1946; Page 46 – ink and scratchboard, title page from The Sev-
enth Ogre, 1932; this page clockwise, top left – scratchboard
spot drawing from Spice Magazine; top right – brush and ink illustration for The Art of Bundling,“In Soot and Cinders from the Passing Trains”, 1938; bottom left scratchboard illustration for
Sinbad the Sailor, (detail) unpublished, ca. 1935; Page 48 – pen-
cil sketch for painting, Funeral for a Friend, ca. 1942; Page 49,
top left – photo of Lee Brown Coye, in studio of Flack Advertis-
ing, working on clay figure models, (sketches on table top include scenes from Sinbad the Sailor), ca. 1935; Page 49, top
right – brush and ink illustration for The Art of Bundling, 1938; Page 49, bottom right – scratchboard and ink illustration for
Johnny Pye & the Fool-killer, unpublished,1938; Page 49, bot-
tom left – ink on scratchboard, Knickerbocker, unpublished,
ca. 1945; Page 50 – ink drawing of “sticks” found at Mann’s Brook from “Chips & Shavings”column,August 22,1963.
the 1937 Associated Artists exhibit with his oil on board Backyard.
In the summer of 1937, Lee received a commission to illustrate one of Balzac’s Droll Stories as a Christmas give-away booklet for the Syracuse printing firm of J. F. Campbell. The Vicar
of Azay-Le-Rideau came out at year’s end
in a 500 edition run under the Braeside Press imprint.While purely a commer- cial assignment, Lee’s work shows a more relaxed line and an earnest sense of humor in tune with the joviality of the story. Balzac’s bawdy tale of a vicar is a strange choice for a Christmas book. Balzac had modeled his Contes Drola-
tiques on the Decameron and told the
story of a vicar in the days when they were allowed to have “wives”.
At about the same time the Balzac book came out, Lee managed a small coup. PM magazine, which began pub- lishing in 1934, was a monthly journal for production managers, art directors, and others in the graphic arts field. By 1937, it had begun showcasing a com- mercial artist in each issue and having him create a cover using some interpre- tation of the magazine’s PM masthead. Some of the artists showcased included A.M. Cassandre, Miguel Covarrubias, Lynd Ward, Paul Rand, and Alexander Steinweiss. Lee was the featured artist for the February/March issue of 1938, and he painted a full-color landscape of a country road using a rural mailbox for the placement of the magazine’s title [pg. 9].The issue included an insert, The Work
of Lee Brown Coye, showing many of
Lee’s ink drawings, which Lee used as a mini-portfolio.
As soon as the winter broke in 1938, Lee was out casting his fishing line.The lonely tranquility of fishing suited him and many times his only companions were dragon-flies skimming over the water and his sketchbook. He had a hand,artistically and with his experiences as a fly fisherman, in the promotional pamphlet Bait [pg. 36]put out by Flack Advertising. Lee continued to revisit the North Pitcher region, on fishing and sketching trips. He was already attracted to the decaying stillness of old buildings, “I guess that’s the morbid side of my per- sonality. I see a lot of pathos in a building [...]. I can’t paint happy pictures [...]. Bright landscapes just aren’t [me].”3That
spring Lee came across the extension of land with the strange “sticks” farmhouse on one of his fishing trips.
On one of his visit to the Syracuse Fine Art Museum’s Lee made drawings
of some modest buildings across the street. He later completed the tempera
Just Across the Street in his home work-
place from the sketches.The painting was entered into that year’s Associated Artists exhibit in March. Professor C. Bertram Walker, on the Associated Artists jury committee, described the painting as a “[...] picture of some rather old and dilapidated red brick buildings[...] Col- lectively they make a most interesting sil- houette against a pale flat sky.The domi- nant color note is a common enough red, but beautifully modulated, complet- ing a harmony in form and color which is extremely restful and satisfying.”4
Just Across the Street won first prize at
the Associated Artists exhibit, and was eventually brought by the Syracuse Museum for its permanent collection. In 1939, it was selected for the Modern American Painting section of the Gold- en Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California.
