Lake Chapala Artists and Authors

American artist Alfred Rogoway (1900–1990) was born in Portland, Oregon, on 4 April 1900. His father was a playwright and mother an artist. Rogaway lived much of each year in Ajijic in the 1940s and 1950s.

While still only a teenager, Rogoway served with the U.S. Navy (1916-1920). His ship was torpedoed and Rogoway was lucky to survive. He subsequently studied art at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Oakland College of Arts and Crafts (with Hamilton Wolf), with summer sessions at Mills College, Oakland, (with Lyonel Feininger and, later, Fernand Leger) and with José Clemente Orozco in Mexico.

In his late thirties, Rogoway had paintings selected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s open competition in three consecutive years (1939-1941), which led to wider acceptance of his work in the art world.

He followed many other talented artists to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1940s, and it was here where he met and married archaeologist Marjorie Goldbert. The Rogoways would live in several countries, including France, Mexico and Spain. Wherever they went they entertained on a lavish scale, throwing legendary parties for fellow artists, intellectuals and state officials.

The young couple moved to France in 1947 with their infant daughter Esther. In Europe, Alfred became friends with Pablo Picasso; the two regularly exchanged ideas. Not long afterwards, they relocated to Ajijic in Mexico, so that Rogoway could devote himself full time to his art. While living in Ajijic, they made regular summer visits to New Mexico to visit friends.

Alfred Rogoway. Mother and Child. Oil and palette knife. c 1955. Reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram.

Katie Goodridge Ingram, who owned an art gallery in Ajijic for many years, is a huge fan of his work, and remembers “Rog” well, as a “dramatic, expansive man… with a saint of a wife”. Ingram is particularly fond of Rogoway’s more representational, less abstract, art that characterized his time in Mexico. Ingram possesses several of his palette paintings on masonite from the 1950s, including “Mother and Child” (see image), “Lovers” and “Horses”.

She recalled that on one occasion, when the Rogoways were living in a house with a second-story viewpoint (mirador), Alfred Rogoway had imbibed one too many and suddenly announced his intention to try to fly:

“He flew off the mirador, broke perhaps an arm, a leg, ribs and who knows what else. So he made tables in bed from the small mosaic tiles from Mexico which my mother found for him in Guadalajara. My mother, Helen Kirtland, was then the happy recipient of two of his tables created during his LONG convalescence.”

In 1950, the Rogoways spent some time in Big Sur, California, and became friends with Henry Miller, who provided encouragement for decades. Rogoway’s work at this time was “somnambulist”, with ethereal elongated figures invoking a dream-like state. No-one was more aware of that than Miller, who said of Rogoway in 1955:

He paints as other men must dream, and his visions take him back thousands of years of world subconsciousness. He belongs to no one medium but to all. His is the gentleness of the large man who cannot touch something small for fear of crushing it, yet all subtleties of his nature find expression on canvas.”

Alfred Rogoway. Guitarista. Watercolor.

By 1955, Rogoway had decided that his best chance of true success in the art world lay in spending more time in New York, where “modern art” was all the rage. His paintings sold well in New York galleries, such as that owned by Laura Barone, and Rogoway’s work was hung in the city’s Museum of Modern Art alongside works by Braque, Miro and Picasso. The Rogoways eventually purchased a large home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and divided their time between Mexico and New York.

In 1958, the family chose to leave Mexico behind and make their new home on a mountain top in Mijas, Spain, high above the Mediterranean. Mijas would be their home for more than twenty years. They continued to entertain on a grand scale and while in Spain, Rogoway’s work was regularly shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in London.

After Marjorie passed away in 1983, Alfred Rogoway moved back to the U.S. to live with daughter Esther and her family in Tucson, Arizona, where he had the use of small studio behind the family home. He continued to paint there right up to the day he died, 11 August 1990.

His numerous exhibitions included Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, California (1939); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1939, 1940, 1941); Laura Barone Gallery, New York (1953–1960; and Grosvenor Gallery, London, U.K. (1972).

His works can be found in the permanent collections of numerous major museums and galleries, including the Grosvenor Gallery in London; the Copenhagen National Museum; the American Gallery in Los Angeles; and the Universities of Illinois, Arizona and New Mexico.

Alfred Rogoway’s daughter, Esther, who spent much of her childhood in Ajijic, is also an artist. She studied at the Tunbridge Wells School of Art in England and at the Art Institute of Barcelona, Spain. Esther and her husband Larry Fitzpatrick operate The Pink Door Studio and Gallery in downtown Tucson, Arizona.

• More images of Rogoway paintings [viewed at https://www.lanningallery.com/alfred-rogoway/?rq=rogoway in October 2015]

Sources:

• Kaya Morgan. Alfred Rogoway (1900-1990): A Somnambulist Who Dreams in Paint. [http://www.islandconnections.com/edit/rogoway.htm, 8 Oct 2015]
• Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940.
• Katie Goodridge Ingram: personal correspondence via email.

