Albert L. Groll
(American 1866-1952)

The following two articles have been taken from the The International
Studio June 1918, and the Craftsman magazine:

A PAINTER OF THE SILENT PLACES BY CHARLES H. PARKER

If you were a lover of art looking at an exhibition of the best of American painting, and you came to a picture showing the desert with its great expanse of sand and sagebrush, distant purple hills and luminous banks of Valkyric clouds, with the spirit of the silent places over all, you would at once excla’m, “This is a Groll,” and you would guess correctly. So closely is the subject of this article identified with his work that the word “Groll” is synonomous, in the world of art, with the deserts of Arizona. Even the primitive Indians, among whom he worked, recognised this in the vigorous, if somewhat personal name they gave him – “Chief Bald-Head-Eagle-Eye,” which interpreted signifies a painter of the silent places. It is this intimate association of the man and his work which has helped to place Albert L. Groll among the leading painters of American landscape.

To most people, including artists, the desert is the desert – a place dreary, lonesome and uninspiring. To Groll, with his deep appreciation of nature in her more subtle and mysterious moods, it was an inspiration – an inspiration so strong that it moved him to the best work of his career. Herein lies a story that touches the high lights of adventure and at times came perilously near the shadows of tragedy.

On his return from Paris and Munich, after seven years’ residence, Groll began his career by painting symphonies. This was in the early nineties, when the Barbizon school and Whistler were exerting great influence over the younger men. To these symphonies Groll gave colour titles, and this association of colour and music vividly illuminates the poetical side of his character. Silver Moon, for instance, is a veritable poem in paint, vibrating with the charm of the nocturne. Harmony in Silver recalls Corot at his best without in any way being imitative. In fact, all of Groll’s earlier work shows this deep poetical expression which in itself would have won him unusual recognition had he chosen to remain within the limits of such a field. Indeed, The Milky Way, a composition of the sand-dunes of Provincetown, pregnant with the majestic mystery of the star-lit heavens, was awarded the silver medal by the International Jury of the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. All this, however, was but a prelude to the great work that was shortly to follow. Urged by the feeling that he had not yet found his true inspiration, Groll went to Arizona for a vacation. Like the prospector seeking gold, he ventured into the desert, and, like the prospector, he remained to endure the hardships of burning sands, hunger and thirst, and the experience of being “lost.” And, to complete the simile, he “struck it rich.”

How rich his “find” proved the art world learned when Groll’s pictures began to appear at Schauss’ Gallery – the deserts of Arizona on Fifth Avenue! These were shortly followed by The Enchanted Mesa, at once recognized as a masterpiece among Groll’s earlier pictures of the West.

Emily G. Hutchings, writing recently in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, ably described its charms:
“The picture is a piece of mystical landscape painting from the brush of Albert Groll of New York. You are likely to shiver at it, no matter what the temperature of the room. It is called The Enchanted Mesa and it was painted in the region from whence Groll derives most of his inspiration. He has been a frequent exhibitor in St. Louis and his titles will serve to show his trend: Rain Clouds on the Desert, The sunny West, Arizona, Flying Clouds, Hopi Land, will suffice. These and several other mountain and desert compositions have been in the American Exhibition during the past ten years. The one now on exhibition is one of the best both in technique and in theme. The middle distance is occupied by the mesa rising sheer and forbidding from the long foreground of wind-swirled sand. At one side the atmosphere is dense with storm-clouds, while on the other the vivid blue is revealed. The sand that is whipped into action takes on the elusive forms of wraiths which appear towards the enchanted rock, where other ghostly forms seem to emerge from the sinister face of the rock cliff. Without imagination you will see nothing in this picture but a jagged mass of rock with a flat top and an intervening atmosphere of flying sand, for Groll has not recognized his ghosts into solid, tangible forms. They exist only for those who have the eyes to see them.”

To many is was a great disappointment that this monumental work did not go into the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum, where Groll is represented by one painting only, which, though typical, is not one of the artist’s great conceptions. Although Groll’s earlier work had won him enviable recognition, the brilliant series of compositions that followed his first trip to the desert firmly established him in the front rank of contemporary landscape painters. Year after year he went back to the scenes of his great inspiration; each visit being followed by work which so enhanced his reputation that, as has been said before, the name of Groll became synonymous with the desert. Most of these pictures have found their way into public and private collections.

