Biography
Charles Malcolm Campbell was born in Dayton, OH in 1905 and raised in nearby Springfield, OH. He recalled wanting to be an artist by age 15, if not knowing exactly what that would mean. His family moved to Cleveland in 1922, and he studied at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) from 1923-1928. Inspired by Daumier, he spent time sketching patrons of a local restaurant. Other major influences from his student days were El Greco, Renoir and Picasso. After completing a thesis on Oriental art, Campbell graduated and tried his hand at teaching, but without a lot of satisfaction. In 1930 he was living with his parents and working as a commercial artist for a Cleveland newspaper. He was also painting, and his paintings were exhibited in Cleveland and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931. By 1933 he had a painting at the Whitney Museum in New York, with subsequent exhibits there in 1937-1939.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York commissioned Campbell to create drawings for their Drawings and Prints Collection in 1935. He married Virginia A. Smith, a stenographer, in 1936, a marriage that would last until 1943. She died of tuberculosis in 1948, and Campbell himself suffered from the disease, requiring him to take a year off from work at one point. In 1937-1938 Campbell bummed around the country, staying for six months in an old house in Texas. His painting from that period, "Texas Boudoir," was part of the Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting and was purchased for their permanent collection. His work was also shown in the exhibit "Frontiers of American Art: Works Progress Administration, Federal Arts Project" (1939) at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
During the late 1930s Campbell completed several mural projects. Among them were "Children at Play" (1937) for the Lakeview Terrace Housing Project in Cleveland, "Hoosier Farm" (1938) for the Angola, IN Post Office, and "Grist for the Mill" (1939) for the Kenedy, TX Post Office. His first two efforts were not that well-received. The Lakeview Terrace residents found the children in his mural too scrawny for their taste and had the mural removed. And the local newspaper in Angola took potshots at his mural there, admitting not to know a lot about art, but feeling free to criticze Campbell's depiction of an Indiana farm.
Back in Cleveland, Campbell found employment with the Ohio Art Project. His work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940 and at the Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition of Sculpture, Watercolors, Drawings and Prints in 1941. In 1942 Campbell met the fashion artist Julia Savulev, who became his lifelong companion and colleague. The couple moved to Los Angeles, and Campbell abandoned public art competitions, exhibiting only in private galleries but successfully living off of those sales. The style that Campbell had evolved by that time was well-suited to the mid-century modern architecture then developing in Southern California, which partly explains his success there.
In 1952 Charles and Julia moved to New Orleans. They opened their own gallery and found that they could sell their art as fast as they could make it. In 1956-1957 the couple made another move, this time to the ghost town of Hilltop, AZ. From there they decamped to Phoenix, AZ, where they remained until Campbell's death. They married in 1963 and lived a reclusive life near Camelback Mountain on the edge of Phoenix. When Campbell's eyesight began to fail in 1980, he attempted sculpting but never felt his work in this media was commercially viable. He committed suicide in 1985.
Critical Analysis
In Campbell's early work he was viewed as a prodigy in the field of drawing, with work acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In some ways these were his most dramatic and successful pieces. But, of course, few things created in the Depression were successful in financial terms, and Campbell could hardly have lived off of that kind of art. As time went on, he evolved a unique modernist style, featuring skillful but unusually-drawn figures and dense vibrant colors. The influence of artists such as Picasso and Chagall was often dramatically present in his work. This was probably why this work was very successful in commercial terms. But it may also explain why Campbell is not regarded as that important in the 20th-century pantheon of American art. While his work was admirable and satisfying to look at, it may not have felt as original as paintings being produced by some of his contemporaries.
Murals
- Angola, Indiana - Steuben County Community Center: Hoosier Farm
- Kenedy, Texas - Post Office: Grist for the Mill
References
- Charles Campbell (ask ART).
- Charles Malcolm Campbell (Shanin Renee Art Gallery).
- Charles Malcolm Campbell (Find a Grave).
- Charles Malcolm Campbell (1st Dibs).
- Charles Malcolm Campbell (Wolfs Gallery).
- Charles Malcolm Campbell (1905 – 1985) (CW American Modernism).
- Jennifer Donnelly, Myth, Modernity, and Mass Housing: The Development of Public Housing in Depression-Era Cleveland, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review Volume XXV, Number I (2013).