claude buck – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

Claude Buck, “Self Portrait”, 1917, Charcoal and Crayon on Paper Mounted on Paper-Board Sheet, 20 x 12.7 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Claude Buck started to paint when he was very young; at the age of eight he applied to be a copyist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum rejected him because of his age, but Buck kept asking and three years later was finally granted permission to copy the old master paintings. Buck was the youngest artist ever to study at the National Academy of Design, where he spent eight years creating works inspired by romantic literature.

In 1917, Claude Buck founded the ‘Introspectives’, a group of four painters who created surreal images and believed that the ‘poetry’ of a picture meant more than the imitation or even the representation of nature. Later in his career, however, Buck completely rejected these strange, dreamlike themes and joined the Society for Sanity in Art, which celebrated straightforward, representational painting. He was also a leading member of the avant-garde Symbolism artist movement in Chicago.

Claude Buck was known for his fantastic, sometimes disturbing images with allegorical and literary themes drawn from writings of Edgar Allen Poe, operas by Richard Wagner, classical mythology and New Testament writings from the Bible. Some of his early paintings had Luminist movement elements achieved with light-toned paints worked with transparent glazes.

Claude Buck, “Sunburst”, Gouache, Watercolor, Pencil, Pen and Colored Ink on Paper, 1913, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC

Claude Buck was born in New York City on July 3, 1890. His father was a traditionally trained, commercial artist, and introduced Buck to drawing at age 4. The young Buck copied Greek classics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at age 14 entered the National Academy of Design, taking classes in still life with Emil Carlsen, figure drawing with Francis Jones, and figure painting George DeForest Brush. He studied there until age 22, receiving eight prizes. Buck then studied in Munich and upon his return began a busy schedule of exhibitions.

He moved to Chicago in 1919, teaching painting for some years at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC), and becoming a leading member of an avant-garde symbolist artists’ group known as the Introspectives. The group, whose members shared an approach to expressing subjective emotion and experience in their work, included, both Rudolph Weisenborn and Emil Armin. Buck, a modernist, was influenced by writers Edgar Allen Poe and William Blake and eccentric visionary painters Ralph Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

He often depicted allegories and literary themes drawn from Romantic sources such as Poe’s poetry, operas by Richard Wagner, as well as classical mythology and the New Testament. He made highly finished still lifes and “hyperrealistic” portraits to support himself and his family. Buck spent the last years of his life in Santa Cruz, and is often considered a California artist despite his deep connections to Chicago.