The son of German immigrants, William Sommer was born in
Detroit on January 18, 1867. He was largely self-taught,
but received instruction early on from artist and commercial
lithographer Julius Melchers. In 1881 Melchers helped Sommer
obtain an apprenticeship with the Detroit Calvert Lithograph
Company. After his seven-year apprenticeship concluded, Sommer
established a solid reputation as a lithographer, and job
offers took him to Boston, New York, and England.
In 1890 Sommer traveled to Europe with, and at the expense
of, fellow lithographer Fred Hager. He completed a year of
additional training in Munich, where he worked with Professors
Johann Herterich, Ludwig Schmid, and Adolph Menzel, and he
made brief excursions to the Alps, Italy and Holland. When
he returned to the United States, Sommer supported himself
as a commercial lithographer in New York, while pursuing
his own art in paints and pastels. In keeping with the Munich
aesthetic, he painted portraits in predominantly earthen
tones with broad strokes of the brush.
In 1907 Sommer accepted a position with the Otis Lithograph
Company of Cleveland, Ohio. His fellow lithographers at Otis
included William Zorach and Abel Warshawsky, both of whom
soon left to study art in Paris. In 1911 Sommer co-founded
the Kokoon Arts Club to promote modern art in Cleveland.
Zorach and Warshawsky joined the group upon returning from
Paris. Warshawsky taught Sommer the fundamentals of Impressionism,
the style that Sommer practiced from 1910 to 1912. Zorach
introduced Sommer to Post-Impressionism—an influence
that registered in the large, flat areas of bright color
and simplified forms in Sommer’s works of 1913 and
1914. A visit to the 1913 Armory Show in New York sparked
an interest in works by Henri Matisse and the Fauves, and
Sommer’s canvases began displaying similarly vivid
colors and energetic brushwork.
In 1914 Sommer relocated to Brandywine, midway between Cleveland
and Akron. He converted an abandoned schoolhouse into a studio,
producing festive watercolors of sensuous nudes that show
Matisse’s influence. He kept up with the vanguard artists
and thinkers through his job at Otis. Inspired by Cézanne
and German Expressionism, Sommer began combining angular
and curving forms in his compositions in about 1917. Increasingly,
through the mid-1920s, he painted expressive, geometric oils
with dense forms in earth tones, focusing on themes of children,
livestock, landscapes, and still lifes. Throughout his career,
Sommer assimilated fractured masses by adopting flat, patterned
arrangements inspired by Matisse’s lines and colors.
By the late 1920s, Sommer’s classic period, he had
developed his own unique style. Using watercolor, which had
become his primary medium, he handled Midwestern subject
matter according to the aesthetic principles of European
modernism. In 1924 the Cleveland Museum of Art awarded Sommer
First Prize for drawing; thereafter, he garnered awards from
that institution and exhibited yearly in their May shows.
From his earliest Munich works to the portraits and genre
subjects of the 1940s, Sommer consistently displayed mastery
of line.
Sommer was hard hit by the Depression and gladly accepted
work on several large-scale murals for federal art projects.
He continued to paint until his death on June 20, 1949. Art
critic Hilton Kramer noted in the New York Times that “his
work seems to have been born . . . of a remarkable inner
serenity and lyric grace. Whatever the disorder or disappointments
of his life, his art is beautifully controlled.” The
Cleveland Museum of Art celebrated Sommer’s career
with a memorial exhibition in 1950, and the Akron Art Institute
hosted a retrospective show in 1970.
Sommer’s work is represented in leading public collections,
among them the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute
of Chicago; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts;
the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Butler Institute of American
Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Akron Art Institute; and Oberlin College,
Oberlin, Ohio.
© Copyright 2007 Hollis Taggart Galleries