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Alice Jean Small (1918-2009) lived for at least four years at Lake Chapala, from 1962 to 1966. During her lifetime, she is reputed to have sold more than 6000 works, making her a likely candidate for the title of “most prolific painter ever to have lived at Lake Chapala”.

Small was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on 11 December  1918. Her passing, on 8 November 2009 in Monterey, California, was commemorated by an art exhibition and celebration of her life.

Small began painting from an early age and attended the Derby School of Art before completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Washington. She also studied at Cranbrook Academy of Arts (Michigan), Chicago School of Design, University of California at Berkeley, the University of Havana and the University of Tokyo.

She studied under many great artists including French cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, Mexican muralist Emilio Amero, painter and sculptor Fernand Léger, and Ukrainian avant-garde artist Alexander Archipenko, as well as Kiyoshi Saitō of Japan and Hungarian aritst László Moholy-Nagy.

In the 1950s, Small spent two years serving with the U.S. Army as Regional Arts and Crafts Director in the Far Eastern Theater. She was a renowned art teacher, and taught painting and design in several U.S. public schools, the University of Washington, West Virginia University and the University of Tampa.

It is unclear precisely what drew Small to relocate in 1962 to Lake Chapala, where she took a house mid-way between Ajijic and Jocotepec: Casa Alicia, Piedra Barrenada. Her stay in Mexico was marred by a personal tragedy. Her young son Edward died at the age of six in 1966 in a hospital in Guadalajara following a brief illness. (Another son, Laird, outlived her).

Known not only for paintings, but also for prints and illustrations, Small exhibited her work in numerous galleries around the world from New York (the Riverside Gallery) to Japan and Mexico (Monterrey, Saltillo, Hermosillo). She held more than 500 one-woman shows and won first prize awards for oils (Florida Art Fair); watercolors and lithographs (Wisonsin Art Fair). An inveterate traveler, and honorary president of the National Association of Women Painters, Small was known as the “traveler with a sketch book.”

Her work in Mexico was sponsored by the U.S. Information Service (USIS). Her exhibitions in Mexico were well received. For example, the Mexico City Times said that, “Diplomatic with an easel, this famed artist paints to span nations with the Bridge of Beauty.” One of her exhibitions in Mexico, in 1963, comprised fifty-five paintings illustrating an imaginary trip around the world; it was first shown at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo.

The following year, fifty of her “Around the World” paintings were on display for both HRH Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower, when they visited Guadalajara within a few days of each other. It is presumed that this display was the exhibit which opened at the Casa de la Cultura in Guadalajara on 29 October 1964, but it is probable that some of Small’s paintings were also on display at the Hotel Montecarlo in Chapala.

[HRH Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited the Hotel Montecarlo with his entourage for lunch on 28 October 1964, while three days later, President Adolfo López Mateos hosted a banquet there in honor of the members of the People to People executive. The People to People (“De Pueblo a Pueblo”) initiative was begun by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 to strengthen non-governmental connections. Eisenhower himself was at the meetings in Guadalajara but did not attend the Montecarlo function, where his son John D. Eisenhower, stood in for him. Walt Disney was another of the many noteworthy dignitaries at this event.]

Small held another exhibit in Guadalajara in June 1965, at the Instituto Mexicano-Norteamericano de Jalisco, at the opening of which she referred to Mexico as “her second home”.

Possibly partly as a result of her time in Mexico, Small developed a passionate interest in the circus and would spend the next forty years bringing circus characters and scenes to life on her canvasses. Fifty of her clown paintings are on permanent display at the Adaptive Physical Education building, Monterey Peninsula College, California. Her portfolio of clown and circus stories, paintings and poems are in the Special Collections in various libraries of the University of California, as well as at Tufts University and Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida.

She was reportedly a very friendly woman, full of kindness and good humor, and fond of donning colorful clothes and hats.

Small published at least three books showcasing her work: Clowns (1988), Painted poems (1995) and Pierre and his present (1997).

Main Sources:

• Monterey Peninsula Herald, California, 14 March 1966
• Colony Reporter (Guadalajara) 21 May 1963
• Obituary notice

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Innovative Mexican artist Ernesto Butterlin, aka Linares, sometimes Ernesto Linares, or more simply “Lin,” had close ties with Ajijic and was active in the 1940s and 1950s. Ernesto’s parents and his two older brothers were all born in Germany and moved to Mexico in 1907, sailing first class aboard the “Fürst Bismarck” of the Hamburg-America line, from Hamburg to Veracruz. The family settled in Guadalajara, but also owned a huerta (orchard) near Ajijic. Ernesto was born in Guadalajara on 4 September 1917.

