Description
Paul Swan (American, 1884-1972) Veritas Oil on Canvas Painting. Oil painting depicts the Roman god of truth Veritas surrounded by a crowd of spectators. The painting is signed and dated 1908 on the back and includes the following poem Veritas painted on the back in black paint: Veritas - Truth is perplexed, all creeds of men are trying to influence him to each ones selfish advantage - the church; the scientist; the fool; the wanton; the curious crowd; the devil himself tries to appropriate and persuade. Signed and dated Paul Swan Sept. 25th 1908 NY. Measures 28 inches high, 23 inches wide. Frame measures 33.5 inches high, 28.3 inches wide. Two patches on reverse with small pencil point sized touch up, otherwise in good condition.
From AskArt: The following article is reprinted with permission from "Adirondack Life" magazine, volume XXXVI, no. 6, September/October 2005 "The Most Beautiful Man in the World" by Janis Londraville "In his Adirondack tract Swan will Found a Greek Colony Where Beauty Loving Souls May Work Out Artistic Ideals." When the New York Sun attached this headline to a May 10, 1914, article on artist and dancer Paul Swan, his fame was growing. Just a year before, after Swan had performed at the Odeon Theater in St. Louis, Swedish-American literary critic Edwin Bjorkman wrote, "In one year, if nothing halts his progress, Swan will be the greatest dancer the world knows." Nor was his acclaim transient. A decade later he would be hailed by the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio as "Nijinsky's successor" after performances in several South American countries. In 1914 theater impresario Arthur Hammerstein advertised Swan as "the most beautiful man in the world" when he hired him to perform aesthetic dances at the Victoria Theater in New York City. On October 27 a New York Evening Journal headline called Swan "The Prettiest Male in Captivity." He was an innovator in dance, the first American male to solo on stage, leaping to music by Percy Grainger, Cesar Cui and other contemporary composers. Papers reported that women and men alike fainted at performances, and "wild excitement" ran through the audience. Swan packed the house every night, and Hammerstein held his show over until mid-November. Such accolades would seem sufficient for any man, but Swan was no less famous as a portrait artist. He had studied at the Chicago Institute of Art but never graduated. When he saw the actress Alla Nazimova performing Ibsen in Albany in 1909 he was inspired to paint her portrait from memory and send it to her as a gift. She liked it so much she commissioned five more, and with the money Swan headed to Greece and Italy, where he learned to paint and sculpt in an idealized style. In 1914 he exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery, in Manhattan, alongside notable artists Maurice Prendergast, Rockwell Kent, Arthur B. Davies and Robert Henri. A decade later New York's prestigious Anderson Gallery held a one-man show of his work. M. Knoedler Galleries, another dealer favored by collectors, chose Swan to be the first artist to exhibit in a new Chicago gallery in 1929. Shortly after, the Macbeth Gallery gave him a solo show in New York City. Then it was off to Paris and more triumphs. Swan encouraged artistic risk. He told the Sun in 1914, "The type of worker whom we aim to interest in our colony is the honest laborer in the realm of the ideal who has something to express and is brave enough to express that something, even at pecuniary loss and in the face of ridicule." Establishing an artists' colony in the Adirondacks was another kind of risk. Three years earlier Swan had married Helen Palmer Gavit, of Albany, whose grandfather was sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer. "I married the only man I could endure," Gavit told family members. She wanted to marry an artist and have children. Swan fulfilled both her wishes, despite his bisexuality. The Gavit summer home, Skiwaukie Farm, near Stony Creek, became an Adirondack haven for Swan, who used an old barn on the property for his studio. Today owned by William and Caryl Hutchens, Skiwaukie reminded the artist of his youth. His parents' farm in Crab Orchard, Nebraska, was the site of his earliest artistic experiments. In one of his first childhood theatrical productions he dressed his little sister Harriet in a sheet to make her look like an angel. He cut a strip of tin roofing (without approval from his parents) for her crown and used burnt matches for makeup. He much preferred these pastimes to helping his brothers plow the fields. Later, at Skiwaukie, he felt at home again, inspired to create some of his most intriguing artworks-with only an occasional assignment to tend the garden. At Skiwaukie he painted several watercolors (now in private collections), the oil Girl in a Canoe, with Lily Pad (which became the cover of a travel brochure for the Lackawanna Railroad Company), and made a series of sketches and oil portraits of naturalist John Burroughs, an old Gavit family friend whom Swan found to be "without imagination or whimsy, too scientific and not at all poetic. He looked at birds and stones and trees without becoming of them." In 1917 Swan's life-size bronze sculpture of suffragette Inez Milholland Boissevain, begun at