{"id":765,"date":"2020-10-09T18:45:35","date_gmt":"2020-10-09T18:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/cfam\/?p=765"},"modified":"2020-10-28T20:39:16","modified_gmt":"2020-10-28T20:39:16","slug":"robert-henri-william-merritt-chase-and-artistic-rivalry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/rma\/2020\/10\/09\/robert-henri-william-merritt-chase-and-artistic-rivalry\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, and Artistic Rivalry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The art\nworld is no stranger to controversy. Recently, a number of major museums on\nboth sides of the Atlantic have decided to postpone\na major retrospective of the work of the American painter Philip Guston<\/a>,\nciting the necessity for increased sensitivity around his work, much of which\nengages with thorny issues of racism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. While I\nhope to write about Guston in this space in the future\u2014he\u2019s one of my favorite\npainters, and there are two works by him in the CFAM collection\u2014today I turn\ninstead to the early twentieth century, when a very different controversy\nrocked the New York art world. This controversy, which came to a head in\nNovember 1907, had everything to do with the rivalry between two of the\ncountry\u2019s foremost artists: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri.1<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1907 controversy was about the future direction of the New York School of Art, which had been founded as the Chase School of Art in 1896 as a more progressive alternative to the Art Students League.2 <\/sup> Changing its name to the New York School of Art in 1898 when Chase turned over administration to others in order to focus on teaching, the school invited Robert Henri to teach there in 1902.3<\/sup> Chase and Henri, two of the best-known and -regarded art teachers in the country, soon found themselves at odds over both the style and subject matter they would teach, a confrontation that resulted in Chase\u2019s resignation from the school he had founded. Though their works share many common features, the differences are also striking. Chase was, in the words of one biographer, \u201ca genteel bohemian,\u201d whose studio in the famed Tenth Street Building was full of opulent and exotic furnishings, evidence of his taste and sophistication. He was well known for strolling around Manhattan with a liveried servant and Irish Wolfhound in tow.4 <\/sup> Henri, who was fifteen years younger, had a very different personal style. Emphasizing his rough-and-tumble Western origins, Henri was an adherent of the strenuous life, a belief that the supposed ills of urban modernity could be cured through vigorous physicality, a position also held by President Theodore Roosevelt, among others.5 <\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These differences in personal style bled into the two men\u2019s approaches to teaching. Chase was known for his painting demonstrations, bravura performances in which he quickly demonstrated his impeccable brushwork and free handling of color. He was also one of the first teachers to take female students, often using them as models for these demonstration pieces.6 <\/sup> Henri, meanwhile, cultivated an intense homosocial masculinity in his studios, encouraging wrestling and other forms of roughhousing\u2014even including ritual hazing.7 <\/sup> Henri was also known as the leading figure of the Ashcan School, a loose conglomeration of painters\u2014many of whom got their starts as commercial illustrators\u2014in Philadelphia and then New York. Under Henri\u2019s influence these artists, whose number included John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Bellows, turned from the refined subject matter preferred by Chase to the raw stuff of everyday life in New York\u2019s streets and tenement buildings.8 <\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n