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A portrait painter and muralist, John White Alexander was one of the leading American exponents of the aesthetic movement based in Paris, London, Munich, and Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. Spending over a decade in Paris, Alexander represented the cosmopolitan outlook of his era, and held a significant role in communicating advanced ideas in art, design, and psychological characteristics of form to his compatriots.
Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, Alexander was orphaned at an early age. When he was twelve years old, he was employed by the Atlantic-Pacific Telegraph Company. Seven years later, he moved to New York, where he found work as a political cartoonist and illustrator at Harper's Weekly Magazine. The income from illustration work allowed Alexander to pursue his studies in Europe, and, in 1877, he enrolled at the Royal Academy in Munich. There he became part of a group of American painters who were influenced by the dynamic painterly style and realism of the German artist, Wilhelm Leibl. Among the leaders of the American contingent in Munich was Frank Duveneck. Alexander became part of Duveneck's coterie, and joined the "Duveneck boys" in Italy in 1879 and 1880. In Venice, Alexander befriended James McNeill Whistler and Henry James, both of whom remained close friends in the years to come.
Alexander returned to America in 1881 and took a studio in the Chelsea Building in New York. In the next year, he became a drawing instructor at Princeton University. Despite this commitment, in the period that followed he found time to travel to the American West, to North Africa, Madrid, Paris, Dordrecht, and London. In Spain, Alexander became especially fascinated by Hals and Velázquez, and their art had a strong influence on the works he created in the subsequent phase of his career.
In 1886, Alexander was sent to London on assignment from Century Magazine to create portraits of famous Americans abroad. At this time, he renewed his friendships with Whistler and James. After a brief return to America, Alexander settled in Paris, where he and his wife, Elizabeth, soon became part of the social and artistic life of a special community of artists and writers. He came to know Auguste Rodin and the writers Oscar Wilde and Octave Mirabeau, and he further strengthened his friendship with Whistler. He also became acquainted with the symbolists and aesthetes of the Paris art and literary world.
Alexander received his first international success in 1893 when he showed three portraits at the Société Nationale des Beaux-arts. It was at this time also that he began to follow Whistler's practice of giving works titles by color rather than sitter. Aware of the psychology of the figure, Alexander created expressiveness through sensuous flowing lines and sinuously arranged forms. He chose to define character more by composition and choice of color than by any distinctive personal traits, and thus his art became one of evocation rather than description. Alexander's psychological orientation allied him not only with Whistler, but also with figures in the Scottish aesthetic movement, John Lavery and James Guthrie, the Spanish painter, Antonio de la Gandara, and the French painters, Albert Besnard and Edmond Aman-Jean. Alexander's masterpiece, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1897 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), demonstrated his affiliation with the symbolist and decorative movements. Named after a poem by John Keats, Alexander's painting expressed the mystery of its subject through formal terms, with sweeping lines and softly flowing shapes.
Alexander was elected an associate member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894. He became a full member of the organization in 1895. Two years later, he was invited to join both the Munich and Vienna secession groups, with whom he exhibited in shows throughout Europe. In the late 1890s, Alexander was responsible for putting together a jury of American and European painters working abroad who selected works for exhibitions held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.
Alexander returned to New York in 1901, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Design. He became an academician in the following year. In 1905, he received a commission for a series of murals depicting the Apotheosis of Pittsburgh for the staircase hall of the Carnegie Institute. This project remained incomplete, but at the time of his death, Alexander had completed 47 of the total 67 panels without assistance.
During the early 1900s, the influences of the Parisian aesthetic and symbolist movements influence continued to be reflected in Alexander's portraits, and he maintained his practice of depicting both elegant women and the prominent social figures of his day. Between 1909 and his death in 1915, Alexander was president of the National Academy of Design and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alexander's works are included in many private and public collections including the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Century Association, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the St. Louis Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton University, New Jersey; Columbia University, New York; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
LNP
*The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery and may not be reproduced in whole or in part, without written permission from Spanierman Gallery nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery.
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