Whale Tale

We know almost nothing about the early life of Albert Pinkham Ryder except that he was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on March 19, 1847, when the whaling industry immortalized by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick still dominated the local economy. The same dark mystery of the sea and its largest inhabitants that enthralled Melville clearly also left an impression on Ryder’s imagination. Ryder’s Jonah (above, from 1885) clearly takes the Bible story as a launching point, but adds a roiling sea and a sense of dreadful hopelessness that is all his own. Just as Melville’s novel examines the existential dread of the discovery of man’s tiny place in a vast universe, Ryder’s painting depicts the prophet as tiny and small in the grand scheme of things, literally swallowed up by forces larger than himself. Ryder stood alone on the very shoreline of modern art in America, born too early to ride the wave of modernism that would arrive with knowledge of the Impressionists just years later.

Impressionism was already in full bloom in France by the time Ryder had become a full-fledged artist. Artist-friends of Ryder, such as J. Alden Weir, were already translating Impressionism for an American audience. Ryder, however, had already formed a style unique unto himself and could not be swayed. There’s a great sense of Romanticism and narrative drama in Ryder’s art, even at its most mysterious. Like Melville and Walt Whitman, Ryder found inspiration in European opera. The Flying Dutchman (above, from 1887) takes its subject matter from Richard Wagner’s opera of the same name. In today’s post-classical music America, it’s hard to conceive the powerful hold that opera, especially Wagner’s all-consuming works, had on the American imagination. Ryder marries his New Bedford roots with the Old Europe mythology in The Flying Dutchman to create another seascape of human frustration. Just as Wagner seemed to heap up musical motifs one upon another to generate a wall of sound full of meaning, Ryder layered paint upon paint to arrive at the effects he pictured in his mind. (Unfortunately, many of Ryder’s paintings now suffer the consequences of this piling on as the subcutaneous paint often failed to dry properly, thus leaving many of Ryder’s works horrible cracked messes that gravity itself literally pulls off of the canvas.)

One of Ryder’s closest friends and the executor of Ryder’s estate after his death was Charles Melville Dewey. Whether Dewey was related to Herman Melville, I do not know and can’t seem to find out. Contemporary accounts of Dewey don’t mention his famous possible relation because the Herman Melville we know today doesn’t become famous until the 1920s, when he’s rediscovered decades after his death. Similarly, a generation of artists right after the turn of the century “rediscovered” Ryder during their search for home-grown modernists to stand up against the invasion of European modernism at the 1913 Armory Show. Although in decline, Ryder lived long enough to enjoy this honor. In works such as Moonlight (above, from 1887), Ryder continues to haunt American art history as a strange branch in the family tree, which eventually bore fruit in influencing artists as diverse as Marsden Hartley and Jackson Pollock. In his paintings of lonely souls borne upon dark and troubled seas, Ryder threw a lifeline to contemporaries seeking their own paths and continues to buoy experimentalists even today.

Patron Saint of American Modernism

When European Modernism landed on American shores with the 1913 Armory Show, planners such as Walt Kuhn and Arthur Davies searched for an American artist to include with the likes of Cezanne and Matisse. Reaching back into the past, they pulled forward Albert Pinkham Ryder as the standard-bearer of proto-Modernism in American painting. Born March 19, 1847, Ryder had become by 1913 a sickly, eccentric, reclusive old man holed up in his filthy Greenwich Village home, nearly forgotten by the art world except for the informed insiders. The Ryder who painted works such as Roadside Meeting (above, from the 1880s) and befriended artists such as John La Farge and J. Alden Weir and authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson now appeared as a ghost of artistry long past and simultaneously a harbinger of things to come.

Ryder’s penchant for simplifying shapes and colors in works such as Moonlight Marine (above, from 1908) easily fits in with the reduction of the subject into basic shapes that marks much of modern art. Ryder’s love for imaginative literature, from the stories of Edgar Allen Poe to the tales of the Ring Cycle that Richard Wagner mined for his operas, fired his visual imagination. Moonlight Marine shows a mysterious seascape that suggests more than it presents, coyly drawing you into the darkness of the work itself. It is easy to take this mystery of Ryder’s paintings and apply them to the man himself, especially when considering his change in behavior in later years. However, Ryder did help found the Society of American Artists in 1878, the closest thing American art has had to a secessionist movement, in response to the exclusionary actions of the National Academy of Design. Like his paintings, Ryder himself was multi-layered; unlike his paintings, however, the façade of the myth of the lonely genius has yet to crack.





I like to think of Ryder as the American visual arts’ equivalent of Herman Melville in terms of “rediscovery.” Melville was never “forgotten,” but in the 1920s and 1930s, when America rose to world prominence post-World War I, the call went out for a great American novel and Moby-Dick was nominated. When American art and culture first embraced European modernism in 1913, they needed a champion of their own to meet the European modernists on the playing field. Ten of Ryder’s works appeared in the show. I personally love works such as Ryder’s The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) (above, from 1895-1910) for their weirdness and strange beauty. He’s so unlike contemporaries such as Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent that it’s hard to believe they lived and painted at the same time. Ryder reportedly slept on a rolled-up carpet in his slovenly apartment near the end, having few visitors yet welcoming those who did seek him out. His poor technique of applying paints and varnishes, as well as the dirt that literally found its way from his studio into the paintings, has taken a toll on the works, with still-moist layers of paint beneath dry surfaces cracking and shifting to the point that helpless conservators need to exhibit some works flat. The unstable chemistry of the paintings has altered their appearance, most likely making them darker, leaving us only to guess at what caught the eye of earlier admirers. Jackson Pollock ranked Ryder as one of his influences, a prophet of sorts that served as the template for the isolated American genius painting in his own way and ignoring the popular trends. Sadly, we see Ryder as if through a glass darkly today, but the glimpses we do catch make him all the more fascinating.

