Janice Sachse: A Retrospective

A RETROSPECTIVE

JA N I C E S A C H S E

A RETROSPECTIVE

JA N I C E S A C H S E

IV

A RETROSPECTIVE

V

JA N I C E S A C H S E

Janice Sachse: A Retrospective is the first book in the Louisiana Treasures series.

It was designed and produced by the LSU School of Art in conjunction with the Sachse Retrospective exhibition at the LSU School of Art Alfred C. Glassell Jr. Exhibition Gallery from March 29 through April 17, 2016.

LOUISI A NA TR E A SUR ES

louisianatreasures.lsu.edu

DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

PROJECT DIRECTOR

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Kitty Pheney

Randi Willett Abigail Smithson Dason Pettit Dan Henderson Tanya Anderson

DESIGNERS Amy Blacketter & Bo Kim LSU School of Art: GDSO (Graphic Design Student Office)

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Luisa Restrepo Perez

FACULTY ADVISOR Rod Parker

PRINTING

ADDITIONAL IMAGES COURTESY OF Harry R. Sachse Polly Rubenstein Henderson Nancy Noles

ESSAYS BY

Pacom Korea, Inc.

Glauco Adorno Darius Spieth

EXHIBITION CURATOR

INTRODUCTIONS BY

Glauco Adorno

Rod Parker Harry R. Sachse

JANICE RUBENSTEIN SACHSE ( 1 9 0 8 - 1 99 8 )

Raised in Baton Rouge, Janice Rubenstein Sachse created artwork that reflected the social conditions of Louisiana during the mid-twentieth century. She studied art at Louisiana State University and Sophie Newcomb College. In 1925 at the LSU Art Department she began working with the renowned muralist Conrad Albrizio, who encouraged her to explore and experiment, an attitude that Sachse retained throughout her 70-year painting career. Although she did not adhere to any one technique or subject matter, Sachse most often painted the people and places of Louisiana, even traveling along the state’s newly built interstate in the early 1970s to create a series of paintings that detailed the state’s landscape. She exhibited widely in Louisiana and was represented by Helen Seger’s La Boetie Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.

In 1999, a year after her death, the Janice R. Sachse Visiting Artist Series (now the Janice R. Sachse School of Art Support Fund) was endowed and established at Louisiana State University in her honor.

UNTITLED 1945 F ROM THE COL L EC TION OF HARRY SACHS E

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INTRODUCTIONS The LSU School of Art faculty, staff and students live daily with a healthy and dynamic interaction between the forces of tradition and the demands of innovation, both individually and culturally, as generation succeeds generation. Although it is cliché to say that a school is like a family, the Janice Sachse Retrospective exhibition has brought to light aspects of family and community that we value in South Louisiana.

Janice R. Sachse’s father, Isaac H. Rubenstein, together with other members of the Baton Rouge business community, was instrumental in securing the land on which the current university campus is built. By the late 1920s, when Sachse came of age as an artist, LSU began a period of extraordinary growth. As a result of their vision, the university grew from just 168 faculty and approximately 2,000 students to almost 400 faculty and a student body of over 6,000 within five years.

Sachse’s pioneering modernist sensibility, which Professor Darius Spieth recognizes in his assessment of her art, was formed in what was then called the Department of Fine Arts. In a few rooms on the lower level of Allen Hall, drawing, design, painting, sculpture, and crafts were taught among a small group of faculty and students. A key faculty figure at that time was Conrad Albrizio, the man Sachse credits with teaching her “everything she knows,” as Glauco Adorno notes in his biographical essay.

The School of Art today is a much larger organization, but the energy and creativity released by transformational classroom interactions between faculty and students, the same that propelled Sachse’s career as an artist, is still very much a part of our lives. The sense of community, the support for innovation and creative ambition, is such an everyday affair that we can easily take it for granted.

Our heartfelt thanks go to Polly Rubenstein Henderson, Sachse’s niece, and to Harry R. Sachse, Janice and Victor Sachse’s son, for their enthusiastic response to the idea of developing this exhibition. Their family story reminds us of, and further connects us to, our roots in this community as well as to the wider world and the global outlook epitomized by this pioneer of modern art in South Louisiana.

Many people in the School of Art and the College of Art & Design came together to make this project happen. We thank Darius Spieth, Glauco Adorno, Kitty Pheney, Louisa Restrepo Perez, the Graphic Design Student Office, Malia Krolak, Julie Lefebvre, and Angela Harwood.

The Janice R. Sachse Retrospective exhibition and reception was made possible by the leaders, supporters, and members of the Glassell Gallery Group as well as the many donors to the LSU School of Art’s Annual and Gallery Support funds at the LSU Foundation. We particularly wish to thanks Mr. & Mrs. J. Alan Priest, of Centerville,

JANICE SACHSE, 1972

Mississippi, for their generous donation of An Approach to New Orleans, a significant Sachse landscape painting which is featured in this book and exhibition and which will remain afterwards as part of the School of Art’s permanent collection.

