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Around NoonThe Art of the Journey:Paul Travis: A RetrospectiveAired December 4, 2001
Henry Adams: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. DP: Now, Henry, Paul Travis grew up on a farm in Wellsville, Ohio. Did he ever talk or write about what gave him the notion to leave that farm and study art? HA: You know, it's kind of a mystery as to why Paul Travis became an artist. It's a curious story. It took him 21 years to graduate from high school, partly because the school was so far away that there were years when they were building a railroad and he couldn't get to school. So, he took 21 years to graduate from high school, then he taught in a one-room country school for a year and then, it's not really clear why he decided to go to the Cleveland Institute of Art. There's none of his early work that survives, but it's sort of the opposite of an infant prodigy. This is someone who is in his twenties before he decides on his career. DP: He began his studies at the Cleveland School of Art, the precursor to the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1913, and as a protégée of Henry Keller. Who was Keller and how important was he to Travis' early development? HA: Well that was a great period for the Cleveland School of Art. You had Henry Keller and you had a number of other teachers at the Cleveland School of Art who were very gifted. And Paul Travis who was there at the same time as the famous American watercolorist Charles Burchfield. In fact, Burchfield became a friend of Travis' and was practically the first person he met at the school. They actually met when he first went into the building to register and Burchfield was also standing in line. So he met Burchfield on his first day in the school. I'd say that what the Cleveland School of Art had then was two things. You had teachers who had terrific technical academic training and then there was a new awareness of modern art and new possibilities, a new creativity. And those things came together. With Travis, he's an example of that. He's someone who had terrific technical skills as a draftsman, but then had a kind of adventurous open spirit towards life, and was interested in putting things together in a creative way. DP: And that was something that he did when he went off to war, he enlisted in World War I in 1917. What sort of impact did the war have on his work? HA: Well, the war had quite an impact in that that was the first time that he had been out of Cleveland. And he talked about when he went to New York and rode a subway for the first time and it was the first time that he had been on a boat that was larger than a rowboat. The war was kind of a paradoxical experience for Travis because it ended up, or it started off in kind of a not very exciting way being in these camps with soldiers and then he was trained as a machine gunner, which was known as the suicide squad. Machine gunners didn't last very long in the First World War. But then his commanding officer became aware of his artistic skills and literally, just at the moment when he was going to be transferred to the front, he was held back and ended up spending most of the war in France doing artistic work and eventually teaching at the American University in France, making a lot of contacts and so forth. The war was really the first time where he had a big exposure to culture in a larger sense. And one of the things about this show is that we're showing Paul Travis' World War I sketchbooks for the first time, which are quite poignant--a lot of very sensitive portraits of French and American soldiers from the First World War. DP: When Travis came back to Cleveland after the war, he went to teach at his old alma mater, the Cleveland School of Art. What was his specialty as an instructor?
DP: That's pretty deep concentration. HA: Yeah. DP: Did he have a philosophy of teaching that he shared with students or colleagues? HA: Well, everyone seems to agree I suppose about two things about his teaching. One is that he just seems to have been an extremely generous, kind of giving person towards his students. And the other is that he had great sensitivity towards letting the students express themselves. He wasn't an authoritarian teacher in any way. On the other hand, he conveyed this terrific sense of excitement that would get people motivated. And, you know, a number of good artists--there's a painter named Raphael Gleitsmann, we have a painting by him in the museum, but he was a protégée of Paul Travis. And many of the first African-American artists at the Cleveland School of Art were protégées of Paul Travis. He just was a very open, generous kind of teacher. DP: He also had a long history with the Museum of Art's May Show. What sorts of works did he contribute to that event? HA: Well, the May Show was quite an important event in Cleveland. This was a good period, the twenties and thirties, for regional art. And Paul Travis, for something like a thirty-year period, showed every year in the May Show. There were three or four Cleveland artists who were regulars in the May Show from the time it started, and Paul Travis was one of those. He showed oils. He showed watercolors. After he came back from Africa, he showed his paintings of Africa. It was an important venue, you know, it was a major event. This was a period when artists could really make a career in Cleveland without the need to go to New York or to go outside this region. DP: You mentioned Africa and that was a really big event--his trip for eight months between 1927 and 1928. What were some of the ways his African trip found its way into his work?
