon Henri's opinion that Jerome's work was too sentimental. John Sloan supported this theory of deliberate exclusion when he stated: "Jerome Myers would and should have been a member. But he was too much Henri's age to adopt the position of disciple which Henri demanded from his friends.'' However true these various interpretations may be, it must be remembered that Jerome had a one-man exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery early in 1908 and, perhaps, Henri simply decided to include artists in his exhibition who had not been given many opportunities to exhibit in New York. In any case, it appears that Myers, himself, never knew the specific reason for his exclusion from this key exhibition. Another landmark in the struggle against academic art was the Exhibition of Independent Artists held in New York in 1910. Once again, Sloan and Henri were the leaders of this progressive venture. This time, however, Jerome Myers joined the 'rebellion.' The exhibition was the first, open, non-juried show ever held by, and for, American artists. Henri stated the purpose of the exhibition: "The fact is that there are a great many good pictures painted in New York which are never exhibited. We aim to place these pictures before the public.'' Following the exhibition of the Eight by two years, the Exhibition of Independent Artists became known as "the second salvo for freedom in art.'' Myers exhibited seven of his drawings and one painting and received several favorable reviews. Furthermore, the exhibition allowed Myers to establish closer ties with those forces which nurtured the development of progressive art in America. In many ways, Myers took the lead in creating new opportunities for the independent artists. In 1911, he, along with Wait Kuhn and Elmer MacRae, organized an exhibition of "The Pastellists" with the hope that the pastel medium would gain greater popularity with the general public. Although it failed in this respect, it did help to pave the way for one of the most significant exhibitions ever held in Americathe Armory Show of 1913. After the closing of the pastellists' exhibition, Myers, Kuhn, MacRae, and Henry Fitch Taylor began discussing the need for a new, large-scale exhibition. The first formal meeting was held in Myers' studio on West 42nd Street. There, among paintings depicting the immigrants of New York City, the organization known as the American Painters and Sculptors was established. But as Walt Kuhn pointed out: "The group of four men who first set the wheels in motion had no idea of the magnitude to which their early longings would lead.'' The organization continued many of the policies developed by the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists. However, a new ingredient was added to the Armory Showmodern European art. (Later, many artists, including Myers, stated that the inclusion of contemporary European art destroyed the original intention of the exhibition which was to exhibit the work of American artists who were ignored by the National Academy.) It was the task of the four men who conceived the idea of an independent exhibition to generate enthusiasm among their fellow artists. Myers recommended John Sloan, George Bellows, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast, and Edward Kramer for membership. His selections underscored his concern that the exhibition serve the interests of native American artists, especially the work of the realists. Myers continued to devote his time and energy to the project, and became one of three men elected to the executive committee. The first note of discord emerged when APS president-elect J. Alden Weir resigned because he did not want to be held responsible for any friction that might develop between the newly-formed organization and the National Academy. Arthur B. Davies was chosen to succeed Weir and he immediately began to orient the show towards European art; in the process, he alienated many American artists. Ironically, it was Jerome Myers who was instrumental in convincing Davies to accept the APS presidency. Thus it was that I, an American art patriot, who painted ashcans and the little people around them, took part in inducing to become the head of our association the one artist in America who had little to do with his contemporaries, who had vast influence with the wealthiest women, who painted unicorns and maidens under moonlight. What I did not know was Davies' intense desire to show the modern art of Europe in America. But through his indefatigable energy, and the financial support he secured, he changed what was to have been an exhibition of American art into the great exhibition of foreign art that made the Armory Show so memorable. Our first idea of an all-American show had broadened far beyond the horizon. The course that Davies eventually pursued first became evident in the selection of the Committee on Domestic Exhibits. His influence was decisive in creating a committee sympathetic to European modernism. As Milton Brown has stated, Davies' action represented a conscious exclusion of the men who supported the realist mode in American art. To