‘Henry Mosler Rediscovered’ Reveals an Artist’s Journey

Among exhibitions inaugurating the handsome new Skirball Cultural Center is one devoted to a painter who made it against the odds. “Henry Mosler Rediscovered: A Nineteenth-Century American-Jewish Artist” traces the career of a German immigrant who established a reputation here in “The Cincinnati Renaissance” in the 1860s, a moment of artistic flowering in that middle-American city. He then became the first American artist acquired by the French government for its state collection of contemporary art, in 1879. He was also the grandfather of one of the founders of the Skirball museum, Audrey Skirball Kenis.

During his lifetime, realistic art--then considered “contemporary” by the establishment--was unhorsed by the modernist revolution. Mosler, along with hundreds of other academicians, was consigned to history’s stacks and forgotten. Recent moves to reevaluate this once-scorned salon art--combined with a current trend to celebrate ethnic heritage--certainly created the climate for this exhibition organized by Skirball curator Barbara Gilbert.

Born in 1841, Mosler lived to be almost 80. His family immigrated to the States when he was 8. Given the anti-Semitism recurrent in art circles as elsewhere during his lifetime, he certainly made his reputation on merit, possibly getting a leg up from his membership in the Freemasonry movement, as suggested in an essay in the catalog by art historian Albert Boime.

Although Mosler executed an occasional Mizrah--a symbolic Jewish prayer plaque--and portraits of a rabbi and his wife, there is no singular concentration in his work on Jewish themes. Viewers of a psychoanalytic bent might find significance in his attraction to historical costume and genre scenes that put heavy emphasis on ethnic or national identity, but that’s dicey. Mosler was a conventional artist who practiced within the customary parameters of his day. If he made any special concession to his surroundings, it was to assimilate and try to reflect them.

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The exhibition opens with a big, very American “Husking Bee.” Merry farm youths flirting, husking corn and boozing in a barn festooned with jack-o’-lanterns, it’s all very much in the spirit of the American painter Alfred Caleb Bingham. During the Civil War, Mosler was employed as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. During Reconstruction, he painted “The Lost Cause,” showing a farm boy who’d gone off to fight for glory returning to a ruined shack. Sentimental? Sure. Salon art, beamed to a bourgeois audience, was intended to pluck the heartstrings like a popular song. In this century, Mosler’s attractive protagonists, colorful characters and meticulous attention to detail were all annexed by the movies.

In 1863, the artist spent three years sharpening his skills in Paris and Dusseldorf before returning to the States with a brushier, more-assured style. In 1874, he departed again, starting two decades as an expatriate.

Based mainly in Munich, he polished his style until he could move seamlessly from an operetta potboiler like “Courtship” to a vigorous, Hals-like portrait such as “Heidi.”

Pictures like “Approaching Storm” may be flimsy anecdotes but they reflect Mosler’s growing ability to capture space with remarkable solidity. Up to now Mosler had painted a lot of pretty, curiously antiseptic women. In Europe he made a breakthrough to sensuality in “Quadroon.” Depicting a woman of mixed race, it’s so oddly poignant and sexy, you barely notice how heroic it is.

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That larger-than-life quality takes hold in his big “Return of the Shrimp Fishers.” Mosler summered in France and was fascinated, like Gauguin--Mosler’s contemporary, though much more avant-garde--with the character of the Breton peasants. This picture, set on the Normandy coast, attempts none of Gauguin’s formal innovations but it does capture a wonderful earthy intensity.

What emerges from this exhibition is an artist capable of surpassing himself and his commitment to the conventions of his time. In 1870, he’d painted what should have been a very corny picture, “Just Moved.” It shows a little family taking a break from the tedious excitement of moving into a new dwelling. The work takes on such an unexpectedly touching aura we’re not surprised to learn that it marked a move to New York by the artist and his family.

When Mosler returned to the States in 1894, his most interesting pictures were serene landscapes and interiors. A big one called “Geraniums in the Window” is really the picture of a man finally content to be at home with the everyday.

* Skirball Cultural Center Museum, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., to June 2, closed Mondays. (310) 440-4500.