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When
notable ability combines with
direct, fresh, naďve and fixed perceptions of a personal world in an artist,
with little or no formal training, the result is a primitive such as
Milwaukee’s internationally known Elsie Hagert Heindl.
The
personal world that Elsie Hagert Heindl settled on her subject matter is rural life, with an occasional exception. Her
father Otto Guido Hagert was a grocer in Bockwa, Germany, where she was
born June 12, 1908. The family emigrated to Wisconsin and found their
social circle among Germanic farm folk, so Elsie as a child began to spend
many happy hours in rural Wisconsin.
The
content of her work – her
essential expression – derives from insights that must have become part of
her very being among the animals of the farm. These metamorphosed into the
vision of orderly, simple, fretful familial life – for beasts as well as
humans – the she depicts in her oeuvre.
Her
vision is made real in bright clean colors, clear light, and rigid
precision of line and of composition. She is a methodical and sound
technician – reinforcing her memory with many sketches, carefully working
out her flat compositions and meticulously preparing surfaces before
beginning to paint.
Her
deliberate method does not inhibit at all her zest and spontaneous delight
in whatever she is painting. She is whimsical, making a pig smile, a cow
stick out its tongue at a child who stuck his out first, a mother duck seem
to talk to her ducklings. The blue jay which finds a place in every picture
is a whimsy and her identifying mark, along which her signature E. Hagert Heindl.
After
Elsie won recognition in Munich and Lugano, her husband Frank persuaded her
to go to Europe several times in the past half decade, visiting Bockwa, of
course. They toured in Switzerland, East and West Germany, Austria and
Czechoslovakia; and she brought back notes, sketches and photos to work
from for the European paints in this show.
Her
composition and color in her European work often is tighter, denser and
more complex. Roofs are often red tiled and the dress of the farmers is
somewhat ethnic. The Wisconsin paintings, many of which are larger in
scale, remain more open and light, in emotional tone as in color. But both
groups reveal that her experience abroad enhanced Elsie Heindl’s vision,
touching deeper springs in her being.
Margaret Fish Rahill, curator
Charles
Allis Art Museum
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