Despite Professor Walker’s descrip- tion, this painting does not sit easily in a regionalist milieu.The canvas was a big step away from the chauvinistic interpre- tation required by the Cazenovia murals, and evokes a more personal sense of place. The palpable quiet and synthetic representation of light, and even the absence of people, convey a compromise between the two different schools of art and appears influenced more by one of Edward Hopper’s studies in loneliness than any of Benton’s canvases.
This American style of realism is something that critics have mistakenly taken as a continuation of nineteenth century academic tradition. Just Across
the Street can be said to mark the point
of departure for Coye’s oeuvre to come. After the positive reception of this can- vas, Coye, never a confident artist, must have felt he was on the right track.
A few months after the PM insert appeared, Lee was rewarded for his many visits to New York’s art markets when he somehow connected with the publishing firm of Farrar & Rinehart. Art editor Ruth E.Anderson had been looking for artists for their Rivers of America series. Anderson had Lee design and paint an evocative, monochromatic dust jacket (a three tier duotone of a Mississippi river- boat, New York City streets, and Russian architecture) for Emerson Waldman’s novel The Land is Large [pg. 70]. Farrar & Rinehart was also bringing out trade editions for the Countryman Press of Weston,Vermont,and on Anderson’s rec- ommendation, and after seeing samples of his work, Countryman commissioned Lee to illustrate Stephen Vincent Benét’s
Johnny Pye and the Fool-killer [pg.51].
Vrest Orton ran Countryman Press. He had returned to his native Vermont in the early 1930s after living in New York City (having worked for H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury previously), and founded the press to publish books of country life and American literature. In Vermont, he set up a letterpress print shop in his barn and started out by designing and printing elegant chap- books written by Edgar Lee Masters and Stephen Vincent Benét. While in New York, Orton had met and become friends with many authors, including Theodore Dreiser and Howard Philip Lovecraft, a writer who had been called
the Edgar Allen Poe of the twentieth century, and would figure in Lee’s work years later. Orton did give Lovecraft edi- torial work, but had no interest in weird literature and never considered publish- ing Lovecraft’s writings.
The Benét novella, half fantasy, half folk tale (and in the same vein as his classic The Devil and Daniel Webster), first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Lee had completed a dozen drawings and these had been incorporated into the typeset galleys when Benét saw them for the first time in early May and disliked the “cartoony” quality of the artwork. Benét demanded that Orton replace Lee and recommended his friend Charles Child. It was Lee’s first experience,though by no means his last, with having one of his illustrative ven- tures turn out stillborn. Benét’s assess- ment of Lee’s work is of course a per- sonal opinion, yet the final Pye artwork done by Child displayed a woodcut style similar to the work Coye had already done, and over the years it had been falsely thought by some (going by early announcements of Coye as the artist) that Child was a pseudonym used by Lee for the Benét book.
The agreement Orton made with Benét allowed the author to dictate the
illustrator for any of his books. Orton wrote Lee that this was akin to allowing the author to pick out fonts for the typesetting and thought Benét “nuts” for not liking Lee’s illustrations. He was thinking of running off proofs of Pye’s galley sheets with Lee’s artwork to give to friends entitled, The Rare Suppressed
Plates for Johnny Pye and The Fool-killer, Suppressed by Stephen Vincent Benét.5
Orton was also preparing for publi- cation Dana Doten’s The Art of Bundling, (subtitled, Being an Inquiry into the Nature
& Origins of that Curious but Universal Folk-Custom, with an Exposition of the Rise & Fall of Bundling in the Eastern Part of No. America). The subject of the book con-
cerned a custom of eighteenth century colonial life in which a young man and woman did their courting in bed fully clothed.As a consolation, and in consid- eration of Coye’s easy acceptance of the Benét situation, Lee was given the com- mission to create drawings for The Art of
Bundling. Lee was able to use some of the
sample illustrations he had done for
Anthony Adverse with some modifications
for Bundling. Lee made a trip to Man- chester, Vermont, at the end of May 1938, to meet Doten, and told him an anecdote about western bundling which Doten used in chapter seven of the book. When Bundling appeared in the fall of 1938, it rated a line in Clifton Fadi- man’s prestigious book column in the
New Yorker, “No student of our history
would fail to read Mr. Doten or to study Lee Brown Coye’s sturdy illustrations.” Fadiman had also noted Dr. Seuss’ first book that same year and was the first prominent reviewer to recognize Lee’s
illustrative talent.
