Marshall Glasier

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Born:  1902 - Wauwatosa, Wisconsin 

Died:   1988

Marshall Glasier was one of the leaders in Wisconsin of a group of artists who determined to bring European modernism to the Wisconsin art scene. His colleagues in this effort were Dudley Huppler and John Wilde in Madison, Karl Priebe in Milwaukee, and Gertrude Abercrombie in Chicago. They created art inspired by European Surrealism, the uniting of dream and reality on canvas initiated by a group of artists in Paris in the 1920s.

In Wisconsin, Glasier and his peers were rebelling particularly against the style, moralistic tone, and provincial subject matter of John Steuart Curry, Regionalist painter from Kansas who had been brought to the University of Wisconsin at Madison as Artist-In-Residence from 1936 to 1946. Glasier was not on the University faculty but was the center of the alternative artists and hosted many gatherings at his parents' home in Madison where he lived after extensive travel. 

Accounts indicate that these gatherings were salon-like and intellectually stimulating and when expanded to include Gertrude Abercrombie, had jazz musicians from Chicago. The group never considered themselves to be an organized art movement but used Surrealism as a focal point for their discussions.

The Wisconsin Surrealists also took trips to Chicago, often visiting the Art Institute and the galleries, and their friend Katherine Kuh, later curator at the Art Institute, exhibited their work in her gallery. In 1947, she hung their paintings at the Art Institute "Annual" with paintings of Salvadore Dali and Max Ernst, prominent European Surrealists.

Although Glasier complained of feeling isolated in his upper Midwestern home state, he was intensely creative, painting mythological, biblical, allegorical and fantasy figures in incongruous, surrealist landscapes. Many of his works were barbs at John Steuart Curry, and in their tone were influenced by his former teacher Grosz. Predictably, Glasier was controversial, and a report of the Milwaukee Art Institute 1937 exhibition was that Wisconsin people believed that Glasier's work was "taking an un-American direction."

 Biographical Credit: askArt
Photo credit: Sept. 25, 1952. Wisconsin Historical Society.