During the 1940s, Haydon became
more closely associated with a number of artists' groups and
unions
in the Chicago area. He began on the Board of Directors for
the Hyde Park Art Center in 1940, and continued there through
1947, but there were a number of other groups evolving at that
time. One was an artists' union, called United American Artists,
and was part of the United Office and Professional Workers
of America. They held meetings and lectures on job possibilities
in other unions, provided artists with help on their income
tax forms, organized exhibitions, and generally worked to better
the economic condition of artists. Local 90, the Chicago branch
of United American Artists, established a gallery in Chicago
in 1938, but it was not until 1941 that Haydon was accepted
as a member. Unfortunately the national union, of which Local
90 was a part, was forced to disband in 1943 due to a lack
of dues paying members. However, from it a new group was formed
without union affiliation called the Artists' League of America.
A similar group formed later in Chicago. This group was first
called the Artists' League of Chicago and was organized early
in 1946, but by December of that year it was incorporated as
the Artists' League of the Midwest. Haydon was a founding member
of this group and its president from 1946-48 and then again
in 1949-50. The Artists League of the Midwest functioned to
sponsor exhibitions, protect artists' rights, and promote sales
and public education about art. They were also active in eliminating
the fee that galleries were charging artists to show their
work.
In addition to becoming more closely associated with professional
artists, Haydon's most significant change came when he moved
to teaching at the University
of Chicago. He was still teaching at George Williams College in 1944, but he
also began that year teaching humanities at the U of C. The next year he joined
the U of C faculty full time as an Assistant Professor of Art and won the $1,000
Quantell Award for excellence in teaching. During the second half of the 1940s,
Haydon immersed himself in refocusing his career exclusively as an artist.
All aspects of his activities, teaching, publications, exhibitions, professional
memberships, were devoted to fine art with little or no attention given to
educational theory, crafts, group work, structured leisure time activities
or any of the other pursuits he followed at George Williams College. He continued
teaching art at the U of C and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1948.
His next published article, "The First Artists of Our Second City: 1945
Selection," was a two-page review of the Art Institute's 49th Annual Exhibition
by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity in ArtNews. This was followed later the
same year with another article reviewing the 56th American Annual exhibition
at the Art Institute, "Chicago's Annual Plays Safe."
The 49th Annual Chicago and Vicinity show that he reviewed in 1945, was the
only show he participated in that year, but beginning the next year he began
steadily to expand his exhibiting. They were mostly small, local shows, many
at the U of C where the Renaissance Society was active in showing work by Chicago
artists. Artists' groups sponsored other exhibits, for example the Artists'
League of the Midwest held member exhibitions in the art galleries at Mandel
Brothers department store. There were also a couple of annuals at the Art Institute,
as well as smaller group shows there. It was a modest beginning, but it was
significantly more exposure than he had previously received.
Another interesting note from this period prior to 1950 involves Haydon's home.
He had married Virginia Elnore Sherwood in 193741 and they had been renting
a home at 5222 Kenwood Avenue until it was sold in 1946. In need of affordable
housing, they looked at a number of "garages and stable houses" until
finding the second floor of an abandoned perfume factory at 932 E. 50th Street.
After much cleaning, scrubbing, sanding, trash hauling, plastering and painting,
they converted 30 x 60 feet of mostly open floor space into a creatively modern
home. Large, old lotion bottles were transformed into lamps; tall, long worktables
had their legs cut down and became upholstered benches; and 6-foot high office
partition walls found in the building served as room dividers. It was such
a remarkable renovation job that it earned them a full page photo spread in
the Chicago Sunday Tribune's Metropolitan Section.
The Haydons had started spending some of their summers in Vermont
beginning in 1940. They made friends there and grew to like the
area enough that when
he won the $1,000 Quantell teaching award, they used the money towards the
purchase of a 115-acre farm near North Calais, Vermont. Many of his "souvenir" type
landscapes were painted there, and it was when they began going to Vermont
that he began his series of "thumbnail" sketches, the small oil sketches
done on 4 x 6" card stock. The subjects of these summer paintings included
typical New England country scenes, with wooded rolling hills or intimate meadows.
