EILSHEMIUS, LOUIS M.

EILSHEMIUS, LOUIS M. (1864–1941), U.S. painter and watercolorist. Born in Arlington, New Jersey, to wealthy and cultured parents, Eilshemius studied at the Art Students League (1884–86) and at the Académie Julian in Paris (1886–87) in addition to taking private lessons from the landscape painter Robert L. Minor (1884–86). Influenced by painters of the Barbizon School, Eilshemius' late 19^th-century landscapes are mostly traditional representations. Delaware Water Gap Village (c. 1886, Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows a panoramic landscape in soft focus with limited yet rich earthy hues. Recognition came early when Eilshemius had paintings accepted at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design while in his early twenties. This initial success was followed by years of critical neglect and often derision.

Around 1910, Eilshemius' art changed drastically when he began making unsophisticated, frankly naïve images that obviously rejected his training. From this period until his death, Eilshemius most frequently painted landscapes inhabited by nude, anatomically distorted female figures, and sometimes mysterious subjects derived from his imagination. In Three Bathers (1918, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), three simplified nudes pose awkwardly in a stream against a shallow, nondescript background. From then, critics began to call his work primitive, a designation Eilshemius disdained as it indicated a lack of training rather than the artist's goal to render "a silent poem" on canvas. Marcel Duchamp discovered Eilshemius at the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Thereafter, Duchamp helped promote the artist; he facilitated a 1920 one-man show of Eilshemius' work at the Société Anonyme, then one of the most progressive venues in the United States, followed by a second exhibition in 1924. While some members of the avant-garde praised Eilshemius, most critics negatively reviewed his work. Frustrated with lack of recognition, in 1921 Eilshemius stopped painting.

Nonetheless, several shows ensued, and interest and praise of Eilshemius' idiosyncratic paintings increased substantially. In 1939 three leading art dealers in New York City held solo exhibitions of Eilshemius' work, and a nearly 300-page biography of the artist was published. Indeed, from 1932 until his death, over 25 one-man shows were organized in New York. Hit by a car in 1932, Eilshemius was permanently paralyzed. He spent the remainder of his days writing letters to newspapers criticizing the art establishment.

bibliography:

W. Schack, And He Sat among the Ashes (1939); P.J. Karlstrom, Louis Michel Eilshemius (1978); idem, Louis M. Eilshemius: Selections from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1978).

[Samantha Baskind (2^nd ed.)]