Rudolph Weisenborn (1881-1974) Part 1

The last of the major modernist painters of the twentieth century awaiting widespread recognition is Rudolph Weisenborn. He was born October 31, 1881, in Chicago, and died there March 15, 1974.[1] As Henry Rago, editor of Chicago’s venerable Poetry magazine, proclaimed in the catalogue of a Weisenborn retrospective exhibition “… [he] should have a permanent place among the few really indispensable painters in our time.”[2] Late in his career a Chicago reviewer was so positive and full of praise that the mystery of Weisenborn’s vanished reputation seems unsolvable.

“Weisenborn is the local artist whose work best reflects the times in which we live… he is one of the greatest and least appreciated of American painters. He also is the most creative in the Chicago area, shows no derivations and turns out canvases so different that to many they are baffling.”[3]

After a peripatetic youth, spent mostly outside Chicago, Weisenborn returned to the Windy City in time to see the Armory Show of 1913 and to share the local interest in Vorticism, an avant-garde British literary and artistic movement known in Chicago chiefly through publications. Although he had received a traditional art education in Denver, Weisenborn quickly moved beyond his early academicism and soon was recognized as Chicago’s leading modernist, a position he held for several decades before sliding into oblivion in the late 1960s. Moreover, in addition to his work as an artist, his activities organizing new venues to show modern art, coupled with his efforts as the first artist in Chicago to offer instruction in modern trends in art, made him a powerful agent for changing the tastes in art of many Chicagoans.

The artist’s reputation was somewhat revived by three events: a symposium in 1988; a 1990 publication based on that symposium (The Old Guard and the Avant-garde; Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940); and a lecture, “Weisenborn’s Windy City; the Life and Art of Rudolph Weisenborn,” given April 29, 1993, by Herman Spertus at the Harold Washington Library (accompanied by a showing of a 1978 documentary film on Weisenborn). Nevertheless, by 1996, when the Museum of Contemporary Art showed Art in Chicago, 1945-1995, it was not thought necessary to include Weisenborn in the exhibition nor even to mention him in the essays in the 312-page catalogue, even though he had exhibited new work in Chicago into the mid-1950s.[4] Moreover, Weisenborn is still poorly represented in museum collections, with the crucial Art Institute of Chicago previously owning a single work, now deaccessioned.[5] Although his work was shown at the Art Institute with some frequency (1918 to 1949),[6] and again in 1965,[7] praised by Chicago art critics in 1951,[8] and again in 1971,[9] efforts for a large retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute, have not been successful.

Surely part of the reason for Weisenborn’s lack of renown was because he worked as a fine artist in Chicago, where it simply was harder to become recognized than it was for an architect or a writer. No serious history of American architecture or literature would ignore the major architects and writers of Chicago. However, there has yet to be published a general history of American art, or of twentieth-century art, that even mentions Weisenborn!

Rudolph’s parents were from Strasbourg, France (still part of Germany at the time they emigrated). His earliest years are best understood in the context that when he was orphaned at an early age, there were two basic approaches for caring for orphans: raising them in an institutional environment or placing them out to be raised in a private home.[10] Placing out sometimes meant indenture or adoption, but nearly always it meant undocumented, not legally binding arrangements.[11] The placing-out approach characterized the Chicago Home for the Friendless, which was entrusted with the care of young Rudolph; its policy was to offer “…protection and employment or assistance to worthy destitute women and children, until other and permanent homes and means of support can be secured to them.”[12]

The practice of placing out gained impetus from the growth of the railroads and what became known as orphan trains. Moreover, the Chicago Home for the Friendless, perhaps typically, acknowledged help from railroads in the form of passes.[13] Many orphans were shipped in groups from east-coast cities, or from the newer cities in the interior, for resettlement in often western rural communities. In some cases, individual orphans were sent by rail to families who had requested them.[14] It was also common for the placed-out orphans not to stay put; some became little wanderers, moving from farm to farm, either because they chose to leave or because they were turned out.[15]

While Weisenborn died before the interest in orphan-train oral histories began, he nevertheless relayed some of his memories to his wife and sons and to newspaper critics and gallery owners. Some of his memories were bitter, and perhaps for this reason there are some inconsistencies in reports of his memories. There is one report that Weisenborn had two siblings who also were adopted.[16] Weisenborn’s birthplace is most often given, by himself and others, as Chicago, but sometimes the nearby Du Page County town of Naperville is said to be his birthplace.[17] His son, West Weisenborn (born 1929), recalled hearing his father had worked on a farm in Naperville.[18] In any case, Rudolph Weisenborn remembered having spent part of his childhood in Chicago, because he once wrote of his move to Chicago in 1913 as a return: “I came back to Chicago and was newly inspired by the visuals and dynamics of the city.”[19] Moreover, he once told an unnamed critic for a Chicago neighborhood newspaper The Booster that he had lived until he was seven in an orphan’s home on the south side of Chicago.[20]

The most detailed account of Rudolph’s early youth was given by his writer wife, Alfreda (“Fritzi”) née Gordon (1900-1968),[21] who married Rudolph on May 4, 1922.[22] This is in an undated account evidently intended as part of a manuscript for an uncompleted biography of her husband.[23] Her chronology is sometimes vague. She wrote that before he was nine years old, Rudolph was orphaned, and shortly after entering the orphanage was adopted by John Derr, the superintendent of schools in Elgin, Illinois. Immediately after the adoption young Rudolph was “…given a basket, a rag tied around his neck, and put on a train to Clark, South Dakota.”[24] There he worked for George Derr (evidently related to John), who lived in a sod shanty, and combined his activities as a farmer with teaching in the town school. Critic Clarence Joseph Bulliet (1883-1952) reported: “At school he (young Rudolph) drew pictures and was the choice of the teacher to decorate the blackboards for holiday occasions.”[25] Nevertheless, Derr treated the young man rather harshly, according to Fritzi Weisenborn, who described punishments such as an hours-long exile to a woodshed, as well as strappings. After about four years, when he was thirteen, Rudolph hitched a ride south on a lumber wagon that dropped him off in Davis,[26] a tiny town in Turner County in southeastern South Dakota. In Davis he worked for the eponymous Mr. Davis (first name not known), in tasks such as cutting bundles for a threshing machine. The atmosphere was less oppressive, and he stayed eighteen months, after which he worked on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. He left the dairy farm to work in Wisconsin (and/or possibly Minnesota) lumber camps, and then worked as a migrant harvester, beginning in Oklahoma in early summer, working his way to North Dakota in the fall.[27] He also spent some time as a Colorado cattle-ranch hand.[28]

Another account, evidently based on a 1951 interview with Weisenborn, stated that he: “…lived until he was seven years old in a South Side orphan’s home, in Chicago. One day the superintendent’s brother from North Dakota wired: ‘Send us a good boy.’ The superintendent sent Rudolph Weisenborn to the farm in the Dakotas where he lived with his foster parents and four sisters until he was 14.”[29]

Weisenborn was said to have studied in 1898 at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.[30] But city life beckoned, as well as a hoped-for career as an artist, and Weisenborn was in Denver by 1902, listed as an artist in a city directory, with an address of 931 21st Street.[31] Evidently, he began his career as a self-taught artist.

Thus it was before his formal art studies that Weisenborn did some portrait sketches for the Denver Post.[32] He also joined the cavalry section of the Colorado Militia, because he liked to ride horses; his enlistment resulted in emergency duty during a miners’ strike in Cripple Creek in 1903-1904.[33] Although he was not involved in any shooting, it was reported he executed sketches used by the Denver Post to cover the strike.[34] He was also stationed in Telluride in the wake of the strike in Cripple Creek,[35] where, according to Sidney Lens, “As late as December 1904 the mines in Telluride, now non-union, had to be patrolled day and night by guards armed with rapid fire guns, for fear of a union resurgence.”[36] Weisenborn worked as a miner in Telluride,[37] and while there sold a few paintings,[38] and also executed a backdrop of a street scene for the opera house attached to the Sheridan Hotel,[39] a harbinger of his future role as a mural painter. Since the Sheridan Opera House dates from 1913,[40] Weisenborn would probably have painted the backdrop there shortly before leaving Colorado.

