Random Inspiration: Richard E. Miller Part IV

With his painting The Chinese Statuette, exhibited at the 1910 Salon, Richard E. Miller revealed the characteristics which would define his art for the rest of his life. The work, a quiet and decorative portrait of a woman, quite possibly his wife, combined virtuosic brushwork and sensuous textures with peculiar color harmonies and sinuous contours.⁶  It prompted Camille Mauclair, the French writer and art critic, to give out the rare praise that Miller was one of only seven foreign artists who were “true painters, serious technicians, sincere, original and sensitive artists.”⁷

The Chinese Statuette

Though Miller’s new direction was not universally admired - the critics who were proponents of Modernism found his paintings too mired in the Academic drawing tradition for their tastes - many lauded his mature work as a “delightful lesson in compromise.”⁸  His complex yet harmonious mixture of draftsmanship, Impressionism, and the radical contemporary palette, allowed him to create ornamental scenes in which the surface of his painting was just as important as the image. In this way, Miller was able to express his belief that “art’s mission is not literary, the telling of a story, but decorative, the conveying of a pleasant optical sensation.”⁹  He may have not been welcomed as a Modernist, nor would he have wanted to be counted among their ranks, but Miller felt his approach placed him amongst a genuine group of modern painters whose responsibility it was to revive the lost science of painting.”¹⁰

[ continued ]

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