Giving an Enigmatic Character His Due
Artist, Model, Collector
Several months ago, I wrote about a transformational gift to the Charles City Public Library. The donor, Arthur Mooney, a former Charles City resident, contributed his extensive art print collection and his compilation of art-related books to the Library. Both collections are remarkably impressive.
This week, I’m focused not on Mooney’s gift, but on the enigmatic donor.
After career starts as a photographer in Iowa (Charles City, Sioux City, and Des Moines), in 1900, Mooney moved to New York City, where he played a peripheral role in the groundbreaking photo-secessionist movement centered around Alfred Stieglitz. Between 1900 and World War I, photo-secessionists succeeded in elevating photography to a respected art form, abandoning what had been a stodgy photographic concept – capturing the world through conventional methods – and employing new techniques like special filters, different lenses, unusual cropping, a softer focus, and diverse darkroom treatments, like sepia toning.
The first major exhibition of this group opened in March, 1902 at the National Arts Club in New York City, an organization founded four years earlier by Charles De Kay of The New York Times and author Hamlin Garland, among others. There were several dozen photo exhibitors, selected by Stieglitz, including Clarence White (7 photos), Gertrude Käsebier (7), Eduard Steichen (7), Stieglitz himself (7)… and one photograph by Mooney. A photo-secessionist roster published in 1903 listed three hierarchical groups: fellows (16), associates (29), and members (62). Mooney is listed as a member, recognizing his talent in this emerging art form.
[Worth noting: Within a decade, photo-secessionists began promoting progressive art of all kinds. Works created by painters, sculptors, and printmakers began supplementing those of photographers. Exhibitions included the first U.S. shows of Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, and Picasso… quite an achievement.]
Mooney was not merely a photographer. He also served as a model, sitting for photographer friends Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier, twice in Käsebier’s case. Although Käsebier’s talents are not particularly well-known today, Stieglitz sang her praises a century ago: “Beyond dispute, the leading portrait photographer in this country.” Meanwhile, a critic noted that White’s soft-focus lens “successfully translated Mooney’s personality as a bachelor bibliophile,” a (barely) coded reference to Mooney’s presumed sexual preference.
In 2015, in an exhibit of Grant Wood prints at the Hillstrom Museum of Art at Gustavus Adolphus College, in St. Peter, Minnesota, Museum Director Donald Myers ventured that Mooney was the model in Wood’s lithograph, “The Midnight Alarm”. “The man’s facial features, particular and idiosyncratic, suggest a specific model. This may have been Arthur Mooney, a photographer from Charles City, Iowa who knew Wood. A photograph of Mooney as a young man shows the same large eyes and ears, strong jaw, prominent nose, and curly hair atop a high forehead as in the print. Mooney’s appearance in a later photograph, by famed photographer Clarence White also supports this identification.”
The Mooney collection includes two Grant Wood lithographs. Mooney purchased a preliminary charcoal drawing of “Tree Planting Group,” which Wood made after his well-known “Arbor Day” painting. Hillstrom Director Myers notes imagery from these artworks is reflected and attributed to Wood on the reverse side of the 2004 Iowa state commemorative quarter dollar. (Political statement: The coin slogan “Foundation in Education” is now highly debatable.)
Mooney’s second Wood lithograph is “Honorary Degree,” noteworthy because the central figure is – “obviously” according to Myers – Grant Wood himself. Wood’s first honorary degree was awarded by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1936, apparently the impetus for this image. It must have been high season for Badgers to honor neighbor Hawkeyes; Hamlin Garland received an honorary degree from UW-Madison the previous year, although Garland also had deep Wisconsin ties.
This second Mooney column is my attempt to give this distinguished photographer/artist, model, and “collector extraordinaire” his due. Arthur Mooney was a complex character, with many diverse facets to his life. Curiously, his extensive gift of 400+ art books to the Charles City Library included only six “Photographers & Photography” volumes (versus 173 “Painters & Painting” books, 32 “Graphic Arts” books, etc.). Did he not collect photo-related books… or perhaps he gifted them elsewhere? Some mysteries remain.
***********
I’m pleased to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. These are my colleagues: