AUTHOR’S NOTE
(Not intended for publication with the article submitted below)
TO WHOM THIS MAY CONCERN:
I, Ignacio L. Moreno, the author of the article below, am an art historian. I have a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland, and teach art history at the Art Institute of Washington. I previously submitted the article below to Wikipedia with the best of intentions but it was deleted because it ostensibly infringed on someone else’s copyright. I therefore wish to clear up any questions about the authorship of this article and to submit it again.
I first met William H. Calfee in 1967 when I was a student at American University and remained a friend until he passed away in 1995. I had many opportunities to discuss his ideas about art from many perspectives, including historical, aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical. After his death I helped to establish the William H. Calfee Foundation in 1996. The foundation is a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to supporting the arts in the community.
I wrote the short biography of William H. Calfee which is currently on the foundation’s website. I have also written about Calfee in the foundation’s newsletters, and in the preface to a catalog of his work. If there are any resemblances between those short essays and the one below it is because I wrote them, not to mention the fact that they necessarily contain many of the same details about his life and work.
As far as copyright issues are concerned, I was formerly responsible for managing the Office of Visual Resources at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which handled all matters pertaining to rights and reproductions involving photography. In that capacity I attended several all-day seminars on copyright issues conducted by the law firm of Arnold & Porter, which represented The Phillips Collection at that time.
I have also published other articles in the Art Bulletin, which is the leading professional publication in art history in the United States and is published by the College Art Association; the Rutgers Art Review, published by Rutgers University; and America, an international journal published by the Organization of American States (OAS). I have also written art reviews for a local magazine in Washington.
I hope this helps to answer any questions there might be about my awareness of copyright issues.
As far as the format for footnotes and list of sources are concerned, I followed the generally accepted format, but was somewhat hampered by not having a complete understanding of how the system in Wikipedia’s user page actually works (such as how to raise the footnotes half a line, or to italicize titles). I am fully prepared to modify any of the footnotes and list of sources to make them agree with how they should appear. A few simple instructions on the steps I need to follow would be greatly appreciated.
It is obviously not my intention that the above note appear with the article below, but it was not clear to me how else I could communicate with whomever acts as the editor(s) of the articles that are submitted.
William H. Calfee: Artist and Educator
William H. Calfee (1909-1995), a native of Washington, D.C., was chair of American University's art department from 1946 to 1954, and continued to teach there until the 1970s. In the 1920s and 1930s he studied art in France, Italy, and at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, where he studied under the sculptor Carl Milles. It was there that he experienced the process of producing monumental work in sculpture. During the Great Depression he produced murals for the Fine Arts Section of the Department of the Interior. The murals can be found today in a number of post offices in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware.(1) During that time he developed an idiom that was both figurative and abstract. His first solo exhibition opened at the James Whyte Gallery (later known as the Franz Bader Gallery) on December 7, 1941.
In the early 1940s Calfee became assistant to C. Law Watkins at the Phillips Memorial Gallery art school, which collaborated with American University in offering a program in fine arts, one of the first university art degree programs in the United States. In 1945 he joined Watkins in teaching at the university and became chair of the art department for the next eight years. Calfee, who was soon joined by fellow artists from the Phillips art school Sarah Baker and Robert Gates, taught the universal principles of art that he discovered in Italian Renaissance fresco painting, but also encouraged innovative exprimentation in his students. Classes were also taught by visiting artists such as Karl Knaths, Herman Maril, and Jack Tworkov. Some graduates of the program, such as Ben Summerford and Luciano Penay, became faculty members at American University. Others went on to teach at other colleges and universities, or became successful independent artists. All of them were imbued with the aesthetic principles that were shared by Duncan Phillips and were the basis of his own collection, which opened to the public in 1921 and is better known today as The Phillips Collection, the first permanent museum of modern art in the United States.(2)
Calfee collaborated with other members of American University's art department faculty to organize the Jefferson Place Gallery near Dupont Circle in 1957. The gallery was organized as a cooperative showing contemporary art in Washington, but also exhibited the work of New York Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, along with local artists such as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Sam Gilliam, and Willem De Looper.(3) Calfee was also co-founder of the Watkins Memorial Collection at American University in honor of C. Law Watkins.(4)
In the late 1970s Calfee moved from Washington to a large home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he lived and worked the rest of his life. During this period Calfee and fellow artist Patricia Friend organized the Kensington Workshop at which they taught their innovative approach to painting for a number of years. In 1979 Calfee received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from American University for his contributions to the university and the community.
One of the best known public works by Calfee from the 1970s is the Monument to Rev. James Reeb, which is dedicated to the civil rights activist whose tragic death during a demonstration contributed to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The sculpture was later acquired by the National Academy of Sciences.(5) Calfee's last major public commission was a monumental abstract sculpture that is located today in front of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Civic Center in Rockville, Maryland. Calfee's works are also included in numerous private and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection.
References: (1) Marlene Park and Gerald E. Parkowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984, pp. 140, 146, 202, 205, 212, 231. Dinah Faber, "'Edwin Booth's First Performance' Bel Air Post Office Mural by William H. Calfee," Harford Historical Bulletin, No. 99, Fall 2004, pp. 34-41. See also The Washington Post, July 14, 1938, p. 14; Oct. 26, 1939, p. 18; Oct. 29, 1939, p. 6; and Dec. 1, 1940, p. 11, which shows Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt examining a sculpture being worked on by William Calfee.
(2) Erika D. Passantino, ed., and David W. Scott, consulting ed., The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making, Washington, D.C.: The Phillips Collection and Yale University New Haven, ca. 1999. For reproductions of works by William H. Calfee in the museum's collection, see Erika D. Passantino, ed., The Phillips Collection: A Summary Catalogue, Washington, D.C.: The Phillips Collection, 1985, p. 243. Calfee discussed his aesthetic philosophy in an interview by Francoise Yohalem, "Washington Sculptor: Bill Calfee," Washington Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, Oct.-Nov. 1982, pp. 9-10.
(3) Sally Acharya, "Exhibit highlights role of AU's artists in mid-twentieth century Washington," American Weekly, January 16, 2007, p. 4. Additional history on the contributions of the artists associated with American University art department is in an article by art critics Frank Getlein and Benjamin Forgey that first appeared in The Evening Star and was later reprinted by permission as "Star Lauds AU Faculty," in the AU Report, Spring 1968, page 5; and a later article by Benjamin Forgey, "Washington's Bad Case of Cultural Amnesia: The Case for Rediscovering the City's Artists of the 1950s," The Washington Post, April 24, 1988, pp. F1-F2.
(4) On the history of the Watkins Collection, see Eric Brace, "After 50 Years, AU Masters the Reappearing," The Washington Post, September 4, 1995, p. C7.
(5) David Schaff, "Reflections on Some Sculptures by William Calfee," in The Sculpture of William H. Calfee, Chevy Chase, MD: The William H. Calfee Foundation, 2006, p. 5, Fig. 4.