Holzhauer’s Southern Paintings at Greenville County Museum

Saturday, 10 June 2006 10:05

Greenville, SC - Dramatic and colorful paintings of working-class Southern scenes are featured in the exhibition Emil Holzhauer: Southern Paintings, on view June 17 through August 27 at the Greenville County Museum of Art.

A German immigrant, Holzhauer (1887–1986) came to the United States at the age of nineteen, already an accomplished jewelry designer and metalworker.  But it was painting that set his imagination on fire, and the young artist found direction for his passion in studies with American realist Robert Henri, whose followers were dubbed “The Ashcan School” for their unvarnished depictions of the common man in everyday urban situations.  Like others who learned from Henri, Holzhauer embraced an adventurous style defined by heavy outlines that constrain vigorous swashes of color.

He painted in New York and the northeast as a young man, and despite some prejudice because of his nationality, joined the Army in 1918, becoming an orderly to Henry Lewis Stimson, who was later Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt. After World War I, Holzhauer’s career blossomed with exhibitions in New York and Chicago.  His work was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was an avid participant in the art colony at Monhegan Island, Maine. 

In 1938, Holzhauer was teaching painting and drawing, and that vocation brought him to the South.  He accepted a position at the Asheville School in 1940 and in 1942 became professor of art at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, a position from which he retired in 1953.  The artist’s career continued to flourish in the South and on Mexican sojourns until 1972, when failing eyesight forced him to stop painting. 

The exhibition focuses on Holzhauer’s paintings during these Southern years.  Set in familiar locations such as Macon, Savannah, and Asheville, the works include oil, watercolor, and pastels.  Colorful scenes of working-class people and energetic cubist-influenced style are consistent throughout the exhibition; but Holzhauer’s representational streetscapes of the early 1940s evolve into more darkly abstracted and distorted forms in works from the 1950s.

A companion exhibition, Southern Scene, is drawn from the Museum’s collection and features paintings by such Holzhauer contemporaries as Thomas Hart Benton, Marion Greenwood, Robert Gwathmey, and Lamar Dodd, among others.  A painting by Edyth Haythe is on view courtesy of Carolina Galleries, Charleston.

Emil Holzhauer: Southern Paintings was organized by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery in Charleston.

Visit the Museum’s web site at http://www.greenvillemuseum.org