: While his Bucks County contemporaries painted scenes from nature,
Robert Spencer focused his attention on the area's working men
and women in and around mills, construction sites and tenements.
The current exhibition, "The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds. The
Paintings of Robert Spencer," up through September 19 at the
Michener's main galleries, documents his deft, painterly touch
and off-beat subject matter. The exhibition should bring Spencer
the greater recognition he deserves.
Because his work is so seldom featured in exhibitions these days,
the Robert Spencer show at the James A. Michener Art Museum is
particularly welcome. Organized by the museum's senior curator
Brian H. Peterson, author of a much admired book, Pennsylvania
Impressionism, the exhibition's more than 45 paintings
illuminate Spencer's singular vision of everyday life around
Bucks County.
The son of an itinerant Swedenborgian minister, Spencer
(1879-1931) was born in Nebraska, but moved around with his
family while growing up. In New York City around the turn of the
century he studied at the National Academy of Design and under
William Merritt Chase and Henri at the New York School of Art.
Spencer moved to Bucks County in 1906, where he began to turn out
dark, murky paintings. He learned the value of deft brushwork in
careful compositions from Daniel Garber, a gifted teacher who
became an important member of the New Hope Impressionists.
Drawing on his exposure to Henri and the rebellious realism of
the Ashcan school, Spencer sought out the unglamorous side of
life around his new home - dilapidated mills, worn tenements,
cluttered backyards and bedraggled blue collar workers. A
patrician who empathized with the working class, he concentrated
on rundown structures - and the folks who lived and worked in
them.
"A landscape without a building or a figure is a very lonely
picture to me," Spencer declared.
Elements of social realism and genre painting infuse Spencer's
canvases generally executed with an Impressionist touch. His
palette tended to be more somber than other Impressionists,
reflecting the gritty reality of his principal subject matter.
The artist created highly accomplished, imaginative work, finding
his artistic voice around 1910 with straightforward, spontaneous
paintings, such as "The Marble Shop," circa 1910, and "The White
Tenement," 1913, depicting aging buildings and messy yards. Also
of note "Three Houses," 1911, featuring a trio of well-worn
tenement buildings. "Grey Mills," "Five o'Clock June," and "The
Closing Hour," all 1913, each 30 by 36 inches, showing workers
going to and from drab factory buildings.
These early efforts were well received by critics and museums
began to take notice. In 1914 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
acquired "Repairing the Bridge," 1913, a quintessential Spencer
canvas in which a gang of workers labor to shore up an old stone
bridge leading to faceless buildings.
As Duncan Phillips, Spen-cer's friend and avid collector observed
in 1926, Spencer "has become the philosopher and the laureate of
the little American industrial village, painting again and again
its old houses, its mysterious factories, its 'types' coming out
of the mill at the noon whistle."
The catalog contains extensive excerpts from the interesting
correspondence between the brooding artist and Phillips, the
optimistic, wealthy patron, who founded what is now The Phillips
Collection in Washington, D.C.
Phillips, who regarded Spencer as "a rebel always against the
standardized and the stereotyped in art," felt the American
followed in the grand tradition of Daumier, Delacroix and Goya.
Spencer had the "ability to express in pictures a significant
relation of figures to landscape," said Phillips.
Phillips purchased everything from nudes posed against a hazy
Delaware River, "On the Bank," 1929, to crowd scenes "Mountebanks
and Thieves," 1923, to workers in cluttered surroundings, "Ship
Chandler's Row," 1926.
Phillips especially admired "The Evangelist," 1919, which he
labeled "a masterpiece of American genre." Based on his own
experiences as the son of a nomadic clergyman, Spencer used
appropriately muted, somber colors to depict a preacher speaking
from a makeshift platform at an outdoor meeting beside a river.
Spencer's precise draftsmanship and idiosyncratic use of flecks
of color are reflected in "The Red Boat," circa 1918, from the
collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Here, a sturdy canal
boat is pulled past a grist mill and a silk mill, symbols of a
way of life that was fast disappearing in Bucks County.
While his paintings of workers and their places of work and
residence were executed in sober tones - giving them a tonalist
feel - Spencer energetically utilized agitate brushwork and a
brighter palette in happier landscape canvases. Examples of this
more Impressionist style include "May Breezes," 1914, in the
White House Collection, "Crossroads," 1918, "Flowing Water,"
1924, and "Riviera Beach," 1928.
Hats off to Peterson and the Michener for assembling this
rewarding show. The 160-page Spencer catalog has a text by
Peterson that covers all aspects of Spencer's productive but
tragically abbreviated career. A collaboration between the
Michener and University of Pennsylvania Press, it is priced at
$39.95 (hardcover).
The Spencer exhibition is on view at the Michener Art Museum, 138
South Pine Street.
