Finding Their Place The Regional Landscapes of Jacques Hans Gallrein and Doel Reed

By the end of their careers, Doel Reed (1895–1985) and Jacques Hans Gallrein (1888–1978)—both successful landscape painters who spent critical years in Stillwater, Oklahoma—were creating landscapes that seem, on initial view, irreconcilably different. Reed’s paintings—and, even more, his aquatints—border on abstraction, incorporating surrealist elements into bleak, minimal desert scenes. Gallrein’s lush, descriptive oils, on the other hand, depict the quiet, semidomesticated elements of the Oklahoma countryside. Born only seven years apart, the two men were trained in very similar ways, both artistically and otherwise. They matured as artists over the course of decades that saw radical shifts in art’s purpose, aesthetics, and audience—and they both recognized the need to adapt, at least discursively, to the new languages of the art world in order to remain relevant to diverse audiences. Despite their awareness of the changes brought by the advent of modernism, both men had strong ties to, and investment in, traditional modes of teaching and producing art, as well as to traditional media and genres. Although neither artist was originally from Oklahoma, their move to the region and resultant exposure to the dominant aesthetics of the Great Plains and the Southwest also had an effect on their work. For each, responding to modernism’s various demands over the course of the twentieth century meant adapting and reinterpreting their existing practices rather than adopting wholesale the tenets of a movement that, by the time both artists were in their eighties, was itself becoming a thing of the past. Despite the stylistic differences between these two artists, they shared a career-long strategy of maintaining devoted local audiences through relatively traditional imagery while pursuing wider audiences through an embrace of aesthetic and political discourses more frequently associated with the avant-garde.

Comparing Reed and Gallrein reveals this shared strategy, but it also reveals significant differences. By the end of their lives, both artists were celebrated for their significance to their local communities: Taos, New Mexico, in Reed’s case, and Stillwater, Oklahoma, in Gallrein’s. Neither man was native to the towns that claimed them (and in fact, both lived outside the borders of those towns)—but where Gallrein had to fight for a sense of belonging, Reed walked through life assured of his sense of place. This was the result of their individual differences, of course—but those individual differences, rooted in ethnicity and economic class, have broader implications for studies of art in Oklahoma as well as for historians’ understanding of national art movements. Moreover, a study of the ways in which both artists maintained local audiences necessary for their survival while simultaneously appealing to wider art audiences with different aesthetic and political demands when it suited them nuances our understanding of the relationship between conservative and modernist movements throughout the twentieth century.

“What appears monolithic from a distance is, upon closer scrutiny, almost infinitely varied.”¹ Art historian Joni L. Kinsey is describing the ecology of the prairie, but her statement applies equally well to the variety of art being produced by artists of the Great Plains throughout the twentieth century. While literary scholar Elizabeth Schultz has recently noted the importance of seascapes as aesthetic models for artists and writers representing the Great Plains to outsiders, Kinsey suggests that two solutions to the problem of this apparently empty landscape have most often been adopted by visual artists, “either avoiding depictions of prairies altogether or taking great care to include something that would provide the prairies with prospects of any sort.”² Artists who attempted the latter were often looking to European models—as both Gallrein and Reed did at certain points in their careers. Art historian Roger B. Stein contrasts artists who “portray[ed] the region with a Claude Lorrain classical landscape barely disguised with a few sagebrush” with those he considers more avant-garde, “those artists who have sought to depict the radical newness and differentness of the Great Plains in visual forms that deny the inherited artistic traditions.”³ For many artists, however—including Reed and Gallrein—the line between traditional and innovative was not quite so clear-cut.

Although on the surface these two Oklahoman artists were embarking on very different aesthetic projects, they were both avant-garde in one important sense: their resolute investment in the local landscape. As Stein observed, “the artists who create these [regionalist] images . . . posit the value of the local above or at least on a par with the national or the universal. The seeming obviousness of this formulation masks the fact that it is a relatively new one.”⁴ Both Reed and Gallrein appear to have believed that their local imagery, framed in the right way, had something of value to say to a national audience. In this sense, Gallrein and Reed were invested—in different ways—in a universalizing conversation that only incidentally referenced local specificities. Reed’s engagement with surrealism and primitivism was evidence of his awareness of international aesthetic trends; Gallrein’s focus on environmentalism and the national parks movement spoke directly to questions of compelling national concern. Reed’s affiliation with the Taos Society of Artists later in his career cemented this understanding of the relevance of regionalisms to the national artistic project. Regional artists’ organizations, intended to increase their members’ national visibility, also created venues for aesthetic debates. How to represent regional landscapes in a way that was recognizable—and recognizably distinct—to outsiders was of central concern. Historian Howard Roberts Lamar notes the complexity of this project:

In a sense, [becoming the official voice of a region] fulfills the basic goal of any artist, to translate the unique and the beautiful into something more universal that a national or general public can understand. In this instance, the artist not only had to communicate more than earth and sky, he or she had to suggest a distinctive regional landscape, history, economy, and culture that would be understood by both a local and a national public.⁵

In this essay, I seek to elaborate upon the idea of regionalist vision, not as an essential quality of particular geographies, but in terms of how local rhetorics helped both Reed and Gallrein to argue for the national significance of their local landscapes. Reed described his representations of the southwestern landscape as mythical hybrids of surrealist symbolism and mechanical abstraction, even as the images themselves remained resolutely representational. Gallrein politicized his domestic landscapes, arguing for national parks and regional architecture as the ecological equivalent of the well-known feminist catchphrase “the personal is political.” This strategy, too, allowed his actual images to remain quietly conservative even as they were hailed as progressive celebrations of local ecology.

In some ways, the careers of Reed and Gallrein were very different. Reed was on track to be a professional artist even in grade school; his path to a professorship at Oklahoma State University was straight and in most ways straightforward. Gallrein, although he also taught at Oklahoma State, found his way there via an extraordinarily circuitous route—and left after only a year to continue a journeyman lifestyle that only led to full-time, professional art-making and instruction in late middle age. Both artists had significant “local” audiences for their work even when the vagaries of broader public opinion and art-world taste left them on the margins. Reed’s local audiences were both literal and metaphorical: literally, in the small towns of Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Taos, New Mexico, and metaphorically, in the tight-knit world of American fine-art print-making. Gallrein’s local audience was made up of his long-term patrons and students—circles of art enthusiasts that he cultivated in and around Stillwater. Reed’s fame as an artist, and his status as a member of the avant-garde, came early, and had peaked by midcentury. Gallrein, on the other hand, struggled to find a place for his realist style until the environmentalist politics of the early 1970s gave his regional landscapes new relevance. It is significant to note that the cultivation of local audiences allowed both Reed and Gallrein to stay solvent and engaged in art-making even at times when their larger reputations were relatively weak.

Audience

The local held additional significance for both artists in terms of their audiences: in both artists’ cases, it was their local audiences who provided the most consistent support, both professional and economic, throughout their careers. For Gallrein, this was straightforward: his students in Stillwater, Perry, Coyle, Ponca City, and other small towns were his most vocal advocates, prompting coverage of his activities and, in the case of Lucille Graham, building his studio into a business venture that supported him until his death. Their respect and love for him is evident in everything from the naming of the “Gallrein Unit” of a local art guild to the congratulatory advertisement they placed in newspapers on Jacques Hans Gallrein Day, signed by thirty-six of his students. An adjacent note of congratulation was sponsored by local businesses, including the Sherwin-Williams Company, the Stillwater Art Guild, Chuck’s Paint and Wallpaper, and others. Gallrein’s story appealed to local journalists because it had an eager audience of local fans, and seemed to confirm a sense of local pride. He “has studied at the Royal Art academy at Munich, traveled around the world and painted in New York and other large cities,” one reporter reminded readers. “But as a place to live and work he prefers the cedar-dotted sandhills along the Cimarron river in Payne county.”⁶ The embrace of Gallrein as a local was the result of decades of community-building through his teaching and exhibitions, and Gallrein eagerly accepted it as an accolade of particular significance.