Weisenborn found a job as a janitor in a Denver high school[41] to finance his studies with Henry Read (1851-1935),[42] a conservative, academic teacher at the Denver Students’ School of Art. Weisenborn studied with Read from 1905 to 1907,[43] but only after trying for four years to gain admission.[44] Weisenborn left there to study with a less conventional artist, Jean Mannheim (1863-1945),[45] newly arrived in Denver from Europe.[46] Weisenborn once stated he had studied at “Jean Mannheim’s School of Art—Denver—1907-1910.”[47] He was attracted to Mannheim because they shared a love for Rembrandt. Weisenborn’s love for Rembrandt had already borne fruit in his “Rembrandtesque” Self-Portrait of 1903,[48] Weisenborn’s earliest surviving work. This painting was greatly admired by Mannheim.[49]

Weisenborn himself once characterized his studies in Denver: “I spent two years drawing from casts: replicas of idealized Greek sculpture, arms, legs torsos which had no relationship to reality, the character of line and form. Just a stultifying matter of light and shade. I even studied Rembrandt and did a self-portrait a la Rembrandt. He was a great painter but not of my time. This was in Colorado and when I went outdoors to paint, Rembrandt and my academic training stifled me; something was fundamentally wrong. Then I saw some impressionist paintings that were like gusts of fresh air from the mountain tops. I came back to Chicago and was newly inspired by the visuals and dynamics of the city.”[50]

Fritzi added that it was only after the two years drawing from casts that he was allowed to work from a living model and noted that her husband had often stated: “It took me ten years to get it [i.e., traditional academic training] out of my system.” She also wrote that the impressionist works seen in Denver were by painted by Claude Monet.[51]

In 1908, while studying with Mannheim, Weisenborn submitted two works, The Wind and Sunset, (locations unknown) to the International Exhibition at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh; both were rejected.[52]

Weisenborn’s Denver experiences probably primed him for the Armory Show, an international art exhibition that included some of the most daring examples of European modernism, seen in at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 24 to April 16, 1913.[53] Moreover, in 1913, Chicago was still in its heyday as a major literary center, and the Armory show was soon followed by local interest in English Vorticism, a short-lived artistic and literary movement strongly influenced by Italian Futurism.

Vorticism received a bit of attention in Chicago, and its appeal to Weisenborn,[54] who had a strong interest in literature, was easy to understand. Blast; Review of the Great English Vortex, the Vorticist magazine, was edited by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), English writer and artist, and Ezra Pound (1885-1972), an expatriate American poet and critic.[55] The first issue of Blast was dated June 20, 1914, and comment on it by Llewellyn Jones, editor of The Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, appeared July 31, 1914. Basically, Jones attributed the content of the first issue of Blast to “Midsummer Madness,” despite his earlier admiration for Pound.[56]

It would probably be wrong to look for too much direct visual influence from Lewis on Weisenborn. As one of Weisenborn’s friends, the British-American Canadian writer, John Grierson once put it, although Lewis had “indeed worked wonders,” he was after all a “brilliant amateur.”[57] Be that as it may, there is no evidence Weisenborn knew much about the paintings of Lewis and his British Vorticist colleagues beyond what he had seen reproduced in a few publications.

The one work by Lewis we can be sure was known to Weisenborn was Portrait of an Englishwoman of 1913 (Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford),[58] a watercolor with pen-and-ink work, reproduced in The Friday Literary Review of the Chicago Evening Post on July 31, 1914. Composed of hard-edged forms, the picture was seemingly completely abstract, but in his adjacent comment Jones cleverly noted that: “Anyone thinking in terms of representative art would say that this was a picture of one of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses tumbling down in an earthquake…”[59]

Weisenborn’s first known showing in Chicago was at the Moulton and Ricketts Gallery in 1914.[60] [James Gardner] Moulton and [Robb R.] Ricketts described themselves as “importers and dealers in foreign and American paintings,” and they were located at 71-73-75 East Van Buren Street.[61] To supplement whatever income he might have derived from painting, Weisenborn also did backgrounds for show windows for Marshall Field’s and the Boston Store.[62] There is no record of his working as an art teacher before 1920, and one can only speculate as to what, beyond fees for decorating show windows, or the sale of an occasional picture, provided an income for Weisenborn.

The first known address for Weisenborn after his return to Chicago was 2721 South Michigan Avenue, where he was living in 1918.[63] By 1920 he was at 19 East Pearson Street.[64] The next year he moved to 854½ North State Street.[65]

The first artist-organized group show Weisenborn might have had something to do with was the short-lived Independent Society of Artists, which opened its first exhibition on April 4, 1916, in the Ohio Building, at Wabash and Congress.[66] It is not known whether Weisenborn had anything to do with organizing the 1916 exhibition, but he was among the forty artists who showed in the Society’s third exhibition at the Arts Club in June, 1918.[67] He was no doubt impressed that for an annual membership fee of two dollars, any member could show two works of art that did not have to be passed on by a jury.[68]

In 1917 Weisenborn began showing with the Palette and Chisel Club in the club rooms at the Athaeneum,[69] where he showed a painting called The Gardner (location unknown).[70] It was in the Club’s tempera show early in 1918 that Weisenborn began to achieve recognition as an innovator. An entire wall, directly opposite the entrance, was devoted to his work. A reviewer praised the “powerful color and unique design” of his tempera paintings and went on to say: “In this exhibit his work reflects the mind of one who lives in a world apart, which makes him, to say the least, an individual.” The reviewer noted the artist “…credits Colorado mountains, canons [i.e., cañons] and sunshine for his color.”[71] The one tempera identified by name was An Abstraction of Spring (location unknown), “composed of lines and color that nature uses at this time of the year,” and “also symbolical of all youth and springtime.”[72] Weisenborn made it easy to identify himself with Colorado, or more generally the cowboys of the west, because he habitually wore a Stetson (ten-gallon) hat.[73] The tempera exhibition brought a measure of national recognition, as the reviewer for American Art News commented: “R. Weisenborn presents a series of poster effects that rival the rainbow for color and are strongly and decoratively composed.”[74]

Following the close of its tempera show, the Palette and Chisel Club’s 1918 annual exhibition opened, on March 23. Weisenborn showed a well received work simply called Portrait (location unknown). Another critic for the Fine Arts Journal noted “…an unusual feeling for the color effects of light,” and the magazine reproduced the painting.[75]

As early as 1919, Weisenborn publicly showed a stormy temperament. He was named a juror for the Palette and Chisel Club annual exhibition and rejected a painting by Arthur Grover Rider (1886-1975)[76] entitled Autumn because he judged it was not finished, even though the artist insisted it was.[77] A Chicago Herald and Examiner reporter related:

“The paint wasn’t dry: some of the hills in the landscape looked as if they had been left out in the rain. Weisenborn asked Rider if the picture was actually finished. Yes, said Rider, but he didn’t say it with enough conviction. So Weisenborn decided Autumn would not be admitted.”[78]

The same reporter added that Weisenborn was overridden by the other jurors and by the board, and took his two works, Ruth and Self-Portrait (locations unknown) out of the show and left, and his friend Ramon Shiva (1893-1963) joined him.[79] Perhaps the absence of the Weisenborn paintings was temporary; Marguerite B. Williams noted “portraits by Weisenborn” in her review dated April 25th.[80]

His experience with the Independent Society of Artists and with the Palette and Chisel Club had the effect of drawing Weisenborn more completely into the life of the community and helped him to develop a sense of solidarity with other progressive-minded artists. This led to a decade of vigorous and imaginative organizing efforts leading to exhibitions and other activities. It also led to a life-long commitment to teaching.

Weisenborn was a frequent exhibitor in Chicago and vicinity exhibitions held annual at the Art Institute; in 1918, 1920 and 1921. The 1921 catalogue illustrated his Symbolist-tinged painting, Correlations (location unknown),[81] which was also illustrated in the Chicago Evening American (from among 350 works shown) and described as “sizable” as part of an admiring description “…boldly colored, boldly outlined, its paint applied with amazing thickness.” The newspaper went on to note:

“Two Chicago girls, Fay and Alice Hamlin, of the student colony of the lower North Side, posed for the artist, one as the younger sister, a dream in the background of life, among things green and undeveloped, while the older one, with her face sharply outlined in the full glare of life’s light, stands in the foreground with its complexities of existence dawning in her eyes.”[82]

In the same newspaper, Will Hollingsworth reported the painting “has caused quite a bit of discussion,” and added:

“The canvas, with its composition of the two figures in a landscape setting, is at the same time rough hewn and sensitively painted. The figure in the background, among the small trees, is handled with delicacy, and if the one in the foreground is treated broadly, the treatment is not carried so far as to obscure the artist’s intention.”[83]

Weisenborn’s own showings at the Art Institute did not prevent him from leading protests the exclusiveness of the Art Institute juries. He participated in an exhibition by “Introspectives,” at the Arts Club in May. Collectively they shook their finger at the established art patrons of Chicago and the jury system stating:

“The Introspective Artist sincerely strives for self-realization, hence the word ‘introspective’ – this seeker of one’s inner self, and, thru that, the realization of the material world within the imagination. Whereas, the academicians teach rules handed down by other men, the introspective artist follows his own rules, prompted by his inner consciousness. If he errs, he is his own judge. If people have little faith in one’s own punishment let them remind themselves of the sorrow of Him who would not accept man’s laws and who died on the cross, listening to the word of his inner conscience.”[84]

