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Ad Code: 3
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An example of work by James Fowler Cooper
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| James Fowler Cooper was born in 1907 in Williamsburg County, SC, in a farming district known as Indiantown. That county had been settled by Scots-Irish settlers in the early 1700s and was a prosperous area both before the Revolutionary War when indigo was the staple crop and afterwards when cotton became its mainstay.
Cooper lived in a reasonably genteel society and admitted to being doted on by his parents as their only child. He entered the University of South Carolina at age 17 where an uncle was a prominent professor and with whom he mostly lived even though he had an on-campus dorm room. He graduated with honors with a bachelor's degree in the double major of English and Latin but he also received a Certificate of Art from Miss Katherine B. Heyward who was instructing there and who had studied art abroad. He also had the opportunity of studying under Miss Elizabeth White who joined the University faculty in 1926.
After graduation from the University of South Carolina in 1928 he went to New York to study at the Art Student's League where he worked under George Bridgeman and Boardman Robinson among others. Cooper said that it was Boardman Robinson and his draftsmanship that was most influential on him since "draftsmanship is a medium that demands drawing more than any other." It was Robinson's teaching that "induced me to try etching," said Cooper.
When he first started his self-education in etching, Cooper contacted Miss Elizabeth White, his former USC teacher who lived in Sumter, SC and she let him use her etching press until he could get his own. He also continued his friendship with Lamar Dodd (whom he regularly saw at Pawley's Island, on the coast of South Carolina) and who helped him with contacts in the art world.
The Charleston Etchers Club, which included such notables as Elizabeth O'Neill Verner and Alfred Hutty, was helping etching as an American art form gain noticed in the 1930s. Cooper, it seems, got some informal advice from Hutty even though he did not enter Hutty's class in Charleston. Indeed, Cooper was virtually a self-taught etcher getting his lessons from books that he bought and studied. Over the years he took on all forms of etching dry point, soft ground and aquatint but he was an acknowledged master at dry point.
In 1939 his work was exhibited at the New York Worlds Fair. He had a one-man show at the Ferargil Gallery in New York in 1940, which had been arranged through the contacts of Lamar Dodd. At that gallery thirty two of Coopers etchings were on display; some were sold and he generally received favorable reviews. In 1940 he also exhibited "Sausage Tomorrow" and "Andante" in the Southern States Arts League in Shreveport, Louisiana. His "Sausage Tomorrow," an etching of a night scene with Negroes preparing to butcher a hog by firelight, won the purchase prize.
Cooper's work has been described as "scholarly, intellectual, and traditional." In the 1930s and 1940s he was considered a "regionalist" by some art critics when that description was being applied to such artists as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. In truth he was actually a gifted gentleman farmer who worked at his art in his spare time committing to paper the scenes and people around him. He did not think in regionalist terms, at least not as an artist, but rather more as one who tried to honestly record local life in a setting that he loved.
His shy demeanor always prevented him from self-promotion so his etchings, even though they constitute a rather large body of work, have generally gone into the private collections of the few who knew him, or his family, or into institutional collections.
He died in 1968 of a weak heart when he was only 61. Since he married later in life he had survived just long enough to see his two children off to college.
Boyd and Stephanie Saunders have collected most of the examples of his work into an admirable book, "The Etchings of James Fowler Cooper." It was published by USC. Press (Columbia, S.C.) in 1982 and it contains an example of the majority of the body of his work. His work may also be seen in public collections at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston; the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC; the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, SC; and various corporate collections.
Submitted October 2002 by Lake High
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