Skip to Content

James Henry Daugherty

Showing 1 of 1


Print this page

James Henry Daugherty does not have an image.


James Henry Daugherty

(Asheville, NC, 1887 - 1974, Westport, CT)

Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia: James Daugherty was born in 1889 in Asheville, North Carolina. The early years of his life was spent in Indiana and Ohio. (1) In 1898, his family moved to Washington, D.C., where in 1903 he enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art. In the summer of 1904, he studied with Thomas Anschutz and Hugh Breckenridge at the Darby Summer School of Painting in Pennsylvania. That fall, before going to Europe, he commenced studies for one year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where one of his teachers was William Merritt Chase. Daugherty took classes in London with the academic painter Frank Brangwyn for two years beginning in 1905. In 1907, he returned to New York, and there he worked for some time as an illustrator. After seeing the Armory Show in 1913, Daugherty was greatly influenced by modernist ideas. (2) In 1915, he met the artist Arthur Burdett Frost, Jr., who introduced him to Synchronism. (3) As a result, Daugherty’s work was transformed; until 1922, he worked in this modernist style and focused on painting inventive abstractions emphasizing color volumes. (4) Daugherty did not focus on pure abstraction for long; by the early 1920s, he returned to a representational style. However, his work continued to show his interest in color. Daugherty is best known for a series of murals painted in a realistic style and rich with social messages. In 1920, Daugherty executed his first monumental mural, the Spirit of Cinema American from the Four Continents from the Loew State Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio. After this first commission, he was sought after for additional mural commissions. He completed many murals as a member of the WPA in the 1930s. Among his best known are those for the Stamford, Connecticut High School (1934), Stamford Connecticut TRAP Housing Project (1937) and the United State Post Office in Virden, Illinois (1939). Many of Daugherty’s murals illustrate scenes from rural life in the Midwest, a frequent subject for the artists of the Regionalist movement. (5) A love for these scenes was fueled by Daugherty’s childhood. He stated, “My earliest impressions are of the life and people on the farms in small town of the Ohio Valley, so warm and so vivid that I cherish them and relish them increasingly.” Daugherty’s work not only reflects that of the Regionalists in subject matter, but in formal issues, as well. His murals are especially reminiscent of those of Thomas Hart Benton, who also came to mural painting from an earlier interest in abstraction. (6) This interest influenced both men when designing large-scale works with numerous figures, in that the general design was more important than various small details. The pronounced rhythms in Daugherty’s work are similar to those developed by Benton, as well. (7) Furthermore, Daugherty’s elongated figures with graceful contours recall Benton’s love of the Michelangelo and El Greco. (8) Daugherty’s career as an author and illustrator that began during his early days in New York continued until the 1960s. He wrote and illustrated many books, his first picture book being Andy and the Lion of 1938. His Daniel Boone won the Newbery Medal in 1940. Daugherty died in Weston, Connecticut in 1974. Sources: 1. Biographical information taken from the following: Marianne Berardi and Henry Adams, Under the Influence: The Students of Thomas Hart Benton (St. Joseph, MO: Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, 1993); Lee Klingman, Illustrators of Children’s Books 1955-1966 (Boston: Horn Book, 1968); and Janet Marqusee, James Daugherty, 1887-1974: American Modernist Works on Paper from the New Deal Era. (New York: Janet Marqusee Fine Arts, 1992). 2. The Armory Show, officially known as The International Exhibition of Modern Art, was the first major exhibition of modernist works from Europe and America. It challenged the academic definition of and public attitude towards visual art. The exhibition opened in New York in March 1913, and went on to venues in Chicago and Boston that same year. 3. Synchronism means “with color.” The movement was a reaction against the monochrome colors of Cubism and stressed the use of color to build the impression of space and depth. Janet Marqusee credits Frost with most influencing Daugherty with newly developed theories on color and form that Frost had studied firsthand in Paris from Patrick Henry Bruce, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and Henri Matisse Marqusee. There is an entire other body of work that is identified with Daugherty. These paintings, which were produced mostly before The Porch, deal with color and abstract form, and are identified readily with the Synchronism artists. 4. It is interesting to note that during World War I, Daugherty worked in shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland and Newport News, Virginia, camouflaging ships for the Navy. 5. The Regionalists were a group of American artists, mostly from the Midwest, who flourished during the 1930s and early 1940s. These artists depicted everyday life in a humble style. 6. Thomas Hart Benton, a leading Regionalist painter, was a friend, associate, and contemporary of Daugherty. The two met as young men in New York, and they had similar careers. Like Daugherty, Benton worked for a time as a Synchromist before returning to figurative work. Benton was a highly successful muralist. According to Norman Kent, Daugherty, too, had a long and professed admiration for the work of Michaelangelo and El Greco (Drawings by American Artists, Bonanza Books, 1968). In the 50's, Daugherty made flat, grid-based compositions with generously sensuous surfaces. This work shows the influence of painters like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Rather than moving toward the greater simplification of 60's Color Field painting, however, Daugherty brought back the Cubist complexity of his early years. There are paintings, too, from his later years that hark back to the spinning color wheels of Daugherty's Delaunay-influenced period. His works from the 1960s update Constructivism while reflecting contemporary geometric work by Frank Stella and Al Held. Yet others bring in hints of Surrealism in their play with biomorphic shapes (Ken Johnson, “James Daugherty: Late Abstractions,” The New York Times, June 21, 2002) 7. Barardi and Adams, 67. 8. Marqusee, Kristen Miller Zohn, Staff, Columbus Museum


Artist Objects

Your current search criteria is: Artist is "James Henry Daugherty".