For Reed, meanwhile, there was the literally local audience in Taos, which still constitutes the bulk of Reed’s patronage. But perhaps more importantly, the American fine-art printmaking community constituted a kind of “local” audience—one that continued to be supportive of Reed’s obsessive technique and increasingly conservative aesthetics long after his paintings were considered old-fashioned by most of the art world. It was the conservative printmaker John Taylor Arms who nominated Reed for membership in the National Academy of Design in 1952; by the late 1970s, few would argue with critic Mary Carroll Nelson’s assessment that “his aquatints are the vehicle that has carried his name worldwide.”⁷ Indeed, in 1951 an interviewer for American Artist was already making essentially the same statement. Throughout the twentieth century the printmaking community, perhaps by virtue of its emphasis on technique and medium-specificity, has consistently been more diverse in its aesthetic commitments—and, generally speaking, has had a more conservative avant-garde than other media. Reed’s stature as a master printer—to a certain extent the result of canny self-promotion to the branch of American printmaking that valued intaglio over other media, and technique over content—assured that he would have an audience for his work regardless of the vagaries of avant-garde fashion.

Career Parallels: The First World War

Among the many differences between Reed’s and Gallrein’s biographies, there are several surprising similarities that offer instructive insights into their careers. Both served in the First World War, for example, and in both cases their service had a lasting and unanticipated impact on their art. Because Gallrein was an immigrant—and a German—he was treated with suspicion and assigned to domestic service. His sense of alienation seems never to have left him, and his search for local acceptance as well as his preference for relative isolation may be traceable to the pervasiveness of the same xenophobic attitudes that caused conflict in the military. Reed, as a healthy young American, was sent to the European front, and came home a respected veteran of combat. His self-assurance, already a central aspect of his personality, was reinforced by the respect he received as a wounded veteran, but at the same time that injury ultimately led to his permanent move to New Mexico many decades later. Reed’s service was straightforward and brief: a student at the Cincinnati Art Academy when the United States entered the war, he was sent to France as an artillery observer with the Forty-Seventh Infantry, Fourth Division (other accounts record him doing reconnaissance and map-making).The post meant that Reed was directly engaged in combat, and soon after his arrival he was caught in a gas attack and was hospitalized. Temporarily blinded, and with permanent lung damage, he was sent home after a brief recuperation in a French hospital. Reed returned to the Cincinnati Art Academy where he studied for two more years, a period that ended with his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Sparks, a watercolor student, in 1920.⁸ Reed’s war service, though brief, was honorable, and he was proud of his participation. Gallrein’s experience, on the other hand, seemed to epitomize the organizational and ideological challenges faced by the United States throughout the war. Like many histories, the facts are not completely clear; the artist himself told several versions of the story over the course of his life. The basic outline, however, remains consistent throughout various tellings—and reveals an experience colored by xenophobia and wartime paranoia.

An undated article pasted into Gallrein’s scrapbooks tells a very innocent version of the story. “He was drafted in the first World war,” the author notes, “and assigned to an artillery unit at Jefferson Barracks, but actually most of his time in service was spent helping sell Liberty bonds.”⁹ On the other hand, Robert Cunningham’s multipart series for the Stillwater NewsPress, published over several issues in 1969, tells a more detailed tale of Gallrein’s time in the service:

Tulsa was booming and the future looked bright early in 1918, then he was swept up by the draft. It looked as though he was going to have to wage war against his kin-folks, but he had cast his lot with this country, and he was willing to do his best. But it was not to be. Gallrein was shipped here and there, did his turn at picking up cigarette butts and riding the “honey wagon,” all of which is a part of recruit training, according to the best minds. Then he was hauled into the orderly room to be told he was going to be shot. That did not sit too well with him. It turned out he spoke better German than English, and the authorities had second thoughts about him. He could be a German spy, they decided. This deduction was strengthened when they searched his luggage and found a map of eastern Oklahoma with certain strategic areas circled. Each circle was a major oil strike, but Gallrein put those marks on the map to designate good fishing holes he wanted to revisit. They debated the meaning of these map marks at some length, but Gallrein finally was told the army would try and get along without him. He went back to Tulsa to pick up the pieces.¹⁰

In other versions of the story, it was not a map but Gallrein’s paintings themselves that were the source of his treachery. “By then, Gallrein had established his impressionistic style,” recorded Connie Falk, of Oklahoma State University’s student paper, the Daily O’Collegian. “Not overlooking this style, the fbi suspected Gallrein of using the dot and dash code in his technique to communicate to the enemy Germans, he said.”¹¹ This version of events is farfetched—and yet, coming from the memory of the artist himself, it suggests something more complex about the relationship to his military experience that Gallrein had developed over the course of fifty-odd years. A more prosaic, but also more likely, explanation of Gallrein’s ejection from the military is the artist’s observation that “the man over me found out” that he spoke German, and let his nationalist prejudices guide the proceedings from there.¹²

Along with the other versions of the story, Cunningham’s folksy, detailed account reveals the awkward position that Gallrein was in as a native German speaker during the war. The United States was swept by Germanophobia during the First World War, and German newspapers, street names, and language classes were banned throughout the country. German nationals considered enemy aliens were confined to internment camps. While Reed was considered to be an upstanding young man doing his duty for the country, Gallrein was met with suspicion and even the threat of execution. In a 1973 interview, Gallrein admitted that despite having “cast his lot with this country,” as Cunningham puts it, “I was an enemy alien, technically.”¹³ Gallrein didn’t become a citizen until much later—as a celebration of his marriage and the acquisition of farmland on which to live. “Once before he had taken the initial steps,” notes Cunningham, “but got side-tracked.”¹⁴ Although his willingness to serve made it clear that Gallrein was dedicated to his adopted country, his treatment at the hands of the U.S. Army shook him significantly. In some versions of the telling, his sadness and frustration come out more clearly than in others. Speaking with Connie Falk of the Daily O’Collegian in 1972, Gallrein simply described the experience as “a terrible, terrible blunder.”¹⁵ Looking at his later work, we might wonder what long-term effects Gallrein’s experiences in the First World War had on his art. The artist largely gave up on an impressionist style of painting at some point—long before his work was particularly well known. We might read the precise realism to which Gallrein turned as an unconscious emphasis on legibility in the visual arts, as he must have longed for clarity and transparency in his language and its reception.¹⁶

Education and Artistic Training

Ironically, the Germanness that gave Gallrein so much trouble during the war was, in artistic terms, his strongest asset upon moving to the United States a decade earlier. At the age of fourteen, Gallrein enrolled at the Kunstgewerbe-und Handwerkerschule in Magdeburg, Germany.¹⁷ As the name of the school suggests, its goals were to educate students in the practical as well as the fine arts, in line with the ideals of the international Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century. While Gallrein was a student at the school, many of the faculty and students were strongly influenced by German symbolism. Gallrein himself cited the artists Franz Stuck and Arnold Böcklin as influences; the latter was an inspiration in his own right for the former.¹⁸ In his striking and celebrated (at least before the First World War) art nouveau and symbolist style, Stuck transformed Böcklin’s mystical and mythological imagery into seductive, sometimes eerie scenes. Böcklin himself created paintings that presented familiar mythology and literature as mysterious, intimate visions. Although it is hard to see these artists’ influence in most of Gallrein’s paintings, the appeal of the exotic and of mythological subjects sporadically made itself felt throughout his career. Other stronger influences began to dominate Gallrein’s work after he left Magdeburg, however.

