Capitalizing the Canvas
Ben L. Summerford's Works Resonate With Distinctly D.C. Qualities

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 2, 2008

It is odd how certain cities, Washington included, declare themselves in painting. The most New Yorkish New York art, it is sort of fair to say, is belligerently new and difficult on purpose. London's is sensational. Chicago's folky-funky. And a lot of art arriving from sun-bright Los Angeles has a glare-reflecting sheen.

Washington's art feels different. Ben L. Summerford's paintings are as Washingtonian as can be.

One of their Washingtonian qualities is that they are distant from the chic. Power here appears in dark suits and rep ties, and the first impression made by Summerford's learned oils -- which are now on view at American University Museum -- is as unfashionable. His tabletop still lifes aren't revolutionary, they're customary. They're also sun-touched and spontaneous. And dense with visual citations. While the authorities they cite -- C¿zanne, Braque, Vuillard, Matisse -- aren't those of the lawbooks, Summerford's pictures defer as dutifully to precedent as do Congress and the courts.

Summerford is 84. His art is frankly Francophilic, and he's been producing it in pretty much the same manner for more than 60 years.

First he sets his table-stage with standard still-life props (a wine bottle, an open book, a crumpled napkin, a lemon on a plate) and then, with unsmoothed color strokes and with critical attention grounded in emotion, he does his best to build afresh summarized depictions of the harmonies he sees.

Ben Summerford was born in Montgomery, Ala., on Feb. 3, 1924. He studied piano from age 9, and in his love of harmony, daily practice and emotional interpretation, he's still sort of a musician.

At the upper left corner of "Box, Clock, and Brushes" (1974), a picture in the key of brown, he paints clear glass against glass, and a bottle of painter's turpentine standing against the windowpane, and next to it a stapler, and also a funnel to fill the bottle, and a clock, and a vase, and brushes, and sun-fall on the tablecloth. Something else is there as well.

When you peer into a Summerford you see Washington's art history, or at least a major chunk of it, unashamedly staring back.

Here museums rule the art world. Summerford ignores the preferences of dealers and the dictates of the market, but pays homage to museums. Lessons he has learned from the pictures on their walls flicker in his art.

You could track his paintings back to 17th-century Holland (where Protestantism drove religious art from fashion, and still lifes of the tabletop appeared to fill the gap), or to the bold new colors of early-modernist France. Or, better still, you could begin at Yale University, circa 1905.

That's where Duncan Phillips encountered C. Law Watkins. Those two young men were classmates, and both were Pennsylvania gentlemen, sensitive and prosperous. Those two men and a third equally important -- Karl Knaths, a modern painter -- are this exhibition's ghosts. They haunt the paintings on the walls.

Duncan Phillips is the man who brought French painting to Washington. The Phillips Collection on 21st Street, the museum that he opened here in 1921, was the city's, and the nation's, first museum of modern art. C. Law Watkins helped him run it. Watkins (who would join him as deputy director there in 1929) also ran the Phillips Gallery Art School, where Karl Knaths taught each spring -- and where Summerford absorbed the dogmas of his art.

The easels of the Phillips school were set up in a sky-lit room on the gallery's third floor. Three things were mostly taught there: painting from the subject summarily and freely, with interacting colors, while maintaining at all times the most heartfelt sensitivity. The Phillips, said its founder, had a mission of beneficence. Its purpose was "assisting people to see beautifully as true artists see."

That's what Summerford learned there. And that's what he would teach.

Summerford first studied at the Phillips in the 1940s. Knaths -- a modernist from Provincetown, Mass., with close ties to Manhattan -- was the young painter's key instructor. After World War II, Watkins took the art school, its methods and its staff out of the museum to American University. Summerford would follow. In 1950, after a year-long fellowship studying art in Paris, Summerford became an instructor at AU.

He would continue teaching painting there -- colorful, self-questioning, attentive-to-the-subject, always-brush-stroke-conscious, Phillipsian easel painting -- for the next 38 years.

His AU students loved him. "Summerford," remembers one of them, Jack Rasmussen, 58, "was easily the best teacher. It was all about authenticity, and the substance of the paint, and the way your brush touched canvas, and the truth of your response to the color of the light. He made you question constantly what it was that your were doing.

"And Summerford could talk. He could talk about painting, this essentially nonverbal experience, and he could talk about it beautifully. It was his speech that set him most apart from the other Phillips teachers who'd come with Watkins to AU. Robert Gates, for instance, was famously silent. He'd look for 20 minutes at a still life you had painted, then he'd say, 'A little red,' and then he'd walk away."

Rasmussen, now director and curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, organized the Summerford display.

It is difficult today to overestimate the influence that the Phillips paintings, and the Phillips School, exerted on Washington, on collectors and museums, and especially on painters -- and not just on old-timey artists like Ben Summerford but also on the more advanced, hard-edge field painters of the Washington Color School.

Summerford has nothing against abstraction. It is just that he prefers, he writes, to ground his painter's choices on "something seen and experienced, not invented."

"I place no virtue," he continues, "on this need of mine to experience my subject in such a manner. It just means that I have found that visual contact with the subject is a surer route to an emotional level of response."

Be that as it may, the Summerfords at the Katzen share more than one might guess, at first, with the more famous abstractions of the Washington Color School.

Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland -- they painted stripes, not flower jugs on tabletops, but they, too, owe a debt to the lessons of the Phillips. That's where they learned their colors.

The small still lifes of Ben Summerford and the big field paintings of the Washington color painters may not look a lot alike. But the complicated interplay of very many colors fuels both of these varieties of Washingtonian art. They spring from the same root.

The 35 oil paintings in the Ben L. Summerford exhibition at American University Museum date from 1954 to 2007. They will remain on view at the Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW, through March 16. For information call 202-885-1300. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free.