For Over 30 Years, Art of Enduring Value . . .
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BIOGRAPHY: HERNDON DAVIS | ||
Born October 27,
1901, Wynnewood OK Herndon Davis was born into the transitional West. He spent the next 61 years living large, a product of his times and an influence on them. During the first half of the twentieth century, the American West was in flux, still highly romanticized, even mythic in the popular imagination, but simultaneously struggling to function as a modern economic force. While Davis’ personal history reflects that larger struggle, his style of presenting his personal history guaranteed a colorful tale, Dickensian in scope and scale, amorphous in date and detail, romantic, even mythic. For Davis, the facts never got in the way of a good story. Oklahoma was still Indian Territory when Davis was born there. His grandfather claimed a first-cousinship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, but that didn’t lend much luster to the family’s circumstances. His parents are described as both “ranchers” and “farmers”; in either role, they moved repeatedly, thirteen times in as many years. Within this nomadic existence, Davis started sketching “as a toddler.” Although the artist later claimed he “could plow a pretty good furrow,” he also hated milking cows. He left home at fourteen. Davis headed for Kansas City, Missouri, shining shoes to earn money for his first art lessons. He surfaced later in Chicago, where he served as an engraver’s apprentice and worked as a commercial artist for Armour & Company. Sometime later he was harvesting fields to fund a short stint at William Jewell College in Liberty, Kansas. Davis first saw Denver in 1920 as a U.S. Army private; troops were stationed here to keep the peace during a streetcar workers’ strike. Davis served three hitches in the army, where his art aptitude was recognized and fostered. Stationed back in Washington, D.C., Davis attended the War College (working as a draftsman on secret military maps of Japan and China) and, briefly, the Corcoran School of Fine Art. Davis had great facility for capturing character in the human face, and his gregarious nature helped bring portrait commissions from the high-ranking military personnel who were also his drinking buddies. Sometime in the 1920s he studied at Yale (again, briefly), working as a restaurant cashier at the old Taft Hotel Grill to finance his studies. By the mid-1920s Davis was in New York City, living in Greenwich Village. He later cited stints at the Art Students League and the National Academy during this period. In his own picaresque version of events, he earned food money by drawing pastels of burlesque queens. For better money (if not better story-telling), Davis also did vast quantities of commercial illustration. During these years, his crosshatched drawings appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, and the Washington Daily News (where he worked with Ernie Pyle), as well as Forum and McClure’s magazines. In 1929 he met Edna Juanita Cotter, another artist in his Greenwich Village apartment building. “Nita” was a British subject from Jamaica, eleven years Davis’ senior and, soon, his wife. The chronology gets tangled again but according to Davis’ much-later Denver Post account, he came to Denver in 1936 (apparently with Nita) to visit his mother. “That is a polite way of saying that an unemployed newspaper artist from Washington D.C. came home to eat,” he demurred. Davis’ vintage first-person version of The Face on the Barroom Floor followed: The Central City Opera House Association hired me to do a series of paintings and sketches of the famous mining town, which they were then rejuvenating as an opera center and tourist attraction. I stayed at the Teller House while working up there, and the whim struck me to paint a face on the floor of the old Teller House barroom. In its mining boom heyday it was just such a floor as the ragged artist [used?] in H. Antoine d’Arcy's famous old poem. But the hotel manager and the bartender would have none of such tomfoolery. They refused me permission to paint the face. Still the idea haunted me, and in my last night in Central City, I persuaded the bellboy Jimmy Libby to give me a hand. After midnight, when the coast was clear, we slipped down there. Jimmy held a candle for me and I painted as fast as I could. Yet it was 3 AM when I finished. By the dawn’s early light I lit out for Denver.* Some other pertinent details: The floor-painting option probably wasn’t proposed, discussed or refused before it was executed. Herndon Davis had had a furious argument that day with Ann Evans, director of the restoration project. The artist who once sketched burlesque queens had opted for grimly realistic depictions of the gunslingers, gamblers, hookers and struggling miners who predated the Opera House Association’s white-gloved interest in the small town. Evans, granddaughter of former Colorado territorial Governor John Evans and nicknamed the “Duchess” of Denver society, insisted he delete the gritty detail. Whether Davis quit or was fired during the fracas isn’t certain, but either way he was out of the job. Bellboy Jimmy Libby (who may actually have been a busboy named Joe) egged Davis on, saying, “You’re finished here anyway. Why not give them something to remember you by?”