George Raab (1866-1943) is an excellent 20th century Wisconsin artist whose name is almost forgotten and whose work has largely been tucked away. A trove of his paintings and prints have recently surfaced and a good sample of the paintings are on display in “George Raab: Wisconsin’s Master of Early Modernism.” It’s the first time his work has been shown since a 1996 exhibit at Neenah’s Bergstrom-Mahler Museum.
Raab came from the state’s Germanic cultural heritage and was open from early days to the modernist currents rippling through Europe’s academies. Born in Sheboygan, he went to Germany for his education and studied in Weimar. After returning to Wisconsin, he founded the Society of Milwaukee Artists, taught at the Milwaukee Art Students League and became a curator at the Layton Gallery of Art.
At least one undated painting in the current exhibit, Woman Near a Lake, is a window onto Raab’s early influences. Depicting a woman in white against a placid lake scene rendered in summery hues, the oil on board shows little interest in Impressionistic plays of light but an awareness of the color block composition of Japanese printmaking that was seminal to early modernism. From My Studio Window (1897) is opposite in emotional tone and subject but not necessarily in form. Painted in Sheboygan, the oil on canvas represents his hometown in bleak blocks of grays and browns. The industrial city is draped under dirty winter snow with black bare trees and telegraph poles shivering against the sky. The view suggests Raab’s awareness of the nascent Ash Can School whose painters favored urban grit over Arcadian landscapes.
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Many of the oils and watercolors in “Wisconsin’s Master of Early Modernism” place Raab among the Midwest regionalists prominent in the 1930s. Among them is an almost cubist farm scene whose geometrically rigid human structures—a familiar Wisconsin red barn and silo—contrast with the fluid shapes of green and amber fields. He also celebrated the era’s industrial optimism through paintings of factories, industrial sites and bridges, often from unconventional perspectives. In one untitled watercolor, a giant grain elevator is framed with a proscenium of tree branches in a touch of 19th-century Romanticism brushing against 20th century industry.
George Raab: Wisconsin’s Master of Early Modernism is on display through Feb. 1 at Landmarks Gallery, 231 N. 76th St.