Critic Eleanor Jewett responded violently thoroughly skewering the group’s concepts in a scathing rebuttal and quoting the forward to the catalogue stating sarcastically their concepts “were too good to miss”:

“It strikes me forcefully that pretense and pedantry are often bedfellows in a shallow mind. The kernel of the introspective attitude apparently is that outside of their gospel there is no salvation… These men are splendid workers – for their own ends. They want notoriety. They disclaim all desires to sell their pictures, yet they demand appreciation from the public. (Riddle: How does the public express appreciation except in the purchase of an artist’s work?)… they vow that the artists of Chicago are in a conspiracy to keep them out, to deny them admittance to places of exhibition… They want the things which they belittle…Pedantry and pretense!”[85]

 for the American exhibition later in the same year and taking the lead in forming a Salon des Refusés, which had a very successful exhibition in Rothschild’s department store on State Street in November 1921, where it ran simultaneously with the Art Institute’s American exhibition, which was shown from November 3 through December 11.[86]

One of the groups Weisenborn helped to organize was Cor Ardens, meant to be international, but best known for its one major Chicago exhibition, held November 16 through 29, 1922, in the Arts Club.[87] The exhibition later moved to Milwaukee. Weisenborn served as vice-president, and his friend Raymond Jonson (1891‑1982) served as president. Jonson noted that after the exhibition, “…interest seemed to drop off. I was able to give less time to it for 1923 was an extremely busy year and in 1924 I moved to Santa Fe.”[88]

In Milwaukee the Cor Ardens exhibition was seen in December 1922, in the main gallery of the newly reconstructed Milwaukee Art Institute.[89] It was not a very adventurous step for Cor Ardens, since only thirty-five canvases were shown, and several of the artists were already known in Milwaukee because they had shown there recently or had served on local exhibition juries. M. B. Mayhew wrote that Weisenborn’s Ben Reitman (location unknown) was “an intense portrait” and “a striking likeness of the famous anarchist leader.”[90] Mayhew seemed more at home with an exhibition of conservative French nineteenth and twentieth century paintings that she found to be “a pleasant variation from the ultra-modernism of the recent Cor Ardens exhibition.”[91]

Meanwhile, Weisenborn continued to show in other venues including a three-person show, with Shiva and Julian Macdonald (1882-1939) that took place March 12 through April 9, 1922, in the Grace Hickox Gallery in the Fine Arts Building.[92] Among the things he showed were some portrait heads, done in charcoal, including a well-received drawing of the composer Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953),[93] evidently made when the composer was in Chicago to play piano in the world premiere of his third piano concerto, on December 16, 1921,[94] and to conduct the world premiere of his opera, A Love for Three Oranges, later in December.[95]

The high-profile presence of Prokofiev had a liberalizing influence in Chicago that may have helped to reinforce Weisenborn’s commitment to a modernist approach, whose ideas may have been strengthened by the modernistic settings for Prokofiev’s opera, created by Boris Anisfeld. Anisfeld’s settings were strongly praised in Chicago.[96]

As noted earlier, Weisenborn and Alfreda (“Fritzi”) Gordon were married on May 4, 1922. She had been born in St. Joseph, Missouri, and was a writer and a former St. Louis night-club singer.[97] She later served a long-time as art critic for the Chicago Times, and in an article in the Times in 1940 she recalled that she had “known the Bohemia of the Near North Side for 25 years.”[98] Thus it is likely Fritzi and Rudolph had met in a milieu of artists and writers. The ceremony was performed by Judge Ana G. Adams in the Court of Domestic Relations; Weisenborn had neglected to bring a ring, so he borrowed a club ring from is attorney and best man, Philip R. Davis.[99]

A month later a fire broke out on June 20 in the studio-apartment the newlyweds were occupying at 854½ North State Street, destroying almost all of Weisenborn’s paintings and seriously burning him;[100] by one account he was treated at the Polyclinic Hospital,[101] and by another he was treated at Passavant Hospital.[102] Although Weisenborn’s recovery was more complete than doctors had first expected, both of his hands had been badly burned and remained very heat sensitive during the rest of his life.[103] The response of the Chicago community was very touching; many artists offered to be donors for skin grafts,[104] and a benefit concert was held.[105] Among the works destroyed was Correlations, mentioned above; evidently also destroyed was a charcoal portrait of Prokofiev.[106]

Shortly before the fire, Weisenborn had opened a small exhibition of twelve tempera paintings in the fourth-floor Piccadilly Gallery in the tearoom in the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue; these constituted most of his works that had escaped the fire.[107] Shortly after the fire, Weisenborn moved to a coach house at 1501 North La Salle Street.[108]

One of Weisenborn’s earliest post-fireworks proved to be one of his best known. This was a portrait of attorney Clarence Darrow (last known Gilman/Gruen Galleries), executed in charcoal in 1924. Due to the trial of the Loeb brothers, with Darrow as defense attorney, the portrait brought some national attention.

Weisenborn had met some actors during the early 1920s when he had painted scenery for a little theatre in the Near North Side neighborhood. One of these was Melvyn Douglas,[109] who returned to Chicago in 1956 to appear as Darrow in Jerome Lawrence’s play, “Inherit the Wind.” The portrait of Darrow was borrowed from the owners, Mr. And Mrs. Solomon Jesmer of Chicago, and hung in Douglas’s dressing room in the Blackstone Theatre “as a virtual mirror.” Weisenborn and Douglas were photographed with the portrait for a newspaper.[110] Weissenborn is shown holding a pencil in his right hand, and in his left hand a photograph of the portrait, probably similar to one Darrow had signed at a Neo-Arlimusc fund-raising event.[111] (Neo-Arlimusc is discussed below.) The “virtual mirror” inspired Douglas to give a performance that drew rave reviews for his evocation of Darrow as “a quiet man loaded with dynamite.”[112] The Darrow portrait was to come into play in a comical way with the local authorities. As recounted by critic Clarence J. Bulliet:

“On morning, long after the Armistice, about 3 o’clock, a squad of twelve Chicago policemen, under command of a lieutenant, invaded the picturesque alley studio of Rudolph Weisenborn, president of the newly-organized No-Jury society of Artists. The studio was hung with batiks newly imported from the orient, with bizarre animal motifs. Weisenborn was showing them for a friend of his, and many of Chicago’s wealthy were visiting the studio in the daylight and early evening hours and buying. In addition to these heathenish [Bulliet being comical], suspicious hangings, there was a charcoal drawing on an easel in a corner that Wesienborn had just made of Clarence Darrow…[who] was attorney for the young criminals, and in the early stages of the trial had said, in his outspoken way, some rather nasty things about juries. The police lieutenant took all this in, including Weisenborn in his bare feet. ‘West-side radical?’ he abruptly questioned… He asked about the batiks… Then, he espied a yellow poster which read in big bold black letters: ‘NO-JURY MEANS FREEDOM.’ This was proof positive – the poster, Darrow’s portrait, ‘West-side radical.’ ‘If you can read that much,’ said Weisenborn, a bit insolently, ‘maybe you can read the finer print.’ The lieutenant drew closer. There he learned the ‘No Jury’ show, whatever it might be, was to be held at Marshall Field’s. ‘Is Marshall Field’s a red hangout?,’ Weisenborn asked the square-head. The lieutenant…marched out into the night alone.”[113]

Another actor friend of Weisenborn’s was Ralph Bellamy, who first met him when he (Bellamy) studied acting at a school on Rush Street, near Weisenborn’s studio;[114] Bellamy stayed on to act at a little theatre in the neighborhood.[115]

Weisenborn’s teaching at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts had begun by the summer of 1920;[116] he taught there consecutively until 1937,[117] and again in 1939.[118] At the Academy he offered a classes in which he hoped to attract a group of younger successful artists who would share their ideas with each other, because, “Such a union [of artists], it is hoped, will eventually cradle a really significant and progressive art movement.”[119] In 1922 he taught at Hull House, “…where for a nominal fee, talented students are given an opportunity for artistic expression that would otherwise not be accorded to them”[120] on Monday, Tuesday and Friday afternoons, quite an active schedule. “The class will be small, so that Mr. Weisenborn may best understand the temperament of the individual student and search for his special aptitude.”[121] He also taught a Sunday class in his studio while teaching at the Academy, beginning in 1935.[122] No doubt with this teaching schedule these activities provided a ready source of income to what were likely less than supportive art sales. Critic C. J. Bulliet claimed Weisenborn was the “Dean of Chicago abstractionists,” a moniker that no doubt worked to attract students.[123]

