Louis M. Eilshemius
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SELF-STYLED "Mahatma, Mightiest Mind and Wonder of the Worlds, Supreme Parnassian and Grand Transcendent Eagle of Art," Louis Michel Eilshemius in old age was an eccentric, embittered by a lifetime of neglect. But he did not begin this way. A "primitive," he was so only in the sense that his art was a spontaneous outlet for an original imagination, with scant regard to prevailing standards of taste or technique. Certainly he was no folk-painter: he was born of well-to-do parents (in 1864 in North Arlington, N. J.), went to college, studied art in New York and at the Académie Julian in Paris, travelled at various times in Europe, North Africa and the South Pacific, and was financially independent.
All his life Eilshemius remained an adolescent, with both the gifts and the limitations of adolescence-sensibility, naiveté, romantic fantasy. His early work was essentially impressionist, but not the academic brand that won prizes: his was a highly personal impressionism, responding to nature with the candor and freshness of youth. His landscapes were spontaneous, unconventional records of nature's moods, having at the same time an odd dreamlike quality, as if they pictured not the everyday scene but an inner world which was yet quite real to their creator. Often he peopled them with naked women, bathing, playing, disporting themselves--pure embodiments of the amorous dreams that haunt the adolescent mind. These innocent fantasies were barely saved from absurdity by their instinctive artistry. They had none of the true primitive's hard woodenness. The subtle pervading light, the tender springlike delicacy of the high-pitched colors, relieved by dark accents, the sensitive patterns, were products of an intuitive talent that, consciously or unconsciously, found the inevitable forms to convey its vision. Even his awkwardness contributed to the sense of a youthful world where all emotions were fresh, all desires possible.
But these were not the qualities that pass academic juries, and after being accepted a few times in early days, Eilshemius' pictures were consistently rejected. For about thirty years he continued to paint without recognition of any kind. Partly due to this frustration, partly through the natural development of his romantic imagination, his art moved further away from the norm toward unbridled fantasy and a growing sense of tragedy. His gentle idyllicism was interrupted more and more by pictures of horror and tortured emotions, uninhibited in their violence. His drawing took on a frenzied freedom, his distortions grew wildly expressive. Drained of light, heavy with despair, his color became sombre, hot, arbitrary. His new dramatic quality often. turned into melodrama, but its lurid banality was transcended by the force of a genuine inner anguish. This passionate inwardness places Eilshemius in the small company of authentic visionaries.
With the arrival of modernism Eilshemius finally received his due. In 1917 the juryless Independents gave him his first chance to exhibit in years. Hailed by advanced artists such as Marcel Duchamp, he was eventually taken up by dealers and treated seriously by critics. But the recognition came too late: in 1921 he had laid down his brushes for good. For twenty more years, until his death in 1941, he lived on, a querulous, pathetically self-glorifying old man--a clear case of overcompensation for the long years of neglect.
Eilshemius: The artist does not learn from a set of books or a university course whether or not his painting is right. He can't discuss it or prove it, but when his impulse is stilled and his painting is finished he requires no instructor, no critic, no public, to certify that the result of his efforts is Art; for Art, like virtue, is its own reward, and the experience is divine.
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