Bruce Sargeant, 1898 - 1938

The pure and brillant world of Bruce Sargeant's art seems terribly removed from our own, unhampered by the prevalent inconsistencies of today's world.  Peopled with comely thoroughbreds, his paintings project a world of vision unchanged from the models cherished by idealists writers like E.M. Foster and Rupert Brooke in that golden decade that led up to the Great War.  Neither buff nor narcissistic, his fairhaired young athletes pose, somewhat uncomfortably before the painter's gaze, not wanting the attention yet feeling their duty to submit. 

Washed in Sargeant's omnipresent bluish-gray palette, trophies and cocker spaniels stand pari passu with his sportsmen, all hovering in that never-never land of privileged youth untainted by a harsh dose of reality.  Though Bruce Sargeant's admixture would later be adopted by photographer Bruce Weber in the pages of fashion journals- covert homoeroticism employed in the service of commerce- the painter's native and glistening adulation of his subjects will never be equaled.

His untimely death on the field of sport, today seems oddly appropriate.  Had he lived, growing older and wiser to the ways of the world, his only recourse would have been despair.  As a painter of the fatal bloom of adolescent youth and glabrous beauty, he remains unequaled.

Thomas Sokolowski
Director, Andy Warhol Museum
Pittsburgh, PA
February, 1997

Brian Drying Himself, unknown	Four Footballers, date unknown	Study for Jumping the Hurdles, 1938
Study for Launching the Shell, date unknown	The Fencing Lesson, date unknown	Three Gymnasts in Handstands, date unknown
Tumblers, date unknown	Two Gymnasts in Handstands, date unknown	Two Gymnasts, One Handstanding, unknown
Two Gymnasts, One Handstanding, unknown	Two Wrestlers Undressing, date unknown Sold	Untitled (Three Rope Climbers), unknown
Untitled (Two Youths Arm Wrestling), unknown	Young Man wirth Rifle, Boots and Fishing Poles, unknown	Lt. Edward Thierry with Gray, 1926
The Baseball Players, unknown	Three Hunters and a Horse, unknown	Study for The Hunter and The Oarsman, date unknown
Maquette, Study for Rock Climbers Sold	Dressing Room III, Detail, date unknown	Pugilsts, date unknown
Shotput, date unknown	Unidentified English Swimmer, date unknown

Brechtoldt Streeruwitz, 1890 - 1973

Brecholdt Streeruwitz, perhaps less influenced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon than Bruce Sargeant or Edith Cromwell, was nonetheless its product.  Born in Vienna in 1985 into a burgerlich jeweler's family, he began regular drawing classes at the age of fifteen at the Kunstgewerbeschule.  The Streeruwitz family would have wished for him to conyinue in the family business with his brother, but his own artistic impulses made that prospect impossible.

At the outbreak of World War I, Streeruwitz enlisted in the Dragoons.  He was sent to the Slovenian-Italian front, where a shrapnel wound disfigured the left side of his face and forced him out of the war.  At the conclusion of hostilities he spent time in Berlin and finally London, where he enrolled in the evening classes at Slade in 1920.  He began a life of back-and-forth between Vienna and London.  He married the upper-class daughter of the Mayor of Baden, with whom he had two children.  The marriage was unsucessful, however, and his wife remained in the family house on the Colloredogasse.

Streeruwitz was apparently not well-liked at the Slade.  Bruce Sargeant noted in a 1936 letter to Edith Cromwell that Streeruwitiz had a knack for saying the "perfectly wrong thing", and after two years under Michallon, lack of funds obliged Streeruwitz to return to Austria.  In 1934 the Viennese Civil War forced Streeruwitz to petition his former colleague Edith Cromwell for a place in her St. Ives cottage.  Cromwell, who was a resident in the summers only, reluctantly agreed.

Streeruwitz remained there until 1937, when a small work of his was included in Hitler's Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Bolstered by this perverse credential, he gained a teaching position in the art department of a London Boys' school.  Unhappy and embittered, he clung to the position through World War II, when he created his "Blitz" paintings. In 1950, interest in the artists condemned by Hitler as degenerate brought Streeruwitz a commission to decorate the dining room of a prominent New York Jewish family in their East 78th Street townhouse.  It was the beginning of a series of moderate successes.  He lived and showed in New York until his death in 1973, painting his "outmoded" Expressionism through Pop Art and the beginnings of Minimalism.

das Krakenhaus (At the Hospital), 1923	die Languste (Lobster), 1931	Horse Skull
Phantommann, date unknown

Edith Thayer Cromwell, 1893 - 1962

Edith ("Eddy") Thayer Cromwell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1893 and died in St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1962.  The premature death of her mother left Cromwell the only child of a liberal father who encouraged her artistic pursuits, sending her to study at the Slade in London at the age of nineteen. 

