Rex Slinkard

Rex Rudy Slinkard (June 5, 1887, Edwardsport, Indiana – October 18, 1918, Manhattan, New York City) was an American modernist painter and teacher. He is best remembered for his Symbolist works, most of which were unknown until after his premature death at age 31.

Biography He was the younger son of rancher, Stephen Wall Slinkard and Laura Simonson. He had an elder brother named Donald. Sometime after 1900, the family moved from Knox County, Indiana to the Saugus section of Los Angeles County, California. They lived on a horse-and-cattle ranch in the Tehachapi Hills, north of the city.

Slinkard studied for two years at the University of Southern California under landscape painter William Lees Judson.

ASL of LA The Art Students League of Los Angeles was organized in April 1906, and loosely modeled after the Art Students League of New York.

Hedges died in January 1910, and when Slinkard returned to California the following summer, he was offered the position of chief instructor at the League. "For the present, instructors of the ASL of LA are pupils of Robert Henri of NY—and you know what that means! You know, at once, that they are strictly up-to-date in their artistic ideas, that they are the most modern of the moderns, and that they are smashing academic traditions with every vigorous stroke of charcoal stick or paintbrush." — Antony Anderson, The Los Angeles Times

In addition to being a prodigious artistic talent, Slinkard was a charismatic teacher. he began a series of increasingly moody self-portraits and was promoted to sergeant at Newark, New Jersey in July. Titled: "Rex Slinkard: Ranchman and Poet-Painter," Hartley asked: "How many are there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming visionary person?" The Los Angeles Museum mounted a second memorial exhibition in May 1929, and reprinted Hartley's essay in its catalogue. Ten paintings by Slinkard were hung alongside works by Thomas Hart Benton, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell and others, in the Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles exhibition at the MacDowell Club of Los Angeles, Taos Building, January – February 1923. The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University mounted a retrospective exhibition: The Legend of Rex Slinkard, November 9, 2011 – February 26, 2012. Slinkard continued to influence his friends and students. Carl Sprinchorn made a 1920s drawing of his grave, done in the style of his late friend. and inserted miniature versions of his teacher's paintings into some of his 1940s Surrealist works.

Sprichorn wrote an unpublished biography: Rex Slinkard: A Biographical-Critical Study of His Life, Paintings, and Drawings (1952). The manuscript is in the Carl Spinchorn Papers at the Raymond H. Fogler Library, University of Maine.(PDF)

Florence A. Williams, sister of Slinkard's fiancee Gladys, bequeathed a large collection of his works to Stanford University in 1955. This forms the core of the Cantor Arts Center's 268 works by Slinkard.