Halsey-McCallum Foundation

Chapter 1

Popular artists grow old in glory more or less deserved, while the unrecognized, if they are to ascend to their own demands, work very hard indeed. For an underappreciated artist, still working is a testimony to the power and the primacy of art itself and a necessary hedge against deflation. Good artists, known or unknown, can't retire, they mustn't, for they remain professional. . . which means, total dedication to substantiating quality and total personal investment for its own sake.(3)

Until the month of his death in February of 1999, William Melton Halsey continued to work daily in oil stick on paper, producing strong abstract compositions in bold, characteristic reds and yellows (fig.1). These final works were the closing expressions of more than sixty years of artistic fervor and unwavering dedication to abstract painting. Even at age eighty four, Halsey completed two or three of these small paintings each day, working diligently in an open studio room, scratching, smearing, and drawing. "There's no subject." he said, "No center of interest: no head, no figure. All over space and color space--an arrangement like stained glass. I like oil-sticks on paper; I can revisit them in a day. I frequently go back and work things out."(4) For Halsey, returning to the studio each day to begin a new piece or to continue working on another became a necessary function of daily life. He frequently told family and friends that making art was his reason to get up every morning.

For over seventy years, Halsey lived in the Southern historic port of Charleston, South Carolina, a city well known for its antebellum homes and Confederate landmarks. The third son of Ashley and Eleanor Loeb Halsey, William Melton was born on March 13, 1915 in his mother's family home at 51 George Street in the historic downtown district. For most of his life, Halsey lived within walking distance of his birthplace, but one could never accuse him of conforming to the ideals and traditions of the surrounding community. In a conservative, historical setting, William Halsey became an unconventional contemporary painter, devoting himself to abstract compositions. Until recently, his painting style found little support in Charleston's art galleries and artists' groups, yet Halsey continued to work and teach there in order to educate and introduce the local public to examples and ideals of modern art.

Despite notable success in prominent New York galleries and opportunities to exhibit in major museums, Halsey refused to leave his native town. Just as he remained loyal to the school of abstraction, he also remained loyal to Charleston. The rough textures, fading pastels, peeling plaster and decaying structures of the city, combined with the clean lines and unique architectural styles of the historic district, provided him with a strong sense of color, design, and forms he could use throughout his career. Halsey later described the inspiration in his home town: "Growing up in a Charleston impoverished and neglected, surrounded by flaking plaster, mortarless brick walls, old tiles, and rotting wood, I saw them as delight rather than decay. Ever since, I have carried on a love affair with fragments, shards, ruins, bits of past civilizations."(5)

Halsey's love of broken and worn materials encouraged his later interests in textures, sculpture and collage, but the local colors and street scenes inspired his early drawings. He was introduced to the idea of drawing cityscapes and street corners by Elizabeth O'Neil Verner, a prominent Charleston artist who was his first art teacher. Verner recognized Halsey's talent when he was just thirteen, after his mother showed her the copies he made of living room paintings.(6) Young Halsey's work impressed Verner, who graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and returned to Charleston to continue her work and teach art classes at the Charleston Museum. Noting Halsey's strong sense of line and proportion, she encouraged him to take her free classes and accompany her on her drawing outings in downtown Charleston. While Verner taught the young student basic techniques and processes of etching and engraving, her major influence was in making him work from life, to paint and draw what he could see in the world rather than what he could copy.(7)

Verner's influence is evident in Halsey's early watercolors and drawings (Figs. 2 and 3). Her emphasis on the everyday local street scenes, often including figures of women walking, emerges in Halsey's compositions. Although his view and treatment of the subject are markedly different, it is clear that while accompanying Verner on drawing sessions in the city, Halsey found a personal interest in rows of houses, building facades, street corners, lamps, and passersby. Halsey continued to use the cityscape as one of his primary subjects through the mid 1950s, but the images changed as he experimented with new painting styles.

