The
American Cubist painter Patrick Henry Bruce was an intimate
of
Gertrude and Leo Stein, the student of both William Merritt Chase
and Robert Henri, and the organizer of Matisse's school, as well
as the friend of fellow-American Edware Hopper and Man Ray. He
once lived above Matisse's apartment, loaned Picasso money, and
was "like family" to Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Yet when he committed
suicide in New York City on November 12, 1936, he was virtually
unknown. He had not exhibited since 1930, in Paris, where he
had
lived from 1904 until his return to New York a few months before
his death. This direct descendant of the American Revolutionary
patriot, a taciturn, self-effacing perfectionist, had become
more
and more withdrawn from the world, from his family, and from his
colleagues. In his last years he destroyed his papers, most of
his paintings, and finally himself. Bruce did his best to leave
this world without a trace. Only a fragment of his work survived.
. .
Patrick
Henry Bruce emerges as mass of contradictions: a dandy, an aesthete,
and an aristocrat withe the habits of a monk; a critic who did
not write, a connoisseur who did not sell, a modernist who thought
the twentieth century was a mistake; dedicated, committed artist
who lived out his life in his paintings and died convinced that
his work would not be understood. . . Bruce never wrote a word
about his art. But what he had to communicate is alive, powerful
and authentic in those few paintings that did survive.
.
. . William C. Agee and Barbara Rose,
PATRICK
HENRY BRUCE — American Modernist, 1979
