Beaux Arts Prodigy: Arts Education and Early Career

Ballin's Childhood Sketchbook c. 1885, UCLA Special Collections

Hugo Ballin was born in New York in 1879. His father, Julius Ballin, emigrated from Oldenberg, Germany, an agricultural center near Hamburg, in 1862 and operated a successful dry good goods store in Manhattan. Hugo’s mother Tilly (nee Rothschild), also emigrated from Bavaria, and the couple settled in a large home on the East Side near the growing community of other wealthy and assimilated German Jews uptown. There the Ballins, with the help of servants, raised their three children Hugo, his elder brother Milton and his younger sister Eveline.

Wyatt Eaton, Self Portrait, 1879, National Gallery of Canada

The Ballins’ affluence also afforded their son Hugo an extensive and rigorous arts education that began when he was just seven years old. Art apparently ran in their family: Julius’ brother, Ernest, who lived with the family for a time, was also an artist and Ballin claimed one of his more distant relatives was a painter in the royal court of Oldenburg.¹ Young Hugo, perhaps through a referral from his uncle, was enrolled in classes at the studio of well-known portraitist Wyatt Eaton, an alumnus of the National Academy of Design in New York and L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At L’École des Beaux-Arts, Eaton studied classical techniques and aesthetic ideals of European antiquity and the Italian Renaissance with master painters like Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Gérôme, and spent summers painting with Jean-Francois Millet in Barbizon. Eaton returned to New York seeking to promote a similar reverence for tradition, craftsmanship and beauty among other American artists. He taught classes in drawing and portraiture at Cooper Union and, along with fellow French-trained artists Helena Gilder and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, organized the Society of American Artists to promote new methods of arts education. By bringing the Beaux Arts tradition to the United States, Eaton and his European-educated peers hoped to advance American art and inspire a new “American Renaissance.”² 

Murals, Mendelssohn Music Hall, Brooklyn Museum

Although Ballin only studied with Eaton for a few years before he died in 1896, Eaton’s mentorship left an indelible impact on Ballin’s artistic style and career. Through his relationship with Eaton, he became acquainted with painter Robert Frederick Blum, who invited Ballin to assist on his murals at Mendelssohn Hall. Ballin then enrolled in classes at the Arts Students League of New York, where he was awarded a scholarship for his composition. After graduating, Ballin travelled to Rome where he joined the National Arts Club and spent thirteen months studying the rich figure painting of the Renaissance, painting and socializing with other members of the club. He then rented a studio space from Michele Gordigiani, an Italian portraitist, in his home outside of Florence for several months where he put on his first solo exhibition. Robert Blum came to see the exhibition and together he and Ballin traveled through Tuscany, the Adriatic coast, Silicy, Calabria and Naples exploring classical Italian frescos. Ballin also visited Munich, Paris and London, but the majority of his three years abroad were spent in Italy.³

FROM UCLA

Sibylla Europa (1906), Smithsonian American Art Museum

Perhaps it is not surprising then that Ballin’s earliest paintings upon his return to New York in 1905 were recognized for their “archaism of the pre-Raphaelite manner.” “He reminds one of the old masters,” one reviewer wrote, “who add [to] likeness some sense of mystery, some vision or symbol. Less spiritual than [George Frederick] Watts, less sensuous than [William Michael] Rossetti, goes back to the Italian masters as they did for inspiration.”⁴ Ballin’s earliest works featured beautiful and idealized female figures, often in pastoral settings, representing classical characters from ancient myths and biblical stories. In “Sibylla Europa” for example, Ballin painted a scene of a mother holding her young child while seeking predictions from the Sibylla Europa, a female oracle of ancient Greek mythology who, according to legend, had prophesized the Massacre of the Innocents, King Herod’s murderous hunt for baby Jesus as recounted in Matthew 2:16-18. Ballin placed his figures in a bucolic scene to represent the story, the mother serving as a symbol of the universal Mother, her baby as the innocence and purity of all mankind, both awaiting their fate as told by the oracle. Like his other paintings in the early 1900s, it featured “idealized types of an idealized age, permanent, elemental, removed from passion, unconscious of their surroundings…” and displayed a “combination of classical formula, poetry, realism and romanticism.”⁵