We also extend our thanks for the continuing support provided by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation through the LSU School of Art Auto Hotel Fund, which benefits from the advice of Nadine Carter Russell. The Alfred C. Glassell Jr. Exhibition Gallery, where the Janice Sachse’s exhibition will be placed in 2016, is located in the Shaw Center. It is an extraordinary facility conceived and developed by a public and private initiative—the same type of partnership which, four or five generations earlier, brought the LSU campus into being. Our appreciation for the vision of the government and civic leaders, especially Mark Drennen and John Davies, which led to this opportunity for our school and brings the Sachse legacy full circle, remains undiminished ten years after it opened.

Rod Parker School of Art Director

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I know I speak for our entire family when I say, we are enormously grateful to LSU, and especially to Rod Parker and his team, for putting together this book and organizing the exhibition of my mother’s work. Janice R. Sachse’s paintings are held in collections as far apart as Paris; Mexico; Washington, D.C.; New York, Phoenix, Arizona; and Houston, Texas; as well as New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It has been quite an effort gathering and photographing her paintings for the exhibition and book.

I first knew my mother was an artist when I was four years old and she made a picture of a sailboat on a linoleum plate with my name on it for me to put in my books. I loved it. Later, as a 10-year-old, I was impressed that she could sign her name backwards in mirror writing. She said it was from signing etchings.

As the accounts in this book and her paintings show, she moved on to oil painting in a big way—wonderful oil paintings of Louisiana landscapes and very internal portraits, intimate pictures of household scenes. I have two of her large landscapes in my office in Washington, D.C. One is a grand outdoor scene of a field and huge clouds with live oak trees in the distance. Clients always comment on it as very moving and some see figures in the trees as grazing buffaloes. I recently added a wonderful painting from her Interstate Series.

I hope everyone enjoys this book and exhibition as much as Polly Henderson (Janice’s niece) and I have enjoyed working with the LSU team who put it together.

Seeing her lifetime of work makes Janice Sachse seem closer and makes us more impressed than ever with the scope and quality of her work.

Harry R. Sachse Washington, D.C., November 2015

JANICE SACHSE, 1928

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JANICE SACHSE: REGIONALISM AND ARTISTIC INNOVATION

BY GLAUCO ADORNO

Janice Sachse was a regional painter who felt deeply connected to the landscapes and people of Louisiana. Inspired by her surroundings, she recorded scenes from her home state with expressionist brushstrokes and a distinctly modern sensibility.

Her portraits of loved ones and views of the marshlands afforded her opportunities for always dynamic experimentations with artistic techniques, a quest which she kept pursuing throughout her artistic life. Janice’s career as an artist started in the 1930s, but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that her work gained national recognition. Her subjects combined regional themes with a modernist approach to figurative compositions, still lifes, and landscapes.

A native of New Orleans, she was born Janice Rubenstein in 1908. Her father, Isaac H. Rubenstein, was a well-traveled man and raised her in a cultured environment that was appreciative of art. He served in the United States Army under Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War and had lived in London and Paris before settling in Louisiana.1 Also in 1908, Rubenstein purchased a commercial establishment in Baton Rouge. After a year acquiring merchandise in New York City with his family, Rubenstein was able to transform the business­—called Rosenfield’s—in a major department store in South Louisiana. Janice was still a small child when the family permanently relocated to the state’s capital.

Janice’s uncle, who lived next door, subscribed to the French periodical L’Illustration, which often included photographic reproductions of acclaimed European artworks. These reproductions were Janice’s first contact with the great painters of the world. The aspiring artist was deeply touched when she realized that she could appreciate celebrated Impressionist masterworks even without being able to read French.2 Her bold personality was already evident in her early years. In the early 1920s, Janice was expelled from University High School in Baton Rouge for drawing a caricature of the director on the blackboard.3 When her parents enrolled her in another school, they allowed her to take private art lessons. She learned basic drawing and painting techniques, and was introduced to drawing from casts and, occasionally, from live models.4 Janice’s formal artistic education, however, started at LSU. In 1921, Janice’s father participated in the effort to find a new home for the expanding Louisiana State University.5 In order to secure the land where the current campus would be built,

Isaac H. Rubenstein—along with other businessmen in Baton Rouge—purchased part of the estate. They held the property collectively until the state government could gather the funds to acquire the land. In the fall of 1925, Janice enrolled as a freshman in the LSU College of Arts & Sciences, just three years after the new campus was inaugurated.6 Here, she developed a close working relationship with New York-born muralist Conrad Albrizio, who taught painting at LSU at the time.7 An accomplished artist, Albrizio was a key figure in Janice’s artistic education.8 As Janice later recalled, while he did not hesitate to sometimes harshly criticize her work, it was he who taught her “everything she knows.”9 Starting in the fall semester of 1926, Janice attended the Newcomb College School of Art in New Orleans.10 Through the new educational setting she came in contact with the New Orleans Arts and Crafts Club, a group of artists and intellectuals who strove to introduce European ideas about modern art to the South.11 Founded in 1922, the purpose of the club was to “stimulate the interest in the arts, encouraging local artists and craftsmen and providing technical instruction for students.”12 The club rapidly gained popularity, attracting painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians to the French Quarter—where they met—helping to transform a neighborhood in decline into a cultural center.13 During the second half of the 1920s, when Janice frequented the club, the group had established its headquarters at 520 Royal Street, where it provided studio space and exhibition galleries to its members. Members also ran the club’s art school, which offered lessons in drawing, painting, sculpture, and crafts.14 During the 1930s, following the years of the Great Depression, the enterprise was financially supported by art enthusiast Sarah Henderson, who owned the school’s building and who served as president of the club’s board.15 The New Orleans Arts and Crafts Club’s efforts culminated with the visit of Gertrude Stein, who, in 1935, delivered a lecture in the club’s headquarters.16 An American expatriate writer in Paris, Stein was famous for promoting the careers of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Ernest Hemingway, among others.

