The Unknown Night: The Genius and Madness of R. A. Blakelock, an American Painter
384
The Unknown Night: The Genius and Madness of R. A. Blakelock, an American Painter
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Overview
At the dawn of the 20th century, Ralph Blakelock’s brooding, hallucinogenic paintings were a striking departure from the prevailing American tradition—and as sought after as the works of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. In 1916, the record-breaking sale of Blakelock’s Brook by Moonlight made him famous. Yet at the time of his triumph, the troubled painter had spent fifteen years in a psychiatric hospital while his family lived in poverty. Released from the asylum, Blakelock fell into the dubious care of an eccentric adventuress, Beatrice Van Rensselaer Adams, who kept him a virtual prisoner while siphoning off the profits of his success, until his mysterious death.
In this acclaimed biography, Glyn Vincent offers the first complete chronicle of Blakelock’s life. Vividly portraying New York in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the narrative begins with his childhood in Greenwich Village and the years he spent peddling his canvases door-to-door and playing piano in vaudeville theaters. Vincent also delves into Blakelock’s journeys among the Sioux and Uinta Native Americans; his mental illness; and the way his exploration of mysticism informed his radical shift away from the Hudson River School of art.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555847708 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
News
One damp April morning in 1916, Harrison Smith, a young reporter for the New York Tribune, left the Tribune Building on Nassau Street in a hurry. Dodging the crowds on the narrow sidewalks of lower Manhattan he headed for the subway kiosk on Park Row. He was on his way uptown to catch the Hudson Tubes to the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. In Jersey City he would board another train for Middletown, New York. It wasn't an obvious destination to chase down a story. In fact, senior reporters, who routinely got their names on the front page, hardly left the office at all. They were too busy writing up the dispatches that arrived from all over the world via telegraph, telephone, and that new noisy mechanical angel the aeroplane, which appeared like a gnat against the blustery American sky. There was plenty of news. German zeppelins were raining bombs on the English coast. The French were defending Verdun. Pancho Villa was hiding out from the American Tenth Cavalry in the rocky gulches of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Smith, on the other hand, faced a two-hour trip on a hard bench seat in a drafty carriage with a view of bare trees and muddy farm fields. He was on his way to interview an American artist, Ralph Albert Blakelock, who for the past fifteen years had been incarcerated, and largely forgotten, in an asylum in Middletown.
Smith later claimed that he personally rediscovered Blakelock. In fact, he was heading to Middletown at the suggestion of Beatrice Van Rensselaer Adams, a young woman he had found waiting outside the city editor's office early that very morning. Adams was a well-coifed vamp — attractive, with dark hair and "glittering" black eyes — who passed herself off as a philanthropist. She had already tipped off the Tribune's competitors to the Blakelock story. In fact, by the time Smith got on the train that day both the New York Times and New York's largest paper, Joseph Pulitzer's World, had already run a series of prominent articles on Blakelock. Far from being the first on the scene, Smith was actually playing catch-up. Two weeks before, a lifetime in the fiercely competitive world of New York's battling dailies, the World, at Beatrice Adams's bidding, had sent an editor up to the asylum to do a front-page story on the artist who was being bandied about in the papers as "America's greatest painter."
Blakelock, once a prominent New York artist, had been committed first to the Long Island State Hospital in Flatbush in 1899. He was transferred to the more isolated hinterlands of Middletown in 1901. Blakelock, the man, was soon forgotten. Yet almost as soon as the doors closed behind him Blakelock's reputation redoubled, as did the market for his work. Considered on a par with such American masters as Whistler, Sargent, Inness, Homer, and Ryder, the paintings Blakelock had sold in hard times for $25 or $30 were being sold by dealers and collectors for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars (paying more than a thousand dollars for a painting was considered wildly extravagant at the time). There was such a demand for Blakelocks that the New York Evening Post noted in 1903 that "every exhibition or sale has one or more of his [Blakelock's] work, and no collection, however small, is thought to be complete without a canvas or two by him." In particular demand were Blakelock's luminous moonlights, which, well known among the cognoscenti, had achieved a legendary status among collectors and artists. By 1913, a Blakelock moonlight, now in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., sold for a record auction price of $13,900. The sale caused quite a stir. That same year, Blakelock was finally elected an associate academician at the National Academy of Design. Soon after, Elliott Daingerfield, a fellow artist, published a biography of Blakelock, and an important exhibition of Blakelock, Inness, and Wyant was held in Chicago, further solidifying their reputation as America's top three landscape painters. Despite his fame in the art world, Blakelock remained sequestered in Middletown, unheralded and penniless. He passed his time painting small impressionistic landscapes on cigar box lids that no one, except for certain members of the staff, took any notice of.