It is characteristic of this artist’s restless temperament that he should, from time to time, have sought new fields of inspiration and suggestion. This tendency is illustrated in his picture of the Red Woods of California, now in the Brooklyn Museum, and his painting of Lake Louise, a result of a visit to the Canadian Rockies, which won the Inness medal in the National Academy exhibition of 1906. But despite these successes, which might well have tempted him away from the desert, he returns to it again and again. In fact, he said recently: “I shall never forsake it.” How strong is this tie, all of Groll’s latest work emphasizes. The Canon de Chelly, illustrated on page cviii, and recently completed, strongly expresses how deep is the appeal made to him by the grandeur and mystery of the primitive and how readily he responds. In another recent work, Gateway of the Garden of the Gods, he depicts a subject demanding rare vision to give it full expression. Rich in archaic form, virility of colour and decorative feeling, it shows a marked advance in the artist’s struggle for light, tenderness and colour sensitiveness, as well as a more refined treatment of the qualities associated with his earlier work. While these two pictures reveal the rugged character of the Southwest in all its primitive force, they still maintain the delicate symphonic charm that is always present in Groll’s work. In this connection, it is interesting to note that this appeal has been recognized by many leading musicians, some of whom are the artist’s intimate friends. It was one of MacDowell’s moonlight symphonies which inspired the picture that hung over the great composer’s bed to the last. His friendship with Gustave Mahler was very close, and many amongst his friends at the present time are men of the highest standing in the world of music. Few American painters have attempted the interpretation of their country with such success. Remington has left us thrilling chapters in the history of the upbuilding of the West. Others daring the hardships of the desert, have endeavoured to imitate Groll, but none has ever achieved his masterly and sympathetic interpretation of the lonely lands of Arizona. Where others found desolation and sadness, to Groll were revealed ramparts of rich purples topped by great mounds of clouds echoing barbaric hymns of praise – “A Garden of the Great Spirit.” In short, he is the first painter to bring to us the epic grandeur of the Western plains. Irresistible craving for colour, better organization, more drawing and a more pronounced desire for significant forms characterize Groll’s latest work. The power of form and colour indicates that some of the principles of the great modernists, like Cezanne and Van Gogh, have been utilized. Groll is not afraid to experiment in technique while maintaining the personal vigour of conception and creation. He has always a deliberate intention and the ability to carry it out. As he learned from Claude Monet, Picasso, Winslow Homer and Inness in the past, so he learns from their successors in the present. While not being an extremist himself or a pioneer in aesthetic movements, he refuses to be confined by academic boundaries. Nor has he much sympathy for those who, lacking in vision themselves, seek to retard the development of others. Power of achievement came to him because he had the courage to learn a new language to give fuller expression to his individuality.

A LANDSCAPE PAINTER WHO HAS DISCOVERED THE COLOR VALUES OF
WESTERN PLAINS: BY CLARA RUGE

Painters of landscape are beginning at last to realize that riches hitherto undreamed-of await them in the western plains. The picture which received the gold medal at the exhibition this year of the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, was “Arizona,” a painting by Albert L. Groll. It is only a stretch of desert and sky and low-lying hills, but it glows like a gem with the indescribable, never-to-be-forgotten color of the Colorado Desert. To people who know nothing of the west except by description, the purple hills, copper and golden wastes of sand, dull grayish patches of sage-brush and mesquite, and pitiless, burning blue sky, seem like the exaggeration of extreme impressionism, but to those familiar with the desert, the blaze of color that dominates the picture almost to the exclusion of a sense of form, is absolute realism.