One of Weisenborn’s students at the Academy of Fine Arts, John E. Walley (1910-1974), recalled he had moved away from his regionalist approach because of a new feeling for abstract design gained from his studies with Weisenborn.[124] After viewing the 1965 retrospective, John and his wife, Jano, also a former Weisenborn student wrote: “…both of us have always felt that our experience as Rudolph’s students was the spark in our young lives. To see that spark still glowing in Rudolph is wonderful…”[125] Students considered Weisenborn to be non-prescriptive in his teaching, trying to encourage each student to find his or her own way. Frank Holland, a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, once summarized Weisenborn’s attitude toward his students:

“He does not force his own style on them, nor does he permit them to simply copy the model or still-life setup. Each person is evidently urged to make his own decisions and to develop an individual painting style and technique. At the same time each student is required to know and to think through what he is attempting.”[126]

Carl Newland Werntz, founder of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, commented that, as a teacher, Weisenborn “really prefers to preserve the individuality of his students.”[127] Writer and critic Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) studied with Weisenborn. “I started working under the direction of Rudolph Weisenborn… and he has remained one of my best friends.” Rexroth fondly recalled:

“…he understood what I was trying to do in my geometrical painting, and he gave me careful criticism of my dispositions of squares and circles. Besides this, he and his wife Fritzi gave me something else - familial affectation. I was always welcome at their house, and they were always ready to feed me, listen to my troubles, and counsel me on my problems - artistic, philosophical, or erotic.”[128]

Rexroth also wrote about his enjoyment of intellectual open-house gatherings regularly held in Chicago and noted: “They [Rudolph and Fritzi Weisenborn] too had ‘at homes,’ and perhaps due to the fact that Rudolph was one of the town’s important artists, they got only the cream of the habitués of the other bohemian hangouts.”[129]

Weisenborn helped to organize and presided over the initial five years of the revolutionary Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists,[130] an organization founded to protest what the artists saw as the continued exclusiveness of the juries for the Chicago and vicinity exhibitions at the Art Institute. The No-Jury Society gave annual exhibitions of its own, usually in the galleries of the Marshall Field Department Store.[131] For the first exhibition the call to submit pictures went out nationally, and artists from all over the U.S. responded. The only requirement was payment of a $4 membership fee; in exchange any artist could submit one or two paintings, depending on the size. The exhibit was so large eight galleries were needed, on the second floor of Field’s building. [132] Complementing the 365 paintings shown was an exhibition of handicrafts and manufactures assembled by the Association of Arts and Industries.[133] A few days before the exhibition closed, a newspaper reported: “The last week of the exhibition of the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists is alive with increasing interest. The crowds thronging the galleries have advertised the event…”[134]

The group also presented lectures by members and guests. A lecture by New York artist and critic Walter Pach (1883-1958), one of the exhibiting artists and author of the catalogue preface,[135] was given on several years later in 1927, at Marshall Field’s.[136] Pach was influential in modern art; he had helped to organize the Armory Show in 1913, which included ten of his own paintings.[137]

The formation of the No-Jury show had an impact as the following year Weisenborn and other “radicals” served as jurors for the Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition at the Art Institute,[138] part of a successful but short-lived attempt to liberalize the event.[139] Among those of the modern group listed in the catalogue were Carl Hoeckner (1883-1972), Raymond Jonson (1891-1982), and Gordon Saint Clair (1885-1966). The remainder of the large jury, some twenty-one artists were of the conservative tendancy. Weisenborn showed his own Leon J. Ell (location unknown), a drawing.[140] In a bit of whimsy it was said he was: “Chief Poo-Bah or Trotzky of the insurgents. Instigator and president of the No-Jury Society. His first masterpiece covered sixty-three square feet including the frame and was covered with $10,000.00 worth of paint. After a series of portentous portraits in charcoal he is devoting the next several years to a second masterpiece.” [141]

An anonymous “no-jury advocate” wrote a letter to a newspaper asking why Weisenborn and others “should declare for ‘no-jury’ and then act as jurors.”[142] In answer Weisenborn wrote a letter to a newspaper dated February 5, 1923, explaining why he had served as a juror:

“The twenty-seventh annual exhibition of artists of Chicago and vicinity is open. It is by far the most democratic showing of local art ever held at the Art institute. To those who have criticized my action as a ‘no-jury’ advocate, I have only this to say, go and see. We, the so-called ‘no-jury members,’ did all in our power to give a representative showing of every phase of art, of every school of art and surely every individual in art. As president of the ‘No-Jury Society of Artists’ I want my critics to know that the no-jury exhibition will hold its second annual showing again at Marshall Field’s and from all indications will be even larger and better than last year’s. Now I would also wish my critics to know I am strong for the no-jury principles, yet I do not believe them flawless in fact. Personally, there is only one way to exhibit pictures—that is, one picture at a time. To me a picture Gallery is most tiresome, and yet it is wonderful to have them. I am very sure that every so-called ‘no-jury juryman’ has been, and is, working for a better art condition. - -Rudolph Weisenborn”[143]

Thus, Weisenborn had decided juries could be an advantage under the right circumstances. In 1924 he showed as part of the Chicago Society of Artists, who presented an exhibition at Marshall Field’s, from March 24 through April 5. Weisenborn also served as a juror; he showed a landscape and “an interpretive charcoal portrait.”[144] Weisenborn’s association with the group was short lived as 1926 was his last year exhibiting with the group.[145]

Weisenborn’s contact with Marshall Field’s was important to his own career, because Harrison M. Becker, the manager of the picture galleries there, was described as “progressive in his ideas,” and a man who “combined commercial instincts with discrimination in taste.”[146] Thus it is not surprising an exhibition of Weisenborn’s black-and-white portraits was shown at Field’s from March 26 to April 7, 1923.[147] Hi Simons wrote an lengthy and sensitive review that began with this observation:

“You will find two kinds of drawings in this exhibition. One is primarily a character sketch. In the other, you will find more interest in form—rhythmic line, harmony, and opposition of lights and darks, handling of shape and substance—than in description of personality. You can judge some, therefore, as portraits, as likenesses, and others as, first of all, compositions in black and white.”[148]

A reviewer for the Chicago Evening Post thoughtfully analyzed a number of portraits in detail, and concluded: “You will recognize them as more important than mere literal transcriptions from the actual; you will think of them as works of art.”[149]

In fact, Weisenborn completed an especially large number of portraits in the 1920s, providing a virtual gallery of people, some residents and some visitors, who were active in Chicago’s artistic and literary life at the time. The portraits of Darrow and Prokofiev have already been mentioned. Many portraits were done in charcoal, in a style, to an extent, that was jointly developed by him and Stanislaus Szukalski (1893-1987), as exemplified by Szukalski’s charcoal portrait of Weisenborn, 1919.[150] All of the portraits were boldly modeled, and a number were rendered with some degree of the facet characteristics of early Cubist or Vorticist painting.

Weisenborn often used Cubism or Vorticism as a starting point for his easel paintings and murals, going on to create original works characterized by bright colors and lively color harmonies, as well as by inventive concepts of space. He usually built up a bold impasto in his paintings, even in those with sharp-edged, precisionist lines. Some of his work was completely abstract, but most was not: the portraits include fine Cubist work. Weisenborn created imaginatively rendered nudes highlighting his original approach to painting the human figure, semi-abstract cityscapes, and landscapes, including many enriched by his vivid memories of the Rocky Mountains. Weisenborn was also active as a theatrical designer. His Vorticist-tinged settings for George Kaiser’s Gas, designed in Chicago in 1925, are of particular note. [151]

A considerable number of Weisenborn’s portraits were published in Chicago newspapers.[152] Samuel Putnam seized the opportunity of using his position as critic to write with some depth about Weisenborn’s 1925 charcoal portrait of him, which was shortly to be seen at the Art Institute in its International Water Color show.[153] The essay takes the form of self-effacing humor and Putnam, a skilled writer, uses that device to provide insight into Weisenborn’s achievement, for example in this passage:

“… there is Rudolph Weisenborn, our leading young vorticist, who sees my impressive head as a center of swirling nebulae, viewed from an elevated train which was taken a notion to play leap-frog with the Wrigley tower.”[154]

Putnam went on to quote Weisenborn himself: “It will be a long time before I go beyond what I have done in Portrait of Samuel Putnam.”[155]

At least one of Weisenborn’s exhibitions stressed Chicago’s literary life. A June 1926, exhibition at the Washington Book Company, 1012 North Rush Street, included the Darrow portrait, and it was noted: “Other portraits of local writers and others being shown are of [poet] Mark Turbyfill, [critic] Putnam, Samuel Ash and Lucile Linder.”[156] These were by no means traditional portraits, but they were, as Simons indicated, much more realistic than the semi-abstract portraits from Weisenborn’s later career.

