L. Kent Wolgamott: Revealing ‘Unknown Blakelock’ is at Sheldon

Sunday, Feb 17, 2008 - 12:16:20 am CST

The exhibition title “The Unknown Blakelock” presupposes that there is a known Blakelock.

While that may be true among art historians and followers of late 19th-century American painting, few who go to the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery to see the show are likely to know much about Ralph Albert Blakelock beyond that fact that they’ve seen his paintings at the museum over the years or that they’ve heard he is one of most forged painters ever.

Born in 1847 in New York City, Blakelock was essentially self-taught, working first in a style that reflected the Hudson River school of naturalistic, atmospheric painters.

But he soon began adding a personal vision to the work, producing paintings that incorporated elements of abstraction while remaining representative enough to be included in conventional exhibitions of the National Academy — evidence that, to an extent, Blakelock was operating ahead of his time.

His best-known paintings were of moonlight scenes and Native encampments, but he covered much other territory in his work. That’s where the idea of “The Unknown Blakelock” comes in.

The exhibition was organized by Sheldon, where the collection includes 24 paintings and 66 drawings, the largest concentration of Blakelock’s work in the United States, in conjunction with the publishing of “Beyond Madness: The Art of Ralph Blakelock 1847-1919,” a book on the artist and his work from Sheldon director emeritus Norman Geske, one of today’s foremost experts on Blakelock. The show, which will be on view at Sheldon through April 5, will travel to the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts in New York City this fall.

“The Unknown Blakelock” contains some fine examples of his moonlight paintings and views of Native encampments, including the very impressive “Western Landscape” of 1871 with a stand of tipis along a river that has carved its way through a desert landscape.

But those paintings basically set the ground for the rest of the exhibition, which is aimed at demonstrating that Blakelock painted much more than just the moody, dark moon-lit scenes and Hudson Riverish encampments and incorporated a nascent modernism into his individualistic works.

Making those points with some visual verve are pieces like “Forest Fire,” in which the forest landscape Blakelock paints is aflame, bright red in the center of the composition, a more burnt hue filling the rest of the frame, and a pair of water-related pictures that hang next to it.

“Summer” is, in some ways, a typical, late 19th-century beach scene, and “Maiden in the Mist” is a fuzzy depiction of a woman near a waterfall that contains a perfectly rendered rainbow, which is a true skill. But both have a distinct view that can only be that of Blakelock’s.

Still lifes also aren’t something one expects to see from Blakelock. But there are three impressive examples of his detailed work in the show, highlighted by the self-descriptive “Bee and Thistle.”

The exhibition also includes a pair of large grotto paintings based on a visit to Jamaica. But “St. Gabriel’s Grotto, Isle of Jamaica” (1872) that depicts people in a tropical woodland near a cave, is so highly worked and semi-abstract that it loses a direct connection to pure landscape.

Almost the opposite are Blakelock’s depictions of “Shanties, Seventh Avenue at 55th St.,” a grayish painting of shacks that occupied the space that is now high-dollar Manhattan real estate. There are no people in the painting. But it touches on a realism that makes a point about poverty in the growing city.

Poverty was something with which Blakelock was intimately familiar. He was married in 1877, and he and his wife, Cora, had nine children. A poor businessman who failed to find a market for his work, Blakelock and his family lived in dire financial straits for decades.

Blakelock’s story is, ultimately, a tragedy. Shortly after the birth of his youngest child in 1899, Blakelock suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized in a sanitarium. It is now believed he suffered from schizophrenia. He continued to paint in the mental hospital until his death in 1919.

At about the time he was institutionalized, Blakelock’s paintings began to sell and, by the early 1900s, his work had become the target of forgers. So many forgeries and pictures with questionable provenance exist that Geske formed the Nebraska Blakelock Inventory that collects information on Blakelock’s work, and works at determining whether any painting, print or drawing attributed to the artist, was actually done by him.

A section of the exhibition is devoted to Geske’s work with the inventory. A film shows Geske talking about Blakelock and evaluating some works. Labels show the classification system for Blakelock’s work and a small wall contains some forgeries and pieces with uncertain provenance, providing a lesson in art history, scholarship and the art market.

That gallery also contains another set of works that fit well under the title “The Unknown Blakelock,” a large series of small drawings and sketches he did of the American West, another sign that he was, in fact, a highly individualistic artist as he traveled west in his own country when his contemporaries were, primarily, going to Europe.

There’s no need to know everything, or much of anything, about Blakelock to enjoy the exhibition. There are some fine paintings in the show, such as the very large, pre-1891 “Brook By Moonlight” and the striking “Seal Rocks,” which shows seals on rocks in a cove in front of a sunset, the latter another surprise.

But with a little background, the exhibition becomes more revealing as a portrait of an artist trying to find his way and producing works that with their individualism and willingness to defy formula pointed toward the future through very traditional subject matter.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.