The New Orleans Arts and Crafts Club enabled Janice to meet several likeminded Louisiana modernist artists, such as Alberta Kinsey, Caroline Durieux, Paul Ninas, and the Woodward Brothers.17 The ability to exchange ideas was crucial during the formative years of the young artist’s career. Membership in this circle allowed Janice to shape her identity as a modern artist of the South. In 1927, Janice came back to the LSU art program, and during that term, at only 19 years of age, she married Baton Rouge attorney Victor Sachse.18 The couple had two sons: Victor Sachse Jr., born in 1930, and Harry Sachse, who was born in 1934. She continued to produce artwork, all the while attending to her duties as a young mother with two small children. A home studio enabled her to wake up early to paint while others were still asleep, pause for breakfast, and then return to the easel when her husband left for the office.19 Given this routine, it is not surprising that domestic themes occupy an important place in Janice’s art.

European avant-garde movements.29 The act of gluing extraneous elements to the canvas support can be traced back to the rise of the collage technique, which was pioneered by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Inspired by New Orleans painter Ida Kohlmeyer, Janice began working on a series of paintings she called Diminutives. In order to express multiple ideas on one canvas, Sachse created a pattern of squares in which she could insert images of her choice. Often enclosing small portraits of members of her family and good friends, Janice’s grid consisted of arrangements of “boxed” figures which explored the

After the end of the war, she returned to Louisiana with her young family, but her artistic development stalled. The realization of the horrors of the Holocaust disturbed Janice so greatly that she took a break of two years from painting.

When asked about this period, Sachse revealed that she was too emotionally distressed to pursue her art.23 She considered her creative activity to be a record of her thoughts and experiences, and she was so overwhelmed by news of the genocide that her motivation became impaired. Janice’s art was tied to her home, her family, and her land, and such horrifying news made it temporarily impossible for her to focus on her work. Her creative impulse, however, “simmered in the background, developing its flavor like a great soup on the back burner,” as she later admitted.24 The support provided by her husband offered Janice Sachse artistic freedom devoid of commercial pressures that, as art historian Richard Cox pointed out, “could often wear down the artist’s spirit.”25 Her goal was neither financial profit nor fame. Janice’s painting was foremost a vehicle of self-expression, and she used it as a means to connect with the world around her. Sachse’s passion lay in expressing her vision, in her coming to terms with reality through art.26 Her representations of the world, focused on the familiar and the domestic, come across as spontaneous meditative exercises. In an interview, she described her practice as steady and controlled.27 While the easel was always available to her, she approached painting not with a feverish need to produce art but with a constant desire to record daily life.28 The niche of artistic independence she thus carved out for herself enabled Sachse to maintain constant experiments with formats, media, and techniques. Although the majority of her works are painted in oil on canvas, her oeuvre includes monotypes, silk-screens, engravings, watercolor, pastels, and drawings. During the 1960s, she developed a collage method that she would apply to several paintings, which involved gluing pieces of canvas on the painted surface to create a three-dimensional effect. An example of this technique is seen in the hair and clothes of a figure study from the end of the decade (Fig. 1). The manner in which Janice handled the material evidences her affinity with the experimental spirit of

Figure 1 Janice Sachse, Waiting, late 1960s, oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas.

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With the advent of the Second World War, Victor joined the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal branch of the United States Army. In 1941, the family moved to Washington, D.C.20 At the same time, Janice served as a nurses’ aide at the Walter Reed Hospital for war veterans.21 Despite the emotional burden that came with helping badly injured soldiers, she took art lessons at the Corcoran School of Art. Having access to the museums in the nation’s capital proved to be a powerful influence in her career; yet, she felt deeply distressed over the war.22 Her artistic insights and production broadened as she absorbed the avant-garde concepts evident in the German Expressionist works in the Corcoran collections.

6

Figure 2 Janice Sachse, Diminutives: Yellow, 1977, oil on canvas.

In 1984, several years after the completion of the painting, she added portraits of her son Harry’s children to the composition, accommodating the growing family. Her willingness to include her grand children’s portraits in the grid hints at the sophisticated nature of the series. Conceived as a collection of multiple and dynamic ideas, the elements in the Diminutives remained open to new situations as time passed.

In a parallel development, Janice Sachse produced a group of paintings that would initiate her most iconic series. As the interstate system expanded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sachse gained easier access to the remotest locations in Louisiana. Attracted by the possibilities of previously unexplored scenery, she traveled the highways by car, recording views of her home state. With the help and photographic skills of her husband Victor, Janice rendered the landscape with expressive brushstrokes and in simplified forms.31 The new series constituted a

variation on subjects she had previously explored. The intimate and expressive approach she had first refined in the views of her home and family were now applied to the landscape of Louisiana.

