
ARTICLES
AUDREY BULLER








“Outdistancing Realism”, New York Times, May 26, 1929


“In the Galleries: Exhibitions Many and Varied”, New York Times, May 26, 1929

“A Mr. and Mrs. Show”, New York Times, May 17, 1934

" Art in Review", New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell, May 24, 1932

“Harley Perkins, Audrey Buller”, ART news, April, 29, 1934

“Paintings in the spotlight of the week”, New York Times, April 30, 1933





“Wives Without Husbands”, New York Times, September 24, 1933



“No- Jury Show Rockefeller Center”, American Magazine of Art, May 1, 1934


“News of Art”, New York Times, June 4, 1935

“Audrey Buller and Winslow Homer”, ART news, May 2, 1936



“In Local Art Galleries”, Howard Devree, New York Times, May 3, 1936
Art: Clean, Opulent World
Monday, May 11, 1936
The walls of Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries vibrated last week with things more colorful, more detailed, more precise and concentrated than their images would normally form in the human eye. Painter Audrey Duller Parsons, 33, had divided her second one-man show about equally between animate and inanimate objects, all of which seemed to have struck her with equal intensity. There was a broken statue with a clutter of dead fish, an antique sugar shepherdess, a dead duck. All these were painted with luscious tactile surfaces, every detail as important as every other.
Notable among the figure paintings were Sunday Morning, a clean, well-fattened woman in an old-rose dressing gown sitting up to a cold fireplace (see cut) ; Fay Reading, a blonde girl in a slip with High Tide of the Flesh on her knee; Sleeping Girl, another blonde superbly relaxed. Such fleshiness caused lusty Painter Reginald Marsh to exult in the exhibition's catalog: "Everywhere in these paintings is luxury. There is wit and a fine, fat magnificence. . . . Miss Duller has painted this clean, opulent world with a terrible power."
Audrey Buller Parsons is tall, hand some, brunette. Her husband is slender, grey-haired Lloyd Parsons, who paints landscapes. Both were born in Montreal, both paint in the same studio overlooking Manhattan's Washington Square.
Her father, the late great eye specialist Dr. Frank Buller, died when she was 3. She tried being a Montreal debutante, gave it up to study at Manhattan's Art Students' League. There Kenneth Hayes Miller told her she could improve her flat, overbright pictures by confining her palette to very few colors. To this good advice she credits the three-dimensional reality of her pictures. It takes her about two months for a painting.
“Art: Clean Opulent World”, Time magazine, May 11, 1936

“Whitney Museum Plans More Shows…New Acquisitions on Display”, New York Times, January 19, 1937







“Exhibit of Flower Paintings Opens”, Palm Beach Post, February 26, 1937.


“New Names Appear on Honor Roll of the National Academy”, The Art Digest, March 15, 1937

“The Growing Importance of Color Reproductions”, New York Times, April 11, 1937


“Whitney Museum Arranges Show”, Edward Alden Jewell, New York Times, June 2, 1937.

