Inside the
Parmount folder I found pages 5-8 of
The Milwaukee Journal from Sunday, August 9, 1936. The pages appear to be from the "art" section, with lots of interesting bits on what was happening in arts at the time. None, perhaps, more interesting to me than this article,
Mrs. Logan, Chicago Art Patron, Writes Book Against Modernism, which was published on page 6.
It's so grand, I have to type it all out -- giving you no reason
not to read it:
Mrs. Frank G. Logan, Chicago, originator of the now nation-wide Sanity in Art movement, has announced that she will carry her fight against "modern, moronic grotesqueries" right into the American home.
Plan citizens of this country, accustomed to talking their art as the museums hand it to them, will become conscious of the fraud that is being perpetrated against them, says Mrs. Logan, and "sweep the rubbish from the galleries."
Mrs. Logan, whose state of nerves over art followed a predominantly modern exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago last winter, is the wife of an institute trustee and donor of the Logan prizes and many other art awards, as well as a generous contributor to the institute.
Calls It Junk
"Even a kitchen calendar can be an inspiration to the housewife if it shows a reproduction of one of the old masters," Mrs. Logan said as she sat in her drawing room facing a Rembrandt and surrounded by a collection including Corot, Rousseau, Van Dyck, Seyffert, Jacques and Hoppner.
"If everyone surrounded himself with copies of our beloved old masters--which we can get for 50 cents--the people would become imbued with a new appreciation of art and would not tolerate the miserable junk some of our museums are showing and calling modern art."
Turner, Ruebns, Innes, and El Greco were among those Mrs. Logan listed for reproduction on calendars and in inexpensive prints to help restore sanity in art judgment to housewives. In course of time the housewife is able to add to the cultural objects in her home in a manner which will create in her children the desire for the better things in life, according to Mrs. Logan.
A Forthcoming Book
While emphasizing that she is in no sense a dictator and wants only to lead people to their best judgment, Mrs. Logan said she was writing a book, also to be called "Sanity in Art," which she hopes will show everybody the folly of modernism.
"I'm deliberately making it an inexpensive book," she said, "so that everyone can have it. I shall use 30 cuts to contrast what is offensive and ridiculous in modern art with the work of real masters, old and new."
Mrs. Logan, who led a fight which resulted in officials in the Art Institute of Chicago bringing "song of the Lark" out of the dusty basement, at least for a time, protested that she is not advocating "mere prettiness which soon palls, but the beauty of form, whether it be of nature of human."
The crusade is carried over the radio and by mail by Mrs. Logan. Each day brings her a gratifying packet of fan mail. Particularly active branch chapters have been formed in Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Greenwich, Conn., and Minneapolis, she said.
Mrs. Logan was Josephine Hancock Logan, the daughter of
Col. John Lane Hancock (1812-1883), a colonel in the Civil War who later established the largest meatpacking house in Chicago who went on to serve as president of the Chicago Board of Trade, and the wife of
Frank Granger Logan, founder of the brokerage house of Logan & Bryan. She is
credited as having written
books of verse, including
Lights and Shadows and
Heights and Depths, and "many lyrics including a Negro monolog entitled
Longing." But it's the Sanity in Art movement for which Mrs. Logan is (if at all) remembered.
The Sanity in Art movement spread to more locations than noted in
The Milwaukee Journal article. In
this 1940 Time article article the leader of the Boston branch, Margaret Fitzhugh Browne -- called "the Society's old-maid president" -- is quoted as saying, "[The Picasso show] is an exhibition of crazy stuff. People who went to the show flocked to join the Society for Sanity in Art."
I think this says plenty about the group's philosophy and just who would join -- as well as
Time's stance on modernism, despite loud out-burst from 'the public' against it.
However, if you think it was a Picasso which had Josephine Logan's panties in a bunch, it wasn't. Her bloomers became bunched when the Chicago Art Institute gave the Logan prize to
Doris Lee's Thanksgiving in 1935; Mrs. Logan was so miffed that she formed an official society, complete with "Inc." and the book, as you've read, was part of the gospel.
In
Time's review, they quote Logan from her book
Sanity in Art:
Sanity in Art means soundness, rationalism, a correct integration of the art work itself in accordance with some internal logic. We know sanity is often difficult to define, and we also know insanity is often apparent at a glance. ... I have been called an iconoclast, and indeed I am one, in that I am trying to destroy false gods that have been forced upon us in the museums.