Sachse’s modernist visions of the Deep South (Fig. 3) illustrated Louisiana from a hitherto little-known perspective. Representations of the state, up to this point, often included cliché imagery of Spanish moss hanging from oak trees and other equally saccharine subjects, whereas Sachse preferred modern, sober depictions of the marshlands.32 On the occasion of a 1975 one-woman exhibition at the AngloAmerican Museum—today’s LSU Museum of Art, but located then in the Memorial Tower on campus—Janice Sachse exhibited her Interstate Series for the first time.

Critics praised her resolutely contemporary views of the wetlands, painted with heavy strokes of rich but naturalistic colors.33 A larger exhibition that took place in the Old State Capitol of Baton Rouge two years later further increased the popularity of the series, which now came to define Sachse’s artistic identity.34 A few years after the launch of the Interstate series, the Hilton Hotel in Baton Rouge purchased 12 large paintings from the set. They hung in the Baton Rouge Hilton’s dining room, which was named after the series. When the Hilton administration sold the hotel in the 1980s, another company renovated the premises and the artworks disappeared. Recently, however, it transpired that the new administration had secured the artworks for safekeeping during the renovations. The Sachse family was since able to reacquire the paintings so that several of the Hilton’s Interstate paintings are on view again in this exhibition.

Encouraged by the success of her Interstate Series, Sachse spoke out in public more frequently. She used interviews to voice her concerns over artistic education in the state. She often commented on the training of young painters.

In her opinion, acquaintance with the great masters and visits to museums were an essential part of the learning process.35 Janice maintained that aspiring artists should also seek counsel and inspiration by socializing with more accomplished professionals, in particular those who teach in a university setting. She claimed that professors hired by universities are artists whose circumstances allow them to sustain their practice according to their true artistic vocation, no matter the marketability of their works.36 According to her niece, Polly Henderson, she was interested in supporting young local artists and often visited the LSU Department of Fine Arts to seek out new talent.37 Putting her ideas into practice, Sachse informally mentored a number of painters, including Louisiana artist George Rodrigue.38

Figure 3 Janice Sachse, Trees on the Batture (From the interstate series), 1970s, oil on canvas.

The influence of Janice Sachse’s work, however, was not confined to the state of Louisiana. Her most significant connection on a national level was with the art dealer Helen Serger. Originally from Silesia, in what is today Poland, and raised in Vienna, Helen Serger fled Europe during the Second World War and settled with

7

spatial relationships between the squares.30 Such is the case in Diminutives: Yellow (Fig. 2), which features a mixture of portraits, icons, and symbols.

8

her husband, the modernist artist Frederick Serger, in New York City. Avid art collectors, the Sergers became fixtures in the artistic scene of the city, as Frederick secured numerous exhibitions in New York and across the country. Concurrently Helen’s frequent trips back to Europe granted her the opportunity to act as a private dealer for art enthusiasts on the East Coast of the United States.39 In 1964, Helen Serger opened La Boetie, a gallery on Madison Avenue in the Upper East Side of New York, where she organized exhibitions of some of the leading figures in European modernism, such as Egon Schiele, Max Pechstein, and Karl SchmidtRottluf, as well as Marcel Duchamp and Paul Klee.40 In many cases, the gallery was a pioneer in the introduction of German and Austrian Expressionists to the United States.41 Helen Serger was particularly interested in the work of female artists.

Exhibitions with titles such as Pioneering Women Artists, 1900 to 1940, frequently featured works by artists such as Hannah Höch and Olga Rozanova.42 Starting in the mid-1960s, Helen Serger exhibited and sold Janice Sachse’s paintings next to modern masters. Moreover, Sachse’s Prophets (Fig. 4) was selected for the New York World’s Fair of 1965 from the artist’s stock at La Boetie.43 The painting was included for display in the selection for “The House of Good Taste,” designed by the Edward Durrell Stone architectural firm.44 Prophets was featured in the living room of the “modern” model house seen at the fair.45 In 1989, The New York Times paid posthumous homage to Serger’s importance by crediting her with introducing avant-garde aesthetics to the United States through her exhibition activity.46 Janice Sachse’s association with Serger is proof that, although local in ambition, her work resonated with a wide audience across the United States.

The location of many works sold by La Boetie during the 1960s and 1970s, including images of religious themes, portraits, and still lifes, is currently unknown. Sachse’s modern compositions were in tune with German Expressionist aesthetics made successful through Helen Serger’s gallery. According to Polly Henderson, during this period, Sachse worked intensively with Serger, since there was a high demand for the artist’s paintings. Unfortunately, the gallery’s sales records are no longer extant. Since Janice’s signature is not always easy to recognize, tracking down those works sold in New York through the gallery—many to international buyers—is impossible.

Janice Sachse stands out as one of the most important mid-century modernist painters from Louisiana. Her innovative approach to modern art—both local and cosmopolitan—adds a uniquely personal vision to the artistic tradition of the state.

Throughout Janice Sachse’s oeuvre, one finds a staunch insistence on being honest to oneself. For her, true artistic endeavors depended on authentic self-expression.