Farrar & Rinehart’s popular Rivers of
America series were finely illustrated
books coming out at the rate of about three volumes a year. Art editor Ruth Anderson would have considered using Lee for one of the Rivers books, but after the series editor Constance Lindsay Skinner died suddenly in early 1939, and was replaced by Benét,with Carl Carmer as co-editor, Lee was effectively shut out of any chance of doing a Rivers of America book. Lee’s temperament was such that he would not have pushed the issue after the situation with the Johnny Pye book.A few Erie Canal-boat sketches Lee did at this time, possibly as demonstration drawings, show that he would have been a natural for the series [pg.55].
As luck would have it, four years later, upon Benét’s own death, Hervey Allen became the series editor. In a curious bit of turnabout (and showing the five-degrees-of-separation in New York publishing), Benét was a reader for Farrar & Rinehart during the mid- 1930s, and he had pushed for the publi- cation of Anthony Adverse when John Farrar had doubts about publishing it. Soured by these developments, years would pass before Lee would approach Farrar & Rinehart again.
On November 22, 1938, as the final show of the season, the Syracuse Muse- um of Fine Arts mounted Lee’s first one- man show.Two of the museum’s galleries were given over to showcasing eighty- one of Lee’s works; paintings and water- colors were hung in the large reception room and the drawings and woodcuts in a smaller gallery off the main floor,
including the illustrations from The Art of
Bundling and the Balzac booklet. During
its three-week run, critics accorded the show a relatively warm reception. Anna Olmsted was instrumental in getting this exhibit organized, and considered Coye to be a discovery of the Syracuse Muse- um. In her regular art column in the
Post-Standard, she gave fervent praise for
Lee’s work,“there is no search for super- ficial decorative effects, no concern with mere prettiness, but instead an unfailing respect for design and pattern in dark and light.” She did overlook some of the cartoonishness and youthful insecurity with anatomy that weakens some of the works on exhibit.
Coye’s art influences by this time had begun to branch out to include Charles Burchfield, along with Benton, Hopper, and Diego Rivera. He valued Hopper for the character and mood of his barren small-town streets, Benton and Rivera for the substance and strength of their draftsmanship and large-scale mural
design,but Burchfield was a different ani- mal. His paintings were unique in invit- ing the viewer to enter into a mystical landscape of radiant light and shadow.
Burchfield, a resident of Buffalo, New York, painted the terrible beauty of nature, mostly devoid of figures, in uniquely subjective terms. Despite working in a realistic style, Burchfield’s art was called expressionistic, visionary, and even abstract at different times. Burchfield’s evocation of mysterious and scary forces attracted Lee’s attention when he first came across the artist’s work in the latter half of the 1930s. It’s interesting to note that Burchfield had, early in his career, worked as a wallpaper pattern designer. Lee’s 1938 watercolor
The Ghost on the Knoll depicted a Burch-
field inspired landscape of a nightime wind swept cemetery (pg 55).
T
he Quaker poet and Syracusan writer, Albert Vann Fowler, a friend of Lee’s,was looking to publish a book of verse that he had written with his wife Helen. Lee agreed to do illustrations and effectively became the production liaison for Scylla The Beautiful. Lee recommend- ed Vrest Orton as a publisher in the early part of 1939, but Orton declined doing the book under his imprint stating that “poetry will not sell” and suggested doing a privately printed edition. Coye and Fowler had also been contemplating doing a book together on the Civil War , and Coye mentioned this to Orton dur- ing a visit to Vermont in the summer of 1939.(A decade earlier Lovecraft had also visited Orton in Vermont.) Orton went as far as suggesting the use of amulti-point-of-view story told by com- mon soldiers, but this book idea was put aside and never taken up again.