Friends were included in these scenes and shown sun bathing or simply reading.
The slowed summer pace was also good for painting portraits, such as this one
entitled Virginia (oil on canvas, 20 x 16",
PA0053) and dated July 29, 1948. In fact, there
are many portraits of Virginia; she was a beautiful woman and often modeled
for Haydon. Here she is shown in 3/4 view, immediately behind her is a tree
trunk, and in the more distant background is an open grassy field. All around
her are the lush, rich multiple shades of summertime green, which of course,
are reflected in the shadows of her face, neck and blouse. While Haydon also
used a little bit of the binocular vision technique on the tree and grassy
field behind her, that is not the purpose of this painting. It is not about
art theories or color relationships, there are plenty of other paintings that
focus there. Rather, it is a loving portrait of his wife, giving all who see
it a wonderful opportunity to know her.
A painting that does incorporate his art theories is Junction
of US 2 and VT 12 (1947, oil on canvas, 24 x 30", PA0066).
This painting is a scene from a spot near Montpelier that the Haydons would
have passed as they headed up VT 12 toward North Calais. Here on a bright summer
day, his focal point is on the road signs; towards his lower left a yellow
car speeds off the picture plane, its shape distorted by the binocular vision
effect as well as blurred by retinal afterimage. The other cars, houses, telephone
poles, and even the figure in the lower right corner, are in varying degrees
of image distortion and bring compositional complexity to this charming view
of rural Vermont.
In the latter half of the 1940s, Haydon came into his full stride as an artist.
He had often given a stylized look to his work, even in his more closely observed
student paintings from the School of the Art Institute. His pictographic drawings
for earlier publications and his mural at Pickering College all show figures
that while representational, are a step or two away from naturalism. As his
abilities grew, he continued incorporating simplified representations of figures
that he could subordinate to the overall effect of the binocular vision technique.
One might expect that since the binocular vision technique is intended to show
the true nature of normal vision, Haydon's paintings would be done in a very
realistic manner. Instead, he purposefully simplified both figure representation
and color choices to focus attention on the complexities of the composition,
especially the multiple contours and transparency effects. Clearly this technique
had been transformed. It started with recording a phenomenon of natural vision
in an effort to relay a realistic view of the world, but now its has become
a creatively and artistically used method of composition. Conversation
in the Street (1947, oil on canvas, 36 x 43", PA0371) shows
this well.
City scenes were popular themes in Haydon's work and Conversation in the Street,
is one of his more well known in the genre. Here he uses the binocular vision
technique in a manner that demonstrates just how powerful and effective it
can be. He has placed two large close-up heads flanking the picture space,
and because they are closest to the viewer and not intended to be the focal
point, they are seen in the greatest amount of distortion. The woman in yellow
is the focal point. She is at the center of the scene, is shown in clear focus
and should be dominating our attention. Rather, the fact that she competes
on equal terms with the two flanking heads effectively illustrates how complex
this composition is. The binocular vision technique is intended to reveal what
is seen when using both eyes in fully conscious vision, and that revelation
shows just how intricately faceted two-eyed sight is. So in this painting,
what is normally surrounding the focal point and usually subordinate in attention
becomes equally important to the fixed point of focus. Compositionally it significantly
enlarges the entire scene and enriches the visual experience with a multiplicity
of transparency patterns.
Also in the latter half of the 1940s, Haydon began expanding his interests
in new directions. He had been working in both his "souvenir" and
binocular vision styles for several years and would continue to do so for the
remainder of his career, but the retinal afterimage technique, never as successful
or visually satisfying, was being used less and less. He began exploring two
new forms: interchangeable polyplane paintings, which let the viewer participate
in the creative process; and mobile sculptures, which enabled Haydon to investigate
a different facet of motion in art. The purpose of the polyplanes was not only
to involve the spectator, but also to expand the artist's creative format to
include light and transparent color, using both images and abstract forms.
