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Thirty-three years ago, Richard Lack started his atelier for classical realism. The modernists laughed, groaned, and went back to their wine. Decades later, the arts movement that found a happy home in Minneapolis may be the most exciting thing happening in the nation.


You walk up a flight of stairs and down the flourescent-lit cinderblock hall of a faceless warehouse in the industrial heart of East Hennepin Avenue. You push through a set of black steel doors labeled simply The Atelier, and you enter a space where time and the outside world have lost their hold. The stinging smell of oil and turpentine hangs on the air, and the pristine white walls are punctuated by long gray curtains hiding innumerable rooms beyond. Dividing the walls like a riot of unrelated windows are hundreds of paintings.

The paintings are landscapes, still lifes, and a small army of figures, mostly nudes looking on. They are solitary images, some in color, many in black and white or sepia, each with its own demure elegance. Pull back one of the curtains and a cascade of cool, northern light dapples the small room as if it were a private chapel. More paintings line the perimeter of the room, stacked upright four or five deep. Opposite the window is a table covered with blue silk, a white porcelain pitcher, a silver tray, and a clutch of pink roses. From one wall, a plaster face, milky and deathly in its bone-like monochrome, frowns down at a disheveled assortment of paint tubes and brushes. The silence is vast, the scent of mineral spirits dizzying. The stillness is both mesmerizing and foreign.

But the sensation suddenly evaporates when a voice chimes out from behind. A small woman with a flash of brilliant blond hair appears from around the corner. Her greeting reveals an easy Texas drawl as she introduces herself as Cyd Wicker, co-director of the Atelier, a school for fine art painters. Wicker’s name reappears over her shoulder, attached to a large painting of Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. It’s a relief to know this isn’t a time warp anymore. As we stroll through room after room of pedestals, easels, still-life props and paint carts, Cyd explains the courses that would-be painters pursue at the Atelier. Four years full-time, drawing the figure three hours every day, five days a week. Pencil, charcoal, painting in black and white, painting in color, portraiture, still-life, interiors. She speaks in terms of tonality, light, nature and observation.

Then she ticks off a list of names: Burne-Jones, Millais, Godward, Waterhouse, and Bouguereau (yes, the beautiful child and mother offering an apple at the MIA—the one that’s on all the posters). But mostly the names are unfamiliar, long dead. Foremost, Wicker talks of lineage, the ancestry of the Atelier—as if it were a family tree. Still more names: Ives Gammell, the Boston School, William Paxton, Jean-Leon Gerome, Jacques-Louis David— these men, too, long past. Except one, Richard Lack, who founded this institution in Minneapolis more than thirty years ago.


At 74 years old, Richard Lack is an institution in his own right. “It’s really been incredible what he’s accomplished,” says Steven Levin, a successful painter and one-time Lack pupil. Lack has been an artist nearly all his life. A well-regarded portraitist and landscape painter, he has works in collections all across the county, including governor’s portraits at our Capitol. Moreover, as the founder of Atelier Lack, the forerunner of the current Atelier, he’s taught his craft to dozens of others. His students consider him to be one of the most influential teachers alive today, a teacher of whom they speak in the same breath as Rembrandt and Rubens. Steve Gjertson, in his recently published biography of Lack, unabashedly calls him “one of the most significant American realists of the second half of the 20th century.”

Yet Lack’s success hasn’t made him a household name by any means, and the fact that people have come from all over the country to study with him has gone largely unnoticed by the cognoscenti. “He stayed on his own path, and it’s always been an uphill struggle,” Wicker says. The established art world looks at Lack as an anomaly, part of something abandoned a hundred years ago in the tidal wave of modernism and its tangle of currents. While Lack may not appreciate the dismissive posturing of the moderns, he doesn’t give them much heed. It’s the past that he really cares about. He is an apostle of a tradition of painting that all but perished in the 20th century. Yet it’s a tradition with roots reaching back to the Renaissance—to the imagery, style, and techniques of those still known as the giants of art history, the likes of Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci.

Lack is a purveyor of realism. “Classical Realism” to be exact, a term his biographer claims Lack himself coined in 1982. And the company of the old masters suits him just fine. It’s their impulse he lives by. For Lack and his followers, what is good in art today should be judged by the same merits it was judged by then. As he wrote more than twenty years ago, “Our criterion is broad and simple: A picture must be beautiful in line and color, and the representational element skillfully achieved. Only then can we dwell on matters of taste, style, innovation, historical significance, relevance of subject matter, paint handling...”