It wasn't until 1916, fifteen years after his incarceration in Middletown, that Blakelock's anonymity was shattered. The extraordinary sale on February 22, 1916, of Brook by Moonlight — a brooding canvas in the Romantic style, completed about 1890 — set a second record price. The moonlight was auctioned along with the rest of the famous art collection of the bankrupt silk mill tycoon Catholina Lambert. The stubby, self-made Yorkshireman had built a three-story art gallery in his castle — dubbed Balmoral by William Carlos Williams — on the cliffs overlooking Paterson, New Jersey, to show off his collection. Estimated to be worth more than $1 million, it included artists from Botticelli to Monet. But it was Blakelock's four-by-six-foot moonlight that was the most talked about during the presale exhibition. One newspaper review of the exhibit observed:
Although higher prices may be obtained for the Titian, the Andrea del Sarto, the Rembrandt, the Botticelli and other of the old masters, undoubtedly the most interesting picture in the collection is the marvellous Moonlight by the American, R. A. Blakelock.
As it turned out, the top price on February 22 went to Blakelock. It has been suggested that the record-high prices paid for Blakelock paintings at this time were brought on by the public "hysteria" about the artist. The truth is that at the time of the sale, Blakelock, in Middletown, was still being ignored by the press, and the sensationalist stories about him didn't begin to circulate until after his record-setting sales. Indeed, one of the strangely overlooked facts about Blakelock's career is that the popularity of his moonlights began not in 1916 but decades before, when he had received enthusiastic praise for his first exhibited monumental moonlight, A Waterfall, Moonlight, in 1886.
Blakelock's moonlights often left critics breathless and somewhat inarticulate. The paintings, they said, had a mystical or spiritual presence, a color-saturated luminosity that was difficult to describe with words. They were repeatedly called "poetic" or "lyrical." Certainly, there was a dramatic, romantic sentiment attached to some of Blakelock's more popular moonlight compositions that today appears dated, but even these paintings have a tenebrous, chiaroscuro veil that evokes something other, something beyond. In Brook by Moonlight, the viewer is sequestered in a secret dark place on the bank of a forest stream. Overhead a large tree leans precipitously from the opposite steep bank, its massive canopy of lacy foliage splintering the lambent glow of the moon. It's a dreamy landscape, naturalistically depicted but entirely imaginary in setting. Blakelock was not so much duplicating a place as he was an experience, a state of consciousness. It was as if the viewer himself were lying on the bank of a stream under the summer moonlight, with the trees rustling above and the vast lonely universe all around.
The dark, melancholy aspect of Blakelock's painting evidently appealed to the tycoon Lambert, who had a tragic personal history of his own. Not that that made him any more generous when he acquired the painting in 1891. He bought the painting either early that year when Blakelock, in a fragile state of mind, was playing the piano on the vaudeville circuit in Paterson or — there are several different stories — later that summer when Blakelock was resting on Lambert's estate in Pennsylvania after his first breakdown. Blakelock had, in any event, asked for at least one thousand dollars for the canvas and only reluctantly accepted Lambert's final offer of six hundred dollars.
In the auction in the Plaza Hotel ballroom on February 22, the first bid after the olive-green curtains were swept aside to reveal the moonlight was $14,000. In four minutes, amid considerable applause, it was sold to the Toledo Museum for $20,000 — a record in 1916 for the sale at auction of work by a living American painter. The suave auctioneer, Thomas E. Kirby, obviously pleased, called Brook by Moonlight the "finest work ever done by an American artist."
