Everett Clarke Thorpe’s “Snow Banks” (1956, oil on canvas, 31.88 x 40 in.) is on exhibit at the Springville Museum of Art’s Mixed Reviews: Utah Art at Mid-Century, through May 13, 2023.

Part One: My Kid (or Cat) Could Do That

In Utah, modernism was welcomed with open arms by only a belated minority. Three decades after New York’s Armory Show — when the various isms of modern art developed in Europe were revealed to the American public — artists in the state of Utah were still struggling with skeptical peers and a bewildered if not belligerent public — a public that often chose not simply to ignore the new isms, as they might with artistic trends today; they attacked, or at the very least, mocked them. Modern artists, to much of the Utah public, were considered incompetent or deranged, seen as hucksters and commies.

Incompetence was the opinion of Cyrus E. Dallin. A native boy (he was born Springville in 1861), Dallin had made it big “back east” with his sculptures of historical figures and Native Americans. At home, he was best known for the “Angel Moroni” first erected on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Salt Lake Temple and for decades after reproduced on LDS temples across the country. When Dallin visited his home state in 1937, at a time when the W.P.A.’s Federal Art Project was encouraging modernist trends in the state, he told the local paper, “This so-called ‘modern art … is rather ‘a refuge for the incompetent’ than a true achievement. The people who are doing the new things seem to have relegated beauty to the past … But art that is not striving toward beauty can never last … Art is to see in the commonplace something of the beautiful, something of the divine, something that touches the feelings. That will live.” (Salt Lake Telegram, 27 July 1937, p.24) Dallin expressed himself in the sort of lofty tones that would echo through the traditional camp of Utah’s art world in the mid-century debates about modern art. 

The layman’s argument regarding modernist incompetence generally boils down to the well-known refrain, “My kid could do that.” And one Utah child put the argument to the test. Linda Lee Vernon was a nine-year old living in the once bustling mining town of Eureka with her widowed mother when she sent the Salt Lake Tribune one of her own artistic creations, accompanied by a letter. “Dear Sirs,” she wrote, “This is my picture of ‘Spring.’ No one seems to understand it. I thought you might. I am nine years old and in the fourth grade. I thought it might have a chance in the art section of your paper.”

Linda Vernon’s “Spring” as reproduced in the Salt Lake Tribune

The editors played along and provided young Linda a critique of the work, saying she “has an eye for complicated composition, repeating time after time, down in the corner, a series of triangles in a very busy pattern, while, as your eye travels up, the design becomes less insistent and the lines more wavy.” The colors of the grade schooler’s work were fairly monotone, so the editors suggested that if the work was meant to represent “Spring,” the artist might have had in mind the early part of the season, full of mud and melting snow.  “[P]erhaps someday, when Linda Lee grows up, and goes to school and studies art she will become one of the country’s leading abstractionists.” (Salt Lake Tribune, 19 Feb. 1950, p.61)

She did not become a Picasso, but Linda, or Lin, did go on to become a librarian, writer and poet. Attempts to reach the author and one-time painter have been unsuccessful, but looking at one of the title’s of her books, Looking Back at the Good Old Days, suggests her views towards modern art would not have changed much.  

Little Lin wasn’t the only one having one over on the modernists. As the Deseret News reported in May 1949, in England, a commercial artist who was no fan of modern trends had his child daub some paint on canvas and then encouraged the family cat to walk over the piece. The trio entered it into a local exhibition where it received praise from art critics as a fine example of the modern school. “Once again the world of ‘modern art’ has been rocked to the very foundation,” the editors of the Deseret News wrote. (Deseret News, 22 May 1949, p.40)

Ev Thorpe was having non of it. Thorpe was a member of the art faculty at the Utah State Agricultural College (now Utah State University) in Logan. (In Utah after the war, the further north you went the more adamant and experimental the modernists became — as if there were a “Maynard Dixon” line somewhere in Salt Lake County, separating the traditionalists in the south from the modernists in the north.) In a letter to the editor responding to the story of the boy in England, Thorpe referred to a recent exhibit of work by school children at the state Capitol, where “artists, critics, and teachers including yours truly, observed that many of the entries were far more interesting and were better original works of art than most of Utah’s adult painters have been turning out for our bigger state shows.”

“The Deseret News presented the report of the English incident as if it would surely teach the art critics a lesson and thereby shatter the foundations of modern art,” Thorpe continued. “If this be so, then I have a suggestion: Why don’t some of our better Utah ‘art-must-be-nature’ painters get out some of their pinks and blues, paint a few pansy and iris still-lives or some nice soft landscapes, and quickly send them to one of the national exhibits announced just under the boy-cat story on your last Sunday’s Art Page. 

“If modern art has now been completely discredited, as the story implies, then no doubt our nature-minded Utahns works of art will be selected to tour both Europe and England. Then the world can see ‘What’s new’ in art. Everything, of course, will be simple and easy for painters from then on.”

Thorpe’s portrait of Utah governor George Dewey Clyde (1959, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in.) was painted within a couple of years of the abstract expressionist work that appears at the top of this article (courtesy Utah Division of Arts & Museums)

Thorpe’s rather fiery polemic reveals an underlying tension in Utah’s small art world at the time: in fact, later that year at the State Fair, the modernist-leaning winning selections, made by the director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, so upset the ‘art-must-be-nature’ crowd, as Thorpe called them, that they threatened to boycott the exhibit the following year (more on that in a future article). “Frankly, I too, rather like the painting done by the English boy and his cat,” Thorpe concluded in his letter to the editor. “Any time my dog, Nipper, can help as much as that he’s welcome to my canvas.’’ (Deseret News, May 29, 1949, p. 37)

Over his career, Thorpe experimented with a range of styles, from expressionist figure paintings to detailed, fantastical landscapes, sports illustrations and abstract expressionist works. He was also an accomplished and sought-after portraitist. The USU professor proved to the public that his inclination to modern trends was no sign of incompetence: he had the chops; he just chose when and how to use them. Similarly, many other Utah artists of the period chose to show their more traditional repertoire along with experimental works, as if to preemptively silence accusations of incompetence.

This article is part of Before Now, Artists of Utah’s program to explore the history of Utah’s art world, and written in conjunction with the Springville Museum of Art’s Mixed Reviews: Utah Art at Mid-Century (on view Aug. 24, 2022 – May 13, 2023).

If you would like to support our Before Now program, please make a contribution to Artists of Utah.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.