Lost Colony Artists
Between the 1930s and the early 1950s, the historic city of St. Augustine, Florida had a thriving cultural community and year round good weather that attracted artists. Today, some of these artists are famous, some are relatively well known.
St. Augustine developed into the largest art colony in the south through the efforts of a small group of dedicated professional and amateur resident artists who founded the St. Augustine Arts Club in the1930’s. Renamed the St. Augustine Art Association, this organization served as the center for the city’s artists. This organization was recognized as an important part of a thriving community by St. Augustine’s businessmen and retail merchants, who recognized that it had the potential to contribute to the city’s economic success. In the 1950’s the St. Augustine Art Association started the annual “Art Marts” around Christmas time. These outdoor art shows were supported by the local merchants as they brought foot traffic to the city.
During the 1940’s 50’s and 60’s, St. Augustine, Florida welcomed artists from northern art centers, such as Rockport and Provincetown, Massachusetts and Woodstock, New York. Their styles were as diverse as the artist’s home places melded and often reflected the historical ambience and sunny weather of the Nation’s Oldest City. Some of the Lost Colony artists include Tod Lindenmuth, Blanche Lazzell, Anthony Thieme, and Emmett Fritz..
The following is from the site http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/3aa/3aa288f.htm
The Art Association continued to exist, but never fulfilled the high expectations of its founders and most dedicated members. It is ironic that the opening of the Art Center, a long-awaited event that should have precipitated even more expansion, was anticlimactic. The group's unprecedented level of growth during Bonfield's presidency was accompanied by increasing dissent between the amateur and professional artists; among resident, visiting, and nonresident artists; and between the modernist and traditionalist factions. The power struggles among the office-holding members -- Bonfield, Lindenmuth, Maddocks, Muller-Uri, Reid, and others -- were particularly divisive. This dissent reached a crescendo in the dispute over the trustee system and what some perceived as Bonfield's dictatorial management style. Many of the most capable governing members -- for example, Muller-Uri -- were exhausted by these struggles and gradually withdrew from the task of managing the organization. Ultimately they rejected Bonfield's grand vision of transforming St. Augustine into a nationally recognized art colony modeled after Rockport, and the Art Association gradually became a provincial organization run by local art enthusiasts.
Other circumstances also prevented the Art Association from fulfilling its potential. Motivated largely by self-interest, St. Augustine's business community generously supported the group, but during the Bonfield years the association's pragmatic values and aesthetic conservatism began to stifle creativity. With few exceptions, the city's art community was unwilling to embrace the abstract expressionism that was de rigueur in more sophisticated northern art colonies, such as Provincetown, where the presence of Hans Hoffman (1880-1966) attracted some of the most famous and progressive American artists of the era. The Art Association's officers were out of step with their time and invariably sought to attract traditionalists, such as Kronberg, Thieme, Wiggins, and Woodward, to serve as magnets for other artists. Many of the paintings produced by the group's artists -- for example, Fritz -- were unabashedly souvenirs for the tourist market, and there was a limit to how long such subjects as historic houses, shrimp boats, and the semitropical landscape could maintain the consumer's interest. St. Augustine was geographically too far from major urban art centers such as New York and Boston, and unlike Rockport and Provincetown, it was a winter rather than a summer art colony,
The rise and fall of St. Augustine's art colony is yet another manifestation of the persistently tenuous role of the visual arts in the United States. As Neil Harris has demonstrated in his classic study The Artist in American Society, [230] the traditionally conflicted attitude toward the fine arts in America is firmly established in our history and part of our national ethos. This phenomenon is by no means a thing of the past. Today the debate continues to rage over such fundamental issues as the appropriateness of private versus public patronage of the arts, the relationship between artistic and commercial interests, the relevance of modernism to an intrinsically conservative nation, and how art reflects the values of a given community. These philosophical and sociological considerations can never be fully resolved, and this is not the place to explore them at length, but suffice it to say that they are very pertinent to the history of what we have chosen to call the "Lost Colony" in the title of this book.
Despite its ultimate failure to achieve national status, at its apex St. Augustine was a community of artists whose personalities and aesthetic inclinations were remarkably diverse. Throughout its early years the Art Association attracted conservative impressionists like Thieme, Wiggins, and Vogt; academic figure painters, such as Kronberg; the modernists Lazzell and the L'Engles the folk-style or "primitive" painters Cunningham and Vedovelli; the visionary eccentric Moffett; the talented amateurs Phinney and Shanks; commercial artists Cole and Groniger; the able graphic artists Muller-Uri, Reid, and Warren; and the nearly expressionistic landscape and seascape painters Lindenmuth, Pfeiffer, and Vayana. St. Augustine's importance as an American art colony is beyond question, and it now remains for the artists' work to speak for itself.