William Clusmann (1859–1927)
William Clusmann, from an illustration published in Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1908.
Born in La Porte, Indiana, William Clusmann moved to Chicago with his family as a boy. After apprenticing to a tinsmith and then in a firm of decorative painters, he studied at the Chicago Academy of Design (predecessor of the Art Institute of Chicago) and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (renamed the Art Institute of Chicago in 1882). To complete his training, he attended the Royal Academy in Munich and the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts, returning to Chicago in 1884. Clusmann’s education prepared him to undertake figural paintings and the portraits that were the mainstay of many artistic careers in Chicago; in Europe, he painted portrait heads of German peasant types and scenes of figures in humble interiors. However, Clusmann established himself as a painter of landscapes, in oils and watercolor, beginning with the first works he exhibited in the Art Institute’s annual shows. While many of his Chicago contemporaries traveled widely in the United States and abroad, Clusmann remained in his home region throughout his career, with the exception of several years spent in Europe in the 1910s and another visit there in early 1927.
In the mid-1890s, such prominent local artists as Charles Francis Browne began urging Chicago’s landscapists to paint the natural beauty of the surrounding area. By that time, Clusmann was already painting the scenery around the Fox River, west of Chicago. He may have been among the first to exhibit a Chicago street scene, with his Wet Day on the Avenue in the Art Institute’s 1896 annual watercolor show; one critic praised it as “a bit of Chicago poetically seen and truthfully portrayed.”[i] By 1908, the artist had turned his attention to the smoky, congested Chicago River. His “weirdly potent marines of local scenes” were widely noted and reproduced in newspapers, and at least five of these paintings were published in a “Chicago River Series” of color picture postcards.[ii] In focusing on the river in his art, Clusmann followed James Bolivar Needham and Albert Fleury, but his approach differed in the relative monumentality of his canvases. His contemporaries credited him, rightly or not, with discovering the artistic possibilities of the polluted urban waterway. His river paintings were featured in at least three separate solo exhibitions at the Marshall Field and Company department store between 1908 and 1918, and another at the Newcomb & Macklin gallery in 1923, in addition to being shown in the Art Institute’s annual exhibitions of work by Chicago-area artists and of watercolor paintings.
For his images of the smoky river, Clusmann painted in blended, muted tones, using a low-keyed range of colors. By the time he returned in 1917 from several years working in Germany, he had adopted the brighter light and colors and the broken brushwork of impressionism; this shift is apparent in several upbeat views he painted in the late 1910s and 1920s from spots near the Art Institute. These and his sunny park scenes were well received in Chicago. Clusmann’s work was shown in exhibitions up to the year of his death, which occurred shortly after his final trip abroad.
[i] “In the Art Studios,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 19, 1896.
[ii] H. Effa Webster, “William Clusmann Produces Weirdly Potent Marines of Local Scenes,” Chicago Examiner, May 11, 1910.
William Clusmann, Chicago Street Scene, undated
Oil on canvas, 40 by 30 inches
William Clusmann’s painting offers a view of Chicago’s “Loop” looking west along Adams Street from Michigan Avenue. On the left looms the hulking brick-and-granite Pullman Building (demolished in the 1950s), designed in 1884 by Solon S. Beman to house the offices of the sleeping-car company. The lighter terra-cotta-clad People’s Gas Building, the work of architect Daniel Burnham in 1910, faces it on the north side of Adams. The vista is blocked at street level by the station for the elevated train line over Wabash Avenue and by choking automobile traffic. Pedestrians fill the sidewalks, some waiting to cross the avenue to the Art Institute of Chicago, from which this elevated view is taken. The building facades, particularly the ponderous bulk of the Pullman, are enlivened by numerous flags, suggesting Memorial Day or Fourth of July observance; the light-colored hats worn by several figures and the parasol sheltering a woman at the lower right hint at summertime warmth.
Clusmann’s rural landscapes often feature mist, rain, twilight, or wintertime settings, and when he began painting the city, soon after the turn of the twentieth century, he softened and screened the polluted industrial Chicago River in tones suggesting overhanging smoke. Within a few years, however, the artist came under the spell of the strong light and higher-keyed colors of impressionism as he shifted his focus to the city’s parks and streets. In the central business district, the construction of such imposing buildings at those depicted here inspired a new pride among Chicago’s citizens and the interest of many of its artists. Between about 1913 and the mid-1920s, Clusmann painted several views of Michigan Avenue and its environs that celebrate the avenue as the city’s new emblem of modern sophistication. One of two almost identical, undated views taken from the same vantage point, this painting is typical of Clusmann’s upbeat presentation of his hometown as a bustling metropolis of ordered prosperity. It reflects a newly positive self-image, particularly for the city’s lakefront, that began to emerge with the expectations raised by the publication of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago of 1909.