Aline
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 The Face of Music II Spring 2002 Introduction to the Exhibition New York-born Aline Fruhauf (1907-78) had a more subtle approach to caricature than the pointed sarcasm one typically associates with the genre. Her interest was sparked in high school, when she became aware of the drawings of Hollywood actors appearing in movie magazines as the vogue for celebrity caricature was gaining momentum in the 1920s1. In particular she was attracted to the work of Ralph Barton (1891-1931), whose humorous drawings were published in Vanity Fair and Judge, among others. In the habit of sending fan mail, she sent Barton an admiring letter and soon became a regular visitor to his Manhattan apartment. Barton introduced the young Fruhauf to the elegant illustrations of the Bloomsbury caricaturist Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), which also made a lasting impression. Through Barton's influence she began to realize that "caricature was not only a respectable form of art but also a valuable way of documenting human beings," as she recalled in her posthumously published memoirs, Making Faces2. Her first attempts were portraits of movie stars painted on shirt boards which she sent to their subjects in exchange for autographed photos, and classroom doodles of her impressions of theatrical performances. Her first caricature appeared in the New York World in 1926 while she was still a student at the Parsons School of Design. With this leap to professional status, Fruhauf began peddling her drawings of the theater world to the New York dailies and landed a regular column in The Morning Telegraph a year later. That same year she began a seven-year stint caricaturing musicians for the pages of Musical America when its regular contributor resigned. Fruhauf, who always made sketches from life, soon realized that concert audiences were not receptive to her "scratching sessions" as she called them, and began attending press conferences and arranging private sittings. One of the perks of her job was that some subjects would play for her. Such was the case with Maurice Ravel, whom she described as "the most congenial celebrity I have ever drawn." George Gershwin was another composer who played while she sketched him. In 1928 the artist was assigned to capture his likeness on the occasion of his premiere of An American in Paris with the New York Philharmonic. Growing dissatisfied with the stultifying approach to drawing known as "Dynamic Symmetry" [sic] taught at Parsons, Fruhauf enrolled in 1930 in the Art Students League studying under Boardman Robinson (life drawing), Kenneth Hayes Miller (painting), and Charles Locke (lithography). This prepared her for the transition from the caricatures she had been publishing in the newspapers, when the demand for them ended after the fall of the stock market, to exhibiting and selling her work in galleries. She was approached by a dealer of old prints who asked her to do a series on legal figures inspired by the nineteenth-century British prototypes by satirists known as Ape and Spy. These drawings were transformed into prints using a new offset process called photo-gelatin. One of her most successful prints from this series was of the Supreme Court justices, The Nine Old Men (1936), which became popular in Washington and sold for many years at an antiques shop in Georgetown. During the 1930s Fruhauf was publishing regularly in theater and art magazines. A series of caricatures on artists and art dealers appeared in Creative Art in 1933. She also joined the graphics division of the Federally funded Works Progress Administration (WPA), which further honed her lithographic skills. More importantly, the WPA experience enabled her to meet and mingle with many of the emerging New York artists whom she caricatured in a new series of lithographs entitled Artists at Work, exhibited at the ACA Gallery in 1938. Her subjects included Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Max Weber, and Raphael Soyer, among others. The artists were followed with a series on New York fashion designers. Fruhauf often incorporated elements of their profession or showed her subjects at work to add depth to the caricature portrait. As we see in this exhibition, she was adept at depicting a group of occupationally related subjects, a formula which became a leitmotif of her career. Fruhauf, who by then had two young daughters,
moved to Bethesda While the artist series had been executed in oil, Fruhauf decided to use encaustic, a technique dating back to the ancient Egyptian mummy portraits from Faiyum, for the musicians. To achieve similar effects, a mixture of pigment, beeswax and turpentine was heated and brushed on a masonite base prepared with gesso. When partially dry the "paint" had to be fused to the surface using an infra-red light. Fruhauf gave a fascinating account of her trials with the medium in Making Faces, and mentioned that the harp of Sylvia Meyer, who played with the National Symphony, was painted in pure gold and burnished, "renaissance-style, with a wedge-shaped piece of polished agate." One of the advantages of the waxy encaustic was that she could scratch through its surface with a fingernail to create white outlines and accents. The 24 paintings of conductors, composers, critics and musicians were exhibited at the Dupont Theatre Art Gallery in November 1957 as The Face of Music in Washington. At the opening, Prentiss Taylor and another friend sent her a bouquet of flowers made out of wax. The show was so popular that it was extended for several months and traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art a year later. Aline Fruhauf remained a dedicated caricaturist, often revisiting some of her favorite subjects in different media, such as Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, Martha Graham, Igor Stravinsky and Alice Longworth. Later in her career she focused on lithography and woodcut; and the "Peggy Bacon of Washington," as one critic called her, was honored with solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian in 1966 and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1977. The encaustic portraits were donated by the artist's husband, Erwin Vollmer, in 1982 and hung for many years in the hallway of the Library's administrative offices. - LuLen Walker Detail of Self-Portrait, 1966, 1 For a thorough discussion of this phenomenon,
see Wendy Wick Reaves with Pie Friendly, Celebrity Caricature
in America (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,
in association with Yale University Press: New Haven and London,
1998), especially Chapter 8 and the description of Fruhauf's
career on page 191. aland@georgetown.edu |
