Альберт Гертер: Жизнь и творчество американского художника

American painter

Albert Herter (March 2, 1871 – February 15, 1950) was an American painter, illustrator, muralist, and interior designer. He was born in New York City, studied at the Art Students League with James Carroll Beckwith, then in Paris with Jean Paul Laurens and Fernand Cormon. Herter painted a 1912 life size double portrait of his sons, Everit (left) and Christian (right), which his friend V. Everit Macy donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Following Everit Herter's 1918 death in World War I, the Metropolitan returned Portrait of College Boys to the artist, and Macy donated Herter's Portrait of a Young Russian Nobleman in exchange. The Muse (1894), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Woman with Red Hair (1894), Smithsonian American Art Museum. Garden of the Hesperides (c. 1898), private collection. A Family Group (1898), private collection. Self Portrait in Costume of Hamlet (c. 1900), Smithsonian American Art Museum. Portrait of Courtlandt Palmer (1906), Metropolitan Museum of Art. The composer is shown at the piano. Still Life with Flowers and Fruit (c. 1910), Hudson River Museum. The Roman Bath (c. 1910), Pittsburgh Athletic Association (private club)
Portrait of Anna Maria Richardson Harkness (after Benjamin Curtis Porter), (1910 1915), Yale University Art Gallery. Portrait of College Boys (1912), private collection. Double portrait of Everit and Christian Herter, sons of the artist. Portrait of a Young Russian Nobleman (c. 1918), Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pilgun Yoon as “Aladdin” (c. 1923), Brooklyn Museum. Founders of the National Academy of Sciences (1924), National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D. C. Depicts President Lincoln signing 1863 legislation creating the National Academy of Sciences. The Bouvier Twins (1926), private collection. Double portrait of Maude and Michelle Bouvier, aunts of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Portrait of Edward S. Harkness (1931), Yale University Art Gallery.

He painted covers for the Ladies' Home Journal and other magazines, and illustrated a number of books. He created several World War I posters.

"Though a painter by profession, Mr. Herter has a keen appreciation of tapestry texture, which he has developed by personal work at the loom. Especially interesting should be the set of 26 panels now on the looms, picturing The Story of New York back to the days when Peter Stuyvesant smoked his long stemmed pipe and cursed in Dutch." The Story of New York (1912) 28 panels, McAlpin Hotel, New York City. The Great Crusade (1920), Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Herter designed Spanish Colonial Revival interiors for the Loew's Warfield Theatre (1923) in San Francisco, including a mural of Spanish style dancers above the proscenium. He designed Byzantine Revival interiors for Broadway's Martin Beck Theatre (1924) in New York City, which was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003.

In 1894, as a wedding gift from the groom's mother, Mary Miles Herter, the couple received a parcel of land between Montauk Highway and Georgica Pond, in East Hampton, Long Island. In 1899, they built "The Creeks," a 40 room, Mediterranean style villa, designed by architect Grosvenor Atterbury. The estate featured about a mile of waterfront on the tidal estuary. The villa contained "his and hers" artist studios so each would have their own workspace. Adele Herter designed the extensive gardens. In 1912, Albert Herter built a larger studio, a soaring 56 by 35 foot space that doubled as a private theater, "where Enrico Caruso, Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova performed." One of the finest examples of a color plan in our architecture is the country place of Mr. Albert Herter at East Hampton, Long Island. Here is a large, rambling house, built so close to the sea that the blue green of the water and the clear blue of the sky are deliberately considered as a part of the color plan. Mr. Herter's idea was to get, if possible, the effect of a house in Sicily, and so he built the house of pinkish yellow stucco and gave it a copper roof. The sea winds have softened the texture and deepened the color of the walls to salmon, and the copper roof has been transformed into ever changing blue greens that repeat the colors of the sea. In front of the house there are terraces massed with flowers of orange and yellow and red, and back of the house there is a Persian garden built around blue and green Persian tiles, and great blue Italian jars. Here flowers of blue and rose, and the amethyst tones in between, are allowed. Black green trees and shrubs are used everywhere, with the general effect of one of Maxfield Parrish's vivid Oriental gardens. After his wife Adele's death at "The Creeks" in 1946, Albert Herter moved permanently to California. After his death, his son Christian Herter sold the estate to Alfonso A. Ossorio in 1951. Ossorio used the house as a gallery to display art collections and worked for 20 years in the gardens landscaping with exotic conifer species in groves dotted with his brightly colored found object sculptures. He donated of "The Creeks" to the Nature Conservancy in 1975. After Ossorio's death in 1990, the property was offered for sale by his partner, dancer Ted Dragon, at the asking price of US$25M. It is now owned by Ronald Perelman.

Adele and Albert Herter spent a good deal of their time in California at "El Mirasol", his mother's estate in Santa Barbara, bought in 1904. Mary Miles Herter had entertained friends there, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's widow Fanny Vandegrift (who later retired to and died at "El Mirasol" in 1914.) The hotel was famed not only for its balanced design and private tranquility but for its wealthy guests including the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, and the heirs of Charles Crocker, J. P. Morgan and Philip Danforth Armour.

He was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1906, and became a full Academician in 1943. He was a member of the Society of American Artists, the American Watercolor Society, the New York Water Color Club, the Society of Mural Painters, and the Century Club.