I find her statements that the false gods of modernism would be forced upon "us" very intriguing... Certainly her husband had some pull (or push) at the Chicago museum, yet she felt that the art was foisted upon museums. An odd statement as museums are seen (and usually have been seen) as the arbitrators of taste and 'what is art'; gate-keepers who dictate or bestow than those foisted-up or dictated to. Perhaps Mrs. Logan chafed at the younger folks who made more decisions regarding these matters (employees and younger trustees vs. old men like her husband). Or perhaps Mrs. Frank G. Logan chafed at being a woman with no say -- other than to push Mr. Logan, who was, by all accounts at this time anyway, a rather retiring gentleman. But in any case, Josephine, who has more influence than most, feels that 'someone' is duping 'us'. It's curious and makes me wish for her journals & diaries... Perhaps the old grand dame had taken young artists under her wing too *wink*
Back to what we do know.
The Society for Sanity in Art was, to
quote Ask Art, "opposed to all forms of modernism, including abstract expressionism, surrealism, and many other changes going on in the world at that time."
I think it's important to note that indeed, the times, they were a-changin' and Mrs. Logan, then approximately 73, wasn't the only one resisting. As noted in the introduction to
Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (2001), published at
the Chicago History Fair site, there were lots of responses to the changing times. Here's a bit from the book's introduction on the Chicago art scene at the time :
In the art world, conservatives split from the Chicago Society of Artists and formed a new organization, the Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors, leaving the modernist core to run the Chicago Society of Artists. Josephine Logan's Sanity in Art organization, founded in 1936, attacked the aesthetics of modernism; Eleanor Jewett, art critic for the Chicago Tribune, shared Logan's point of view and labeled the works of Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh brutal, primitive, and childish.
An example of Josephine Logan's power (and her own primitive & childish charm) is told in the following story of when the Chicago Art Institute opened its
47th annual show in 1936:
Last week's Chicago Art Institute show carefully avoided any of the extreme schools of U. S. painting, was described by Chicago's ablest critic, Clarence Joseph Bulliet (Chicago Daily News), as "a sedate show of practically unrelieved conservatism." The jury for painting-Edmund Archer, John Steuart Curry, Jerry Farnsworth, Meyric Rogers, Thomas Tallmadge-salved its artistic conscience by giving Mrs. Logan's prize to an unexceptionable if uninspired studio nude entitled Olympia, by capable, hard-working Robert Philipp of Manhattan.
Late in the afternoon day before the show opened, Mrs. Logan, accompanied by Chicago Tribune Critic Eleanor Jewett, arrived at the museum. Director Robert B. Harshe rushed forward hastily, conducted his patron to the prizewinning Olympia.
"Do you approve, Mrs. Logan? Do you approve?'' he cried anxiously.
"Yes," said Mrs. Logan, "I approve. It is very sweet."
Sweeping through the rest of the gallery, Mrs. Logan looked with marked disfavor on another prizewinner, Earthquake by Jon Corbino, showing a sleeping family on the second floor of a collapsing barn above a group of frightened horses.
"And why, Mr. Harshe," asked she, "should a thing like that be given a prize?" Hanging next to the prizewinning earthquake was a picture by Jim Lee of two amiable Japanese moppets reading a book. As a rebuke. Mrs. Logan bought it.
I cannot find images of
Earthquake, nor of the Jim Lee work Logan purchased; but did find the "uninspired studio nude"
Olympia by
Robert Philipp.
I don't think needs only to rely on Time's characterization that Logan was being a cheeky-little-monkey, purchasing Lee's work to rebuke the award-winning Corbino; I can think of numerous occasions when I've seen such thing.
While Sanity in Art has been called "an aesthetic 'Moral Majority'"
* Logan and her ilk were not necessarily prudish when it came to nudity. Being lovers of the classics, they recognized "beauty of form, whether it be of nature of human" such as with
Olympia. And even devout movement members who were artists, such as early Sanity in Art member Claudia M. Barkdull McKenzie, created nudes. This is the California painter's
Floral Still life with Nude.
"Plump, round-faced Josephine Hancock Logan" not only founded the Society for Sanity in Art, Inc., but gave out its own Sanity in Art Awards. And in 1939 the society had its own first national exhibition at Chicago's Stevens Hotel. Of it,
Time said:
Mrs. Logan turned up early, dressed in pink lace, pink gloves, diamond and emerald bracelets, a hat of feathers and flowers. While an eight-piece orchestra played her favorite tunes and she—befeathered, beflowered and bemused—sat humming them, a crowd, many of them oldsters, peered at 255 sane exhibits, murmured brightly: "Isn't it wonderful to see real painting again?" First of the eleven prizes went to Chauncey Ryder, 71, for a harmless landscape; other prizes to sound, conservative Frank W. Benson, 77, mountain-whittling Gutzon Borglum, 68. Herself a little dim about who had won the prizes, Donor Logan purred comfortably: "But they're all my old friends."
