Herman Trunk
Encyclopedia
Herman Trunk also known as Herman Trunk Jr., was an American painter active in the modernist
movement of the 1920s and 1930s. He exhibited alongside some of the most famous artists of the day. At present his contributions to figurative abstract art are being recovered by scholars and critics.
. Trunk joined the Army during World War I and served in Europe with the 176th Pursuit Squadron. Upon his return to the states, Trunk resumed his study of painting, working under John Sloan
and Hayley Lever at the Art Students League in 1919. He studied with Henry Lee McFee
at the League’s summer workshops in Woodstock, New York. According to Meredith Ward, Trunk learned about cubism
as a form from McFee, and that with the encouragement of Lever (and critical notice from Forbes Watson in the mid-1920s), Trunk selected watercolor as his main medium. In a 1935 interview in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, Trunk explained, “With water color . . . you can get a thing done after you have figured out its content and form – while you still feel it. But oils – by the time you’re half through, most of the emotion may have died.”
, the Society of Independent Artists
, the National Academy of Design
, the Art Institute of Chicago
, and the Brooklyn Society of Independent Artists. In 1925, New York gallery owner F. Valentine Dudensing became interested in Trunk, and thereafter Trunk showed quite frequently with Dudensing. His first one-man show at Dudensing Galleries took place in November-December 1928, and garnered many positive reviews: “His is a picture offering beauty, in a deliberate arrangement to achieve that effect. The beauty though is alive, for it is veined with the blood of poetry and energy”. His work was frequently compared to Charles Demuth
, but once Trunk’s skill with color determination and line design emerged, he was recognized as having a “style extremely individual”. Another critic explained that, “He has a remarkable flair for reducing natural objects to their essential shapes and primary colors – a process saved from any posterlike suggestion because of the sensitive treatment and appreciation for subtleties of color and design”.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Trunk’s work moved increasingly towards geometric and architectural experiments, as his fame grew within the art community in New York City. In 1931, Zoltan Hecht’s School for the New Age reproduced one of Trunk’s sailboat images as a hand-hooked rug, an item which attracted the notice of architect and designer Eugene Schoen. Trunk joined many museum exhibitions, including the first and second biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art
in 1932 and 1936. In 1933, his work appeared in the Venice Biennale
as part of the Whitney Exhibit; he was the only artist from Brooklyn to be included. During the same period he participated in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum
. The depression intervened, and Trunk Brothers printmakers collapsed, as did Dudensing’s gallery. The artist showed in 1938 with the Collectors of American Art in New York. Trunk worked with Marion Grant, of Grant Studios in Brooklyn, holding a one-man exhibition there in March 1939. The New York Sun said of the Grant exhibit, “He will paint in the same composition the outside of a house and its interior as well, present within a single frame three seasons at once, and yet in either case contrive to weld the whole into a decorative entity. It is much like the fragmentary, unrelated, yet overlapping, glimpses that come in dreams, or the way logically disconnected, though vividly realized bits of experience, flash on the drowsing memory when it is not focused intently on any particular thing. With all it is vastly interesting and to be appreciated must be seen”.
After World War I, Trunk’s work included paintings which Meredith Ward describes as “strikingly proto-Pop,” and marks Trunk as a forerunner of the 1960s Pop art
genre.
, John Marin
, Stuart Davis
, Joseph Stella
, Joseph Pollet
, Edward Hopper
, Arthur Dove
, and many more. His work was supported by Juliana Force, Frederick C. Bartlett, Chester Holmes Aldrich
, H.C. Richardson, Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, Edward Root, Forbes Watson, and others. In a January 20, 1928 letter to Stella Bowen
, Ford Madox Ford
praised Trunk's work as "really remarkable." Trunk’s recovery as a major American modernist painter began with the spring 1989 exhibition at Herschl & Adler Galleries. There are many reasons Trunk had been overlooked by art historians until the current moment: his background and commitments were traditional, as he was a devoted husband and father. He was nicknamed “The Candlelight Painter” by the media in the 1920s since he maintained his job as a printmaker and painted at night. In addition, Trunk was a faithful Catholic during a period of virulent anti-Catholic sentiment. Reconsideration of Trunk’s commitment to his Catholic faith and its impact on his art is examined by art historian Cynthia Fowler in the 2009 exhibition Herman Trunk: Catholic Modernist and the accompanying exhibition catalogue. A discussion of Trunk's still-life paintings, the work for which he is best known, is also examined in this catalogue by art historian Dena Gilby. In addition, an October 2009 conference in honor of Trunk at Emmanuel College, “Early American Modernism and Religion,” turned its attention towards the role of faith to the artistic movement. Most important to understanding Trunk’s lack of visibility today may very well be the fact that a World War I injury rendered Trunk nearly deaf, and as a result social networking at galleries and shows was difficult for him. At present, interest in Trunk is building. Two shows appeared in 2009. Emmanuel College in Boston held “Herman Trunk: Catholic Modernist” in September and October; and in October through December Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts hosted “Herman Trunk (1894-1963) and the Modernist Still Life."