Fowler wanted to get Scylla The
Beautiful out by December 7, 1939, well
in time for Christmas, yet both he and Coye were still attempting to get things in motion with Orton as late as Octo- ber 23. Orton drastically cut his prices to a fifth of his normal fee, out of his friendship for Coye. But Fowler finally decided to find someone else to do the job, and Robert Roberts, in nearby Hamilton, N.Y., took over the printing of 550 copies of the book. Republican Press was the printer’s colophon used to give the book a “publisher”—the book was more of a vanity publication on the part of the Fowlers.
For Scylla Lee used a spatter ink technique that gave the artwork a gritty, urban feel. One curious incident remi- niscent of the Cazenovia mural occurred when one of the pictures from
Scylla, “In Soot and Cinders from the
Trains,” [pg. 47] appeared in the Syra- cuse Post-Standard on December 18, 1939, and elicited a letter from a reader that took offense at the “shocking repre- sentation of a woman in a state of undress.” The drawing depicted the Syracuse intersection of Washington Street and Irving Avenue from ten years earlier. In the foreground the Cazenovia stream locomotive is passing while blue- collar workmen lounge along the street. The one lone woman breezing along the sidewalk is wearing a low cut, above the knee, slip of a dress. Hardly naked, yet suggestive for the era. Lee explained, “...in 1927 and 1928 [I] passed this cor-
ner every day, going to and from work. ...I can only say that Washington Street was famous throughout the county for something besides the railroad tracks.”6
T
he Museum of Modern Art wasestablished in 1929 to promote modernism, which meant mostly French and other European artists. The other major museum in New York, the Metropolitan, like many long established art museums across the country, was even more hidebound in its opposition to living American artists.The Met had turned down a large donation from socialite, sculptress, and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to add an American wing of modern art to the stogy enclave. The decision incensed Whitney and she decided to finance the first major museum to showcase living American artists.The Whitney Museum opened on Eight Street in Greenwich Village on November 18, 1931.
From the start, Julianna Force, the
first director of the Whitney (and long- time personal secretary to the founder), possessed the open-minded dynamics that drove the museum in its efforts to give American artists the same attention as other museums were giving to Euro- pean artists. She initiated, with Gertrude Whitney’s approval, bi-annuals exhibits (which soon became annual shows), for American sculpture, painting, and watercolor. Artists were invited to send work without juries or prizes to con- tend with.The museum was unique in paying a “rental” compensation to the artists for exhibiting their works and not charging a commission on works sold. Force and Gertrude Whitney were well known for championing young and unknown artists.
Julianna Force invited Lee to show two watercolors at the 1939 Whitney annual exhibit.Anna Olmsted had taken the lank, red-haired artist under her wing, and it is likely that her patronage had convinced Julianna about Lee’s maturing talent. Force was accustomed to playing the fairy godmother role for artists. Lee was one of seventy-one artists invited to send two works each, of their own selection. Other artists invited to that year’s show included Edward Hop- per, Charles Burchfield, Peggy Bacon, and Reginald Marsh. Coye was one of a large contingent of artists exhibiting at the Whitney for the first time.
One of the paintings Lee sent to the Whitney show was Dark House, a somber-hued watercolor he had done of a house in Paris, New York. It was one of many weekend watercolors Lee had painted during that year, but this piece
This page, clockwise, top left – ink drawing
of Canal boat 1937; this page, top right – scratchboard illustration for “The Black Mod-
onna”, Weird Tales, May 1947; this page,bot-
tom center – brush and ink illustrations for
The Art of Bundling, 1938; bottom left, this
page – watercolor, The Ghost on the Knoll,
(from newspaper halftone), whereabouts un- known; winner of first prize for watercolors at the 12th annual Associated Artists show in Syracuse, New York, 1938; page 56 – scratch- board illustration for 3 Tales of Horror, 1967.
was noticed by a representative of the Metropolitan Museum and purchased by that institution.A painting bought by the Met would have been a singular break- through for any artist, but the Depression was still on everyone’s mind and Lee continued to work in advertising even after he learned that his paintings had been selected to appear in the American art exhibit at the Golden Gate Interna- tional Exposition in San Francisco.
By early 1939, Lee had left Flack’s and moved to William Lane Advertising. He had not been there long when he announced that he was quitting advertis- ing.He had no specific career plans other than to paint. Ruth was furious, but the deed had been done and nothing she said