Halsey discovered abstraction in 1930 while studying under Edward I. R. Jennings, one of the few modernists in Charleston. Jennings, who trained at Columbia University under Arthur Wesley Dow, introduced Halsey to modernist theory and ideals of form and color harmony.(8) Under Jenning's instruction, Halsey produced one of his first non-representational paintings entitled, The Live Oak (Fig. 4). Employing curves and colors similar to Jenning's (Fig. 5), Halsey created a stylized image of an oak on a hill-like cliff, overlooking fields and a mountain range beneath a gradated sky. An advanced composition and style for such a young student, this work suggests Halsey was motivated at a young age to break from what he later called, "the prevailing influence of the old Charleston picturesque" style of painting.(9)

When Halsey was eighteen, he became interested in seeking broader training at art schools in the North. However, his family, disapproving of his plans to attend art school, convinced him to seek art education nearby. In 1932 he reluctantly enrolled at the University of South Carolina where his uncle, William D. Melton, had served as president. At the University, he actively pursued painting and became involved in the school theater, frequently working on set designs. Despite his efforts to find serious artistic challenges and instruction, within two years Halsey completed almost all of the art courses and felt unchallenged and restricted by the conservative department. At the time, the University of South Carolina offered no life classes, and the instructors strongly discouraged Halsey's attempts to hire nude models on his own.(10)
Feeling unchallenged and bored with the curriculum and general education requirements, Halsey decided to leave the University.(11)

After leaving the University of South Carolina in 1934, Halsey attended a summer art school at Boothbay Harbor, Maine where he took landscape classes in pencil and painting. When the program ended, he returned to South Carolina and moved to Greenville to take life classes under the prominent local portrait artist, Margaret Moore Walker.(12) Increasingly unsatisfied with his instructors and impatiently awaiting an opportunity to study outside South Carolina, Halsey began applying to art schools. At this time, he wrote to Laura M. Bragg, former head of the Charleston Museum, including a mature personal statement on his expectations for art instructors and art school:

I want somebody who will not so much instruct me, tell me what to do, as help me to do what I want to do. I need primarily a great deal of work from the nude model, just ground-work in draftsmanship, and contact with real artists, modern artists who know what's going on in the world of art. For Charleston, though I love her very much as a city, is, as you know, still practically in the china painting era, as far as art is considered. I don't want to be influenced by other artists, imitate popular advanced methods, but I want to see what's going on, get a thorough foundation, and then come back and work out my own method for myself. Whether I'm a modernist, non-objective, or realist, I want to say what I've got to say in my own way. Perhaps I haven't anything to say yet, but I believe I will have something some day.(13)

Focused for a nineteen year old aspiring artist from Charleston, South Carolina, Halsey possessed a strong will and devotion to further his passion in art. His dedication to modernism and interest in studying out-of-state withstood criticisms from Charleston friends and discouragements from local teachers who did not support or understand his need to leave South Carolina. Even Elizabeth O'Neil Verner, who studied in Philadelphia, wrote to Halsey when he was considering New York art schools, urging him to stay home:

I think the best thing I can think of for you is to stay in Charleston for one year and work out your salvation here. I do not know of any artists in New York who have been more successful than the Charleston group, and by this I do not speak of myself but of Edward von Siebold Dingle, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, Alfred Hutty and others. You would in no way rival or conflict with any of this group but to my mind would be a great addition to it. . .I think very often we make the mistake of going too far afield.(14)

Despite local pressures to remain in South Carolina, Halsey decided to pursue studies in the fall of 1935 at the Art Students' League in New York. However, the summer of 1935, Halsey met Russian stage designer Sergei Soudeikine, who convinced him to attend the Boston Museum School. Soudeikine worked as the principal set designer for the Metropolitan Opera, and came to Charleston to make drawings of the city for the first production of Porgy and Bess. He encouraged Halsey to apply to the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts because his friend, Alexander Iacovleff, was the director there. Halsey later explained, "Discussing art and art schools, Soudeikine remarked that he would recommend only one art school in the country: the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts."(15)

Impressed with Soudekeine's personal work and knowledge of art, Halsey took his advice, applied and enrolled at the Boston school. He studied there from 1935 to 1939, under Alexander Iacovleff , Lewis Rubinstein and Karl Zerbe. From 1935 to 1937, Iacovleff instructed Halsey in basic principles of composition, draftsmanship, perspective, anatomy, and fresco painting. (Figs. 6 and 7). This strictly academic and traditional training was of particular benefit to Halsey, who lacked the artistic background many of his fellow students shared. Remembering his early days in Boston, Halsey later recalled, "Moving to Boston gave me a terrific inferiority complex because I realized a lot of the students there came out of high school and were from the Boston area, and these students several years younger than I was had good training. In their public schools they had art education, which we never had in South Carolina, and they also had access to the Boston Museum and classes at the Museum School . . . I felt as if I was behind, which I was, and it took me a while to catch up."