“Whitney Museum Annual”, New York Times, November 5, 1937

“Whitney Museum Annual”, New York Times, November 15, 1937
ART IN NEW YORK by MARGARETB REUNING THE BEST cross section of contemporary American art that has recently been put on record is the annual exhibition of painting, at the Whitney Museum. We all know that cutting such a good, clean slice through the heterogeneous composition of present-day output requires skill; it is the more commendable a performance here because it has been accomplished not by a jury of selection but by the artists themselves. Each painter included in the showing has had the opportunity to choose the work which he felt best represented his real achievement. Occasionally, one would wish that the artist (or his dealer, perhaps) had' made a wiser selection but in general the choice is admirable, resulting in an unusually stimulating exhibition. Every large showing of American painting emphasizes the variety of esthetic conviction, the lack of conformity to any one artistic creed of our art world. There is no "American School" or for that matter no local School; every painter appears to be on his own. It further appears that the more he is on his own the better his work, for the would-be translations of French ideas which crop out in abstract or surrealist canvases are the most negligible items of the exhibition, although one must also include in this bad side of the ledger one of those palpable imitations of Mexican murals which used to appear on every side when our attack of Mexicanitis was at its height. The general impression of this large showing is that our artists are taking more account of the fact that good painting is not like a rash that breaks out from a rush of brushes to the canvas, but is based on hard work and discipline. The contemporary scene is reflected on many canvases, stressing the point that in itself no subject is commonplace, yet its approach and treatment may render it so, nor will vehemence of handling or violence of color redeem this banality. This clashing of cymbals to hide commonplace ideas, however, is not much in evidence, for the greater part of these canvases of the "American scene" illustrate lucidly the fact that however ordinary and matter of fact the sub-ject, the artist can transform it through his imaginative recasting into a new compelling expression, conveying his emotional reaction to us in his own terms. Some of the outstanding works of this class are Charles Locke's Waterfront; Pretzel Vender by Elliot Orr; Hob-son Pittman's Quiet Evening; William Gropper's The Last Cow; Wheat by Joe Jones; Turkey in the Straw by Manuel Tolegian; The Railroad Cut by Lamar Dodd; Employment Agency by Isaac Soyer; Antonio Martino's Terrace Street Hill; Julian Levi's Shipbottom Fishery; Charles Sheeler's Clapboards in Sun light; Louis Bouches Summer of 1 937. Other notable landscapes are by Andr6e Ruellan, Alilen Tucker, Edward Hopper, Henry Mattson, Emlen Etting. It is pleasing to observe a number of artists laying aside mannerisms and finding a personal convincing idiom; among these artists, all good painters, are Audrey Buller, who escapes her slick neat little formula of meticulous perfection for the simplicity and freedom of a delightful flower piece, Canterbury Bells; Henry Billings who, temporarily at least, renounces his absorption in the machine age for humanity in an excellent figure piece; Katherine Schmidt, dropping her new objectivity formulas for vital portraiture, physical gesture and mental habit finely synchronized; Paul Cadmus, eschewing stunt per-formances for a finely considered and thoroughly accomplished figure painting. There are, in fact, some brilliant figure paintings in this exhibit which alone would give it distinction; Kunyioshi's Cafe, Speicher's Marianna, Jack Levine's String Quartette must head the list which includes other excellent works such as David Celantano's First Born, Isabel Bishop's Girls with a Book and Girls Against Sky by Guy Pene Du Bois.
“Art In New York”, Margaret Breuning, Parnasus, December, 1937, vol 9, no.7, 23.

Edward Alden Jewell, New York Times, April 13, 1938, p29.



“Metropolitan Buys Native Canvases”, New York Times, July 17, 1938

“Notes”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v33, no.7, July 1938, 169.


“Lucy Sewing”, ART news, March, 1937, 18.




“Metropolitan Museum of Art Buys Canvas By Montrealer”, Montreal Gazette, July 23, 1938.



“12 American Pictures of the Year Shown at College”, Times Daily, October 18, 1938.