She abhorred art that catered to the mainstream taste of the public and considered art produced for decorative purposes as lacking in character. Nothing was more sinful than adjusting one’s own ideas to satisfy the demands of the market.47

Figure 4 Janice Sachse, Prophets, 1963, oil on canvas.

Sachse was an untiring experimenter. The multitude of techniques and styles she incorporated in her work reveals a preoccupation with constantly improving and challenging oneself. She warned others to “avoid the tyranny of the technique,” claiming that artists who are recognized by their style have their potential impaired by conventions.48 In her opinion, experimentation led to an “expansion of technique,” which she considered a precondition for being a great artist. The pursuit of these free-spirited experiments and their application to local subject matter, such as scenes from daily life and views of the Louisiana landscape, destined Janice Sachse to become a modernist pioneer and one of the great artists of the South.

1.

2.

3.

9

END NOTES National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., “United States

22.

Sachse, “Louisiana Legends: Interview with Gus Weil,” TV interview, June 6, 1985.

Index to Service Records, War with Spain, 1898,” Company B, 7th Infantry Unit, Illinois.

23.

Ibid.

Microfilm Publication M871, roll 99. See https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QK7J-

24.

Polly Henderson, in discussion with the author.

YKG4.

25.

Cox, “Janice Sachse: Intimate Regional Art,” 7.

Janice Sachse, “Louisiana Legends: Interview with Janice Sachse by Gus Weil,” TV

26.

Polly Henderson, in discussion with the author.

interview, June 6, 1985. LPB Digital Collection, http://ladigitalmedia.org/video_v2/

27.

Ibid.

asset-detail/LLOLG-0302, accessed September 8, 2015.

28.

Cox, “Janice Sachse: Intimate Regional Art,” 8.

Richard Cox, “Janice Sachse: Intimate Regional Art,” in Janice Sachse Retrospective,

29.

Sachse, “Interview by Gus Weil,” TV interview, June 6, 1985.

1939 – 1983, exh. cat. (Baton Rouge: Franklin Press, 1983), 8.

30.

Keith Cooper Marshall, “Janice R. Sachse: A Painterly Response to a Region” American

4.

Ibid.

5.

Louisiana State University Office of the Chancellor Records, Special Collections - Hill

31.

Ibid., 38.

Memorial Library, Baton Rouge, LA, “List of Purchasers of Gartness/Williams Plantation,

32.

Cox, “Janice Sachse: Intimate Regional Art,” 7.

May 23, 1918.” RG #A0001, Box 74, Folder 1441.

33.

Anne Price, “Nothing Too Small for Observation,” The Sunday Advocate, Baton Rouge,

6.

Artist 44, no. 458 (September, 1980), 40.

Louisiana State University Archives, Special Collections - Hill Memorial Library, Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, “LSU Directory Faculty

LA (November 2, 1975), 9-E. 34.

and Students 1925/1926,” LD3108.A3.

Anne Price, “An Intense Artistic Experience,” The Sunday Advocate, Baton Rouge, LA (October 16, 1977), 18.

7.

Cox, “Janice Sachse: Intimate Regional Art,” 8.

35.

Marshall, “Janice Sachse: A Painterly Response to a Region,” 38.

8.

Kathleen Orillion, “Conrad Albrizio: An Introduction to the Artist,” in Conrad Albrizio

36.

Ibid.

1894 – 1973, exh. cat. (Baton Rouge, 1986), 2.

37.

Polly Henderson, in discussion with the author.

9.

Sachse, “Louisiana Legends: Interview with Gus Weil,” TV interview, June 6, 1985.

38.

Ibid.

10.

Ibid.

39.

George Stiles, Frederick Serger, Life and Work (New York City: Schonemann Galleries,

11.

Laura Clark Brown. “New Orleans Modernism: The Arts and Crafts Club in the Vieux Carré, 1919-1939.” in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical

Inc., 1962), 13.

40.

Association 41, no. 3 (Summer 2000), 319.

12.

13.

Anon., The Arts and Crafts Club New Orleans: Bulletin of the New Orleans Art School

Anon., “Helen Serger, 88, Dies: Dealer in Modern Art,” The New York Times (November 18, 1989), 13.

41.

Janice Sachse owned catalogs published by La Boetie accompanying the exhibitions

(New Orleans: The Arts and Crafts Club, 1929), 3.

of the artists mentioned. She signed her name on the covers of these catalogs.

Deborah C. Pollack, Visual Art and the Urban Evolution of the New South (Columbia:

The catalogs are now part of the collection of Middleton Library at Louisiana State

University of South Carolina Press, 2015), 215.

University.

14.

Anon., The Arts and Crafts Club New Orleans, 9.

15.

Brown, New Orleans Modernism, 317.

16.

Pollack, Visual Art and the Urban Evolution of the New South, 216.

43.

Cox, “Janice Sachse: Intimate Regional Art,” 48.

17.

Ibid.

44.

Anon., Official Guide: The New York World’s Fair (New York: The Editors of Time-Life

18.

Louisiana State University Archives, Special Collections - Hill Memorial Library, Baton

42.

Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen and Helen Serger, Pioneering Women Artists: 1900 to 1940, exh. cat. (New York City: La Boetie, 1980), n. p.

Books, 1965), 64.

Rouge LA, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, “LSU Directory Faculty

45.