Halsey worked diligently to master basic skills and concentrate on specific mediums. During his first year of classes, he enrolled in a fresco painting course, even though Iacovleff thought he was not advanced enough for the class, and became proficient enough to work as a class assistant during his second year.(16) In the summer of 1937, he focused upon these classroom skills to complete his first commission, which was part of a government W.P.A. project to restore the historic Dock Street Theater in Charleston.(17) For decorative renovations, Halsey created frescoes for the bar room, courtyard, and the doors of the theater. "None of what I did was original," he later said. "The murals in the bar room were adapted from some of Hogarth's prints from the Rake's series, because they were the right period, the fresco in the courtyard was taken from the masks of comedy and tragedy from an old theater in Charleston, and the decorations over the door were period pieces too . . . but I was very excited about getting a commission to do anything at all."(18)

In the fall of 1937, after completing an active summer in Charleston, Halsey returned to the Museum School to discover newfound appreciation for his work. Alexander Iacovleff had resigned from his position as director of the Museum School, and German-born painter Karl Zerbe replaced him. Zerbe immediately showed interest in Halsey's work, and recognizing his experience and proficiency in the fresco medium, awarded him a position as Assistant Instructor of Drawing and Painting Fresco during the 1938-1939 academic year.(19)

Under Zerbe's instruction, Halsey began teaching and working under a revolutionized curriculum at the Museum School. Comparing the different academic approaches of Iacovleff and Zerbe, Halsey later said, "Zerbe was a total contrast. He was primarily a painter and was interested in paint and color and not in draftsmanship, so we [students] got a very different viewpoint." Halsey repeatedly insisted that he valued his educational experience at the Museum School because it combined two years of instruction in academic draftsmanship with another two years of technical introductions to color and texture. In 1960, he commented on the benefits of his education: "My art training was traditional, and I am glad it was. I am convinced that the best modern painters are those with traditional backgrounds. Before you can depart from anything, you must know what you are departing from."(20)

Halsey also credited his experience at the Boston Museum School with encouraging him to submit art to museum exhibitions and teaching him the benefits of traveling abroad. During his fourth and final year, Halsey's painting, Condemned, was selected by the jurors for the Eighteenth International Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. This honor marked Halsey's first inclusion in a major museum exhibition. Furthermore, upon his graduation in May, the Boston Museum school bestowed upon him their highest honor, the James William Paige Fellowship for study abroad.(21)

Awarded only when the faculty agreed upon a worthy student, the Paige Fellowship was presented, on average, every four or five years. Its stipulations required that it be used for two years of travel and study in Europe, so Halsey made preliminary plans to rent a studio in Paris for the fall. On June 5, Halsey married fellow South Carolinian and Museum School art student Corrie McCallum in Boston, and the two made plans to move to Europe. They immediately took their honeymoon to Pittsfiend, Massachusetts, where Halsey worked on his second commission, a set of three frescoed panels in the geological room of the Berkshire Museum. Laura M. Bragg, former director if the Charleston Museum and new director of the Berkshire, commissioned the work, and simultaneously offered Halsey his first one-man exhibition at the museum in July. Through this exhibition, Halsey met Hudson D. Walker, a prominent gallery owner in New York, who agreed to represent his work in the Hudson D. Walker Gallery for one year.

The promise of further study on the Paige Fellowship, museum experience and gallery representation indicated that Halsey might soon find success in the American art scene. But historic events would interfere. War broke out in Europe, and one of the first ships torpedoed carried a Boston Museum School student. The school immediately said it would not be held responsible for putting students in danger in Europe, and consequently withdrew the fellowship.(22) Desperate to save the scholarship, Halsey and his new wife asked for permission to use the grant in Mexico. Reluctantly, the school agreed to ignore the European stipulation and honored their request, urging them to set sail for Vera Cruz (23)

In September of 1939, Halsey and McCallum settled in Mexico City. They found a sizable villa with an extra room for Halsey's studio at Calle del Fresno 162, in Villa Obregon. The artists immediately began studying murals and color in the city. Halsey enrolled in classes at the Academy San Carlos, and contacted Diego Rivera, who lived and painted nearby. Although the couple originally wished to spend these early years studying art in the more well-traveled cities of Europe, Halsey later said their experiences in Mexico made him a stronger artist. Instead of viewing and copying works by Old Masters, Halsey studied textures, color tones, village life, and cultural history, influences continuously present in his later works.