Closely following the Academy Exhibition at Philadelphia, a private exhibition of Mr. Groll’s work was given at the Schaus art gallery in New York. Here was shown an interesting group of the desert pictures, together with other examples of the artist’s more familiar work here in the east. These earlier paintings show the awaking of perception and power of expression that has enabled him to depict so vividly the very heart of the west. They are studies of the familiar atmospheric effects of dawn, twilight, moonlight, mist, sunshine, starlight, - every mood and change of the day as it is seen at Cape Cod, Sandy Hook, Provincetown, or in Prospect Park and the urban and sophisticated Central Park. One especially noteworthy picture is as characteristic of night in the east as “Arizona” is of noon-day in the west. It bears the name of “The Milky Way,” and was awarded a silver medal by the International jury at the St. Louis Exposition. The canvas shows simply a stretch of sand dunes at Provincetown, - gray and mysterious under a night sky thickly sown with stars. That is all, and yet there is majesty and mystery, - the feeling of the cool, quiet night and of the near sea lying tranquil under the stars. The strange gloaming light is so clear in its darkness that details seem to take shape under a steady gaze, as when the eyes become so used to the gloom that dimly-seen objects grow visible.

The same effect of clear darkness is seen in a picture of a little lake in Central Park, only it is twilight instead of night. This picture is all green, - strange, dark green of trees and grass in the half-light after the sun has gone down, - and its whole feeling is that of rest and coolness at the close of the day. Still more mysterious is a bit of meadow-land, shaded only by a thin, scattered row of slim young trees, and all bathed in the clear light of the full moon. It is just after a shower, and the silver light seems to bring a subdued sparkle from everything it touches.

The dawn-picture called “A Harmony in Silver” is the artist’s own favorite of all his earlier work. It is well named, for it is an indeterminate mass of faint, silvery grays and greens, with hints of mother-of-pearly in the mists of early morning through which a suggestion of the landscape is dimly seen. The birches in the foreground form a rarely good bit of composition. In “A Bit of Sandy Hook” appears again the distinctive atmosphere of the eastern coast, with its cold greens and grays and the watery blue of its sky. It was because of his feeling for the subdued atmospheric effects of the east that the artist friends of Mr. Groll were inclined to think that his decision to go to the desert of Arizona and New Mexico with Prof. Stuart Culin of the Brooklyn Institute, would be merely a waste of time. Mr. Groll felt himself that his journey to the west meant only a much needed vacation, but his first glimpse of the desert, with its low-lying, almost monotonous forms and its flaming colors, set him almost feverishly at work lest he should lose something of the miracle of this new world that awaited an interpreter. He worked constantly for the three months of his stay, bringing home innumerable sketches and suggestions, and some finished pictures. Since his return to New York, the spell of the west has remained as potent as when he made his first sketches, and to this the art world owes “Arizona,” and the group of blazing canvases, small and large, that formed the principal feature of the private exhibition in New York.

To all except a very few, the Arizona Desert has remained an undiscovered country to landscape artists, and any true picturing of it seems like glimpses of another world. Mr. Groll’s virile handling of
his colors, while it never oversteps the bounds which divide truth from exaggeration, is yet startling in it daring. In “The Sandstorm” is an example of this fearlessness that is more striking even than in the tiny canvases that glow like flames with untempered purples, coppers, vermilions and blues. The air is filled with the whirling sand, - and a part of it. A glimpse of low purple hills is in the background, and the deep blue sky is felt, rather than seen, above and through the sand-cloud. Flaming sunlight filters through everything, increasing, rather than softening, the menace of the storm. Another remarkable effect is obtained in “The Rising Sandstorm,” where the light is less obscured, but where the sense of terror and resistless power is ever greater, because more subtle and imaginative. Still more daring is “The Rainbow,” – such a rainbow as is never seen except in the mercilessly clear air of the desert. It is no gracious, delicately-tinted arch, but the end of a straight, many-colored flame, of which the upper end is lost in a lowering storm cloud. The desert is shown in all of its moods, placid or savage, bold or mellow, and to this visitor of three short months it has given up the secrets of its strange charm, withheld from painters for so many years. Mr. Groll is still in the early thirties. Of German descent, he is a New Yorker by birth. Most of his student years were spent in Munich, where he paid much more attention to figure painting than to landscape. His preference, however, gradually turned more and more in the direction of landscape, both because it was more material reason that, in the early days of his struggle for recognition there came a time when he could not afford models for figure pieces. Like most troubles and deprivations, this was a blessing under a somewhat harsh disguise, for it forced the young artist to find his models in the trees and rivers, hills and fields, where all beauty is free to him who has eyes to see, and so he came to his own.