Cox, “Janice Sachse: Intimate Regional Art,” 32.

and Students 1927/1928,” LD3108.A3.

46.

Anon., “Helen Serger,” The New York Times (November 18, 1989), 13.

19.

Polly Henderson (Janice Sachse’s niece) in discussion with the author, August 2015.

47.

Ibid.

20.

Sachse, “Louisiana Legends: Interview with Gus Weil,” TV interview, June 6, 1985.

48.

Marshall, “Janice R. Sachse: A Painterly Response to a Region,” 38.

21.

Polly Henderson, in discussion with the author.

10

JANICE SACHSE: PIONEERING MODERNISM IN SOUTHERN LOUISIANA

BY DARIUS SPIETH

Several recent exhibitions have refocused attention on the relationship between the center and the periphery in the history of modern art. In 2011, The Getty synchronized a series of exhibitions under the title Pacific Standard Time, which highlighted modern art in southern California between 1945 and 1980. Implicitly, the Pacific Standard Time initiative called into question received notions that modern American art, during the middle of the twentieth century, could only blossom on the East Coast, and specifically in New York. Two years later, the Centre Pompidou in Paris organized another landmark exhibition called Modernités plurielles, 1905-1975. Modernités plurielles was concerned with extending the canon of modern art beyond America and Europe by showcasing modern works created, for instance, in Latin America, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Southeast Asia. The exhibition was widely seen as the first attempt to write a global history of modernism.

What do these exhibitions have to do with the life and art of Janice Sachse, apart, perhaps, a coincidence in chronology? Sachse was a pioneer of modernism in southern Louisiana. To work as a modern artist in Baton Rouge, during the mid-years of the twentieth century, meant forging a career on the periphery of modernism. Unlike today, there were hardly any commercial galleries to show modern art in Baton Rouge during the 1960s and 1970s. The same held true for most other cities of comparable size, but at least there was the LSU Art program in Baton Rouge, which Sachse had attended in the late 1920s. It is here that she found early support for her creative ambitions and a community of like-minded artists. This scarcity of modern art venues in the capital city made Sachse look for representation in New York, thus allowing her to build a bridge between center and periphery. From the mid-1960s onward, she showed at Helen Serger’s La Boetie Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, which featured such luminaries of modern art as Kurt Schwitters, Emil Nolde, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky, some of whom strongly influenced Sachse’s own development as a modern artist.

The name of Serger’s gallery in itself was programmatic. It referred both to the namesake Parisian gallery, which had promoted works of the Italian and Russian avant-garde since before World War I, and to the rue de la Boëtie, north of the Elysée Palace, where Pablo Picasso had moved in 1918, and where the Surrealists organized some of their activities in the 1920s and 1930s. As a gallery directed by a woman that focused on Expressionist art, along with Dadaist and Surrealist work,

A Max Ernst, Vox Angelica, 1943, oil on canvas.

La Boetie also recalled the precedent of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery, which had held a virtual monopoly as a private showcase for avant-garde art in New York during the 1940s. Guggenheim’s roster of Dadaists and Surrealists had included Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, and especially Max Ernst. Moreover, Guggenheim was famous for introducing the pioneers of Cubism (Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger), of German Expressionism (Wassily Kandinsky), and of American Abstract Expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, among others) to a New York audience.

Sachse’s paintings reflect this variety of twentieth-century avant-garde styles. Her series of Diminutives from the 1970s, for instance, features compartmentalized compositions reminiscent of Max Ernst and Paul Klee (pp. 38-41; ill. A and B); each compartment contains a sampling of Sachse iconography: portraits of friends and family, still lifes, and landscapes. The Cubist influence is strongest in Sachse’s still lifes, which are defined by a more monochrome palette, flattened space, and faceted planes (pp. 36, 89). The arbitrary and often strident colors of the late nineteenth-century Nabis and early twentieth-century Fauvist painters left their imprint on many of Sachse’s early landscapes. The bright, yellow sky in Sachse’s 1971 silkscreen Feliciana (p. 31) reminds the observer of the Talisman (ill. C), a small river landscape painted on a cigar box lid, which Nabis artist

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Paul Sérusier had executed while residing in Brittany in 1888. In doing so, he followed closely Paul Gauguin’s instructions, delivered as a dialogue: “How do you see the trees?” “They are yellow.” “Well, then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. Render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.” The stark, black outlines found in the Feliciana print or in landscape compositions like Crepe Myrtles after the Rain (p. 66) are another feature that

C Paul Sérusier, The Talisman (Landscape of the Bois d’Amour at Pont-Aven), 1888, oil on cigar box cover.

Sachse’s compositions share with the cloisonnisme of Nabis painters like Gauguin or Emile Bernard (ill. D).

B Paul Klee, Small Rhythmic Landscape, ca. 1920, oil on cardboard.

Sachse was above all a great colorist, as many of her landscapes demonstrate.

Crepe Myrtles after the Rain evokes associations with the Dutch landscapes of the young Piet Mondrian (ill. E), when he was going through his Fauvist phase.

Many of Sachse’s Cézannesque still lifes (pp. 34-35, 84-85) provide examples of

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D Emile Bernard, Market in Brittany, 1888, oil on canvas.