Such high-flown praise was, some thought, exaggerated. Even so, most critics agreed that there was no other nineteenth-century American painter quite as original as Blakelock. He had done more than any other artist, with the possible exception of Albert Pinkham Ryder — whom he frequently was compared to — to wrest American landscape painting from its pastoral foundations. In Blakelock's hands, an art that was once considered the reflection of an "objective" place became an expression of subconscious feelings. "Blakelock was by nature a dreamer," wrote the critic Raymond Wyer in 1916. "To call him a landscape painter is incorrect. No artist has used the landscape as means to an end more than he."
Indeed, Blakelock's radical paintings of the 1880s and 1890s took self-expression into an imaginary realm that had as much in common with the abstract expressionist ideas of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko in the mid-twentieth century as it did with the painters of his own time. "It goes, in certain directions, beyond anything produced by any other American," The Nation commented in 1916 on the precocious nature of Blakelock's work. Contrasting his paintings to the "more objective" work of Homer, Wyant, and Inness, The Nation opined that Blakelock "has occupied a field which has scarcely been touched by any of these … Blakelock goes furthest in his freedom from conscious premeditation and his complete triumph over the limitations of his medium."
There was considerable pride in the many articles that followed up the Brook by Moonlight sale that an American work brought such a high price (a Pierre-Auguste Renoir sold for only $16,000). It was noted, too, that the total for the eleven Blakelocks in the sale, more than $46,000, was well above those achieved by the Botticellis, the Rembrandts, the Renoirs, the Monets, the Pissarros, and the rest. In a country whose art market had been dominated for more than a century by European paintings, this was considered quite a coup.
No sooner had Brook by Moonlight arrived at the Toledo Museum than it was packed up and shipped back to New York to be shown at an exhibit of Blakelock's paintings being held at the Reinhardt Galleries on Fifth Avenue. The exhibit opened to great fanfare on April 3, 1916. It had been organized as part of a concerted effort to gain the release of Blakelock from the asylum and provide a fund to support the impoverished artist and his family. Photographs of Blakelock, his paintings, and Mrs. Adams, the pretty, photogenic philanthropist who had "rescued" the painter from anonymity, had been featured in many of the city's papers. The Blakelock story seemed to have been more than adequately covered. Still, Harrison Smith, who claimed to have "a scent for a front-page story," was convinced that the artist's impending visit to the city would grab even grander headlines. About this Smith was right. The public's curiosity for Blakelock was to prove insatiable. The discovery of a destitute mad genius whose mysterious paintings had millionaires bidding fortunes was the kind of Horatio Alger myth Americans loved. Blakelock was fast becoming an American success story, a tragedy averted, a calamitous life with a happy ending. At least it seemed so.
As the train slowly puffed its way through the Ramapo hills, Smith had more than two hours to mull over what he had learned about Blakelock. The commonly known, or rather believed known, facts were few. Blakelock was born in New York in 1847, the son of a physician. His father wanted him to study medicine, but Blakelock's passion was for music and art. "So repugnant was the thought of the career of a physician," one early biographical article stated about Blakelock, "that he resolved, whatever might be the cost, to become his own master, and unaided, to seek fame with brush and palette." Blakelock was ambitious, no doubt about that. He was a small wisp of a man who moved quickly, taking the stairs two at a time even in his sixties. His long fine hands were like a leprechaun's, Smith later wrote, and they dashed through the air as he spoke. He was ethereal in a down-to-earth sort of way. He mostly wrote home asking for art materials, but he was also quite concerned about getting new tailored clothes, his cigars and cigarettes. He was not a heavy drinker, but he mentioned bouts of drinking wine — real or imagined — to the staff. At the hospital, Blakelock never missed an "entertainment." He was not at all averse to playing a popular tune on the piano. His tastes were democratic; he was as happy with vaudeville as with opera, a reader of Longfellow, one suspects, more often than of Virgil.
