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Biography

Eugene Paul Ullman, American painter, born in New York on March 27, 1877; died in Paris, France, on April 26, 1953. His father, Sigmund, was an important manufacturer of printing ink, the first in the United States to make colored ink for glossy paper. His firm also made a lithographer’s proof ink of unusually high quality. Sigmund Ullman was not only greatly interested in chemistry as it related to the production of ink but in its artistic use. It is said that, owing to the prominence of Renaissance art, he believed that Italians were especially gifted in understanding color gradations and hence sought out immigrants from that country when in need of new employees. Of his four sons, one became a chemist but died in his early twenties and the other two took over the business. Eugene was one of the best pupils in the Columbia University Grammar School (the Normal School Training Department), winning prizes for Latin, German, and drawing. In the latter he displayed his artistic talent. His mother encouraged him to follow his inclination and had the painter Walter Griffin give him drawing lessons. Nevertheless his father insisted that, like his brothers, he should attend Packard’s business school for one year and then spend another year learning the ropes in the ink factory. After this experience he enrolled in William Merritt Chase’s school, and ultimately taught in his teacher’s New York School of Art as well as at Shinnecock. In the 1897 photograph of Chase’s class, Ullman is shown in the center, immediately behind Chase and to his left. In the photograph of Chase’s class taken in Haarlem in 1903, Ullman, now no longer a student, stands in the back row. By this time he had traveled to Spain to copy Velázquez’s works in the Prado, and to France as well, where he underwent the influence of the Impressionists, and especially Cézanne’s. It was in Haarlem that he did Chase’s portrait, later bought by the French government and now in the Museum of Franco-American Cooperation in Blérancourt. Also owned by this museum is a painting of wounded Zouaves at the American Ambulance Hospital in Neuilly, where the artist volunteered as a carpenter and handyman in World War I, as well as a painting by his son Paul, who served in the American Field Service in 1939-40 and in 1944 with the Office of Strategic Services. At least one historian of American art considers Ullman’s to be the best portrait of Chase—not counting the self-portraits; and the French minister responsible for its purchase was quoted as saying that it was as good as any comparable portraits by Whistler. Chase, in turn, did a portrait of Ullman and gave him one of his daughter Alice. Both works are reproduced in Ronald Pisano’s catalogue raisonné of Chase’s œuvre. Ullman was a rising star in the first decade of the twentieth century. His first award was a bronze medal at the Saint Louis World’s Fair in 1904. In 1905 he was awarded a first-class medal at the Exposition of the City of Orléans. It was followed the next year by the Pennsylvania Academy’s annual Temple Gold Medal for his portrait of Mrs. Fisher, in the Munich style, owned by the Indianapolis Art Museum. His portrait of the Arnold Bennetts at home, with the famous writer in the background playing the piano while his wife reads a book in the foreground was reproduced in the fourth volume of the novelist’s letters. Lady at the Buffet graced the cover of The Atlantic Daily News, distributed to every transatlantic passenger. Articles about him appeared in newspapers, in The McIntosh Monthly, and in The Craftsman, which reproduced, among other paintings, his portrait of Mrs. Booth Tarkington. Her father-in-law had been a justice of the Indiana Supreme Court; so had the artist’s father-in-law. It was in France where he decided to settle, relying on a generous allowance from his father. The Beaux-Arts bestowed on him an associate membership, which he resigned in 1923, perhaps in protest for the Beaux-Arts rejection of avant-garde artists. This action seems to have alienated him from official circles and won him no allies. Bennett mentions in his Journals the news of Eugene’s marriage to Alice Woods, daughter of Judge William Allen Woods of the Seventh District Court, novelist, short-story writer, and a student of Chase’s. It was through her literary connections that he got to know the Bennetts and Margaret Cravens, who in 1911 commissioned him to do Pound’s portrait. He then did hers, offered as a gift. Among the artist’s correspondence and photographs of his paintings, now in the Kellen Archives of the Parsons School of Design, is the one of Cravens’s portrait, but not that of Pound. Indeed, when he spoke about the poet, he never mentioned that he had painted his portrait; he may well have ripped up its photograph. His portrait of Gertrude Stein, which he gave her, has apparently disappeared. In a letter to Cravens, Pound compares his poetics to a remark of Ullman’s about green undertones of human flesh. It is possible that the painter was thinking of his painting of the Japanese actress Madame Hanako (ca. 1908), now owned by the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, but in three pictures created about this time there are small swaths of pure green to render the flesh, as if he were undergoing the influence of the Fauves. The one that can be most accurately dated is that of his son Paul, born in 1906, showing a boy between 6 and 8 years old. (The portrait of Paul’s brother Allen, born in 1905, showing a child about 4 years old, is in the old style.) The other one is of a French woman, owned by Auburn University’s J. C. Smith Art Museum. A nude from the waist up with a turban (the model was probably an Azerbaijani refugee from the Russian Revolution) shows the same treatment. There is also a still life with red apples casting green shadows on a white surface. Let us say that in his first style Ullman was an epigone of Chase. Indeed, one critic calls him an understudy of his master, and it is likely that Sadakichi Hartmann mentions him in the 6th impression of his