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Netherlander, Singer are similar in style
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art & architecture writer
Published on Sunday, Sep 07, 2008
This year is the centennial of Clyde Singer’s birth, and as good a reason as any to hold a mammoth tribute to this Ohio artist.
A video of Singer’s life and art has been airing on PBS Channels 45/49 for the past week, and the two museums involved in showing his work, the Canton Museum of Art and the Butler Institute of American Art, have been busy getting out the word.
These two venues have been involved in a five-year collaboration on the Singer exhibit, spearheaded by Canton’s curator of collections and registrar, Lynnda Arrasmith.
Both Canton Museum of Art Executive Director M.J. Albacete ''and I felt it was time,'' Arrasmith said of the undertaking. Singer died in 1999, ''and we felt he needed to be recognized. We knew he had a body of work, but we didn't realize how big it was.''
3,000 paintings
It's estimated that Singer finished about 3,000 paintings. About 100 are in Canton and 100 more are at the Butler in Youngstown.
Those who knew him speak warmly of him, his kindness, his courtesy and his willingness to put his hand to anything that needed to be done.
As the assistant director of the Butler, he was not above taking out the trash, sweeping the floor, salting the walks and even painting a sign or creating a faux marble baseboard on a gallery door.
He didn't believe his work would ever be famous, revealed in his lack of ego displayed at the annual Butler Christmas Party, where gift exchanges mandated that no one spend over $2. Singer would always come with one of his paintings on which was hung prominently a large tag that read ''$1.98.''
He cherished his Mondays off, during which time he would work on his paintings, and these he would invariably put in inexpensive frames he bought at the five and dime, a yard sale or store markdown. The Butler staff still refers to cheap framing as ''a Clyde frame.''
He was art critic at the Youngstown Vindicator for more than 50 years, and in all that time, no one can remember him actually criticizing a work of art; his reviews consisted mostly of explanation and background, but little, if any, evaluation.
He grew up poor, the youngest boy in a family of four boys and two girls. His father died in a brickyard accident when he was young. At school, his classmates called him ''Rags.''
New York art league
But he had talent and burning ambition. In 1931 after graduating high school and working as a sign painter, he took his life savings of $300 and on the promise of an uncle to put him up for free, Singer enrolled at the Columbus Art School. By 1933, he felt the need to move on, so he submitted his work to the Art Students League in New York City and was one of the few who received a full scholarship to study there for two years.
Among his teachers there were Kenneth Hayes Miller, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry.
His major influences were the Ashcan School, the Eight and American Scene Painting. He was drawn to the work of George Bellows, Curry, Benton, Miller and John Sloan, all of whom were interested in depicting everyday life.
During his time at the Art Students League, Singer frequented the locations that Bellows and Sloan had painted, in particular, McSorley's Ale House in Greenwich Village. He would also visit the East 57th Street galleries as often as he could to keep current with the New York art scene.
The Ashcan School, the Eight, the American Scene — all, however, had their roots in European painting in various schools and traditions going back to the Renaissance — and Singer absorbed it all.
It's been shown that Benton was influenced by such Italian masters as Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and we can see a similar influence in such Singer paintings as Approach to the Village (1936) and Sandy Valley (1934).
Other Italian masters like Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello seem to have come down through his teachers to Singer as well, for we can see their lessons in composition and structure in such works as An Incident in the Life of David Blythe (1955) and The Flower Vendor (1935).
These sundry influences are revealed in the interest Singer took in depicting his hometown of Malvern and his favorite sites in Canton, Youngstown and New York City.
If we were to ally Singer with a single old master, however, the closest fit would probably be someone like Pieter Breughel the Elder, a Netherlandish painter of the Northern Renaissance, whose paintings The Wedding Dance and The Peasant Dance compare in many ways with Singer's The Barn Dance.
Everyday scenes
Like Breughel, the artists of the American Scene School, the Ashcan School and the Eight were all interested in depicting the life of the streets, of documenting the lives of ordinary people and everyday events, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the heroic to the gritty and lowdown.
In his own endeavors, Singer's art draws from not only these lessons, but also from his experiences: in his hometown, as a soldier in the Pacific during World War II and through his love of sports, particularly baseball and boxing. And to all this he brought his uncanny ability to capture regular folks at work and play.
Singer's fascination with the Sunday comics and his early work as a sign and billboard painter also come through in his paintings, as do his sometimes barbed wit and incisive observations of local characters and customs.
But at heart, he was an American Scene/Ashcan School painter. In an American Artist article of 1969, author Roger Bonham described Singer's methods of seeking out and recording subject matter: ''He enjoys nothing more than tracking down the native American in his habitat, particularly the often appealing and amusing female of the species. These subjects . . . he puts down with consummate skill learned from the masters of the Ashcan and Benton-Curry-Wood schools of art.''
Singer has been dubbed ''the Last Ashcan Artist'' in an essay by Columbus Museum Director Nannette V. Maciejunes and Christopher Duckworth in the impressive biography/exhibit catalog, written by Albacete and published by Kent State University Press.
And that he may very well have been. But if he was the last, he most certainly wasn't the least.
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture. Contact her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
This year is the centennial of Clyde Singer’s birth, and as good a reason as any to hold a mammoth tribute to this Ohio artist.
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