Fred Darge (American, 1900-1978). Round Up Days. Oil on canvas. 24 x 32 inches (61.0 x 81.3 cm). Signed lower right: F...

Description

Fred Darge (American, 1900-1978)
Round Up Days
Oil on canvas
24 x 32 inches (61.0 x 81.3 cm)
Signed lower right: F. Darge
Titled on the stretcher: Round Up Days
Titled and inscribed on the reverse: Round Up Days / Klepper Art Club 2-44

After disembarking from his native Germany at Port Arthur, Texas, in 1923, Fred Darge allegedly worked as a
hand at ranches in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California before enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago
(AIC) in 1924. He studied at the AIC until 1930. His painting Round Up Days may be a nostalgic memory of
his early exposure to real cowboys in the West as well as his dedication to capturing cowboy lifeways across
West Texas and the Big Bend region. His inclusion of a piebald longhorn in the center of this drove of most
"whiteface" cattle (along with a Durham cross at left), could indicate and condensation of the history of West
Texas ranching in one painting. Moreover, Darge's exposure to the "Wild West" of performance and fiction
(via bestselling German author Karl May's "Old West" novels) informed his cowboy paintings his entire
career.

Chicago also served as the conduit for a number of artists who became part of the New Mexico colonies.
Chicago-based Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins visited Taos first in 1914 and E. Martin Hennings in 1917,
before they became permanent residents there, and members of the Taos Society of Artists. Because of
the large German and eastern and northern European communities in Chicago, artists from these groups
migrated to Santa Fe, including B. J. O. Nordfeldt and Gustave Baumann. All these Chicago artists exhibited
their New Mexico paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago while Darge studied there.

After an automobile tour through the West, including Texas and Big Bend in 1929, Darge arrived in San
Antonio, Texas in late 1933. He continued to travel and sketch in the West for the rest of his life. Darge likely
composed his painting The Buffalo at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Oklahoma, as
it was one of many places he sketched annually.

In 1935, Darge relocated to Dallas and began wintering in north Texas and sketching on ranches in West
Texas and in New Mexico during summers. By this time, Texas had become "progressive" and had allegedly
moved on from its cattle and cowboy past. Any artist who focused on these anachronistic subjects could
be effectively marginalized and juried out of major exhibitions. Although a frequent exhibitor in the Dallas
Allied Arts exhibitions, Darge was never part of the exclusive club that was the Lone Star Regionalists.
However, stylistically, thematically, and philosophically Fred Darge was clearly a Regionalist; and he did not
learn those lessons in Texas. He learned them in Chicago.

Darge saw the value in preserving the West, Old and New, through art. This view paralleled those of the
"Big Three" Regionalists, Iowa's Grant Wood, Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton, and Kansas's John Steuart
Curry. For example, Wood's Regionalist philosophy involved saving "bits of American folklore that are too
good to lose." Furthermore, Darge (like Wood, Benton, and Curry) hoped to "instill new magic and charm
into old fables," such as those found in the rural Middle West and the Southwest, "so they would not, in the
wake of iconoclasts be lost forever."

America's awareness of Grant Wood began with the exhibition of his most famous painting, American
Gothic, at the annual exhibition of American paintings and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago in
October 1930. Also included in this exhibition were paintings Benton and Curry, and by Taos artists Ernest
Blumenschein, Walter Ufer, and W. Herbert Dunton. A watershed moment for American Regionalism,
this exhibition would have been visited frequently by students at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, including Darge. Finally, at Chicago's Century of Progress International Exposition (World's
Fair), "Contemporary American Painting," held in 1933-34, Benton, Curry, Wood, Blumenschein, Ufer--
Regionalists all by this time-exhibited there. Surely Darge left Chicago with affirmation for what his future
direction would take.

Regionalism also included a subset of "conscious primitivism" to which Darge also had connections, in my view. Doris Lee (1905-1983) and Agnes Tait (1894-1981) are two examples of this stylistic avenue. Both were well-trained in the academic tradition in Paris and New York, yet both chose a distinctive style that smacked of primitivism for their mature work which included murals and easel paintings for the New Deal art programs. Both felt this path made their depictions of everyday life in America more understandable to everyone without the artifice
of so-called "high art. Their work is indebted to the "primitive" painters of the 17th century, especially in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany and was well published in the 1930s. Much like the work of Lee and Tait, Fred Darge's paintings often include sections that challenge Albertian perspective and the rules of anatomy. Given that he could paint well using these academic strictures, I believe his naivete was studied, practiced, and conscious.

-Fred Darge: American Regionalist by Michael R. Grauer




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