The Lesson (1907), Smithsonian American Art Museum

Ballin’s beautiful, virginal female figures embodied his vision of art as an elevated, refined form of culture. He had a deep admiration for the master painters of Europe, not simply for their work, but also for their revered status in European society. Influenced by both his mentorship with Eaton and his own education in Europe, he viewed art a skilled craft to be honed through years of apprenticeship and master artists as cultural elites who possessed superior taste and refined sense of beauty. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Ballin did not believe that American artists should adapt their work to appeal to a broad audience or expect their work would “exact reverence from all observers.” Just as an individual had to develop “a certain skill and proficiency” before he could be considered an artist, so too was “education… needed to appreciate a masterpiece of art.” Instead, true artists like him, wealthy patrons and other cultural elites, should aspire to replicate the transcendent beauty of the European masters and, by doing so, elevate the taste of the American public at large. Ballin’s hierarchical understanding of taste and culture made his attitudes about art rather snobbish, but he, like many of his peers, believed their art served a public purpose; their role as artists was to create “pure decorative beauty” that would enrich and improve American society.⁶

Mabel Ballin, Photoplay, 1921. WikiMedia Commons.

Ballin’s “pre-Raphaelite” style was well received by art circles in New York. Upon his return to the city, he was inducted as a member of the Society of American Artists and awarded their Shaw Fund Prize in 1905 for his piece “Pastoral.” In the same year, his “Mother and Child” received the National Academy of Design’s annual Thomas B. Clarke Prize and in 1907, he received the Academy’s Julius Hallgarten Prize and their Isidor Gold Medal. He worked with painters Kenneth Hayes Miller and Gustave Ciomiotti Jr. to organize the Society of Young Painters and rented a space in Holbein Studios on 55th street, just blocks away from the Mendelssohn Club Building where he had helped Robert Burns complete his murals as a teenager. In 1909, Ballin met a young actress named Mabel Croft and fell deeply in love. Within months they married and purchased a large home on the Saugatuck River in Connecticut. His affection for his wife was obvious to some observers who noted “traces of certain singularly attractive feminine features asserting themselves more and more in his canvasses” likely because he “unconsciously reproduces her features in his work.”⁷ With a beautiful new wife and a successful career as a painter and portraitist, Hugo Ballin had firmly established himself within the Beaux Arts movement and the New York art world by the time he turned thirty. And in 1912, he received the largest and most prestigious commission of his young career: an invitation to paint twenty-six murals in the Executive Chamber of the new Wisconsin State Capitol.

FROM UCLA

The decorative art included in Capitol in Madison reflected a stylistic shift among American artists of the Beaux-Arts school, described by art historian Bailey Van Hook in her book, The Virgin and the Dynamo. Although European-educated artists of Wyatt Eaton’s generation worked to foster an "American Renaissance," they didn't always agree about how exactly to forge a distinctly American style. Ballin, like his mentors Eaton and Blum, believed in emulating and preserving the traditional forms and techniques of the European masters. But replicating these strategies was also limiting and an increasing number of younger American artists who were closer in age to Ballin opted to experiment with new forms and techniques. These artists, also educated in Europe, sought to capture the dynamic changes occurring in American society in the age industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. To establish a more “modern” American style in mural painting, they replaced allegory with history: instead of using idealized, female figures to serve as symbols in their paintings, they opted for more realistic, masculine figures to represent characters from American history. They featured “real” events, rather than ancient legends, relating stories that would educate the American public about the country's history, cultivate patriotism and assert a proud, American nationalism. As Bailey Van Hook argued, replacing idealized female figures (virgins) with modern, dynamic masculine ones (dynamos) reflected a shift from idealism to modernism emerging among American artists that was part of their efforts to forge a uniquely American national style.⁸ 

Ballin's murals at the Wisconsin State Capitol captured his personal quest to reconcile his love for classicism with this emerging trend in American mural art. In the fifty-two figures that appear in the pieces he designed for the Executive Chamber, he incorporated both allegorical symbols and real, historical figures to tell his version of Wisconsin's history. The duality of the murals was captured in the space: the allegorical paintings were placed on the ceiling of the room, while the historical paintings lined the walls. The largest painting in the room, “Unity after the Civil War making Peace,” blended the two styles together, embodying Ballin's efforts to position himself as a leader of his generation of American artists.

