Rex Slinkard
Rex Rudy Slinkard (June 5, 1887, Edwardsport, Indiana – October 18, 1918, Manhattan, New York City) was an American modernist painter and teacher.
[3] Slinkard studied for two years at the University of Southern California under landscape painter William Lees Judson.
The League awarded Slinkard a 1908 scholarship to study under Henri at the William Merritt Chase School in New York City.
A cameo portrait of Slinkard appears in the foreground of Bellows's early fight painting, Stag at Sharkey's (1909).
[7] Hedges died in January 1910, and when Slinkard returned to California the following summer, he was offered the position of chief instructor at the League.
[5] The school organized an exhibition of works by Slinkard and League alumnus Pruett Carter in August 1910,[5] which received a highly favorable review in The Los Angeles Times.
— Antony Anderson, The Los Angeles Times[9]In addition to being a prodigious artistic talent, Slinkard was a charismatic teacher.
[17]In Young Rivers (1916), perhaps Slinkard's most famous painting, he transformed the irrigation ditches of Saugus into an idyllic landscape populated by ethereal youths and animals.
[3] Curiously, Young Rivers was painted in the basement of his parents' house on Wright Street in Los Angeles.
[3] Carl Sprinchorn accompanied his body on the train ride from New York City to Los Angeles, for funeral and burial.
Marsden Hartley, who never met the artist but had been shown his paintings and letters by Carl Sprinchorn,[21]: 98 penned an effusive essay for the catalogue.
[22] Titled: "Rex Slinkard: Ranchman and Poet-Painter,"[21] Hartley asked: "How many are there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming visionary person?
It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as is would have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing.
Rex Slinkard was a genius of first quality.He was a young boy of light walking on a man's strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him.
He had, this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him.
[4] Knoedler Gallery in New York City mounted a memorial exhibition, January 19–31, 1920, and reprinted Hartley's essay in its catalogue.
[1] Slinkard, who had trained with Robert Henri, developed a lyrical, semiabstract form of symbolist painting in which he blended suggestions of music and dance into figural compositions.
In Slinkard's paintings volume and outline alternately separated and blended to accentuate Wagnerian episodes of libinal yearning.
The highly original visual qualities of these works were effectively captured in Hartley's erotically charged description of Slinkard's method, written to accompany the Los Angeles Museum's 1919 memorial exhibition.
[1] Former-student Nick Brigante made a series of 1920s drawings in Slinkard's style,[10] and inserted miniature versions of his teacher's paintings into some of his 1940s Surrealist works.
[28][h] Sprichorn wrote an unpublished biography: Rex Slinkard: A Biographical-Critical Study of His Life, Paintings, and Drawings (c.1952).
(PDF) Florence A. Williams, sister of Slinkard's fiancee Gladys, bequeathed a large collection of his works to Stanford University in 1955.
