Otto Hake (1876–1965)
Oscar Gross, Portrait of Otto Hake, 1929, oil on canvas (29 by 17 inches), Palette and Chisel Chisel Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago.
A native of Ulm, Germany, Otto Eugene Hake immigrated to the United States as a teen and apprenticed with a wood-engraver in St. Louis. He arrived in Chicago in 1892 to work as an engraver and illustrator for the Binner-Wells Company. Hake enlisted during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and earned American citizenship when he turned twenty-one. He began his formal art training at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905, the year he received his first mural commission, for a Chicago public school. He also began studying, and soon teaching as well, at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1902). Around the same time, he launched a career as a freelance illustrator and designer. Hake went abroad in 1912 to study at the Académie Colarossi in Paris and at the Debschitz Academy in Munich.
Much of Hake’s professional life revolved around the Palette and Chisel Club, an organization of artists supporting themselves with commercial work while pursuing fine-art aspirations. Hake joined the club in 1905 and served as its president in 1910 and again in 1926–27. He also edited its journal, The Cow Bell, and began teaching classes at the club in the 1920s. Hake was one of several artists who decorated the walls of a room in the club headquarters, in 1940.
Hake exhibited in various local venues, beginning with paintings and sketches in the Palette and Chisel Club’s show at the Art Institute in 1916. He also occasionally participated in the Art Institute’s Chicago and Vicinity annuals during the 1920s and early 1930s. That period was the high point in Hake’s career, when he won a number of honors in the Palette and Chisel’s annual exhibitions. In 1927, he held his own show of sketches and drawings at the club, which the Chicago Tribune’s conservative critic Eleanor Jewett praised.[i] In addition to figural works, Hake painted landscapes, finding subjects in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina (which he visited in 1926 with Rudolph Ingerle); Brown County, Indiana; and throughout the Chicago region. He also made color woodblock prints of landscape subjects, perhaps as early as the mid-1910s. In the 1930s, however, Hake was best known as a painter of murals, several of which he executed as part of the federal government’s New Deal relief projects. These decorated schools and other public buildings in and around Chicago, notably the Museum of Science and Industry and the Lakeshore Athletic Club building (now owned by Northwestern University). After completing two school mural projects in 1940, Hake essentially retired from Chicago’s art scene.
[i] Eleanor Jewett, “Otto Hake to Open Exhibition Today at Palette and Chisel,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 12, 1927; Eleanor Jewett, “Art and Artists. Critic Visits Some Current Exhibits,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 17, 1927.
Otto Hake, Louise Sellergren Holding a Rose, circa 1928
Oil on canvas, 32 by 28 inches
Dramatically illuminated from below, as if by stage footlights, Louise Sellergren is draped in a wide-sleeved Chinese coat in her portrait by Otto Hake. Gathering the glamorous embroidered silk garment about her, she holds a red rose between her fingers. Sellergren casts a lavender- and-blue shadow on the pastel-tinted folds of what appears to be a stage curtain just behind her. Notwithstanding these references to the subject’s theatrical career, the portrait presents her not in character but as a fashionable woman of her time. Her hair is bobbed according to 1920s fashion, and she wears a black dress or blouse with a simple neckline beneath her colorful coat. Lending a touch of sophisticated elegance and exoticism, such striking apparel was common in portraits and images of women by American artists beginning in the late nineteenth century—as also seen, for example, in George Oscar Baker’s The Chinese Coat.
Hake’s portrait was exhibited at the Palette and Chisel Club’s “studio show” in April 1928. When it was shown again in the club’s thirty-fourth annual members’ exhibition the following month, the critic for the Chicago Daily News remarked that “Otto Hake’s imposing canvas of a blond [sic] young woman in a Mandarin coat” was one of several works “that bespeak the serious artistic intentions of this club.”[i] Although Hake was better known as a painter of landscapes and figural murals, this work testifies to his ability as a portrait painter. The graceful monogram with which he signed it also hints at his career as a designer and illustrator.
How Hake came to portray Louise Sellergren is unknown, and no portrait commissions are associated with his career. Sellergren was born in 1902 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and studied at the Chicago College of Music. Between 1923 and 1935, she enjoyed a minor career as a singer in concert, church, and radio recitals and in light opera, including one season in New York. The ring she wears on her left hand in Hake’s portrait is likely not a wedding band, for Sellergren was single until 1935, when she married Johnson F. Hammond, a physician who edited the Journal of the American Medical Association. Thereafter, Louise Hammond became active in various music and arts organizations, serving as director of the Chicago-based Musicians Club of Women, for example. She died in Chicago in 1994.
[i] “Spring Exhibitions,” Chicago Daily News, May 2, 1928.