Gallrein’s father was an amateur lepidopterist, and the love of nature prompted by this pursuit led the young artist to focus on landscape painting. (Indeed, this love of natural science may have been what endeared the raw landscape of central Oklahoma to him. As it did for Kansas artist Henry Varnum Poor, who “knew every bird and insect and made collections of them,” perhaps Gallrein’s close study of the landscape made Oklahoma a “friendly world.”¹⁹) At the age of eighteen, Gallrein was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, where he studied with Wilhelm Trübner.²⁰ Trübner was a realist painter who had been strongly influenced by midcentury French realism, from Courbet to Manet. The former had visited Munich and demonstrated his alla prima method of painting from life, and Trübner, along with many others, was deeply affected both by the spontaneity of this practice and by the unsentimental realism that the older artist espoused. The foremost German exponent of this realist style was Wilhelm Liebl. Trübner and other devotees of the style gathered around Liebl, becoming known as the Liebl Circle. Although in some respects their realist style was seen as more conservative than the symbolism of the Kunstgewerbeund Handwerkerschule in Magdeburg, it was to have more longevity. Gallrein’s adoption of the Liebl Circle’s impressionist brushstrokes, as we have seen, apparently persisted well into the second decade of the twentieth century and even reappeared decades later. His affinity for realism, tempered by the misty romanticism of Böcklin, lasted much longer. The tensions in Gallrein’s work between sentimental romanticism and literalist realism did not go unremarked. “He is a romanticist, a realist, as well as a naturalist,” noted the Stillwater NewsPress in 1968. “He has always felt that the artist should paint what he sees, but ‘he sees with the soul as well as the eyes,’ he points out to his students.”²¹

German realism had been popular in the United States since the early 1800s, and indeed, many American painters traveled to Germany to study with the masters of realism throughout the nineteenth century. The persistence of this popularity into the middle of the twentieth century sometimes left art critics frustrated with mainstream taste. “Just as American poets followed the 19th century German poetry that idolized nature and clothed it in romantic haze[, ] so did American painters follow in the wake of German nature painters,” wrote Aline Jean Treanor in a review for the Daily Oklahoman in 1956. “So there have been little-Munich schools scattered throughout the United States, an earlier generation of this latest three-year-old school in Perry [founded by Gallrein].”²² Treanor leaves her reader in no doubt as to the contemporary relevance of this type of painting: “Perry artists would feel quite at home,” she laments, “to step into the Brown Country galleries in Nashville, Ind., where Munich-trained T. C. Steele founded one of these landscape schools some 30 years ago.”²³ And indeed, Steele’s work, done in the first quarter of the century, is very much like Gallrein’s from the third quarter, in both its Midwest landscape subject matter and its realist style.

Like Gallrein, Reed enjoyed an early start as a trained artist, attending the John Herron Art Institute’s Saturday art classes as a child in Indianapolis.²⁴ In another biographical coincidence, T. C. Steele was one of the founding core faculty at the Herron School and would have been a major figure on the faculty while Reed was taking classes, although it is unlikely that the two ever met at that time. Reed went on to study architecture as an apprentice after he graduated from high school, and in 1916, after four years of apprenticeship, decided to enroll at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. While there, Reed studied with James R. Hopkins, Herman H. Wessel, and Lewis H. Meakin. All three men were known for their American impressionist paintings. Wessel and Meakin both specialized in landscape—and it is likely that Reed’s early landscapes, like Gallrein’s, were done in the same aesthetic vocabulary as his teachers’. Both Wessel and Meakin were print-makers as well as painters, although Reed apparently only studied intaglio printing with the latter. Meakin often printed for other faculty at the art academy, including Frank Duveneck. Reed recalled watching this process:

Many years ago, while I was an art student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, I had the privilege of watching L. H. Meaken [sic] print from the skillfully-executed plates of Frank Duveneck. . . . I still recall Meaken’s studio on the top floor of the Art Museum, the great press, stacks of dampened paper, the pungent odor of acids and etching ink, and an atmosphere of strangeness one associates with an adventure that may change his entire life.²⁵

For all these artists, the fine-art etching was a natural companion to impressionist painting, since both emphasized the hand of the artist, plein-air execution, and landscape subjects.²⁶ As we will see, Reed’s development of a related intaglio medium, aquatint, would diverge from his teachers’ work in some respects, but he retained a respect for the technical prowess and fine-tuned expertise of a professional printer like Meakin.

Reed left the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1920, but his style developed in ways that paralleled his teachers’ experience. By the 1930s, both Reed and Wessel were working in a regionalist style influenced by the nationalism that emerged during the Great Depression. Wessel began to work on public mural projects, in post offices and government buildings, adapting his style to the crisp, illustrative style favored by programs like the Works Progress Administration. Reed, meanwhile, remained committed to easel painting and printmaking—but his landscapes began to reflect the increasing popularity of the regionalist movement. Paintings by Reed from the 1930s, such as Oklahoma Farm (Fig. 1) reveal the heightened palette and expressionist brushwork we associate with Thomas Hart Benton, in Missouri, and John Steuart Curry, in Kansas, along with the emphasis on local and rural subject matter. Despite Reed’s adaptation to changing stylistic influences, he maintained that his art engaged with universal values that had a long history—and that desire for the universal may have contributed to his rejection of regionalist style, which was accompanied by sometimes vitriolic antimodernist rhetoric that alienated many art-world audiences. “The only rule in which I am primarily interested,” he observed to an interviewer, “dictates ‘one should fill the space successfully.’ This principle of composition was accepted as a fundamental of good design by the decorators of the Greek vase, the Gothic sculptor, and the Renaissance painter alike.” Having been exposed to comprehensive collections at the Herron Museum and at the Cincinnati Art Museum, where his teacher, Meakin, was a curator until 1917, Reed was predisposed to think about his work in a very broad historical context.

Fig. 1.

Doel Reed, Oklahoma Farm, 1935. Oil on canvas, 29.5 34 inches. Courtesy Oklahoma State University Museum of Art.

The Artist as Teacher

Perhaps because both Reed and Gallrein were immersed in such rich learning environments as students, teaching remained critical to their practice throughout their careers. Gallrein found his students haphazardly: after moving to Oklahoma in order to see the American West in person, he picked up a couple of eager students when they saw him painting outdoors. Soon he was teaching at Murray State College in Tishomingo; shortly thereafter he applied for a job at Oklahoma State University. That lasted a year, and then Gallrein was on his own again. Several failed business ventures later, he finally found himself back outdoors, painting and attracting students. He started teaching regular private classes in Ponca City and Perry, and eventually in Stillwater as well. Teaching allowed him to dedicate more time to painting than ever before, and he “amazed even himself with his ability to improve his technique despite his mounting years.”²⁷ Similarly, “I learned more teaching than I ever learned in art school,” Reed was quoted as saying in 1971.²⁸ In a sense, what Reed learned in art school—and Gallrein learned through experience—was that he would only really learn his craft by teaching it to others.