History of American Art with this in mind. His second style would be a colorful one including the possible Fauve influence and the Zouaves in the Blérancourt museum. H received a silver medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, but the style of the painting he exhibited has not been determined. The third style, dating mostly from the twenties, is characterized by broader brush strokes in pale landscapes and portraits, sometimes with subdued yellows and browns dating mostly from the twenties, after his divorce from Alice. Several of these were exhibited in the Milch Gallery in 1924. Girl with a Cat, now in the Heckscher Museum, was reproduced in the New York Herald and The Morning Bath, which he gave to the Brooklyn Museum, was reproduced in The New York Times Magazine and The New York Evening Post’s art page, as well as in The Spur, where his work received an excellent review from Lula Merrick. The greatest praise bestowed on him in those days came from B. J. Kospoth in the Sunday June 9, 1929 Chicago Tribune European Edition, which reproduced the Portrait of Mrs. E. P. Ullman, and Femme lisant sur une chaise longue, now in a private collection in Minneapolis. The fourth style began in the early thirties after his move from Nice to Marseilles, where he paints the old port, then to Lourmarin, where he does landscapes with the château and of the Vallée de la Fausse Monnaie. He then takes his second wife, Suzanne Lioni, whom he had married in 1928, and their young son to Belgium, where he paints the ruined mediæval tower at Sichem and the hotel where they lived. There is more detail in the foliage, which is greener, and objects are more delineated. It continues after his move to Paris in 1935, with summers spent in Savoy and Brittany, where the family remained for the rest of the year after Paris was evacuated. The French newspapers reproduced a few of those paintings. Royal Cortissoz had very kind words for him as well in the April 11, 1943 New York Herald Tribune, which reproduced Ullman’s view of Douarnenez at low tide, painted in 1937. The fifth style takes shape on his return to the United States in 1940 after the Germans took France. After spending two years in New York City, with summer visits to his son Paul’s farm in Stonington, Connecticut, the family moved to Ridgefield. Typical of this style, which is really a continuation of the fourth, are two large landscapes, one of a field on the farm of James Alden Weir—inherited by his daughter Dorothy and occupied by her and her husband the sculptor Mahonri Young; it is now a national park. It was bought by the widow of Arthur Garfield Hays. Three others showed the rear of his brother George’s property. The best one shows the house, the original part of which had been an inn in Colonial times, as well as people playing croquet. The other two were painted from the window of the studio that George had created for him by having the chauffeur’s apartment wrecked on the second floor of his garage. One of these is a winter scene, bought by the French government, which later sold it at auction. In 1944 the news of Paul’s capture and execution by the French Sûreté under German command after parachuting into France before the Normandy invasion was a severe blow to his father, for Paul, a gifted painter and etcher, was his disciple and favorite son. He quarreled with George and, when the war ended, moved to Westport, where he had a studio built on his property. At this point his work betrays signs of age, although the winter landscape painted through his studio window—reproduced on the cover of his last exhibit catalogue and now owned by Auburn’s J. C. Smith Museum—still displays considerable talent. When Suzanne died in 1950 he decided to pass his last years in France despite the advice of good friends who advised him against it. France was no longer the same land he had known in his youth. When he died in 1953, only his youngest son and his two best friends, the sculptor Ary Bitter and the painter Louis Degallaix, attended his funeral. Ullman was active in societies of expatriate American artists and their organization, becoming president of two of them. In 1941, with the Canadian-American sculptor Cecil Howard, he founded the Four Arts Aid Society—of which he was elected Honorary President—to provide aid to French artists living under the German occupation and in Vichy France. Bennett mentions in his Journals that at one time Ullman owned a Tissot, but he must have sold it before the Depression. Before moving back to France he owned a Molinar (from which a conservator unintentionally removed the signature during cleaning), three Chases, a small Daubigny, a very early Monet, four landscapes by Georges Michel, a small landscape with horses by John Lewis Brown, a beachscape by Guillemet, a painting of Géricault’s death mask and a small landscape by Cals, a small genre painting by Bonvin showing a boy holding a pheasant (which once belonged to Alexandre Dumas fils), a studio painting by Maurer when he was a student, three canvases by his friend Degallaix, and two by Chantal Quenneville. He and Suzanne were given watercolors by the French illustrator Dignimont. He also had watercolors from the illustrator Charles-Auguste Edelmann, and drawings by Charles Jacques, Bonvin, Steinlen, Guy Pène Du Bois, Ary Bitter, Hermine David, and the Swiss sculptor Marguerite-Anne Blonay. He bought several small ceramic statuettes from Ary Bitter, who gave him the original clay sculpture of Dalou’s medallion of Corneille at the Comédie Française and an original defective cast of Houdon’s Frileuse, both obtained from their founder. Besides Ullman’s son Paul, there were and are other artists and artistically inclined individuals in the family. His son Allen was a sculptor and painter. Their mother illustrated her own novels. His great-uncle, Adolph Steiner, was chief draftsman of the Central Pacific. His niece Charlotte was a gifted painter. His first cousin, Eleanor Modrakowska, was a painter and etcher. Allen’s granddaughter, Alice, is a painter; Paul’s son, Jacques, is an architect whose wife is a watercolorist.