If an exhibition, or a compendium in book form, could be assembled of Weisenborn’s portrait drawings of the 1920s, it would be a unique window on the past, showing how leading Chicago intellectuals, artists, and their patrons, were viewed and surely would also provide some insight as to how they viewed themselves. As Rexroth had noted: “Weisenborn turned out in those days excessively vorticist portraits of all of Chicago of the Twenties.”[157]

In a 1926 exhibit in Madison, WI, Weisenborn was described in the review as an artist “whose reputation is spreading throughout America.”[158] Unfortunately during the heart of his career his work had little play outside of Chicago excepting a few Midwestern towns such as Milwaukee, Madison, Evansville,[159] and St. Louis. An international tour was arranged by art patroness Mrs. John Alden Carpenter and heralded in the news, but it is unclear if it came to fruition as no other mentions were made in the press.[160]

Weisenborn’s exhibited with the Society of Independent artists three times in New York. In 1924 he showed his portraits of Clarence Darrow and Chicago artist Minnie Harms Neebe (1873-1936)[161] Two years later he showed his portrait of Samuel.[162] The following month the Society of Independent artists loaned some of the paintings for a small exhibition in show for the Newark Museum Association. A reviewer for a local newspaper referred to Weisenborn as “one of the strongest painters of the Middle West.”[163] Weisenborn’s last showing with the Society of Independent Artists was at the Grand Central Palace in New York, where two of his tempera paintings were on view from April 13 to May 6, 1934.[164]

For the international exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Weisenborn submitted a work in 1929 and one in 1930; both were rejected.[165] The records indicate Weisenborn withdrew his Chicago (1927, Illinois State Museum) from consideration for the 1929 exhibition; one can only speculate he may have thought the painting too modern for consideration.

These out-of-town shows did not mean Weisenborn put less emphasis on Chicago. He had one-person showings at the Chicago Randolph Theater,[166] Washington Book Company in June 1926,[167] September 1927 in the lobby of the Playhouse in the Fine Arts Building[168] and in November 1927 at the Stutz Petit Salon.[169][170] Later in 1928, Weisenborn had an art exhibition in a little theater, known as The Cube, that presented live drama and was located in the University of Chicago neighborhood.[171]

Weisenborn showed his Interior (location unknown) in a small group exhibition at the Moulin Rouge Café, 416 South Wabash Avenue, presented by the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists in November 1926. Interior was singled out for praise by Putnam as “the most outstanding picture in this show.”[172] The regular fifth annual exhibition of the society was presented in 1927 from January 10 through 22 at the Marshall Fields Galleries, but shortly before the exhibition, Weisenborn stepped down as president because of “…friction with his fellow directors of the society over the conduct of the forthcoming show,”[173] and, by one account, “[mis]management of the society’s ball” was also a factor.[174] Fritzi Weisenborn later recalled her husband had thought the time had come to move its annual exhibition out of Marshall Field’s but the other directors balked:

[1]A great many original source documents on art organizations where Weisenborn was active come from the library of the Illinois Historical Art Project, who have compiled extensive files on Chicago’s historic artistic groups.

[2]Henry Rago, “foreword,” in: Rosenstone Art Gallery, Bernard Horwich Center, Rudolph Weisenborn, a Retrospective, November 10-December 1, 1965 (Chicago: Rosenstone Art Gallery, Bernard Horwich Center, 1965), unpaged. Twenty-two works were shown. Henry Rago (1915-1969) was a poet as well as an editor.

[3]This in reference to a one-man exhibit at the Adele Lawson’s Gallery in the Palmer House. Copeland C. Burg, “Abstractionist in 1-Man Show,” Chicago American, 11/20/1953, p.11.

[4]Lynn Warren, editor, Art in Chicago, 1945-1995 (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996). Weisenborn was not even mentioned on pages 36-58, which primarily contained background information on earlier developments. Several Chicago scholars attribute this oversight to a lack of knowledge in the curatorial staff of the museum on the art of the period that covers the foundation of the very art they exhibited.

[5]That work is Provincetown No.4, 1950, was sold at Christie’s in 2011. But even here, as critic Eleanor Jewett noted, it was “…not too lively or characteristic a painting and with none of the ginger in his color which Weisenborn knows so well how to use,” and conceded only that it was “…a sizeable canvas and pleasant in a neutral fashion.” See her “Two Modernists’ Works Acquired for Art Institute,” Chicago Tribune, 5/12/1951, part 2, p.5. Jewett, not incidentally, while perhaps a bit more open-minded very early in her career (as shown by her acceptance of Boris Anisfeld, described below), had for many years been strongly opposed to modernism in art, but had been converted over the years, surely in large part by Weisenborn. On her one-time intransigence against modern art, see: Sue Ann Prince, “‘Of the Which and the Why of the Daub and Smear’: Chicago Critics take on Modernism,” and Avis Berman, “The Katharine Kuh Gallery: an Informal Portrait,” both in: Sue Ann Prince, editor, The Old Guard and the Avant-garde; Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); see especially pages 103-117, 159-160, 163-164 and 166. Prince offers much detail on Jewett’s early intransigence in matters concerning modern art, but overstated her case when she wrote that in the mid-1920s “Jewett was solidifying a viewpoint that would intensify throughout the rest of her career.” Op. cit., Prince, The Old Guard and the Avant-garde…, p.105).

[6]Peter Hastings Falk, editor, The Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1888‑1950, (Madison, Connecticut: Sound View Press, 1990). Other sources include: Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, “Art for the Public,” Magazine of Art, September, 1938, Vol. 31, No. 9, pp.530-531 and 550; “Chicago’s Own,” Art Digest, Vol. 17, No. 8, 1/15/1943, p.18; “‘Our Fighting Navy’,” Art Digest, Vol. 19, No. 19, August, 1945, p.9; and Abstract and Surrealist American Art; Fifty‑eighth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago Catalog of an Exhibition Held November 6, 1947 through January 11, 1948, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1947), item 250 on p.61. See also: “Abstract and Surrealist American Art,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vol. 41, No. 1, December, 1947, p.88, and illustration of Weisenborn’s Metropolis on p.[90].

[7]Op. cit. Rago, Rudolph Weisenborn, a Retrospective, unpaged.

[8]Copeland C. Burg, “Weisenborn’s Talent Demands Spot in the Sun,” Chicago Herald-American, 8/31/1951, p.8. Burg complained that: “Weisenborn has been forced to display his work in little galleries totally inadequate to show off properly his powerful work.”

[9]Harold Haydon, “That Thorny Matter of Neglect of Local Artists,” Chicago Sun-Times, 4/25/1971, part 3, p.13.

[10]Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains; Placing Out in America, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 147-149 et passim.

[11]Op. cit., Holt, The Orphan Trains, pp.141-142. The most prominent placing-out organization, the New York Children’s Aid Society, actually insisted on a lack of legal documents; idem, 62.

[12]Chicago Home for the Friendless, Thirtieth Annual Report for the Year 1888, (Chicago: Chicago Home for the Friendless, 1889), p.44.

[13]Chicago Home for the Friendless, Twenty-seventh Annual Report for the Year 1885, (Chicago: G. P. Brown & Co., 1886), p.19.

[14]Op. cit., Holt, The Orphan Trains, 50-51.

[15]Op. cit., Holt, The Orphan Trains, 63-64 and 127.

[16]Clarence J. Bulliet, “Artists of Chicago Past and Present; No. 11: Rudolph Weisenborn,” Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11.

[17]Kenneth R. Hey, “Five Artists and the Chicago Modernist Movement, 1909-1928” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1973), p.[198]. The reader should note that this dissertation is packed with both useful information and complete errors.

[18]Oral history of Rudolph Weisenborn, recorded 5/16/1997, by his son, West Weisenborn, Illinois Historical Art Project Library (IHAP).

[19]Rudolph Weisenborn, “abstract? ABSOLUTELY!,” undated [1956] typescript, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frames 0017 and 0018. Used as a catalogue essay in: Recent Paintings by Weisenborn May 4 thru May 31, (Chicago: House of Arts, 1956) [four-page mimeographed pamphlet], Ryerson Library Pamphlet P-05500, Art Institute of Chicago.

[20]“Exhibit at Riccardo’s—Weisenborn First Abstract Painter,” The Booster, 3/21/1951, sec.2, p.5. The Booster may be hard to find; the article cited is available in the Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, Vol. 86. It is also on Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1409.

[21]Fritzi Wesienborn’s obituary in Chicago Tribune, 3/11/1968, sec. 1A, p.18.

[22]Who’s Who in America, Vol. 34, 1966-1967, (Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who, Incorporated, 1966), p.2259.

[23]Shown by her son, Gordon Weisenborn (1923-1986), to Kenneth Hey. Portions were summarized in: op. cit., Hey, [198]-202.

[24]Op. cit., Kenneth Hey, “Five Artists . . .,” p.199.

[25]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11.

