Frank N. Wilcox
Encyclopedia
Frank Nelson Wilcox was a modernist
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
and a master of watercolor. Wilcox is described as the "Dean of Cleveland School
Cleveland School
The Cleveland School refers to the flourishing local arts community of Northeast Ohio during the period from 1910-1960. It was so named in 1928 by Elrick Davis, a journalist with the Cleveland Press...
painters," though some sources give this appellation to Henry Keller
Henry Keller
Henry George Keller was an American artist who led a generation of Ohio watercolor painters of the Cleveland School. Keller's students at the Cleveland School of Art and his Berlin Heights, Ohio summer school included Charles E. Burchfield, Paul Travis, and Frank N...
or Frederick Gottwald
Frederick Gottwald
Frederick Carl Gottwald was a traditionalist American painter who was influential in the development of the Cleveland School of art, sometimes called the "dean of Cleveland painters"...
.
Life
Frank Nelson Wilcox, Jr. was born on October 3, 1887 to Frank Nelson Wilcox and Jessie Fremont Snow Wilcox at 61 Linwood Street in Cleveland, OhioCleveland, Ohio
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
. His father, a prominent lawyer, died at home in 1904 shortly before Wilcox' 17th birthday. His brother, lawyer and publisher Owen N. Wilcox, was president of the Gates Legal Publishing Company or The Gates Press. His sister Ruth Wilcox was a respected librarian.
In 1906 Wilcox enrolled from the Cleveland School of Art under the tutelage of Henry Keller, Louis Rorimer, and Frederick Gottwald. He also attended Keller's Berlin Heights
Berlin Heights, Ohio
Berlin Heights is a village in Erie County, Ohio, United States. The population was 685 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Sandusky, Ohio Metropolitan Statistical Area....
summer school from 1909. After graduating in 1910, Wilcox traveled and studied in Europe, spending a year at Acad%C3%A9mie Colarossi where he was influenced by French impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
. He joined the Cleveland School of Art faculty in 1913. Among his students were Lawrence Edwin Blazey
Lawrence Edwin Blazey
Lawrence Edwin Blazey was an American artist and teacher, listed in "Who's Who in American Art". Blazey attended the Cleveland School of Art, now the Cleveland Institute of Art, and later returned to lecture and teach at his alma mater...
, Carl Gaertner
Carl Gaertner
Carl Gaertner was an American artist.Gaertner was born in Cleveland in 1898 and remained there until his death in 1952. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, which was then called the Cleveland School of Art, from 1920–1923 and taught there from 1925-1952.Gaertner's subject matter varied,...
, Paul Travis
Paul Travis
Paul Bough Travis was an American artist of the Cleveland School....
, and Charles E. Burchfield
Charles E. Burchfield
Charles Ephraim Burchfield was an American painter and visionary artist, known for his passionate watercolors of nature scenes and townscapes...
. Around this time Wilcox became associated with Cowan Pottery
Cowan Pottery
The Cowan Pottery Studio was founded by R. Guy Cowan in Lakewood, Ohio, United States in 1912. It moved to Rocky River, Ohio in 1920, and operated until 1931, when the financial stress of the Great Depression resulted in its bankruptcy...
.
In 1916 Wilcox married fellow artist Florence Bard, and they spent most of their honeymoon painting in Berlin Heights with Keller. They had one daughter, Mary. In 1918 he joined the Cleveland Society of Artists
Cleveland Society of Artists
The Cleveland Society of Artists was a Cleveland, Ohio artists group founded in March, 1913 by George Adomeit and Charles Shackleton to continue the traditions of academic art. Both founders had been members of The Arts Club of Cleveland. The society was for many years a staunch rival to the...
, a conservative counter to the Bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
Kokoon Arts Club
Kokoon Arts Club
The Kokoon Arts Club, sometimes spelled Kokoon Arts Klub, was a Bohemian artists group founded in 1911 by Carl Moellman and William Sommer to promote Modernism in Cleveland, Ohio. Moellman had been a member of New York City's Kit Kat Club, which served as inspiration for Kokoon...
, and would later serve as its president. He also began teaching night school at the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute at this time, and taught briefly at Baldwin-Wallace College
Baldwin-Wallace College
Baldwin–Wallace College is a liberal arts college in Berea, Ohio, founded in 1845. It is home to the Riemenschneider-Bach Institute and the Baldwin–Wallace Conservatory of Music, an internationally renowned music school. The college is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Students receive a...
.
Wilcox died on April 17, 1964, having taught at the Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Art or CIA) for over 40 years. Today CIA awards a scholarship prize in his name to students majoring in printmaking
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
.
Work
Wilcox was influenced by Keller's innovative watercolor techniques, and from 1910 to 1916 they experimented together with impressionismImpressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
and post-impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Fry used the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and Post-Impressionism...
. Wilcox soon developed his own signature style in the American Scene
American scene painting
American scene painting refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. American scene painting is also known as Regionalism....
or Regionalist
Regionalism (art)
Regionalism is an American realist modern art movement that was popular during the 1930s. The artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life...
tradition of the early 20th century.
Wilcox wrote and illustrated Ohio Indian Trails in 1933, which was favorably reviewed by the New York Times in 1934. This book was edited and reprinted in 1970 by William A. McGill. McGill also edited and reprinted Wilcox' Canals of the Old Northwest
in 1969.
Wilcox also wrote, illustrated, and published Weather Wisdom in 1949, a limited edition (50 copies) of twenty-four serigraphs
Screen-printing
Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate...
(silk screened prints) accompanied by commentary "based upon familiar weather observations commonly made by people living in the country."
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art is an art museum situated in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on Cleveland's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian art, the museum houses a diverse permanent collection of more than 43,000...
lists 36 Wilcox paintings in its collection.
One variant of his 1928 still images Fisherman of Percé, Quebec is reposited with the U.S. Library of Congress.
Wilcox displayed over 250 works at Cleveland's annual May Show. He received numerous awards, including the Penton Medal for as The Omnibus, Paris (1920), Fish Tug on Lake Erie (1921), Blacksmith Shop (1922), and The Gravel Pit (1922). Other paintings include The Trailing Fog (1929), Under the Big Top (1930), and Ohio Landscape (1932).