“Two Art Exhibits Open at Resort”, The Palm Beach Post, Jan 17, 1940
TRENDS IN AMERICAN PAINTING Doubtless it seems to every generation in turn that its own time is unique in the crowding of events, in the rapidity of change. Despite the progressive developments each period has its own intellectual flavor, and this flavor is nowhere so clearly sensed as in the arts. To those who are old enough to have known art in the United States for a full generation, its evolution seems decidedly rapid. A review of the painters who were honored at the beginning of this century reveals many whose works are still found enjoyable to the museum visitor but very few indeed who have any vital significance for progressive American artists. A list could be made of important names among the painters of the second half of the nineteenth century, and these names would conjure up for us the sentiment of an era decidedly unlike the present, an era which seems to younger eyes today to have been one of poetic moods and well-bred harmonies foreign to the present. George Inness, William Morris Hunt, Eastman Johnson, and George Fuller were already Old Masters as the century closed. Slightly later than these came John La Farge, Alexander Wyant, James Mc- Neill Whistler, Homer Martin, Frank Du-veneck, Edwin A. Abbey, Elihu Vedder, Albert P. Ryder, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Thomas W. Dewing, Abbott H. Thayer, George de Forest Brush, and finally John Singer Sargent. A few of the group developed styles which were largely home-made, but for the most part they had studied in Europe and had brought back reflections of the arts of Diisseldorf or Paris. The work of these men offers a great variety of the rich stuff that goes to make up the artistic heritage of the United States, and it may well be that the perspective of more years will reveal a more intimate relation between it and the progressive art of the twentieth century. But at the close range which circumstances permit, two men only out of the entire lot appear to have any vital message for the younger generations of painters-namely, Homer and Eakins, the two whose work is least urbane and least poetic, in the usual sense of those words. There were two distinct movements in American painting which came between the sorts of work just mentioned and the painting of today. First in point of time came the Impressionism based on the discoveries in France of Manet, Monet, and Pissarro and developed here by such men as Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Maurice Prendergast, John Twachtman, Frederick Frieseke, Ernest Lawson, and Allen Tucker. Mary Cassatt should also be mentioned in this group, but she remained in France. Some of the present-day exponents of Impressionism are Richard E. Miller, Gifford Beal, Frank W. Benson, and Carroll Tyson. Perhaps Leon Kroll also should be included in this group, though his art shows other affiliations as well. Through these men, then, the sunlight which had been discovered by the French painters came to shine in America, but it would be hard to say just how much of it was transmitted to the younger generation by the men who first mastered the new style here. The younger painters have had ample opportunity to make a direct study of great French Impressionist paintings both in America and in Europe. A second movement, altogether different in its approach to painting, came to the fore early in the new century. In I908 under the leadership of Robert Henri the Society of the Eight was organized and an exhibition was held at the Macbeth Galleries. In addition to Henri, the group consisted of John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn, William J. Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Arthur B Davies, and Maurice Prendergast. The Eight were united by their common opposition to the conservative art of the time. Davies's own art with its dreamlike poetry was outside the immediate aims of the group. So also was Prendergast's, which was a highly personal variant of the Pointillist work in France. And so likewise were Law-son's landscapes, which, because of their Cezanne-like solidity, constituted probably slum children dancing to the music of the hurdy-gurdy, character studies of every sort of street type except that from Wall Street. During the first years of the Eight, the lessons of the Impressionists were ignored. Henri's canvases were even darker than those of his great hero, Frans Hals. Later on, in his studies of Irish and gypsy types he profited by Manet's treatment of light. THE DUST STORM, FIFTH AVENUE, BY JOHN SLOAN the strongest Impressionist painting in America. The other five were closely united in their artistic aims. Each had started as a news-paper cartoonist and illustrator and had the reporter's vivid interest in every aspect of normal, everyday city life. Their first exhibitions looked like 0. Henry's stories be-come visible, except that the painters disdained every situation that was forced, every scene that verged, however slightly, on the dramatic or the sentimental. There was something of Spartan self-discipline about them. They held to casual aspects-men drinking at a bar, a ferryboat careening through the rain, well-to-do, properly governed children sledding in Central Park, or Glackens, who afterward became a devoted follower of Renoir, also began by painting in a low key. Sloan, who like Henri had studied under Anshutz in Philadelphia, became famous for his cartoons, which appeared in the old Masses and other periodicals, and his early paintings, like his cartoons, were spiced with a mild irony. Shinn devoted himself especially to subjects connected with circus and vaudeville. George Luks, who had been a professional boxer, leaned toward picaresque subjects, painting in a low key and enriching with warm glazes. Jerome Myers and Glenn Coleman had similar interests and some-times exhibited their work with that of the Eight. The Henri group had a profound and lasting effect on American painting. Not only did they introduce through their paintings this rigidly non-romantic subject matter so well suited to the brittle temper of the twentieth century, but three at least of the group, Henri, Sloan, and Luks, became exceedingly influential teachers. The most sensational of Henri's pupils was George W. Alfred Stieglitz had for several years been showing Modernist art at his gallery, known as 291, but for most New Yorkers the epoch-making Armory show of 1913 furnished the first acquaintance with Post-impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism. The effect was electric. Progressive artists were galvanized, and conservative artists and art lovers could not laugh-the exhibits seemed WINTER, BY ROCKWELL KENT Bellows, whose extraordinary technical power was at the service of a virile and exuberant nature. He delighted in prize fights, revival meetings, and all activities which arouse popular enthusiasm. Bellows died at the age of forty-three. Eugene Speicher, a painter of fine sensibility and poise, who was a close friend of Bellows, also owed much to Henri's teaching. Edward Hopper, painter of splendid prose, and satiric Guy Pene du Bois like-wise came under his spell. Rockwell Kent, whose resonant landscapes had made a stir in the art world even before the Society of the Eight was formed, studied under Chase and Thayer, but Henri likewise exerted an influence on him too outrageous of that. Cezanne for the first time became an influence of prime importance in American Painting. The Metropolitan Museum bought the Colline des Pauvres out of the exhibition. His impressive mastery of form was assimilated by Max Weber. Walt Kuhn, who was associated with Davies in organizing the Armory show, has been influences by Picasso’s so called blue and pink periods. . Impressed by the Cubist paintings of Picasso, Marcel Duchamps, and Braque, several progressive Americans passed through a period of painting abstractions, and others, notably Stewart Davis, and Arthur Dove have continued to paint them even to this day. The famous advice of Cezanne that painters return to the art of the museums has been followed with scholarship and understanding by Kenneth Hayes Miller, who has introduced his many able pupils to the study of the Old Masters. Indeed, to tell who were the actual teachers of the younger painters, that is, of those who have not yet reached middle age is to give little idea of the sources of their styles. It was not until the Armory show had thrown wide open the world of artistic ideas that the early and circumstantial works of Winslow ering periods and places of study wrote, "Columbia University, Art Students' League with George Bellows and John Sloan. Studied in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Italy, and Spain." She forgot to mention Mexico. Thus who can say what visual ideas may have clicked into place in the inquiring minds of such leading painters as Bernard Karfiol, Maurice Sterne, George Biddle, Morris Kantor, Arnold Blanch, Doris Lee, Henry Mattson, or Reginald Marsh? We do not know what mysterious thing it is in the Homer came to be appreciated. In 1917 Bryson Burroughs at the Metropolitan Museum revealed to the artists the severe virtues of Eakins's painting. These were influences upon the developing painters, but so were Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Seurat, and Van Gogh, and so also were Bruegel, El Greco, Goya, and Piero della Francesca. Most present-day painters have seen the great picture galleries either in fact or by the proxy of reproductions, and in most cases several years of study and effort have gone into the creation of the individual style between leaving art school and gaining a reputation. Doris Rosenthal, for instance, who won Guggenheim fellowships in 1931 and 1936, in answer to a questionnaire cov-temperament of each artist that leads him or her to choose a particular sort of needed substance, but we do know that nowadays the art student is no longer dissuaded from "weakening his individuality" by looking at things in museums, a warning which was not uncommon twenty or thirty years ago. The result of all this liberal teaching and rich pabulum is that present-day painters are too individual to make profitable on our part too close an attempt at grouping or generalization. To be sure, one might point out a certain solid conservatism which is common to Jerry Farnsworth, Robert Brackman, Henry Schnakenberg, and Robert Philipp. Or one might call attention to a common enthusiasm for fastidious purity of drawing and color in Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Luigi Lucioni, Edna Reindel, and Audrey Buller. And there is the obvious fact that various regions of our wide country are celebrated with spirit by Grant Wood, Thomas Benton, Joe Jones, Charles Burch-field, John Steuart Curry, Frank Mechau, and Georgina Klitgaard. But doubtless most of the artists mentioned would them-some critics consider their finest works. For perhaps twenty-five years Alfred Stieglitz has been calling attention to water colors by John Marin, and an enthusiastic following considers these to be among the most significant works of art produced in America. The water colors of Charles De-muth are among the most exquisite of creations. Today a good many American artists are working in gouache. Charles THRESHING, BY JOE JONES selves feel that these classifications were unprofitable. This brief outline of contemporary painting in the United States would be incomplete indeed if no mention were made of the painters of water colors, for these seem recently to be at least as successful as the men and women who work in oils. A generation ago Winslow Homer and John Sargent painted the water colors which Burchfield, Aaron Bohrod, and Raymond Breinin, all from the Middle West, excel in this medium. Henry Keller and Clarence Carter, both of Cleveland, are also fine artists in water color. The West Coast has in recent years produced a particularly promising crop of water colorists, including Millard Sheets, Dong Kingman, George Post, Alexander Nepote, Milford Zornes, and Gladys Aller. HARRY B. WEHLE.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 1940