They also incorporated the element of time. Time and flux were factors Haydon
had investigated earlier in his philosophy papers and tried to capture with
the retinal afterimage technique in painting. Although not achieving the effect
he wanted with that more literal approach, the polyplanes offered a different
avenue.
With the polyplane paintings, he used 4 glass panels that were painted in different
abstract patterns. They were inserted in to a specially constructed light box
and illuminated from behind. The panels could be accessed at any time and their
arrangement changed; in fact he asked his colleagues in the University of Chicago's
mathematics department to calculate the number of variations that four square
glass panels
would produce. They determined there were at least 98,308 combinations. A later
polyplane version was done on circular glass panels and could produce an infinite
number of combinations. When there is virtually no end to the creative process,
time becomes incorporated as an equally important element. Any static state
for the work is simply a pause in its path of realization.
The first polyplane painting, Metropolis,
was small in size, only 14" x 14". Each of the four panels represented
an abstraction from city life. One showed architectural motifs, another showed
city traffic, the third represented smoke and steam, and the last depicted
city lights at night. Metropolis was first presented at his lecture-demonstration
entitled, "New Vision in Painting," given to the Chicago Artists
Association in March of 1946. But its first public exhibition was in 1947 at
an Art Institute of Chicago show that was organized by the museum's Society
for Contemporary American Art. It was shown again that same year at the U of
C's Renaissance Society. Later in the year, at the Art Institute's 58th Annual
American Exhibition of "Abstract and Surrealist Art," another polyplane
painting was shown, Abstraction on Four
Glass Panels, (32" diameter, 1947). In
this work, four circular glass disks were rotated by turning dials.
In his attempts to involve the spectator, he believe the polyplane format was, "by
nature appropriate to the accelerated change and emphasis on participation
in the work of art that characterizes this century." However, despite
his efforts to promote this new format, it did not have the kind of influence
he had hoped. Even 20 years later, when Abstraction on Four Glass Panels, was
included in Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art's 1968 Options exhibition,
it still did not have the art impact he wanted, although he did report that
it "was almost worn it out by the kids turning the dials."45 Interestingly,
Robert Raushenberg was also included in the show with a very similar work called
Revolver of 1967. So, while Haydon's polyplane paintings may not have been
successful in initiating a new method in art, they do illustrate another of
his efforts to expand the artist's choices and means of expression.
Haydon's mobiles did bring him quite a lot of attention. Alexander Calder has
been credited with first popularizing mobiles in the early 1930s. Haydon's
first appeared in the form of wire sculpture in 1946 and evolved into mobiles
the next year. Of his many creations, some were suspended from the ceiling,
others were designed on stands for table top display. In either form, they
were quite popular, many having a charming and playful appearance. One direction
he pursued was to design mobiles with less freeform movement and more controlled
action. He experimented with interconnected spirals and considered employing
pendulums, but it was his freeform mobiles that had the most commercial success.
Among the more popular designs were Flying
Fishbowl, (15" diameter, beginning in 1949) and the Character mobiles
(beginning in 1950). Another popular
form was the Cat mobile. These began as an idea in a sketchbook in 1949,
but did not become realized until 1954 when the first was shown at Chicago's
57th
Street Art Fair in June. Numerous examples of each were made and sold, and
while they were all of the same basic form, each was unique. Haydon's partner
in this venture was Carl Kahler, an artist who ran a silk screen print shop.
Together they produced mobiles and either sold them directly to gift shops
around the U.S. or as a kit to assemble through Sun Glo Studios, which was
located in the Merchandise Mart. Their enterprise was called "Chicago
Mobiles, Art and Display" and was located at 544 W. Lake Street in Chicago.
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