John Wilde - Early Influences

Early Influences

The youngest of three boys born to Emil and Mathilda Wilde, John Henry Wilde was born near Milwaukee, Wisconsin on December 12, 1919. As a youth he met Karl Priebe (1914–1976) who later became Wilde's colleague in art and a life-long friend. While in high school Wilde visited the Milwaukee studios of Santos Zingale (1908–1999) and Alfred Sessler (1901–1963) and realized that his own talent for drawing could lead to a viable career. Soon after this he began informal study with Milwaukee painter Paul Clemens (1911–1992). As an undergraduate in art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wilde met the artist Marshall Glasier (1902–1989). In the late 1930s Glasier studied at the Art Students League but found it difficult in Depression-era New York to make his way an artist. He returned to the home of his youth in Madison, where he lived with his parents for the next twenty years, setting up his art studio in the attic of their house. According to Wilde, Glasier became “the hub of—the catalyst for—the most exciting art event Madison had experienced…” Although Glasier was not connected with the university, the casual salons he regularly hosted at his parents’ home where a gathering place for students, faculty and “other Madison personalities” who wanted to discuss contemporary literature, art and music. Glazier and the young artists in his circle rejected the American Regionalist painting of the day, which was exemplified by the work of John Steuart Curry, who was artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to 1946. The dissenters coalesced into a loosely organized group that included Glasier, Wilde, Sylvia Fein (b. 1919) and Dudley Huppler (1917–1988) in Madison, Wisconsin; Karl Priebe (1914–1976) in Milwaukee and Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) in Chicago. Wilde also met and married fellow art student Helen Ashman (1919–1966) in 1942. The group of friends often met at Karl Priebe's studio in Milwaukee and frequented the Chicago home of Gertrude Abercrombie, whose gatherings of artists and jazz musicians were legendary.

Another influence on Wilde’s early career was an art professor at the University of Wisconsin, James S. Watrous (1908–1999). A draughtsman, muralist, mosaicist and art historian, Watrous taught ‘old master’ methods of drawing and painting using the materials and techniques of European painting and drawing from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. He taught his students how to make their own inks, chalks and crayons from materials found in nature, how to craft reed and quill pens and how to prepare grounds for metal point drawing, including silver point, the medium in which Wilde became a modern master. Wilde took Watrous's lessons to heart, poring over recipes for oil mediums and eventually formulating a secret mixture for use in his own work.