Shadowland (Mar-Aug 1923)

The Odyssey of George Hart Who is the dean of the globe-trotting painters, and whose work shows a genuine gusto for life By Edgar Cahill IT has been said that the American creative intelligences who made die deepest impression on Europe have been precisely these who never left these shores. Argument from this would proceed to the conclusion that home-grown talent is best. It may be. Cer ■ tainly the man deeply rooted in his native earth is better off, aesthetically, than the cosmopolitan tumbleweed hustled hither and yon in response to all the winds of art doctrine, and the obscure tides of unvisited. island-dotted seas. But this does not exhaust our categories. There is another type of artist, the true space-eater, the man in love with all the moods and manifestations of the world. Such an one is not influenced by an ignorant public's demand for "tourist art." He <ees beyond the merely odd, the mildly exotic, and the postalcard picturesque so dear to a people fed on canned tours and evaporated culture. He knows that adventures are internal ; that they take place inside a nervous system. And he paints pictures of himself against all the gorgeous backdrops of this sublunary globe. If his internal adventures are interesting, then his works are also. If they are not, his works drop with scarcely an audible splash into the great ocean of travelogs in paint, which is fed by copious streams from nearly every art gallery this side of the Statue of Liberty. An artist who has lived a co'orful subjective Odyssey, with chapters staged in all parts of the known world, is George O. Hart. Mr. Hart is, perhaps, the dean of globetrotting painters. Iceland and Patagonia, Egypt and Tahiti. the West Indies, Europe, Mexico, the hills and flats of New Jersey, and a thousand other places, are his familiar stamping grounds. Everywhere he is vividly himself. He is not trying to imitate anyone, or to please anyone' but himself. He has followed no art fashions, and he of in if It PSWtetfVl has worshipped no idols, excessively. The names Daumier and of Rowlandson have been mentioned connection with his. But his likeness to these artists there be one, is temperamental rather than technical. his hi= love of human character for its own sake, and in his ability to use the roughest manifestations of this roughneck world to construct pictures of undeniable charm. He shows a genuine gusto for life, from high to low tide. One must love these vagabonds, these dice players and cockfighters, these bits of human wreckage that float up to our social sea walls, if one is to make them live as Hart makes them live. The Odyssey of George Hart began when, as a boy, he found himself much more interested in drawing pictures than in anything else. He studied drawing for a while in a Rochester school, and then moved on, painting signs for a living all over the Union. Later he saved up enough money to go to Paris where he studied for some months at the Julian Academy. Tiring of academical routine he quit and went out into the French countryside to paint landscape. The first one of these was accepted for exhibition by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Then followed years of restless wandering all over the globe. Hart lugged portfolios full of sketches thru Egypt when Maspero, the great French Egyptologist, was carrying on his investigations ; thru Tahiti when Gauguin was still an unknown ornament of that widely advertised island ; thru the West Indies when Jamaica rum was not on the contraband list. A bare catalog of his wanderings would more than fill this magazine. Thru all these wanderings went his sketch-book and his portfolio of water colors. Why? Because he wanted to astound the people "back home" with his tourist picture-book? Not at all. George Hart did not exhibit those things for years. He had no idea of exhibiting or selling them. He did them for his own pleasure as he traveled about the world, paying his way, meanwhile, by working at all sorts of things unrelated to his art. It was not until he had been painting for a score of years that two well-known artists persuaded him to exhibit at the Montross Galleries. The result is that, instead of the usual tricks of the traveling artist-showman, we have the sensitive, {Continued on page 70) pB«w. Page Eleven