BGuthrie Photos: DC -- American University -- Katzen Arts Center -- 2020A Winter Exhibit: Robert Franklin Gates: Paint What You See

DC -- American University -- Katzen Arts Center -- 2020A Winter Exhibit: Robert Franklin Gates: Paint What You See:

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Description of Pictures: Robert Franklin Gates: Paint What You See
Curated by Jack Rasmussen
January 25-May 24, 2020
Robert Franklin Gates: Paint What You See showcases an adventurous artist who greatly influenced the course of Washington art from his arrival from Detroit in 1930, at the age of 24, until his death in 1982 as an AU Professor Emeritus. He was a muralist, painter, printmaker, draftsman, and professor at the Phillips Gallery School and then American University for over forty years. His watercolors earned him early acclaim, signaled by their inclusion in the very first exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art upon its opening in 1941. Gates’ paintings can be found in The Phillips Collection, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Dumbarton Oaks, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Corcoran Legacy Collection and the Watkins Memorial Collection at the American University Museum.
A fully illustrated catalog with essay by curator Jack Rasmussen will be published in conjunction with this exhibition.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. KATGAT_200124_01.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates: Paint What You See Curated by Jack Rasmussen
2. KATGAT_200125_001.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates; Paint What You See Curated by Jack Rasmussen
3. KATGAT_200125_012.JPG: ROBERT FRANKLIN GATES: PAINT WHAT YOU SEE INTRODUCTION In fall 1973 I walked into my first class in American University's MFA program and met Robert Franklin Gates. He was a tall man, wearing a well-inked lab coat, and he welcomed me into his etching class with a big, friendly handshake. He spoke very little. I later learned his students in the 1950s gave him the nickname "Coop" after the legendary reticence of actor Gary Cooper, whose most famous line was "Yep." Still, on occasion, Gates would entertain us with remarkable, even inspiring, stories about his life and the path he took to become an artist. He didn't really need many words to be a great teacher, demonstrating on a copper plate the subtleties of intaglio printmaking, or showing us how to calculate the golden ratio. The following semester, I took a painting class from Gates, where his four-word advisory to me was "paint what you see." What seemed a simple enough task soon produced the realization that all painting is a process of abstraction, with the artist taking line, form, and color from subjects in the real world and imaginatively discovering and capturing their equivalents in paint―artifacts of the artist's understanding to create an image. When you rely on your own vision and understanding, you cannot escape yourself, your experience, your context, your culture. This is when I began grasping Gates' instruction to "paint what you see:" to look as intently as possible and not be distracted by what one might have heard about styles and fashions, and all the other expectations of the commercial and academic art world. I remember a time I was struggling with my painting of a still life and had it leaning up at the end of a corridor so I could take a good, long look. Gates stopped and spent 10 minutes standing next to me in silence. Finally he said, "a little red," and continued on his way. He didn't pick up a brush and make corrections on my canvas. He wasn't telling me to use more or less red. Instead, I took his three words to suggest I might consider red with all its optical and emotional potential as I struggled to translate my understanding of the world into paint on canvas. He encouraged me to see the world my way, and to paint that world. Gates retired from American University as professor emeritus in 1975, the same semester I finished my MFA. His students subsequently learned he had been suffering from the onset of arteriosclerosis, and his increased reticence was a symptom of the progression of his disease. Over the previous five years he had made and exhibited paintings that were some of his most original and transcendent. They were the culmination of a long and prolific career that wound its way from Regionalist-inspired impressionist watercolors, through paintings of figures and landscapes informed by the influence of abstract expressionism, to the masterful classicism of his late, outsized, and timeless still lifes and landscapes. The progression of Gates' disease finally ended his journey. He died in 1982 at the age of 76.
