Franklin Chenault Watkins
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Watkins' characteristic style developed slowly. Born in New York in 1894, he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with several interruptions, from 1913 to 1918. For the next five years he worked in a New York advertising agency, finding little time for his own art. There followed a year of study in Europe during which he absorbed influences from modern French painting and from such Renaissance masters of distortion as Tintoretto and El Greco. He was thirty-seven when he first received public recognition in a burst of publicity over the award of a prize to his Suicide in Costume; he was forty when he had his first one-man exhibition at the Rehn Gallery in 1934.
Since then he has lived quietly in Philadelphia, working with extraordinary deliberation. His first mature work of the early 'thirties was the most obviously expressionist; contours are in constant, broken motion, anatomy and poses are strongly exaggerated, suggesting violent inner tensions. Yet even here an underlying sobriety rules. The architectural lines of the table in Soliloquy, and the great empty space above, imprison the twisting figure in a kind of impersonal calm. The mood of sober thoughtfulness becomes more marked in the fine portraits of the late 'thirties and 'forties. Poses are now chosen to illuminate individual character. Distortions are rigidly disciplined to serve the same purpose; they are subtler, permitting an acceptable likeness, but they are also strong enough to impart the artist's interpretation of his subject. The hewn granite look of Justice Roberts' head with its roughened planes and harsh lighting is an impressive example. Returning in recent years to a less realist style, Watkins has forged his own symbols of Death and Resurrection in two huge murals that create their mood principally through gesture and design. Like all his work, they evolved slowly, traversing many changes, for Watkins is a painter of inmost thoughts who finds no ready-made images in nature but must create them from his own deeply pondered ideas, whether of a man's character or the significance of religious experience.
Watkins: My work is not strongly prompted by displays to my sight. Often the sound of a few words, freed of their intended meaning; the description of an action, not seeing it; thoughts of the portrait subject, not the look, will form motives that press me. My eye is not an infallible image-maker, though sometimes coherent shape emerges from the recollection of things seen in passing. But while my sources are visually impure, I do try to manage that in my pictures the energy they generate shall come back clean. I find comfort in believing I am not alone with this problem.
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