Daniel Garber at PAFA and the Michener

Daniel Garber's ideal eternal moments

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

I first learned about Daniel Garber from his large painting Mother and Son. I liked the work’s simple elegance. It was a pleasing image, and that was enough for me. Now I’ve had an opportunity to view a large sampling of his early works, and I find that Garber possessed the ability to create pleasing images on a fairly consistent level. He can be repetitive, but just when you start to become bored, he’ll stop you in your tracks with an image of simple, jaw-dropping beauty—and always bathed in that same cool elegance that first drew me to his work.

Garber was born in 1880, spent two years studying at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. That was followed by an additional five years at the Pennsylvania Academy, where his studies culminated a two-year Cresson Travel Grant, which allowed him to tour and work in Europe. He returned to the U.S. and in 1909 was offered a teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he remained until 1950.

Garber’s artistic pedigree was fairly illustrious. He was a student of Thomas Anshutz, who had studied at the Academy under Thomas Eakins and also abroad in Munich. Anshutz practiced the dark-hued, heavy-looking realism of the Munich School and, indeed, Garber’s early work, The Aged Sycamore, is an entirely presentable example of Munich School aesthetics, albeit enlivened by the sense Garber conveys of the wind buffeting the old tree.

A mythic Maxfield Parrish feel

His view of nature continues to be enlivened by a romantic sensibility. The large 1912 painting The Wilderness may speak worlds to trained artists about the joys of a careful thought-out composition, but to the amateur eye it conveys an image of tangled, hibernating fecundity. Comes the spring and you’ll see Buds and Blossoms, which is almost pointillist in its rendering of the thousand flickers of color that make up a landscape in full bloom.

Garber’s figure studies— whether of his wife, Mary, or his daughter, Tanis— present the paradox of Garber’s work. You want to call them, “impressionistic,” but you’d be wrong to do so. Far from trying to capture life on the run, as it were, Garber slowed life to a halt with his simple, but carefully worked out poses. Gathering Grapes, his 1909 painting of Mary, conveys an almost Maxfield Parrish mythic feel. Slightly later, The Studio Wall almost approaches the aesthetics of Symbolism with its single grand gesture that seems it hint at a world of hidden meanings. Even the apparently spontaneous image of Garber’s daughter, barefoot and drenched in sunlight as she pauses at an open door—the very sort of image for which photography was seemingly invented—turns out to have been a three-month labor of love. It is also a prime example of the sort of ideal eternal moment that Garber said he sought to capture in his art.

What he knew, what we’ve forgotten

Is Garber still a name to be reckoned with these days? Or is he on the way to being forgotten? If the latter is true, I wonder why. Surely it’s enough for any artist to create beauty. Yes, I know: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; ugly has a beauty all its own; less is more, etc. But let’s get real for a moment. Can the average artist come up with The Studio Wall? Suppose that was an assignment. Some artists active today could do it. Some artists might whip up a superior version. But is it so easy to do, so beneath our extended notice that a talent like Garber’s should be dismissed? I think not.

There’s an undated photograph at the Academy exhibit—judging from the fashions worn by the woman students, I think it’s from the 1930s—showing a classroom of aspiring artists watching in rapt attention as Garber works away at his easel. It’s “the artist as celebrity.” But I wonder if those long-ago students didn’t know something that we today may have forgotten.



For another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.