Tag Archive for Scott Joplin

SEDALIA/PARIS CULTURAL EXCHANGE: Wilson and Picasso/Joplin and Stravinsky

Some might think David Wilson a folk or outsider artist because he was isolated and self-taught. His work however shows a debt to French Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s era. As the Bizarro cartoon shows outsider artists usually use found materials instead of professional paints like Wilson.

Both Doug Freed and John Hawkins thought /David Wilson had been influenced by Picasso. Neither had any knowledge of Wilson’s exposure to modern art or even if he had any training. Painting by a self-taught itinerant from a middling Midwestern town would normally fall into the Outsider Art category. Indeed, Wilson’s socio-economic status is well outside middle class perimeters. He was an unemployed, poor, alcoholic with a penchant for challenging authority and landing in jail. Without clawing through the history of outsider art definitions (like any esthetic marker it shifts over time, especially when it becomes a marketing term), there are some shifts in its meaning but also commonalities, none of which characterize Wilson’s work. Outsider Art is quite often crude and that naïveté constitutes its charm. Wilson’s paintings do not have this slapdash look. Placing them alongside a Pablo Picasso canvas tends to confirm Freed’s and Hawkins’ linkage. Wilson adheres to a flat picture plane and his fractured Cubist and biomorphic shapes and use of a kind of pointillist brushwork are characteristics of School of Paris works, not folk or outsider efforts.

Yet Wilson’s paintings are not in the Museum of Modern Art of New York City, or any other prestigious urban temple of high art. Sedalia’s Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2002, has nine galleries of “thoughtful grouping of paintings by renowned artists such as Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, and Gene Davis, and abstract sculptural ceramics by the likes of Peter Voulkos, Jim Leedy, Jun Kaneko, and Ken Ferguson,” it has no David Wilsons. Doug Freed, former director, pointed out the reasons for this oversight, confirming also his affinity with Modern Art: “I think you are correct in connecting it with the 1920 school of Paris.  His work has not been available. He didn’t have a dealer. Maybe with the attention he is getting a painting may be acquired by the Daum eventually.”

Occasionally a frame shop in Sedalia would accept consignment paintings, but efforts at marketing wall art have floundered. In the May 29, 1974 The Sedalia Democrat was a display ad for “Sedalia’s New Crimson Gallery, Home of Fine Arts” at 507 W. 16th St. David Wilson is listed as one of the six “fine artists.” The August 2nd newspaper ran another, smaller display ad announcing the gallery’s closing. Modern Art might have been an especially hard sell. Images that depart from sentimental realism rarely graced the walls of mid-Missouri domiciles. Critic Leo Steinberg said modern art “is always born in anxiety” and its purpose is to “translate this anxiety to the spectator.” That’s not an emotion middle class Americans wanted from the pictures above their sofa.

If Picasso somehow inspired David Wilson Scott Joplin influenced a modernist luminary, reversing the transatlantic flow of culture. Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, around the first world war, heard ragtime piano music and got his hands on ragtime sheet music, some of it likely by Scott Joplin, its most prominent composer. Stravinsky wrote nine pieces incorporating elements of ragtime.

Picasso did the sketch for the sheet music of one of Stravinsky’s ragtime influenced compositions. Modernism was a global phenomena that involved a middling town in central Missouri. David Wilson was influenced by it and Scott Joplin’s music had an effect of one of Modernism’s giants.

In 1919, the year David Wilson was born, Stravinsky published a piano version of his Ragtime for Eleven Instruments. His friend Pablo Picasso supplied a sketch for the cover of the sheet music. Just as Wilson’s work isn’t a clone of Picasso’s style, the famous modernist composer didn’t write a rag, but used elements of the American popular music. Alexy Viegas, in his 2018 PhD thesis, Stravinsky’s Ragtime for Eleven Instruments, believed Joplin indeed was Stravinsky’s source:

Stravinsky uses the American genre in Ragtime for Eleven Instruments as a basis for creating unique and quirky music. According to Taruskin (1996: 1307), Stravinsky borrows Joplinesque clichés in this piece to create a unique musical text. Through the study of this work, we notice clichéd adaptations not only of Scott Joplin’s compositions, but also of stylistic features of traditional ragtime.

In Stravinsky and Jazz (2017), Andy Jarema states this incorporation of the “freshness and novel rhythm” of music of “Negro origin” is indicative of modernism’s appetite for arts of non-Western origin:

Stravinsky’s interest in jazz is also representative of a fundamental core belief held by not just other composers in the 20th century, but artists flying under the banner of the modernist movement as a whole. The modernist movement emerged out of the need to find the reconciliation of two dichotomous worldviews: One which attempted to capture the nearly infinite pluralism of local cultures in the world, the other that saw the industrial age paving the way towards a futuristic, machine driven society. Artists were seeking out the myths and legends of cultures as faraway from their own as possible, sources capable of, “transcending contemporary local traditions, of speaking of the very source of culture.” However, by pulling this culture from its source and appropriating it in a different context, authenticity was almost guaranteed to be lost. In place of the lost authenticity, though, he gained a new perspective by bringing it into tension with the vision of modern day society. … In the vein of many other modernist artists, he was a pluralistic connoisseur who attempted to encapsulate and internalize authentic looks at cultures outside of his own into his own style as an artist.

