From New York to Nebo: The Artistic Journey of Eugene Thomason

By Martha R. Severens

“Art lovers will enjoy reading about and admiring the paintings of this talented regional southern artist.” —Lowcountry Companion

A product of the industrialized New South, Eugene Healan Thomason (1895–1972) made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York to advance his art education and launch his career. Like so many other aspiring American artists, he understood that the city offered unparalleled personal and professional opportunities—prestigious schools, groundbreaking teachers, and an intoxicating cosmopolitan milieu—for a promising young painter in the early 1920s. The patronage of one of the nation’s most powerful tycoons afforded him entrance to the renowned Art Students League, where he fell under the influence of the leading members of the Ashcan School, including Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks. In all, Thomason spent a decade in the city, adopting—and eventually adapting—the Ashcan movement’s gritty realistic aesthetic into a distinctive regionalist style that utilized thick paint and simple subject matter.

Eugene Thomason returned to the South in the early 1930s, living first in Charlotte, North Carolina, before settling in a small Appalachian crossroads called Nebo. For the next thirty-plus years, he mined the rural landscape’s rolling terrain and area residents for inspiration, finding there an abundance of colorful imagery more evocative—and more personally resonant—than the urbanism of New York. Painting at the same time as such well known Regionalists as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Eugene Thomason embraced and convincingly portrayed his own region, becoming the visual spokesman for that place and its people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611175110

Martha R. Severens

Martha R. Severens was curator at the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, from 1992 to 2010.

Book preview

FROM NEW YORK TO NEBO

FROM NEW YORK TO NEBO

THE ARTISTIC JOURNEY OF EUGENE THOMASON

MARTHA R. SEVERENS

THE JOHNSON COLLECTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

© The Johnson Collection, LLC

The Johnson Collection

PO Box 3524, Spartanburg, South Carolina 29304-3524

864.585.2000 thejohnsoncollection.org

David Henderson, Director

Sarah Tignor, Collection Manager & Registrar

Lynne Blackman, Public Relations & Publications Coordinator

Aimee Wise, Collection Assistant

Holly Watters, Collection Assistant

All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all images are by Eugene Healan Thomason (1895–1972) and are the property of the Johnson Collection, LLC. All vintage photographs included in this volume are courtesy of the Thomason Family Archive in the possession of Lavinia Thomason Sauter.

Copublished in partnership with the University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina 29208. 800.768.2500. www.sc.edu/uscpress

Editor: Lynne Blackman

Design: Gee Creative, Charleston, South Carolina

Photography: Tim Barnwell Photography, Asheville, North Carolina; Rick Rhodes Photography & Imaging, LLC, Charleston, South Carolina

Production: Printed in Canada by Friesens

ISBN 978-1-61117-510-3 (hardbound) — ISBN 978-1-61117-511-0 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This volume accompanies the exhibition of the same title. Exhibition venues include:

Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia

Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina

Mint Museum Randolph, Charlotte, North Carolina

Cover: Self-Portrait, 1959, oil on masonite, 30 × 25 inches (detail)

Frontispiece: Three Chimneys, 1939, oil on canvas, 20 × 24 inches (detail)

Back: Autumn, oil on canvas, 30½ × 36 inches

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

From New York to Nebo

The Johnson Collection

Annotations

Index

FOREWORD

Not long after I arrived at the Mint Museum in 2006, I received a letter from the Charlotte Observer’s longtime arts writer Richard Maschal suggesting that I might find it interesting to learn more about a late Charlotte artist named Eugene Thomason. As a newcomer to the region, I was not familiar with Thomason’s work and welcomed the opportunity. Through Maschal’s introduction, I spent an eye-opening morning with one of the artist’s relatives who lives just outside the city. During that visit, I saw some fine examples of Thomason’s work and heard first-hand reports of his career and character. Subsequent research in the museum’s files revealed that Thomason had no fewer than three solo exhibitions at the Mint during his lifetime. The first, which took place in early 1937, occurred less than a year after the museum opened its doors; the next was in 1959, and the third in 1964.

Boy with Chrysanthemums, circa 1936–1937, oil on canvas, 41.38 × 32.25 inches (detail). Collection of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina. Gift of Dr. A. Everette James, Jr. and Jeannette Cross James. See also page 58.

Throughout his career, Thomason most frequently has been linked to his mentor George Luks, a rough-and-tumble member of the group of artists in Robert Henri’s circle known as The Eight or the Ashcan School. The impact of the time that Thomason spent in New York collaborating with such artists as Luks (who became a close friend) can be seen in his embrace of everyday subjects painted quickly from life with vigorous brushwork and thickly-applied paint. These qualities are evident in the Mint’s one Thomason canvas, Boy with Chrysanthemums (page 58), and, as it happens, they factored into its creation. According to his late wife Thomason completed the picture in approximately half an hour after convincing the boy, whom he had found on his doorstep, to pose for him. Perhaps because of the spontaneity of the situation, Thomason did something that he was known, on occasion, to do: he used a canvas upon which he had already begun another painting. This fact was discovered only when Boy with Chrysanthemums underwent conservation treatment in 2008 in preparation for its reinstallation in the museum’s new uptown facility in 2010.

Thomason’s oeuvre is a fascinating one, and the Johnson Collection’s publication and companion exhibition offer us the chance to reassess both its importance and its place in American art history. Rather than being considered an offshoot or country version of the Ashcan sensibility, I believe that Thomason and his work might more accurately be understood as a part of what Henri, Luks, and their colleagues made possible: the emergence of American Scene painting (often called Regionalism) as a viable artistic practice. This movement was taking shape just as Thomason returned to his boyhood hometown of Charlotte in the early 1930s and as he turned his attention to the people around him (like the boy in the Mint Museum’s painting or, later, to his neighbors in the Nebo area) as subject matter. Thomason’s homecoming coincided with a particularly rich moment in Charlotte’s cultural history, for despite the fact that the city was still struggling to recover from the Great Depression, it was also undergoing what one newspaper writer called a cultural Renaissance. This reawakening was led by artists like Thomason who invigorated Charlotte’s art scene by encouraging aspiring local artists and facilitating large group exhibitions of their work, and by visionaries like Mary Myers Dwelle, who led the charge to repurpose the United States Mint building as the state’s first art museum. Period newspaper articles, many cited by Martha Severens in her insightful essay here, document the burgeoning artistic activity in the city in the mid-1930s and the community’s growing appetite for the arts. Considering this history, and Charlotte’s continued emergence as one of the region’s most significant cultural centers, it is particularly fitting for the Mint to be involved with this exhibition which takes place nearly eighty years after Thomason’s work was first shown here in 1937.

Jonathan Stuhlman, PhD

Senior Curator of American, Modern, and Contemporary Art

The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge and thank the many individuals who have contributed to the production of From New York to Nebo: The Artistic Journey of Eugene Thomason. First and foremost are the people at the Johnson Collection who have shepherded the project with tact and grace. The generous support and vision of Susu and George Johnson have guided the development of the collection, which is now an outstanding representation of art of the American South. Under the avid