* Davis didn’t start work immediately. While the sixteen-year-old Libby sanded the floor varnish off with a rough brick, the artist got primed on Cuba Libres. Once lubricated, he painted Nita’s face, and “lit out for Denver,” claiming later he’d feared having to clean the floor if he lingered. He also faced trouble back in town. Nita wouldn’t be happy about the lost job, and she proved to be even more unhappy to learn that her own distinctive features were decorating the floor of a bar. How quickly she found out about The Face remains a mystery. As it turned out, the hotel management loved the painting and quickly supplied two semi-overlapping stories to explain its existence. The first was that the painting was the impetus for the sentimental H. Antoine d’Arcy poem about a dying vagabond-cowboy painting his sweetheart’s image (conversely, Davis cited the schmaltzy poem as his own inspiration in his 1954 Denver Post account). The second and truer explanation: a drunk painted The Face. Certainly the artist was drunk at the time. If Davis signed his work the night he painted it, the signature soon went missing, which added romantic mystery as the quaintly pretty visage started attracting sightseers. In 1937, Davis (again, with or without Nita?) headed for Puerto Rica, where he found work as art director of El Imparcial, a San Juan newspaper. The job soon ended when the paper’s offices were bombed. Davis emerged unscathed and by February 1938, his “Puerto Rican Sketches in Gouache” were on exhibit in the Denver Art Museum’s Chappell House at 1300 Logan Street. Whether Davis came back to Denver with his artwork isn’t clear, but his mother was apparently still living here, and Davis and Nita owned a home at 1323 Kalamath. Davis later claimed that after painting The Face, he didn’t return to Denver until 1946 and then was stunned at its fame and irate because he wasn’t receiving credit. He told of going up to Central City in 1946 and signing the now-renowned artwork, but claimed that in the interests of romantic mystery and tourism, the signature was removed as soon as he left the building. Perhaps at Nita’s own insistence, Davis never credited her as his inspiration, saying instead, “It was just a face… If it happens to look like some one, it is just a happenstance.” However, when two Denver buddies tried to commission him to paint identical faces in their homes, Davis refused, offering to paint floor-portraits of their own wives rather than his. Both men maintained the secret of The Face’s identity until after Davis’ death. Davis lived in Denver for many of his remaining years, working as illustrator at both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, sometimes simultaneously. This had to be a major juggling act, since the afternoon broadsheet Post and the morning tabloid News were locked in a long, bitter and often ugly feud for journalistic dominance. His column-and-illustration combo, “Once Upon a Time,” appeared in the Post with tales of the old west; his society sketches of the contemporary west appeared in the Sunday News. Art remained only one of his trades: he worked doing layout for printing shops as well. Downtown Denver suited Davis. He had alley-shortcuts to many of the saloons then lining the streets, often swapping portrait work to clear his outstanding bar tabs. For example, at the Keg, he painted the owner’s likeness on a barstool seat: “Now everyone can sit on my face,” said that delighted recipient.
The history of the west fascinated Davis and he recorded his visions of it both visually and verbally. A series of watercolor paintings of unique area buildings became one of Davis’ means to explore local and regional history, of which he had a rich understanding. Besides his continuing illustration work, many other activities occupied the artist over the years. Davis received a White House commission for a portrait of Eisenhower (who had ties to Denver through his wife Mamie). At the old Meininger’s art supply store, many of the artists’ portraits painted on palettes were done by Davis. He also had mural work all over the city: at the tearoom of the Denver Dry Goods store, in a basement “amusement room” for attorney-pal Fred M. Mazzulla; at Denver’s old Juvenile Hall (“Americans Who Have Triumphed Over Childhood Adversity”) and in the Denver Press Club, among other locations. In 1962, Herndon Davis was back in Washington D.C. working on plans for a massive mural for the Smithsonian Institute when he suffered a fatal heart attack. He’s buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver. Nita Davis died in 1975, triggering a retelling of the story behind The Face on the Barroom Floor, which still generates enough interest to be revisited in the Denver and Colorado press every five years or so. PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY: Text
© Renna Shesso & the Savageau Gallery 2001 | ||
