A few months back, I wrote about a current touring exhibition of works by Tamara de Lempicka.
As I said then, the Art Deco style of the Roaring Twenties (which the French call les années folles) evokes an image of tuxedoed men with pomaded hair squiring sleek women wearing evening gowns and dripping in diamonds to parties from Paris to the Riviera. But the Art Deco period had its notable practitioners in America, too, and I was recently called upon to appraise some works by one of the most noted of them in his time, an artist whose reputation has only recently begun to rise after a long period of obscurity, Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872-1930).
Chanler was born in New York, NY in 1872, a scion of several noted families of America’s Gilded Age, including the Astors and the Delanos. His mother, Margaret Astor Ward Chanler, died when he was three, and his father, John Winthrop Chanler, died two years later, leaving Chanler and his siblings, dubbed “the Astor Orphans” in the popular press, to be brought up by guardians and privately educated by tutors at Rokeby, the family estate on the Hudson River in Barrytown, NY. He showed an early interest in art and at 17 accompanied his brother to Rome. The stay in Europe was ostensibly to complete Chanler’s education, but another impetus was his family’s concern for his already-evident propensity for what a biographer has called “inappropriate female attachments.” Chanler subsequently went to Paris to stay with another brother and also lived with families in the French countryside and in Wales.
Returning to Rome in 1891, Chanler studied with noted academic sculptors there. He opened his own studio in Rome, but the architect Stanford White, a friend of the family, urged him to continue his studies in Paris. After moving there in 1893, Chanler studied sculpture with the famous French sculptor Alexandre Falguière, but he also began to study painting at the Académie Julian and other institutions.
Upon gaining control of his inheritance at age 21, Chanler married, had two daughters, and lived in London and Paris. In 1900 he executed his first decorative screen in Paris. This piece resulted in a large number of commissions for other decorative screens over the next two decades, and those screens are his most sought-after works today. This six-panel screen from around 1915 sold at auction for just over $20,000 in 2020 and would bring more today.
Robert Winthrop Chanler, Six-Panel Screen, c. 1915. Photo courtesy AskArt.
Chanler moved back to the United States in 1902 and had his first one-person exhibition in New York the following year. He bought a farm in Red Hook, NY, a village near his childhood home in Barrytown, where he worked on commissions and took part in local politics. (He would be elected Sheriff of Dutchess County, NY, five years later. His three-year term would be noted for Chanler and his “chief deputy,” the writer Richard Harding Davis, spending alcohol-fueled evenings riding madly about in chaps and ten-gallon hats in search of evildoers.)
Chanler returned to Paris in 1905, where his painting Giraffes was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. The following year he met Getrude Vanderbilt Whitney in Paris. Their friendship and professional association would last the rest of his life, as she commissioned several works from him. Chanler returned from France in 1906, but would divide much of his subsequent life between Paris and New York.
Already tabloid fodder because of a divorce in 1907, Chanler married Natalina Cavalieri, an opera diva, in Paris in 1910. Their short-lived marriage ended in a very public divorce a couple of years later, increasing the artist’s notoriety. He lived in a house near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, a building which he christened the “House of Fantasy.” The frequent riotous parties held there were appropriately scandalous and were a prelude to the Roaring Twenties.
In 1913 a group of Chanler’s decorative screens were included in the Armory Show, the historic event that introduced European modernist art to an American audience. Over a four-year period following the show, Chanler executed decorative commissions for clients in locations ranging from Manhattan to Long Island to West Virginia to Florida. Around 1920 he purchased a home in Woodstock, NY, where he spent summers and was, with his two mistresses, a notable participant in the bohemian scene for which the art colony was famous.
In 1922 Chanler had several solo exhibitions, the most important of which was an exhibition of 54 works at the Kingore Gallery in New York, an exhibition that was accompanied by the first major catalog on the artist. By the following year, Chanler became increasingly involved in painting portraits; his preoccupation with the genre would continue for the rest of his life. He had a retrospective exhibition at Grand Central Galleries in New York in 1926. The following year, his sister donated a screen to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Larger-than-life figures have real-life bodies, alas, and all those years of partying took their toll.
The 58-year-old Chanler died in 1930, in Kingston, NY, the result of a heart attack he had suffered in Woodstock three months previously. His artistic reputation fell into obscurity as the Art Deco style grew passé in the 1930s, but the reassessment in the past generation of the Art Deco style brought new attention to his work, leading to the publication of a major monograph in 2016.
Why has Chanler only now been rediscovered? It was partly the result of his being consigned to the category of “decorative” rather than “fine” art. It was also because many of the commissions he executed for Gertrude Whitney Vanderbilt and others remained in private hands, out of sight of the general public. Another factor was that some commissions such as the swimming pool in a grotto that he designed for James Deering’s mansion “Vizcaya” in Miami suffered deterioration over the years, with conservation efforts beginning only comparatively recently. A final reason was Chanler’s turn toward portraiture in the Twenties. Portraits are notoriously hard to sell, and the current market for Chanler’s portraits is in the very low four figures.
But the line between fine and decorative art has become increasingly blurred in recent years. These days, when “curated” luxury auctions can include everything from an Abstract Expressionist painting to a game-worn Michael Jordan jersey, the definition of “important objects” seems to be up in the air. I’ll leave it to others to puzzle things out, but I look forward to my first live experience of a full-scale Chanler commission this summer, when Roberta and I plan to view his murals for the home of W.R. Coe, now part of the Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park in Oyster Bay, Long Island. I suppose that wearing chaps and cowboy hats during the pilgrimage might be an appropriate homage, but I think we’ll skip that part.
