R.H. Ives Gammell was the last of his breed. By the time Lack found him, he was living in relative obscurity. The split between the old guard and the moderns had been bellicose—many, including Gammell, saw it as an all-or-nothing proposition—and Gammell would be left behind. In 1946, he had published the tome Twilight of Painting, an argument for the tradition that he realized was dying in front of his eyes. The very small handful that followed Gammell saw him as a last thread to the past, to the truth of painting. Lack had found what he was looking for.
In the following years, Lack pursued the arduous path he set for himself. While the rest of the art world was going headlong in every direction except traditional realism, Lack was doggedly marching the opposite way. “I was totally convinced that I was right and everybody was wrong,” he says. Lack’s talent didn’t go entirely unnoticed. There were those with money who saw art the way he did, and the landscapes and portrait commissions kept him working nearly full-time through the 60s. Finally, the old-world model of the atelier, the same that Gammell had tried to emulate, came back to Lack. “I had a wonderful dream about starting a school. I’m a Jungian. I feel strongly about dreams, so I listened. My dream consciousness told me I should start a school. I could see it and it looked wonderful. So I set out with a studio, and enough people knew about me and wanted to get some education. I started with four or five students, but there were a lot more who wanted to learn, and people kept coming.”
For more than twenty years, Lack taught his full-time programs in his non-profit school. He wrote about technique and about teaching and published and edited on the history of his genre. He helped found the Society of Classical Realism—still headquartered in Minneapolis—and its quarterly, The Classical Realism Journal. Around all this grew an ardent group of students who took up apprenticeships. Lack says, “There were about 90 people altogether. About 30 people managed to master what I had to teach, and from that came about a dozen real painters, ones who could make a living. I’d say about four or five went on to teach. Teaching is hard, not all people who can paint can teach. It was a labor of love.”
The numbers sound modest, but if Gammell was one thread, Lack had woven in a few more, including himself. The fact is, a number of Lack students have gone on start ateliers of their own. Wicker and Atelier co-director Dale Redpath are both Lack graduates, as are Pete Bougie and Brian Lewis, directors of The Bougie Studio of Art in Minneapolis. Annette Le Sueur, another student, started her own school in Excelsior (she has since retired), and subsequently the Minnesota River School was founded in the same area by one of Le Sueur’s protégés. While that would make the Twin Cities something of a hotbed for classical realism, Lack’s hand is apparent elsewhere as well. Jim Childs, who studied with both Lack and Gammell, founded the Drawing Academy of the Atlantic in New York. Michael Chelich and Bruno Surdo direct the School of Representational Art in Chicago, and Charles Cecil took Lack’s taste for impressionism and carried it back to found his school in Florence, Italy. Lack can afford to be modest when he says, “It’s like a brotherhood, really. Something that carries on.”
Even the stigma of being left behind by the establishment seems now to have been left behind by Lack—though his opinions on art remain crisp. “You have to have an inner conviction. That’s the best kind to have, otherwise you’re at the whims of anything that comes along. If you don’t have an inner solid core you get swept away. I got started painting pictures and reading more, learning more and more, and studying the depth psychology that’s always fascinated me. As you know—as anybody who knows anything about history knows—in today’s world, there is a curious disconnect between our conscious life and these deeper spiritual things. Times are out of joint. You can’t follow fashion. That’s for the museum crowd. It was OK to be outside of fashion because that’s all it is, just fashion. I’ve been ridiculed, but I’ve also been admired for what I’ve done. Some people look at me like I’m the devil incarnate. But they don’t understand. It [the debate on art] is very adolescent. When you get into the practical aspect of it, you have a sense of doing a good job and fulfilling it. In my discussions with modernists, that’s the bridge we can make. Evaluating it is up to other people.” He pauses, smiles, and goes on, “We know a lot, but we’re not the most artistic culture. We’re such a narrow, one-sided mass culture that you just wish we could break away from it and think about something else. I was in a museum in Europe years ago. I was watching the people and thought to myself, ‘The French are looking at the paintings; the Italians are looking at each other; the Germans are looking at their guide books; and the Americans are looking at their watches.’”
What about the future of art and the rifts between genres? Here Lack pauses again, his tone becomes more magnanimous. “I have no idea. You look at this whole thing, it’s like apples and oranges. People get a lot out of modern art, they say they do. It’s a mistake to mix this up and say I’ve got the true religion and your religion is terrible. So we have 9/11—people fighting over ‘spiritual truths,’ and now we’re paying the price for it. The danger with any religious idea is that it can lead to fanaticism. It can lead to great things, but it can also lead to fanaticism. I’ve seen that in art. And since art is of the spirit, when you get into things of the spirit what can you say? Somebody comes and tells you, ‘I just saw God last night.’ Well he’s either crazy or he seems to be really interested in this phenomena. Who am I to say? I didn’t see God last night, but he did.” Lack’s tone is steadfast, but he extends an olive branch. “When you get into matters of the spirit you don’t have rational arguments. The thing about painting is, if you enjoy it—and I love to paint, I’m sure an abstract painter feels the same way—I can’t take that away from them any more than they can take that away from me.”
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