"My parents bought the house in Cornwall in 1930, and we lived there year-round until I think about 1936, when we moved to New York City in the winters," Olga Rothschild, Landeck's daughter, said. "He loved Cornwall. We used to go out on day trips and sketch and draw. We would drive and go someplace and he would draw the landscape for a book he was working on."
That book, Chard Powers Smith's, "The Housatonic: Puritan River," was one of three that Landeck illustrated. The other two were a rare edition of Robert Frost poetry and a book-length poem by fellow Cornwall resident and friend Mark Van Doren called "The Mayfield Deer." All three are part of the Georgia museum retrospective.
Also in the exhibit are the country prints "Corban's Silo," "Bantam Barns," "West Cornwall Station," "Cornwall Bridge Station," and "Moonlight in the Country."
The artist's pictures of the country and city are suffused with a loneliness and bleakness, a kind of neo-naturalism in which the hulking structures of an industrial society and the indifference of nature seem to overtake any conventional notion of human dominion. The emphasis on structure is likely connected to Landeck's education-he trained as an architect-and also to his shy, almost distant temperament, engrossed as he was in his work.
"I think [the bleakness in his work] was really a reflection of the times too, with the Depression and the war years," said Ms. Rothschild, who lives in Massachusetts. "But he was very focused and concentrated. If you said, 'Daddy, daddy' to him, he wouldn't hear what you were saying."
"He was certainly very affectionate to me and my brother [Philip], but I'd say he was a very shy man," she added. "He certainly had a series of depressions, but he was very sociable, he loved his friends and he loved parties."
Landeck was born in Crandon, Wis., in 1905. He attended elementary school in Oshkosh, Wis., and attended high school in Toledo, Ohio, where his mother and her new husband moved in 1917 after his parents divorced. In Toledo, Landeck took his first art classes and learned to play the violin.
In 1923, Landeck went to the University of Michigan, studying architecture for two years before transferring to Columbia University in New York City to finish his degree.
At Columbia, while sampling New York City's museums and galleries, Landeck became interested in printmaking. He bought a small used press, began making prints, and quickly found an audience for them. His first etching, "The Armenian," a small portrait of a sly-looking, bearded and wrinkled old man in a fez, was picked up by the Kennedy Galleries, and representatives of the galleries wanted to see more of his work.
After graduating from Columbia in 1927, Landeck worked for an architectural firm for a short time. The same year, he married a fellow Columbia architecture student, Beatrice Boerum. The pair went to Europe for a year and a half, and during the trip Landeck continued to make etchings, toting his press with him through Turkey, Italy, Germany, France, and Holland. Landeck's daughter Olga was born on the trip in 1929 in Paris.
But despite Landeck's newfound enthusiasm for printmaking and his early success in New York City, the new family's economic prospects began to sour as the Great Depression took hold in the United States. The family decided to move back home and find a cheap place in the country. They settled on a property with a granary, barn and modest house perched high atop an outcropping in East Cornwall.
"Cornwall was just kind of an accident," Ms. Rothschild said. "They were looking for a place to live, and they were driving around. They found an agent in Cornwall Bridge. It was only $1,000 for the house and 19 acres, and they felt they could afford it. It would be a place to sit out the depression."
Landeck converted the granary on the property into his studio, the interior of which is pictured in his 1935 drypoint "Studio Interior No. 1," which is in the Georgia exhibit.
While living in Cornwall, Landeck became good friends with the author James Thurber and Van Doren. He also kept up connections in New York City.
He taught art for a few years at Romford School for Boys in Washington, which closed its doors in the late 1940s and is now home to the Rumsey Hall School. Beatrice taught music at the now-defunct Spring Hill School in Litchfield, which Olga and Philip, who was born in 1931, both attended.
Landeck ultimately wound up teaching art at the Brearley School, a prestigious, private girls school on East 83rd Street in New York City. He taught there from 1935 until he retired in 1958.
As he taught, Landeck continued in his own artistic pursuits, producing many prints of city and country architecture. His work was critically acclaimed, and in the late 1930s and early 1940s he was elected to the National Academy of Design, the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Landeck's popularity tapered off during and after World War II, however, as realism took a back seat to the wave of abstract expressionism sweeping the art world. Despite the changing avant garde, except for a few experimental works Landeck stuck to his style and subjects with the tenacity of an artist confident in the quality, purpose and integrity of his work, apart from any view to please the gallery-going public of the present. But Landeck wasn't making much money.
"Certainly he never had much money, so money was always a problem," Ms. Rothschild said. "Private schools paid very little in those days."
That changed, though, after June and Norman Kraeft, a couple of enterprising gallery owners from Washington, D.C., came to Cornwall to visit him. The couple was looking at property in Bethlehem, where they wanted to establish a satellite of their "June 1" gallery. They had seen a few of Landeck's prints in the Library of Congress, and wanted to represent him.
"We were digging around for artists to represent," said Mr. Kraeft, who is now retired and lives in Arizona with his wife. "One of the fields of art that attracted us early on was architectural art, the architectural printmakers beginning with Ernest Roth, Edward Hopper [and other artists]. That quality of loneliness is also present in Hopper's work. I remember discussing Hopper with Armin at one point and Armin freely admitted to being indebted to Hopper."
The Kraefts represented Landeck for many years and became his close friends. He was the top seller in their gallery, and according to Mr. Kraeft, they sold over 2,000 of his prints over the years. The Kraefts themselves amassed a large collection of Landeck's work-almost certainly the largest collection of the artist's works in the world. They wrote the Catalogue Raisonné of his prints in 1994, and are supplying over 100 of Landeck's works to the Georgia museum for the retrospective, comprising over 90 percent of the works in the exhibit. To preserve the prints for posterity, the couple is giving the Landeck collection to the museum after the show.
"We put this collection together very carefully," Ms. Kraeft said. "The early prints are hard to find. We got to thinking about it and we thought that after our deaths this collection will go to auction and be blown to the four winds. We didn't want that to happen."
Landeck divorced Beatrice in 1945, remarried in 1957, and died in 1984, leaving behind many friends in Cornwall and the city.
"He was very likable," said Marc Simont, a noted children's book illustrator who lives in Cornwall. "In those days Cornwall got smaller, and those of us who lived here got together. He was very well-liked by everybody, and he was of course an excellent artist. He was in a craft that you have to be very serious about it, and he knew it inside and out."
Though technically precise and sometimes almost photographic in resolution (unsurprisingly, Landeck took up photography later in his life, though he saw no direct link between printmaking and that medium), his works were rarely conversational or social, and even more rarely aroused an art world eager for sensationalism.
Indeed, as Mr. Simont said at Landeck's memorial service, "The great variety of media at the disposal of the artists of today, and the obsesession with the desire to shock with the outrageously sensational, has brought about a sort of "Star Wars" of the Arts, in which the artist is hidden more than revealed."
Noted sculptor and Cornwall resident Tim Prentice was Landeck's son's age when the family lived in town.
"My strongest memory of [Landeck] was when I was a kid of 12, I biked up Great Hill, which was like Everest, to spend the night with my buddy Phil [Landeck's son]," he said. "When I got up to the house I leaned my bike on a tree and tiptoed across the dewy grass and looked in the window, and Armin and Philip were in the living room facing each other over a music stand, each with a violin, playing the Bach Double Violin Concerto in B. Here's this picture of the artist's life burned in my mind. They had no electricity. A kerosene lamp lit the room. It basically blew me away."
|
|
