The following text was written collaboratively by Carolyn Pillers Dobler, Professor and Chair, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Gustavus Adolphus College, whose research and teaching is in statistics, with interests in mathematical origami, data visualization, and mathematics education; and Donald Myers, Director of the Hillstrom Museum of Art and Instructor in the Department of Art and Art History. It was produced as part of a recurring exhibition program of the Hillstrom Museum of Art titled FOCUS IN/ON, in which individual works in the Hillstrom Collection are explored in depth in a collaborative process that engages the expertise of College community members across the curriculum. The text was featured in the Museum’s exhibition FOCUS IN/ON: Henry Schnakenberg’s Dominoes, on view from February 15 through April 18, 2010, in which was displayed a 1956 oil painting by American artist Henry Schnakenberg (1892-1970), a gift to the Museum from Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom in 2000. That painting, a still life, was the impetus for the study, which considers Schnakenberg, his work, style and career, as well as the history of dominoes and mathematical circumstances and problems associated with them.
An Artist Characterized
A t a memorial service for American Realist Henry Schnakenberg (1892-1970), artist of the Hillstrom Museum of Art’s 1956 oil painting Dominoes, poet Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977) praised the late painter in a tribute that was reproduced in the Newtown (Connecticut) newspaper, the Bee. Untermeyer, a celebrated author and Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in the early 1960s, had become friends with Schnakenberg when he moved to Newtown in 1947 after having spent the earlier part of his illustrious artistic career in New York City. The poet praised the artist not only for his artwork but also for his fine qualities as a person, calling him “Good at heart and good in deed, generous in act and in spirit,” concluding that “…Henry was loved by everyone.” About Schnakenberg and art, Untermeyer said, “To watch him handle a work of art or admire a painting was infectious to those who were with him,” and he quoted his friend as saying that “’an artist paints as he lives.’” An obituary for the artist in the New York Times echoed Schnakenberg’s self-assessment, calling him, in its headline, “An Artist of Everyday Themes,” and in the main text, “an imaginative realist.”
These descriptions are indicative of two frequently noted qualities of the artist. First, that he was a good and kind person who sought to help others and who was devoted to causes in which he believed. And second, that his art was solidly based in reality, as well as very accomplished. Schnakenberg’s characteristics had been described over thirty years earlier in a November 28, 1936 article in The New Yorker, by critic and social philosopher Lewis Mumford (1895-1990). In reviewing the third biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he cited the artist along with two other highly admired and prominent Americans, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), as the best of a group of contemporary American painters he termed “the Poets of the Actual.” Noting the excellence of their craftsmanship, Mumford observed that what these three esteemed artists also had in common was their attitude towards their subject matter.