Color washes, textural layers of paint, incised lines and worn edges reappear consistently in his paintings of the 1950s through the 1980s. Halsey noted that the similar rustic treasures of both Charleston and the small towns of Mexico inspired these techniques and compositional themes, and he credits his two-year sojourn in Mexico with inspiring his use of strong colors--particularly reds, yellows, and oranges. Speculating that he would not have learned or embraced this sense of color if he had studied in Paris, Halsey recently said, "The kind of color I use is strong or primitive, intense color--something very present in Mexico, not present in Europe."(24)

While Halsey continued to work in Mexico in January of 1940, the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston hosted Halsey's first one-man exhibition in South Carolina. The show traveled to the Norfolk Museum and the Lynchburg Art Gallery in Virginia. At the same time, the Domus Gallery in Mexico city, run by German architects who featured avant garde furniture, also honored the American student with a one-man show, and the Hudson D. Walker Gallery continued to exhibit his works in New York City.(25) As Halsey continued to produce art and develop styles each day, the works he created in Mexico became strikingly different from those he continued to exhibit and sell in the States. Freeing his hand from tight, academic drawings, Halsey responded to lively street scenes, figure studies and landscapes with quick brush strokes and loose representations (Figs. 8, 9, and10). In his Self Portrait, 1940, one sees his newfound bright colors, sense of light, and enigmatic, graffiti-like etchings (Fig. 11). Halsey included these scratchy, street scribble images, probably adapted from graffiti, hieroglyphs, and ceramic decorations, in the background of his self-portrait. These inclusions suggest the influence and inspiration these scrawlings had on Halsey during this time. He used these lines to add energy to flat areas of space, and he would continue to use such calligraphic language as his personal artistic alphabet through his last piece. In this sense, Mexico, and the Mexican culture, became his consistent lifelong subject. At age 70, Halsey described his inspiration: "Mexico seems the whole orientation of my life and work."(26)

In the eighteen-month period Halsey and McCallum lived in Mexico, Halsey produced more than seventy-five paintings.(27) These works included images of Mexican street life, portraits of neighbors or friends, arranged still life compositions, and loose, expressive reactions to the surrounding nature and environment. When his Paige Fellowship ended in March of 1942, Halsey and McCallum were forced to return to Charleston, despite their longing to stay in Mexico. They arrived in Charleston with only 25 cents and a new baby girl named Paige after Halsey's Boston Museum School Fellowship. Immediately the young family moved in with Halsey's parents. Within weeks they employed themselves by teaching art classes in their home, but found few permanent job opportunities.

With no stable income, Halsey and McCallum looked to nearby cities for teaching jobs. In September of 1942, Halsey took a position teaching painting and drawing as the Director of the Telfair Academy in Savannah, Georgia. In November, the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored a one-man exhibit of his work. However, as the War progressed, Halsey's position was terminated, and he reluctantly joined the war effort as a timekeeper with the Southeastern Shipyard Corporation in order to support his family.(28) From June 1943 until mid-1945, Halsey produced art, but removed himself from the academic art world. Despite the hiatus, one of his older paintings, Little Girl Posing, was included in the Twenty Second International Exhibition of Watercolors at the Art Institute of Chicago in May of 1943. The work was chosen for the show's commemorative poster (Figs. 12 and 13 ), although it did not receive any specific honors at the show.(29) The subject, a girl from Halsey's class in Charleston, poses among platforms and studio blocks. Halsey's brush strokes, simple and gestural, outline a modeled figure highlighted in yellow, contoured in browns. The portrait captures the form, posture, and gaze of a young child. Museum critics recognized the skill employed in the work, and their encouragement inspired Halsey to begin painting regularly again.

In May of 1944, Halsey's son, David Ashley, was born. To support his growing family, Halsey began painting regular commissions of restaurant scenes and tourist attractions for publications of the Ford Times and Lincoln-Mercury Times monthly travel guide magazines. From 1944 to 1961, he continued to complete small sketches of specific restaurants, Charleston gardens, and historic landmarks for these publications. Occasionally, he wrote the accompanying articles on the history and attractions of Charleston, but Halsey contributed to these publications purely for the added income. His primary artistic interests of the time revolved around the larger art markets and exhibitions in New York and Boston, to which he submitted entries for annuals and group shows.