Another distinct focus of Sachse’s iconography is portraiture, especially of her family and friends. This choice of subject matter links her again with the Nabis, some of whose painters, like Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, have been described as “Interior Impressionists.” In these images, Sachse developed a unique way of rendering domestic bliss in a social realist style that continued to retain her fondness of patterns and neo-Fauvist colors (pp. 27-30, 65, 77-79).

E Piet Mondrian, Woods near Oele, 1908, oil on canvas.

Impressionistic landscapes make up the largest part of Sachse’s artistic output, culminating in her Interstate Series of the 1970s. Rendered in a deliberately broad manner to capture fleeting aspects of the scenery and climatic effects, the Interstate Series documents the specificities of Louisiana landscapes, especially the marshes. Interestingly, even here neo-Fauvist inclinations, in the form of purple reflections on pools of water as in Cedar Trees and Hyacinths (p. 49) or glowing, orange skies as in Moment of Sunset (p. 57), break up periodically the serenity of the vistas.

In all of her artworks, Sachse brought to bear a modernist sensibility that bespeaks her profound familiarity with twentieth-century avant-garde styles and their conventions. She executed these works at a moment when few artists in the state knew how to integrate modernist ideas into an original painterly idiom. Although she was a local painter, her connection to a leading center of modernism, New York, allowed her to gain a global outlook on what defined art in the twentieth century. For all of these reasons, Janice Sachse stands out as an important pioneer of modern art in southern Louisiana.

F Henri Matisse, Odalisque in Red Trousers, ca. 1924-25, oil on canvas.

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her perpetuating the nervous and arbitrary color scheme that Henri Matisse and his followers, known collectively as the Fauves, introduced to the canon of modern art in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the combination of stridently colored red skirts and checkerboard patterns in Repetitions From a Primitive Painting (p. 81) remind one of Matisse’s love for textiles (ill. F). Matisse, like Sachse, was interested in capturing carefree moments or Bonheur and Joie de vivre, an emotional response to art which they both tried to convey through color.

F E AT U R E D W O R K

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LIT TLE L A M BS 1938 ENGRAVING

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ORDWAY STREET (1945 SNOW IN D C) 1945 PA S T E L

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GEORGETOW N 1945 PA S T E L

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PU R PL E PA NSIES IN P OT 1945 C HARCOA L ON PA PER

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ST. JOSEPH’ S CATHEDRAL 1964 OIL ON C AN VA S

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A RCA DE 1965 OIL AN D COL L AGE ON BOA RD

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HIBISCUS 1966 WAT ERCOLOR

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SOMME R SIST E RS/P ORTRAIT OF T WO YOUNG GIRL S 1968 OIL ON C AN VA S US ED W ITH PE RMISSION OF THE L SU MUS EUM OF ART

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LEMONS IN M Y GA R DE N 1971 OIL ON C AN VA S

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WA ITING L ATE 1960 s OIL AND COL L AGE ON C A N VA S

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A LA MO LAT E 1960 s OIL AND AC RY L IC USED WITH PE R MISSION OF THE LOUISIA NA A RT & SC IENC E M US EU M

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FELIC IANA 1960 SIL KSCRE E N

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BLU E LE A F 1972 OIL/ACRY L IC

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YOUNG HERON FISHING 1972 IN K AN D PA S T E L ON PAPE R

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GEORGI A N CA NIST E R A N D OTHE R THINGS 1979 INK WA SH, WATE RCOLOR, AN D S E PI A

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OBJECTS D’A RT

ST UDIO BOWL AN D BRUSHES FROM MY STUDIO

1979 PE N A N D IN K WA SH

C .1968 IN K WA SH AN D WAT E RCOLOR

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OBJECTS ARRANGED C .1965 OIL ON C AN VA S

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THUN DER OV ER THE MARSHLAN DS 1983 E TCHING

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DIMIN UTIV ES : R E D 1975 OIL ON C AN VA S

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DIMIN UTIV ES : QUILT 1977 OIL ON BOARD

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LE F T : DIMINUTIVES: BLUE 1975 OIL ON C A N VA S

RIGHT : DIMINUTIVES: YELLOW C . 1977 OIL ON C A N VA S

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R ESU LTA NT FOR M IV 1960 MIXED ME DI A

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AN APPROAC H TO N EW ORLE ANS 1975 OIL ON C AN VA S

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LE F T :

ABOV E:

L A BAT T U R E - RIVE R BA NK

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( F ROM THE INT E RSTAT E S E RIES ) 1975 OIL ON C A N VA S

(FROM THE INT ERSTAT E SERIES) 1975 OIL ON BOARD

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ROA D BET W E E N TH E CA NE F IELDS ( F ROM THE INTE RSTATE SE RIES) 1976 OIL ON C AN VA S

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CINC LARE PLANTATION OUTER HOUSES (FROM THE INT ERSTAT E SERIES) 1976 OIL ON C AN VA S

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LE F T : PIN K SPRING ON M A RSH LA KE ( F ROM THE INTE RSTATE S E RIES ) 1970 s OIL ON C A N VA S

RIGHT : EGR ET IN TH E M A RSH GR A SS 1982 OIL ON L IN E N C A N VA S

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M A RSH GR A SS ES W ET L A N DS 1977 OIL ON PAN E L BOA R D