The 1930 Mexican census, conducted on 15 May of that year lists the members of the household as:

• Juan Butterlin 59, engineer, born in Germany
• Amalia de Butterlin 49, born in Germany, speaks German, English, French
• Ernesto Butterlin 12
• Ma de Los Angeles Delgadillo 40, maid
• Ma Guillermina Flores 16
• Ma del Refugio Flores 12

By the early 1940s, Ernesto, then in his twenties and using the name Linares for his art, was living and painting year-round in Ajijic. From about 1943 to 1945, he shared his village home with American artists Charmin Schlossman Lanier and Sylvia Fein, whose husbands were on active military service overseas. American writer Neill James first moved to Ajijic in September 1943 and in an early article about the village described Linares as a “young Mexican abstract painter who is currently showing his works in a traveling exhibition in the USA.” That brief description shows that Ernesto had already achieved some success as an artist, even at this early age.

Linares (Ernesto Butterlin): Untitled; 1949. Reproduced by permission of the owner.

A more detailed description of Ernesto and his work comes from the notebooks kept by Victor Serge, a Russian living in exile in Mexico, who visited Ajijic in December 1944 and stayed over the New Year:

“Ernesto Butterlin reminds me of Pilnyak. Often with lacquer for car bodies, he earnestly makes surrealist or abstract pictures in jumbled lines and lively tones, sometimes decorative. He wants to make money in New York, be someone, and this method worries him, and he genuinely loves art, and he’s full of inhibitions and poses. Big, blond, pince-nez, the untroubled face of a good German.”

Ernesto Butterlin: Untitled; date unknown

In about 1945, Ernesto entertained visiting American artist George Buehr (1905-1983), a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, as his house guest.

In January 1947, Ernesto exhibited in a group show at Villa Montecarlo in Chapala, alongside fellow artists Charmin Schlossman, Muriel Lytton-Bernard and Dick Kitchin. Charlotte Wax also appears to have had paintings in that show.

Shortly afterwards, in about 1947, American artist, anthropologist and author Tobias Schneebaum arrived on the scene. Schneebaum lived and painted in Mexico, including several spells in Ajijic, from 1947 to 1950. In Ajijic, he quickly became friends with Ernesto. In Wild Man, Schneebaum writes, “A young blond painter, born in Guadalajara of German parents, also lived in Ajijic. He was twenty-seven, blue-eyed, four inches over six feet, and very handsome, and was subject to the attentions of both the men and the women who later passed through town…”

“His family owned property in Ajijic, fields of corn and beans through which he moved like a country squire. Ajijic was small, with a population of three thousand, barely a third of whom had homes in the village itself, the other two-thirds living on their farms. He knew everyone by name and was adored and respected by old and young alike. He’d changed his Germanic name to Linares to identify more closely with the country of his birth, and liked to be called Lynn. He painted during the day with bright reds and yellows in wide bands of color, freely brushed and ripped on, a technique he claimed preceded Jackson Pollock, who he insisted had seen his work. He’d had one-man shows in New York and Mexico City.” (Wild Man, 12).

Elsewhere, Schneebaum describes how Ernesto “had inherited a considerable amount of farmland on the outskirts of Ajijic, but he spent most of his time painting in a drip technique that might have preceded the work of Jackson Pollock.” (Secret Places, 7)

Schneebaum, Ernesto Butterlin and a third artist Nicolas Muzenic were all employed by Irma Jonas to teach students attending her summer painting schools in Ajijic (held 1947-1949 inclusive). According to Schneebaum, an ill-fated love triangle developed between the three artists at this time, complicated by the arrival of “haughty and radiantly beautiful” Zoe, the “fourth member of our group”, who had previously been living with Henry Miller in Big Sur, when she heard about Lin and decided to visit Ajijic:

“After my return to Ajijic from Mexico City, other foreigners came to stay, notably Nikolas (sic) Muzenic, with whom I fell in love. He had been a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College… Nikolas, alas, fell in love with Lynn, not with me. It was a disastrous affair that started out as if it would last forever. Nikolas remained in Ajijic for about two years…” (Secret Places, 7)].

In Wild Man, Schneebaum recalls that, “Lynn’s casual ways bewitched and irritated Nicolas, just as Nicolas’s arrogant, snobbish manner attracted and mortified Lynn. Nicolas moved into Lynn’s house and began a frenzied, volcanic affair that lasted two years.” (Wild Man, 13) Schneebaum adds that Nicolas eventually bought the property and forced Butterlin to move out, complete with his large collection of pre-Columbian art.