The teacher wasn’t writing about Cherry Spoon Bridges. “The rest of the world can have it,” he says in a satisfied undertone, on a glorious autumn day in his studio. His snow white hair and quiet gaze give him a countenance that is at once ancient and full of life. Somehow his aluminum walker and blue robe have a regal dignity, lit from north facing windows set at 45 degrees, just as da Vinci dictated. In a way, you could call it a matter of perspective.For Richard Lack, the centuries of instruction handed down from master to student is the lifeblood that must still flow today to make a good painting. Back then, an apprenticeship might have lasted for decades. Drawing from live models, grinding paints, handling a brush—this was the way all artists learned. It was complex knowledge that no painter could do without. Over time, the masters’ ateliers were joined by larger schools, painters forming academies, still carrying on in the same traditions as the old masters. “Art Institutes” were not only museums; they were also schools for aspiring painters. (Even the Walker Art Galleries, as it was known 70 years ago, offered classes.) Through it all, the hand of the master could be traced. But then it abruptly stopped.

Almost overnight, as the art historians would explain it, a revolution occurred. First came the impressionists, then the expressionists and the cubists and the sychronists. There was no stopping it after that. In the explosion of the new century, the Academy was reduced to a caricature—the scoffing “academic,” an old-fashioned, sentimental throwback. It was not so much a schism in art as it was a drubbing. Those names that just rolled off Cyd Wicker’s tongue with such admiring eloquence? As far as the moderns were concerned, these were the names of the losers. Good riddance! With them went the atelier and with the atelier went the methods of the masters. Painters of the old ways were looked upon as reliquaries, protecting nothing anyone wanted; technique wasn’t important, neither was representation. Such painters became the Don Quixotes of their generation.

This is where Richard Lack began, a youth from Minneapolis, getting special permission as a teenager to attend adult drawing classes at the Walker, and then taking up painting in earnest at the Minneapolis School of Art. He was determined to follow the vision of the old masters. “I liked it from the beginning. Things were different then, there was still a questioning of whether [modernism] was going to be the path for students to go and how it would be over the long haul. The work being produced by the modernists, that was Picasso, Matisse, I wasn’t convinced. I’d walk through the galleries at the Institute and look at the Rembrandt. I’d see the traveling shows of modernism, Kokoshka, et cetera, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t like these forms of modern art.’ I would look at these exhibitions and then go back to the Institute and compare the old paintings and I thought there was nothing of interest out there. You look at the Rembrandt [the famous ‘Lucretia’ still on display at the MIA] and people would say it’s old, it’s gone. And I’d say, ‘Well, but I still like it. It’s a mystery.’”

Searching for a channel to the past through art school was a disappointment. The shift away from the traditional approaches of only a few decades earlier was swift. “In all honesty, I looked at my teachers and it was a mystery to them, too. They’d say, ‘Well, we’re modern here. This is today’s world. Forget about that stuff.’ But I still kept looking at those paintings, the craft, the beauty. I couldn’t get past it. So that put me on the path. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to give this one more shot. I’m going to go out East, out to New York. There must be something out there.’

“So I got a place on the edge of the Village with a friend and started sniffing around, visiting the galleries, the old Art Students League, some of the artist’s studios.” Unfortunately for Lack, it turned out to be far from what he’d been hoping for. Thanks to the intellectual diaspora resulting from the Second World War, New York had become a haven and hotbed for all the modern movements. While all roads were leading to the new cultural capitol, Lack was turning up dead ends. “There was an old academician [Frank Vincent deMond] that I was hoping to work with, only to discover he’d recently died. It was a big disappointment. I realized New York was just Minneapolis, but bigger,” Lack admits. “There wasn’t anything there for me.” He had a few months before he’d planned to return to Minnesota, to follow a different course—studying chemical engineering at the University. “I decided as long as I was there, I’d take advantage of the museums and do some copies.” For several weeks he spent every morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveying the centuries.

“I remember I was copying a school-of-Velasquez piece, when a young man came up to me one day and we started talking painting. He told me he was up in Boston studying with an old codger who was connected to the old European tradition—this fellow Gammell who was teaching up there. So I took the bus up and met him at the Fenway Studios, one of the last of the old studio buildings.” Gammell looked at Lack’s portfolio, and liked what he saw. He invited Lack to help him with a mural project he was doing for a bank in Rhode Island. They worked together on that for a few months, and developed a rapport. “Gammell was well educated and he’d walk around throwing questions at us, and I realized this guy was different. He worked from a totally different viewpoint, the craft, how to make pictures. I was really impressed. That’s where I started my serious training, my apprentice training.”R.H. Ives Gammell was the last of his breed. By the time Lack found him, he was living in relative obscurity. The split between the old guard and the moderns had been bellicose—many, including Gammell, saw it as an all-or-nothing proposition—and Gammell would be left behind. In 1946, he had published the tome Twilight of Painting, an argument for the tradition that he realized was dying in front of his eyes. The very small handful that followed Gammell saw him as a last thread to the past, to the truth of painting. Lack had found what he was looking for.