Time paints her as some ditzy matron of the arts, forcing me to wonder more about this woman who was so outraged at modernism that she had to start such a public campaign in her 70's. Just a photo would be nice at this point. *sigh*
I could not find any images of the Sanity in Art award, but here's a
description from an auction catalog:
SOCIETY FOR SANITY IN ART AWARD MEDAL, 1937. 75.8mm. Bronze. Signed, "Mortens." (MACO) Lightly tarnished Unc. Obverse: SOCIETY FOR SANITY IN ART JOSEPHINE HANCOCK LOGAN FOUNDER around a high relief central bust of Mrs. Logan, looking very much like a wealthy dowager. The reverse features a deco style nude young woman seated above an inscription: SOCIETY FOR SANITY IN ART/ MEDAL/ AWARDED TO/ The medal is not awarded.
It would be easy to imply that Logan and others in the Sanity in Art movement were, well, 'nutty'. But you have to remember the context of time.
Logan and others in this movement had not only survived the great depression (and the Logans did so clearly with wealth & power intact), but they were the product of Victorian values -- and now they faced a changing world which demanded that they acquiesce & fade away.
The changes in art, museums replacing Rembrandts with Picassos, was not just a visual 'out with the old, in with the new' statement, a sign that power was shifting; it was much more than that.
Art was the way one expressed the grace of privilege, both by owning it and by being a patron. On a personal level, one worked hard to be able to afford real art. Such wealth and power had its public responsibility, namely to guard culture & extol values and art was one of the ways to do so. To stand by and watch masters -- or at least the space for their works -- be eviscerated by modernism was to watch one's lifetime (seemingly) become irrelevant and to have concern for the future. What would the values and art of those times be?
While it's easy to see that modernism did more than just survive, and the researcher in me says to let the documentation of the artists Mrs. Logan speak to their own longevity & popularity (especially when compared to the longevity & popularity of those she eschewed), I feel it only fair to state that Mrs. Logan's concerns, the ideals of the Sanity in Art movement, show up continually in any matter of social change -- including reactions to art which reflects such things.
Josephine Hancock Logan passed away in November of 1943 at the age of 81.
Her obit notes that she had "dedicated a society for "Sanity in Art" to the proposition that "The 'Cuckoo of Publicity' has laid the egg of a new 'dodo bird' in the hard nest of art," thereafter purred contentedly at her own safe & sane exhibits," and tacks-on a brief mention that she was also co-founder of the American College of Surgeons.
Not long after her passing,
the Art Institute of Chicago began used the Logan name to reward just the sort of modern works that Josephine loathed.
It is not clear just what the 'Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize' indicates -- awards, funds, both? -- for the "Purchase Prize" is relegated to a single line associated with specific objects in the collection.
Worse yet, the Logans are ignored on the museum's website entirely.Since Frank Granger Logan served for more than 50 years on the institution's board, started the Chicago Art Institute's awards, and became honorary president, it seems only decent to acknowledge him. And while Josephine Hancock Logan's legacy may seem more murky in its qualities, it's clear that she was a passionate supporter of the arts. Her reaction to modernism is a part of art history & should be well documented.
The absence is a modern, moronic grotesquery.
It should be clear by now, that if you have any knowledge to add to the story of Josephine Hancock Logan I'd love to hear it. I'm also interested in any papers, books, objects of hers (I can't pay much, but I'll take good care of them!)
Additional stray thoughts...I could find no references to any radio shows by Mrs. Logan &/or Sanity in Art; but I'll keep looking.
The 'masters on calendars and other inexpensive prints' idea would have been deemed
kitsch by Gillo Dorfles. I'm not sure this qualifies as irony, but it bears noting.
* In her book,
My Love Affair with Modern Art, Katharine Kuh wrote this of the Sanity in Art movement:
Sanity in Art was like an aesthetic "Moral Majority." It was a rabid movement of art vigilantes with its objective to have the most reactionary art, and only American art at that, shown, bought, or collected in Chicago and the rest of the Midwest. In turn, the group was intent on eliminating the practice of modernism -- any deviation from its rigid provincial code attracted explosive verbal onslaughts. In my case, the attacks were physically threatening as well, as when someone smashed the glass window of the gallery to register disapproval of an exhibition of Joan Miro.
Kuh says the organization was "unique to Chicago", which is not true; but it's her experience as gallery owner which counts here. Of course, Kuh herself is controversial too; but that's for another time.
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