[26]Op. cit., Kenneth Hey, “Five Artists...,” p.199.

[27]Fritzi Weisenborn, summarized in op. cit., Hey, p.199; op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11. The two accounts differ slightly.

[28]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11.

[29]Op. cit., The Booster, 3/21/1951, sec.2, p.5. The four sisters (or foster sisters) are not mentioned in any other account.

[30]No paper trail related to his studies at the University of North Dakota has been found. There is a reference to “agricultural college” in: op. cit., “Exhibit at Riccardo’s—Weisenborn First Abstract Painter,” sec.2, p.5; North Dakota’s agricultural college is in Fargo, and is now part of North Dakota State University; no paper trail was left there either.

[31]Ballenger & Richards Thirtieth Annual Denver City Directory for 1902, (Denver: Ballenger & Richards, [1902], p.1124. Weisenborn was listed at 801 13th Street on page 1182 of a similar city directory published in 1903.

[32]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11. In random searches through microfilm files of the Denver Post, no examples were found.

[33]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11. The Colorado Militia were frequently sent to Cripple Creek during a strike lasting from August 10, 1903, until July 26, 1904. See: Percy Stanley Fritz, Colorado; The Centennial State, (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1941), pp.372-373; Marshall Sprague, Money Mountain; The Story of Cripple Creek Gold, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953), pp.249-259; and Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars; from the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1973), 125-134.

[34]Fritzi Weisenborn, summarized in op. cit, Kenneth Hey, “Five Artists...,” pp.200-201 and op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11.

[35]Op cit., oral history of Rudolph Weisenborn, recorded 5/16/1997.

[36]Op. cit, Lens, The Labor Wars, p.134.

[37]West Weisenborn remembers his father talking about working in the Tomboy, Smugglers and Union mines; op cit., oral history of Rudolph Weisenborn, recorded 5/16/1997.

[38]Rudolph Weisenborn once wrote a letter trying to find one of his paintings that had once belonged to a retired mine-owner in Telluride: Rudolph Weisenborn to Editor, Telluride Tribune, 11/9/1957, Archives of American Art, microfilm reel 856, frame 0036. No answer to Weisenborn’s letter can be located. According to Telluride resident Jim Bedford, the Sheridan Hotel still owns easel paintings, some of which could possibly be by Weisenborn (telephone interview with Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, January, 1999).

[39]Op. cit., oral history of Rudolph Weisenborn, recorded 5/16/1997; Telluride resident Jim Bedford reported the backdrop, somewhat altered by added figures, is still owned by the Sheridan Hotel (telephone interview with Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, January, 1999)..

[40]Thomas J. Noel, Buildings of Colorado, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 586.

[41]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11.

[42]On Read see: Mantle Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, enlarged edition, (Greens Farms, Connecticut: Modern Books and Crafts, Inc., 1926/1974), p.295, and Peter Hastings Falk, editor, Who Was Who in American Art, (Madison, Connecticut: Sound View Press, 1985), p.507.

[43]Weisenborn dated his study with Read as 1905-1907 on a personnel sheet for the Art Institute of Chicago, dated 12/18/1948, and presumably prepared by Weisenborn in connection with the showing of one of his works in a Chicago and Vicinity Annual Exhibition.

[44]John C. Becken, “Among Three Million: Rudolph Weisenborn,” unidentified clipping from a Chicago newspaper, undated, but evidently from June 1927, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1243.

[45]Op. cit., Fielding, Dictionary..., p.227; op. cit., Falk, Who Was Who..., p.393; and Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940 (San Francisco: Hughes Publishing Company, 1986), p.293. For a discussion of Mannheim’s career, and illustrations of his work, see: William H. Gerdts and Will South, California Impressionism, (New York: Abbeville Pess, 1998), p.260 et passim.

[46]Op cit., Hughes, p.293, and Fritzi Weisenborn, summarized in op. cit, Kenneth Hey, “Five Artists...,” pp.199-200. Fritzi Weisenborn wrote another, slightly differing, account of these years in a single-page press release of 1953 for an exhibition at the Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico. A copy is in the Illinois Historical Art Project (IHAP) library.

[47]Weisenborn dated his study with Mannheim as 1907-1910, op. cit., personnel sheet for the Art Institute of Chicago, dated 12/18/1948.

[48]The painting (still owned by the family as of 1999) was reproduced, in op. cit., Rudolph Weisenborn, a Retrospective, unpaged.

[49]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11.

[50]Op. cit., Weisenborn, “abstract? ABSOLUTELY!,” Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frames 0017 and 0018.

[51]Op. cit., Fritzi Weisenborn, press release of 1953.

[52]“Weisenborn, Rudolph,” index card from the exhibition records of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

[53]On the Chicago showing of the Armory Show, see: Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), pp.187-214; and International Exhibition of Modern Art, Association of Modern Painters and Sculptors, Inc., (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1913).

[54]Clarence J. Bulliet, Apples and Madonnas; Emotional Expression in Modern Art, new revised and enlarged edition, (New York: Covici-Friede Publishers, 1930), p.234.

[55]Pound’s work had appeared in the first issue of the Chicago magazine Poetry, in October, 1912, and beginning with the second issue became its foreign correspondent.

[56]Llewellyn Jones, “Midsummer Madness,” The Friday Literary Review of the Chicago Evening Post, 7/31/1914, unpaged [p.8]; a page from a Vorticist Manifesto appeared on p.[9].

[57]John Grierson, “Saving Modern Art from Its Friends,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 6/2/1925, p.4

[58]Portrait of an Englishwoman was reproduced in: Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis: Holding up the Mirror to Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.9, and in: Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis, Paintings and Drawings, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), figure 146 on plate 22 (see also p.357).

[59]Op. Cit., Jones, “Midsummer Madness,” unpaged [p.8].

[60]The date of the Moulton and Ricketts exhibition appears on op. cit, personnel sheet for the Art Institute of Chicago, dated 12/18/1948. The show was listed in “Current Art Shows,” Chicago Examiner, 4/27/1918, p.8, displaying “paintings of unique impressionism.”

[61]The Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, (Chicago: The Chicago Directory Company, 1913), p.966; on Moulton, see: “Moulton, James Gardner,” John W. Leonard, editor, The Book of Chicagoans; a Biographical Dictionary of Leading Living Men in the City of Chicago, (Chicago: A.N. Marquis & Company, 1905), p.423. Moulton and Ricketts also had galleries in New York and Milwaukee: see, op. cit, “Moulton & Ricketts’ Failure ...The Firm’s History,” p.2.

[62]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.11.

[63]Op. cit., Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record…, p.940.

[64]Op. cit., Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record…, p.940. The Beil and Hermant Building was a rather tony studio in its day.

[65]Op. cit., Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record…, p.940.

[66]Louise James Bargelt, “Art,” Chicago Tribune, 4/9/1916, sec. 8, p.11.

[67]Special Exhibition of Paintings by The Independent Society of Artists, (Chicago: The Arts Club of Chicago, 6/7/1918), IHAP Library. Weisenborn exhibited A Winter Abstraction (location unknown). Paul Kruty makes the error of stating that there was only one exhibition of the Independent Society of Artists in his article, “Declarations of Independents: Chicago’s Alternative Art Groups in the 1920s,” in op. cit., Sue Ann Prince, editor, The Old Guard and the Avant-garde, p.78. For further information on the group see the Art Organizations section in this book.

[68]Op. cit., Bargelt, sec. 8, p.11.

[69]On the Chicago Athenaeum, see: Joseph M. Siry, “Chicago’s Auditorium: Opera or Anarchism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 57, No. 2, June, 1998, pp.150-151 and 159.

[70]Chicago Daily Journal, Wednesday, 4/18/1917; from a clipping in the Palette and Chisel Club file in the Newberry Library; not found in the microfilm files of this newspaper in the Harold Washington Library.

[71]“Palette and Chisel Club,” Chicago Examiner, 3/9/1918; from a clipping in the Palette and Chisel Club file in the Newberry Library; not found in the microfilm files of this newspaper in the Harold Washington Library.

[72]Op. cit., Chicago Examiner, 3/9/1918.

[73]Gordon Weisenborn, interviewed by Kenneth R. Hey, April 16-17, 1973, in op. cit. Hey, p.201; see also: Jacob Zavel Jacobsen, Thirty-Five Saints and Emil Armin, (Chicago: L.M. Stein, 1929), p.101.

[74]Marion Deyer, “Chicago,” American Art News, Vol. 16, No. 22, 3/9/1928, p.6.

[75]Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Annual Exhibition Palette and Chisel Club,” Fine Arts Journal, Vol. 36, April 1918, p.7. Portrait was reproduced on p.4.

[76]Rider, a native Chicagoan who had studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and in Europe, later became well known as one of the California Impressionists, and was also a motion-picture scenic artist for MGM and Fox Studios. See: op. cit., Gerdts and South, California Impressionism, p.263 et passim, and op. cit. Hughes, Artists in California, p.388.