David Wilson’s work (left) has an inexplicable similarity to Picasso’s painting (right). We haven’t a clue why or how.

David Henry Wilson (1919-1989) Biographical Fragments

David Henry Wilson’s obituary is not online. His father’s is and was published in The Sedalia Democrat June 8, 1973. This lists David Henry’s immediate family.

The family home at 1403 E. Third is now a grassy vacant lot. Google Earth shows it’s only about a hundred feet from railroad tracks. Trains still rumble through Sedalia, but many fewer than in the past. The quality of sleep so near to the tracks must not have been good. All that clanking, banging and whistling may have been music to Missouri Pacific engineer, David Senior, but it may not have been a lullaby for the rest of the clan.

The lot of the Wilson family home as seen on Google Earth.

David H. Wilson’s art is indeed “a feast for the eyes.” It’s rhythmic, clean colored, harmonious, cheerful and upbeat. The artist’s life was anything but. A search of the archives of The Sedalia Democrat reveals minor run-ins with the law, but nothing dramatic and nothing social or positive. Except for the photo of Wilson standing by his Ragtime picture in 1974, there are only bare bones public records, which reveal nothing of his personality and nothing of his artistic motivations. He passed through seven decades of life in Sedalia, Missouri, unnoticed, unheralded and unrewarded.

The following is a scant chronology from the Democrat:

July 12, 1942, “Local Board Names Thirty for Induction”: “Leave July 23 For Jefferson Barracks St. Louis.” Along with twelve other inductees is “David Henry Wilson, 3027, 1403 East Third.”

August 18, 1947. “Fine Arts Awards”

Under “Oil Paintings by Amateurs: 3. David H. Wilson, Sedalia.”

September 11, 1964. “David Wilson, 1403 East Third, charged with being intoxicated and disturbing the peace on complaint of D. E. Wilson, pleaded guilty and was given a suspended 30-day jail sentence.”

November 10, 1972. “The following persons were charged with disorderly conduct: … David H. Wilson, 1403 E. Third, fined $10.”

August 10, 1973. “Cash, paintings taken from home. David Wilson, 1403 East Third, reported $60 in cash and two paintings of undetermined value were stolen from his home early Friday morning. Wilson told police that a woman was visiting his home and after she left the items were missing.”

July 30, 1975. “Disorderly conduct: David Wilson, 1403 East Third, fined $50.”

Today there are few remnants of the Wilson home place by the tracks.

Doug Freed, an educator and artist whose work is well-represented in public and private collections, gave us his impressions of David Wilson:

I met David Wilson when I first arrived in Sedalia in late 1968. I really didn’t know him very well but respected his paintings. The work’ s content was often religious but not entirely. He was definitely influenced by Picasso and Leger. His work was meticulously crafted. I don’t think he had any formal training but don’t know for sure. He was a real character but was in the throes of alcoholism. He would call me as well as others and threaten to jump in front of the train which passed through town on a regular sequence if I didn’t buy him a six pack of beer. He used this ploy several times with me, my wife, as well as numerous other people that knew him.

John Hawkins said his father, Allen L. Hawkins, mayor of Sedalia (1978 to 1981) and David were “close friends”:

He (Wilson) was quite a character, nice guy. He used to call my dad sometimes when he was out to the bar and needed a ride home. … We’d have to stop at a liquor store on the way home. I’d drink a beer or two. Don’t think he had a job. … David used to go to our church quite a bit, to counsel with our priest (Father Lusley?)—counseled Wilson. Calvary Episcopal Church) at Broadway and Ohio. He was counseling there. He drank a little bit you know. … I was always intrigued by his paintings. I don’t know if it was sand that he used in them. … He was a starving artist for sure. I don’t know if he ever had a vehicle or not, because he walked everywhere. The Democrat had written an article and interviewed him. He wore glasses. … Kind of like a Picasso style. He done quite a few of Scott Joplin. … He would voice his opinion. He was definitely vocal. I think he was more of a Republican or a conservative as for political. It didn’t bother him to give his opinion. Bars—the Pacific, Interlude, and Leo’s Budweiser bar was on Main Street.

PICTURING AND PERFORMING SCOTT JOPLIN: In Murals and a Festival, Sedalia, Missouri, Celebrates Ragtime’s Premiere Composer

David Wilson, Ragtime, circa 1974, oil on Masonite, 51 x 36, City of Sedalia, Missouri. Now in an office in the Municipal Building. One might think a fractured folk modern work like this would vex the citizens of a mid-size Midwestern town, but Wilson’s depiction of Scott Joplin is a favorite with the public. It has kinetic energy, not unlike the spirited rhythm of ragtime music.

