Daniel Garber: A Passionate Man

"Lambertville Beach" by Daniel Garber

"Family chess games were not always so serene in the Daniel Garber household. A competitive player, Garber himself was prone to slamming the chess board across the room in moments of anger; remorsefully, he would repair the battered chessmen yet again. Like most people, his life was full of illnesses, accidents, periods of debt and bad weather, and his letters reveal bouts of depression and moments of grouchiness. At the same time, the successful completion of a difficult painting or an unexpected sale would bring on an almost giddy elation.

Garber appears in the anecdotes of those who knew him as a passionate and quixotic man. An artist who had to cease much of his painting after a heart attack in 1942 because 'the excitement was more than his heart could stand' did not go placidly to his work. Yet through all these ups and downs in his life and temperament, his paintings remain determinedly balanced and serene. 

It is apparent that Garber willfully chose calmer, happier moments, and persistently ignored or transformed less beautiful perspectives. A friend remembers encountering Garber on the roadside one morning, all set up with a fresh canvas on his easel, patiently 'waiting for the sunlight to break through the mist.' 

Not all effects in nature suited his notion of art. Sometimes he had to wait or look away. While searching for his own vision of abstract beauty, Garber simultaneously had to defend representation against the stylized interpretations of the avant-garde. 'Modern art?' said Garber. 'Well, I don't just care to paint it myself. I don't like to be a snake shedding its skin every so often. I have never vacillated or changed in my work - so far as my real feeling for art is concerned.' 'Of course, I want to follow along in art; I don't want to hark back, and I think that my work is modern, in the true sense of that word.' 'The field for American art is perfectly wonderful!' he exclaimed in 1923. Modestly, sanely, insistently, Garber continues to challenge the conventions of 'so-called modern art.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)