Cameron Booth (1892–1980)

The Tillers, 1924

Oil on canvas

42 x 54 inches

Acquisition Fund Purchase, 2001.08

Essay by Robert Silberman, Ph.D. 
University of Minnesota

            Cameron Booth played a central role in the history of art in Minnesota during the twentieth century.  Referred to as the “dean of Minnesota painters,”[1] his importance was due not only to his art, but to the teaching and other activities that helped make him an influential figure in bringing modernism to the state and the region.

            Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, the son of a minister, Booth lived in several places including Minnesota before attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  There he acquired a solid training in the fundamentals of art and was introduced to contemporary movements such as post-impressionism and cubism, both in class and out.  At the end of his first year he saw the famous Armory Show, the groundbreaking exhibition of modern art that included work by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp.

            After service in World War I and a brief stint studying art in Paris, Booth came back to Minnesota in 1921 to teach at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design).  But he returned to Europe and studied with a pair of acclaimed teachers who promoted a modernist approach, André Lhote and Hans Hofmann.  He also met major artists such as Léger and Rouault before returning once more to Minnesota to teach at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) in 1929.  Booth was appointed director in 1938, and during his tenure presented several exhibitions of contemporary avant-garde art.  After a Guggenheim fellowship and several years teaching in New York, he came back to the state for good in 1948, joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota.  Among his many students was James Rosenquist, the well-known pop artist.

            The Tillers, which shows Czech-American farmers in Hopkins preparing a plot of land for growing berries, is a major early work and a forceful demonstration of Booth’s skill as a painter.  Booth said in an interview not long before it was made, “We [modern artists] are interested in simplicity of design, size and relation of spaces, and emphasis of direction of line—and color is an unending study in itself.”[2]  The composition illustrates those concerns.  It combines the monumental forms of the hills and the draft horses with more human psychological and personal touches—the man leaning on the hoe, the women possibly chatting.  Booth packs many elements into the design, yet preserves a sense of order:  the man’s face and hands—placed just slightly off-center—remain the prime focus, while the horses, women, buildings, and tilled field in the background introduce a rich sense of counterpoint.  The broad curves of the hills and the horses are matched by the snaking form of what appears to be netting, set on the ground so that it later can be put over the posts to protect the berries.  The varied shapes and irregular placement of the posts, fashioned from tree limbs or saplings, establish an elaborate rhythm far from a mechanical regularity.  The composition is unified by Booth’s expressive yet controlled brushwork, which binds the human and the natural.

            Beyond the technical mastery, what is most striking in Booth’s art is the combination of lyricism and strength.  In The Tillers the horses and the man are at rest, yet with its densely packed elements the scene conveys great energy.

            Booth said that the moderns were “really old-fashioned,” sharing with the ancient Greeks and Egyptians and the early Renaissance masters a devotion to basic design.[3] That helps explain why Booth was no simple realist or rlabel egionalist (a once applied to him, to his great irritation).  The main figure in The Tillers recalls Millet’s painting Man with a Hoe, celebrated in a famous poem of the same name by Edwin Markham:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back, the burden of the world.

            But even as Booth confers nobility upon these rural folk (with maybe a bit of humor in the treatment of the women) he remains most enthralled by the formal aspects of art, the subtle balance of shapes and colors within a coherent pictorial structure. 

            Later in his career, Booth turned to abstraction, and no wonder:  he was always fascinated by composition and color, even apart from content, and he delighted in the sheer pleasure of paint and painting.  His shift was representative of a broader transformation in painting at the mid-century.  Yet he continued to do some representational paintings—often of horses, a favorite subject.  Booth’s resolute lack of dogmatism and his embrace of the ancient as well as the modern, representation as well as abstraction, help explain both his own vitality as an artist and his significant role in bringing modernism to Minnesota.

[1] Nina Marchetti Archabal, “In Memoriam, Cameron Booth, 1892-1980:  A Chronicle from His Scrapbooks,” Minnesota History 47, vol. 3 (Fall 1980): 100.  See also H. H. Arnason, Cameron Booth (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1961).

[2] Sybil Farmer, “Booth Declares Sound Training Is Need of Painter,” Minneapolis Journal, October 7, 1923.

[3] Ibid.