“Lin” (Ernesto Butterlin) in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962

In about 1948, Ernesto Butterlin, in association with one or more of his brothers, opened an art gallery in Ajijic. This is the gallery pictured in the Life Magazine article (23 December 1957) about Ajijic. The “Margo de Butterlin” or “Margaret North de Butterlin” described in that article was Otto’s lover (during his marriage to Peggy); Margo married Ernesto (who was gay) in order to acquire the Butterlin surname; she appears to have provided the financial means to help establish the gallery. In Life Magazine, she is described as “both rich and fashionable”, as well as, “US-born but Mexican by her last marriage”. The article goes on to say that “Her present husband runs the Galeria where the painters display their works and also buy drinks.”

Ernesto Butterlin: Untitled, ca 1950. Reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram

Disappointingly little is known of what became of most of Ernesto Butterlin’s pioneering artworks, and whether any are held in public collections, though both Ernesto and his older brother Otto were among the 28 artists given a joint exhibition in June 1954, in Mexico City, at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes’ Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. Other artists whose work was featured on that occasion include Roberto F. Balbuena, Michael Baxte, Leonora Carrinqton, Enrique Climent, José Feher, Elvira Gascón, Gunther Gerzso and Carlos Mérida.

In 1962, ‘Linares’ exhibited at the 1st Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures on Ajijic Beach, organized by Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery. Other artists from Ajijic in this juried show with prizes, held in front of Posada Ajijic, included Antonio Cárdenas, Mary Cardwell, Juan Gutiérrez, Dick Keltner, Carlos López Ruíz, Betty Mans, Gail Michels, John Minor, Eugenio Olmedo, Florentino Padilla, Tink Strother, Digur Weber, Doug Weber, Rhoda Williamson, Sid Williamson, Javier Zaragoza and Paul Zars. Also exhibiting were José Ramos and Padre Santiago Ramírez (both from Jocotepec) and Javier Martínez (from Chapala), as well as Alfredo Santos and Gustavo Sendis from Guadalajara.

Ernesto Butterlin died in 1964. Schneebaum’s claim that Lin “…committed suicide. In order to fit his six-foot, four-inch body into the coffin, it was necessary to cut off his feet at the ankles.” (Secret Places, 7) is sensationalist and less than reliable. Ernesto Butterlin’s funeral and wake were held at the home in Ajijic of John Lee, an American writer who was a friend of the artist in the early 1960s. Lee has written that Ernesto, who “stayed single and was a friend of Eric, the Hildreths, the Hoppers, and me”, “died of cancer”, a version of events substantiated by others who were around at the time, including the art gallery owner Katie Goodridge Ingram.

Partial list of sources:

• Colony Reporter (Guadalajara), 16 July 1964.
• El Informador: 24 Jan 1947, 6; 2 June 1962, 11.
• Tobias Schneebaum, Wild Man, Viking Press, 1979
• Tobias Schneebaum, Secret Places: My life in New York and New Guinea, University of Wisconsin, 2000

This article was updated on 1 May 2016 to include mention of Ernesto Butterlin’s wife. As always, we would love to receive any comments, corrections or additional information.

Related posts:

• Unraveling the story of Lake Chapala’s artistic Butterlin brothers
• Frederick W. Butterlin (ca 1905-?), photographer
• German-Mexican artist Hanns Otto Butterlin (1900-ca 1960)

Ann (sometimes Anna) Sonia Medalie (1896-1991) was a muralist early in her career before becoming an outstanding painter of flowers and landscapes. During her six years in Mexico (1942-1948), Medalie made occasional trips back to San Francisco, but was actively painting in Ajijic on Lake Chapala for six months in 1944. American surrealist painter Sylvia Fein, who was living in Ajiijc at that time, has fond memories of Medalie, and greatly admired her artistic drive which, even then, enabled her to live from the proceeds of her artwork.

Ann Medalie: Flowers (date unknown)

Medalie, born in Latvia on 17 April 1896, was the youngest of six children of Jacob and Beila (née Gluckman) Medalie. The family was forced to move to Lithuania when she was young. In 1921, after the first world war, the family emigrated to Chicago, where she studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago. Medalie also worked as a furniture decorator for more than a decade, first in Chicago, and then subsequently in Los Angeles (1928-1932) and finally San Francisco.

Paintings by Medalie were included in the shows of San Francisco Society of Women Artists (1937-41) and the San Francisco Art Association (1938-41).

In San Francisco, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Medalie worked with sculptor Sargent Johnson (1888-1967) and was an assistant to Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966) on the colorful murals in the Maritime Museum. During San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition in 1940, Medalie assisted Diego Rivera (1886-1957) on a mural at “Art in Action”, becoming good friends with both Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), and was also an assistant to Miguel Covarrubias when he was completing his incredible series of six murals (maps), the “Pageant of the Pacific“.