Gallrein taught at Oklahoma State University before the First World War, and Reed afterward. University politics affected both their careers: Gallrein resigned after a year, disappointed and angry about the institution’s lack of support for a university president he felt was a good friend and excellent administrator. Reed, on the other hand, went from one success to another: as department head, he guided the Art Department through a variety of administrative changes, large and small.²⁹ Reed’s influence as a colleague and educator was profound, and he used the university’s resources, as well as his position as department head, to create a workshop atmosphere that has been compared, with reason, to those run by painters in the Renaissance.³⁰ Reed encouraged his students to perfect their technical skills by close study of their teacher’s techniques—up to and including copying his work directly, particularly when working in aquatint, the medium in which Reed’s work became most celebrated. Student work that came out of Reed’s classroom was often indistinguishable from that of the teacher—his most accomplished students avidly studied, and ultimately replicated, his techniques. For example, prints by former osu student (and later, faculty member) B. J. Smith, made while Smith was Reed’s printmaking student, are indistinguishable from prints by the master (Fig. 2). Smith clearly followed Reed’s instructions as far as technique—but more than that, Smith copied his teacher’s style.

Reed’s goal as a teacher was to establish and promote the highest possible level of print-making—a medium that he felt was uniquely able to communicate his artistic intentions. A truly artistic aquatint, he wrote, could be developed from a drawing that “expresses not only the emotional message of the artist, but incorporates the range and beauties of the aquatint.”³¹ When we see student work like Smith’s, we understand that style and subject matter were as much a part of Reed’s pedagogy as technique. Whether teaching printmaking or painting, Reed’s emphatic belief in the synthesis of style, content, and technique often led him to be autocratic in his teaching methods. Smith recounted a story of two painting students who became intrigued by abstract expressionism and tried it out in Reed’s class. Their professor’s reaction was allegedly to eject them from the class and from the program—and then, using his influence with the administration, he attempted to prevent them from enrolling in any other program!³² Anecdotal and third-hand as this story is, we must take it as an indication of Reed’s mythos rather than as historical fact. Widespread agreement among those who knew him, however, along with the indisputable visual evidence of student work such as Smith’s, suggests that the spirit of the story is accurate even if the specifics are not.

Gallrein, like Reed, expected his students to learn by imitation, to cleave to his stylistic and technical example, and to preserve his legacy for the future. Although Gallrein taught sporadically throughout his career, he was in his seventies before he established a dedicated group of students. In a sense, it began with a tragedy: Gallrein’s wife, Florence, had a stroke in 1964. Florence had been overseeing the business side of Gallrein’s career as a painter and teacher, but suddenly she was not only unable to take care of the couple’s finances but was in need of constant care herself. Gallrein, with no head for business, turned to a student, Lucille Graham, for help. Graham had enrolled in Gallrein’s classes when he began teaching in Stillwater a year earlier, and she combined a natural talent for painting with an equally savvy head for business. As Stillwater NewsPress reporter Robert Cunningham observed in a series of articles profiling the artist, “It was a good combination. The studio was moved to a remodeled second floor in the Graham home in Stillwater and art lessons continued on a broader scale.”³³ Classes had started on a small scale in 1963, prompted by a group of students who created a club they dubbed the “Gallrein Unit” of the “Conservative Artists’ Guild.” At the time of its creation, the Gallrein Unit was the only chapter of the guild, and it met in Graham’s home.³⁴

Fig. 2.

B. J. Smith, Untitled (Landscape), undated. Aquatint, 11 14.25 inches. Courtesy Oklahoma State University Museum of Art. Gift of George Smith in memory of B. J. Smith.

By 1968, Gallrein was publicly identifying Graham as his successor: an article in the NewsPress carried the headline “Jacques Gallrein Grooming Mrs. Graham to Carry on His Personal Style of Art.” The article’s author, Elsie Shoemaker, recorded Gallrein’s desire for a successor:

Though the old master still enjoys teaching and painting and selling, he knows that some day he will step down, and when he does he wants to leave the teaching of his kind of art in capable hands. He hopes Mrs. Graham will be the one to continue his work, because as he says, “She has already developed a definite style . . . she has it—style—more than any other of my students.”³⁵

The NewsPress critic was writing on the occasion of an exhibition of Gallrein’s and Graham’s work at the Studio Gallery—now a formal, public exhibition space within the Graham home—and he took the opportunity to note about the latter’s paintings that “they’re much like her teacher’s in color and design characteristics.”³⁶ Indeed, a comparison between paintings by student and teacher confirms this assessment: without signatures, one might be hard pressed to tell the two hands apart.

Self-Fashioning: Myths of Artistic Identity

In 1943 Reed authored a series of articles that explain, through words and photographs, exactly how he made his aquatints, from polishing the plate through printing an edition. They were published in American Artist—a magazine aimed at professional and amateur artists whose content focused on contemporary art and artists, with a practical focus on their art-making techniques. Throughout his description, two things become very clear: first, that Reed wanted to explain to as wide an audience as possible how to achieve the pristine clarity of his aquatints; and second, that he was certain that this pristine clarity is the only reasonable goal for an intaglio print-maker. “The finished plate should contain the artist’s emotional message, his manner of saying it, the range of values, the beauty of line, and in all the complete expression so that only good craftsmanship is necessary to bring forth the beauties of the plate. Hand wiping and retroussage are unnecessary in printing a well-etched aquatint.”³⁷ Reed’s printmaking process reflects the antiromantic, mechanistic ideals of modernist aesthetics. The techniques that Reed rejects as unnecessary (and implicitly as the tools of those who lack artistic skill and good craftsmanship) were extensively used by nineteenth-century artists to exploit the effect of leaving the etching plate’s surface only partially or selectively wiped clean of ink. Turn-of-the-century printmakers were enamored of the smoky, subjective effects achievable with a judicious use of this so-called plate tone. Perhaps most famously, James Abbott McNeill Whistler used plate tone so dramatically that his etchings effectively became monoprints—and he even embraced technical errors like foulbiting, which leaves dark spots in white areas, when they enhanced the aesthetic effect of his image. Of course, such assessments are subjective, rooted in specific historical contexts that informed people’s aesthetic preferences as well as their understanding of the goals and motivations of art-making. By the 1930s, printmakers were generally striving for uniformity between impressions within an edition rather than singular effects, and they—including Reed—explained their preference for uniformity in the language of labor and mechanization, even when their imagery—as with Reed’s—was more pastoral than industrial.³⁸

This change in priorities reflected changes in the print market, as well as changes in aesthetic preference: by the 1930s, printmakers were expected to publish fixed editions of their work in which each impression was as similar to the others as possible, in order to give the work a predictable value in the marketplace. Moreover, choices in media were expanding to include printmaking processes that were by their very nature more uniform in their results. Where intaglio processes like etching and dry-point had dominated nineteenth-century fine art print production, by the third decade of the twentieth century, lithography had taken over. Screen printing would soon follow (in 1951, American Artist published a how-to guide for artists interested in screen printing, suggesting its mainstream appeal to contemporary print-makers). Both of these techniques had their origins in commercial printing, which led them to focus on consistency of production as a primary value. Although Reed remained a champion of etching and aquatint, his clean, crisp aesthetic, which focused on the perfectly etched plate and its exactly reproducible printed image, shared much with contemporary lithographic practice.

