Portait of the Artist as an Old Master

For Richard Lack, the centuries of instruction handed down from master to student is the lifeblood that must still flow today to make a good painting. Back then, an apprenticeship might have lasted for decades. Drawing from live models, grinding paints, handling a brush—this was the way all artists learned. It was complex knowledge that no painter could do without. Over time, the masters’ ateliers were joined by larger schools, painters forming academies, still carrying on in the same traditions as the old masters. “Art Institutes” were not only museums; they were also schools for aspiring painters. (Even the Walker Art Galleries, as it was known 70 years ago, offered classes.) Through it all, the hand of the master could be traced. But then it abruptly stopped.

Almost overnight, as the art historians would explain it, a revolution occurred. First came the impressionists, then the expressionists and the cubists and the sychronists. There was no stopping it after that. In the explosion of the new century, the Academy was reduced to a caricature—the scoffing “academic,” an old-fashioned, sentimental throwback. It was not so much a schism in art as it was a drubbing. Those names that just rolled off Cyd Wicker’s tongue with such admiring eloquence? As far as the moderns were concerned, these were the names of the losers. Good riddance! With them went the atelier and with the atelier went the methods of the masters. Painters of the old ways were looked upon as reliquaries, protecting nothing anyone wanted; technique wasn’t important, neither was representation. Such painters became the Don Quixotes of their generation.

This is where Richard Lack began, a youth from Minneapolis, getting special permission as a teenager to attend adult drawing classes at the Walker, and then taking up painting in earnest at the Minneapolis School of Art. He was determined to follow the vision of the old masters. “I liked it from the beginning. Things were different then, there was still a questioning of whether [modernism] was going to be the path for students to go and how it would be over the long haul. The work being produced by the modernists, that was Picasso, Matisse, I wasn’t convinced. I’d walk through the galleries at the Institute and look at the Rembrandt. I’d see the traveling shows of modernism, Kokoshka, et cetera, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t like these forms of modern art.’ I would look at these exhibitions and then go back to the Institute and compare the old paintings and I thought there was nothing of interest out there. You look at the Rembrandt [the famous ‘Lucretia’ still on display at the MIA] and people would say it’s old, it’s gone. And I’d say, ‘Well, but I still like it. It’s a mystery.’”

Searching for a channel to the past through art school was a disappointment. The shift away from the traditional approaches of only a few decades earlier was swift. “In all honesty, I looked at my teachers and it was a mystery to them, too. They’d say, ‘Well, we’re modern here. This is today’s world. Forget about that stuff.’ But I still kept looking at those paintings, the craft, the beauty. I couldn’t get past it. So that put me on the path. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to give this one more shot. I’m going to go out East, out to New York. There must be something out there.’

“So I got a place on the edge of the Village with a friend and started sniffing around, visiting the galleries, the old Art Students League, some of the artist’s studios.” Unfortunately for Lack, it turned out to be far from what he’d been hoping for. Thanks to the intellectual diaspora resulting from the Second World War, New York had become a haven and hotbed for all the modern movements. While all roads were leading to the new cultural capitol, Lack was turning up dead ends. “There was an old academician [Frank Vincent deMond] that I was hoping to work with, only to discover he’d recently died. It was a big disappointment. I realized New York was just Minneapolis, but bigger,” Lack admits. “There wasn’t anything there for me.” He had a few months before he’d planned to return to Minnesota, to follow a different course—studying chemical engineering at the University. “I decided as long as I was there, I’d take advantage of the museums and do some copies.” For several weeks he spent every morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveying the centuries.

“I remember I was copying a school-of-Velasquez piece, when a young man came up to me one day and we started talking painting. He told me he was up in Boston studying with an old codger who was connected to the old European tradition—this fellow Gammell who was teaching up there. So I took the bus up and met him at the Fenway Studios, one of the last of the old studio buildings.” Gammell looked at Lack’s portfolio, and liked what he saw. He invited Lack to help him with a mural project he was doing for a bank in Rhode Island. They worked together on that for a few months, and developed a rapport. “Gammell was well educated and he’d walk around throwing questions at us, and I realized this guy was different. He worked from a totally different viewpoint, the craft, how to make pictures. I was really impressed. That’s where I started my serious training, my apprentice training.”


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