Holmead Phillips
You
ask yourself, "What are American art experts waiting for to 'recuperate'
an artist who is such an honor to their national art?"
—Poet Stephane Rey, writing about a Holmead retrospective in Brussels, 1982.
Holmead Phillips (1889-1975) is an enigma in his own country. Born in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, he spent most of his long life in transit between America and Europe, having chosen the artist's life in 1912, at age 23. The son of a prominent midstate businessman, Holmead's wanderings took him to art colonies on the Eastern seaboard and to prolonged residence in Paris, Bruges, Munich, and Brussels, as well as to New York City and Rye, New York, where he lived during WWII.
Holmead has been called "the original American Expressionist" by German art historian Rainer Zimmerman. He achieved his technique with pigments he mixed and applied with a palette knife, becoming what Francois Monod called in 1927 a "born colorist" with a "virile, simple, and brusque" style. His chosen subjects—landscape, architecture, allegory and portrait—are both vivid and tortured, strong and tender.
For the first time in 2003, the works in this exhibit finally returned to Holmead's homeland, thanks to loans from private collectors and the Paula Modersohn Becker museum in Bremen, Germany. Susquehanna Art Museum's 2004 Holmead exhibit hopes to continue to bring recognition to this unsuspected "Pennsylvania Treasure."
Welcome.