Andrew Dasburg, Charles Rosen and George Bellows. (Historical Society of Woodstock Archives)
From the start Andrew Dasburg was the ring-leader of “The Rock City Radicals,” that group, including Konrad Cramer and Henry Lee McFee, which in the early teens of the last century utilized Cubist and other European influences to twist traditional landscape and still-life painting in Woodstock inside out. Dasburg’s artistic odyssey found its feet here, as evidenced by his painting [dated around 1910] included in The Woodstock Artist’s Association and Museum’s current show “Embracing The New.”
Married many times, Dasburg demonstrated a devotion to Woodstock which — like a marriage — was passionate, dramatic, and fraught; his life here becoming a near constant struggle to reconcile domestic and financial difficulty with an over-riding need to create. Eventually, for a time, he happily balanced the vastly contrasting environs of Taos, New Mexico with Woodstock, until a final break with his “Catskill wife” presaged his permanent relocation to New Mexico. There, after decades of poverty, artistic vacillation, disastrous health, periods of desolation (including one in which he stopped painting entirely) and indeed a highly adventurous romantic life, the hard-won mantle of genius finally settled over this stooped master — albeit qualified to the region of his greatest and most dedicated accomplishment: Taos, where still at work at around his simple adobe home, Dasburg died at the age of 92 in 1979.
Some 65 years earlier he was on the front lines of the American Avant-garde in Woodstock — this being the only time such as description applied to our “backwater,” until Guston made his lonely vigil here 50 years later. This, then, is part of a longer story…
Andrew Dasburg — who would never know the name let alone the nationality of his father — was born in Paris in 1887; shortly thereafter he returned with his mother to her childhood home near their namesake, Dasburg, Germany. At the age of four his hip was profoundly injured. Two years later, after emigrating with his mother to immigrant-stuffed New York City, that hip re-injured left him handicapped for life. At a school for crippled children Andrew’s art teacher noticed his talent for drawing and enrolled him part-time in the Art Students League. In 1904, at 17, Andrew’s mother scraped together payment for night classes with firebrand Robert Henri at The Chase School of Art, and here Dasburg met future Woodstocker and wunderkindt of “The Ashcan School,” George Bellows.
Probably the recipient of a scholarship, Andrew attended The Art Students League’s new Woodstock summer school in 1907, where he met his future wife, Grace Mott Johnson (called “Johnson” by one and all, including the couples’ only child.) Instructor Birge Harrison, newly retired from stodgy Byrdcliffe, created gauzily lit canvasses of the tonalist school — a far cry from the gutsy reportage of Robert Henri. Harrison’s star pupil/assistant, John Carlson, another child emigre, was fast becoming a master of traditional plein-aire painting — “solidly grounded work” against which Dasburg’s modernist efforts would outrageously contrast. Though Andrew secretly differed with instructor Harrison, writing in 1908, “I will never be satisfied with just painting atmospheric conditions and changes of light,” he knew how to conform when necessary, winning first place (perhaps besting Carlson) in a juried show of Harrison’s students’ work from the previous year at The League’s base in New York.
In 1909, with money which could only have come from his lady “Johnson,” the young art students embarked for Europe, marrying in London and joining friends in Paris. Finding herself pregnant, losing their baby, and increasingly dissatisfied with her husband’s high-handedness, Johnson returned to Woodstock, soon sharing letters from Dasburg placing many under his spell.
In his year abroad Andrew encountered the paintings of Cezanne at the Vollard gallery, met Picasso at the apartments of Gertrude and Leo Stein, made two copies of a Cezanne still life which instantly became ‘[the] standard of what I want to attain in my painting’; visited Matisse in his studio where The Master wiped away what seemed trivial as Dasburg watched him “re-draw the line until it had a limpidity and casualness without being forced.” He experienced the paintings of Renoir, which, with other masterworks, were hung “floor to ceiling in every room.”
Steaming home in 1910, genius-stuffed, Andrew returned to Woodstock, hailed the conquering hero. Yet it would take three years before the ticking bomb of modernity exploded onto a Dasburg canvas. Never careful to date, spare from rage, fail to gift, or keep track of once sold, “known Dasburgs” leave many gaps. We do know he accompanied George Bellows (arguably the most energetic painter on these shores) to Monhegan Island whereupon Bellows unleashed the most prodigious outpouring of his life. Not surprisingly, one surviving canvas of the eleven Dasburg completed there bears witness, not to Cezanne, but to Van Gogh as transmuted through the thoroughly American George Bellows.
Both Bellows and Dasburg participated in the hugely important 1913 New York Armory Show — where Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” was famously dubbed “Explosion in a Shingle Factory,” and battle lines between formalists and Cubist-inspired insurgents were — literally — drawn in blood. “I like him,” Dasburg wrote his wife, “who lays himself open to all…who has the strength to prevail…and does not fear to put himself where only the worthiest will survive.” Back in Woodstock, while artistic argument seldom if ever came to blows, divisions were, indeed, distinct. Dasburg had by now been joined by young German expatriot, Conrad Kramer (who’d recently married local painter Florence Balin), and Henry McFee, whose wife Aileen dubbed Woodstock’s Avant-garde “The Post-Toasties” versus John Carlson’s conservative “Nature Boys.”