Bucks
Baum National Penn Art Exhibit
Dear Friends,
Good morning. “Owning one Walter Emerson Baum painting is like eating only one potato chip,” Martha “Missy” Hutson-Saxton told a crowd last week at the new National Penn bank, a few miles west of New Hope on Route 202. “If you have one Baum [painting], you’ll want another…maybe three, four or five…just like potato chips.” Hutson- Saxton is an art historian.
Baum’s grandson, J. Lawrence Grim, Jr. and Kathleen O’Dea hung the 10 oil paintings and 19 watercolors plus a sculpture for the exhibit. Prices range from $750 to $85,000.
I was particularly impressed with Baum’s sculpture of himself at about age 25. He constructed it out of beeswax in 1909. Grim told me that when his grandfather sculpted the piece, the beeswax was soft and pliable. When it hardened, it became hard as iron. I touched it and lived to tell the tale.
When Grim was introduced, he reminded the crowd that Walter Emerson Baum was the only native Bucks County member of the New Hope School [of art]. He was a contemporary of Daniel Garber, Walter Schofield, and Edward Redfield. Baum also wrote hundreds of articles for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Sellersville Herald.
Grim told us that the bank first displayed Baum paintings in 1996 at its Doylestown location. When it opened its Souderton branch several years later, a Baum exhibit was the highlight. Humorously, Grim added that he was allotted eight minutes of speaking time but would yield most of them to Missy Hutson-Saxton, who wrote an illustrated book about Baum. Any owner of a Baum painting should buy a copy.
O’Dea told me that the Baum show was a mix of styles. Wall plaques explain them. There are snow scenes, Allentown City scenes, and contemporary works. “The bank has come alive with art,” she said. The exhibit is imaginatively presented.
Baum was a prolific artist. During his lifetime, he must have painted thousands of works. When he died in 1956, Baum left hundreds of paintings in his Sellersville home. It was from that home that the paintings were gathered. In the Saxton book, “Walter Emerson Baum, 1884-1956”, there are 170 illustrations. In the 1960 listing of the Allentown Art Museum, the pre-1956 collection numbered 221.
I looked at the 1996 column that I wrote about Walter Emerson Baum through the eyes of Hutson-Saxton. At the time, she was a trustee and guest curator at the Allentown Art Museum where Baum was one of the founders. She was also a trustee at the Baum School of Art, which Walter Emerson Baum founded. Hutson-Saxton is a Baum expert.
Here are a few paragraphs from that column.
“During Baum’s life, his asking price for paintings ranged from $10 for a miniature to $1,700 for a three by four foot canvass. Hutson- Saxton told us that during Baum’s lifetime, he produced nearly 5,000 paintings. He produced between one and two paintings each week…
“We often think of Baum as the landscape painter and that is certainly true. He became an internationally known artist after he won the best landscape prize in the 1925 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts competition. But he was just as fond of urban scenes. Hundreds of his canvasses depict life in the city…
“Walter Baum created most of his best known works from Philadelphia to the Pocono’s but there are scenes from the New Jersey and Massachusetts shores too. According to Huston- Saxton, Baum’s wife, Flora, read the works of Shakespeare and poetry to him as he painted…
“Founding an art school was among his major accomplishments. For 30 years, he nurtured the idea, first in an old firehouse with five students and then in a succession of buildings, which the Allentown schools made available to him. Through the encouragement of friends and officials, the present location at 5th and Linden Sts. became the Baum School of Art’s final home…
“I particularly enjoyed hearing Hutson- Saxton’s research on the Circulating Picture Club. For just $1, you could rent a painting…that was back in 1933. It was a novel way to get local artists’ paintings into homes and businesses for display…
“It never fails to amaze me how people in the performing and non performing art world devote their lives to their craft…often living in poverty. Walter Baum paid a tremendous price for pursuing art. His parents wanted him to become a barber and follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and father…
“It’s sad that artists are seldom recognized for their genius during their lifetimes. Walter Emerson Baum did not accumulate a fortune, but for all of us, he left a legacy in paintings and the Baum School of Art,” my column concluded.
At the bank’s exhibit, Hutson- Saxton told the visitors that Baum painted every day. “Your life was better if you knew him,” she said.
The Baum show marks the official opening of the bank and will be open to the public through August.
Sincerely,
Charles Meredith