Myers, the problem was not merely the inclusion of European art but the fear that the work would saturate the American art market as a result of the exhibition. He wrote: "When I did see the pictures for the first time my mind was more troubled than my eyes, for Davies had unlocked the door to foreign art and thrown the key away.'' Indeed, the European work attracted most of the attention while some of the finest examples of American realist art were totally neglected. It was "one score after another for foreign art.'' To add insult to injury, the association decided to exclude all work done by Americans when the exhibit traveled to Boston. Guy Pene du Bois voiced the realists' dismay when he wrote that the Association had "turned the society into a Cubist, a Futurist, a Post-Impressionist organization as radical and as narrow in its aims as the National Academy of Design." Finding their original intentions betrayed and discovering that a strict financial account was never kept, a group of American painters consisting of Myers, Henri, Sloan, Luks, Bellows, du Bois, Jonas Lie, and Leon Dabo resigned from the Association. The resignation of Myers ended "a year of innocent effort'' in one of the monumental events in the history of American art. Although he was one of only a few men who devoted an entire year exclusively to the work of the Armory Show, his efforts and hopes were to be shattered in the end. He later referred to the exhibition as "The great American betrayal.'' Jerome Myers' active participation in the major art organizations and exhibitions during the opening years of the twentieth century contributed greatly to the development of art in America. His paintings of this period are of equal interest and significance to students of American art. As we have seen, the artist began painting and drawing the unglamorous areas of the city, especially the Lower East Side, at an early date. This early work is a statement of sympathy and respect for the unpretentious lives of a city's inhabitants. All aspects of life on the Lower East Side appealed to Myers, from the daily transactions in the marketplace to the festive religious processions observed in the Italian neighborhoods. Myers discovered that the energetic, often-times frenetic, pace of East Side life was to be found particularly in the marketplace where the immigrants purchased or peddled their wares in the crowded city streets. The well-composed Calico Sellers (Fig. 6) and East Side Study (Rivington Street) (Fig. 7), as well as the characteristic scenes, Evening Glow (Fig. 8) and Ghetto Market (Fig. 9), depict the daily routines of the East Side in which the women took their own baskets to the market and went from stall to stall procuring the necessary breads, vegetables, dairy products and meats Myers painted similar tableaux in his travels through Europe, but he always preferred the ghetto markets of New York to their Parisian counterparts. When the immigrants "merge here with New York," he wrote, "something happens that gives vibrancy I didn't get in any other place.'' Although Myers painted many scenes of the marketplace throughout his career, he, like most of the city painters of the time, recorded the more leisurely moments of urban life. The innumerable city piers were often places of refuge, especially during the hot summer evenings. East River Pier (Fig. 10) and the remarkably beautiful End of the Walk (Fig. 11) are poetic statements of repose and solitude. Here, the children watch passing boats and play while their parents discuss various issues of the day or merely escape the turmoil of the city in quiet slumber. The glowing, muted colors and the emphasis on the horizontal planes of the canvases reaffirm the themes of tranquility and silence. The palette, as well as the subject matter, indicates Myers' interest in the work of Rembrandt, the one great master upon whom Myers relied for artistic and spiritual guidance.Of Dutch extraction himself, he deeply admired Rembrandt as a man and as an artist. Myers stated, "It may be that Rembrandt's Dutch courage has sustained me, even as his art has inspired. On faith and as an atavistic liberty, I have adopted him as an exemplar.'' Rembrandt's depictions of the Jewish ghettos of Amsterdam and his sympathetic portraits of old people were powerful stimuli for Jerome Myers who also painted the ghetto life of a major city and sought to capture the spirit and character of old age in his work (Fig. 12). Furthermore, both artists produced innumerable self-portraits. (Indeed, many of Jerome's self-portraits are based directly upon Rembrandt's.) In addition to thematic similarities, both artists painted with a palette limited to a few colors and almost always in 1ow-keyed tones. A master of chiaroscuro, Rembrandt was able to create shadowy, suggestive depths of space in his tonal masterpieces. Myers often utilized a subdued palette in his early paintings; many of his figures are placed in a predominantly golden atmosphere and background forms merge with, and sometimes are lost in, the surrounding space. Certainly the evocative potential of shadow was