Biography
Douglas Cornwall Nicholson's career as a muralist showed starkly the limitations of the Depression Era art programs. While he obviously had considerable talent in that field, he repeatedly failed to get commissions for his work, and ultimately had a career as a book designer and commercial artist.
Nicholson was born in Omaha, NE in 1907. He enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1926, but transferred to the University of California two years later. From 1928-1930 he was a student of Ray Boynton's, also studying with Hans Hofmann and Worth Ryder. Boynton was a pioneer in the use of wet plaster fresco. He had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, moved to California and taught and exhibited in the San Francisco Bay area.
In 1934 Nicholson served as an apprentice to Boynton when he was working in the Coit Tower. After Public Works of Art funding ended, Nicholson found support from the California State Emergency Relief Act (1933-1935). But, although he made proposals for a number of local projects in Oakland, his ideas were rejected by the art supervisor for the Oakland schools, who had a final say in such matters.
In 1935 Nicholson entered government service with the WPA, serving as a mural painter for the Section of Fine arts. But his first assignment was as a day laborer on a road crew. He didn't last long with the WPA, because his wife owned the house in which they were living, and this disqualified him from public assistance.
Nicholson fared somewhat better in competitive art programs run by the government. He was runner-up in a 1939 National Competition for the Public Buildings Administration in Kansas City. (A competition for the Rincon Annex Postal Station in San Francisco was handled similarly.) As runner-up he was given a contract for the Camas, WA Post Office, his only Post Office mural.
Following the war Nicholson illustrated a Report on Strategic Bombing of the Oil Industry in Japan. He had a number of commercial clients, producing artwork for Schlage Lock and Safeway Stores. From 1951-1959 he was assistant design director of the Dobeckum packaging division of Dow Chemical in Berkeley.
Nicholson also did book designs, receiving an award in 1960 for one of the fifty best book jacket designs of the year. Throughout the 1960s he was a design consultant for the University of Chicago Press, the University of California Press, and Mills College. He died in Berkeley in 1975.
Critical Analysis
With few examples of Nicholson's work available, it is impossible to make general statements about his art. But, judging from his Camas, WA Post Office mural, he was a capable painter with an excellent eye for design. Compared with other murals of that era, Nicholson's work is quite distinct. His palette is limited to pale browns and greens (unless this is just an artifact of the fading of the pigments that he used). The composition is wonderfully flowing, with a fallen tree dominating the space across the work, but with the branches of the tree weaving in and out of the other pictorial elements. Those elements include a farm wife, an axeman, and a Native American woman fishing. Much as the tree branches arch across the whole painting, the shapes of the fish in the woman's hands are repeated in other sections of the mural, given the whole piece a very unified tone. Overall, Nicholson accomplishes a lot with very simple elements.
In an oral interview for the Smithsonian, Nicholson was asked where this style - apparently so different from that of other Depression Era mural artists - might have come from. Surprisingly, Nicholson said that he had tirelessly studied the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Orozco and Jean Charlot and that he had feared at the time that his mural would appear to be merely derivative of their work. Who knows if he was just having a little joke with the interviewer? Some critics have described the mural as futuristic, perhaps because it certainly looked to a future beyond the traditional American Scene.
Murals
- Camas, Washington - Post Office: Beginning of a New World
References
- Biography of Douglas Cornwall Nicholson (1907-1975) (Artprice).
- Deaths, April 1975 (Dartmouth College) (Dartmouth Alumni Magazine).
- Douglas Cornwall Nicholson (askART).
- Oral history interview with Douglas Cornwall Nicholson, 1965 Feb. 12 (Archives of American Art).
- The Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture in Washington State, 1934-1943 (The Great Depression in Washington State).