Arts and Letters

Franklin Watkins died on December 4th. His death, occurring in Italy where he had been summoned to supervise the hanging of his painting recently acquired by the Vatican, lends a certain symmetry to the saga of his life. Watkins was an internationalist, a statesman, if you will, who operated unostentatiously in the service of art from his base in Philadelphia.

The facts of this engagement with the international art world (not to be confused with the cabal of dealers and speculators) are pretty much as follows: his first trip to Italy was in 1920 on a Cresson Traveling Scholarship granted by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the school to which he had recently returned from a stint in World War I navy camouflage. This association with Italy led eventually to his being appointed Artist-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome where his influence on winners of the Prix de Rome was exhilarating and extensive. He later became a trustee and lifetime fellow, enabling him to play a large part in ventilating some of the musty aesthetic corridors of what had become a stuffy hidebound institution.

Watkins also served many years on the selection juries of the Guggenheim Foundation, seeking out and sending some of our brightest young talents to Europe. In 1960 he was sent to Russia with an exhibition of selected works by American artists, arranged by the State Department as part of its cultural exchange program. On this mission his ingratiating manner and tact converted hostility into warm acceptance.

This urbane and handsome man with the aquiline bald-eagle look of Frank Lloyd Wright (whom he very much resembled), carried himself with the same grace if less arrogance than the famous architect. The thing they really had in common was a profound, obsessive concern for their students. Watkins leaves an enduring patrimony to generations of students at the Pennsylvania Academy, where his teaching and critiques since 1943 enlarged their creative perspectives on an inspiring scale.

Up to this point I have said nothing about Watkins's great distinction as a painter. John Canaday, a notoriously hard man to please, said the following in The New York Times: "…without much question the best portrait painter in this country by the definition of a portrait that includes the personal exploration of the sitter's character without concessions to the man who pays the bill." I really cannot add to that assessment except to say that portraiture, which in the twentieth century has descended into a sort of cosmetic taxidermy, has been elevated to unexpected heights by Watkins. His daring, vigorous approach, often veering toward gross caricature, somehow made these portraits acceptable to those official bodies or private sitters who had commissioned them. Perhaps the conjunction of exemplary honesty and the artist's spirited love of his medium and his delight in its sensuous application is the answer.

Let me end with a brief anecdote of our personal friendship, which began in 1919 when we were fellow students at the Pennsylvania Academy. Circa 1931 I was living in Philadelphia and had just bought a large picture frame with an oval mat at auction. When it arrived at my small house I discovered that there was no way to get it around the bend in the stairwell which led to my studio. In the emergency I called Watty whose studio was larger, asking him to store the frame for me, assuring him that he was free to use it at any time. The oval shape or something about this beat-up frame triggered a response in that chancy mechanism whereby an artist's ideas present themselves. In any case Watty used the frame, painted "Suicide in Costume," sent it unsolicited to the Carnegie International (the most prestigious exhibition in the world at that time), was accepted and awarded first prize by the international jury, bringing considerable fame to an otherwise unknown and obscure artist. Yes, my share in the prize has been paid many times over by years of rewarding friendship.