In 1942, Medalie moved to Mexico. While her precise itinerary is unknown, she spent six months or so in Ajijic in the latter half of 1944.

Medalie was one of the participating artists in a group show at the Villa Montecarlo in 1944 in Chapala, along with Sylvia Fein, Jaime López Bermudez, Otto Butterlin, Ernesto Butterlin (“Linares”), and Betty Binkley.

In November 1944, she was one of the many distinguished guests at the opening (at the same venue) of an exhibition of paintings by Edythe (Edith) Wallach. According to the Guadalajara daily El Informador, the guests included: Mr and Mrs Jack Bennett; Nigel Stansbury Millett and his father; Miss Neill James; Sr. Pablo García Hernández, representative of Teatro Mexicano del Arte; Mr Otto Butterlin and his lovely daughter Rita; Mr Witter Bynner, famous American poet; Mr Charles Stigel; Dr and Mrs Charles Halmos; Mrs George de Huton (sic); Miss Ann Medalie; Sr. Herbert Johnson and his wife, “and many more.”

Ann Medalie: “Washing Clothes – in Ajijic”; illustration from Modern Mexico, October 1945.

Two paintings by Medalie, “Net Fishermen (at Ajijic)” and “Washing Clothes – in Ajijic” were used as illustrations for Neill James’ article “I live in Ajijic!” in the October 1945 issue of Modern Mexico.

In early 1945, she held a solo exhibition in Mexico City at the Galeria de Arte Decoración (Venustiano Carranza #30). The list of works for that exhibition shows how significant her time painting in Ajijic had been, since several of the forty oils on show had clear links to Ajijic and Lake Chapala. For example she painted the garden at Quinta Johnson, as well as the view from Quinta Johnson. The Johnsons were long-time residents of Ajijic who had built their home and magnificent sub-tropical gardens on the lakefront. The originals of the two paintings used to illustrate Neill James’ article were also included in the show, along with a surrealist “Adam and Eve” and numerous realistic flower paintings. While Medalie did paint some surrealist works, she was best known for her exquisitely detailed and keenly observed flower paintings.

In 1948, Medalie left the Americas to live in South Africa. By 1951, she had moved to Israel, which became her home and studio for the remainder of her long, productive life. She was one of the founders of the artist community in Safed in Israel.

In her career as an artist, Ann Sonia Medalie held solo exhibitions in the U.S.A, Mexico, South Africa and Israel. She died in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 30 April 1991.

Related posts:

• Mexico in the USA: Pacific fauna and flora mural in San Francisco
• Sylvia Fein, one of America’s foremost surrealists, lived and painted in Ajijic 1943-46

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Sylvia Fein, one of America’s foremost female surrealist painters, spent several formative years in Ajijic in the 1940s.

Born in Milwaukee in November 1919, she was only 19 when she met her future husband William “Bill” Scheuber. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, and the couple married on 30 May 1942. Even at that time, a contemporary newspaper described her as “Wisconsin’s foremost woman painter.” Fein was one of a group of six painters known as the Wisconsin group who exhibited together and remained life-long friends. The others were Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977), Marshall Glasier (1902-1988), Dudley Huppler (1917-1988), Karl Priebe (1914-1976) and John Wilde (1919-2006).

Sylvia Fein, Ajijic, c 1944. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Sylvia Fein.

While her husband was away on military service (as an Air Force cryptographer), she moved to Mexico in 1943 to recuperate from pneumonia. Initially, she visited her mother in Mexico City, but a casual encounter with a former high school classmate, Charmin Schlossman Levy, led to her traveling to Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala, where she lived and painted until 1946. Interviewed by the press more than sixty years later in Mexico City, Fein said that ever since that time, “I have loved Mexico and could cry on my return because I have the dust of Mexico on my heart”.

Her first show in Mexico was a group show at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala in 1944. Other artists exhibiting in that show included Jaime López Bermúdez, Otto Butterlin, Ernesto Butterlin (“Lin”), Ann Medalie and Betty Binkley.

During the years she lived in Ajijic, Fein was busy completing paintings for her first solo exhibition at the Perls Galleries in New York City in 1946. A sample of her works from this time can be seen at Work in Mexico, 1943-47, which includes images titled “Muchacha de Ajijic” (below) and “Insects that inhabit my studio in Ajijic.”

Sylvia Fein: Muchacha de Ajijic (1945). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

She recalls on her website that, while in Ajijic,

she helped rebuild the adobe house in which she had her studio, taught English to a few young people eager to go to work in Mexico City, and started an embroidered blouse industry for women who owned the two foot-pedaled sewing machines in the village. In exchange for exotic insects brought to her by the children for her own drawings, she provided paper, pencils and crayons and noted thoughtfully how spontaneously the children drew, and their meticulous observation, dexterity, humor and enjoyment.” (Elsewhere, she is said to have also worked with a local women’s cooperative and helped on a friend’s farm during her time in Ajijic.)

