Western Painters
Julius Seyler
by MARGARET L. BROWN
Charles Russell may have denounced the impressionism showcased in the New York Armory Show of 1913 as “smeary” — “most people can’t savvy all this dreamy stuff,” he said — but the show introduced modernism to American audiences and brought names like Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, and Kandinsky to the fore of artistic dialogue in this country. But what of German-born Julius Seyler? A well-regarded European painter in his day and one of the 300 avant-garde artists featured in the Armory Show, Seyler subsequently turned his attention to the American West, specifically the Blackfeet Indians and the newly established Glacier National Park, creating a body of work that failed to attract the attention or scholarship of his contemporaries such as Russell, W.R. Leigh, Joseph Sharp, and Maynard Dixon.
Looking at his paintings, one questions the reasons for Seyler’s obscurity. William E. Farr, a Montana historian who discovered Seyler’s Western paintings by chance while touring the Wachau region of Austria in 1992 and authored the recent book Julius Seyler and the Blackfeet (University of Oklahoma Press), posits that, in addition to being an impressionist among a field of realists, Seyler simply had bad timing. “The randomness of good timing had placed Seyler among the Blackfeet in 1913, but its opposite, bad timing — namely, the outbreak of World War I and the growing hostility of Americans against Germany — placed him outside the protective pale enjoyed by patriotic American painters. Now subject to the emergence of a nasty national prejudice and unable to return home, Seyler retreated into a long self-imposed exile and the estrangement of his art before eventually going back to Germany, never to return to America. He was simply out of sync.”
A century later, Seyler is finally being placed where he belongs: in the pantheon of significant historic Western artists.
Farr’s Julius Seyler and the Blackfeet, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, is available at www.oupress.com.
Issue: September 2010