[77]The printed list of paintings shown did not include Rider’s Autumn; in the copy in the Palette and Chisel Club file at the Newberry Library, Chicago, an addition, written in ink, lists the work.

[78]“Marne [i.e., site of a fierce World War I battle] Tame to This Artist’s Row; Palette and Chisel Club Froths in Temperamental Battle Over Entry at Exhibit,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, dated in pen as May 2, 1919 on microfilm reel 856, frame 1170, Archives of American Art; the date could not be verified in the microfilm files of the newspaper in the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, evidently because the article did not appear in all editions, and was not in the edition microfilmed.

[79]Op. cit., Chicago Herald and Examiner, dated in pen as May 2, 1919.

[80]Marguerite B. Williams, “Palette and Chisel Annual Exhibition,” Chicago Daily News, 4/25/1919, p.12.

[81]The Catalogue of The Twenty-Fifth Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1921), n.p., plate 5.

[82]Chicago Evening American, 1921 [exact date and page number not available]; reproduced on Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1172.

[83]Will Hollingsworth, “Throngs Visit Chicago Artists Exhibit,” Chicago Evening American, 1/29/1921 [page number not available], Archives of American Art, microfilm reel 856, frame 1171.

[84]“Introspective Artists,” in “News of the Art World,” Chicago Evening Post, 5/10/1921, p.5.

[85]Eleanor Jewett, “Art And Architecture,” Chicago Tribune, 5/15/1921, part 9, pp.8-9.

[86]Lena M. McCauley, “Salon des Refuses to appear Here” in “News of the Art World,” Chicago Evening Post, 11/15/1921, p.11. This footnote courtesy of research compiled by the IHAP Library. Some thirty-six years later Weisenborn recalled the salon was in 1919. Edith Weigle, “No Jury Show Often Stormy,” Chicago Tribune, 2/10/1957, part 7, p.4.

[87]On Cor Ardens see: op. cit., Kruty, The Old Guard and the Avant-garde, pp.79-80 and especially the IHAP library.

[88]Letter from Raymond Jonson to Mrs. M.J. Sparks, TLS, May 5, 1970, xerox copy in IHAP library.

[89]“Cor Ardens Will Exhibit at Institute; Milwaukee Art-Tasters Will Be Alert to See Work Done by Unique Group,” Milwaukee Journal, 12/3/1922.

[90]M. B. Mayhew, Milwaukee Sentinel, 12/17/1922, society, drama, music and movies section, p.3.

[91]M.B. Mayhew, “Exhibition of French Artists to Close Jan. 9,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 12/31/1922, drama, music, fashion, clubs and society section, p.4.

[92]Will Hollingsworth, “Architectural Show Is Now Popular,” Chicago American, 3/18/1922, in AIC Scrapbooks, vol.43. Lena M. McCauley, “Worth Seeing,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 4/4/1922, p.8. The invitation is in the Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago, pamphlet box P-05500.

[93]Op. cit., Hollingsworth, Chicago American, 3/18/1922.

[94]Karleton Hackett, “Prokofieff Wins Plaudits at Stock Concert,” Chicago Evening Post, 12/17/1921, p.12.

[95]Karleton Hackett, “‘Love for Three Oranges’ Said to Be Russian Jazz,” Chicago Evening Post, 12/31/1921/ p.5; “Prokofieff’s Opera in Chicago,” New York Times, 1/8/1922, p.4; Edward C. Moore, Forty Years of Opera in Chicago, (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930), pp.235-236.

[96]Eleanor Jewett, “Anisfeld Drawings of Opera Settings Given to [Art] Institute,” Chicago Tribune, 1/15/1922, part 9, p.5; Edward Moore, “‘Love for Three Oranges’ Color Marvel, but Enigmatic Noise; Prokofieff’s Opera Put on in Gorgeous Style,” Chicago Tribune, 12/31/1921, part 6, p.7.

[97]Op. cit., Fritzi Weisenborn’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, 3/11/1968, sec. 1A, p.18.

[98]Alfreda Gordon [Fritzi Weisenborn], “Bohemia with a Haircut,” Chicago Times, 3/24/1940, p.4-M.

[99]“Art Insurgent Weds in Court,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1188.

[100]“Artist Loses All His Productions in Studio Blast,” Chicago Evening Post, 6/21/1922, Home Edition, p.[1].

[101]“Rudolph Weisenborn,” Chicago Evening Post, 6/27/1922, “News of the Art World,” p.8.

[102]“Artist Weisenborn is Burned in Studio Fire,” unidentified clipping, undated but evidently published 6/21/1922, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1174.

[103]Op. cit., Oral history of Rudolph Weisenborn, recorded 5/16/1997.

[104]“Arrange Benefit to Artist,” clipping from an unidentified Chicago newspaper from July 1922, Archives of American Art microfilm 856, frame 1174.

[105]The concert, organized by Jane Addams, Ramon Shiva and a large committee is described in unidentified Chicago newspaper clippings from July 1922, Archives of America Art microfilm 856, frame 1174.

[106]Op. Cit., Chicago Evening Post, 6/21/1922, Home Edition, p.[1]: “All but one of his charcoal portraits, recently exhibited at the Fine Arts building, were destroyed.”

[107]Op. cit., “Rudolph Weisenborn,” Chicago Evening Post, 6/27/1922, p.8; Marguerite B. Williams, “Art Notes,” Chicago Daily News, 6/21/1922, p.10; the exhibition was also discussed in a clipping from another, unidentified, Chicago newspaper from July 1922, Archives of America Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1174.

[108]No precise date can be given for the move; the first listing of Weisenborn in a Chicago city directory was in 1923, when he was listed at 1501 North La Salle: Chicago City Directory, 1923, (Chicago: R.L. Polk & Co., 1923), p.2729. (This was the first Chicago city directory published since 1917.)

[109]Op. cit., Alfreda Gordon [Fritzi Weisenborn], Chicago Times, 3/24/1940, p. 4-M-5-M.

[110]“Darrow, Darrow on the Wall,” Chicago Sun-Times, 2/26/1956, sec.2, p.2. The portrait is reproduced in: op. cit., The Old Guard and the Avant-garde, p.69. The actor Ralph Bellamy discussed the friendship between himself, Douglas and Weisenborn in: Ralph Bellamy, When the Smoke Hit the Fan, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979), pp.44-45. West Weisenborn remembers visiting an actor’s home (he was unsure if it was that of Douglas or Bellamy) on a trip to California with his father in 1941; telephone interview with Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, 6/26/1998.

[111]Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1285.

[112]Claudia Cassidy, “On the Aisle: Douglas’ Superb Darrow Is Focus of ‘Inherit the Wind’,” Chicago Tribune, 2/9/1956, part 4, p.3.

[113]Clarence J. Bulliet, “How Modern Art Came to Town: The War Years and the Advent of No-Jury Shows,” The Chicagoan, Vol. 12, September 1931, 72.

[114]Caption under picture labeled “Real Art to Art Talk,” Chicago American, 3/23/1955, part 2, p.25.

[115]Op. cit., Alfreda Gordon [Fritzi Weisenborn], Chicago Times, 3/24/1940, p. 4-M-5-M.

[116]This was Weisenborn’s first documented experience as a teacher; see: “News of the Art World ...Academy of Fine Arts,” Chicago Evening Post, 8/10/1920, p.8.

[117]Clarence J. Bulliet, “Chicago Academy opens 35th Season,” Chicago Daily News, 10/10/1936, Art Antiques and the Artists section, p.4R.

[118]It was announced he re-joined the faculty to teach a Saturday class in C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries: Weisenborn’s Class,” Chicago Daily News, 12/25/1938, Art and Music Section, p.24.

[119]“Seeks to Scotch Success Stigma by Sunday Class,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 12/17/1929, p.4; see also: “Spare Time Classes in Art Open Oct. 12,” 9/24/1929, p.11. The cohesion developed by Weisenborn’s Academy students is illustrated by an off-campus group exhibition the staged. Clarence J. Bulliet, “Around the Picture Galleries: Beholden to Weisenborn,” Chicago Daily News, 11/25/1933, Art and Artists Section, p.24.

[120]From a clipping from a Chicago newspaper from July 1922, Archives of America Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1174.

[121]“At Hull House,” Chicago Evening Post, News of the Art World, p.[9]. See also: Eleanor Jewett, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Tribune, 6/18/1922, part 8, p.12.