By midcentury, Reed routinely characterized himself as a “worker,” engaged in creative production. This was not uncommon in an age that celebrated American manufacturing and in a political climate that championed the worker as the source of the United States’ economic prosperity as well as a sign of its national success. In a 1943 article on aquatint for American Artist, Reed hailed the efficiency of his “fellow workers.” “They, also, have discarded many steps [from the traditional aquatint process], as it is in this manner that a workable plan arrives.”³⁹ For Reed, the mechanics of his aquatint process led to aesthetic results that would most please the thoughtful creative worker: in a 1943 essay for American Artist, he observed that

the artist of today interested in form, pattern, and textures will find in the aquatint a medium of unlimited possibilities. With its great range of values from brilliant lights to intense, rich blacks, it is, in the hands of the creative worker, a means of expression not surpassed by any black and white medium. It is not a means for the reproduction of some fanciful sketch, but rather for the creation of serious and well-planned work.⁴⁰

Dismissing spontaneity as “fanciful,” Reed implicitly aligns the careful solidity of his geometric abstraction with the labor of a serious worker.

The mechanical quality of Reed’s printmaking technique is echoed in his use of geometric abstraction to reduce the landscape to a series of layered forms. Much of the specificity of his landscapes, whether ostensibly in Oklahoma or New Mexico, is deprioritized in favor of this abstraction and its emotional impact, regardless of site-specific sentiment. This strategy is often heightened by Reed’s insertion of surrealistic elements, which heighten the sense of unease and instability created by stormy skies and imbalanced rocks. For example, in Elements of the Past (Fig. 3), Reed’s own description focuses on the abstraction of the composition. “It was so planned that the eye would follow past the large mass of the dark doorway to the brilliant light on the broken wall and that this light would be broken by the more-or-less abstract pattern of the plaster and adobe. The strong light was carried into the sky in a pattern that would give that area movement.”⁴¹ But in addition to the chiaroscuro and patterning, we are invited to respond to the content itself: architectural elements with no clear purpose inhabit a space of rock fragments, scarred walls, and overcast sky. The sheer inexplicability of these elements, especially in combination with one another, introduces a surreal element to a landscape that is impossible to identify as local to any particular region.

Fig. 3.

Doel Reed, Elements of the Past, 1950. Aquatint, 11.125 17.125 inches. Courtesy Oklahoma State University Museum of Art. Gift of Brenda Falconer Harris in honor of Patricia Moore Falconer Cantrell.

The introduction of surrealism and its attendant emotional response to Reed’s aqua-tints reminds us that despite his industrializing language and mechanistic geometric abstraction, Reed always impressed upon viewers, readers, and students the importance of artistic subjectivity—understood in a romanticized, expressionistic way. We recall that according to Reed, aquatint is a “means of expression,” and he believed that in addition to its formal perfections, every successful plate would “contain the artist’s emotional message.” “I strive,” Reed told an interviewer in 1951, “to fill [my composition] with a sense of beauty, a dramatic quality, and at the same time to establish a means of emotional communication.”⁴² The process, too, must be allowed its emotional side: in rejecting the use of gauges that indicate the precise strength of the acid bath, Reed observed, “They can be used very successfully, but they remove all the adventure, doubt, and frenzy that go into the making of fine prints.”⁴³ The apparent contradictions of Reed’s self-descriptions both as a mechanical worker and a sensitive seeker of beauty are resolved when we understand his need to appeal to different audiences: an art-world audience looking for evidence of modernist aesthetic inquiry, and a consumer audience looking for familiar local color and appealingly decorative compositions.

Reed accepted with pleasure the many accolades that came his way in the first half of the twentieth century, and for a short time he was celebrated on the national stage. A 1951 interview with Reed in American Artist noted that “in the field of aquatint he has no peer. He paints too, but it is his aquatints that have won his enviable reputation as an artist.”⁴⁴ The artist’s style stayed consistent for decades, and the elements of Reed’s practice that made him progressive in the 1930s and 1940s made him increasingly retrograde in the decades after the Second World War. Reed rejected postwar abstraction outright (for himself, but also, as we have seen, among his students). Although Reed’s influence was similarly felt among the Art Department faculty, they were not constrained by the same dependence as his students were. And although the early work of other printmakers on the Oklahoma State University faculty such as J. Jay McVicker and Dale McKinney is strikingly similar to Reed’s (again, particularly when they were working in intaglio), by the 1940s both of the younger artists were avidly exploring the potential of complete abstraction for their work, as well as diverse printmaking media such as silkscreen and lithography. They were not unusual in this interest: in 1950 the associate curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Beverly Hale, announced that “Abstraction definitely is sweeping the country.”⁴⁵ Although Reed was sometimes open to the innovations allowed by these changes, the overall impact on his work was small. The artist’s adherence to printmaking was a strategy that allowed him to preserve a national reputation as the American avant-garde passed him by.

Although his paintings received no critical attention throughout the Cold War, Reed’s prints continued to be considered technically masterful and even, by some standards, experimental. In 1979, for example, interviewer Mary Carroll Nelson noted favorably that Reed had incorporated the use of a lithographic crayon into his intaglio work.⁴⁶ In images like Cordova (Fig. 4), printed in 1960, Reed used the lithographic crayon rather than etching ground to stop out parts of the plate. The result is a crayon-like line that, unsurprisingly, looks like a lithographic mark in reverse—and the uncharacteristic effect was appealingly experimental to Reed’s “local” audience of traditional American printmakers.⁴⁷ Reed himself used examples like this to emphasize his connection to modernist experimentation and the national printmaking avant-garde. Gallrein, on the other hand, was defiantly antimodern for much of his career. Slightly older than Reed, he had also been trained in a conservative tradition, and his early experiences in the United States did not encourage him to embrace the avant-garde. Gallrein did admit to creating abstract works as teaching aids, and a 1959 painting titled Modern Landscape (Fig. 5) reveals a dramatically different style than the one typically associated with Gallrein. A heightened palette and strikingly post-Impressionist brushstroke consisting of tiny overlapping crosses offers a hint of what Gallrein’s early work may have looked like. But Modern Landscape is the exception in Gallrein’s realist oeuvre. “When I first started at school,” Gallrein told student reporter Cathy Wright, “the abstract influence was just beginning, but I have never agreed with it. I was confused by it because I don’t understand it, and I think most people don’t.”⁴⁸

Fig. 4.

Doel Reed, Cordova, 1960. Aquatint, 11 19.5 inches. Courtesy Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Doel Reed Center for the Arts Collection, from the estate of Martha Reed.

This confusion in the face of modern art may have been widely felt, but it was far from universal even in relatively conservative communities like Oklahoma. Aline Jean Treanor, reporting for the Daily Oklahoman, lamented the scarcity of modern art openly and sarcastically. “Haven and sanctuary have been discovered for reluctant spirits and lost souls fleeing from the turbulent realm of modern art,” she began a 1956 review of Gallrein’s recent activity. “It’s Perry, where you’ll find no more trace of an abstractionist or expressionist than a brindle gnu or an abominable snow man.”⁴⁹ Despite Treanor’s scorn, and as the existence of Modern Landscape suggests, Gallrein’s position was as pragmatic as it was philosophical—there was a strong market in Oklahoma for a painter who could both provide and teach others realistic landscape painting; the audience for modern or abstract art was distinctly smaller. “Gallrein is considered outstanding as a conservative painter,” commented the Stillwater NewsPress, somewhat ambivalently, in 1968. Five years earlier, the paper had marked the advent of the “Conservative Artists’ Guild” in the city—an organization that in naming itself was borrowing from nationwide conversations about the relative place of modernist experimentation in the contemporary art world. The divide, throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, was heated, with art competitions going as far as offering separate entry categories for conservative and modern work. Some observers were distressed by the schism: an anonymous correspondent with American Artist magazine in 1943 grumbled, “I am continually distressed to find that artists . . . are extremely narrow and confined in their interests. Conservatives damn the modernists; modernists damn the conservatives. . . . There are as many kinds of taste in art as there are in cheese.”⁵⁰ Unfortunately, few agreed with this rational position. The debate peaked in Oklahoma in the 1960s, epitomized by the organizations that ultimately came together to create the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