Man Bites Dog

“I hate people who own dogs,” the playwright and painter August Strindberg once said. “They should have the courage to bite people themselves.” Born January 22, 1849, Strindberg created groundbreaking plays such as Miss Julie that called into question all authority, both of God and man. Politically, Strindberg verged on the edge of anarchy with a foothold in the world of socialism. A powerful, charismatic personality, Strindberg attracted friends in all the arts, including the unconventional painters Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. Munch painted Strindberg in oils and later created a woodblock portrait (above, from 1896). Strindberg’s relationship with Munch was often strained, as the younger artist always seemed too needy of Strindberg’s approval. As Munch began painting his personal, expressive works that would haunt generations, Strindberg already had been painting works born of his own personal anguish.



Strindberg approached painting as a release, a drug to ease his pain. Painting made Strindberg 'indescribably happy—as if he'd just taken hashish,' he wrote. Works such as Storm in the Skerries (aka, The Flying Dutchman) (above, from 1892) exhibit all the turmoil of Strindberg’s soul. Using palette knives, Strindberg slathered on the paint to create a thick, swirling mass of color and texture that recreates the turbulent seas of Richard Wagner’s operatic vision. Strindberg also painted more calmer scenes, as was seen in a 2005 Tate Britain exhibition, but it in is these wild, symbolic snapshots of his psyche that Strindberg holds the most interest for viewers today. Such technique and wild abandon remind me of the works of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Strindberg’s equally eccentric fellow visionary across the Atlantic in America. Ryder and Strindberg most certainly never met, but would have had a fascinating conversation if they had.


Strindberg once claimed that he painted the first truly symbolic landscapes, such as his The City (above, from 1903). Such a claim depends on how you define the symbolic landscape, but Strindberg certainly worked on the cutting edge of art. If he had devoted more time to painting, he might be known primarily as an artist than as a writer. Of course, Strindberg required such a heightened state of emotion to create his works that he most likely would have burned out if he’d worked exclusively as a painter. Strindberg later experimented with photography, exposing photographic plates to the clear night sky and believing that he’d captured impressions of the stars themselves. (Most experts today suspect that earthbound dust really created the pinpoint marks.) Like Alfred Jarry, Strindberg’s mind and spirit spilled forth into every medium available, including the visual arts, offering an enticing morsel of what could have been so much more.

Mirror of Illusions

Considered by some the greatest living American artist of the first two decades of the 20th century, Arthur B. Davies fell into relative obscurity shortly after his death in 1928. Born September 26, 1862, Davies helped introduce European modern art into America through his involvement with the 1913 Armory Show, perhaps setting off the chain of events that led to his fallen reputation. In works such as Maya, Mirror of Illusions (above), from 1910, Davies created Symbolist netherworlds in his paintings, peopling them with nymph-like nudes in indistinct, yet evocative landscapes. Davies own personal life was spent in an illusory netherworld of his own making, too.

After moving to New York City in 1896, Davies began work as a magazine illustrator, developing the style that would lead to paintings such as The Hesitation of Orestes (above), from 1915-1918. Like his contemporary painter/illustrator Maxfield Parrish, Davies combined great draftsmanship with a flair for fantasy imagery that took fragments of past mythologies, such as the story of Orestes, and wove whole narratives around them. This narrative power and murky mysticism lead some to compare Davies’ work with that of Albert Pinkham Ryder, another contemporary working in the Symbolist vein. After some early successes, a benefactor paid for Davies to travel to Europe to study, where he encountered the latest trends in modern art.

Davies soaked up many of the influences he found in Europe. Dancers (above) shows the influence of Cubism as well as the bright palette of the Fauves {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauvism } . Davies soon aligned with like-minded Americans such as Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Henri and The Eight to bring modern art to America. The 1913 Armory Show that introduced Duchamp, Picasso, and other visionaries to America would not have happened without the efforts of Arthur B. Davies. After Davies’s death, the first president of the MoMA credited Davies with the idea of a modern art museum in America. While championing modern art in America, Davies led a kind of surreal personal life, first marrying a woman who had murdered her first husband and then living a double life between his wife and two children and his mistress and their child. The life and work of Arthur B. Davies, however, continue to defy the odds by remaining in obscurity.

Albert Pinkham Ryder Turns 160

One of my favorite painters, Albert Pinkham Ryder, celebrates his 160th birthday today. Born in 1847, Ryder was largely unknown to the public of his time but was influential among contemporaries and future modernists. The mixture of Romanticism plus Expressionism and Symbolism in his works always draws me in. Above is Ryder's Boat in Moonlight.

I'll never forget the first time I saw a Ryder painting in person. It was displayed laying flat down on a table because Ryder was so untrained in painting techniques that he painted on top of still wet paint, creating layers of never dried paint beneath the finished work. Over time, as the painting was displayed on a wall, the top layer of paint cracked and began to slide down on the river of pasty paint beneath. The odd, unintended effect of the painting actually moving by itself has always stuck in my mind.

I also have to grin when I think of Ryder's cameo in Caleb Carr's novel, The Alienist.