DP: Not just artistically, but sociologically... HA: Many of the photographs are quite wonderful. He took these glass slides which are really quite extraordinary. DP: You're tuned to Around Noon here on 90.3 WCPN®. I'm Dee Perry, and I'm here with Henry Adams, the curator of Paul Travis: A Retrospective, the new exhibition opening at the Beck Center this weekend, sponsored by The Cleveland Artists' Foundation. And joining us now from CAF is Paul Travis' daughter, Elisabeth Dreyfuss. Elisabeth, thanks for coming and welcome to Around Noon. Elisabeth Dreyfuss: Thank you very much. DP: This exhibition, Elisabeth, got its start when Henry came to your house to see a work by Viktor Schreckengost that he had given to your father. Can you talk about your part in this? ED: Well, Henry then disappeared after entering the house and seeing the Schreckengost, I think at that point he decided to put it in the Schreckengost show because we had quite a number of Paul's paintings in house and out on the porch off the living room, and I think it was two and half hours actually before we saw Henry come up, surface for cookies and coffee. It was delightful to me because in many ways The Cleveland Artists' Foundation is devoted to bringing the light of day back to artists who made such a contribution here and to seeing Cleveland as a place where artists can live and make a living and be part of the community. Travis raised three kids as an artist in Cleveland, Ohio. So those kinds of things were in my mind as I saw him going through the Travis things and looking at the artifacts. I think Henry probably overcame an initial kind of reluctance to think of Africa as an important source. I'm just speculating about that. But gradually, what was to be a week's project for Henry, turned out to be a whole summer. I think it's important to say too, that Travis' trip to Africa was sponsored by the actors and board members at Karamu. And that black/white thing was very important in the twenties--the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes was in and out of Cleveland, the Jeliffes were an important piece. Not only the encouragement and the feeling that it was a valid dream--he had the dream since Stanley met Livingston--but that it was doable. And the Karamu people, the Gilpin Players and the African art sponsors at that time gave him the wherewithal to bring back treasures. His task was to bring back to them the real Africa. And, as Henry mentioned, photographs, lanternslides, films, paintings, drawings--he made hundreds of on-site sketches of Lake Victoria and the Riff Valley, and so forth. Two things about Travis that are important to know are that he loved to sleep outdoors, this was a great skill--thought a tent was a very convenient place to be--and he was an incredible walker. So he, on foot, went into the Ituri Forest and met people. The Southern Ohio farm boy thing gave Travis a feeling of comfort with all people. He just fit in. Ate whatever folks were eating. A little fear of snakes, but otherwise intrepid. DP: Was it true that Paul Travis' work that was--that is, his work inspired by his trip to Africa--was also an inspiration for Viktor Schreckengost's? ED: I think many Clevelanders were affected by the African thing. I see it in textiles, there's a Potter named (Charles) Jeffery that was inspired by it, Russell Aikens--several. But Schreck I think immortalized it particularly with that marvelous head of a child known as Legenda. DP: That is a beautiful piece. Henry, talk a bit more about what happened when you went to Elizabeth's house. What impressions did you leave with in terms of Paul Travis' work? HA: Well, the first thing that struck me was just that he was a marvelous draftsman, and of course what I was looking at was all mixed up. So one moment I'd be looking at a drawing from World War I and then I'd be looking at a drawing of an African figure and then at a floral study that looked a little bit like Charles Burchfield. I suppose what impressed me first was just he has a wonderful quality of line. You can see that he drew with great skill, but also with a kind of emotion that was responding to the subject so that these drawings and watercolors form a kind of visual diary of his life. And then there are all these strange pieces, and as I was sorting through them, I was trying to figure out what kind of sequence they went in and in a way it was like looking at a novel about someone's life, but seeing the chapters all out of order and trying to figure out what sequence they go in and what they're expressing. And then I suppose the unusualness of it all is kind of fascinating. Why would a farm boy from Ohio choose to go to Africa in the 1920's? It's a pretty unusual step to make. And clearly, I think that one of things that's interesting is that going to Africa was clearly an emotionally transforming experience. That after he went to Africa, everything that he made after that had some of the spirit of Africa in his work. This clearly was just a completely transforming experience for him. DP: Elizabeth, in the show's catalogue Henry states that your father's art "sensitively reflects the changes in his life both in its subject matter and style." Are you able to recognize those changes that your father went through?
