Art: Michener gives another Bucks painter his due

The James A. Michener Art Museum has been admirably assiduous in calling attention to Bucks County painters of merit who have drifted beyond the historical spotlight, to the point where their names and achievements have been nearly forgotten.

The latest member of the New Hope art colony to benefit from the museum's advocacy is Charles W. Ward (1900-62), a talented muralist as well as an easel painter. He's bookmarked in art history as being the first artist commissioned by the Depression-era Public Works of Art Project to create a mural for a public building.

In fact, Ward was one of the first artists in the country to be employed by the federal program; he signed up just 11 days after it was announced. His 7-by-12-foot mural Progress of Industry was commissioned in 1934 and installed in the Trenton post office in 1935. He subsequently created two more murals for that building, both 6 by 20 feet - Rural Delivery and Second Battle of Trenton, both installed in 1937.

Ward made one other post office mural, for Roanoke Rapids, N.C. Cotton Pickers created a buzz in that rural Southern town because it challenged a racial stereotype by depicting African Americans as dignified, hardworking citizens.

All four murals are still in place, although the North Carolina post office building now houses law offices.

Small-scale photo reproductions of these murals and studies for them comprise one major section of the Ward exhibition. A former industrial worker, the artist was superbly equipped to devise visual narratives that celebrated American workers.

His muscular realist style, at times echoing Diego Rivera, was particularly apt for the men-and-machines theme of the first Trenton mural and paintings such as Millwrights.

Ward was born in Trenton, the son of a machinist; after quitting high school at 16, he joined his father at the American Steel and Wire plant there in 1917. He had enjoyed drawing as a child, and began to take night classes in mechanical drawing at the city's School of Industrial Arts (SIA).

Initially, he did so to advance his career as a machinist, but eventually, encouraged by a teacher named Henry R. MacGinnis, he gravitated to fine-arts courses.

In 1924, Ward left his factory job to enroll in the SIA full-time. After graduating in 1926, he moved on to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where one of his teachers was Daniel Garber, perhaps the most prominent of the New Hope painters. Ward studied at PAFA for five years, at the end of which he was awarded a Cresson traveling fellowship that carried him around Europe for nearly five months.

The academy's imprint is manifest in Ward's early paintings, which guest curator David Leopold, director of the Studio of Ben Solowey in Bedminster, presents as the exhibition's opening segment. There's nothing remarkable about them; like most PAFA students, Ward became proficient in all aspects of traditional realist painting, including landscape, portraiture, and still life.

Yet one exceptional canvas, Spring (Goldie Peacock's House), painted in 1933, reveals an artist adept at communicating the vitality of nature within a traditional framework, part townscape and part genre - a man working in his garden.

The buildings create a backdrop for the rhythmic gyrations of trees crowned with a gaudy efflorescence of white blossoms. The painting bridges convention and modernism effortlessly.

It was at this time that Ward moved to the village of Carversville, about five miles north of New Hope on the Delaware River, where he lived until his death. This was landscape country, and Ward obliged by painting picturesque scenes such as Apple Tree in Spring and Preston's Barn in which lively color and deftly integrated structure of forms dominate. These are forceful interpretations of common subjects.

While painting such landscapes during the 1930s, Ward was also engaged in his mural work, in which, by contrast, people and human activity predominate. Some of the compositions are montages that depict several simultaneous but related activities.

Even though Ward didn't visit Mexico for the first time until 1939, some compositions - Progress of Industry in particular - suggest a familiarity with Diego Rivera's mural style, just as several female figures in Rural Delivery resemble Mexican peasants.

Ward and a friend, Ned Stull, traveled to Mexico in early 1939. The 10 weeks he spent there stimulated him in the way that European artists such as Henri Matisse and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were inspired by the clarified light, intense colors, and, to them, exotic culture of North Africa.

The second Mexican experience - Ward returned for five months in 1954 - made his painting more vivacious and lyrical, exemplified, for instance, by the pastel Mexican Butcher, a man carrying a huge bull's head in a basket. This quality persisted into his late years, in paintings such as Blue House and Snowy Fields, which are lighter in touch and more fanciful in color than his earlier work.

At 68 paintings, prints and drawings, "Paintings for People" is a relatively condensed show, and even though it touches on the major aspects of Ward's career, it doesn't have the comprehensiveness of a full retrospective.

Leopold's catalog essay on the artist compensates in considerable measure because, unlike the installation, it provides a detailed chronological reconstruction of the artist's life and career, which ended abruptly in 1962 when he died on a Center City sidewalk of a heart attack.

Ward was recogized regionally in his lifetime; he exhibited with New Hope artists Harry Leith-Ross, Leon Kroll, and R.A.D. Miller, another under-the-radar regional talent featured in a current Michener show. Ward also had several solo shows in New York City and two in Raleigh, N.C.

Only three works in the Michener show come from museum collections; Spring (Goldie Peacock's House), which belongs to the Michener, is one of them. The other institutional loans come from the Woodmere Art Museum and the Everhart Museum in Scranton.

This suggests that Ward isn't highly visible in public collections. (The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns a tempera mural study that couldn't be lent because of its fragile condition.)

Fortunately, the Ward family preserved a good deal of work, which allowed the Michener to undertake this richly deserved effort to raise the artist's profile.

Visitors interested in discovering Ward must deal with one minor annoyance, however. Many moppets and their parents headed for the Jim Henson exhibition in the museum's new wing find their way to the Muppets though the Ward show in the Fred Beans gallery. A connecting door that should be closed wasn't during my outing, permitting the infiltration of an excessive amount of cacophony and distraction.

"Charles W. Ward: Paintings for People" continues at the James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, through Feb. 14. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Friday, 10 to 5 Saturdays, and noon to 5 Sundays. Open to 9 p.m. Fridays through November. Admission: $10 general, $9 for seniors, $7.50 for college students with ID and $5 for visitors 6 to 18. Information: 215-340-9800 or www.michenerartmuseum.org.

On Dec. 4 from 1 to 3 p.m., guest curator David Leopold will lead a six-block walk in Trenton to see examples of 20th-century murals, including those that Charles Ward made for the Trenton post office. Advance registration is required. $20 for museum members, $25 for nonmembers.

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