She knew, and worked with, Neill James (who first arrived in Ajijic in September 1943), and this quote means that Fein was already helping local children develop their artistic talents almost a decade before James began a more formal program for children’s art in 1954.

In Dust on my Heart (1946), Neill James describes how Sylvia Fein “worked out some original designs” for embroidery as her role in one of the first village enterprises that allowed local women and girls to earn some money at home during their spare time. In addition, Fein played a key role in marketing the embroidered blouses in Mexico City.

Victor Serge, a Russian exile in Mexico, visited Ajijic over the Christmas-New Year period, 1944-45, and describes Fein in his diaries as having an:

irregular face where the forehead is too big, anxious and frustrated: her husband has been a long time in the war somewhere in the islands of the Pacific. She’s afraid of bad news and is hard hit by being on her own. She has the first-rate drawing of a diligent beginner, gladly turns over the pages of old albums, knows water-color, treasures Persian miniatures. As she’s dominated by frustration and anxiety, the canvases of a very mournful young girl result, naive, delicate and falsely naive, with remarkable symbolics of cats, birds, eyes.”

After Ajijic, and when her husband returned from the war, the couple lived for a time in Mexico City before driving, with Fein’s paintings, back to the U.S.. Before leaving Mexico, Fein did some exporting of silver jewelry, seeking out fine pieces and shipping them to an uncle who had a shop in Milwaukee. Fein dealt with many of the most famous silversmiths of Taxco.

At the U.S. border crossing on their return, the customs agent asked about all the paintings. After a brief discussion, it was apparently agreed that they were “antiques” and therefore exempt from duty!

Fein’s first solo exhibition was a great success. Reviewing the show for The New Yorker, Robert M. Coates wrote that,  “The Perls has a first one-man exhibition by a young Milwaukee artist named Sylvia Fein… whose work somehow manages to suggest the German Gothic and the Oriental at practically the same moment… her technique—firm, precise, and clear—is always authoritative.”

Later that year, her work was included in the 1946–47 Whitney Annual exhibition, alongside paintings by Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, and Jackson Pollock.

• Sylvia Fein: self-portrait, 1949

When WW2 ended and her husband Bill Scheuber returned from military service, they made their home in the San Francisco Bay area where Fein completed her MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1962, Alfred Frankenstein extolled the virtues of Fein’s art: “Clarity, finesse, and perfection of draftsmanship are other virtues Sylvia Fein possesses. She is one of the most highly individual painters in the Bay Region and one of the most accomplished”.

After their daughter Heidi was born, Fein kept a meticulous record of her early drawings and artwork, which prompted her to write two landmark books about children’s art: Heidi’s Horse (California: Exelrod Press, 1976) and First Drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking (Exelrod, 1992). The books have had a major influence on child development specialists interested in the creative process of young children.

• Sylvia Fein, Heidi’s Horse, and children’s first drawings (6 min Youtube video)
• Sylvia Fein and her husband, Bill Scheuber, discussing her two books (Youtube video)

Like Carrington, Kahlo and other great women artists of the past century, Fein is a solitary genius who has created a rich world on her own terms.”                  – Michael Duncan, Art in America, April 2008

Only late in life, did Fein finally receive the recognition long due her as one of America’s foremost surrealists. A series of major shows then placed her art alongside that of other great painters such as Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Miller and Dorothea Tanning:

• “With Friends: Six Magic Realists 1940-1965”, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin (2005)
• “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012); Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (2012)
• “Surreal Nature” Krowswork Gallery, Oakland, California (2014)

Fein’s work also features in volume 2 of Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860-1960, a four volume work by Maurine St. Gaudens (Schiffer Publishing, 2015).

Sylvia Fein’s other major solo exhibitions include: Perls Galleries, New York (1946); Feingarten Galleries, San Francisco (1957, 1959, 1961); Sagittarius Gallery, New York (1958); Lane Galleries, Los Angeles (1958); Saint Mary’s College, Moraga, California (1960); Kunstkabinett, Frankfurt, Germany (1960); Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland, California (1962); Ruthermore Galleries, Oakland, California (1962); Maxwell Art Galleries, San Francisco (1963); Nicole Gallery, Berkeley, California (1965); Bresler Galleries, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1966).

• 17-minute vimeo video about Sylvia Fein and her work

Sylvia Fein died in California on 1 April 2024, at the age of 104.

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Sylvia Fein for her warm hospitality during a visit to her home and studio in February 2015, and for being kind enough to review a draft of this post.

