Thirty-three years ago, Richard Lack started his atelier for classical realism. The modernists laughed, groaned, and went back to their wine. Decades later, the arts movement that found a happy home in Minneapolis may be the most exciting thing happening in the nation.
You walk up a flight of stairs and down the flourescent-lit cinderblock hall of a faceless warehouse in the industrial heart of East Hennepin Avenue. You push through a set of black steel doors labeled simply The Atelier, and you enter a space where time and the outside world have lost their hold. The stinging smell of oil and turpentine hangs on the air, and the pristine white walls are punctuated by long gray curtains hiding innumerable rooms beyond. Dividing the walls like a riot of unrelated windows are hundreds of paintings.
The paintings are landscapes, still lifes, and a small army of figures, mostly nudes looking on. They are solitary images, some in color, many in black and white or sepia, each with its own demure elegance. Pull back one of the curtains and a cascade of cool, northern light dapples the small room as if it were a private chapel. More paintings line the perimeter of the room, stacked upright four or five deep. Opposite the window is a table covered with blue silk, a white porcelain pitcher, a silver tray, and a clutch of pink roses. From one wall, a plaster face, milky and deathly in its bone-like monochrome, frowns down at a disheveled assortment of paint tubes and brushes. The silence is vast, the scent of mineral spirits dizzying. The stillness is both mesmerizing and foreign.
But the sensation suddenly evaporates when a voice chimes out from behind. A small woman with a flash of brilliant blond hair appears from around the corner. Her greeting reveals an easy Texas drawl as she introduces herself as Cyd Wicker, co-director of the Atelier, a school for fine art painters. Wicker’s name reappears over her shoulder, attached to a large painting of Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. It’s a relief to know this isn’t a time warp anymore. As we stroll through room after room of pedestals, easels, still-life props and paint carts, Cyd explains the courses that would-be painters pursue at the Atelier. Four years full-time, drawing the figure three hours every day, five days a week. Pencil, charcoal, painting in black and white, painting in color, portraiture, still-life, interiors. She speaks in terms of tonality, light, nature and observation.
Then she ticks off a list of names: Burne-Jones, Millais, Godward, Waterhouse, and Bouguereau (yes, the beautiful child and mother offering an apple at the MIA—the one that’s on all the posters). But mostly the names are unfamiliar, long dead. Foremost, Wicker talks of lineage, the ancestry of the Atelier—as if it were a family tree. Still more names: Ives Gammell, the Boston School, William Paxton, Jean-Leon Gerome, Jacques-Louis David— these men, too, long past. Except one, Richard Lack, who founded this institution in Minneapolis more than thirty years ago.
At 74 years old, Richard Lack is an institution in his own right. “It’s really been incredible what he’s accomplished,” says Steven Levin, a successful painter and one-time Lack pupil. Lack has been an artist nearly all his life. A well-regarded portraitist and landscape painter, he has works in collections all across the county, including governor’s portraits at our Capitol. Moreover, as the founder of Atelier Lack, the forerunner of the current Atelier, he’s taught his craft to dozens of others. His students consider him to be one of the most influential teachers alive today, a teacher of whom they speak in the same breath as Rembrandt and Rubens. Steve Gjertson, in his recently published biography of Lack, unabashedly calls him “one of the most significant American realists of the second half of the 20th century.”
Yet Lack’s success hasn’t made him a household name by any means, and the fact that people have come from all over the country to study with him has gone largely unnoticed by the cognoscenti. “He stayed on his own path, and it’s always been an uphill struggle,” Wicker says. The established art world looks at Lack as an anomaly, part of something abandoned a hundred years ago in the tidal wave of modernism and its tangle of currents. While Lack may not appreciate the dismissive posturing of the moderns, he doesn’t give them much heed. It’s the past that he really cares about. He is an apostle of a tradition of painting that all but perished in the 20th century. Yet it’s a tradition with roots reaching back to the Renaissance—to the imagery, style, and techniques of those still known as the giants of art history, the likes of Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci.
Lack is a purveyor of realism. “Classical Realism” to be exact, a term his biographer claims Lack himself coined in 1982. And the company of the old masters suits him just fine. It’s their impulse he lives by. For Lack and his followers, what is good in art today should be judged by the same merits it was judged by then. As he wrote more than twenty years ago, “Our criterion is broad and simple: A picture must be beautiful in line and color, and the representational element skillfully achieved. Only then can we dwell on matters of taste, style, innovation, historical significance, relevance of subject matter, paint handling…”
The teacher wasn’t writing about Cherry Spoon Bridges. “The rest of the world can have it,” he says in a satisfied undertone, on a glorious autumn day in his studio. His snow white hair and quiet gaze give him a countenance that is at once ancient and full of life. Somehow his aluminum walker and blue robe have a regal dignity, lit from north facing windows set at 45 degrees, just as da Vinci dictated. In a way, you could call it a matter of perspective.