A visit to Mark Beard’s studio is like discovering Michelangelo’s lair: oil paintings layer the walls, lifedrawings litter the table at the feet of heroic bronzes; ceramics, architectural maquettes are everywhere; virtuosity, in every medium. And then it gets even more interesting.
Mark’s talent is so overflowing that, years ago, he needed to channel himself into alter egos. Mark invented the persona of “Bruce Sargeant,” an imagined English artist, contemporary of E. M. Forster, Rupert Brooke, and John Sloan. Mark also created Bruce Sargeant’s teacher, Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon, a 19th-century French Academist. Michallon also taught Edith Thayer Cromwell, an American avant-gardeist; and Brechtolt Steeruwitz, the German Expressionist, a most complex personality. Peter Coulter, the newest persona, represents the "third generation" as he was taught briefly by Thayer Cromwell and Streerowitz. The style of each of these artists is individual, brilliant and true.
Mark Beard is unprecedented, but not singular. Accomplished in every medium, he is more than a complete artist—he is at least six. 

 

Study for Athletes, date unknown	Study for Athletes Winter, date unknown	Study for Athletes II, date unknown
Mounting the Horse, 2013 Sold	Fencing Class, date unknown	Three Hunters and a Horse, date unknown
Two Men Standing , date unknown	Outing with Horses and Bicycles, date unknown	Outing with Horses and Motorcycle, date unknown
Untitled (Two Youths Arm Wrestling), date unknown	Two Gymnasts in Handstands, date unknown	Tumblers, date unknown
Two Gymnasts, One Handstanding, date unknown	Lt. Edward Thierry with Gray, 1926	Harvard Athletes, date unknown
Pugilists, date unknown	Group of Athletes, date unknown	Single Rower, date unknown
Young Man wirth Rifle, Boots and Fishing Poles, date unknown	Unidentified English Swimmer, date unknown	Study for the Riverbank, date unknown
Dressing Room III, Detail, date unknown	Athletes Wrestling I, date unknown	Athletes, date unknown
Athletes Wrestling II, date unknown	Shotput, date unknown

Brechtoldt Streeruwitz, 1890 - 1973

Brecholdt Streeruwitz, perhaps less influenced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon than Bruce Sargeant or Edith Cromwell, was nonetheless its product.  Born in Vienna in 1985 into a burgerlich jeweler's family, he began regular drawing classes at the age of fifteen at the Kunstgewerbeschule.  The Streeruwitz family would have wished for him to conyinue in the family business with his brother, but his own artistic impulses made that prospect impossible.

At the outbreak of World War I, Streeruwitz enlisted in the Dragoons.  He was sent to the Slovenian-Italian front, where a shrapnel wound disfigured the left side of his face and forced him out of the war.  At the conclusion of hostilities he spent time in Berlin and finally London, where he enrolled in the evening classes at Slade in 1920.  He began a life of back-and-forth between Vienna and London.  He married the upper-class daughter of the Mayor of Baden, with whom he had two children.  The marriage was unsucessful, however, and his wife remained in the family house on the Colloredogasse.

Streeruwitz was apparently not well-liked at the Slade.  Bruce Sargeant noted in a 1936 letter to Edith Cromwell that Streeruwitiz had a knack for saying the "perfectly wrong thing", and after two years under Michallon, lack of funds obliged Streeruwitz to return to Austria.  In 1934 the Viennese Civil War forced Streeruwitz to petition his former colleague Edith Cromwell for a place in her St. Ives cottage.  Cromwell, who was a resident in the summers only, reluctantly agreed.

Streeruwitz remained there until 1937, when a small work of his was included in Hitler's Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Bolstered by this perverse credential, he gained a teaching position in the art department of a London Boys' school.  Unhappy and embittered, he clung to the position through World War II, when he created his "Blitz" paintings. In 1950, interest in the artists condemned by Hitler as degenerate brought Streeruwitz a commission to decorate the dining room of a prominent New York Jewish family in their East 78th Street townhouse.  It was the beginning of a series of moderate successes.  He lived and showed in New York until his death in 1973, painting his "outmoded" Expressionism through Pop Art and the beginnings of Minimalism.

Der Trauerzug Franz Josephes II, date unknown	die Languste , 1931	Funeral, date unknown
Horse Skull, date unknown	Untitled (Man in Uniform), date unknown	Untitled Figure, date unknown
Phantommann, date unknown

Edith Thayer Cromwell, 1893 - 1962

Edith ("Eddy") Thayer Cromwell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1893 and died in St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1962.  The premature death of her mother left Cromwell the only child of a liberal father who encouraged her artistic pursuits, sending her to study at the Slade in London at the age of nineteen. 

It was there that she encountered Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon.  Cromwell responded to her teacher's strict discipline and the two remained friends until Michallon's death in the Cornish cottage she would inherit from him 1930. 

At the onset of World War I, Edith returned to America and moved after a time in Boston to New York, where she met Charles Demuth and Mardsen Hartley.  They took her to Alfred Steieglitz's gallery, 291 and introduced her to the American avant-garde.

