Belle Cramer and the nettlesome artists of Group 15
St. Louis's rabblerousing Midcentury painters.
Hello! Aplogies for missing a post last week. I had a multitude of adult tasks to deal with. To make up for a no-post week, I’ll also have a li’l short/silly/fun piece on Friday. This post continues the riff from two weeks ago, where I took a deep dive into St. Louis artist Martyl Schweig Langsdorf’s famous Doomsday Clock.
In my time, I’ve known people who’d hijack a Hadron Collider to travel back in time to visit the St. Louis World’s Fair. Eh. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post, but that would be at the bottom of my time-traveling itinerary. Much higher on the list would be St. Louis between 1910 and 1950, specifically the art scene.
The best-known artists from that era are Joe Jones and Thomas Hart Benton (who famously said art shows should be held in bars, not galleries or museums). Benton was a Congressman’s son who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago; Jones was the kid of a housepainter, a self-taught artist determined to paint canvases instead of clapboard. They both made their name as regionalists, insisting on a more honest art that reflected who they were, and where they were. Both were at the right place at the right time. As young artists during the ‘30s, their canvases of working people and farmers caught the imagination of Americans because the miseries of the Depression made people politically radical, pro-union and angry about class. Once World War II was underway, both Jones and Benton were in New York City. After that move, their politics, and their work, softened. Jones’ brushwork got finer, his colors more pastel. He painted magazine covers and Chesterfield ads. And both he and Benton took comissions from Standard Oil. If nothing else, the two men read the zeitgeist, and rode it to great benefit to their careers, not to mention their bank accounts.
The women regionalists in that circle are far less famous, but maybe the avoidance of the pressure that fame brings allowed them to stay dedicated to the vision of their work. Martyl — who I wrote about last week — also painted images of working people, walking every corner of St. Louis, making little sketches that she eventually turned them into full-scale paintings in her studio. She was never a firebrand like Jones, but stayed politically active her whole life, particualrly around antinuclear issues.
In the early 1930s, Martyl’s mother Aimee, along with painter Jesse Rickly, invited Benton and Jones into the new art colony they founded in Ste. Genevieve. Both women studied in Provincetown, Rhode Island, spent time on the East Coast and Europe, and felt that they wanted to make work that was completely original — doing that required them to be in the Middle West. It was the Ste. Gen colony that first brought coastal attention to regional Missouri artists — Jones in particular. He also had a hand in its demise, causing considerable anger in the town after trying to organize a strike among the lime kiln workers there.
After the colony dissolved, it was forgotten in the wake of World War II, TV, et cetera. The colony would’ve been mostly forgotten had it not been for a 20-year-old intern, Melanie Owen, who rediscovered their work while working for the State of Missouri. “At first, no one paid attention to the art colony,” she told The Daily Journal in 1980. “Then people began referring to it as ‘the Mecca of Midwestern art.’ It really was a big deal.”
The Felix Valle House in Ste. Gen staged an exhibit, which was reviewed by St. Louis Post-Dispatch art critic Bob Duffy. The colony’s purpose, he wrote, "was serious. Inspired by regionalist painting (painting made most famous by John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood and Missourian Thomas Hart Benton), the artsts who made up the colony in the 30s were committed to celebrating the heartland of America; its people, its small towns, its commecial life, its rivers and hills and meadows. They wanted to make art that was indigenous to America, art that was free of what they considered the too-pervasive influence of Europe and New York."
After things fell apart in Ste. Gen, Rickly, Schweig and most of the other artists drifted back up to St. Louis. Rickly and Schweig helped found Group 15, an arts collective St. Louis Star-Times culture critic Reed Hynds described as “a small but mettlesome cluster of St. Louis artists.” I first misread that word as “nettlesome,” and that descriptor isn’t wrong. In 1944, William Inge — another St. Louis artist who made a name for himself — wrote a piece about a group show at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
“Three years ago, a revolt took place in the art circles of St. Louis. It was a minor revolt and quiet, but it was a revolt nonetheless, when 15 members of the Artists Guild decided to have an independent show of their own,” he wrote. “There was justified vanity, one suspects, in their reasons, for they wanted more exclusive showings than the Guild, with its large membership could provide them; and they felt that in their small gorup, they couuld be more compatible and exhibit their work to greater advantage.
