Louis the ladies’ man
“Afternoon Wind”, a heckuva painting by one crazy guy.
Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864-1941) used to hand out business cards on which he described himself as, among many, many other things, a mystic, a mesmerist, a humourist and “the most wonderful and diverse painter of nude groups in the world”.
Well okay, here’s the rest:
Educator, ex-actor, amateur all-round doctor, mesmerist-prophet and mystic, reader of hands and faces, linguist of five languages, graphologist, dramatist (seven works), short-story writer and novelettes (26 works), humourist galore, ex-mimic, animal voices and humans, ex-all-round athletic sportsman (to 1889), universal supreme critic, ex-Don Giovanni, designer of jewellery etc, spiritist, spirit-painter supreme, best marksman to 1881, ex-chess and billiard player to1909, scientist supreme: all ologies, ex-fancy amateur dancer, the most rapid creator in three arts, travelling salesman — in 30 cities on 30 nights, philanthropist, saved 20 lives — three from suicide, greatest religionist, globetrotter, half the globe, western. His middle name is “Variety”. All the supreme genius minds down the ages find domain in EILSHEMIUS. Born 1864 near Newark, New Jersey.
Somehow, not even all that is enough to make you famous in New York. He was most famous for writing wacky letters to the editor of the New York Sun — on any subject at all. He claimed to be an expert on everything under the sun.
He definitely knew a thing or two about painting, at least, and put his academic coaching to decent use in figures and landscapes but, after a couple of exhibitions that went nowhere, no one was offering him the expected break. Louis didn’t need cash, though: A family trust fund kept him in a swell brownstone on East Fifty-Seventh when he wasn’t seeing the world.
Then around 1910 his artwork got a little crazier, and this is what people eventually — two decades later — decided they liked. He painted stiffly posed women with eyes staring at something off-frame in a way that makes you jumpy. The works were primitive and obsessive and refreshingly non-European. The one shown here is “The Prodigy” from 1917. The pianist is looking at you, but she’s obviously lost in the music, so we’re left on our own to wonder.
Eilshemius was also clearly concentrating hard on something else because his paintings became less lifelike and detailed. The visions he wanted to capture must have been compelling because he started painting on newspapers and cigar-box lids, anything that came to hand, and then he just painted a frame around them.
Critics came up with a range of interpretations, from “odd” to “drunk” to “wild” and “deranged”, but in one of the best pieces of art criticism I’ve come across lately, Catherine McNickle Chastain has decided that Louis’ women were all hypnotised, the better for him to have his way with them — at least in his imagination.
She concludes that Eilshemius got overtly pathological about painting women because of the victory of women’s suffrance in 1921 and the fact that he was twice scorned by women to whom he proposed. And then, too, around 1910, he had shown flickers of mental illness. He was painfully shy, terrified of human touch, and yet he was a megalomaniac.
So when there was a boom in mesmerism, when it emerged from the carnival sideshows to earn some respect, Eilshemius may have fancied being in control of women for a change instead of vice versa. Having read George Du Maurier’s novel “Trilby” about the evil musician Svengali (that’s Du Maurier’s illustration here), he wrote a guide to casting the spell, advising that the subject should be unaware she’s being mesmerised, and explaining that the power comes through the mesmerist’s eyes.
Eilshemius also self-published a book called “The Devil’s Diary”, about a crafty but fun-loving “Satan” who hypnotises and seduces women.
Chastain points out that Louis’ females have the look of sleepwalkers, and credits a New York Times critic for finally spotting, in 1978, that there was a “sinister magic” about the paintings.
Eilshemius lived alone the last three decades of his life and communicated with the outside world primarily through his near-daily letters to the Sun. One of his few friends, sculptor Louise Nevelson, said she saw him talking to one of his paintings at a gallery. It depicted women sitting on a bench and he told them, in the course of a long lecture, to “sit where I put you”.
The entranced woman in “The Prodigy”, Chastain reports, is Marie Fowler, a girl Louis fancied at college and continued fantasising about for decades, even writing about her in his diary, describing her as being under his mesmerist spell.
“Dreaming of Temptation” from 1918 shows a spirit lurking behind a zombified woman just rising from sleep. In his pamphlet for hypnotists, Eilshemius suggested the technique of breathing upon the subject’s neck and moving your eyes and head up and down, at which point you can proceed “to flirt with her” and “make her actions subservient to your caprice”.
More such autobiography emerges in “The Rejected Suitor”, below, from 1915. A scene from the stage, complete with its own built-on frame, its occupants are cartoonish, quite a sidestep for a technically proficient artist (he’d been taught by Dali House regular Bouguereau). The critic Duncan Phillips compared him to Rousseau, but admitted that the composition, with its repeating ovals and horizontal and vertical elements lent it an assured sophistication that the Douanier never had.
The Rousseau linkage strengthens in 1907’s “Samoa” (click the pic to see it much larger), painted five years after Louis spent two months in the South Pacific. He travelled widely on the family ticket. The native woman may be the citizen of an exotic setting, but she’s still an individual.
Even his early work, where the school lessons still apply, Louis was on the edge of his rocker. “Mother Bereft”, circa 1890, could be Eilshemius’ own mother, who lost three of her six children prematurely. The work has been called “a masterful composition [that] obeys no sensible laws”. Things are askew, the woman’s expression enigmatic. Louis himself saw all the components winding in toward each other. It’s all rather upsetting.
Regarding “Afternoon Wind” from 1899, at the top of this post, I have no wish to argue with one commentator’s contention that is the women were standing by the stream instead of flying about, it “would be no less fantastic, only more comfortable”. The landscape is so pleasant that it’s not a surprise that people would be floating in its midst.
Marcel Duchamp met Eilshemius at the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition and was enthralled, probably because Louis was so off the wall, a fine dada candidate. He particularly liked his painting “Rose-Marie Calling (Supplication)”, but Chastain suggests that Duchamp — whose own “Fountain” had just been chucked out of the show because it was silly — was deliberately praising the queerest work in the exhibition in another bid to redefine art.
“Supplication” was another picture of Marie Fowler.
At any rate, Duchamp helped arrange Eilshemius’ first solo exhibition in 1920, at the Societe Anonyme in New York, but the reception was so foul that Louis packed up his paints for good. There is a single work dated 1937 — it’s called “Zeppelin in Flames Over New Jersey”, which is pretty funny considering — but when he died in 1941, he hadn’t painted in years, even though his work was on view in many Manhattan galleries. Few if any admirers actually understood the compulsion behind the compelling images.
There’s more about Louis here.
