Ralph Albert Blakelock “Still a Sensation”
By Louis Salerno
They came from across the country, and some from other nations. A line formed in front of our building. The gallery showrooms were filled beyond capacity. Enthusiasm for his work was feverish. Before the evening was over, nearly every painting was sold—opening night at Questroyal for the visionary painter Ralph Albert Blakelock in 2005.
Passion for Blakelock’s work has not waned since his death in 1919. At the turn of the twentieth century, paintings by the artist set two American auction records. During the famous Catholina Lambert sale in 1916, the total realized for the Blakelock canvases exceeded that for the Monets, the Renoirs, the Botticellis, and the Pissarros. And at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, a Blakelock achieved the highest price at a Sotheby’s sale in New York, selling for more than $3,500,000.
He was institutionalized and his family was impoverished just as the art world was beginning to understand the full extent of his virtuosity. In 1902, an article in the Brush and Pencil stated, “It has been said of him, that he stands quite alone among American artists as an original creative genius.” In 1916, the Nation wrote, “In the persons of such men as Poe or Blakelock, American art seems to flare up and consume the boundary-posts of convention and become a law unto itself.” In 1942, the New York Times said, “By every right he deserves a niche equal in importance to the positions held by Winslow Homer, Albert P. Ryder and Thomas Eakins.” The New Yorker, in 1947, proclaimed “the strongest individualists in the history of art. Homer, Blakelock, Eakins, and Ryder.”
Our most prominent artists acknowledged his brilliance. George Bellows considered Blakelock a genius and remarked that “he made a strong impression not only upon American art, but upon the art of the world.” Marsden Hartley said his work was a “plausible basis for a genuine American art.” Blakelock was abstract expressionist Franz Kline’s favorite artist, and both Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth collected his work.
A century has passed since Blakelock’s death. Art continues to be reinvented, and the world is a different place. But I continue to be amazed by the number of visitors to the gallery who stand before a Blakelock in awe. I believe that his art awakens a primordial instinct that eludes and defies explanation. It impacts the thinking person of the twenty-first century as profoundly as it did in the nineteenth century. I am also convinced that one hundred years from today, his work will remain just as meaningful and as potent.