In 1974 David Wilson was commissioned to paint a portrait of Scott Joplin. It was displayed in the hall of Sedalia’s new municipal building. For better security today it hangs in an office. That same year, Sedalia launched its first annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival.

At the end of World War I, other syncopated popular music forms like stride piano, boogie-woogie, Dixieland, blues and jazz successively supplanted ragtime.  Periodically, it was dusted off and performed. Joshua Rifkin’s album of Scott Joplin in 1970 sold a million copies, equally the sales number of Maple Leaf Rag sheet music a century earlier.

Marvin Hamlisch won an Oscar for his score based on Scott Joplin’s songs for the movie The Sting. That 1973 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford was awarded a total of seven Academy awards including Best Picture.

The 1970s saw a national revival of interest in Joplin, but Sedalia’s ragtime heritage had been continuous since the turn of the nineteenth century when the town was the base for a number of black piano players who pioneered the lively syncopated dance music. Businessman John Stark was located here and his success publishing Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 established Joplin as the “King of Ragtime.”

Article from The Sedalia Democrat, May 23, 1974.

The Sedalia Democrat followed every stage of Joplin’s career. Through the years, nostalgic stories recalled his success and the good old days when he enthralled white concertgoers and diverse patrons of the town’s many bawdy houses. Sedalia is a well-churched town, but is candid about its wide-open past as a booming railroad nexus with a thriving red light district and surfeit of saloons. Does the fetching musicality of ragtime provide a soundtrack that covers over the grim realities of its prostitution industry and rampant alcohol abuse? Scott Joplin would die in an asylum at the age of 48 of syphilitic dementia.

Photographs of Scott Joplin have survived so artists are able to paint credible portraits. Some of David Wilson’s other paintings prove he could have created a recognizable Joplin, but obviously he chose not to. In both our painting and the one at Sedalia’s Municipal Building he departed from the constraints of verisimilitude.

Other Sedalia public art works of Joplin are realistic. In 1977, Eric Bransby was paid $10,000 to paint three panels illustrating the town’s past (below left).

The entire chamber of a courtroom of the Pettis County courthouse is lined with pictures of local history by Barbara Campbell done in 2000. She of course included scenes evocative of Scott Joplin’s years in Sedalia, circa 1895-1901 (center).

Stanley James Heard painted a large mural of Joplin at the piano in 1994 on the wall of the Wilkins Music Co. 205 S. Ohio (below right).

(Click image to enlarge).

 

 

 

DAVID WILSON: A Sedalia Missouri outsider (?) artist envisions Scott Joplin

David Wilson, title unknown, circa 1970s, oil on Masonite, 28 x 48. As Wilson was known to have executed a commission to paint Scott Joplin we assume this is also a picture of the ragtime composer.

David Wilson, back of the Scott Joplin painting above. Initially we wondered if this was part of a discarded panel of a series of religious paintings he created for the Sedalia Episcopal Church. However, the snake wrapped around the woman’s wrist does not fit any of the forty-four references to serpents in the Bible. Nor does it seem to be a picture of a snake biting Cleopatra. Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health and hygiene is often portrayed feeding or watering a snake wrapped around her. There are ancient sculptures of Hygieia holding a bowl from which the snake is drinking. There is a bowl in Wilson’s fragment. Understanding the origin’s and intent of David Wilson’s art will be challenging.

One day in the 1980s we wandered into Ed Yuell’s frame shop on the courthouse square in Sedalia, Missouri and spied some bold and unconventional artworks left on consignment. The largest of the group we purchased was an oil on Masonite of a piano player. On the back was a section of another picture showing two figures in robes. The woman holds a bowl and has a serpent wrapped around her wrist. Its technique of thickly daubed oil paint is identical to the front but stylistically it is more conventional. The fractured modernist musician front panel was signed WILSON.

Scott Joplin is a local hero and Sedalia has a long running, yearly ragtime festival so we assumed it portrayed the famous composer of “Maple Leaf Rag.” Ed agreed and told us David Wilson painted a Scott Joplin piece, which was on display at the city’s municipal building.  The Sedalia Democrat, May 23, 1974, page 14, ran a photo of the artist and this painting, headlined “Municipal Abstract.” The “local artist” was misidentified as David Walker. The next day the paper ran an “identity was wrong” admission and credited David Wilson.

To our knowledge there has been no fine arts recognition of David Henry Wilson (1919-1989).  He has not been formally exhibited, or had works sold at auction. In subsequent posts we will reveal what we have learned about this obscure creator of powerful and intriguing images.

(This is the first in a series of six posts on David Wilson.)