“Leopard and Deer (1912), by Robert W. Chanler: On Chanler, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso and the periphery\", 'art in the periphery' blog, September 20, 2015

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art in the peripherylife outside the canon

“Leopard and Deer” (1912), by Robert W. Chanler:On Chanler, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso andthe periphery

by Foteini Vlachou (Instituto de História da Arte, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade

Nova de Lisboa)



Robert W. Chanler (American, 1872-1930), Leopard and Deer, 1912, gouache or tempera on canvas

mounted on wood, 194.3 × 133.4 cm, Rokeby Collection (exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, 1913);

photo from the Armory Show at 100

Visual association is not always rational, or even easy to justify. When a friend* sent me Robert W. Chanler’s

1912 work Leopard and Deer, I was immediately reminded of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso’s Os galgos (The

greyhounds), as well as the �oral background of medieval tapestries, such as La Dame à la licorne series of

the Musée de Cluny. What is interesting in this particular juxtaposition is that Chanler and Amadeo share

history together as well. They both participated in the legendary Armory Show, the 1913 International

Exhibition of Modern Art. The Armory Show is credited for having introduced modern art to the United

States, although a cursory look at some of the artworks present at the exhibition su�ces to reveal the

incredible versatility, variety and even contradiction of pictorial and plastic styles represented under the



quali�cation of the ‘modern’ (a selection of artworks is available on the excellent site of the Show’s

centenary exhibition).

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (Portuguese, 1887-1918), Greyhounds (Os galgos), 1911, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm, Centro de Arte

Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (photo © Foteini Vlachou)



The relationship of the two men extends further. Chanler was among those who bought Amadeo’s works at

the Armory Show (see Shannon Vittoria’s short entry “An Unexpected Success“), and both men had studied

in Paris. Although Chanler had returned to New York by 1902 (see Megan Fort’s “The Fantastic Robert

Winthrop Chanler“), he maintained his ties with Paris, exhibiting at the 1905 Salon d’Automne what was

probably his most famous work, Au Pays des Girafes, and also returning (?) to the city to get married in 1910.

The kind of art history that focuses on networks, artists’ sociability, circulations and lived experiences in real

places (such as the socio-spatial history undertaken by the Artl@s project focusing on geo-referenced data

of exhibitions among other things, or the recently concluded ArtTransForm project

that studied transnational artistic education before modernism) could lead to interesting associations,

normally di�cult to reach through mere stylistic analysis.

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, Return from the Chase, ca. 1911, oil on canvas, 30.2 x 64.1 cm, Muskegon Museum of Art,

Michigan (exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, 1913; gift of Manierre Dawson to the museum); photo from the

Armory Show at 100

Furthermore, the posthumous reception of the work of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso and Robert Chanler

presents an ironic analogy: they were both written out of the canonical histories of modernism and the

assessments of the impact of the Armory Show. Whereas Amadeo was recognized in Portugal for his

importance as a modernist, the country’s peripheral status impeded his integration in the modernist canon

(periphery here understood as a structure with distinct traits, and not axiologically determined). He will

receive his due in the upcoming 2016 Grand Palais exhibition, but the prejudice associated with a concept

of the periphery as retrograde is still remarkably persistent in popular publications, such as the article that

appeared in The Art Newspaper, entitled “Forgotten Portuguese Modernist gets Grand Palais show“.

Forgotten by whom? The article further calls Lisbon, condescendingly, a “relative backwater”, while the

implication of Amadeo’s international recognition as a direct result of being exhibited at the Grand Palais, is

that Paris is still the unquestionable center.



Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, The Stronghold, 1912, oil on canvas, 92.4 × 61 cm, The Art Institute

of Chicago (exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, 1913); photo of the museum

In the case of Robert W. Chanler’s work, that has been obscured over time partly by ignorance, or because it

is degrading in locations relatively di�cult to access (such as the Crow Room mural in the painter’s ancestral

home), periphery can still be seen as constituting the main problem. Not a periphery geographically de�ned

(Chanler lived and produced his work for wealthy patrons in New York), but one de�ned as situated in the

margins of the modernist canon. As a muralist and a painter of screens, Chanler’s work exempli�es the

tension between the decorative and modern art (and subsequently abstraction), that characterized the

writing of much of the history of Western art from the Renaissance onwards. Chanler, although present at

the Armory Show, is absent from the history of modernism.



Chanler’s concerns and e�orts at plastic expression seem to have been similar to those of other

modernists: the construction of an irrational space, the exploration of the textural qualities of the painted

surface (see the brilliant Porcupines here below), an interest in medieval art, as well as non-western art

forms like screens, even the attempt to bring together art and decoration in an everyday setting (much like

the Nabis claimed to do, in a sense) etc. But this is not the place to argue for a re-evaluation of the artist;

rather, it is an e�ort to show that when canonical history has been, by de�nition, selective and exclusionary,

acknowledging (or apologizing for) its omissions will not get us very far. It is the very logic of exclusion that

needs to be addressed in the �rst instance.



Robert Winthrop Chanler, Screen: “Porcupines” and “Nightmare”, signed and dated 1914, oil on wood, 175.8 x 122.2 cm,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (photo of the museum)

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* The photographer Gerasimos Mamonas.

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This entry was posted in Featured Artwork and tagged Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, Armory Show, Artl@s

project, ArtTransForm, modernist canon, Os galgos, periphery, Robert Winthrop Chanler, Rokeby on

September 20, 2015 [https://artintheperiphery.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/leopard-and-deer-1912-by-

robert-w-chanler-on-chanler-amadeo-de-souza-cardoso-and-the-periphery/] .

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“Leopard and Deer (1912), by Robert W. Chanler: On Chanler, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso and the periphery\", 'art in the periphery' blog, September 20, 2015