His work as a Catholic artist also has drawn attention from the National Museum of Catholic Art and History, which will include Trunk as part of its contribution to the “International Holiday Traditions Exhibition.” Presenting fifty artists from a variety of faith traditions, the exhibition takes place from December 12, 2009 through January 10, 2010 at the Historical Society of Washington D.C. Trunk’s modernist Madonna watercolor contributes to the Catholic section of the exhibition.
holds Trunk’s papers, which include the following: "Letters, writings, photographs, printed material, and a DVD videorecording relating to Trunk's career as a modernist painter. Letters are from Juliana Force, Arthur E. McFarlane, Henry McFee, author B.F. Morrow, and Charles J. Simpson, secretary of the American Veterans Society of Artists, Harry C. Richardson, Gertrude Herdle Moore, Holger Cahill, Audrey F. McMahon, Hugo C.M. Wendel, Kimon Nicolaides, Zoltan Hecht, and Marion M. Grant, among others. Writings include consignment forms and reports from the Dudensing Gallery, New York City, an artist statement, one notebook labeled Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Etruscan, and Greco-Roman, one notebook on fresco painting, and two notebooks listing information on art works by Trunk. Photographs are of Trunk, his wife, and others. Printed material consists of scrapbook pages, newspaper clippings, exhibition catalogs and pamphlets mostly concerning Trunk's exhibitions at Dudensing Gallery, New York.”
Many of his paintings remain in the possession of his family and with private collectors. In 2009, The Herman Trunk Foundation was incorporated as part of the effort to preserve the artist's legacy.
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...
movement of the 1920s and 1930s. He exhibited alongside some of the most famous artists of the day. At present his contributions to figurative abstract art are being recovered by scholars and critics.
Biography
Born in New York City to a family of printmakers, Trunk spent much of his life in the family’s home at 135 Essex Street in Brooklyn. He became interested in art while a child at the Dominican Convent School, and as a young adult took night classes in art at the Pratt Institute in BrooklynPratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
. Trunk joined the Army during World War I and served in Europe with the 176th Pursuit Squadron. Upon his return to the states, Trunk resumed his study of painting, working under John Sloan
John French Sloan
John French Sloan was an American artist. As a member of The Eight, he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. He was known for his urban genre painting and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often through his window...
and Hayley Lever at the Art Students League in 1919. He studied with Henry Lee McFee
Henry Lee McFee
Henry Lee McFee was a pioneer American cubist painter and a prominent member of the Woodstock artists colony.-Biography:...
at the League’s summer workshops in Woodstock, New York. According to Meredith Ward, Trunk learned about cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
as a form from McFee, and that with the encouragement of Lever (and critical notice from Forbes Watson in the mid-1920s), Trunk selected watercolor as his main medium. In a 1935 interview in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, Trunk explained, “With water color . . . you can get a thing done after you have figured out its content and form – while you still feel it. But oils – by the time you’re half through, most of the emotion may have died.”
Exhibits and Emphases
In the 1920s Trunk’s work appeared in exhibitions by the Art Students League of New YorkArt Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
, the Society of Independent Artists
Society of Independent Artists
Society of Independent Artists was an association of American artists founded in 1916 and based in New York.Based on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants, the goal of the society was to hold annual exhibitions by avant-garde artists. Exhibitions were to be open to anyone who wanted to...
, the National Academy of Design
National Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...
, the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
, and the Brooklyn Society of Independent Artists. In 1925, New York gallery owner F. Valentine Dudensing became interested in Trunk, and thereafter Trunk showed quite frequently with Dudensing. His first one-man show at Dudensing Galleries took place in November-December 1928, and garnered many positive reviews: “His is a picture offering beauty, in a deliberate arrangement to achieve that effect. The beauty though is alive, for it is veined with the blood of poetry and energy”. His work was frequently compared to Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism....
, but once Trunk’s skill with color determination and line design emerged, he was recognized as having a “style extremely individual”. Another critic explained that, “He has a remarkable flair for reducing natural objects to their essential shapes and primary colors – a process saved from any posterlike suggestion because of the sensitive treatment and appreciation for subtleties of color and design”.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Trunk’s work moved increasingly towards geometric and architectural experiments, as his fame grew within the art community in New York City. In 1931, Zoltan Hecht’s School for the New Age reproduced one of Trunk’s sailboat images as a hand-hooked rug, an item which attracted the notice of architect and designer Eugene Schoen. Trunk joined many museum exhibitions, including the first and second biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
in 1932 and 1936. In 1933, his work appeared in the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
as part of the Whitney Exhibit; he was the only artist from Brooklyn to be included. During the same period he participated in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
. The depression intervened, and Trunk Brothers printmakers collapsed, as did Dudensing’s gallery. The artist showed in 1938 with the Collectors of American Art in New York. Trunk worked with Marion Grant, of Grant Studios in Brooklyn, holding a one-man exhibition there in March 1939. The New York Sun said of the Grant exhibit, “He will paint in the same composition the outside of a house and its interior as well, present within a single frame three seasons at once, and yet in either case contrive to weld the whole into a decorative entity. It is much like the fragmentary, unrelated, yet overlapping, glimpses that come in dreams, or the way logically disconnected, though vividly realized bits of experience, flash on the drowsing memory when it is not focused intently on any particular thing. With all it is vastly interesting and to be appreciated must be seen”.
