Frances Cranmer Greenman (1890–1981)

Dewey Albinson, 1922

Oil on canvas

77½ x 41½ inches

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Butler, 69.20.01

Essay by Julie L’Enfant, Ph.D.
College of Visual Arts

            Frances Cranmer Greenman’s autobiography, Higher Than the Sky, describes painting “a full-length, about nine feet high, of the painter Dewey Albinson with his blond head like a sunflower nodding on the long stalk of his long green pants” that she later sent to the annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.[1]  Set in a rustic studio, the portrait of Albinson does not exaggerate the lankiness of the young artist, who was six feet four inches tall.  The figure’s serpentine elegance recalls the portrait tradition that began with Titian and included John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Robert Henri—all strong influences on Greenman—but it also faithfully renders Albinson’s characteristic slouch.  Greenman’s portrait is “modern,” rather than academic:  the figure in this rustic setting is outlined and flat, without subtle chiaroscuro, and the muted color palette creates a strong design.  The flatness of the portrait is emphasized by rough, multi-directional brushstrokes and scratches on the canvas, called “scraffito.”

            Dewey Albinson (1898-1971), born of Swedish parents in Minneapolis and trained as an artist at the Minneapolis School of Art and the Art Students League in New York, was also a modern painter.[2]  In 1922 he made the first of many expeditions to paint at Grand Portage, an old settlement on the north shore of Lake Superior.  Albinson was captivated by the forests, shores, and waters of this area—which was not yet accessible by road—and established a strong connection to the Native American people there.  His paintings broke the landscape into its geometric elements, in his own rugged form of Cubism, as in Grand Portage (1922, see illustration).  The painting that frames Albinson’s head in this portrait may be one of his own from this series.  He gained widespread attention with exhibitions of the Grand Portage paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Milwaukee Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

            Albinson would soon depart for two years in Paris, where he studied with André L’Hôte, as did Minnesota artists Clement Haupers, Clara Mairs, Jo Lutz Rollins, and many other American artists.  Later he took an active role in Minnesota art, serving from 1926 to 1929 as director of the Saint Paul School of Art (the former name of the Minnesota Museum of American Art) and from 1935 to 1937 as director of the WPA Art Centers in Minnesota.[3]  Albinson also wandered the United States and lived in Canada, Italy, and Mexico (where he spent the last fifteen years of his life), but he is associated most closely with Minnesota because of the strength of his work there in the 1920s and 1930s.

            Greenman is another Minnesota artist who achieved a national reputation.  Born in South Dakota, she studied at the Corcoran School of Art, the Art Students League in New York, and at ateliers in Paris.  Her most influential teachers were the fashionable American impressionist William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, the leader of the so-called “Ashcan School.”  By 1921 she had established herself as a society painter in Minneapolis.  But her frenetic life as artist, wife, and mother had exhausted her, so she spent that summer on a farm in Wisconsin.  There, freed from working on commission, she was able to paint as she wished and think about her philosophy of art.  As Higher Than the Sky records, she counted herself among painters such as El Greco, Frans Hals, and Augustus John, “the drunks—the Dionysians—who paint in a bacchanalia of emotional abandon,” as opposed to the Apollonians, the “cool, smooth tight painters:  Canaletto, Holbein, and Ingres.”  Greenman wryly called herself “one of the much lesser loosers.”[4] 

            For a few years after this turning point, Greenman produced portraits that were sometimes aggressively stylized (and not well received), but gradually she moved to a sketchier, more flattering style in her portraits of the rich and famous, including Mary Pickford, Lynn Fontanne, and Gerald Murphy.  Her peripatetic career included periods in New York, Hollywood, and all points in between before she settled again in Minneapolis in the 1940s.  Among her numerous portraits, which Greenman estimated at one thousand, the portrait of Dewey Albinson is an important example of her work in the 1920s, when she could state, “I feel very sincerely now that to paint in a strong, rough way is essentially beautiful.  It’s vital.”[5]

[1] She would paint "another whopper" of the artist Clara Mairs, also in the Minnesota Museum of American Art collection, the following year. Frances Cranmer Greenman, Higher Than the Sky (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 136.

[2] For a good overview of Albinson's life and work, see Mary Towley Swanson, "The Artist as Chronicler," Minnesota History 52, no. 7 (Fall 1991): 264-78.

[3] Donald R. Torbert, "A Century of Art and Architecture in Minnesota," in A History of the Arts in Minnesota, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1958), 33.

[4] Greenman, Higher Than the Sky, 135.

[5] "Most Talked-About Picture in Minnesota, But Artist Insists It Isn't Bolshevik," Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, Oct. 23, 1921. Greenman papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.