4. KATGAT_200125_016.JPG: EDUCATION Robert Franklin Gates was born October 6, 1906, in Detroit, Michigan. We know about his life as a young artist due to handwritten documents from 1936 now accessible in the Smithsonian. Institution's Archives of American Art. In these documents, we learn that he could not recall a time when he was not drawing or painting. He did remember spending summers at a cottage visiting his grandparents on the St. Clair River above Detroit where many Detroit artists would come to escape the city. I was given a little paint box and used to go sketching with them. They were all amused by my imitating them, but John Morse and Joe Gies began giving me instruction. Joe Gies... was an American who had studied in Paris with Bouguereau... Then, and up until the time of his death as an old man, he wore a black hat, flowing tie, and the pointed beard that he acquired in his youth in Paris. He was one of the pioneers of art in Detroit. In high school, Gates took all the art classes he could and then "ran away," becoming a cook on a sand barge on the Great Lakes, which, as he would note, "led to my being sent to military school." After graduating, Gates then attended the Detroit School of Arts and Crafts for one year before leaving "with the idea that an artist had to travel and see the world before he could really amount to much." His handwritten descriptions of those travels are a gift to all young artists. I was selling shoes to pay my expenses and in the first town I hit I sold five pairs in a garage. I was arrested and escorted to the edge of town when I tried to sell a pair to the mayor who owned the only shoe store in town. I went to a dance that night and sold 16 pair to the men when they came out to smoke. Most of my sales were made in pool rooms and hamburger joints. I sold 29 pairs in two hours in an all-night restaurant. I would make enough in a few days to be able to sketch for a week or so without working. Returning from his adventures, Gates talked his father into sending him to New York City to attend the Art Students League in 1929. There, among other classes, he studied anatomy with George Brandt Bridgman. According to accounts from other students who worked with this mentor: Bridgman, constantly inebriated and chewing on a large black cigar, would rail at his students about the importance of mastering anatomy: "Don't think color's going to do you any good. Or lovely compositions. You can't paint a house until it's built." Gates stayed one year at the Art Students League before leaving for Washington, DC, to attend the Phillips Gallery Art School. He always felt he had benefited from studying with Bridgman, writing somewhat tongue in cheek, "I learned considerable about anatomy that year, and it has stood me in good stead. I resisted Bridgeman's artistic influence as best I could."
5. KATGAT_200125_020.JPG: CARRIBEAN "ADVENTURE" Taking the summer off from his classes at the Phillips Gallery Art School in 1932, Gates boarded a four-masted schooner, the Doris Hamlin, for a two-and-a-half-month, 5,000-mile voyage. The ill-fated trip, labeled the "Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition," was organized by L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction writer and founder of the Church of Scientology. The purpose of the expedition was to take "fifty young gentleman rovers" and explore and film pirate "strongholds and bivouacs" and to "collect whatever one collects for exhibits in museums." Leaving Baltimore on June 24, the schooner was soon blown off course and by the time it reached Ponce, Puerto Rico, Hubbard had abandoned ship. When the Doris Hamlin sailed into port at Fort de France, Martinique, it had run out of money and fresh water. The students were left with the boat, abandoned by Hubbard and most of the crew. Stranded, they were forced to fend for themselves. To get back to Baltimore, they developed a technique whereby they would sail into a port to pick up food with the little money they had, then start a fight so they would be thrown off the island and not have to pay port fees they could ill afford. The ship's captain, F. E. Garfield, summed up the voyage: "The worst trip I ever made." Gates' and the captain's characterization of the voyage differ considerably from the glowing picture painted 50 years later on the Church of Scientology's website, where "...those who sailed with Mr. Hubbard in 1932 would still speak of that voyage as the one grand adventure in the twilight of their youth." Gates returned with many watercolors, executed on the voyage despite the continuously bad weather they encountered, which he exhibited to good reviews at The Art League in Washington, DC. Helen Buchalter, writing for The Washington Daily News, observed, "Gates did find some strong subjects for watercolors even if their only suggestion of sunlight is a dull gray glare... these Caribbean paintings have a new directness, a feeling of imminent storm in somber waters, and low clouds over roof-dotted hillsides." One of the watercolors was purchased by C. Law Watkins, head of the education department at the Phillips Gallery, director of its school, and one of Gates' teachers. Gates continued taking classes at the Phillips until 1933, when Watkins made him his assistant. By 1934, at the age of 27, Gates was made an Instructor at the Phillips.