The Wisconsin State Capitol (1906-1917)

Court of Honor and Grand Basin, 1893, WikiMedia Commons

The State Capitol in Wisconsin was one of dozens of civic buildings erected in the “golden age” of Beaux Arts architecture in America initiated by the World’s Columbia Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. The Exposition fairgrounds included an elaborate cityscape with over 200 buildings constructed specifically for the event, known as the White City, designed to showcase for America’s cultural, agricultural and industrial contributions. The organizers recruited the most-well known and highly regarded artists and architects in the country, many of whom had been educated in Europe and modeled their designs off of the Beaux Arts style: monumental buildings with classical symmetry, composition and ornamentation and grand interiors embellished with decorations that accentuated the beauty of the space. In an era of rapid industrialization, mass immigration, and “the closing of the frontier,” the neoclassical architecture of the White City projected clarity of purpose and order to evoke civic pride and national patriotism among visitors. The Exposition’s success inspired a wave of municipal construction projects as government officials throughout the country rushed to erect similarly grandiose public buildings that would serve as monuments to the greatness and strength of their own cities and states. Some of the biggest commissions came from western states eager to express their civic aspirations and cultural prestige after growing from sparsely settled territories to modern, dynamic states in the decades after the Civil War, including massive State Capitol buildings in Minnesota (1904), Iowa (1905), and Wisconsin (1906-1917).⁹

Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, 1893, WikiMedia Commons

Wisconsin’s former State Capitol was built during the Civil War, but had burned to the ground after a gas leak during the winter of 1904. Two years later, the State hired architect George B. Post, a veteran of the Columbia Exposition, to design a replacement. Post had a degree in civil engineering from New York University and studied architecture in the studio of Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to attend L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. After working on several buildings in New York in the 1880s, including the New York Stock Exchange Building and the New York Cotton Exchange Building, Post was recruited to design the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the Columbia Exposition. He designed a massive structure that was over 230 feet tall and 1,600 feet long and housed over 40 acres of exhibition space, making it the largest enclosed space ever built. Post also commissioned several muralists to decorate the domes of the building, helping to making mural decoration a popular feature of Beaux Arts architecture in its “golden age.”

Wisconsin State Capitol, 2004, Wisconsin State Journal

The Capitol Building in Madison that Post designed was equally ornate and grandiose. Echoing the nation’s capitol, Post’s structure featured a large central dome positioned at the intersection of four building wings extending to the north, south, east and west, with entrances at both the southeast and northwest axes. Like his building in the White City, the structure was massive: it rose almost three hundred feet tall, just three feet shorter than the nation’s capitol, and contained over 400,000 square feet of space. It was assembled out of forty-three types of stone from six countries and eight states, including white granite from Vermont on the exterior of the building and the dome and granites from Wisconsin in the hallways of lower three floors. It took more than a decade to complete the Capitol and cost the state $7.25 million total, but it continues to serve as monument to the virtues of democracy and the strength and power of the State.

