Biography

Spencer Douglass Crockwell was born in Columbus, OH in 1904, the son of a mining engineer with the Crockwell Mine & Mill Supply Company. His family moved to St. Louis in 1907, where he lived until 1932. He enrolled in Washington University in 1922, intending to major in engineering but switched to the business college. After graduating in 1926, he attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts from 1927-1929. He received European Traveling Fellowships in 1930 and 1931, enabling him to study in France and elsewhere on the Continent.

In the years 1929-1933 Crockwell developed his "Men at Work" series, depicting workers, often as cogs in an industrial machine. He won the St. Louis Artists Guild award in 1930-1931 and embarked upon a career in freelance illustration, which lasted from 1931-1966. Beginning in 1933, Crockwell composed 18 covers for the Saturday Evening Post and garnered dozens of commercial clients.

In 1932 Crockwell moved to Glens Fall, NY, where he lived until his death in 1968. He married Margaret Braman, who had been a fellow art student in St. Louis, in 1933. They had three children: Douglass (1937), Johanna (1941) and Margaret (1945).

Crockwell entered the first Treasury Department mural competition and received an honorable mention, which led to three Post Office mural commissions: "Vermont Industries" for White River Junction, VT (1937), "Endicott, 1901—Excavation for the Ideal Factory" for Endicott, NY (1938), and "Signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek" for Macon, MS (1944). Completion of the Macon mural was delayed owing to the crush of commercial commissions that Crockwell received. From 1939-1957 he did advertising campaigns for Welch's Grape Juice, Republic Steel, GE, Friskies, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, The Brewing Industry Association and many other clients. During World War II Crockwell produced recruiting posters for the United Service Organizations (USO) and the U.S. Army, Marines and Nurse Corps. His work earned various awards in the 1940s: the New York Art Directors Award for best poster (1942), the Art Directors Club of New York Award for best human interest color illustration (1944 and 1945), and the Art Directors Club of New York Gold Medal for best poster (1947).

Beginning in 1934, Crockwell conducted experiments with non-representational films. He sought flexible, low-cost techniques for animation. And in 1936-1937 he created surrealistic films with his friend, the sculptor David Smith. Over the next decade he created a number of other films. His "Glens Falls Sequence" was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1946.

Crockwell's film work led to patents on a "Method of Producing Animated Pictures" (1940) and a wax-slicing machine for movie-making (1948). He had developed this machine to create a movie frame by frame by depositing thin slices of wax on film and creating patterns by shining light through the wax. Beginning in 1949, Crockwell became interested in Mutoscopes and acquired a collection of this early form of cinema, once popular in Penny Arcades, as well as creating his own Mutoscope reels. These were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. In addition to Crockwell's experiments and inventions he wrote occasional articles on topics in physics.

Crockwell was an active citizen in Glens Falls. He directed the Glens Fall Chamber of Commerce from 1945-1948, he served on the Glens Falls Board of Education from 1951-1965, he was chairman of the board of the Hyde Collection from 1952-1968, and he served as the Hyde's acting director from 1964-1968. He helped put on an exhibit of David Smith's work at the Hyde in 1964. Donating a portion of the land near his house, Crockwell helped establish the Glens Falls Tennis and Swim Club.

Critical Analysis

Douglass Crockwell was an anomaly in the world of American art. Given his enormous commercial success and a last name that almost matched that of Norman Rockwell (ten years his senior), it might be tempting to dismiss Crockwell's commercial work as that of a Rockwell imitator. But this would be unfair and would miss the depth of Crockwell's creativity. In any case, Crockwell knew Rockwell personally, and he typically signed his work as "Douglass" or "DC" to avoid any confusion with Rockwell's work.

For, while Crockwell was extremely prolific in his commercial art, his attitude toward this work was that it earned him a good living and enabled him to explore other areas of art that were of greater intrinsic interest to him. Hence his explorations in cinema and his efforts to create new tools for animation.

Crockwell's "Men of Work" series may have been the best of his fine art paintings. Particularly striking is his "Paper Workers," where he had the brilliant idea of depicting the factory workers as carved pieces of wood - items of no more significance to the mill owners than the logs from which their rolls of paper had been created.

Crockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers do bear a superficial resemblance to those of Norman Rockwell. But he tended to avoid the saccharine quality that infected some of Rockwell's paintings. One critic likened Crockwell's painting to the movies of Douglas Sirk, pointing out that the figures in Crockwell's various family gatherings never quite looked at each other directly and gave you the slightly uncomfortable feeling that they were just acting out their roles in the painting. And indeed they were: Crockwell's preferred mode was to gather around a few acquaintances and create a tableau for a possible picture. He would then combine the various tableaux in his final painting. Thus a multi-generational family grouping in a Crockwell painting would often be a composite of the families of various Glens Falls residents.

Murals

• Macon, Mississippi - Post Office: Signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek
• Endicott, New York - Post Office: Endicott, 1901 - Excavation for the Ideal Factory
• White River Junction, Vermont - Former Post Office: Vermont Industries

References

1. (Spencer) Douglass Crockwell (Facebook).
2. By Spencer Douglass Crockwell (The Illustrated Gallery).
3. Douglass Crockwell (Wikipedia).
4. Douglass Crockwell (Smithsonian American Art Museum).
5. Douglass Crockwell (American Art Archives).
6. Douglass Crockwell (The Visual Telling of Stories).
7. Douglass Crockwell (The Hyde Collection).
8. Douglass Crockwell Collection, 1897-1976 (Eastman Museum).
9. Douglass Crockwell: 1904-1968 (National Museum of American Illustration).
10. Phil Beard, Douglass Crockwell's Double Life, notes on the arts and visual culture November 26 (2009).
11. Sandra Hutchinson, Douglass Crockwell's Glens Falls Legacy, Sandra's Town & Country September 13 (2016).
12. Oral history interview with Douglass Crockwell, 1965 February 21 (Archives of American Art).
13. The Other Rockwell: Douglass Crockwell (The Hyde Collection).
14. Spencer Crockwell (askART).
15. Spencer Douglass Crockwell was born in Columbus, Ohio (The Hyde Collection).