In the following years, Lack pursued the arduous path he set for himself. While the rest of the art world was going headlong in every direction except traditional realism, Lack was doggedly marching the opposite way. “I was totally convinced that I was right and everybody was wrong,” he says. Lack’s talent didn’t go entirely unnoticed. There were those with money who saw art the way he did, and the landscapes and portrait commissions kept him working nearly full-time through the 60s. Finally, the old-world model of the atelier, the same that Gammell had tried to emulate, came back to Lack. “I had a wonderful dream about starting a school. I’m a Jungian. I feel strongly about dreams, so I listened. My dream consciousness told me I should start a school. I could see it and it looked wonderful. So I set out with a studio, and enough people knew about me and wanted to get some education. I started with four or five students, but there were a lot more who wanted to learn, and people kept coming.”

For more than twenty years, Lack taught his full-time programs in his non-profit school. He wrote about technique and about teaching and published and edited on the history of his genre. He helped found the Society of Classical Realism—still headquartered in Minneapolis—and its quarterly, The Classical Realism Journal. Around all this grew an ardent group of students who took up apprenticeships. Lack says, “There were about 90 people altogether. About 30 people managed to master what I had to teach, and from that came about a dozen real painters, ones who could make a living. I’d say about four or five went on to teach. Teaching is hard, not all people who can paint can teach. It was a labor of love.”

The numbers sound modest, but if Gammell was one thread, Lack had woven in a few more, including himself. The fact is, a number of Lack students have gone on start ateliers of their own. Wicker and Atelier co-director Dale Redpath are both Lack graduates, as are Pete Bougie and Brian Lewis, directors of The Bougie Studio of Art in Minneapolis. Annette Le Sueur, another student, started her own school in Excelsior (she has since retired), and subsequently the Minnesota River School was founded in the same area by one of Le Sueur’s protégés. While that would make the Twin Cities something of a hotbed for classical realism, Lack’s hand is apparent elsewhere as well. Jim Childs, who studied with both Lack and Gammell, founded the Drawing Academy of the Atlantic in New York. Michael Chelich and Bruno Surdo direct the School of Representational Art in Chicago, and Charles Cecil took Lack’s taste for impressionism and carried it back to found his school in Florence, Italy. Lack can afford to be modest when he says, “It’s like a brotherhood, really. Something that carries on.”

Even the stigma of being left behind by the establishment seems now to have been left behind by Lack—though his opinions on art remain crisp. “You have to have an inner conviction. That’s the best kind to have, otherwise you’re at the whims of anything that comes along. If you don’t have an inner solid core you get swept away. I got started painting pictures and reading more, learning more and more, and studying the depth psychology that’s always fascinated me. As you know—as anybody who knows anything about history knows—in today’s world, there is a curious disconnect between our conscious life and these deeper spiritual things. Times are out of joint. You can’t follow fashion. That’s for the museum crowd. It was OK to be outside of fashion because that’s all it is, just fashion. I’ve been ridiculed, but I’ve also been admired for what I’ve done. Some people look at me like I’m the devil incarnate. But they don’t understand. It [the debate on art] is very adolescent. When you get into the practical aspect of it, you have a sense of doing a good job and fulfilling it. In my discussions with modernists, that’s the bridge we can make. Evaluating it is up to other people.” He pauses, smiles, and goes on, “We know a lot, but we’re not the most artistic culture. We’re such a narrow, one-sided mass culture that you just wish we could break away from it and think about something else. I was in a museum in Europe years ago. I was watching the people and thought to myself, ‘The French are looking at the paintings; the Italians are looking at each other; the Germans are looking at their guide books; and the Americans are looking at their watches.’”

