Russell Cowles
Russell Cowles was an American artist who painted landscapes, still lifes, and human forms in a style that combined both modernist and traditional elements. In 1947 The New York Times critic Howard Devree said "his work shows a remarkably dynamic understanding of both traditional occidental and oriental painting as well as of the abstract principles which activate and underlie the modern movement as such". Over a career that spanned some fifty years, he achieved an unusual degree of success as measured by gallery representation, commercial sales of his work, critical reception, and representation in museum collections. He traveled widely throughout his life, combining the study and practice of art with an interest in learning about distant places and cultures. These travels included a circumferential world tour of nearly two years as well as frequent trips to Europe and travel within the United States.
During the first two decades of his career, he experimented with a range of styles from neo-classical and academic to abstract and non-objective. As he moved from one to the next, he absorbed its value to him and eventually established a mature style that was seen as completely his own. In 1946, a critic of the New York Sun wrote of Cowles's mature style that, "by artful simplification and placement of form, he unfailingly achieves designs of perfect balance. Essentially a realist. he is discreet in his modifications; forms are divested of superficialities, but never subjected to extreme distortion". In 1952, a critic for the Los Angeles Times called him "a sensitive, well balanced, highly cultivated artist who loves his medium and demands of himself a craftsmanship to match his knowledge and sensibility".
Early life and education
Russell Cowles was born on October 7, 1887, in Algona, Iowa, and was raised in Des Moines, Iowa. Before her marriage, his mother had attended classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, during his childhood, she encouraged his interest in art. After graduating from West High School in Des Moines, he enrolled and spent two years at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. He subsequently transferred to Dartmouth, graduating in 1909.By this time his rags-to-riches father had succeeded in banking and turned a failing newspaper, the Des Moines Register, into a widely-read and financially successful business. As an adult, Cowles participated in the family's prosperity thus ensuring that he could live well and travel widely while pursuing a career in art.
While studying at Dartmouth Cowles attended two sessions of the summer school of the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York. He later referred to his college education as poor preparation for an artist. He said its emphasis on an accurate depiction of the world with archaeological exactness was a "misfortune", implying that he achieved his own approach to art, which he said was neither academic nor conventional, only after he had overcome the influence of this "whole system of education".
After graduating from Dartmouth Cowles traveled in Europe for three months, took a job in the advertising department of one of his father's newspapers, and studied at the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines. He subsequently moved to Manhattan where, in 1911, he took classes first at the National Academy of Design and then at the Art Students League At this time, he also studied independently under Douglas Volk, Kenyon Cox, and Barry Faulkner, all well-known muralists with traditional artistic values. In 1915 he was awarded a fellowship in painting at the American Academy in Rome. His competition submission was a classically-inspired allegorical painting for a theater drop curtain entitled "The Drama as Teacher". The fellowship included residence, use of a studio at the academy, and funds for travel. In 1918, he exhibited another allegorical painting, the "Rape of Europa" at an Academy exhibition. His studies at the Academy being interrupted by World War I, Cowles spread his studies over four years rather than the usual three. "The Drama as Teacher" was reproduced as the frontispiece of a book called Masterpieces of Modern Drama. An image taken from the book is shown at right.
Career in art
During the early 1920s, Cowles lived and worked in Manhattan. In 1923, continuing his preference for large-scale, neo-classical, allegorical works, he made a mural in two panels for the lobby of one of his father's newspapers, the Des Moines Register. One of them symbolized the press and its functions and the other symbolized the contributions that newspapers make to social justice, freedom of speech, and open debate of issues. In 1925, while traveling abroad, he was awarded a $500 prize by the Art Institute of Chicago for another neo-classical painting, "The Consolation of Ariadne". Cowles's three allegorical paintings received an unusual amount of attention in the press. The New York Times printed a photographic reproduction of "The Drama as Teacher" in its issue for August 1, 1915, the Des Moines Register devoted a full page to the two press panels in its issue for June 3, 1923, and American Magazine of Art reproduced "Consolation of Ariadne" in its December 1925 issue.In 1927 and 1928 Cowles traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa as well as South, South-Eastern, and East Asia. By the time he returned to the United States in December 1928, he had made careful study of foreign art styles and cultures and produced a large portfolio of paintings and drawings. This world tour resulted in a transition in his work away from large-scale neo-classical subjects and treatment. Indicating the complexity of the sources on which Cowles drew, one critic saw in this new approach the influence of Rubens and Renoir, while another saw in it the influence of Cézanne and Gauguin. A third critic saw the influence of Cowles's study in Asia and said he seemed receptive to the modern art of Europe, but was hardly "a convert". In 1935, Cowles himself expressed a belief that "the artist must shut from his vision all mere outward currents and eddies, and fads and fashions." In 1933, he showed a painting, "Seated Nude", in a group show in New York sponsored by Salons of America. This painting is shown at left.
