(Excerpt from A Reader's Guide to Modern Art
Earle, Helen...)
Excerpt from A Reader's Guide to Modern Art
Earle, Helen R. Biographical Sketches of American Artists; Michigan State Library. (this very valuable book should be consulted for all modern American artists.)
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Robert Bartholow Harshe was an American artist and museum director. He served as a representative of San Francisco Exposition, member American committee of three to International Congress of Art Education, and as director of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1921 to 1938.
Background
Robert Bartholow Harshe was born on May 26, 1879 in Salisbury, Missouri, United States. He was the only child of William and Emily (Robinson) Harshe. His father, who ran a book store, was of Pennsylvania German descent, his mother of English.
His maternal grandmother, who had come to Missouri from Virginia in 1855, owned a hotel in Salisbury where the Harshes and several of their relatives lived, and Robert grew up with a group of cousins who were like brothers and sisters to him.
A great-uncle on his mother's side had been a portrait painter, and as a youngster Harshe was fond of drawing.
Education
Harshe attended the Columbia, Missouri, high school and the University of Missouri, graduating from the latter in 1899.
Determined to become a painter, he studied in Chicago at the Art Institute School and later (1904-1905) in New York, at Columbia University's Teachers College under Arthur Dow and at the Art Students' League. He also pursued his painting at the Colorossi Academy in Paris.
Career
Harshe worked in London at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he came in contact with Frank Brangwyn and Philip de László. Thoroughly familiar with the crafts, Harshe returned to the United States to spend most of the next ten years in teaching.
In 1902-1903 he was supervisor in manual arts at Columbus, Georgia; during the period 1908-1913 he was assistant professor of graphic drawing at Stanford University. These years of teaching made Harshe vividly aware of the problems of art education, and this knowledge was of great service in his later museum work, in which he constantly strove to bring the public and the gallery into closer contact.
In 1915 he became director of the Oakland Public Museum in California, where he reorganized the gallery and introduced striking new installations. In that same year he was appointed superintendent of fine, applied, and manual arts at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and soon after assistant chief of the department of fine arts.
In 1916 he became assistant director of the department of fine arts of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1920 Harshe was appointed assistant director of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1921 director, a post he held with conspicuous brilliance until his death. During those years the museum grew to world prominence. The building was greatly enlarged and the collections increased in quality and variety. This was particularly true in the painting field, where Harshe's enthusiasm built up a collection to rival those of the important museums of the world, the Art Institute becoming distinctively celebrated for its 19th and 20th century French paintings. Harshe believed strongly in the important role of exhibitions and was forever searching out significant material. Under his leadership the Art Institute held a series of one-man showings of the work of notable painters of all ages.
In 1933 he assembled what has been called the greatest loan exhibition ever held, presenting in almost unbroken sequence works of the great masters from the mid-thirteenth to the twentieth century. His 1934 exhibition stressed American masters, in a survey from colonial beginnings in the eighteenth century to the latest experiments in abstract form.
An able writer, Harshe was the author of A Reader's Guide to Modern Art (1914) and Prints and Their Makers (1915) and contributed to many periodicals, both literary and artistic. He devoted his weekends and free time to painting and during his lifetime won recognition for his oils and etchings; he is represented in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, the Los Angeles Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Harshe died in Chicago of a heart attack. His ashes were buried in Salisbury, Missouri.
Achievements
Robert Bartholow Harshe is best remembered as director of the Art Institute of Chicago and of the Oakland Public Museum in California. Thanks to his efforts, this department of the Exposition made art history. He is also well-remembered for the two exhibitions held at the Art Institute in connection with the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-1934.
He became a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1925 and an officer in 1937, a knight of the Royal Order of the North Star (Sweden) in 1929, and a chevalier of the Crown of Belgium in 1937.
Harshe received honorary degrees from Northwestern University in 1926, the University of Nebraska in 1927, and Yale University in 1934.