6. KATGAT_200125_025.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Under Sail, 1932
7. KATGAT_200125_029.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Coastal Scene, 1932
8. KATGAT_200125_037.JPG: YOUGHIOGHENY FOREST COLONY In 1933, Gates and his first wife, the artist Margaret Casey Gates, moved to Aurora, West Virginia, to live in the Youghiogheny Forest Colony and somehow make the long and complicated commute to their teaching jobs at the Phillips. The Forest Colony was founded in 1931 by Frank Reeves, a geologist, who purchased 100 acres along the Youghiogheny River and built a large log building called "The Tavern," surrounded by 12 cabins. These had been constructed for summer use but were soon occupied year- round by Washington-area artists, writers, doctors, architects, and musicians. Besides Robert and Margaret Gates, the colony's residents included sculptor Joe Goethe, architects Arved Kundzin and Thomas Hood, and photographer Volkmar Wentzel. They often displayed their work on the walls of the Tavern. Wentzel went on to become a legendary National Geographic photographer. He gave this explanation for joining the other artists living in the Forest Colony: "It was Depression time. It was cheaper to live in the country." He was attracted to the clean air, the breathtaking landscape, and "the enjoyment of civilized and cultivated company." Wentzel began photographing the people and environs of Aurora in the mid-1930s, frequently turning his lens on nearby farms. Wentzel portrayed the pigs on Gerald Parks' farm, and Gates portrayed the pigs. belonging to Bessie Shoemaker. Gates, as a Regionalist-inspired romantic just beginning his work on public murals, chose to paint two pigs romping in the barnyard. Wentzel, as a young photojournalist at the beginning of his career, photographed the stark image of four pigs hanging upside. down from a tree after their slaughter.
9. KATGAT_200125_043.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Bessie Shoemaker's Pigs, 1934
10. KATGAT_200125_046.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Toadstools, Cathedral Woods, 1937
11. KATGAT_200125_048.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Across the Valley, West Virginia, 1933
12. KATGAT_200125_059.JPG: GOVERNMENT COMMISSIONS As the Depression worsened, the federal government took a growing and crucial role in supporting artists. In 1934, the PWAP commissioned Gates and Prentiss Taylor, another Washington artist, to paint the gardens of Charleston, South Carolina. The resulting watercolors were exhibited in a traveling show, which included a stop at the National Museum in Washington (later known as the National Collection of Fine Arts, and now the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or SAAM) in 1935, The following year, the Treasury's Section of Fine Arts commissioned Gates, together with Washington artists Mitchell Jamieson and Prentiss Taylor, to sail to the Virgin Islands in order to paint watercolors of the people and landscape. The watercolors were to hang in government buildings and travel in exhibitions around the states to stimulate tourism. The resulting watercolors showed that Gates had expanded his palette and, at the age of thirty, fully mastered the medium. Despite the acclaim garnered by the Virgin Island watercolors, Gates did not seem anxious to repeat the experience. He wrote about the artistic challenges of painting the people and places of the Islands: Its [sic] too much like cake. At first I was excited about it. But its [sic] too picturesque. It sort of wears on you. Everywhere you go there is a picture ready for you. And there is so much brilliant color it drives you crazy.... The goats start in the afternoon, by night the donkeys begin to bray, then the roosters start up at midnight and the dogs bark all the time.