In 1910 the Oklahoma Art League was founded with the intention “to foster a love and taste for art and to establish a permanent museum of art.” The league collected work and held exhibitions, but lacked permanent space. This was remedied in 1936, thanks to the Works Progress Administration, which sponsored the creation of the wpa Experimental Gallery, run by artist Nan Sheets. Under her direction, the gallery expanded and began to offer classes as well as exhibitions. During the Second World War, federal funding for the arts dried up, and the art league turned to private philanthropy to raise funds for a permanent building: the Oklahoma Art Center. Continuing to grow, by 1958 the league’s collection was moved to yet another new building, on the state fairgrounds, and was designated a museum. Sheets retired in 1965, and her fellow art league member, Eleanor Kirkpatrick, took over. In 1968 the museum purchased the Washington Gallery of Modern Art Collection and was immediately the center of a serious controversy between the state’s “modern” and “conservative” art communities. The rift was unbridgeable, and the Museum of Conservative Art was born. The Oklahoma Art Center remained committed to modernism, focusing on twentieth-century American painting and photography. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the split persisted. Financial constraints, and the increasingly untenable position of the Museum of Conservative Art, led the two institutions to reunite in 1989—eleven years after Gallrein’s death. As far as Gallrein was concerned, the break between conservatism and modernism was permanent—and as the Gallrein Unit of the Conservative Artists’ Guild in Stillwater enthusiastically confirmed, he was on their side.

That Gallrein’s paintings suddenly became celebrated for their progressive ideology in the late 1960s was perhaps more historical coincidence than conscious intention on the artist’s part. Despite its accidental nature, the artist embraced his newfound fame wholeheartedly, quickly adapting his rhetoric to match the stories reporters sought. Whereas in 1968 the NewsPress’s description of Gallrein’s work as “his kind of art” was a comment on the conservatism of his style, just a few short years later the NewsPress and other publications were rethinking the relevance of his realistic style. The artist himself—or perhaps his student, business partner, and tireless advocate, Lucille Graham—was quick to recognize the affinities between the environmentalist movement and the late Victorian sentiments about the significance of the natural world that had been informing Gallrein’s work for decades. The contradictions between Gallrein’s German romanticism and his scientific interest in the natural world were resolved in the heightened emotional language of environmentalists. Suddenly, journalists were noting his background in entomology alongside his love of nature, and both were seen as equally progressive.

On December 8, 1970, the Daily O’Collegian bore a headline that proclaimed dramatically, “Artist Is Waging Ecological War.” In the article, journalist Pat Upton frames a familiar fact about Gallrein in a strikingly new way:

Fig. 5.

Jacques Hans Gallrein, Modern Landscape, 1950. Oil on canvas, 11.5 15.25 inches. Courtesy Oklahoma State University Museum of Art. Gift of Lucille Ritthaler Graham and her son, Michael Graham.

Oklahoma holds a special attraction to Gallrein for it has mountains, valleys, plains and forests and much more all uniquely packaged in one state, he explains. “It’s sad though,” says the son of a German entomologist, “because I can capture a beautiful little road or a sparkling stream one year and when I return the next, they’ve been bulldozed and destroyed.”⁵¹

Clearly orchestrated to some extent by Gallrein, who replaced a version of his autobiography in which he came to Oklahoma seeking Indians and the mythic American West with this new emphasis on the state’s diverse natural beauty, Upton’s narrative further augments Gallrein’s ecological motivation by asserting his familial connection to the study of the natural sciences. In its revelation of the natural world, the realism of Gallrein’s painting has become its most significant feature. The reinvention of Gallrein as an aesthetic eco-warrior was quickly echoed by other journalists. Elsie Shoemaker, writing for the NewsPress in 1970, underscored the connection between Gallrein’s interest in painting from nature and his father’s scientific pursuits: “People who have seen Artist Gallrein’s work know that it does speak for this kind of interest. As a boy he, in Germany, collected butterflies as he assisted his father who was a professional butterfly collector.”⁵² Shoemaker returns to this theme a year later: “His father in Germany was always an environmentalist,” she begins. “His hobby was entomology. He was interested in bird and animal life. . . . [Gallrein relates that] his mother was almost as interested in the butterflies as was his father.”⁵³ In this version of Gallrein’s childhood, both parents were instrumental in pointing the young artist toward natural—and therefore environmentalist—subjects. Even his students were called on to take part in this new mythmaking: “Gallrein himself is a great conservationist, his students will tell you, they having picked up this characteristic from what he does himself and what he likes for them to paint,” claimed Shoemaker. Probing more deeply into this question of conservationist subject matter, however, she gets a rather vague answer. “His paintings in the main reflect this interest in nature—landscape, ‘most of them beautiful landscapes,’ one [student] has said.”⁵⁴ All this coverage appears to have been sparked by two exhibitions of Gallrein’s work in 1970.

The first was held at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, in association with Earth Day, and the second was held at Platt National Park (now the Chickasaw National Recreation Area) to inaugurate the new Travertine Nature Center. The exhibition at East Central University was just one among many events held during the Earth Day festivities, but the write-up in the Ada Sunday News reflected Gallrein’s (and presumably Graham’s) increasingly canny marketing of the artist’s work. “The exhibit will feature works by Jacques Hans Gallrein of Coyle, a former staff member of the Oklahoma State University art department,” the article begins—and the writer’s focus on Gallrein’s Oklahoma State University connection is immediately striking. Although Gallrein always acknowledged his brief stint at the university, he never foregrounded it, presumably recognizing that a single year out of a career that lasted more than seven decades had not been particularly influential in itself. But as his work began to attract attention in the 1970s, his brief affiliation with osu became inseparable from his name.

In 1969 the Travertine Nature Center opened at Platt National Park. One of only two such centers in the country, it was sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior and was intended to “awaken an awareness of ” the National Environmental Education Development (need) program.⁵⁵ need was a broad-based approach to integrating environmental awareness into grade-school curricula that included components related to four broad subject areas: communication, social studies, the arts, and mathematics.⁵⁶ In 1970 park superintendent Jack E. Stark invited Gallrein to exhibit his paintings at the center for a week in June. As the NewsPress editorialized, “The Stillwater-Coyle artist has been asked to exhibit because his pictures show so well what we have now, but may not have in the years ahead if we continue despoiling the countryside.”⁵⁷ During the week of the show, Gallrein also held “paint-outs” at the park, during which he and others painted park scenes outdoors. Intentionally evocative of the Civil Rights “sit-ins” that had been used by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others to protest racial injustice in the 1950s and 1960s, Gallrein’s paint-outs reframed the plein-air techniques of the late nineteenth century as environmental activism. As the NewsPress pointed out to its readers, Gallrein’s involvement at the park was “for the sake of ecology rather than art—paintings showing nature as we know it now in place of what such places may become if we misuse our native beauty.”⁵⁸ Gallrein’s efforts, along with those of Platt National Park, were recognized in the National Park Service’s newsletter, published by the Department of the Interior in September 1970.⁵⁹

Fig. 6.

Jacques Hans Gallrein, Nature Center—Platt National Park, 1970. Oil on canvas, 18 24 inches. Courtesy Oklahoma State University Museum of Art. Gift of Lucille Ritthaler Graham and her son, Michael Graham.

