WILLIAM SOMMER
Landscape with Power Lines.
Watercolor and pen and ink on cream wove paper, 1935. 390x500 mm; 15¼x19¾ inches. Signed in ink, lower left recto and with an additional watercolor drawing, signed and dated in ink, verso.Provenance: Private collection, New York.The current work, painted near the artist's studio and home in Brandywine, Ohio, is characteristic of Sommer's (1867-1949) mature style, with its flattened perspective and generous use of concentrated pigments. Sommer's work typically takes on abstract characteristics, though consistently emote restlessness and spontaneity. Sommer projected influences of Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne on to his thoroughly American subjects, Brandywine landscapes and local portraits. Sommer was born in Detroit and from 1878 to 1883 studied drawing locally under sculptor and lithographer Julius Melchers. After apprenticing at the Detroit Calvert Lithograph Company, Sommer worked in lithography at the Bufford Company in Boston, the Ottman Company in New York, and at the Dangerfield Brothers Printing Company in London. After studying in Munich with intermittent travels through Europe, Sommer returned to New York. Influenced by early German Expressionism, Sommer joined the American Kit Kat Club, which provided life drawing models, akin to the Whitney Studio Club. In 1907 Sommer followed his printmaking work to the Otis Lithography Company in Cleveland, where he began a friendship with William Zorach and founded the Kokoon Art Club. In 1914, Sommer and his wife Martha purchased their property in Brandywine where he set up his studio in an old schoolhouse, working as an artist, muralist, and theater production designer. Finding himself without work during the Great Depression, Sommer worked first under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project, the Works Progress Administration, and then the Treasury Art Project, the most notable project being a mural he completed for Brett Hall in the Cleveland Public Library.