Biography
Lawrence Cornelius Adams was born in Charlotte, NC in 1905. He studied at the Art Students League and at Yale, eventually receiving a PhD degree. He married Helen DeLong in 1931. The couple had four children - three sons Lawrence, Richard and Joseph, and a daughter Mary Alice.
In 1932, Adams designed sets for the Missouri Workshop Theatre. After spending a summer at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center with Boardman Robinson in 1933, Adams moved to Chicago, where he painted working class scenes in Chicago's West Monroe district. For about a decade, beginning in 1935, Adams taught at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He was hired as an assistant to Thomas Hart Benton for work on the Missouri State Capitol murals, although his contribution seems to have been limited to transferring Benton's drawings to plywood panels.
In 1938 Adams's work was shown at the Whitney Museum in New York in their exhibit of "Paintings by Artists West of the Mississippi." He studied with Gordon Gilkey at Stephens College in Columbia in 1939 to learn woodcut printmaking and etching. In 1940 he won the Logan Medal of the Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago. This medal, amusingly enough, was awarded by the Society for Sanity in Art, crusaders against all forms of modern art.
Adams had work shown at the Whitney in 1941 at their "Annual Exhibition of Artists Under Forty." And in 1942 he completed a Post Office mural "Saturday Afternoon on Main Street" for Sullivan, MO. His work was also included in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1944.
In 1947 Adams accepted a position as an Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at Wells College in Aurora, NY. Wells College mentions prior appointments for Adams at the University of Wisconsin and Louisiana College in the years 1945-1947. Adams retired from teaching in 1971. His eldest son, Lawrence, died in a swimming accident in 1979. Adams himself died in Hadley, MA in 1982.
Critical Analysis
There are several examples of Adams's work from the 1930s. The earliest is a New York street scene, indistinguishable from street scenes in small towns of that era, except for the Holman's Bakery truck (Holman's had opened in New York in 1930). This painting is very literal, but slightly later paintings, such as "Crossing the Tracks," have a simplified composition and somewhat abstract forms. Later in his career Adams produced more frankly abstract works, such as "The Drinkers." One hopes that his patrons from the Society for Sanity in Art were not too upset. Given the shapes across the top of this painting, it's possible to read it as a parody of a Time magazine cover. While this is probably just an accident, it does open an interesting possible interpretation.
Adams's mural for Sullivan, MO belongs to his earlier, Regionalist period. The painting depicts a Saturday afternoon on Main Street in Sullivan. The painting, as its title says, provides a literal representation of a street in Sullivan. That said, the colors are bright, and the faces of the people in the painting are engaging. The whole composition does feel oddly posed, with a line of people spread across the horizontal expanse of the painting. A nice touch is Adams's balancing of the little boy with the ice cream cone on the left with a little girl with a lollipop on the right. While the figures in the center of the mural are having a discussion, there is no drama and no angst in this small American town.
Murals
- Sullivan, Missouri - Post Office: Saturday Afternoon on Main Street
References
- Biography of Lawrence Adams (1905-1985) (Artprice).
- Dr. Lawrence Cornelius Adams (Find a Grave).
- Gordon Gilkey Oral History Interview (Oral History Program).
- Lawrence Adams (1905 - 1985) (artist-info).
- Missouri Workshop Set Design (University Archives, University of Missouri).
- New Personnel, College Art Journal Vol. 7, No. 1, Autumn (1947). p.47.