mastered by both artists. Histories of life on the Lower East Side establish the importance of music as one of the joys of the immigrant families during the early years of the twentieth century. The East Side has been called by some a singing society where people who did not speak the same language became friends because they were able to hum the same tunes. Music became a fundamental part of their daily existence. Myers did not overlook this aspect of immigrant life; he was particularly captivated by the night concerts that attracted the denizens of the East Side. Although men, women, and children may have gone their separate ways during the day, they were drawn together by these musical events as seen in Myers' painting Band Concert Night (Fig. 13) of 1910. The park is filled to capacity and the joy of the evening concert is emphasized pictorially by the sparkling touches of color in the dresses and ribbons of the women and children. They act as a foil to the otherwise dark and somber canvas. The Tambourine (Fig. 14), painted in 1905, captures a cultural as well as a festive interlude in the lives of the children of the city. The music of the hurdy-gurdy man was invariably a cause of delight among the young. One European immigrant who had grown up on the East Side recalled that "The children flocked from all directions, danced and sang. The bright summer sky, the happy dancing children, the lively strains of the music seemed of another world. Here was America at last.'' The hurdy-gurdy man was also a source of culture for the poorer sections of New York. His organ played selections from such operas as "Rigoletto" and "II Trovatore" and, as Myers observed, one could be transported "from the East Side street to scenes at the Metropolitan Opera House .... "whenever the hurdy-gurdy man came down the street. The Tambourine exemplifies the importance of music to the children on the Lower East Side. It also illustrates Myers' deep feeling for the children of this area who became perpetual sources of inspiration for the artist. In fact, it seems that the joys of childhood somehow sheltered him from the more sordid aspects of life on the East Side. He once wrote that "the happiness of children, their number and their well being amply made up for the parent's privation.'' (Perhaps Myers' preoccupation with themes of youthful abandon is explained by the lack of such merriment during his own childhood.) Myers usually depicted children who played without any conspicuous parental restraint. The Tambourine and Children Playing (Fig. 15) show the artist's free-spirited children at play; the youngsters are absorbed in their respective pursuits and, alone, are responsible for the transformation of these East Side areas into momentary fields of joy. Jerome's paintings of children at play are pictures of fancy as well as fact. That is, the children usually possess a 'picture-book' quality. They are always clean and healthy and, whether they are running in the dirt or dreaming by a pier, are dressed in their Sunday best or, as John Sloan once said, in pinafores and pantaloons. Such cleanliness would rarely be found in the dingy tenement districts of the Lower East Side. However, youngsters were depicted in this manner in many children's books published in the nineteenth century. Kate Greenaway's illustrations, for example, exemplify many of the same qualities employed by Myers: flat, unmodeled forms, delicate, soft colors, and little, if any, illusionistic space. However, this flat, decorative quality, which often appears in the paintings of Jerome Myers, may denote the artist's awareness of the Nabis and, in particular, the early paintings of Pierre Bonnard whose work he may have seen in Paris. Bonnard's early tonal compositions, heightened by small dots of higher-keyed colors are similar to Jerome's oil paintings. Furthermore, thematic similarities are noted in their common interest in everyday city scenes. Both artists were sensitive observers of life and infused prosaic reality with a poetic charm. One month before his death in 1940, Jerome commented upon the changes that had taken place in New York over the past fifty years: Something is gone. Something is missing. I say to myself, 'It is the warmth of human contact; that's what it is. It is gone. Men and women and children hide behind the walls of their homes.' New Yorkers no longer live in the open. Although disturbed by this trend, Jerome's artistic commitment to city life remained steadfast and constant throughout his career. Although he explored various themes and techniques in his work from time to time, he never diverted significantly from the path he first pursued as an artist at the turn of the century. Jerome Myers captured the rich flow of life on the Lower East Side from the marketplace to the pier; he expressed the basic character of the people from childhood to old age. The humane and dignified spirit found in his portraits of city life was deep and true. It was both as an artist and as an activist in art organizations that he made a significant contribution to the development of twentieth-century American art.