[122]“Weisenborn’s Class,” Chicago Daily News, 10/5/1935, Art, Antiques and The Artists section, p.4: “Rudolph Weisenborn is conducting a life drawing and painting class Sundays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in his studio, 1007 Rush Street.” A notice appears again in C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries: Weisenborn’s Sunday Class,” Chicago Daily News, 9/12/1936, Art, Antiques and the Artists Section, p.4R. Edith Weigle, “Mexico Put on Canvas by Local Artist,” Chicago Tribune, 10/5/1947, p.G4.

[123]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 5/4/1935, p.1, and C. J. Bulliet,  “Around the Galleries,” Chicago Daily News, Antiques and the Arts section, 4/10/1937.

[124]John E. Walley, interviewed by Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, Chicago, 1/1973.

[125]Letter from John E. and Jano Walley to Rudolph and Fritzi Weisenborn, 11/11/1965, two-page handwritten note, signed, Archives of American Art, microfilm reel 856, frames 0044 and 0045.

[126]Frank Holland, “Exhibit of Students’ Works Is Colorful, Exciting Show,” Chicago Sun, 9/28/1947, p.15.

[127]“Dull, Busy, Utilitarian Chicago Might Well Be Cheered up by Art,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 7/2/1929, p.15.

[128]Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), p.146.Op. cit, Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, p.147.

[129]Op. cit, Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, p.147.

[130]“The No-Jury Society,” Chicago Evening Post, 8/29/1922, p.7.

[131]On the No-Jury Society see: op. cit., Kruty, The Old Guard…, pp.80-88 and 245-246; and op. cit., Hey, pp.212-218

[132]Lena M. McCauley, “No-Jury Exhibit Is Nationwide,” Chicago Evening Post, 10/3/1922, p.9.

[133]Op. cit., McCauley, Chicago Evening Post, 10/3/1922, p.9. On the Association of Arts and Industries, see: Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, “The Association of Arts and Industries: Background and Origins of the Bauhaus Movement in Chicago” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1973).

[134]“The No-Jury Society,” Chicago Evening Post, 10/10/1922, p.22.

[135]Fifth Annual Exhibition of the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, (Chicago: No-Jury Society of Artists, 1/10/1927).

[136]“Leading American Modernists Send Work to No Jury Show; Walter Pach to Speak,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 1/4/1927, p.8.

[137]Op. cit., Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, pp.69-72 and 299.

[138]Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, February 1 to March 11, 1923, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1923), p.6.

[139]Paul T. Gilbert, “Anti-Jury Art Radicals Pack Exhibition Jury; Clash of Modernist and Conservative Ideas Seen at Big Show,” Chicago Herald and American, March 1923, [exact date and page number not known], Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1183.

[140]Op. cit., Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, item 311.

[141]A whimsical caricature found in “The Parade of Chicago Artists to the No-Jury Artists Cubist Ball,” Chicago Literary Times, Vol. 1, 9/15/1923.

[142]“What is ‘No-Jury’ Jury,” unidentified clipping from a newspaper of January or February 1923, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1187. The writer had signed his or her name to the letter but it was not printed by the newspaper.

[143]Unidentified clipping from a newspaper, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1187.

[144]Marguerite B. Williams, “Art Notes,” Chicago Daily News, 3/19/1924, p.10; “Society of Artists in First Exhibition; Offerings Not Large in Numbers, but Prove Pleasing Collection, Critic Says,” Chicago Daily News, 3/24/1924 [page number and date could not be confirmed in microfilms of the Daily News], Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1205; Sam Putnam, “The Chicago Society,“ Chicago Evening Post, 4/1/1924, [unnumbered page, probably p.10]; and “Chicago Society of Artists,” unidentified newspaper clipping from about 3/24/1924, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1205.

[145]IHAP library files.

[146]See Becker’s obituary, Chicago Daily News, Art, Antiques & Interiors Section, 4/5/1941, p.15

[147]Hi Simons, “Of Mr. Weisenborn,” Chicago Evening Post, 3/27/1923, p.11; and “Weisenborn,” unidentified newspaper, dated in pen “Sunday, April 1, 23,” Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 187.

[148]Op. cit., Simons, Chicago Evening Post, 3/27/1923, p.11.

[149]Chicago Evening Post, 3/27/1923, [page number not available], Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1187.

[150]Published in: Susan S. Weininger, “Modernism and Chicago Art: 1910-1940,” in op. cit., The Old Guard and the Avant-garde, p.[69].

[151]George Kaiser, Gas; a Play in Five Acts; translated from the German by Hermann Scheffauer, (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1924). Donald James Powers’ review, “The Destructive Power of Machinery,” appeared in the Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, 4/17/1925, p.2. John Grierson, “Vorticism Brought to Serve Drama,” illustrated with Weisenborn’s “working-drawing,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 2/17/1925, p.11. Evidently Weisenborn’s sets for Gas were never used; the American premiere of the play took place on 1/27/1926, at the Goodman Theater of the Art Institute of Chicago, with sets by Louis Lozowick; see: “New Russian Art Adapted to Stage,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 1/26/1926, p.24, and Clarence J. Bulliet, “‘Gas’ a Work of Genius Only Half Attained,” Chicago Evening Post, 1/28/1926, p.11.

[152]An example would be an “unfinished portrait sketch” of writer and pacifist Dorothy Day (1897-1980) (location unknown), published in the Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, 4/18/1924, p.8.

[153]Art Institute of Chicago, The International Watercolor Exhibition, May 1-June 4, 1925, item 403, as cited in: op. cit., Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record…, pp. 19, 940.

[154]Samuel Putnam, “Seeing Myself as Artists See Me,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 4/21/1925, p.5.

[155]Op. cit., Putnam, Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 4/21/1925, p.5.

[156]Picture caption under portrait of Darrow, Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, 6/18/1926, p.3; the portrait of Mark Turbyfill was illustrated in the Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 4/27/1926, p.5.

[157]Op. cit., Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, p.147.

[158]“Review Work of Artists Which Is on Exhibit Here,” Wisconsin State Journal, 3/14/1926, p.23 (“Music and Art Page”); see also: “Eleven Chicago Artists Exhibiting at Madison,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 3/16/1926, p.12. (Weisenborn’s portrait of Grierson was illustrated in the Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World about 1925 [exact date and page number not available], Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1216.)

[159]“Many Attend Art Exhibit Opening; Paintings by Chicago Artists Are Displayed at the Coliseum,” Evansville Journal, 5/1/1922, page number unknown, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1171.

[160]The tour was to include works by about twenty modern Chicago artists and would be shown in London, Paris, Warsaw and Vienna, see: “Our Moderns Go Abroad,” in “News of the Art World,” supplement, Chicago Evening Post, 7/29/1924.

[161]Clark S. Marlor, The Society of Independent Artists; the Exhibition Record, 1917-1944, (Park Ridge, New Jersey: Noyes Press, 1984), pp.14, 64, 569 and 594.

[162]Op. Cit., Marlor, pp.14, 64, 569 and 594.

[163]“Newark Shows Work of Seven Chicagoans,” unidentified Newark newspaper clipping of April 1926, Archives of American Art reel 1229, frame 1926; see also: “Museum Shows Artists’ Work; Selected Paintings Hung in Library Exhibition Room,” Newark Star-Eagle, 4/19/1926, p.4.

[164]Op. Cit., Marlor, pp.64, 569 and 595.

[165]Op. cit., “Weisenborn, Rudolph,” index card from the exhibition records of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

[166]“Rudolph Weisenborn,” The Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 3/2/1926, p.6. One of the works was illustrated in the 3/9/1926 issue, p.16. His portrait of Chicago artist James Cady Ewell was illustrated in the 3/16/1926 issue, p.12.

[167]“Exhibit by Weisenborn,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 6/15/1926, p.6.

[168]Marguerite B. Williams, “Here and There in the Art World; Ray’s Film and Modern Art,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 9/14/1927, p.16; Regina Shapiro was illustrated. Weisenborn had been chosen by the New York-based Mindlins, operators of the Playhouse, because they found him to be “the most outstanding of the Chicago artists whose work we have seen” and “the modern spirit of his paintings is peculiarly fitting to the type of motion pictures being shown in the Playhouse.” Shown on the Playhouse screen during the Weisenborn exhibition were Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Man Ray’s Of What Are the Young Films Dreaming?

[169]“Playhouse Will Open Exhbition Room,” Chicago Daily News, 8/31/1927 (a clipping is in Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, vol.53, p.145).

[170]Op. cit., Williams, “Here and There in the Art World,” p.16.

[171]“Exhibit by Weisenborn,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 6/15/1926, p.5.

[172]Samuel Putnam, “Our Independents Invade Cabarets,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 11/16/1926, pp.4 and 5; Weisenborn’s Interior was reproduced on p.4.

[173]“Weisenborn Quits as President of No-Jury,” Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 12/14/1926, p.1.

[174]“Neo-Arlimusc Art Group Born,” unidentified Chicago newspaper clipping, 12/[?]/1926, Archives of American Art microfilm reel 856, frame 1274.