Homer Ellertson
1892 - 1935
self portrait circa 1925
watercolor 16 x 20 in.
courtesy of Donna Erskine
This versatile artist built his reputation while living and working in Tryon. After studying at Pratt Institute and in ateliers in France, he was a successful designer of textiles and carpets in Manhattan. At the age of 27 he decided to leave New York and to pursue a career as a serious painter. Arriving in the Tryon artists’ colony in 1920, he found immediate support among the many painters already there. He was young, good-looking, earnest, and energetic. He was also abundantly talented.
Ellertson was not interested in conventional painting. From the time of his arrival in Tryon, he was motivated to discover new forms of expression. His early attempts at avant-garde work can be somewhat awkward, but he worked enthusiastically and tried different approaches, getting better all the time and developing his distinctive style.
When we look at his explorations in Modernism, we see something in common with the new directions then being explored by Augustus Vincent Tack, the important New York painter who began to winter regularly in Tryon at the same time Ellertson decided to come.
Construction of El Taarn 1923
[study for textile wall hanging now at Asheville Art Museum]
gouache, pencil & ink 18 x 25 in.
courtesy of Pamela McDougald
The elder artist may, indeed, have been his unnamed artist friend who recommended Tryon as a good place for artists. During this period Tack was moving in top social circles and had a family with expensive habits, so he had to keep producing portraits of the wealthy in order to maintain his lifestyle. But he, too, desired most to create a new and more meaningful art. Tack’s colorful avant-garde landscapes were too radical to appeal to most buyers, but he had a discerning patron who supported his Modernist experimentation, Duncan Phillips. On a trip to visit Tack in Tryon, Phillips purchased for his growing private museum two of Ellertson’s oils, which remain in The Phillips Collection in Washington. One, The Ebro, deploys radical perspective and deconstruction. It is a landscape of Spain from Ellertson’s 1927 trip to Europe. (In the same year, when Phillips bought the two new works from the young Tryon artist, he lent his old Spanish paintings to the Metropolitan in New York for their special exhibition of Old Spanish Masters.)
A retrospective of the art of Homer Ellertson was held in the summer of 2000 at Tryon Fine Arts Center. Lenders from out of town as well as from Tryon contributed many fine works to the show. This author produced a catalog where 32 of the exhibited pictures are illustrated and discussed, with an essay about the artist’s life.
In Tryon Artists: 1892-1942 show at The Upstairs Gallery in 2001, additional Ellertson work was displayed. Tropic Flora and White Cockatoo are small gouaches, highly decorative, that undoubtedly are early designs. A charcoal drawing shows his experiments in form and perspective alluding to Cubism.
Gruyère 1927
[depicting the Swiss town famous for its centuries-old cheesemaking traditions]
oil on canvas 21 ½ x 18 in.
collection of Michael McCue
Tradition shows likely inspiration from Tack; in scale and composition it is reminiscent of an Art Moderne wall mural. Counting Pennies is one of a number of accomplished oils from his extended European honeymoon, when he developed the fascinating complex iconographies that Phillips found appealing. (These paintings with imagery of Europe were probably executed after his return to his Tryon studio.) Such large watercolors as Tropic Refuge and Blue Ridge Fiddler mark a later phase, when Ellertson traveled the South and developed a fresh and distinctive style portraying American subject matter. Here, too, we have the big watercolor version of the ink wash Aged Creole seen in the earlier show. (It hangs in one of his informal lightly whitewashed frames, unique to Ellertson, seen as well on several other works last year.) These watercolors enhanced his reputation with enthusiastic art critics of the 1930s who extolled his fresh style and confident good humor.
At the last moment before the 2000 Ellertson retrospective opened, his arras-like wall hanging, seven feet by eleven feet, was brought out of a dark corner at the Polk County History Museum. Den Oprettelse af El-Taarn Aar 1923 (“The Building of El Taarn in 1923,” in his ancestral Norwegian) was created for his Tryon dream home and studio, “El Taarn,” which he designed with great originality and taste. Successive owners of the picturesque structure had kept the textile until Col. and Mrs. R. Peyton Tabb donated it to the local institution. Not able to dedicate a wall suitable for its display, to restore the 77-year old fabric that was dirty and stained, or to conserve it properly in a climate-controlled environment, the Historical Association donated it to Asheville Art Museum. This important batik with stitching was restored by the former textile conservator of Biltmore Estate. The first Ellertson artwork in that museum, it is significant from the perspective of North Carolina’s history in the medium of fabric arts. Believed to have been executed in New York, this sophisticated composition in blue and orange on a ground of faded pink is a fine example of Art Moderne. At the same time, it deploys mountain iconography, and incorporates a wide band of blue denim recalling the Arts and Crafts esthetic.
Tropic Refuge
watercolor 34 x 24 in.
Private Collection
During his art career of just 15 years Ellertson’s work was shown extensively around the United States. Some of the places he exhibited were Minneapolis, Birmingham, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Charleston, and the artists’ community of Ogunquit on the coast of Maine. His first solo show was in New York in 1930. After his death of a heart attack at the age of 42, solo shows were held in San Francisco, Boston, Milwaukee and several other cities. His work was well received by critics and collectors. Tryon people have always appreciated his paintings, legacies of a first rate artist who developed a unique style, and who thrived in the artistic milieu of its lively artists’ colony. Two of his early Tryon works are on permanent display at the Fine Arts Center and two of his Modernist pictures of Paris are at Lanier Library. It is fitting that these public places offer an opportunity to see work by the man who arguably was its most original artist. Had he lived until after World War II, we can only imagine what greater fame he might have achieved in the world of art.