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

Artist Ray Cooper, a friend of Tom Brudenell, traveled with Brudenell from Berkeley to Jocotepec in late 1967 and remained in the town for several months until April 1968. It was during the town’s annual January fiestas in 1968 that Brudenell drew a barefoot Cooper, working by candlelight at a desk, under the protection of a typical Jocotepec tiled roof:

Tom Brudenell: Ray Cooper in Jocotepec,  1968

Brudenell recalls his Berkeley friend as long-haired, usually barefoot, and absorbed in his art and his family.

Cooper has vivid memories of their trip to Mexico, perhaps because it was his first trip abroad. He remembers that he did not want to be seen as a hippie, given that at that time “hippies were being deported” from Mexico. To that end, he kept his hair short, never wore shorts, and “wore long sleeve white or light blue dress shirts and clean Levi’s… We dressed to a middle class Mexican standard, avoided marijuana and were sober.”

Cooper, born in 1942, studied at the Cornish School of Allied Arts in Seattle (1962-1963) and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (1964-1967). Disillusioned by the direction art education was taking, and demoralized by the Vietnam War, Cooper dropped out of art school, and jumped at the chance to travel with Brudenell to Mexico.

Cooper recalls that they entered Mexico after a detour to Phoenix to collect a dark-haired, bespectacled girl named Peggy who was on her way down to San Miguel de Allende to start a photography class. He remembers that, after an adventurous trip, they left Peggy in San Miguel and returned to Lake Chapala, where they looked for a house to rent. Deciding that rents were too high in Chapala and Ajijic, they settled on a small home in Jocotepec, where both painters soon became immersed in their work.

(Coincidentally, Ray Cooper’s brother Stanley and one of his brother’s close friends, the artist Billy King, would both later live in the Lake Chapala area for many years.)

Cooper loved Mexico. He liked the people, enjoyed the food and found new artistic freedom in being there. His trip turned out to be the start of extensive travels in various parts of the world, including Costa Rica, Mauritius, France, Greece, Italy, Tunisia and Egypt.

Ray Cooper: Travelers (ca 1970). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

While in Mexico, Cooper discovered Huichol Indian art for the first time. He greatly admired the ceramics skills of pre-Columbian potters in Colima, renowned for their beautifully-proportioned portrayals of animals and zoomorphic figures. Spending time in Guadalajara, contemplating the striking, large-scale murals by artists such as José Clemente Orozco, also had a powerful influence on his art.

Shortly after his return to the U.S., Cooper utilized his memories of the art of Huichol Indians, Colima potters and Mexican muralists, to help him draw a stage backdrop of imaginary figures for a Halloween Ball fund-raiser for the (later controversial) Synanon rehabilitation program in San Francisco.

Cooper’s fine paintings have been featured in many exhibitions, including at the California Biennial Competitive Show, Richmond, California (1968); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1968); Geyser Peak Winery Reception Center, California (solo show, 1975); Napa Sonoma Wine Industry Competitive Exhibit, California (Prize-winning, 1975); Oregon Episcopal School Faculty Exhibitions, Portland (1979-1993); Botanical Garden, Asheville, North Carolina (solo show, 2002); Muse Salon, Haywood Park Hotel, Asheville (2003); The Casbah, Tunis, Tunisia (2004); Holy Ground, Asheville, North Carolina (solo show, 2007); Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina (collaborative exhibit with Tunisian artist Hamadi Ben Saad, entitled “Trans-Atlantic Voyages”, 2010); Opportunity House, Hendersonville, North Carolina (solo show and workshop, 2012); Starving Artist Art Supply and Gallery, Hendersonville, North Carolina (2012); The Arts Arena Gallery, Delray Beach, Florida (2014).

Ray Cooper: Temple (2013). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Alongside his art, Cooper worked for many years in landscape design. This is especially evident in many of his later paintings which are powerfully simple depictions of the natural world.

On his website, Cooper explains that,

My work explores the mystery of life using easily read symbols that imply passage of time and evolution. The earth, sky, water, clouds, ferns, flowering trees, and fruit are essences abstracted to represent everything.”

While we cannot know how all this came to be, we must wonder. Science can only describe, it does not explain. A transcendent element in science is possible, and faith without rational thought does not necessarily rise above superstition. To know anything, both are necessary.

Questioning the nature of Nature, plus having faith in the existence of a Divine ultimate reality are equal in my attempt to understand the world. The profound mystery of life requires a leap of faith and my paintings are about that.”

Want to learn more?

• Ray Cooper’s website – http://www.raycoopergallery.com/ – had numerous examples of recent work but is no longer active.
• His former website has examples of earlier work.

Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks to both Tom Brudenell (first interviewed at his home, 1 Feb 2015) and Ray Cooper (first interviewed by phone and email, 15 April 2015) for sharing their memories of Mexico.