“Without trying to think of a more impressive title, the artists decided to call themselves Group 15,” he continued. “Although the membership rests at the number today, it will not be restructed in the future, because they plan to welcome any new artists whose work meets their standards. Those standards are high, for most of the group are painters of reputation who have won significant awards and had their work shown in New York and Chicago.”
The star of the show, Inge noted, was Martyl, but he also called out Miriam McKinnie and Belle Cramer, Like Martyl, both women were completely devoted to their work, showed all over the country as well as in Europe, and continued to evolve artistically until their deaths. Cramer grew up in New York City, moved to England, and married a doctor. On all those stop-offs, she painted and burst into the art scene, showed prolifically and made friends with every other creative person she crossed paths with. When Dr. Cramer landed a position at the Barnard Free Skin and Cancer Hospital in St. Louis, Belle “engaged in the local arts scene almost immediately, participating in an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum in November of 1940 and mounting her first solo exhibition at Eleanor Smith Galleries in 1941,” Missouri Remembers wrote. “A member of the St. Louis Artists’ Guild and Group 15, a small but prolific collective of progressive artists, Cramer participated in hundreds of exhibitions during her nearly forty active years in St. Louis, including solo, group and retrospective shows.”
In writing about her piece in the Group 15 show, “Time is Out of Joint,” Inge praised her “dramatic way of symbolizing an individualistic and romantic protest against our time. Mrs. Cramer almost always paints with oils, using them so softly they could be mistaken for pastels. Her pictures have a peculiar radiance, like that of a rainbow trying to take shape.” She was a master of color, well-respected and well-reviewed, and never as celebrated or as successful as Jones or Benton. Her work has been rediscovered only fairly recently, and was shown at Walker-Cunningham Fine Art in 2019. (You can see work from that show here.)
As Missouri Remembers also notes, the “vibrancy of Cramer’s work was matched equally by her vibrant personality. Widowed in 1945 while she was in her early sixties, Cramer adopted the St. Louis art community as a kind of surrogate family and came to be regarded as one of its matriarchs, often nicknamed the ‘grande dame of St. Louis painters.’ Outside of her rigorous professional life, Cramer was known to host large parties at her apartment on Delmar Boulevard, entertaining established St. Louisans as well as bright young artists.”
If you’d asked Belle Cramer if she' was bothered by that, I suspect she’d probably say no, if Sally Bixby Defty’s 1966 profile in the Post-Dispatch is any guide. Then 82, Cramer kept up the schedule she’d maintained since 1904, hitting her studio at 9 a.m. and painting ‘til noon.
“Her paintings hang in 65 St. Louis collections and museums, homes, and colleges from New York to Los Angeles,” Defty wrote. “She has had many one-man shows in London, New York and St. Louis.” She wasn't just painting, but still making multiple solo trips to Mexico and Guatemala, as well as hosting parties at her Central West End apartment.
“The food is superb, the drinks are copious (usually served by a fleet of fresh-faced young Concordia seminarians) and the hostess in full flower into the small hours of the morning,” Defty wrote. “She inevitably wears bright colors so characteristic of her painting: you'll never catch Belle Cramer in ‘basic black.’ The guests run the gamut from other sprightly octogeneraians such as Mr. and Mrs. Alexander S. Langsdorf” — otherwise known as Martyl and her husband — “to young artists recently landed in St. Louis.”
“I've had a marvelous life,” Cramer told Defty. And she would be right.
My first grown up art exhibit was Thomas Hart Benton. It was at the LA County Art museum. I was gobsmacked.