After the first World War and the death of her father, Cromwell returned to the Slade in London and assisted Michallon in his evening classes, where she met young Bruce Sargeant in 1920.  Cromwell developed an immediate rapport with the sensitive young man, encouraging him to study full-time and bringing him under the wing of the rigorous Michallon.  She painted Sargeant's portrait in 1925 and remained his lifelong friend and confidante.  In 1930 she moved to New York where she lived part-time, dividing her summers between St. Ives and landscape painting trips to France and New England.

Cromwell began mixing with a glamorous circle of jet-setting women and embarked upon a series of affairs.  She later explored exotic themes ih her work.  In the mid-'50s a series of heart attacks forced Edith into semi-retirement, where she painted until her death in 1962.

Horse and Rider, 1926	Male Standing in the Woods, 1925	Still Life with Peppers, 1929
The Bison Screen, 1927	Trout Study II, 1921	Untitled (Bison), date unknown
Untitled Portrait	MB 064, 1929	Untitled Female Nude, Standing, date unknown
Untitled Landscape II, date unknown	MB 067, 1930	Workmen, 1925

Hippolyte - Alexandre Michallon, 1849 -1930

The long and peripatetic artistic career of Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon began in a conventional fashion.  The only son of  prosperous bourgeois parents in Tours, he first studied drawing with his mother, an accomplished amateur painter of insects.  His father, an undertaker who appreciated his son's talent and supported his ambition to become a painter, sent him to Paris at age sixteen to enroll in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot (1786-1868), an eminent history painter and professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with whom he studied for three years, until Picot's death.   Under his aging teacher's guidance and tutelage, Michallon entered the preliminary stages of the Prix de Rome contest at the Ecole three times, winning an Honorable Mention in 1869 for his composition entitled The Solider of the Marathon. 

For the next twenty years Michallon regualarly exhibited paintings on historiacl and biblical themes at the Paris Salon, as well as commissioned portraits.  By his own account, the most ambitious work of Michallon's career was a thirty-foot canvas depicting Noah's Ark, which he exhibited in the Salon in 1875.  Michallon began painting atmospheric but zoologically correct images of exotic animals in the wild.  These achieved a certain popularity among French and foreign collectors alike, providing Michallon with financial security for the first time in his career.

Michallon moved to England in 1893.  His outstanding technical skills esily earned him a position on the faculty of the Slade School of Art in 1900.   The craze for animal paintings proved short-lived.  He continued to teach at Slade for the next two decades, but his classes gradually dwindled in size as the academic approach and methods he espoused went from outmoded to downright unpopular.  Finally in 1922, finding himself reduced to a single pupil, the talented young American Bruce Sargeant, he retired from Slade, persuading Sargeant to leave with him and undergo private instruction at home.  

Several years later he retired to a cottage at St. Ives, Cornwall, where he lived quietly until his death in 1930, forgotten by all but a few former students, among them Edith Thayer Cromwell, who nursed him during his final year, and Bruce Sargeant, who designed and executed the bronze memorial plaque in his honor in the tiny church of St. Ethylburga-by-the-Sea, where he is buried in the churchyard.

Wheelock Whitney
New York, NY
September 2004

La Chasse aux Cygnes, 1892	Le Martyr de Saint Sebastien, date unknown	Pelican, date unknown
The American Buffalo, 1875	Vers L'Arche, date unknown

Peter Coulter

Brechtholdt Streeruwitz and Edith Thayer Cromwell's friendship in New York led to a shared pedagogy.  They taught a program of "Art in the Schools" in their last years.  Their most successful pupil was Peter Coulter.  The influence of their Slade training, extending back to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts-influenced teacher Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon, is expressed in Peter Coulter's painting, King Leopold's Ghost.  Peter Coulter worked with political elements of holocausts such as the Armenian and Belgian.  His work with the American slave trade and his many installations include his recent monumental work showing black rubber hands piled in the center of a gallery floor  to express the horrors of the 1890s Congo holocaust.  

As a friend and colleague of Peter Coulter, it is interesting for me to see a didactic lineage that we both share as well as an almost hereditary connection through my great Uncle Bruce and his colleagues.  Through I have not had the successes of Peter Coulter, we have shared models, exhibitions and good times.  It was Peter who introduced me to the novel use of Polaroid transfers, and for that I am grateful.

Mark Beard
New York, NY
October 2004

15 Minutes of Shame, c.2000	King Leopold's Ghost, date unknown	Mortality, 2012
Subliminal Art (Buy Art), 2008

charcoal on paper

MB 020, 1989	MB 025, 1997	MB 027, 2007
MB 028, 2007	MB 030, 2002	MB 031, 2007
MB 033, 1998	MB 034, 2008	MB 036, 2008
MB 037, 2008	MB 040, 2009	MB 041, 2009
MB 043, 2008	MB 045, 2008	MB 047, 2007
MB 051, 2000	MB 053, 2010	MB 054, 2010
MB 059, 2006	MB 072	MB 056, 2005
MB 060, 1998	MB 062, 2005	MB 063, 2002
MB 065, 2000	MB 066, 2001	MB 068, 2001
MB 069, 2001	MB 070	MB 071, 2001