In 1947, Back Street Charleston (Figure 14) was included in the October Pepsi-Cola Annual at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This painting resembled street and village scenes Halsey produced in Mexico. This abstracted composition of a Charleston city-scape included juxtaposed buildings and vegetation, including sharply angled trees, overlapping rooftops and a local church steeple. Halsey continued to paint and draw similar images of his native city for the next three years, completing colorful, semi-abstract street scenes and row houses markedly different from other Charleston artists' pastel and watercolor interpretations. These images were not well-received in the local art markets, which did not support modernist techniques or abstraction. But newfound attention in New York encouraged Halsey to work again, straining through his artistic struggles to develop new styles and techniques in his work.

Halsey later said of this period, "I didn't know what the hell I was really after. Then, I began to do some things that were more personal . . . more individual and I got this feeling that there was a perfect solution to every painting. I began to look at the whole thing like a scientific process with the idea that if I worked long and hard enough in the development of a painting I would ultimately achieve a total and perfect balance."(30) Halsey began to spend months and years on single compositions. Painting small pieces of paper and attaching them to surfaces, Halsey would experiment with color, texture, shape, and their subsequent effects on compositions. Adding layers to canvases, he built surfaces and texture to construct structures beneath images. To support heavy surfaces, he began using masonite and wood paneling, rather than canvas. These media allowed him to scrape paint away from areas, incise lines and patterns, and reveal underlying colors. With this technique, Halsey created complex geometric patterns and strong linear designs.

Incorporating newfound textures and layers of paint into his first major series of paintings, Halsey created compositions of Charleston street scenes and row houses. He copied the flat patterns and shapes of the cityscapes and streets, filling their corners with blues, reds, and greens. Evident in his 1947 painting, After Rain (Fig. 15) , Halsey often simplified buildings and windows to rectangles, triangles, and squares. These shapes often described the shape and color of a simplified neighborhood street or view of town.

These cityscape compositions, which revealed Charleston's architecture in terms of color and texture, did not impress many native Charlestonians in the late 1940s; however this work did attract attention in the larger art markets. In 1948, Halsey's street scene, Night Houses (Fig. 16), was included in a respectable group show in a major gallery in New York. This event marked his introduction to the mainstream modern art scene in America, and served as his initial opportunity to gain widespread recognition for his work.

(3) Stuart Shedletsky, ed., Still Working: Underknown Artists of Age in America (New York:Parsons School of Design, in association with University of Washington Press, 1994) 12.

(4) William Halsey, interview with Martha Severens, 1 April 1998, Interview for exhibit: William Halsey, 1999. Collection of the Greenville County Museum of Art; Greenville, South Carolina.

(5) Halsey's artist statement in Changing Images: 1936-1987, an exhibition sponsored by the Piccolo Spoleto Festival at Beth Elohim Synagogue, 1987.

(6) Martha Severens, William Halsey, Essay (Greenville, SC: Greenville County Museum of Art, 1999) 13.

(7) Morris, 9.

(8) Severens, 13.

(9) Morris, 11.

(10) Kirwin interview, 1986.

(11) Morris, 10.

(12) Morris, 10.

(13) William Melton Halsey, Charleston, to Laura M. Bragg, Pittsfield, 11 August 1934, transcript in the Bragg Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina.

(14) Elizabeth O'Neil Verner, Charleston, to William Melton Halsey, Charleston, 23 May 1934, Verner Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina.

(15) Morris, 10.

(16) Severens, 14.

(17) Severens, 14.

(18) Kirwin interview, 1986.

(19) Morris, 11.

(20) Margaret Harold, Oil Paintings and Why They Won the Prize (Nashville, TN: Allied Publications 1960): 20.

(21) Morris, 12.

(22) Kirwin interview, 1986.

(23) Morris 12-13.

(24) Severens, 14.

(25) Morris, 14-15.

(26) Kirwin interview, 1986.

(27) Morris, 14.

(28) Morris, 16.

(29) Little Girl Posing is now a part of the Dreher High School collection in Columbia, South Carolina.

(30) Morris interview, 1972.