The paintings Gallrein produced of scenes at Platt National Park are not his most interesting—at least not from a formalist or avant-garde perspective. Compositionally and technically, the paintings are flat-footed and literal, as in Nature Center—Platt National Park (Fig. 6). The painting’s horizontal sweep is emphasized by the low walls and wide chimney of the building it depicts, the Travertine Nature Center. With its unremarkable depiction of an equally unremarkable building, this painting was, paradoxically, exactly what environmental advocates wanted. Gallrein’s realism allowed viewers to see his paintings as documentary.

The building shown in [Nature Center] gets its name from Travertine Creek which the interpretive building spans. Travertine is a soft carbonate rock deposited by the flowing waters in this area, including Travertine Creek and a sample of it is on display in the building. . . . The building . . . serves as an introduction and invitation to get outside into the true exhibit area—and this spot is one of the highly enjoyed nature spots in the state.⁶⁰

In other paintings from Platt, including Bear Falls and Sycamore Crossing, Gallrein uses generic conventions to depict elements of the Platt landscape in the conventional visual rhetoric of natural beauty. The familiarity of these conventions appealed to environmentalist audiences because they made a compelling, easily accessible case for the significance of Platt National Park—and by extension, all national parks. (At the same time that he was painting at Platt, Gallrein was exhibiting paintings of other national parks—including the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park—at the Studio Gallery.)

NewsPress writer Elsie Shoemaker quoted Gallrein in order to underscore his politicized approach to his work: “It seems only logical,” the artist is recorded as observing, “that a voluntary reduction in our wasteful ways would be wiser than a forced ending to man’s existence.” Revisiting the environmentalist artist in 1971, Shoemaker noted that “his poetry should be read to prove his interest in the ecological situation today.” An unpublished collection of Gallrein’s poems suggests that his two major themes were love and nature. In general, the nature poems are abstract and celebratory, but in some of them nature is clearly opposed to the dreariness of a manmade landscape. In “The Mountain with the Golden Peak,” for example, the narrator relates a journey: “Like a fool, in seeking fame, / I walked the asphalt’s dreary way, / An errant dreamer I became / who did not earn the piper’s pay.” The narrator continues through “cities with their noisy roar” until he “looked in wonderment and awe . . . And thought these gilded heights I saw / My mountains were, the golden peak.” As he realizes his mistake, the smog and crowds part to make room for the realization that the search for wealth had led “the lost to empty streams to drink.” The narrator flees to the countryside (“I sought the verdant field once more”) where he finds peace and escape.⁶¹ The sentiment in this and other poems is clear: the city and its built environment provide only temporary, illusory pleasure, in contrast to the more lasting peace brought by nature. As Gallrein said of his move from Oklahoma City to a homestead along the Cimarron, “Here was happiness akin to that experienced by Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond.”⁶²

Although Gallrein’s basic ecological principles were sound, it wasn’t always clear that his facts were in order. In the same article, Shoemaker prompted the artist to discuss specific solutions to the ecological crisis: “We in this country have never practiced economy in the matter of our resources,” she quoted Gallrein as responding. “We use and discard, instead of trying to recycle.” When the idea of car recycling—crushing vehicles into easily transportable blocks and reclaiming the steel at processing plants—was proposed, however, Gallrein rejected the idea as both “too expensive” and not yet practical.⁶³ In fact, car recycling had been in use for over forty years and by 1970 was standard practice for dealing with automotive waste.⁶⁴ Despite his lack of expertise, Gallrein’s passion was real and lasting—and he recognized that the popularity of his paintings among conservative audiences could have a progressive political effect. He continued to use his exhibitions as platforms for environmental conversations throughout the early 1970s. Gallrein was featured in the October 1972 issue of Ecosystem, an environmental journal put out by the Oklahoma Environmental Information and Media Center, and in September 1972 was named “Environmental Artist of the Year” by then-governor David Hall at the Governor’s Sediment Control Conference.⁶⁵ In 1974 the Oklahoma State Legislature declared June 29 “Jacques Hans Gallrein Day,” citing the artist for his “immeasurable contribution to the rising public interest in preservation of our natural environment through the exhibition of his many beautiful paintings of that environment and through his many presentations and speeches to environmental groups.”⁶⁶ Gallrein’s students, ever loyal, celebrated the day with a two-page advertisement in the NewsPress in which they congratulated the artist for his environmental advocacy and reproduced two of his paintings.

Finding a Local Identity

Gallrein’s late-career fame emphasized his local identity: the artist was continually identified in newspapers and journals that were themselves locally, rather than nationally, relevant by his place of residence (“Stillwater-Coyle artist,” for example) or work (“former Oklahoma State University professor of art”).⁶⁷ But this sense of place and purpose came very late to a man whose first six decades were marked by dramatic geographical moves and radical shifts in career. A biographical sketch described his motivation: “It was because of his intense wish for complete freedom that he left his native land in 1909. Regimentation of German youth had already begun and he wanted no part of it.”⁶⁸ Gallrein’s first attempts to see the world, while still in art school, met with only mixed success:

He decided he had to see what was beyond the horizon, and to know what the beautiful ships that came and went into the harbors of Germany did when not in port. In order to be ready for a sailor job, should one materialize, he withdrew from art school and took temporary work delivering shoes for a factory. He went regularly to the bulletin boards that listed ship sailing and job opportunities, dreaming all along of the exotic places he would visit and paint. . . . After weeks of waiting and watching the bulletin boards he read this notice one morning: “Wanted: second steward; no experience. Ship: Prince Albert.” He got the job, and learned a second steward was a table hop who got to visit all the places listed, but all he ever saw at these stops was the kitchen and dining room The ship’s log mentioned stopping at such places as Southampton, Cherbourg, Port Said, Hong Kong and Kobe, but as far as his own broadening experience went, he might as well have stayed at Munich.⁶⁹

Abandoning his hopes of worldwide travel, Gallrein focused instead on the vision of the exotic that most interested him: American Indians. The artist frequently explained his emigration in terms of his fascination with the American West. “I had seen [Indians] in Wild West shows in Germany and all the stories intrigued me,” he said once.⁷⁰ A painting such as Indian Camp (undated) is evidence of Gallrein’s dream of “captur[ing] them on canvas”⁷¹—and also evidence of the romanticized, stereotypical vision that he had absorbed from the Wild West shows. After landing in New York, Gallrein continued on to Oklahoma at the urging of Charles Schreyvogel.⁷² Schreyvogel had gained public recognition for his Western paintings in 1901 when he was awarded the Thomas Clarke Prize at the National Academy of Design. A native New Yorker who worked in Hoboken and painted primarily from an imagination as lively as Gallrein’s, Schreyvogel was born to German immigrant parents and likely met Gallrein through the German community in New York.

In fact, Gallrein’s first encounters with Native Americans were very far from the romantic visions he had entertained thanks to the images of George Catlin and Alfred Jacob Miller, or the Western adventure stories told by German novelist Karl May. When he arrived in Oklahoma, Gallrein expected to be met by “an Indian willing to provide for foreigners.” As events transpired, “Aunt Kate” was only willing to provide poorly paid work that involved hard physical labor. Gallrein was too slight for the work, and eventually he left the woman’s employ, his romantic vision of Native Americans somewhat tarnished.⁷³ As his dreams of exotic travel were repeatedly shattered by reality, Gallrein continually turned to painting to fulfill his desire for the unfamiliar. Celebrated as a “master of atmosphere,” Gallrein believed that “mood and poetry are essential to art; they take one away from the hard facts of reality and bring him into a beautiful world that stimulates the imagination.”⁷⁴ In paintings such as Chiron and Crocale (1974) and Fly River in New Guinea (1965), Gallrein alternately sends his viewer into a mythological past and a geographically distant present. Gallrein painted imaginary scenes like these alongside his avowedly local and politically engaged paintings of Oklahoma landscapes, revealing the persistent influence of his early teachers, Stuck and Böcklin, despite his turn toward local politics. Ultimately, Gallrein would leave Oklahoma only once—and his departure was short-lived.

