Arthur Diehl "Going Down"
Certain outsize personalities seem to transcend time and communicate their vividness across the decades. Discovering such a tantalizing one as Arthur Diehl’s reminds us that someone’s ability to dominate the cultural scene with charisma and charm wasn’t invented in this Internet age of instant fame.
The UA Art Museum celebrates the life of Arthur Vidal Diehl (1870-1929) through his art until August 7. The energy and expertise of his art are displayed on dandelion-colored walls, a bright hue repeated in Diehl’s skies, sand dunes, architectural details and a myriad of other rendered surfaces. The paintings include radiant landscapes, stylized portraits and whimsical, dreamlike scenes and allegories.
Display cases contain sketches, ephemera, hand drawn postcards, prints, an unpublished children’s book with delightful watercolor illustrations, photographs, letters, newspaper and magazine articles and a collection of tiny framed oils that he painted because he wanted to “offer something for everyone in every price range.”
Diehl was a talented artist, gregarious entertainer, genteel philosopher and scholar, who painted, played the piano and told stories, often at the same time. The mystery is how the prodigious output of such an exuberant presence could be packed into boxes and hidden away in basements for 50 years.
After his death in 1929, according to his granddaughter Eugenia “Genii” Pell, an artist and Tucson resident, his widow and son (her father) kept the Provincetown (MA) studio open for a year, to try to sell some of the paintings. After that, “they just went into boxes. A lot of them weren’t framed or anything. They were just there in the basement in boxes.” About 12 years ago, her parents moved to Arizona and brought everything with them. And they said, “Well it’s all yours. You’re the only one who will do anything with it.”
Lauren Rabb, curator of the UA Art Museum, chose the specific works for the show from the many rescued from obscurity, cleaned up and framed by Pell. Interviewed in a video about the show, Rabb explains that, “The purpose of this exhibition on the life and times of Arthur Diehl was to highlight an artist who is not as well known as he should be, but also to illustrate what life was like for a very special and unusual artist at the turn of the last century. He found a way to make a living at a time when artists were really struggling, and he was fantastic at it.”
And if Arthur Diehl was alive and painting, philosophizing, playing the piano, inventing pithy aphorisms and entertaining visitors to his studio now (“Friends, I greet you” was his welcome), he’d probably be a sensation for the speed at which he could execute his detailed artworks. One apocryphal story about that particular skill tells how a ship was going down off the coast of Massachusetts where he was living, and seeing this, he ran back to his studio and actually finished the painting before the ship sank. Another example of this facility is a tender, almost impressionistic portrait of his son painted in 15 minutes shortly before Diehl’s death
The museum, located at 1031 N. Olive Rd., is open Tuesday through Friday, 9am to 5pm; Saturday and Sunday, Noon to 4pm. Admission is $5; students, faculty, staff with ID and children are free. Details at 621-7567 and ArtMuseum.Arizona.edu.
