The Art of Dos Passos

For John Dos Passos, art was an obligation fueled by passion. It was his duty as an artist, he felt, to record both the objective and subjective realities of specific moments and to express them in a form that conveyed the spirit of his time. By his own account, Dos Passos became a visual artist on December 31, 1917, two weeks before his twenty-second birthday, after viewing the frescoes at Giotto's Chapel in Padua. He was an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross, and stationed just behind the front line of battle, near the Arena Chapel. He credits the majesty of those of those, "perfectly imagined forms colored and spaced with such sober magnificence," as his inspiration to begin painting.

Dos Passos was a serious student of the visual arts, well versed and well trained in both art history and technique. He passed the entrance exam for Harvard in 1911, at the age of fifteen, too young, his father thought, to begin college. Dos Passos instead arranged for a private tutor to take his son on a six-month grand tour of France, England, Italy, Greece, and the Middle East to study the masters of classic art, architecture, and literature. The fall after graduating from Harvard, in June 1916, with a degree in English, Dos Passos traveled to Spain to study art and architecture for one three-month trimester at the Centros de Studios Historicos in Madrid where his courses included a drawing class. While he was there, his father died, and soon afterward Dos Passos joined a volunteer ambulance corps for service in World War I. He was stationed first in Paris, then in central and northern Italy. His earliest surviving drawings are in a sketchbook dated "Rome/March 1918." During the war years he became an avid sketcher, working in pencil, colored pencil, and sometimes watercolors. Near the end of the war, Dos Passos left the ambulance corps and joined the U.S. Army. As he was awaiting demobilization in Paris, he participated in a program of the Army Overseas Education Commission that allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne in spring 1919. During that time he took art classes in Paris and began writing Three Soldiers, his first mature novel.

By spring 1920, John Dos Passos was focused intently on making art, both literary and visual. After arranging his discharge from the U.S. Army in Paris the previous summer, he embarked on an eight-month tour of Spain and Portugal where he immersed himself in what he called "the poetry of existence." In 1921-1922, Dos Passos took a 10,000-mile trip from New York across Europe to the Soviet republic of Georgia and then circled through the Middle East to North Africa and back to Europe through Spain. He traveled by boat, train, horse-drawn phaeton, camel caravan, and mail plane. The trip sharpened Dos Passos's sensitivity to the cultural differences between himself and the people he encountered.

Dos Passos returned to New York for his first major art exhibit, a showing at the National Arts Club in February-March 1922. In the New York World Magazine, A. Hamilton Gibbs quoted a critic's comment on the paintings: "Hardly one of them bothers about form, but I've never seen a man have such a hell of a good time with color."

Dos Passos reveled in what he called "the creative tidal wave that spread over the world from the Paris of before the last European war." His intellectual curiosity was fed by his acquaintance with Picasso, Fernand Leger, the Russian émigré Natalia Gontcharova, and his participation in artist communities in New York and Paris. And he also studied with Robert Laurent at Hamilton Easter Field's Ogunquit, Maine, art colony in summer 1922.

In January 1923, Dos Passos's friend and art teacher, Adelaide Lawson and sculptor Ruben Nakian, featured fifty of his paintings in a major exhibit at the Whitney Studio Club, along with the works of other artists. That exhibit included paintings rendered to accompany Dos Passos's written account of the trip through the Middle East, collected in 1927, along with eight of his color illustrations, as Orient Express. Two months after the Whitney Studio Club show closed; Dos Passos sailed to Europe. He went first to Paris, where he joined Leger, Gontcharova, and Gerald Murphy, to paint the stage sets for the Diaghilev's Ballets Russe production Les Noce.

Dos Passos was encouraged to exhibit his work by Adelaide Lawson and Hamilton Easter Field, a wealthy art patron who, the year he died, founded Salons of America, an organization sponsoring non-juried, no award art shows that flourished from 1922 to 1936. The philosophy of Salons of America was well suited to Dos Passos' libertarian instincts. He served as a director in 1928-1929 and from 1931 to 1936. When Salons of America folded, Dos Passos lost his forum for visual arts. He allowed his works to be included in exhibits arranged by Adelaide Lawson and her husband, former Salons of America president Wood Gaylor, but he never again exhibited his works on a regular basis. He continued, nonetheless, to paint as energetically as he wrote for the rest of his life.

In 1967, Dos Passos was invited to Rome to accept the prestigious Felltrinelli Prize for international distinction in literature. In his acceptance speech, entitled, "What Makes a Novelist," he recalled that night, six weeks shy of fifty years earlier, when he peeped through the sandbags at Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel: "the intensity of their homely narrative was immensely heightened by the feeling that perhaps we were the last men who would ever look on these masterpieces; and the feeling too that perhaps, perhaps, Giotto's gospel tales might be the last thing we would experience on this earth." He realized that night, he said, "It was up to us to try and describe in colors that would not fade, our America that we loved and hated." Here, in colors that shine with intensity, is his fulfillment of that responsibility.