13. KATGAT_200125_062.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Charleston Dock, Steamer Seminole, 1934
14. KATGAT_200125_068.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Untitled, 1936
15. KATGAT_200125_070.JPG: PUBLIC MURALS To jumpstart his career as a muralist, Gates strategically arranged to spend the summer of 1938 studying at the Colorado Springs. Fine Arts Center with Henry Varnum Poor. Poor was one of the most successful painters. and muralists of his time, and the Fine Arts Center's students had an impressive record of winning government mural competitions. Gates returned from his study with Poor to successfully compete for a mural commission for the Bethesda, Maryland, post office, offered by Treasury's Section of Fine Arts. His mural design was executed and installed in 1939. It depicts a scene from Bethesda's semiweekly Montgomery Farm Women's Cooperative Market. Both the Bethesda Post Office mural and the Farm Women's Cooperative across the street can be enjoyed today in their original locations. This commission was quickly followed in 1940 by Treasury Department commissions in Oakland, Maryland, and Lewisburg, West Virginia. Image: Robert Franklin Gates with reproduction of his mural for the post office in Bethesda, MD, 1938. Unidentified photographer. Robert Franklin Gates papers, 1910-1988, bulk 1928 1988. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
16. KATGAT_200125_077.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Deer in the Field, 1948
17. KATGAT_200125_080.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Trees in Winter, 1944
18. KATGAT_200125_083.JPG: JOHN MARIN Despite his strong figurative artistic origins, Gates in the late 1940s and early 1950s was taking a slow turn towards abstraction, even as he questioned the very possibility of abstract visual language. "You can't call it abstract, because it all comes from some experience, some point. of departure in nature." His embrace of abstraction is likely to have been influenced by his teaching. colleagues at the Phillips. Gallery Art School and then at American University: Karl Knaths, Jack Tworkov, and especially John Marin. Marin became interested in my watercolors and asked after them from time to time and criticized them for me. I have kept the sketches that he criticized, with his own drawings on the back showing me how I should have done them. I plan to sell them in my old age and live on the proceeds; they are my Social Security. The influence of the drawings helped me keep that kind of linear, structural approach I used for so long... The hardest job in painting is to avoid tricks, like copying the use of line in Marin. Image: John Marin, Taos Canyon, New Mexico, 1929. Watercolor. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dolores and John W. Beck, Winter Park, FL, 2012.58.
19. KATGAT_200125_102.JPG: CHARLES BURCHFIELD The evolution of Gates' particular nature-infused abstraction was on display in his two-person exhibition at the Phillips Gallery with Charles Burchfield in 1947. Both artists were masters of the watercolor medium, and their preferred subject matter was the landscape. They both appeared to abstract from the landscape for expressive purposes, though Burchfield's landscapes tended towards fantasy, while those of Gates had a more convincing physicality. Ben L. Summerford, Gates' former student and then teaching colleague at American University, offered his understanding of this physical quality present in Gates' art, speculating about the inspiration for Winter Sun, a 1949 egg tempera painting: The painting is constructional and architectonic, perhaps reflecting Gates's interest in geology, which was the other consuming interest in his life. In a 1960 interview (with Jean White in The Washington Post), he revealed, "I almost became a geologist instead of a painter... I still can't get through a new road cut without examining the minerals and fossils." As his student, I knew about Gates' interest in geology. A visit to his Alexandria, Virginia, studio in 1978 made the extent of his obsession clear. Fully a third of his large, light-filled studio was devoted to a collection of micromounts, tiny mounted mineral specimens that required magnification to be appreciated. His vast collection was carefully organized in rows of gleaming metal cabinets. Alongside the cabinets were tables with different apparatus set up for magnifying and illuminating the specimens. Their crystalline structures and vibrant colors provide a clue to understanding the Gates's way of seeing and his approach to representation, even in his most abstract compositions. In a sense, the magnified crystals functioned as an organizing principle, or the "bones" for his landscape, cityscape, and figural compositions. Instead of painterly abstractions of nature, he was creating images undergirded by physical structures found in nature. This inner structure made his works utterly convincing in a naturalist sense, even as their subjects were bent, folded, and rearranged in dynamic ways. Image: Charles Burchfield, Still-Life in Winter, 1951. Watercolor and pencil on paper mounted on paperboard. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design, 1978.56.
