The life & art of Stuart M. Egnal

I was previewing the upcoming sale at one of my favorite auction houses when a familiar name re-appeared: Stuart M. Egnal.

I had written about Egnal and his mother Sylvia two months ago when stacks of his etchings and her books turned up on tables at the auction house. And here he was again, but this time he was represented by some very large oil-on-canvas paintings, including a multicolored tube-shaped sculpture.

The morning of the auction, I got two emails from Stuart’s niece and nephew. They had seen my earlier post, which included a call-out to anyone who could give me more information about Stuart and his mother. Then I heard from Stuart’s brother John, a retired law professor living in Connecticut. I was happy to hear from them because I love discovering artists, and then learning about them and their works.

Here’s my interview with John concerning his brother, who was two years older than he, and his mother, an artist herself who’s 99 years old:

Born into an artistic family

Sylvia made life-size and larger-than-life copper and enamel flowers for more than 30 years, along with leaded glass pieces and lampshades. She stopped creating her art about five or 10 years ago. During the 1920s and 1930s, her uncle in New York was doctor to well-known artists  for whom he swapped his services for their artwork. His collection included Georgia O’Keefe, Renoir and Matisse. Sylvia inherited some of the collection.

“Art was in his blood, by nature and nurturing,” John said.

Finding his passion

“When Stuart was a senior in high school, he went to see a Picasso exhibit and came back from the exhibit and said, ‘I have to paint,'”’ John recalled. “He was not terribly strong academically. (When he took on the art), he then painted with a passion.”

Stuart went off to college in Syracuse, but found that it did not meet his needs. Two years later, he returned home and enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). He spent a year studying in Italy and painting “prodigiously,” John said. When Stuart came back, he had so many canvases that he had them rolled over each other.

It was in Florence where he met poet Wendell Berry, whom Stuart would sketch for the back flap of the poet’s book “Openings,” published in 1968. The book includes the poem “In Memory: Stuart Egnal” that Berry wrote after Stuart’s death.

Stuart enrolled in the graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania to seek a master’s in fine arts (which he did obtain). He painted scenes outside his studio at Penn and at his own apartment. He painted still lifes, abstracts, portraits and self-portraits. He did etchings, acrylics more than oils, and cardboard and wood sculptures. According to Uniques and Antiques, the auction house that was selling his works, he is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

“He had lots of different styles,” said John. “Sometimes it was hard to tell what he was actually looking at.”

Stuart gets sick

Two years into the program at Penn, he was diagnosed with a form of cancer. John said it grew out of radiation treatment he had been given for an enlarged thymus when he was born.

“In 1940, doctors said they could fix it,” said John. “They bombarded him with x-rays. Twenty-five years later, it showed up as a form of cancer. In the early days, they used chemotherapy.”

Stuart moved back into his mother’s house during the summer of 1965, along with John and their sister. He had good days and bad days. Sometimes the cancer was in remission, other times he was sick. He painted in a third-floor bedroom in his parents’ six-room house in West Philadelphia, where John said he would wander up sometimes. But he did not recall watching his brother paint often.

He lived about a year and a half after the cancer was diagnosed, dying in June 1966 at age 26.

“He was driven in a way that was different from anything that had come before,” said John. “He took life as it came to him. Once the artist way of expressing himself was there, it was like he had this passion and he was prolific for the years he had.”

Art left behind

For more than 40 years, Sylvia kept Stuart’s artwork – about 100 to 200 pieces – in her basement and in her studio in West Philadelphia. When John settled his mother’s estate last summer, he invited relatives and friends to take a set number of pieces and donated others to the University City Arts League, which his mother co-founded. The arts league had held an exhibition of Stuart’s works – paintings, sculptures, cardboard cutouts and prints – in 2006.

More than a dozen paintings are hanging on the walls of Sylvia’s home or stacked in a closet. Family members kept the best of them.

The overflow ended up at the auction house where I came across them. Three of the pieces in the recent auction were sold with a Spring 1967 catalog that accompanied a retrospective exhibit of Stuart’s works. Inside was a 1964 artist’s statement from him, which said in part:

“Music has always been a strong influence in my life and work. For about ten years I have been studying jazz and listening to the different movements as they have developed. The idea of a theme, that is a group of chord changes and a rhythm or group of rhythms in a jazz piece is exploited to the fullest extremes by John Coltrane and Group. And the variations (improvisations by the soloists) seem to directly relate to the current problem which I am working through. This idea of theme and variations is just as strong in baroque (Bach) music and also in classical music. … I have always worked in series – or thematically – variations on a theme or motif.”

Postscript: I later got a chance to meet Sylvia Egnal along with her son John, and saw some of her artwork.  She was a co-founder of the University City Arts League, which got started in 1965 when a group of women sat around lamenting the lack of a space for art classes and exhibitions near where they lived in West Philadelphia. The league still offers classes and mounts exhibitions.

“I never called myself an artist,” Sylvia said. “I never did it as a means of support.” She had a brother who did metal work and an uncle who was a collector. Her husband Michael was an attorney.

She made art because she “had the talent and the interest and she created beautiful things,” John said. “She’s very self-effacing.”

He added that his mother had a show and exhibition of about 15 of her metal flower arrangements and they sold out within 20 minutes. Some people were ready to buy more,  but she wasn’t interested in making more. “She did it for people she cared about,” he said.

“I was fortunate,” Sylvia said. Added her son, “she did what she loved.”

Click on first photo below to start the gallery of artwork by Stuart and Sylvia Egnal.

Update: Sylvia Egnal died on Oct. 14, 2014 at age 103.

 

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