Gallrein went to New Mexico in pursuit of the unfamiliar—as Reed did, too, just a few years later. As seems inevitable at this point, both artists had vastly different experiences there. Gallrein went in 1938, after the economics of the depression had forced him to sell his Oklahoma City greenhouse business. Drawn by advertisements for homesteading possibilities, Gallrein was willing to stay in New Mexico indefinitely—but in the end the artist’s stay lasted only a few days. “He and his little dog headed that way in a well-worn car,” documented Cunningham. “They made it, but New Mexico was not what Gallrein thought. A blinding snow storm shortened his vision as soon as he arrived, and he decided not to wait for the atmosphere to clear. He spent a miserable day and night in his car—snowed in, and existed on cold canned dog food.” Happily, Gallrein retained his sense of humor even through this setback: “It was delicious,” was the only comment Cunningham recorded.⁷⁵ As so often happens in Gallrein’s archive, the stories he told of his past many years later weren’t always consistent. In 1973, four years after he was interviewed by Cunningham, Gallrein spoke with a reporter for the Daily O’Collegian. “I’d heard there was some good land out there,” Gallrein told Cathy Wright. “I locked up my house in Oklahoma City and headed west. Well, it turned out there was nothing there but sand, and I said, ‘My God, I wouldn’t be buried here’ and turned around and came back.”⁷⁶ Snow or sand, Gallrein’s stay confirmed his preference for Oklahoma over the rest of the country. As Wright recorded in 1973, Gallrein ultimately considered himself “an Oklahoman more than I am an American.”⁷⁷ Thanks largely to his embrace of the environmentalist movement, Gallrein’s carefully nurtured myth of local selfhood was finally firmly in place.

Doel Reed went to Taos, New Mexico, for the first time during the Second World War, compelled by gas rationing to seek a desirable landscape close to Stillwater. What made Taos appropriately scenic—indeed, “the nearest scenic area to Stillwater”?⁷⁸ “Reed saw the rugged mountains and canyon shapes and the old adobe houses so close to the earth in form and substance, and they fired his creative vision,” Nelson records.

Reed’s work does not include Indians, nor is it about the sunlight that dominates New Mexico. It is instead about the patterns nature and man have made, reduced almost to abstract forms. The result is not flat; indeed, it is almost sculptural in its effect, and it involves light employed for dramatic purposes. . . . He is uninterested in the reflected literal painting or picture, and searches instead for dominance over his material.⁷⁹

While Gallrein in the late 1960s and early 1970s was searching for conventional scenes of nature that would be widely perceived as “beautiful” and thereby inspire viewers with a desire for environmental justice and ecological preservation, Reed was looking for something very different. In the unfamiliar Taos landscape, Reed found a sculptural abstraction over which he could layer his emotional and intellectual aesthetic goals. As Reed became a regular visitor to Taos, the landscape became increasingly familiar to him, and his images of the New Mexico landscape became images of a local rather than an alien landscape. In 1959, upon his retirement from Oklahoma State University, Reed and his family went from being summer visitors to permanent residents of New Mexico, settling outside Taos in the small community of Talpa. He became associated with the Taos art colony and the Taos Society of Artists, although his paintings and prints share little with the work of the founding generation of that movement. E. Irving Couse, Ernest Blumenschein, Joseph Henry Sharp, and others focused on precisely the “Indians [and] sunlight” that were dismissed by Nelson in her description of Reed’s more abstract, personal approach to the land.

Whether in Stillwater, Oklahoma, or Talpa, New Mexico, Reed cultivated a sense of local identity and belonging. Nelson’s description of Reed in New Mexico hints at the complex politics that made this possible. “He has the comfortable poise of a born country squire,” Nelson wrote of Reed in his “comfortable, spare” Talpa studio.⁸⁰ Reed was inheriting a sense of ownership that had been crafted by that founding generation of the Taos Society of Artists, who along with other Anglo-American migrants largely viewed the indigenous people of Taos as part of a picturesque natural backdrop—in need of preservation, perhaps, but also relegated to an inferior social and economic position in service to the needs of the newcomers. The twin influences of racism and capitalism ensured that Reed would experience all the benefits of his privileged position, and the naturalness with which he fell into the role of “country squire” was in keeping with the social climate of the community as a whole.⁸¹ Reed’s decision to live outside Taos, in the rural community of Talpa, and his continued pursuit of idealized imagery (rather than turning to the type of pseudo-ethnographic subject matter that has remained popular throughout the century in the Southwest) was made possible by this cultural privilege—and was a key factor in Reed’s negotiation of a balance between the local and national appeal in his work.

Nelson’s interview crafts an image of Reed that is rooted in a sense of regional identity; and, given the hagiographic tone of her article overall, we might be forgiven for assuming that it was an image that Reed approved—and even cultivated. “He is so thoroughly a creation of the American heartland,” Nelson enthused, “that his life and work are an inspiration for artists throughout this country—living proof that talent can flourish in any locale.”⁸² What constitutes this heartland character? “Consistently direct and certain, . . . without fixed ideas or pomposity,” she begins, and continues: “folksy humor, loyalty, excellence at a trade, love of country, modesty, and clear thinking. These seem to be innate elements of Reed’s personality. He is a reassuringly stable man.”⁸³ Other reports of Reed’s character diverge from this description, but Nelson’s mythmaking has a purpose that goes beyond the simple facts of Reed’s personality. Her goal is to argue for the local as a defining characteristic of Reed’s work, and in so doing she is complicit with the artist himself.

Both Gallrein and Reed enjoyed careers that saw significant successes, thanks in large part to their self-fashioning as regional artists with national relevance. Throughout their careers, they had to negotiate tensions between the local and the national in terms of aesthetics, economics, and politics. Through their war experiences, educational backgrounds, teaching, and artistic careers, Reed and Gallrein developed their individual artistic styles—and then, cannily, both exploited available discourses. Comparing two artists who shared such close geographical and temporal proximity, and yet had such strikingly disparate careers and aesthetic concerns, reminds us that the criteria for artistic success are in many ways broader that we generally admit them to be in academic circles. Faced with similar constraints in terms of their desire to fit into some kind of national avant-garde while simultaneously meeting the demands of a local audience, Gallrein and Reed responded very differently on the level of aesthetics, imagery, and style. And yet, from this brief historical distance, we can see that they both created a body of work and a mythology of the self that at least periodically reflected the ideologies of the avant-garde art world without alienating their core communities. Their sensitivity and adaptability to surrounding discourses, whether the primitivism of Taos or the environmentalist movement of the 1970s, allowed both artists to negotiate complex and sometimes conflicting demands as they crafted successful artistic careers. Literary scholar Frank Davey has observed that “regionalism operates as a transformation of geography into a sign that can conceal the presence of ideology.”⁸⁴ In comparing the careers of Reed and Gallrein, who for the majority of their careers shared a geographical location but whose engagements with regionalist ideologies were strikingly different, regionalism becomes a lens through which to reveal, rather than naturalize, the presence of ideology. While both artists were eager to be identified in terms of their place within geographical and artistic localities, they identified with those ideas of the local opportunistically, rather than through an appeal to essentialized local identities.