Remembering Clyde Singer, a truly important artist

By KATHY EARNHART

Editor’s note: Kathy Earnhart is the director of public relations for the Butler Institute of American Art. This is her personal remembrance of Clyde Singer.

I grew up in Niles, Ohio, in the 1950s and ’60s. My eldest sister, who was a great influence on me, was always drawing and creating art, and her inspiration led me to similar interests and pursuits.

Each Sunday, together, we would look forward to getting the Youngstown Vindicator, and read faithfully “Clyde Singer’s World of Art.” We didn’t know the gentleman with the smiling face that looked out at us each Sunday from the newsprint page, but we were sure from what we read that he was someone important.

Occasionally, we would see a feature in what we knew as the “brown section” of the paper (rotogravure) that would focus on some project or show at the Butler in which Mr. Singer was involved. Again, we noticed the smiling face and plaid coat, more certain than ever that Mr. Singer was a very special and important person.

My sister and I both became art teachers (she still teaches art in Virginia), mothers and artists in our individual, semiprofessional ways. After 15 years of teaching art to children in public and parochial schools, my career in art was to suddenly change. I had the great good fortune to meet Dr. Lou Zona, who was my instructor for an art graduate class at YSU, and thus began my involvement with the Butler Institute.

When a position on the Butler staff opened up, Dr. Zona offered me a job in the public relations department of the museum, and I happily accepted.

Soon after I began working at the Butler, I met Clyde Singer. Here was the gentleman in the newspaper whose words I had read for so many years. And Mr. Singer did not disappoint. He proved to be a very important person, a source of information and history, and, along with Dr. Zona, a wonderful mentor to me and others on the Butler staff.

Mr. Singer was always quick with a smile, a kind word, and advice that was deceptively simple. When asking him for materials for some research, he would point to his many files and say, “Kid, if you know the alphabet, you can work in art history.” And I would help myself to the materials I needed, and return them to the vast “alphabetical” storage files that Mr. Singer had assembled over his 50-plus years as collections curator at the Butler.

Mr. Singer also had a way of simplifying a tense situation with a quick word or phrase. When faced with adversity, his advice was, “Kid, when you see a train coming, step out of the way!” And, upon my leaving his office, he liked to repeat to me the phrase that was the motto of McSorley’s Tavern in New York that so many of his paintings depict: “Be good, or be gone!”

Listening to Mr. Singer speak of his adventures as a young man at New York’s Art Student’s League was a revelation. Many of the American masters I studied in art history class were either Mr. Singer’s teachers or peers during his long painting career which spanned most of the 20th century. His off-handed references about artists who were my heroes, such as Thomas Hart Benton, would be matter-of-fact. “Benton? Benton was a wiry little guy, moved like a boxer, and he had a curling black mustache. You had to do it his way, or you were in trouble.”

When speaking about the Butler collection, he would drop little tidbits about the artists who had created masterworks. For instance, he referred to William Merritt Chase who created “Did You Speak to Me?”— one of the most prized of the Butler’s works, this way: “Chase? Chase did this one when he was doing a series of pumpkin paintings. See, there’s one he tried to cover up. Frugal, Chase was frugal.” And sure enough, if you look closely at that painting, an orange shadow is faintly visible — unmistakably a pumpkin! (And this comment was doubly comical since no one was more frugal than Mr. Singer!)

Mr. Singer’s own painting career was the great focus of his life, even in his later years. He kept incredible records of his works all the way back to the 1920s — the whereabouts of each work, who owned it, if the work had been resold, the years that each work was created, etc., all recorded by hand in a series of ledgers that he had stacked in his Butler office. “They are all out there in the world someplace,” he told me when speaking of his paintings, as though he was lovingly referring to his children.

He was a natural when it came to the visual arts — forever a child with a sense of humor (seen in his paintings), full of mischief and fun. And he was in awe of the beautiful world in which we live.

Mr. Singer would often ask my help with gathering some photography for a current show, or another bit of information that he would include in his column, which he hand-delivered to The Vindicator each Wednesday afternoon to be printed “Sunday, a week” as he would say. In later years, when the newspaper could no longer accept his hand-written information, I was privileged to type his column for him.

When Mr. Singer left the Butler in 1998, I experienced a “full circle” moment, when the task of carrying on his weekly column fell to me — the person who as a child read his words so faithfully for so many years. And I was so honored to meet his weekly deadline of “Sunday, a week” in a manner that I hoped would have pleased him.

It is my feeling that Mr. Singer would be astonished at the attention that this exhibition, “Clyde Singer’s America,” draws to his life and work. Strong in his opinions about everything “art,” his take on this retrospective would be interesting at the least. He once told me, referring to retirement, “When the time comes, Kid, you just walk away.”

He left us quietly, but his work will speak volumes forevermore. This I know for sure ... Clyde Singer was a very special and important person.