“Carnegie Survey of American Painting”, Parnassus, v12, no7, November 1940, 35.

Craftsmen to Join in Store Program”, The Pittsburgh Press, November 10, 1940







Edward Alden Jewell, New York Times, February 10, 1943







“With Accent on Modernism”, Edward Alden Jewell, New York Times, February 14, 1943


“Invited to Exhibit”, The Montreal Gazette, January 22, 1944

“Here There, Elsewhere”, New York Times, July 22, 1945



“On Summer Vacation: Art Takes to the Road”, ART news, August,1945, 13.


“Carnegie Opens Its Annual”, New York Times, October 13, 1946

“Japanese Prints Going on Display”, New York Times, December 2, 1949, p.27.

“In realistic Veins… An Innovation”, New York Times, December 14, 1949




“3 Women Artists Display Paintings”, New York Times, April 25, 1952.

Art Digest , May 1, 1952



Henry McBride, ART news, May, 1952


“Audrey Buller”, Providence Journal, November 30,1984
FRANK BULLER

“Dr. Frank Buller”, Montreal Daily Witness, March 21, 1889

To Unveil Bust of Famous Specialist, McGill Daily, October 25, 1934

Montreal Gazette, October 27, 1934,8

“Tribute of Discipline”, Montreal Gazette, October 29, 1934

“Family Donated Bust Made Possible Memorial to Late Dr. Buller”,
Montreal Gazette, October 31, 1934
JEAN BULLER

The Metropolitan, November 6, 1897, p6.

New York Times, April 22, 1939

New York Times, May 2, 1939

“Estates Appraised”, New York Times, September 26, 1940
Lloyd Parsons

New York Times February 15, 1968

Newport Daily News, March 29, 1968