GORSLINE'S BAR SCENE
by Joan K. Yanni
What's going on in Douglas Gorsline's narrative painting, Bar Scene? A man, with hat, drink, cigarette and leer has placed his hand on the shoulder of a woman seated at the bar. She is well dressed, and though the top buttons of her blouse are provocatively open, she looks sad and resigned rather than inviting. Is she his date and wishing she weren't? Is he trying to pick her up? The patrons in the background are talking among themselves, ignoring the central couple. (In 1942, without television, bar patrons were forced to entertain themselves by conversing!) What happens next? Does the woman decide to leave—or to stay and make the best of things? The viewer must finish the story.
Douglas Gorsline (1913-1985) was born in Rochester to a wealthy and prominent family who came to Rochester in 1816. The Gorslines were contractors and builders; they had built the aqueduct which carried the Erie Canal over the Genesee, as well as the Rochester Savings Bank and other notable landmarks. Douglas received his first formal art training at the Mechanic's Institute (now Rochester Institute of Technology) and took some courses in figure drawing at MAG's Creative Workshop. In 1931 he went to the Yale University School of Fine Arts for a year, then enrolled in New York's Art Students League. His "arrival" on the New York art scene came about in 1938 when one of his paintings was selected for the Whitney Museum's annual exhibition of contemporary American art. The following year he had his first one-man show at the Arden Gallery in New York.
Gorsline was painting at a time when realistic, narrative themes dominated American art, even though Europe was experimenting with abstraction. Though there were a few abstractionists in the 1938 Whitney show, none won acclaim. A non-objective painting by Stuart Davis, and Ilya Bolotowsky's study of organic forms were declared "baffling." The Art League itself was in debate over the direction of art. In 1932 John Sloan had resigned as president of the League because expressionist George Grosz had been refused a teaching post. Yet Stuart Davis taught there in 1931-32, and abstractionist Hans Hofmann in 1932-33; but they were among the few voices of modernism in a conservative faculty.
Gorsline was probably drawn to the League by the reputation of his mentor, realist Kenneth Hayes Miller. From the mid-1930 into the '50s, Gorsline pictured fashionable, "modern" men and women in his paintings and prints, such as those in MAG's Bar Scene and Check-Up (part of the 1995 exhibit, Art By and About Women) in which a 1940s woman, in clinging dress, fur jacket and wide-brimmed hat, checks her make-up in her compact mirror on a city street corner. The subject of both these paintings was Gorsline's first wife, Elizabeth "Ziggy" Perkins, daughter of Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, who molded the manuscripts of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in particular, Thomas Wolfe. Through these literary connections, Gorsline began a lasting friendship with Wolfe, whom he painted 5 or 6 times and whose Look Homeward, Angel he illustrated in a special edition after Wolfe's death.
Gorsline's continued interest in narrative painting and his association with the publishing world brought about his writing and illustrating a history of costume, What People Wore, in 1952. He taught drawing at the National Academy of Design from 1959 to 1962, then began a series of illustration projects for Sports Illustrated, which he continued until the late '70s. In 1965 his search for new material prompted him to move to France to paint. He was able to combine his painting with illustrating and achieve the highest standards in both.
Always interested in portraying movement in art, as Marcel Duchamps had in Nude Descending a Staircase, Gorsline attempted to join Cubism to Realism in both his painting and his sports illustrations. He began to work in a series of sequential frames, which he called "sequential simultaneity," using fractured vertical panels to show ongoing action—in a horse race, on a basketball court, skiing, or even in landscapes and portraits. His sequential work received favorable reviews, though it never attracted imitators.
Gorsline enjoyed the role of artist/reporter. He loved to travel to sporting events, recreating them with his perceptive eye and keen draftsmanship. In 1973 he was invited to the People's Republic of China to paint its landscape and people. In 1975 he began a series of children's picture books for Random House and illustrated a book of nursery rhymes as well as the Clement Moore classic, The Night Before Christmas (now out of print). Some of his illustrations from the 1960s and '70s are among his finest works. He died suddenly in France in 1985 at the age of 72. A retrospective exhibit of his works was held at the Gallery in 1990. His widow, Marie, who had traveled with him and promoted his works, has created the Musée Gorsline, in Bussy-le-Grand, France, to honor his works.
More on Douglas Gorsline: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently purchased Gorsline's illustrations for Thomas Wolfe's classic, Look Homeward, Angel, and is making them available to the Gallery prior to their exhibition in Asheville, NC for Wolfe's 100th birthday celebration. They will be exhibited in the Forman Gallery in 1999. Director of Exhibitions Marie Via wrote the overview on Gorsline's career for the catalog that will accompany the exhibit.
See Grant Holcomb (2001) Voices
in the Gallery: Writers on Art.
See Grant Holcomb (2001) Voices in the Gallery: Writers on Art.
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