Romantics at Milwaukee

All the way from John Singleton Copley to Edward Hopper, realism seems the keynote of American art, and romanticism remains underrated. With the single exception of Albert Pinkham Ryder, the American romanticists have never achieved the fame of their realist contemporaries. To collect and cherish such little-known artists takes courage and personal conviction.

Next week the collection of a man who has both goes on view at the Milwaukee Art Center, demonstrates some of the good things that Americans have yet to discover in their own heritage. The 125 canvases, roughly half the collection of Detroit Businessman Larry Fleischman, reflect a warmly romantic taste, and uncompromising standards too. Among them: The Uncanny Badger is a strange picture by John La Farge, a mural painter and stained-glass designer of renown who worked mostly in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. It was inspired by a trip to Japan with his famed friend, Historian-Biographer Henry Adams. In a note scribbled on the picture's back La Farge wrote: "With the Japanese, the badger is uncanny.

He misleads and deceives by many tricks, and takes wayfarers out of the way. Thus, he calls at a distance by beating a tattoo on his swollen abdomen. The noise, as I have heard it, is not unlike the muffled roar of the waterfall near by." Though painted in Japan, La Farge's deep purple glade reflects a typically American feeling for nature as something both seductive and fearful.

The Devil and Tom Walker,* by John Quidor, shows the same ambivalence, perhaps drawn from the well-pruned splendor of English romantic poetry on the one hand and the wild reality of the American wilderness on the other. An illustrator of genius, Quidor was a friend and admirer of Washington Irving, and his best paintings are based on incidents from Irving's tales. But he found few customers, painted decorative designs on fire engines for a living.

The Evening Hymn, done in 1835, was Washington Allston's personal hymn to Italy, where he had spent happy years as a student. The mature Allston wasted most of his talent on huge Biblical canvases hopelessly designed to shake the world, e.g., his unfinished Belshazzar's Feast. Trapped in the cheerful, chilly Boston of the transcendentalists, the wellsprings of his art running dry, he looked back longingly to the Mediterranean world that he had always been too much of a Puritan to grasp.

John Sloan, who is usually tagged as a leading practitioner of the Ashcan School, was on vacation from realism in Picnic on the Ridge. On a glorious night near Santa Fe, a group of artists gathers round a picnic fire. Sloan himself is in profile, holding a coffee cup. His wife kneels just behind him. He summered in Santa Fe, but Sloan worked in Greenwich Village and became a sort of guardian spirit of its artists. Once, from the top of Washington Square Arch, he went so far as to proclaim the Village an independent republic.

World War II, oddly enough, turned Collector Fleischman to art. A tech sergeant in the 301st Infantry, he fought at Lorient, later found himself detailed to Grave Registration, identifying bodies, notifying next of kin, etc. This, he explains, "brought me into touch with people speculating on the meaning of war and searching for what is true and enduring. Inevitably this led to a discussion of art. Art is the most personal, intimate experience a man can have. It's entirely between the artist and you. There is no conductor, no musician, no actor, nobody to interpret the experience for you."

At 35, Fleischman divides his working day among half a dozen enterprises, from carpet stores to hotels to Broadway productions, devotes his evenings and weekends to art. One of his proudest acquisitions is a painting by Ryder, the great est romantic of them all -- a self-portrait painted about the age of 43. Parts of his collection have been shown in 15 countries, and Fleischman himself generally goes along to lecture. In his native Detroit, he is a sparkplug of Archives of American Art, an institution set up to gather artists' letters, recorded inter views and other research material. "Outside our immediate family," Fleischman says, with a fond glance at his wife, "art is the most important thing in our lives."

* In Washington Irving's tale, Tom Walker, Yankee miser, accidentally kicks up a skull in the woods and is admonished by a guardian devil named Old Scratch. His wife loses body and soul to Old Scratch, but wily Tom sells his soul only, and for hard cash. "Lend the money," the devil suggests, "at 2% a month." "Egad," replies Tom, "I'll charge 4!"

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