This fall is Harper season.
The late Charley Harper and Edie Harper – husband and wife and two of Cincinnati’s favorite artists – each have a major retrospective exhibition of their work at a prominent art museum in town at the same time.
The Art of Charley Harper: Creatures Wild and Tame opens Friday, Oct. 16, at the Cincinnati Art Museum and runs through March 7.
Then, Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play opens Saturday, Oct. 17, at the Taft Museum of Art and runs until Jan. 24.
Add in the Harper Alive spectacle at Blink last week and it is clear that Harper is in the air.
Most locals are familiar with Charley Harper. The mid-century modernist painter and illustrator created images of ladybugs, cardinals and other members of the animal kingdom
as brightly colored geometric shapes. His art is found on murals and posters, in books and souvenir shops all over.
Folks may also know Edie’s “Crazy Cat, Crazy Quilt,” which was recreated as a downtown mural by 1001 Colors (formerly ArtWorks). But there is more to Edie than cat paintings.
“Edie, I’ve always believed, is toe to toe the same stature artist as Charley, just perhaps maybe not as widely recognized,” said their son, Brett Harper, who has been keeper of the Harper legacy since his parents died and runs the Charley Harper Art Studio.
Brett approached Julie Aronson, curator of American paintings, sculpture and drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum, about doing a retrospective of Charley’s art. The question was how to include Edie without her taking a backseat.
Aronson reached out to the Taft Museum of Art to give Edie her own show.
“I felt like she needed her own devoted attention, and it occurred to me that maybe concurrent exhibitions at the Art Museum and the Taft would be a way to get her the attention she deserved, and would also create this fantastic moment around the Harpers,” Aronson said.
Charley Harper: Creatures Wild and Tame
Charley Harper has a distinctive style that sets him apart from other naturalist painters. He called it “minimal realism.”
Where naturalist artists like John James Audubon put a great deal of detail into their illustrations, Charley stripped the subjects down to shapes.
“What he did was pare down details to its essential characteristics … using shapes and colors and line in a very elegant kind of shorthand in order to give you a sense of what an animal is like, what its behaviors are like, what its habitat is, and to try to give you as much information as possible, but using this very stylish and abbreviated form,” Aronson said.
As Charley himself once wrote: “I never count the feathers in the wings – I just count the wings.”
His art appears simple, but can be a stunning design. And often shows his playful side. A cardinal angrily flapping its wings at seeing a rival, which is his own reflection in a window. A bird about to land on an island that is actually the head of a submerged polar bear.
“His animals have so much personality,” Aronson said. “You can kind of see him smiling behind these images.”
Of the 150 works from Charley’s career on display, Brett said the standout pieces are the original poster art Charley created for the National Park Service, one a year for 10 years, each depicting the ecology of the nation’s parks. After a brief showing in Washington, D.C., they have been in storage since 1991 and haven’t been seen by the public since.
“To me, they’re national treasures,” Brett said. “I hope that people agree when they see them.”
A 65-year love story
Charley Harper and Edie McKee met in the first class on the first day at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1940.
Charley had grown up on a farm in West Virginia. Edie lived in Cincinnati and graduated from Wyoming High School. They were separated by World War II, when Charley was drafted and served overseas drawing reconnaissance maps. Meanwhile, Edie was hired as a photographer for the Army Corps of Engineers.
They eventually reunited at the Art Academy and graduated in 1947, then were married that August. Charley won a prestigious traveling scholarship, and they used the travel money for a cross-country trip.
“They took a long honeymoon around the country, and each day, they would get up and paint or draw, often the same subject in front of them with their own take on it,” Brett said.
Charley developed his modern, minimalist style. Within a few years he began doing illustrations for Ford Times magazine published by the Ford Motor Co. and a number of natural science books, notably “The Giant Golden Book of Biology.”
Edie continued to experiment with photography and painting, then joined the Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati to explore fabric arts.
“Their work is very different,” said Tamera Lenz Muente, curator at the Taft Museum. “Edie really developed her own eye. While the two of them certainly inspired each other, worked together … Charley was making work for magazines and posters and clients, Edie was really making her work to experiment as an artist.”
Before Charley died in 2007 and Edie died in 2010, the couple’s work had been shown together a few times. Now Edie has her own spotlight.
Edie Harper: Modernist at Play
The title of Edie’s exhibit, Modernist at Play, expresses her spirit of exploration and her embrace of modernism and abstraction in all areas of her work, from paintings and prints to photographs, enamels and tapestry weavings.
Edie took up photography in the 1940s, at the beginning of when photographers were using the camera to create abstraction, Muente said. “She’s looking at the real world and composing things in her camera.”
A photograph of a sheet of metal with a drilled hole in it – taken for the Army Corps of Engineers – becomes abstract blocks and circles. Edie even had a solo photo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in 1961.
Her work with enamel is on par with respected Ohio enamellists of the period, said Ann Glasscock, associate curator at the Taft.
“There’s this interest in pattern and line and abstraction that really comes through her various media,” Glasscock said.
“She was a multidisciplinary artist who excelled in many media, and whose work and life deserves further exploration.”
For Charley and Edie, there is a season for both to shine, on their own and together.
If you go
The Art of Charley Harper: Creatures Wild and Tame exhibit, Cincinnati Art Museum, 953 Eden Park Drive, Walnut Hills. Tickets: $17, $14 seniors, college students and children 6-17; free for members and children 5 and under; $2 discount online; cincinnatiartmuseum.org. Oct. 16-March 7.
Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play exhibit, Taft Museum of Art, 316 Pike St., Downtown. Tickets: $15, $12 seniors; free for members, military, youth 17 and under, students 18 and over and teachers; Sundays and Mondays are free; www.taftmuseum.org. Oct. 17-Jan. 24.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Charley and Edie Harper love story continues with tandem art shows
