MERCERSBURG MAGAZINE SPRING 2017
Putting in the PREPARATION
By Chip Patterson
WILLIAM CLUTZ ’51 LOOKS BACK ON MORE THAN SIX DECADES IN THE ART WORLD One minute you were in, the next minute you were out—that was the New York art world, according to William “Bill” Clutz ’51. Art dealers came and went. Your paintings might sell as soon as they were shown; then in a few months, nobody cared. It was practically impossible for anyone—even the critics—to predict which artists would succeed and which would never amount to anything. “It was very much like the theatre, or fashion,” Clutz says. In the 1960s and ’70s, an artist’s work typically could be in demand at a given time and then abruptly go out of vogue. “I had a dealer and the dealer would go out of business for one reason or another. This was happening a fair amount of the time, and it’s something you live with.” But “something always opened up,” he says. He saw the setbacks as temporary and focused on creating. Despite an incredibly fickle environment, Clutz became a successful artist, with pieces ending up in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and dozens of galleries, museums and corporate collections throughout the United States. He taught painting at the University of Minnesota, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and for 22 years at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Clutz’s career materials are housed in the Archives of American Art within the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He retired in 2008 and lives in Rhinebeck, New York. When Clutz attended Mercersburg in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Academy did not offer art classes, but Clutz studied privately with Mercersburg resident Thomas Danaher (whose wife, Ellen, was the daughter of legendary Mercersburg faculty member and track & field coach Jimmy Curran; as an aside, the Danahers’ son, Tom ’62, attended Mercersburg and died in 2015). After graduating from the University of Iowa in 1955, Clutz began to display his work at local shows, and not long afterward, he moved to New York City. For new artists especially, the center of the art world was unpredictable and unreliable. “At one point I went with a very good dealer, who developed people like Alex Katz [the internationally known painter and sculptor], and he was publishing [Katz’s] editions,” says Clutz. “This was the 1960s, and the dealer told me I needed to become better known, and he wanted me to do prints for him. So I did.”
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