It was there that she encountered Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon.  Cromwell responded to her teacher's strict discipline and the two remained friends until Michallon's death in the Cornish cottage she would inherit from him 1930. 

At the onset of World War I, Edith returned to America and moved after a time in Boston to New York, where she met Charles Demuth and Mardsen Hartley.  They took her to Alfred Steieglitz's gallery, 291 and introduced her to the American avant-garde.

After the first World War and the death of her father, Cromwell returned to the Slade in London and assisted Michallon in his evening classes, where she met young Bruce Sargeant in 1920.  Cromwell developed an immediate rapport with the sensitive young man, encouraging him to study full-time and bringing him under the wing of the rigorous Michallon.  She painted Sargeant's portrait in 1925 and remained his lifelong friend and confidante.  In 1930 she moved to New York where she lived part-time, dividing her summers between St. Ives and landscape painting trips to France and New England.

Cromwell began mixing with a glamorous circle of jet-setting women and embarked upon a series of affairs.  She later explored exotic themes ih her work.  In the mid-'50s a series of heart attacks forced Edith into semi-retirement, where she painted until her death in 1962.

Horse and Rider, 1926	Male Standing in the Woods, 1925	Still Life with Peppers, 1929
The Bison Screen, 1927	Trout Study II, 1921	Untitled (Bison), date unknown
Untitled Female Nude, Standing, date unknown	Untitled Landscape II	Untitled Male Nude, 1932

Hippolyte - Alexandre Michallon, 1849 -1930

The long and peripatetic artistic career of Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon began in a conventional fashion.  The only son of  prosperous bourgeois parents in Tours, he first studied drawing with his mother, an accomplished amateur painter of insects.  His father, an undertaker who appreciated his son's talent and supported his ambition to become a painter, sent him to Paris at age sixteen to enroll in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot (1786-1868), an eminent history painter and professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with whom he studied for three years, until Picot's death.   Under his aging teacher's guidance and tutelage, Michallon entered the preliminary stages of the Prix de Rome contest at the Ecole three times, winning an Honorable Mention in 1869 for his composition entitled The Solider of the Marathon. 

For the next twenty years Michallon regualarly exhibited paintings on historiacl and biblical themes at the Paris Salon, as well as commissioned portraits.  By his own account, the most ambitious work of Michallon's career was a thirty-foot canvas depicting Noah's Ark, which he exhibited in the Salon in 1875.  Michallon began painting atmospheric but zoologically correct images of exotic animals in the wild.  These achieved a certain popularity among French and foreign collectors alike, providing Michallon with financial security for the first time in his career.

Michallon moved to England in 1893.  His outstanding technical skills esily earned him a position on the faculty of the Slade School of Art in 1900.   The craze for animal paintings proved short-lived.  He continued to teach at Slade for the next two decades, but his classes gradually dwindled in size as the academic approach and methods he espoused went from outmoded to downright unpopular.  Finally in 1922, finding himself reduced to a single pupil, the talented young American Bruce Sargeant, he retired from Slade, persuading Sargeant to leave with him and undergo private instruction at home.  

Several years later he retired to a cottage at St. Ives, Cornwall, where he lived quietly until his death in 1930, forgotten by all but a few former students, among them Edith Thayer Cromwell, who nursed him during his final year, and Bruce Sargeant, who designed and executed the bronze memorial plaque in his honor in the tiny church of St. Ethylburga-by-the-Sea, where he is buried in the churchyard.

Wheelock Whitney
New York, NY
September 2004

The American Buffalo, 1875

Peter Coulter

Brechtholdt Streeruwitz and Edith Thayer Cromwell's friendship in New York led to a shared pedagogy.  They taught a program of "Art in the Schools" in their last years.  Their most successful pupil was Peter Coulter.  The influence of their Slade training, extending back to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts-influenced teacher Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon, is expressed in Peter Coulter's painting, King Leopold's Ghost.  Peter Coulter worked with political elements of holocausts such as the Armenian and Belgian.  His work with the American slave trade and his many installations include his recent monumental work showing black rubber hands piled in the center of a gallery floor  to express the horrors of the 1890s Congo holocaust.  

As a friend and colleague of Peter Coulter, it is interesting for me to see a didactic lineage that we both share as well as an almost hereditary connection through my great Uncle Bruce and his colleagues.  Through I have not had the successes of Peter Coulter, we have shared models, exhibitions and good times.  It was Peter who introduced me to the novel use of Polaroid transfers, and for that I am grateful.

Mark Beard
New York, NY
October 2004

King Leopold's Ghost

Piss, Shit, Blood and Death