Biography

Austin Merrill Mecklem was born in Colfax, WA in 1890. His family moved to Seattle in 1900, with a brief departure for Olympia in 1910 when his father was named State Insurance Commissioner. Mecklem attended the University of Washington for two years, from 1910-1912. He then took off two years to work at the Treadwell gold mine in Juneau, Alaska to raise money for art school. He then attended the San Francisco School of Fine Arts from 1914-1916 until his education was interrupted by World War I. He joined the U.S. Navy and served two years in Vladivostok.

Returning to the United States, Mecklem moved to New York and attended the Art Students League (1922-1923), studying under George Bridgman and Frank Vincent DuMond. He also studied with Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Hayes Miller. He married the sculptor Hannah Small, and the couple joined the Maverick Art Colony just outside of Woodstock, NY. Here they joined artists Harry Gottleib, Arnold and Lucile Blanch, Eugenie Gershoy, Carl and Helen Walters, and John Flannagan.

In 1926 the couple traveled to France, Holland, Belgium and England. The following year Mecklem moved to Portland, OR, where he taught painting and life drawing. His first recognition came in 1928, when he held a solo show at the Portland Art Museum and won a prize from the Louisville Museum. Another European trip came in 1930. The following year Mecklem and Small were in New York, but Small became involved with the artist Eugene Ludins (the younger brother of muralist Ryah Ludins), and Mecklem and Small divorced.

In 1937, Mecklem married another artist, Marianne Appel. They traveled to Alaska for half a year to work on a mural for the WPA Alaska Project. Mecklem received a commission from Fortune magazine to paint about the progress of building the Grand Coulee Dam. He also had commissions for a couple of murals in New York State Armories. The Mecklem/Appel mural project came to fruition in 1943, with a Post Office mural in Wrangell, AK. Prior to that Mecklem completed a Post Office mural in Portland, CT (1942), and a mural for the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, DC (1943).

Mecklem had built a cabin in Woodstock, where he painted and taught summer art classes. He also had teaching stints at the Museum School in Portland, OR, the Art Students League in New York, and the Albright Art School in Buffalo, NY. His last teaching position was the one in Buffalo in 1950. He died in Kingston, NY in 1951.

Critical Analysis

Financial constraints and the Great War delayed the start of Mecklem's artistic career by a good decade. He was in his 30s by the time he was studying at the Art Students League in New York. But that decade had enabled him to see a lot of the world. He had worked in the gold mines of Alaska, and he had served on an armored cruiser in the war. His paintings in the 1930s and 1940s reflected these experiences. They were typically large-scale landscapes - either natural landscapes or industrial landscapes.

A striking example of the latter is Mecklem's "Engine House and Bunkers," painted in 1934. The scene is an enormous industrial operation, with large buildings under a pall of smoke from the trains and factories. But, except for a patch of green in the foreground of the painting, the whole scene is pervaded by a wash of red color, which suggests the heat of the industrial furnaces but also evokes an eery sense of blood from a living being. In this regard the whole picture seems disturbingly alive.

Mecklem's first Post Office murals depicted "Shade Grown Tobacco," an important crop in the Portland, CT region. Logically, Mecklem's composition is a triptych, with workers hoeing the field on the left, other harvesting tobacco leaves in the center, and a woman sewing the leaves into a bundle on the right. But the transitions from one section to another are so subtle, that the whole composition stands up as a beautiful whole.

Mecklem's second mural, for the Recorder of Deeds Office, must stem from his days in Alaska. The mural depicts Matthew Alexander Henson planting the American flag at the North Pole. Henson and his associated are all bundled in fur-lined cloaks against a cold and forbidding background. It's hard not to compare this mural with Rockwell Kent's "Mail Service in the Arctic." Mecklem's scene is bleaker and less populated than that of Kent, as befits the subject matter of the two paintings.

Mecklem's third mural has a very different look from his other two, being executed in collaboration with his new wife, Marianne Appel. This mural is a fascinating blend of styles, faithfully rendering a harbor scene while paying homage to local Native American motifs. But the overall composition has the feel of a Japanese painting, with the quiet sea dominating the composition while steep cliffs rise above the factory operations dwarfed by the natural environment.

A very different style shows up in a lithograph that Mecklem produced a year before his death. "Square Set" (or "Dance Party") is not a landscape; it is dominated by square dancers, and these figures are depicted in a light manner far removed in style and spirit from Mecklem's early work.

Murals

• Wrangell, Alaska - Post Office: Old Town in Alaska
• Portland, Connecticut - Post Office: Shade Grown Tobacco
• Washington, District of Columbia - Recorder of Deeds Building: Matthew Henson Planting the American Flag at the North Pole

References

1. Austin Mecklem (Wikipedia).
2. Austin Mecklem (Hudson River Valley Institute).
3. Austin Mecklem (Smithsonian American Art Museum).
4. Austin Mecklem, 56, Known for Paintings, New York Times October 9 (1951).
5. Austin Merrill "Meck" Mecklem (Find a Grave).
6. Austin Merrill Mecklem (askART).
7. Austin Merrill Mecklem (Ro Gallery).
8. Austin Merrill Mecklem (1894-1951), Indian Town, Ketchikan, Alaska, 1937, Ashcan Daily September 8 (2024).
9. Austin Merrill Mecklem and Marianne Greer Appel papers, 1910-2009 (Archives of American Art).
10. A Finding Aid to the Austin Merrill Mecklem and Marianne Greer Appel papers, 1910-2006, bulk 1928-1977 in the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives).
11. Mecklems of the World (Todd Mecklem).