20. KATGAT_200125_105.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Costa Rican Mantlepiece, 1973
21. KATGAT_200125_113.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Still Life with Blue Glass, c 1970
22. KATGAT_200125_117.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Back Lit Still Life, 1970s
23. KATGAT_200125_120.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Eastern Bay, 1969
24. KATGAT_200125_125.JPG: LATE REALISM Gates had passed through abstract expressionism and come out the other side to build a body of work that was completely original, really unlike anything his peers were doing. Still employing masterful brushwork and descriptive gesture, with growing surety he expanded on his formal canniness. The large paintings of this mature period have been brought into perfect, timeless balance. In a large painting like Untitled (1970), Gates is no longer only concerned with capturing the specifics of place and time. He is reaching for the universal. The table and fruit are captured in raking sunlight against a black interior space. The color is intense, the surfaces are activated by his painterly brushwork, but the composition is nonetheless completely poised in a way that, of all the arts, only paintings can be. Once again, it is important to remember that Gates achieved this stillness, at least in part, by using geometry to structure his compositions. He taught the use of the golden ratio in composition to his students as far back as the 1950s. As his paintings grew in scale, this underlying geometry slowly became even more overt. Gates remained consistently invested in structure, regardless of the subject, style, or medium. As we look now at Gates' work, let us remember the following salient points. Gates came of age in the first half of the twentieth century, shaped by two World Wars and the Great Depression. He found his own way around the various avant-garde waves that came and went, painting what he saw with his heart and his mind, not what was being promoted as the latest thing by critical voices or the marketplace. His work was optimistic during difficult times, becoming almost celebratory during his middle, expressionist years, and then quiet and thoughtful as he grew into maturity. His art had many sources and influences, but it was always his own. Gates painted life with expressive brushwork and perfectly tuned color. His mastery of the formal qualities informing his compositions ultimately gave us works to contemplate in complete stillness. The late works especially transcend their simple subjects: light falling on fruit, vases, or saints. They present a catalog of changeless verities, perhaps intended to inspire viewers to find their own quiet center within a chaotic universe. In addition to his masterful art, and the range of experience he pursued to bring more to that art, Gates left us a model for how we might dedicate ourselves and grow through interesting times and adventures. As we consider his artistic accomplishments and the example he has set, it is possible that we, too, may become people engaged in the world, responsive to its challenges. As Gates lived and taught, we are here to change the world. If we speak with our own voice, we can make a difference.
25. KATGAT_200125_127.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Narrows with Geese, 1971
26. KATGAT_200125_134.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Landscape with Pear Tree, 1965
27. KATGAT_200125_138.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Interior with Begonias, 1972
28. KATGAT_200125_149.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Hat, 1962
29. KATGAT_200125_155.JPG: RETURN TO FIGURATION Gates never gave up his attachment to naturalism, even as his work in the late 50s to early 60s focused on increasingly large scale and highly abstracted figures and landscapes. In paintings like Tarascan from 1958, Gates' paint is thickly applied, at once gestural and beautifully descriptive. The paint evokes the look and feel of the indigenous people of Central Mexico, their light and surrounding landscape. When discussing Gates' work, it is likely our concern with Abstraction vs. Realism has set up a false dichotomy. The triumph of Gates' art is that he moved freely between the two modes, and then successfully merged them in his late work. Gates was completely aware of the artworld around him. As a primary force in American University's Watkins Gallery and the off-campus cooperative Jefferson Place Gallery in the 1950s and 1960s, Gates was one of those responsible for introducing the most avant-garde artists to a Washington audience, including the very first exhibitions of Washington Color School painters. Even as he was presenting the most "advanced" art, by the mid-60s his paintings were moving away from abstraction and back towards realism. That a painter is influenced by Nature is obvious. That he should also be influenced by art is necessary, for in art are the means of understanding Nature. We see great forces at work, great rhythms and cycles, a continuous conflict of movement and stability, activity and rest - influences of one force on a greater or smaller force. Earth, water, air, light, heat, and the plants and animals, all this life and these processes change and evolve around us and we must, and do, change with them. The painter then, searching with paint, somehow tries to find their equivalent in terms of line, mass and color. It is ironic that Gates' seemingly most abstract work, his paintings. executed while in Iraq on a grant from the Department of State from September 1966 to February 1967, were also his most realistic. The sun, shimmering off the desert floor, was dematerializing the landscape before his eyes. Masses of color seem to float above and below the horizon in these Rothko-esque optical illusions. It is instructive that the gorgeously convincing Landscape with Pear Tree, on loan from The Phillips Collection, was painted in 1965, two years before Orange Desert, when his return to realism was already well under way.
30. KATGAT_200125_157.JPG: Robert Franklin Gates Five Peaches or Squaring the Circle, 1971
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