Arts and Letters

The impact of the Armory Show on American art is well known. It has perhaps been over-dramatized in recent years, as if it came with the brilliant flash of a revelation, illuminating a dull, brown world.

It was, of course, a great catalyst and its effects were many-sided. It did not turn everyone automatically into a Cubist and Fauvist. Indeed the revolutionary ferment which was bubbling everywhere, in form as well as in subject matter, had already begun to move us more into international currents.

This is worth mentioning in Henry Schnakenberg's case not as a bare historical fact but because it illuminates the ambiance of his formative years as a painter. He went to the Art Students League during its flowering with such brilliant students as Peggy Bacon, Isabel Bishop, Alexander Brook, Louis Bouché, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Reginald Marsh, just to mention the ones who eventually became members of our Institute. The influence of the new formalism was marginal and indirect on most of these painters. Schnakenberg did make some experiments along these lines as did Bouché and Kuniyoshi, but the obvious devices were gradually dropped in favor of realism, even as the influence of the School of Paris receded during the Twenties and Thirties.

Henry Schnakenberg was a highly cultivated person who was thoroughly familiar with the art of the past, as he had virtually grown up in the great galleries of Europe, and returned to visit them all his life. He had discriminating taste and an unfailing eye, more than that, a generous and unfettered mind. He brought all this to bear in his own work, not as an eclectic, but within the range of his own direct perceptions and responses to the visible world. Though we don't think of him as an original stylist, his work was distinctly his own, filtered through his personal integrity and held together by his innate sense of scale.