Related posts:

• Tom Brudenell, painter and muralist

Artist, portraitist and illustrator Charles Lewis Wrenn was born 18 Sep 1880 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died 28 Oct 1952 in Norwalk, Fairfield, Connecticut.

He painted several watercolors at Lake Chapala, including some in Ajijic in 1943, though the precise dates of his visit or visits to the area are currently unknown. This watercolor of fishermen tending their nets is typical of his work; it is almost identical to another watercolor dated 1943, presumably painted at the same time:

Charles L. Wrenn. c 1943. Lake Chapala. (Davis Brothers Auction, 2022)

Wrenn’s choice of subject matter at Lake Chapala included some relatively rarely painted scenes, such as this lovely painting of a ruined building on historic Mezcala Island:

Charles L. Wrenn. c 1943. “Old Prison at Lake Chapala.” (Reproduced by kind permission of Allen Bourne)

This gloomier watercolor, entitled “Water Carrier, Lake Chapala” was for sale on eBay in November 2015:

Charles L. Wrenn. Water Carrier, Lake Chapala. Date unknown (eBay, 2015)

And this charming Ajijic watercolor, dated 1943, with its obvious illustrator influence, was for sale on eBay in 2024:

Charles L. Wrenn. 1943. Ajijic, Mexico. (eBay, March 2024)

In about 1900 (when he was about 20 years old) Wrenn moved to New York City and lived in Manhattan. After graduating from Princeton in the class of 1903, he immersed himself in art, studying at The Art Students League, and with the impressionist painter William Merritt Chase (1849-1916).  On 5 October 1907 he married Helen Gibbs Bourne of New Jersey, and they moved to 364 West 23rd Street; his art studio was at 9 East 10th Street. The couple later moved to Wilson Point, Norwalk, where Charles (“Charlie”) had his studio in the loft of his red barn.

Cover art by Charles L. Wrenn

In 1914, Wrenn wrote that, “My ten years since graduation have been devoted to ART.  After a year at the Art Students’ League and The New York Art School, I took up the illustrating branch and have been following it ever since.” From 1911 to 1917 he drew illustrations for stories in The Red Book Magazine, People’s Home Journal, and The Housewife. He also painted cover illustrations for the pulp magazine Breezy Stories.

Wrenn illustrated numerous books, including: Molly Brown’s Sophomore Days by Nell Speed (1912); The Boy Scouts at the Panama Canal (1913) and Boy Scouts under Sealed Orders (1916), both by Howard Payson; Uncle Noah’s Christmas Inspiration (1914) by Leona Dalrymple; Guns of Europe (1915), Tree of Appomattox (1916), Hosts of the Air (1915), The Great Sioux Trail (1918), The Sun of Quebec: A Story of a Great Crisis (1919), all by Joseph A. Altsheler; Polly’s Senior Year at Boarding School (1917) by Dorothy Whitehill; Boy Scouts Afloat (1917) by Walter Walden; and For the Freedom of the Seas (1918) by Ralph Henry Barbour.

In 1918, at age thirty-eight, he was not accepted for military service in WWI, so he applied for a passport and went to France for one year as a citizen volunteer for the Red Cross, working as a stretcher bearer. His passport describes him as 5′ 10½”, blue eyes, grey hair, thin face, with a Roman nose and a scar on his right thumb. He listed his occupation as “artist”.

Cover art by Charles L. Wrenn

After the Great War ended in 1919 he traveled to study art in Morocco, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Tunis, Egypt, and Great Britain. He returned to the U.S. in September of 1920. He returned to Europe in 1922, this time accompanied by his wife and his mother. They returned from Palermo, Italy aboard the “Providence”.

In 1929, he visited Haiti and in 1931 Bermuda.

From 1920 to 1936 he sold freelance pulp magazine covers to The Danger Trail, People’s Magazine, Ranch Romances, Three Star Magazine, and War Stories. He also drew interior story illustrations for Clues.

In 1936 he moved to Wilson Point, South Norwalk, in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he painted portraits and landscapes for the remainder of his life. Wrenn was a member of The Society of Illustrators and specialized in painting portraits and landscapes. He painted in many parts of the U.S. including the Catskill Mountains, California, and Walpi Mesa in Arizona.

After spending time in Mexico in the early 1940s, Wrenn held “a small exhibition of his Mexican water colors” at Loring Andrews gallery in Cincinnati in June 1946. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, besides paintings of Pátzcuaro and elsewhere, “His subject matter varies from the paintings of the strange narrow streets to the old houses of the natives of Lake Chapala.”

Wrenn and his wife visited Europe in 1952, returning only four months before his death.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Source

• The Cincinnati Enquirer: 16 June 1946, 74.

This post was updated on 12 November 2015, and on 30 March 2024.

Comments, corrections or additional material welcome, whether via comments or email.