Corbino Jon - Corbino: From Rubens to Ringling

Laughing Angel, 1941, opaque watercolor, oil, and fabricated black chalk on board (34 3/8 23 5/16 inches). 2009 Marcia Corbino/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 42.12.

CORBINO

FROM RUBENS TO RINGLING

JANIS LONDRAVILLE

AND

RICHARD LONDRAVILLE

FOREWORD BY KARAL ANN MARLING

COVER ART: Stampeding Bulls, 1937, oil on canvas (27 15/16 41 15/16 inches).
2009 Marcia Corbino/Artists Rights Society, New York. Private collection.
Courtesy of the Georgia Museum of Art.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2011 State University of New York

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Londraville, Janis, 1949
Corbino : from Rubens to Ringling / Janis Londraville and Richard
Londraville ; foreword by Karal Ann Marling.
p. cm.
Excelsior editions.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3571-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Corbino, Jon, 19051964. 2. Italian American artistsBiography. I. Londraville, Richard, 1933 II. Title. III. Title: From Rubens to Ringling.
N6537.C6597L66 2011
759.13dc22

2010031913

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Linda R. McKee,
for believing

ILLUSTRATIONS
AND COLOR PLATES

FOREWORD

More than twenty-five years ago, I wrote my first bookon New Deal mural painting. While my research was less concerned with individual artists and their stylistic idiosyncrasies than it was with the knotty relationship between iconography, public expectations, and the politics of poverty, I encountered now-almost-forgotten artists at every turn. One of these was Jon Corbino. Or, as the art press of the era more often called him, CORBINO. During the troubled 1930s, in other words, his was a kind of brand name. He was a known entity, like Rubens and Delacroix, to whom he was most often compared. In some artistic quartersthe summer art colony circuit and the galleries of Madison Avenue, at any ratehis was a genuine, formidable presence. One name said it all.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Corbino should have been recruited for the mural work whereby the Roosevelt administration aimed to preserve the usable skills of poverty-stricken American artists while adding to the nation's aesthetic treasure. Nor that Audrey McMahon, an arts administrator deeply involved in directing federal aid to painters hit hard by the Great Depression, should have put Corbino on her roster of prominent painters with the potential to add luster to the often controversial government programs.

So, when the Section of Fine Arts was organized under the aegis of the Treasury Department to commission murals for public buildings using funds already sequestered for miscellaneous embellishments, Corbino was at the top of the list. Generally, in the interest of fairness and transparency, artists were contracted on the basis of anonymous competitions for a given site. In some cases, however, that process was short-circuited. Stellar figures, like Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, were courted simply because of their reputations. The slightly-less-famous too were often exempt from the usual competitive folderol. Corbino was assigned to paint a beach scene for an expansive blank wall in the new Long Beach, New York post officesimply because he was CORBINO!

And because, not incidentally, Jon Corbino was already identified with complex, multifigural compositions often set along the Atlantic shoreline where he summered. In the end, that's what Uncle Sam got, a vintage Corbino packed with thirty-odd large, grandly proportioned figures of men, women, children, and a couple of plump, cherubic babies, all frolicking in the sand. But because Jon Corbino was Corbinoproud, temperamental, suspiciousthe evolution of the mural was fraught with problems of his own creation. Despite an apparent sympathy with the forgotten man en masse, that warm feeling did not extend to the art bureaucrats burdened with internal rules and a paralyzing fear of public disapproval. Corbino only saw his own needs. He would not submit the small color study required. Oh, no. Corbino would send a full-size color cartoon instead. Corbino would not modestly cover up the naked bottom of a plump matron changing her clothes on the beach under cover of a tiny towel. Not Corbino! He further refused to abide by set specifications for a durable mural canvas. As a result, Jon Corbino never got another New Deal commission.

Corbino was a great contrarian: a man with the troubled childhood of immigrant poverty; an impulsive, angry man who ultimately married three times, shedding wives and children with vengeful abandon; a suspicious man, whose succession of ex-dealers testified to his inability to sustain calm professional relationships. His was a mercurial temperament. A fellow artist once remarked that his fame had largely faded away by the time abstract expressionism came to rule the critical universe. There were two reasons for the rapid eclipse of Corbino, the commentator declared. First, he moved to Florida, cutting himself off from the mainstream of activity just at the time when New York City had become the undisputed center of the art world. And then he died, of self-neglect and, one suspects, of his own choleric nature. In truth, Corbino had become plain old Jon Corbino several years before his untimely demise.

That's a pity, because the trajectory of the process whereby Giovanni Corbino became Jon Corbino, CORBINO, and finally Jon Corbino again, illuminates a whole, neglected chapter in the twentieth-century struggle to define what American art ought to be. In the meticulously researched biography that follows, Janis and Richard Londraville have constructed a kind of metabiography of an era in which American art struggled to come of age in the wake of the Armory Show of 1913. Despiteor because ofexposure to European modernism, Americans tended to seek a monumental, almost-abstract simplicity grounded in the heroic, legible art of the past. The young Corbino experimented with solid, Rubensian figures in space, and a complementary cast of the mighty horses and bulls that lent a mythic weight of meaning to his largest paintings.

This endemic neoclassicism (or neo-baroque expressionism) also informed a nascent and widespread strain of social realism of the late 1920s and 1930s. Corbino's career course repeatedly intersected the paths of Edward Hopper, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Thomas Hart Benton, and Reginald Marsh. Although Jon Corbino was not a member of regionalist or urban realist circles, his local subject matter and his vigorous draftsmanship define a kind of mainstream aesthetic of the interwar period common to both groups. He became Corbino by virtue of a style and an iconography of great and almost universal appeal to Americans of that era. Like his most esteemed contemporaries, he painted readable pictures of force, strength, and portent. Neither political nor polemical, they were simply excellent Corbino Americana.