The Romantic Mood

Walter Stuempfig is a stoop-shouldered Philadelphian with an unruly little mustache and a worried look. He has less to worry about than most artists, for at 35 Stuempfig is a solid critical and popular success: he has sold out three one-man shows in six years and won a reputation as the foremost young "romantic" painter in the U.S. Stuempfig's latest exhibition, which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week, did nothing to diminish that reputation, but it did raise a question : How romantic can you get?

Tenderness & Gloom. In Stuempfig's case, romantic art seemed to mean painting that sacrificed everything else to mood. His The Old Man, one of the hits of the exhibition, showed both the strength and weakness of Stuempfig's approach to art.

The hero of The Old Man occupied one corner of a composition that was too loose and bare to be properly described as a composition at all. There was nothing sunny about the level light that pointed up a shuttered window above the old man's head, and the sky beyond had in it more paint than air. Yet the somber, dilapidated house front dwarfing the children on the sidewalk, the green smudge of a treetop peering over the adjoining wall, the sick and sagging figure of the old man himself, and even the murky, unreal light and haphazard composition all helped put across the mood Stuempfig was after. Like The Lifeboat and others of his best works, The Old Man was a familiar scene glimpsed through a mist of tenderness and gloom..

Along with most of his contemporaries, Stuempfig has tried his hand at abstract art, but only once. "I was told to paint an abstraction," says he, "and I did it, in school, where all abstractions belong. But at the Pennsylvania Academy where I studied I tried to resist the tendency of the average art student to like the obvious --the obvious being Picasso and Matisse."

A widower with two sons, 8 and 12, Stuempfig somehow combines his absorption in art with "generally fulfilling the job of parent. It's either work or stomach ulcers for me because if I don't paint I get sick." For the last 15 years he has been painting an average 56-hour week, alternately learning and ignoring his craft.

Move People. "Technique, composition and all that should be unconscious," Stuempfig explains. "This whole emphasis on technique is a product of the 19th and 20th Centuries; before that people painted the way they walked. The aim is to create something that moves people, that affects them in one way or another."

But a few of the pictures in last week's show were not in the least moving, and they were the ones that proved how cold, competent and clear-eyed a painter Stuempfig is when he chooses not to be romantic. Dark, highly polished still lifes of vegetables on a table, they were so expertly done as to invite comparison with the 18th Century French master, Jean Baptiste Chardin.

Loathe Labels. Like any artist worth the name, Stuempfig loathes labels. He accepts the label "romantic" only because he believes that "all good painters are romantic painters. You have to have a certain romantic approach to life or you wouldn't be a painter in the first place. I can't define the word; to me it applies even to Thomas Eakins and Velasquez."

Stuempfig's own The Boatsmen had the sweetly melancholy atmosphere--though not the many-faceted brilliance--of Eakins' paintings of the same subject, and his dramatic Self Portrait looked curiously like a court dwarf by Velasquez. The difference was that Velasquez and Eakins had been realists first and romantics second: they never sacrificed so much to mood as Stuempfig did.

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