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Written by Kat Murrell
May 5, 2011
Ruth Grotenrath’s “Still Life with Fan.” – Photo: Elaine Erickson Gallery
Ballet dancers are a favorite motif of Schomer Lichtner. – Photo: Elaine Erickson Gallery
Ruth Grotenrath and Schomer Lichtner are two artists who are inextricably linked. Closely associated with art in Milwaukee from the ’30s through the last decades of the 20th century, they lived in the city as well as on a farmstead by Holy Hill. Although married to each other, they were decidedly independent as artists.
This is an opportune time for a crash course in their work. Current exhibitions at the Racine Art Museum and the Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend) as well as a show at Elaine Erickson Gallery in Milwaukee’s Third Ward all feature the pair’s work. The Haggerty Museum of Art gets into the Grotenrath-Lichtner celebration with a show opening in late June.
A recent distribution of hundreds of pieces to a number of Wisconsin arts organizations has helped spread their vision. A nod for the most in-depth current exploration of their life must go to Susan J. Montgomery and her newly authored monographs on the couple. Admirably, the books are published as separate volumes, each independent from the other, rather than a combined study that would have only added to the sense of Lichtner and Grotenrath as artistic Siamese twins.
Lichtner was born in Peoria, Ill., in 1905; Grotenrath in Milwaukee in 1912. They met in a drawing class in the early 1930s, “with Schomer declaring that it was love at first sight,” according to the Museum of Wisconsin Art. Their exhibition includes early images that connect with the earthy regionalist impulse of the 1930s, which rejected European avant-garde abstraction in favor of pictures lauding the values of rural Americana, such as Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Lichtner’s “Blackbird in the Corn” (1939) has robust baroque ripples similar to those of Oklahoma regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. But Lichtner does Benton one better with saturated colors, a veritable glow in the brilliant and billowing cornstalk in the moonlight.
It was the decade of the Great Depression, and both artists were involved with the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which employed artists in beautification programs. The MWA shows Grotenrath’s studies for a post office project in Huron, but most interestingly and poignantly the exhibit shows her social awareness. Her painting “Modern Madonna” (1935) confronts the growing political horror in Europe, showing a blindfolded woman, seated with two young children whom she holds protectively while symbols of Fascism loom ominously.
Lichtner and Grotenrath became considerably lighter and brighter in the postwar period, and infused a good dose of artistic ingredients from such sources as Matisse and Japanese art. Lichtner’s hallmark motifs, such as cows and ballet dancers, spring to life in various forms.
Grotenrath is a littler harder to pin down in terms of subject, but her penchant for pattern and color is consistent and engaging. Shapes and spaces overlap with confidence and verve. In the patchwork of colors that plays over the painting surface, shades of Cezanne may be seen. To make an even stronger comparison, one could look to the Intimiste paintings of Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard in late 19th century France. Grotenrath follows in a similar suit, with comfortable interior spaces and still lifes that take on a rich beauty in their dense decoration.
All three venues showing their work provide a chronological overview of the artists’ careers, though with variations. The Racine Art Museum presents a cavernous room with the feel of a large museum exhibition, while the Museum of Wisconsin Art shows a more compact collection, augmented by drawings and unique three-dimensional work. Elaine Erickson Gallery offers the most intimate setting, as the art seems to live and breathe in a space that shares the warm characteristics of a living room.
The similarity in the organization of all three shows is understandable. But one wonders about the continual joining of the two artists, relentlessly showing them in tandem rather than standing both on their own. Other artistic marriages – such as Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, or Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler – are rarely if ever underscored with exhibitions that revolve around their personal relationship rather than fruits of their labor. Though in life Grotenrath and Lichtner were a great romance, it may be nice after this rediscovery to pull the two apart, to see each without the shadow of the other.
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