Skiwaukie, would be placed at the entrance to Meadowmount, the Milholland summer home near Elizabethtown. (Unfortunately, Girl in a Canoe and the sculpture of Boissevain have disappeared. Photographs remain in Swan's scrapbooks, now owned by the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, in Sarasota, Florida.) How residents of Stony Creek reacted to artists and dancers traipsing around the woods is an open question. Papers often ran notices about the arrival of the Gavits. Swan's reputation as "the most beautiful man in the world" made for some interesting community speculation. Reports about his visits were positive, suggesting that the town was proud to have a world-famous artist/dancer (who was also an actor and published poet) in its midst. On June 12, 1919, the Warrensburgh News told readers that Swan used the barn at Skiwaukie to "paint pictures which are shipped from here each fall to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and other museums for sale and exhibition." Stony Creek was already a beehive of cultural activity, encouraging the intellectual pursuits of residents and guests. During summer 1919 a visiting delegation of New York State librarians praised the local library for its impressive selection of literature -more than five hundred volumes of the world's great works (Warrensburgh News, July 10, 1919). An avid reader, Swan was a frequent visitor. Local news stories about the art colony ceased in the early 1920s. It's unclear whether the project paled for Swan, or whether the practical aspects of dealing with other artists intruded. The place was large enough to house only about five visitors at a time, but his temperament was such that he may not have been inclined to share Skiwaukie or his studio for very long. Swan incorporated the mountains into much of his work between 1912 and 1929, his last summer there. He produced his Adirondack tour de force in 1927, a large canvas called The Three Graces. Early that autumn, his oil Jeanne d'Arc (now in a private collection in Italy) was shown in the Exhibition of Independent Artists, held at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York City. New York Times critic Caroline Beauchamp judged it the best painting in the show. Another admirer, art collector Albert Wielich, was so impressed that he commissioned Swan to do a portrait of his family. Painted on heavy Belgian linen, the landscape in The Three Graces is filled with vibrant autumn colors. A patch of cerulean, leading the eye to the background and the mountains, complements the green tones of the forest. In the foreground are the graces: Wielich's wife, Beatrice, and daughters, Carmen (dark hair) and Dorothy. They suggest the original three graces-Thalia (fruitfulness), Aglaia (radiance), and Euphrosyne (joy). But these beauties are far from Greece, and the landscape belongs to the North Country. Wanting to be on site to capture the colors of the changing season, Swan made preliminary sketches at Skiwaukie as soon as the Waldorf exhibition ended. He returned to New York to finish the 69-by-101-inch canvas in his studio, where he had access to his models. The Three Graces is now for sale at Woodbury Antiques & Fine Art, in Woodbury, Connecticut. Not many Adirondackers today recognize Swan's name. The State University of New York at Potsdam held a retrospective of his work in fall 2001, but the tragedy of September 11 pushed it into the shadows. The college's Gibson Gallery is now considering another exhibition, and the Stony Creek Historical Society is organizing a show for August 2006, with lectures and a tour of Skiwaukie. Even though Swan had painted or sculpted some of the world's most prominent people-including British prime minister James Ramsay MacDonald, aviator Charles Lindbergh and presidents Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy-one of the most famous men in the world of twentieth-century art and dance has nearly faded into oblivion. He was praised in newspapers around the world, but his paintings were rarely donated to museums, kept instead in the families who commissioned them. A few publicly owned works include a bust of Willa Cather in the State Capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska, and a portrait of community leader Electra Doren in the Dayton Public Library, in Ohio. Swan's life-size oil of actress Nance O'Neil hangs at the Players, an actors' club on Grammercy Park, in New York, and is listed with the National Portrait Gallery. Princeton University has Swan's bust of James V. Forrestal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's secretary of defense. The Albany Institute of History and Art owns five Swan oil portraits of Gavit family members. In 2003 seventeen of his paintings and drawings became part of the permanent collection of the Ringling Museum. Year by year more work is surfacing. As recently as March 2005 one of the few existing wall hangings Swan painted, Paolo and Francesca, was purchased in California by a European art collector. In the same month, his portrait of Anais Nin's brother, musician Joaquin Nin, was acquired by a collector in South Carolina. Recently the family of steam-governor inventor Junius Royal Judson notified the Ringling Museum that Swan's 1911 portrait of Mrs. Judson is still safely in the