Jun 21, 2016 - Sale 2420

Sale 2420 - Lot 59

Price Realized: $ 531
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(ART). Lichtenauer, J. Mortimer. Diary of an American art student in Paris. Photograph of author and friends mounted on first page. [125] manuscript pages. 4to, original limp calf, moderate wear; contents clean and legible; signed on first page. (MRS) Paris, 13 October 1897 to 23 April 1898
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Joseph Mortimer Lichtenauer (1876-1966) was the son of a New York investment advisor who went on to a long career in art, and became a member of the Salmagundi Club. A Parisian training was considered essential for a serious artist in this period, and Lichtenauer was constantly surrounded by other painters--French and American, students and masters. When the diary opened, he was in attendance at the famed Académie Julian, where his instructors were Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. He soon left for a rented studio with friends Arthur R. Friedlander and Augustus M. Gerdes, who both went on to modest success. They solicited useful advice from American expatriate William Turner Dannat. Other artists he met included Cadwallader Washburn ("a deaf mute, but a very clever student", 16 March), Louis Vaillant, and Carolus-Duran. He also marveled that "that demi-God Whistler" lived a few doors away (10 March). Perhaps the best-remembered artist he actually saw was Henry Ossawa Tanner of Pennsylvania: "I eat my lunch now at the American Club. Today Tanner, a half negro and a credit to his race, I saw there. This young fellow has just been honored by having the French government buy the picture he exhibited in last spring's salon. The Raising of Lazarus I believe is the subject of his composition" (23 October 1897).
Lichtenauer also discusses current affairs. The jingoistic march to the Spanish-American war is traced at length. The anti-Semitic Dreyfus Affair which was then roiling France was also naturally of great interest to Lichtenauer as a Jewish American. He notes with alarm the student mobs outside Émile Zola's house chanting "Long live the Army! Death to the Jews!" (20 January). On a more personal note, his efforts to join the American Art Association became mysteriously stalled, and he noted that "Hartshorne on the committee, being a Jew-hater, I suspect is at the bottom of all this" (9 December). Friends in the club soon expedited his application. Art, though, is at the heart of the diary--an articulate young man struggling to understand his craft while surrounded by brilliant competitors.