After World War I, Trunk’s work included paintings which Meredith Ward describes as “strikingly proto-Pop,” and marks Trunk as a forerunner of the 1960s Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
genre.
Resurgence of Interest in Trunk
During the 1920s and 1930s, Trunk exhibited alongside some of the most prominent artists in American modernism, those that critics remember today, including Charles DemuthCharles Demuth
Charles Demuth was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism....
, John Marin
John Marin
John Marin was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors.-Biography:...
, Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella was an Italian-born, American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America. He is associated with the American Precisionism movement of the 1910s-1940s....
, Joseph Pollet
Joseph Pollet
Joseph C. Pollet was an American painter.Pollet was born in Albbruck, Germany and emigrated with his parents to New York City in 1911. He studied at the Art Students League of New York...
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...
, and many more. His work was supported by Juliana Force, Frederick C. Bartlett, Chester Holmes Aldrich
Chester Holmes Aldrich
Chester Holmes Aldrich was an American architect and director of the American Academy in Rome from 1935 until his death in 1940.-Early life:...
, H.C. Richardson, Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, Edward Root, Forbes Watson, and others. In a January 20, 1928 letter to Stella Bowen
Stella Bowen
Esther Gwendolyn "Stella" Bowen was an Australian artist, born in North Adelaide in the southern part of the country. As a young girl, Bowen enjoyed drawing and convinced her mother to allow her to study with Margaret Preston...
, Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
praised Trunk's work as "really remarkable." Trunk’s recovery as a major American modernist painter began with the spring 1989 exhibition at Herschl & Adler Galleries. There are many reasons Trunk had been overlooked by art historians until the current moment: his background and commitments were traditional, as he was a devoted husband and father. He was nicknamed “The Candlelight Painter” by the media in the 1920s since he maintained his job as a printmaker and painted at night. In addition, Trunk was a faithful Catholic during a period of virulent anti-Catholic sentiment. Reconsideration of Trunk’s commitment to his Catholic faith and its impact on his art is examined by art historian Cynthia Fowler in the 2009 exhibition Herman Trunk: Catholic Modernist and the accompanying exhibition catalogue. A discussion of Trunk's still-life paintings, the work for which he is best known, is also examined in this catalogue by art historian Dena Gilby. In addition, an October 2009 conference in honor of Trunk at Emmanuel College, “Early American Modernism and Religion,” turned its attention towards the role of faith to the artistic movement. Most important to understanding Trunk’s lack of visibility today may very well be the fact that a World War I injury rendered Trunk nearly deaf, and as a result social networking at galleries and shows was difficult for him. At present, interest in Trunk is building. Two shows appeared in 2009. Emmanuel College in Boston held “Herman Trunk: Catholic Modernist” in September and October; and in October through December Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts hosted “Herman Trunk (1894-1963) and the Modernist Still Life."
His work as a Catholic artist also has drawn attention from the National Museum of Catholic Art and History, which will include Trunk as part of its contribution to the “International Holiday Traditions Exhibition.” Presenting fifty artists from a variety of faith traditions, the exhibition takes place from December 12, 2009 through January 10, 2010 at the Historical Society of Washington D.C. Trunk’s modernist Madonna watercolor contributes to the Catholic section of the exhibition.
Trunk's Papers and Private Collections
The Smithsonian Archives of American ArtArchives of American Art
The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 16 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C...
holds Trunk’s papers, which include the following: "Letters, writings, photographs, printed material, and a DVD videorecording relating to Trunk's career as a modernist painter. Letters are from Juliana Force, Arthur E. McFarlane, Henry McFee, author B.F. Morrow, and Charles J. Simpson, secretary of the American Veterans Society of Artists, Harry C. Richardson, Gertrude Herdle Moore, Holger Cahill, Audrey F. McMahon, Hugo C.M. Wendel, Kimon Nicolaides, Zoltan Hecht, and Marion M. Grant, among others. Writings include consignment forms and reports from the Dudensing Gallery, New York City, an artist statement, one notebook labeled Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Etruscan, and Greco-Roman, one notebook on fresco painting, and two notebooks listing information on art works by Trunk. Photographs are of Trunk, his wife, and others. Printed material consists of scrapbook pages, newspaper clippings, exhibition catalogs and pamphlets mostly concerning Trunk's exhibitions at Dudensing Gallery, New York.”
Many of his paintings remain in the possession of his family and with private collectors. In 2009, The Herman Trunk Foundation was incorporated as part of the effort to preserve the artist's legacy.
External links
- The Herman Trunk Foundation
- Emmanuel College, "Herman Trunk: Catholic Modernist" Sept. 8 - Oct. 22 2009
- Endicott College, "Herman Trunk and the Modernist Still Life" Oct. 15 - Dec. 18 2009
- Herman Trunk Papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Francis M. Naumann 1994 Exhibition
- New York Times essay on 1992 Nardin Fine Arts show
- National Museum of Catholic Art and History
- Trunk's Paintings