As new generations continue to rediscover Midcentury Modernism as a beloved art, architectural and design style, the following for Cincinnati-based Charley Harper seemingly is on an indefinite spike.
Harper, who eventually landed in Cincinnati but was raised in West Virginia, created paintings, prints and illustrations that frequently stylized their nature-related subjects by deemphasizing depth and accentuating colorfulness and geometric characteristics, a common motif around the middle of the 20th century. He died in 2007 at age 84, just as Mad Men began and Todd Oldham’s celebrated Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life was being published.
Interest isn’t cooling off yet in this centenary year of Harper’s birth – including internationally – helped by the recent publication of the clothbound monograph Wild Life: The Life and Work of Charley Harper by Brett Harper (son and only child of Harper and his artist wife Edie), Margaret Rhodes and publisher gestalten. The Germany-based publishing house proposed the book to Brett, who directs the Charley Harper Art Studio. Publisher gestalten will distribute the English-language book internationally.
As the book’s title indicates, this isn’t just a collection of images; it also has a biographical narrative written by Rhodes, an editor at New York Magazine with a background in design stories. She spent time in Cincinnati last fall researching Harper’s life – including his time as a gifted Art Academy of Cincinnati student – as well as his flowering as a modernist artist drawn to nature as a subject.
“One of the attractions was that I wanted a larger appreciation of Charley’s work in Europe,” Harper’s son tells CityBeat. “Knowing that there were customers in Europe of his prints and posters, I thought it would be a good thing to do it. And also, one of the attractions was that I felt they would have a portion of the book allocated to my mother, Edie, and her work.” (The book does also include Edie Harper’s work).
This is also the centenary year for Edie, who died in 2010 at age 87. She met Harper at the Art Academy, and they married shortly after their graduation in 1947. While her own work in various mediums wasn’t as well known as his during their lifetime, it has flourished recently. Covington arts venue The Carnegie gave Edie a 2017 retrospective, and ArtWorks created a distinctive public mural, on display now in Over-the-Rhine, called “Crazy Cat, Crazy Quilt.” The mural is based on one of her artworks.
“[Rhodes] spent some of the time at our archives looking at images we have that are unsold or we will not sell,” Brett says. “People have not seen a lot of those. She also worked with the National Park Service, getting photographs of early layouts for what would be larger posters.”
“I think the aesthetic qualities of Charley’s work make it seem like it’s quite simple — like there’s this naivete and picture-book quality to them,” Rhodes says. “Once I started digging into his process, his notes and his ideas, you start to see what’s going on is so deeply considered.”
She credits The Carnegie’s exhibition director Matt Distel, whom she interviewed, for comparing Harper to a metronome in the way he refined one style over the years, pushing his approach toward a platonic ideal of perfection.
The book is heavily influenced by Harper’s design sensibility — even the table of contents is essentially an art element, appearing like a maze with the print forming circular black lines. Near it are the artist’s famous red ladybugs, simplified to any almost surreal level, with their eye-like black circles giving them an anthropomorphic quality.
Overall, the plentiful art reproductions do reinforce Harper’s reputation as a stylized colorist whose love for nature made him a kind of modern, streamlined Henri Rousseau. But the book also features work that surprises in terms of its minimalism, its restrained color choices or its subject matter. Who knew, for instance, that Harper once designed a trendy Cool-Ray sunglasses advertisement?
Rhodes and Brett chose quite a bit of fascinating archival material for the book, including a 1948 letter from Art Academy dean Robert Coffin to the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation that extolls the artist’s potential.
“Mr. Harper is one of the finest young men with one of the greatest potentials in fine arts that I have seen in my fifteen years of association with young artists,” the letter reads.
Other interesting artifacts shown in the book include Harper’s 1957 color rendering of his Midcentury Modern “dream home and studio,” designed by architect Rudy Hermes (it was built with changes from the rendering and is owned by Brett today). There is also a 1960 photo of Harper hanging his paintings at the Ford Rotunda in Dearborn, Michigan. First built in 1934 for the Chicago World’s Fair, this daringly modern structure with its layered roof and circular sides was moved to Dearborn and used as a tourist attraction with exhibits until it burned down in 1962. Harper’s paintings, along with the mural that he created in the rotunda’s reception area, were lost in the fire, according to motorcities.org.
What is left for Charley (and Edie) to posthumously achieve? His son has one big idea he’d like to pursue if anyone is interested — a museum in Downtown Cincinnati.
“I would really enjoy seeing that,” he says. “Ideally, I would like to see something downtown like the [Andy] Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh or Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.” It could connect with a trail that would lead to indoor ceramic tile murals that Charley created at the Duke Energy Convention Center and the John Weld Peck Federal Building, as well as to two ArtWorks outdoor painted murals created in remembrance of the Harpers — Charley’s ”Homecoming,” with two bluebirds near the Hamilton County Courthouse, and Edie’s aforementioned one, Brett says.
If a proper entity would run the museum, Brett says, it could also have the previously mentioned suburban house and studio, which might be open for occasional tours like the Pacific Palisades, California, home of the late Modernist designers Charles and Ray Eames.
“I think it would be a tourist attraction,” he adds.
Buy Wild Life: The Life and Work of Charley Harper at us.gestalten.com. Learn about Harper’s life and work at charleyharperartstudio.com.
Stay connected with CityBeat. Subscribe to our newsletters, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google News, Apple News and Reddit.
Send CityBeat a news or story tip or submit a calendar event.
Related
New Book Includes Never-Before-Seen Images of Doris Day’s Childhood in Cincinnati
Related Stories
The Taft Museum of Art’s Newest Exhibit Brings Costumes from Film Adaptations of Jane Austen’s Novels to Life
This article appears in Jun 15-28, 2022.