family's collection in Rochester, New York. There are discoveries almost weekly. My husband, Richard, first heard about Swan from Chestertown poet Jeanne Robert Foster, in 1967. We learned more about him in the 1990s while we were researching her biography. Swan and Foster, who met while Foster was an art critic for the American Review of Reviews, were friends for more than sixty years. With Foster, Swan could speak openly about his unconventional life without fear of being judged. Her quiet good sense and sympathetic ear made her a confidante to a man who loved his wife and two daughters but was conflicted by his bisexuality. Curiosity led us to search for Swan's family. In Virginia we located Dallas Swan Jr., a nephew who had carefully preserved his uncle's scrapbooks and letters. Also in Dallas's possession was Swan's unpublished memoir. We were astounded when we discovered what an international sensation he had been. When Swan moved to Paris in the early 1930s, he took the city by storm, both as a dancer and artist. Les Études Poetique (1937) called him an "incomparable virtuoso." His artwork was in the Paris salons every year. His sculptures, including salon medal-winner Maurice Ravel, were the talk of reviewers. But fate disrupted his European career. On September 12, 1939, the impending war forced Swan to flee Paris. He grabbed as much as he could carry-a fraction of his work. What he left behind vanished. Recently, one of his landscapes was located in an antique shop near his former studio. But none of the sculptures has been found, and we can only hope that Maurice Ravel and the bronzes Petit Soldat Inconnu and L'opprimé survive in some secret collection. Only the photographs Swan kept in his scrapbooks provide a record. Back in New York, Swan took over a studio in Carnegie Hall that had been used by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. The world was a different place, changed utterly by the chaos in Europe, but still Swan produced. Montross Gallery held a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings in June 1940 that received excellent reviews. His oil of actress/dancer Lisan Kaye was pictured in newspapers as far away as Quebec. Swan's weekly recitals at Carnegie Hall continued through the 1940s and 1950s. Artists and writers passed through his studio to be painted or to enjoy an evening of aesthetic dancing and art lectures. Among his admirers were musician Percy Grainger, writer William S. Burroughs, and artists Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder and Robert Barnes. Barnes and Duchamp donated money toward Swan's rent. Barnes told me that "the interest that Marcel, myself and Alex Calder had in Paul Swan was. . . in the capacity of collecting interesting and oddly representative characters, . . . in this case vanity. . . . Marcel-all of us-enjoyed entering into weird situations with unusual people without being judgmental. Swan was a benevolent egomaniac." Those who remember Swan describe a sweet nature yoked to an unwavering conviction of his own magnificence. Once, when he was visiting his brother Dallas Sr., Swan announced that Dallas had not paid enough for a painting and he was going to repossess it-he was a great painter and deserved more money. After a heated discussion, Swan stormed back to his studio without the painting, feeling abused by his wealthy sibling. The effects of aging were inevitable, and crowds for Swan's performances grew smaller. He was evicted from Carnegie Hall in 1961 and moved to shabbier digs at the Van Dyke Hotel, where pop artist Andy Warhol filmed him in stationary-camera avant-garde movies Paul Swan and Paul Swan I-IV. Swan also appeared in Camp, one of Warhol's better-known films. While living at the Van Dyke, Swan painted the young Rockefeller children Nelson Jr. and Mark, as well as writer Malachy McCourt. But his eyesight was deteriorating, and when he could no longer paint or care for himself, his daughters moved him into a nursing home in Bedford Hills, New York, in October 1971. He died there the following February. In 1980 Swan's relatives bought a small gravestone to mark the approximate spot where Reuben Swan buried a coffee can filled with his brother's ashes in the Crab Orchard Cemetery, in Nebraska. Until 1999 no one knew about a cache of scrapbooks and letters that Swan's nephew kept. He gave them to the Ringling Museum in 2003. Owned by collectors in Australia, England, Denmark, France, Greece and Italy, Swan paintings today are commanding high prices. Privately commissioned works long tucked away in family basements are now being restored by a new generation. Lost or stolen art is beginning to surface, such as sixty-six Swan paintings found under the floorboards of an old New Jersey house in 2002. It would be hard to name a contemporary person so well known in so many artistic fields. One of the most important aspects of Swan's story is that of the extraordinary genius who found spiritual solace in the Adirondacks. Here he was able to incorporate a new element into his developing artistic philosophy. His final sojourn north was in the summer of 1929, but the influence of this place never left his art. Janis and Richard Londraville's biography of Paul Swan will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in January 2006.