Daniel Chester French “Wisconsin” (1914), WikiMedia Commons

Post recruited colleagues he had worked with on the Columbian Exposition to design decorations for the building to complement its mission, including Daniel Chester French, Kenyon Cox, and Edwin Howland Blashfield. Jean Francois Millet, a longtime instructor at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, was to serve as the director of decoration and contribute works of his own, but died on the Titanic en route. But despite his absence, all of the artists stayed true to Beaux Arts ideals: each artist created individual works that beautified the space and utilized Renaissance-inspired imagery to engender the ideals of civic responsibility, good government and State pride, complementing the mission of Post’s design. On the pediment of the west wing of the building, for example, Viennese-educated sculptor Karl Bitter created a piece entitled “Unveiling the Resources of the State” which featured a large Romanesque female figure to represent the State surrounded by figures symbolizing the state’s natural resources. In his sculpture for the top of the dome, Daniel Chester French similarly represented the state as an enrobed female figure, pointing off into the distance in reference to the state’s motto, “Forward.” Edwin Blashfield’s tondo, “The Resources of Wisconsin,” which decorated the top of the rotunda, took the imagery even further by featuring a woman wrapped in weathered American flag surrounded by diaphanous female figures holding the state’s biggest exports. All three works used allegorical, female figures to represent the values the artists believed to be fundamental to Wisconsin’s success and democratic society more broadly.

Blashfield, “The Resources of Wisconsin” (1914), WikiMedia Commons

Other murals in the Capitol Building, by contrast, employed historical motifs and included real characters and events from American history rather than symbolic female ones. Albert Herter painted a series of murals for the Supreme Court Hearing Room that offered a history of the evolution of the law, including scenes from the Roman courts, the signing of the Constitution and disputes over sovereignty in the earliest days of American settlement in Wisconsin. Charles Yardley Turner’s murals in a hearing room on the North wing similarly featured pastoral scenes of Native Americans and colonists from Wisconsin’s past as well as “A Modern Transportation Scene” showcasing a vibrant harbor, railroad lines and automobiles. As art historian Bailey Van Hook described, these historical motifs reflected a desire among some American artists to move away from the classical, Beaux Arts style and forge a distinct, national American style in mural art that would capture the dynamic changes occurring in American society at the time.¹⁰

Albert Herter, Supreme Court Hearing Room Murals (1915), wisconsin.gov

Executive Chamber, 1915, Wisconsin Historical Society

Hugo Ballin received the commission to design the murals in the Executive Chamber after the artists originally chosen to paint them, Jean Francois Millet, died on the Titanic. The commission came after much of the building and its art had already been completed, allowing Ballin to model his designs off of those of the other, older and more experienced artists. In doing so, he fused the two styles that prevailed, combining allegorical and historical motifs in his works. On the ceiling, he echoed the works of Bitter, French and Blashfield by portraying “The Spirit of Wisconsin” as an enrobed, female figure and using other symbolic, mostly female, figures to represent the “Virtues” of the state: agriculture, mining and lumber, commerce, the arts, wisdom, labor, charity, justice and religious tolerance. On the walls of the Chamber, he featured famous characters and episodes in Wisconsin’s history painted in a more realistic style, including Jean Nicolet’s arrival at Green Bay in 1634, Major Whistler accepting peace from Red Bird after the so-called “Winnebago War” of 1827, and a portrait of Joseph Bailey, Colonel of the Wisconsin Cavalry Regiment in the Civil War. In the largest panel on the South wall of the room titled “Unity Making Peace After The Civil War,” Ballin incorporated both motifs, representing “Unity” as an angelic female figure standing between famous characters from Wisconsin’s history. By blending history and allegory, Ballin's murals at the Wisconsin State Capitol captured his personal quest to reconcile his love for classicism with the emerging American style of mural painting.

Executive Chamber, North and West Walls, Wisconsin Historical Society

Unfortunately for Ballin, his fusion was not well received by the murals’ commissioners. Their critiques were described in a letter to Ballin from the projects’ leaders:
“The universal opinion among those who have expressed themselves is that your work on the ceiling is unsurpassed, that your paintings on either side of the mantel are most beautiful and that the pictures of the Surrender of Redbird and Lapham are all that they should be. The rest are regarded as unfortunate. Whether or not this is because of the choice of subject, in the execution, or in the conception of what the pictures should portray, I am not able to state.”
Ballin did not take the criticism lightly and returned to Madison a few months later to make the desired repairs and corrections. But he also defended his choices and refused to change some elements of his work and, by doing so, revealed his attitudes about art, history and representation in the early days of his career.

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