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C EDAR TREES AN D HYAC INTHS 1974 OIL ON C AN VA S

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AU DU BON OA K S 1970 s OIL ON C A N VA S

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OV E R F LOW ( F ROM THE INTE RSTATE SE RIES ) 1970 s OIL ON C AN VA S

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LON E PIN E IN LAN DSCAPE (FROM THE INT ERSTAT E SERIES) 1970 s OIL ON C AN VA S

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PLANTATION ROAD AN D AZ ALE A S 1977 OIL ON C AN VA S

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COT TON F IE L D 1977 OIL ON C AN VA S

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SPRING FLO ODING 1977 GOUACHE ON D’ARCHES RAG

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T R EES ON TH E BAT T U R E ( F ROM THE INTE RSTATE SE RIES) 1970 s OIL ON C A N VA S

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MOMENT OF SUNSET 1970 s OIL ON C ANVA S

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GR EEN PA NOR A M A 1976 OIL ON C AN VA S

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W INTER TREES 1970 s OIL ON C AN VA S

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LOUISIANA MARSH LAN DSCAPE 1975 OIL ON C AN VA S

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V E RTICA L L A NDSCA PE , SU MME R L ATE 1970 s G OUAC H E

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SU M M E R S K Y, SU NS ET ON TH E LA KE LAT E 1970 s GOUACH E

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ATC HAFALAYA OUTING 1974 OIL ON C AN VA S

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OLD STATE CAPITOL 1987 OIL ON C AN VA S

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P ORTRAIT OF DAV ID C .1978 OIL ON C AN VA S

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C REPE MYRTLES AF TER THE RAIN 1974 OIL ON C AN VA S

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THE BOYS C . 1970 OIL ON C AN VA S

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O CE A N L INE R A N D F ISH ES C .1960 WAT ERCOLOR

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YOUNG GIRL S AN D D O G ON THE BE AC H L AT E 1960 s OIL ON C AN VA S

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LE F T : NO ON IN M Y GA R DE N 1980 OIL ON C A N VA S

AC RY L IC SKETCH 1982 AC RY L IC

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WOMAN N. D. PENC IL AN D WAT E RCOLOR

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ST U DY F ROM TH E R A PE OF TH E SA BINES 1960 PE N, IN K A N D WATE RCOLOR

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S ELF P ORT R A IT F ROM 1950 PHOTOGR A PH 1981 MONOT YPE

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BIRDS IN FEEDER 1990 WAT E RCOLOR

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F LOWE RS IN GL A SS JA R 1980 s OIL ON C AN VA S

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P ORT R A IT OF V ICTOR E DWA R D SACHS E 1980 s OIL ON PLY WO OD

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P ORTRAIT OF CAROLIN E DURIEUX C . 1960 OIL ON PLY WOOD

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P ORT R A IT OF DA ME E DITH SIT WE LL C . 1960 OIL ON PLY WO OD

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A BOVE RIGHT : UNTIT LE D E A RLY 1960 s OIL ON C A N VA S

A BOVE LE F T : FOUR CATS ON CARPET 1979 WO OD CUT A N D WAT ERCOLOR

LE F T : FOUR CATS 1979 WO OD CUT A N D WAT ERCOLOR

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R E PETITIONS FROM A PRIMITIV E PAINTING L AT E 1960 s OIL ON C AN VA S

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DESIGNS F ROM A M USH RO OM 1950 s PENCIL A N D WATE RCOLOR

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PE A RS A ND T E A P OT 1960 s OIL ON C A N VA S

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T E R R ACOT TA F LOWE RS 1970 s OIL ON C A N VA S

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FLOW ERS IN A VA SE 1970 T E MPE RA ON BOARD

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H Y DR A NGE A 1966 WAT ERCOLOR

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LE F T : F LOWERS ON MY PATIO TABLE 1964 AC RY L IC

RIGHT : STILL LIFE W ITH BOT TLE ON TABLE C .1968 AC RY L IC

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T E A P OT N. D. OIL ON C AN VA S

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TA BL E BY TH E W IND OW 1972 OIL ON PLY WO OD

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TA BLE A ND C H A IRS 1972 OIL ON C AN VA S

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L SU CA M PA NIL E C .1972 OIL ON C A N VA S

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank all of the individuals and organizations involved with this project. We especially thank Harry R. Sachse, Janice and Victor Sachse’s son, and his family as well as Polly Rubenstein Henderson, Janice’s niece, and her children for all of their assistance in gathering research and locating many of the works featured in this book and the accompanying retrospective exhibition.

Additional appreciation is offered to the collectors who loaned their works to be photographed and included in this book especially: Polly P. Cole, Anne and Paul Marks Jr., Virginia and John B. Noland, Renee and J. Alan Priest, Camilla and Gordon Pugh, Michael D. Robinson and Donald J. Boutté, and Marguerite and Hays Town Jr. Final thanks to the organizations who offered assistance towards this project including the Louisiana Art and Science Museum and the LSU Museum of Art.

LOUISIANA TRE A SURES

louisianatreasures.lsu.edu

JANICE RUBENSTEIN SACHSE (1908-1998)