Worldly watercolors
Columbus native Schille's extensive travels inspired vivid works on display
You might call her the traveling teacher. For much of her career, painter Alice Schille (1869-1955) held a day job as an art teacher at the Columbus Art School (now the Columbus College of Art & Design). Yet, during her time away from the classroom, Schille journeyed throughout Europe, North Africa and the U.S. in search of places to paint.
“She taught through her whole life,” said Tara Keny, the co-curator of a new exhibit of Schille’s work at the Columbus Museum of Art. “She would travel in the summers, and then she would come back during the school year and teach.”
“In a New Light: Alice Schille and the American Watercolor Movement”
— on display through Sept. 29 — offers a vivid view of the fruits of the artist’s globe-trotting.
“She was always interested in seeing what other artists were doing in other countries and how they were painting different locales,” said Keny, a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Keny curated the exhibit with her father, James Keny, co-owner of Keny Galleries in German Village — long a champion of Schille’s artistic significance.
“Growing up, running around the gallery, I was exposed to her work,” said Tara Keny, adding that the museum exhibit is the most extensive survey to date of Schille’s watercolors, the artist’s medium of choice.
“Many of them haven’t been seen in years,” she said. “It covers the span of her career and the gems from each moment.”
A native of Columbus, Schille had a taste for travel from early in life. She trained at the Art Students League of New York and the Academie Colarossi in Paris — both among the locales she mined for inspiration.
In “Reflections, Church
Interior, France,” a congregation sits in a hastily assembled arrangement of chairs beneath the grand arches and stained-glass windows of a church. A lonelier picture of a place of worship is offered in “An Old Church in Brittany,” in which shadowy figures stand far from the altar of a church painted in dark, muddy tones.
The French countryside is elegantly evoked in “Mother and Child in a Garden, France,” in which a parent cradles her toddler-age offspring in a chair surrounded by flowers and greenery of all sorts — memorably represented in sunny dollops of green, yellow, pink and red.
Equally eye-popping is “Gay Spots of Color on the East Side, New York,” which
presents an exhilarating view of the city: Pedestrians and horse-drawn buggies — some rendered with little more than a dab or two of dark paint — crowd a cobblestone street that is framed by towering buildings on either side. The work communicates the energy and excitement of urban life.
Schille turned her eye toward Massachusetts with “The Blue Umbrella, Gloucester,” in which two women — whose faces are either obscured by their hats or otherwise featureless — care for young children playing on a beach. Like the ocean behind the figures, the umbrella sheltering them is painted in a vibrant blue.
“Adobes, Northern New Mexico,” meanwhile, depicts a series of squat, cozy structures lining the landscape of the 47th state.
Other notable places are represented in works such as “Tunis, Africa (White Heat),” which shows a city street enveloped in a blinding light that suggests oppressively high temperatures, and “Children, Cornish Coast,” which offers a gaggle of youngsters playing beside the water.
In this stellar show, the breadth of Schille’s travels — and the depth of her gifts — are given their due.
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