DP: And Henry too, along with Elizabeth here, the women in Travis' life were very important to him. How do you think that influenced his work? HA: Well, it's interesting that all the letters that Travis wrote to Africa or to women or to his wife, to his mother and to his sister. And it seems to go back to the family framework where he grew up in a household where it was sort of a striking contrast--the men were incredibly laconic. His father never spoke more than one sentence at a time, whereas his mother was a great gossip and full of stories and that kind of thing. His mother was also a great a gardener, and I think that somehow her sensitivity to plants and flowers is one of the things that turned Travis to being an artist in the first place. So that it does seem as though the women in his life somehow turned him towards this more sensitive way of approaching the world. He's sort of an interesting combination that way, because he has--I mean I hate to use clichés like this--but he has a kind of feminine sensitivity. He also was quite a rugged guy. DP: An adventurer. Elizabeth, what do you see as your father's legacy? ED: Well, he taught a million students in this community. I think that was his legacy. And, as Henry mentioned, his way of teaching was very much about bringing out what was in that student--facilitating the student. We have wonderful letters from students. I remember one from Clarence Carter saying that during his moments of discouragement, Travis encouraged him and continued him on the road. So the art school was a great place, it still is a great place, it's a nurturing place, and I think that's his legacy. The other legacy is that I think he's a great American artist and we have a wonderful body of work on the walls at the Beck Center--50 pieces or so. Many of the artifacts from Africa. So that kind of a legacy. I also think that it's marvelous that a young man can come...he said ambition reached over the hills of southern Ohio and pulled him away...that that story can still be an American story. DP: That's a great legacy. Thank you for sharing some of it with us. Thank you too, Henry. My guests have been the Cleveland Museum of Art's Henry Adams, the curator of the new exhibition, Paul Travis: A Retrospective and Elizabeth Dreyfuss, Paul Travis' daughter and member of the Cleveland Artists' Foundation which is sponsoring the exhibit. Paul
Travis: A Retrospective |
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Dee
Perry: The art of the journey is one that enlivens the mind and enhances
the spirit. There's possibly no greater teacher than travel with its lessons
in life and its education of experience. Today Around Noon, we'll
venture into an exhibition that profiles an Ohio artist whose trips to
Africa, Europe and even the big city of Cleveland helped hone his skills
as an artist. Opening this weekend at the Beck Center for the Arts is
the Cleveland Artists Foundation exhibition 
HA:
He taught...well, I think he taught quite a number of things, but eventually
his greatest skill was that of teaching watercolor. He was quite a virtuoso
watercolorist. He could work directly on a blank piece of paper with no
preparatory drawing, and in twenty minutes, half an hour, put together
these marvelous images. He worked in a very free way. He would wet the
paper and then apply the brushstrokes very wet. I think in the early stages
of it, it would look like it was just sort of nothing at all, just these
splatters of paint, and then in the last few minutes he would pull out
an image. Pull out a tiger or a jungle landscape, or whatever. And apparently
he was quite a virtuoso because he did it with tremendous concentration.
And apparently when he was painting he would become so absorbed that he
would literally forget to swallow or to breathe, and then he would periodically
sort of sputter and choke, and then he would go back into the painting
process. 
HA:
Well, the African trip is a fascinating event in Paul Travis' career--and
in some ways a puzzling one because of course in those days if you were
an artist, you tended to go to Europe to study and Paul Travis had a sabbatical,
everyone assumed he was going to go to France to study and instead he
announced that he wanted to go to Africa. And he traveled all the way
across Africa from Cape Town to Cairo. Which was quite an adventurous
thing to be doing in the 1920's. I think that Africa is still a place
where there are dangers and hardships to travel, but in the 1920's it
was quite remote. I mean just to give you a sense, when his camera spring
broke in Kenya, it took two months to get another one shipped to him.
It wasn't like today, where you can use your cell phone and have Federal
Express and that kind of thing. You were very much out there. You know
it's a curious thing. He had read about African explorers as a child,
that clearly had something to do with it, and I think he saw this just
as one of the last places in the world that was relatively unexplored
and that artists hadn't examined before. Frankly, one of the things I
found fascinating about writing about Travis is simply learning more about
Africa, which is a fascinating continent. Terrific variety both geographically
and culturally--you know thousands of different tribal groups, really
quite different from each other. And Travis made drawings, he took photographs,
and he made films. It's actually a major... a historically important group
of documents about Africa in that period. 
ED:
Yes. In many ways I saw them in my own lifetime because those changes
became clearer in the fifties, sixties, seventies. Travis was very upset
by the atomic bomb. He saw it as a threat. He took it very seriously.
And it shows up in his art. Henry selected one of the pieces, one of the
later pieces, where the world is going off into chaos--are we leaving
the earth because it's uninhabitable kind of thing. There's a watercolor--he
did a lot of waterholes sort of subjects--and one of them shows just a
glow in the background after the bomb is dropped. So there's this strange
preoccupation finally with the sort of ultimate reality. And that's a
long way from a young man who started out really in a Garden of Eden in
southern Ohio--with a buggy, a bible, a team of horses, the farmland,
you know, and high reverence for nature. It shows up continually in his
work. Excellent, just to think of families that might want to come to
this show at the Beck Center, wonderful capturing of animals and great,
great pictures. So there's a love of nature. He also sees conflict in
nature, but ultimately this...it's just a small piece, but it's influenced
my activities as an adult, this preoccupation with the danger the bomb
represents. 