What about the future of art and the rifts between genres? Here Lack pauses again, his tone becomes more magnanimous. “I have no idea. You look at this whole thing, it’s like apples and oranges. People get a lot out of modern art, they say they do. It’s a mistake to mix this up and say I’ve got the true religion and your religion is terrible. So we have 9/11—people fighting over ‘spiritual truths,’ and now we’re paying the price for it. The danger with any religious idea is that it can lead to fanaticism. It can lead to great things, but it can also lead to fanaticism. I’ve seen that in art. And since art is of the spirit, when you get into things of the spirit what can you say? Somebody comes and tells you, ‘I just saw God last night.’ Well he’s either crazy or he seems to be really interested in this phenomena. Who am I to say? I didn’t see God last night, but he did.” Lack’s tone is steadfast, but he extends an olive branch. “When you get into matters of the spirit you don’t have rational arguments. The thing about painting is, if you enjoy it—and I love to paint, I’m sure an abstract painter feels the same way—I can’t take that away from them any more than they can take that away from me.”Of all the seeming ironies in Lack’s career, the best may have been saved for last. Today, in the twilight of his own painting, the face of history is turning once again to give his kind of work a second look. In fact, realism, arguably led by the classical style, is stronger than it’s been in 40 years. Small and even large museums are organizing popular shows around artists of the 19th century academy and the pre-Raphaelites. Take, for instance, “Exposed: The Victorian Nude,” currently showing at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibit was brought over from the Tate in London—the same organizers as the MIA’s concurrently running “American Sublime.” Or the summer’s example at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, certainly a cultural arbiter of some repute, the largest exhibit ever of the work of Thomas Eakins, one of the nations most influential American painters of the late 19th century. While Eakins had the misfortune of living near the end of the realist era and thus was among those missing from much of modern art-history commentary, he has, like many of his contemporaries, been finally invited into the pantheon. Though no museum in New York has exhibited Eakins since 1970, Phillippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan, asserts, “Thomas Eakins is recognized as one of America’s foremost painters.” The summer also saw a recognition of American impressionist Edmund Tarbell at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago. Tarbell was a contemporary of Gammell’s, and a fellow leader of the Boston school.

Collectors seem to be paying attention as well. For the past two years they’ve been coming out in droves at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, turning what used to be thought of as second tier sales into highlights of the season. In fact, while the rest of the market remains heavily slumped, art from the turn of the last century is clearly on the rise, consistently pushing up estimates from one sale to the next. Works by William Bouguereau, the pre-modern artist the rest of the art world so dearly loved to hate, are fetching double and even triple what they were only five years ago. Some are fetching in the millions. In May 2000, his painting “Charity” sold for a record $3.45 million. This year “Saint Cecilia,” by Bouguereau’s contemporary John William Waterhouse, sold for more than $10 million. Clearly the realists have an abiding appeal to American collectors.

Even for the contemporary realist, the prospects are better than they’ve been in a long time. Tina Blondell, a Minneapolis artist who grew up learning her techniques in the museums of Italy, describes herself as a part of a broader trend, the new realism. “This is taking off all over the world,” says Blondell. “Look at Julie Heffernen. Her recent show in Chelsea was a huge success.” Indeed. Whatever the reason, and there are plenty of theories, realism is back on the walls of galleries across the county. But this time, classical realism is also getting some serious attention.

Students of Lack such as Steve Gjertson, James Childs, Charles Cecil, and Steven Levin are each finding a measure of acknowledgment that Gammell could barely have dreamed about. Levin is among a stable of more than 20 artists of the realist genre who show regularly at John Pence Gallery in San Francisco—a gallery dedicated to the genre for better than 25 years. Wicker ticks off another list, this time a selection of successful Lack graduates: Besides Gjertson, Levin, Bougie, and Cecil, there are Jeff Larson, Lisa Bormann, and Kirk Richards; Michelle Mitchell and Jim Oslan in Chicago; Carl Samson in Ohio; John Walker, Brian Lewis, and Jean Grapp in the Bay area; Alan Banks, Gary Hoffman, and Jim Childs in New York; Mark Balma in Italy; Kurt Anderson in Arizona. The list continues. Levin lends further perspective. “There is obviously more acknowledgment and, at the same time, there are a whole lot of talented painters coming out, and now more schools are also succeeding.” What he’s describing is something that sounds like a movement, something that has a future again, as well as a past.

So Richard Lack has a legacy—partly accidental, partly planned. His paintings have been widely collected, both publicly and privately, and his influence, if not pervasive, is an undeniable presence in the fabric of the tradition. His devotees are many and still growing. There are disciples to carry on the cause, as well as new ateliers, new galleries and curators to acknowledge the master’s hand. Now Lack can let the fire burn low. “I’m fortunate to have found a way to get some training and to give it. I myself have learned something about painting, and by teaching other kindred souls. What more do you want? You’ve got the collective mass culture and you have to relate to it as best you can, because it’s so powerful. But on the other hand, when you get away from that and get inside the studio and close your door, you’re still with your own heart. I can paint and let the world go by.”