Word: henried
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After Welsh Rarebit. Born in Cincinnati in 1865, the son of a wild West faro player, Robert Henri (belligerently pronounced Hen-rye) got his early training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, followed it with eleven years, on and off, of traveling in France, Italy and Spain. Back in Philadelphia in the '90s, Henri was ready for his first circle of converts, a group of Philadelphia newspaper illustrators who made Henri's studio their rendezvous. There, between amateur theatricals, impromptu concerts and Welsh-rarebit feasts, Henri preached a two-fisted approach to painting, drove home...
...Henri's pupils moved to New York, Henri followed them. Setting up his own school in upper Broadway's Lincoln Arcade, Henri attracted young art students in droves. Henri's school was unquestionably the liveliest art center in New York. Scoffing at "art for art's sake," Henri urged his students to plunge into life, read Whitman and Dostoevsky, go to see Isadora Duncan dance. Students like Guy Pène du Bois and Edward Hopper became Henri enthusiasts. So did Rockwell Kent. Assigned to paint Central Park, Kent is said to have spent the night...
...with the Ash Can. With its defiant 1908 show, staged in protest against the academic National Academy of Design, Henri's "Ash Can School"* blew the lid off New York's art world. Critics were horrified, but Manhattanites turned up at the rate of 300 an hour to see paintings of such "unartistic" subjects as dance halls and crowded city streets...
Down with the Mickey Finn. Ironically, the Armory show also marked the end of Henri's overwhelming influence (although he lived until 1929). As a portraitist, Henri strove to catch "the living instant," and he often said his goal was "to paint the greatest portrait in the world in 30 minutes." His robust bravura can still hold the spectator's eye. But today Henri's surface effects seem thin and superficial, less revolutionary than mannered Manet...
...What Henri did was to galvanize a host of painters into facing their native material in their own way, thus giving to realism a fresh meaning and vitality. "Without Henri's and Sloan's prompt and relentless efforts," said one of Henri's former students, "art in America would have imbibed its 'Mickey Finn' of complacency, slept on, hobbled on, sinking lower and lower . . . sugary and perfumed with the heavy odor of preservatives...