In the mid-1930s Cowles began experimenting with abstraction while continuing to produce realistic work. One critic saw his abstractions as a phase that "was entered into consciously with a view to the idea of getting a firmer grip on the fundamentals of pictorial composition". Critics now began to see in his work, as one said, an "authentic personal note" or, as another said, he was, in his work, "essentially Russell Cowles, versatile American painter". In 1935, the Feragil Galleries in New York gave Cowles his first solo exhibition and he participated in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At that time he also began splitting his year between New York and New Mexico In 1936 he was given a solo exhibition that appeared first at the Denver Art Museum and later in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the Wichita Art Museum. In 1937 he showed New Mexico paintings in a solo exhibition at the Chappell House gallery in the Denver Art Museum. The museum's director said this recent work showed "a richer and more fluent expression of his ideas". The next year Cowles began a long and fruitful relationship with the Kraushaar Galleries in a group exhibition and he participated in another group show at the Whitney.
Between 1935 and 1955, Cowles received encouragement from The New York Times critic, Howard Devree. Devree said Cowles used "consistent development" and "courageous experiment" to, eventually, achieve "front rank" among American artists.
In about 1938, Cowles made what would become one of his best known paintings, "The Farmer and the Raincloud". The painting was exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair and achieved widespread distribution when sold as a lithographic print in a portfolio called "American Art Today". In a caption to a photo of the painting in the Des Moines Tribune, Cowles said that it might appear to have been painted in Iowa, but was actually suggested by an event he witnessed in Nova Scotia.
Beginning in 1939, Kraushaar's gave him eleven solo exhibitions, nine during his life and two after death.
In the 1940s, he began splitting his time between an apartment in Manhattan and a farm in New Milford, Connecticut. During this period, critics saw an evolution from content that lacked emotional content and a tendency to be "coldly intellectual" toward greater "warmth of color and emotional depth", as one said. He continued to show frequently with solo shows at Iowa State University, the Corcoran Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Kraushaar's. He also participated in group shows frequently at Kraushaar's and also in museum settings such as the Riverside Museum, the Whitney, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In the Spring of 1946, a critic for the New York Sun said Cowles was able to achieve "stunning results" through "skillful line usage and suggestive color accompaniment" and a critic for The New York Times considered Cowles to have by then secured a position "in the front rank of American artists", saying that "The technical integrity that is characteristic of all Cowles' work helps to give it an immediate appeal for it is combined with a disciplined emotive use of color." "His rhythms", he wrote, "are of life as well as of color and form and they evoke a response from both the mind and the heart". Later that year Life magazine included a painting by Cowles in a review article called "Ten Years of American Art; Life Reviews the Record of a Lively, Important Decade".
During the 1950s and 1960s, despite the art world's enthusiasm for abstract expressionism and the New York School, Cowles continued to show in commercial galleries and to draw favorable critical reviews. In addition to solo exhibitions at Kraushaar's, he was given solo shows at the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries in 1952 and the gallery at Dartmouth College in 1963. In 1950, Howard Devree said he saw Cowles "at his best" in a Kraushaar exhibition. Two years later another critic called him a "master colorist and a faultless designer". In March 1954, the Evening Star of Washington D.C. reproduced one of his paintings in a review of an exhibition at the Art Center in Des Moines and, regarding a Kraushaar show a month before, he was said to possess "an almost mystical feeling for the essential character of his themes". In reviewing Kraushaar exhibitions of 1959 and 1965, Stuart Preston of The New York Times critic was less enthusiastic about Cowles's work than his fellow critic Howard Devree. Preston did not dismiss Cowles for being a representational artist, however, but being "methodical" and showing a "puritanical mistrust of natural beauty".
A 1973 solo exhibition at Kraushaar's was the last during his lifetime. Between the 1940s and 1970s, Cowles divided his work year between his home in New Milford and an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He died at the Manhattan apartment on February 22, 1979.