Forrest Flower

The Gallery seeks quality artwork by Forrest Flower.
Artwork shown is in the Gallery Collection and not for sale. Please fill out contact us form, stating your interest and we will let you know when artwork becomes available. Thank you.

BORN: 1912, Portage, WI

DIED: 1948, Wauwatosa, WI

While Forrest Wayne Flower died prematurely at the age of 36, his mark on the Midwest’s artistic scene is undeniable. Charlotte Partridge, his teacher at the Layton School of Art, said, “Forrest Flower’s influence on the art of Wisconsin is real and enduring. He struggled unceasingly to learn the craft of painting. He was a slow painter, seldom satisfied because his goal was high.”

Flower received multiple awards to study at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. He studied under Charlotte Partridge and Gerrit Sinclair, and graduated in 1934.

Flower got his professional start documenting a Civilian Conservation Camp in Upper Michigan as a WPA artist. Also, under the act, he painted murals for post offices in Wisconsin, including one in Viroqua and another in Rice Lake. One mural, “Indian Stealing Horses in the Black Hawk War”, won a high prize in the Gimbel show at the Centennial Exposition. The same mural was reproduced in an issue of Life magazine.

After graduation, Forrest married fellow Layton art student Margo Miller and they had two sons - Tim (1936) and Dean (1938).  (Margo Miller Flower was a very a talented artist herself - and taught art first at Milwaukee Downer Seminary, and in 1950 at Ann Arbor, MI in the public schools.) Forrest and Margo divorced in 1946.

In the late 1940s, Flower returned to Layton to teach and lived in an artist colony in downtown Milwaukee, called Studio Row. He married his second wife (Bernice "Ber" Clemick) about 1947 who had two daughters from a previous marriage.

Forrest was asthmatic since childhood, and never should have taken up smoking.  In 1948, at only 36 years old, Forrest passed from lung cancer.  

Flower was well-known for his commissioned portraits and later, for his surrealistic paintings. In 1949, Layton held a Memorial Exhibition, and the MJS newspaper article reporting the show said Forrest had $17,000 in outstanding commission orders. His final, but incomplete painting still on his easel was a portrait of a former student and family friend - Mary Theisen Helm - also reported in the MJS article and confirmed by Mary's son, Erik. That portrait of Mary is in the Gallery collection below.

Also in 1949, the Gimbels Department Store created a fellowship for a Layton School of Art graduate in Flower’s name.

Flower’s works have been exhibited in various institutions including the Layton Gallery of Art, Rockefeller Center in New York as part of the First National Exhibition of American Art (1936), and the Milwaukee Art Institute. His works are part of the permanent collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Gallery of Wisconsin Art.

Biographical Sources: 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://americanart.si.edu/artist/forrest-flower-1592

Milwaukee Art Museum, http://collection.mam.org/details.php?id=11734  

Dean Flower, son of Forrest Flower.

Erik Helm, son of Mary Theisen Helm

Photo credit: Wisconsin Historical Society