The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank V. Dudley

Abstract

The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank V. Dudley. Edited by James R. Dabbert. (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. Xiii, 240. Illustrations. Cloth, $60.00; Paper, $29.95). This richly illustrated book is the catalog of the exhibition of Dudley's work shown at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University in 2006, but is also a stand-alone onograph that provides the definitive word on the painter of the rich and varied landscape of this rich and colorful area on the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan. And, as the Brauer Museum has an excellent selection of paintings by Dudley and the Indiana State the largest holdings of all, it is most fitting that the University host this exhibition of the work so admired by the foresighted long-time curator of the museum-Richard H.W. Brauer. The book is comprised of four essays, and a catalog with color plates of the seventytwo paintings in the exhibit. While there is a great deal of intertwining of the material of the essays, there is very little overlap, as each of the authors have written about different aspects of the work and the exhibit. The first, and longest, essay is a biography of the artist, well illustrated with more than fifty photographs of Dudley, members of his family, his studio, and other places important to his life and interests. Dabbert has drawn on letters, family diaries, newspaper and magazine accounts and provides a full and somewhat celebratory biography, voiding analysis of the work and its importance in the world of art. He also weaves the involvement with place, both of the Dunes and the places Dudley lived, into the story. We learn a great deal about the painter's interests, his passions, his relationship and role within the artists' organizations to which he belonged, and how he wove those elements into an artistic life. The article by Greenhouse is an analysis of the artist's work, in terms of how he achieved his ambitions in paint, his conservative style, and his range and type of subjects within the limits of the area to which he devoted a long career. She cautiously points to several possible influences in his early development, but concentrates on what the artist paints - and doesn't paint - as a way of placing him within the context of both the specific Chicago art world and the broader trends in American painting during the years of his major activity. Inevitably, she must engage with his avoidance, or at least muting, of the realities of urban life, though Dudley, like so many of the French Impressionists he admired, lived, and worked almost all his adult life in a major industrial city. …