LOUIS BOUCHE
1896-1969
Self Portrait with Helmet, 1959
Oil on canvas, 24 X 20" (60.96 X 50.80 cm.)
Signed, upper left
Museum purchase, 965-0-170
Born in New York City to French parents, Louis Bouch6 was encouraged as a child to
draw. His father, Henri L. Bouch6, an architectural decorator, worked with the major turn-
of-the -century architects designing interiors, such as the Breakers in Newport, Rhode
Island and the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel, New York City, primarily for very wealthy and
socially prominent families. After his father's death, Louis and his mother moved to
Europe where they lived from 1909 to 1915. In Paris, Louis attended classes
or sketched at the Acad6mie de la Grande Chaumiere, Colarossi, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
and several ateliers. Upon returning to New York, Bouch6 studied at the Art Students
League, exhibited at the Whitney Studio, and worked as a camouflage artist for the Navy
during World War I. At the Penguin Club in New York City, he and Alexander Brook
associated with Walt Kuhn, Jules Pascin, George "Pop" Hart and the patron, John
Quinn. His first solo exhibition was praised by the critic Henry McBride.' Because he
often included Nottingham lace in his pictures, this early period was called his
"Nottingham lace curtain manner."
From 1922 to 1926 he directed the Belmaison Gallery, New York City, part of
Wanamaker's Gallery of Decorative Arts, afterwards pursuing a profitable career painting
interior murals. During the Great Depression, however, he returned to easel painting. He
referred to this as his "corkynuts" period because his painterly canvases
featured objects he picked up on the beach. The compositions, however, were not
traditional still lifes but modernist arrangements. His second solo exhibition in 1932 at
the Valentine Gallery received mixed reviews. The New Yorker critic noted "a
certain lack ... of the cohesion that is usually present in the work of men who have been
painting seven days a week." But he also observed a lifting of color and a loosening
of technique, and praised Bouche's subtle color sense, finally concluding that, "Most
of his compositions are happy, and some have humor, a trait that is almost absent in our
native painting." The work was too abstract for other critics, who commented on its
resemblance to Georges Braque, Andre Lurpt, Pablo Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico, or
compared it to the disjecta Membra of the Surrealist school. Partly due to these
criticisms, Bouche began to paint American subjects more realistically, in keeping with
the general direction of American art in the 1930s.
In addition to resuming easel painting, in the 1930s Bouche painted several
murals, executed panels for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and was associate director of the
New York School of Interior Decoration. In 1936 he had the first of many
exhibitions at Kraushaar Galleries in New York. The following year Harry Salpeter profiled
him in Esquire as the "Boulevardier of Art." Bouche, a very large man, delighted
in well-tailored suits, and his daughter recalled that the various merchants of Savile Row
and St. James' Street jointly contrived to give him the appearance of a successful
banker."
Self-portraits were not a staple of his work, but in the later 1950s Bouche painted
several, including Self Portrait with Helmet (1958, private collection).
This work, slightly larger than the Butler Institute's Self Portrait with Helmet, also
shows him in the butcher's apron he wore when painting. However, the earlier self-portrait
is bust-length and has details of bookcases and a picture on the background wall. Both
self-portraits have the fine color, humor, and sartorial elegance for which Bouche was
known, evidenced in the first self-portrait by a pith helmet, decorated with a gold,
glittery emblem, and in the second a pink scarf-the stuff of costume parties. The Butler
Institute's self-portrait was reproduced in American Artist in 1960 with an
appreciative comment: "Louis Bouche ... painted this histrionic portrayal, dated 1959,
in which the artist plays a role in honest realism-pith helmet, walrus mustache,
tortoise-shell glasses perched on nose-a strait-backed conception of a British officer
gone Bohemian. Here is a dramatic perception and presentation of an urbane, educated
artist whose style stems from what he has digested of the past and present and shows a
feeling for paint and an innate love of the art of painting."