Louis Michel Eilshemius is known for his bizarre scenes of nudes frolicking through landscapes. Despite his reputation as a romantic primitive, his training and early years reflect a conservative art background.
The son of a socially prominent and wealthy family, he attended school abroad and received his first drawing lessons in Dresden. In 1884 he enrolled at the Arts Students League in New York and also studied privately with the landscape painter Robert C. Minor (1840-1904). In late 1886 he enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris. His landscapes of the 1880s reveal the influence of the Barbizon school, especially the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). Eilshemius also briefly experimented with impressionism in 1889.
Financially secure, he traveled extensively -- to California in 1889 and during the winter of 1893-94, Europe and Algeria in 1892, the South Seas in 1901 -- and remained independent of artistic trends. By the late 1890s his painting began to diverge from academic art, and during the first decade of the next century his work became more eccentric and disturbing. From 1906 to 1909 he painted a large number of Samoan subjects. In 1910 he painted smaller works, eventually replacing canvas with less expensive material, such as the tops of cigar boxes. At this time his art changed radically as the elements of fantasy increased with his abandonment of technical control. From 1913 to 1917 he produced his largest paintings, of nymphs and battle subjects. In 1921 he stopped painting. Throughout most of his life he divided his time between painting, writing, and composing, publishing in 1895 the first of several books of verse and fiction.
Eilshemius became especially favored by the avant-garde in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) proclaimed Eilshemius’s entry submitted to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists as one of the most important paintings. In 1920 he was accorded his first solo exhibition, organized by the Société Anonyme. The year 1932 marked the critical reception of his art and, ironically, the beginning of the artist’s physical and mental deterioration due to an automobile accident.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archiv. Am. Art, Louis M. Eilshemius Papers § William Schack, And He Sat among the Ashes: A Biography of Louis M. Eilshemius (New York: American Artists Group, 1939) § Paul Johnson Karlstrom, "Louis Michel Eilshemius, 1864-1941: A Monograph and Catalogue of the Paintings," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973, with bibliography, catalogue oeuvre, lists of Eilshemius paintings in the collections of Roy R. Neuberger and Joseph H. Hirshhorn § Paul J. Karlstrom, Louis Michel Eilshemnis (New York: Abrams, 1978), with chronology, bibliography § Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and others, Louis M. Eilshemius: Selections from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, exh. cat., 1978, published by Smithsonian Institution Press, with text by Paul J. Karlstrom, chronology, list of exhibitions, bibliographies.