Blakelock was said to be a pleasant companion, but he was hardly a cosmopolitan or social person, and he was far too esoteric and sensitive to be a truly gregarious man. He was moody, and at the hospital he often kept to himself, spending many hours with his nose buried in a newspaper or a book. Sometimes he went to the piano to play — insofar as he could — more serious music like Beethoven and Wagner. He was a devotee of the arcane spiritual writings of Emanuel Sweden-borg, a mystic whose unorthodox interpretation of Christianity was popular among nineteenth-century intellectuals and spiritualists. Blakelock's favorite activity was to be outside alone, close to nature, deep in the woods by some babbling brook. Indeed, most of his early career was spent tramping through the forests of New England and exploring the deep wildernesses out west. Several newspapers had gotten hold of a picture of him as a young adventurer, his hair swept back, his handsome, aristocratic face held high, his eyes beaming with idealism.
If time had allowed, Smith might also have found in the Tribune archives references to Elliott Daingerfield's brief 1914 biography of Blakelock. In it Daingerfield stressed that Blakelock was a self-taught artist who, he stated, had learned about color on his journeys west among the American Indians. "When the barbaric depth of their color, the richness and plenitude of reds and yellows, the strength and brilliancy of light awakened his vision," Daingerfield wrote, "his own soul, an untamed one, responded to no conventional law; these children of the forests and plain appealed to his deepest instincts."
Many writers mentioned Blakelock's childlike, impractical personality. Those who knew him attested to his "unswerving convictions" and his devotion to art. There were those who considered his idealism "lofty." He was known to become quite testy when criticized. Invariably, people meeting Blakelock came away uttering clichés about his vitality, his genius, his soulful blue eyes. Critics often likened him to Romantics such as Walt Whitman or Edgar Allan Poe. One critic, Harriet Moore, compared him to Chopin. "He was a combination of painter and musician," she ventured. "Blakelock was a mystic and a colorist … a soul so sensitive, so fiery, highly wrought, that he could scarcely be at home on earth."
The most recent newspaper articles Smith found played up Blakelock's years of hardship and neglect, the times when he walked the streets, his long hair beaded, a dagger in his waistband, carrying his canvases under his arm in search of a buyer. If Smith had dug deeper he would have found stories alluding to Blakelock's previous erratic and violent behavior — that he had burned and torn up hundred-dollar bills in the streets, attacked people, and threatened his family. The painter was, the articles said, still deluded. He was prone to "exalted" states. He imagined that he was royalty and that his paintings were worth millions. He conflated money and art, painting million-dollar bills on rectangular sheets of cloth, landscapes on one side, denominations on the other. He sometimes rambled incoherently about strange subjects — dissertations "on astral bodies and communications with Mars." But these were merely aberrant eccentricities, the stories intoned, attributable to his years of poverty and suffering. Given the right support and environment, it was believed, Blakelock might soon get back to creating masterpieces. The World wrote:
Blakelock is no longer violently insane; his illusions are now no more pronounced than they were during the years when he painted his greatest pictures, when the line between insanity and genius was barely distinguishable ... His interest in art and his ambition to paint have recently shown signs of revival.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Unknown Night"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Glyn Vincent.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Looking for Blakelock,
Part I: Exhibition,
1 News,
2 The Asylum,
3 Beatrice Adams,
4 Release,
Part II: Blood and Art,
5 From Yorkshire to New York,
6 Village Life,
7 The Blood,
8 The Art,
Part III: On the Snake River,
9 Up The Missouri River,
10 Indian Paintings,
11 The Pacific and Home,
12 To Wyoming,
Part IV: On the Line,
13 A Crisis,
14 Marriage,
15 Recognition and Controversy,
16 East Orange,
17 A Waterfall, Moonlight — A Taste of Success,
Part V: Moonlight,
18 Death and Vaudeville,
19 The First Collapse,
20 Recovery and Relapse,
21 Money and Modern Art,
22 Middletown and Catskill,
Part VI: Fame and Misfortune,
23 The Reinhardt Gallery Exhibit,
24 The Real Mrs. Adams,
25 A Battle of Hide-and-Seek,
26 Two Years of Freedom,
27 The Last Year,
Epilogue,
Source Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,