Two TWA stewardesses were in Columbus one evening in the late 1950s, staying overnight at a motel airport, when they learned that nationally renowned painter Emerson Burkhart was hosting an open house that night. They decided to hop a cab over to his place on East Woodland Ave, arriving around 10pm. The ladies stayed late, enjoyed themselves and ended up in a deep conversation in the kitchen with the late crowd. Then about 2AM, one stewardess turned to the other and said, “when you get to the motel, have the cab bring my bags back here. I’m not flying out tomorrow.” She stayed for multiple months.
Emerson Burkhart was born on a farm near Kalida Ohio in 1905. In first grade, he drew a likeness of his teacher on the blackboard. His fellow students and teacher were impressed. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, but in 1926 he graduated with an Art degree from Ohio Wesleyan University.
After college, he went to New York where he painted under the tutelage of well-known New England painter Charles Hawthorne for four years. Burkhart moved back to Columbus in 1931 to teach at the Columbus School of Art and to paint.
His best-known works documented life in the African American community in Columbus. He mostly worked in oil and paid a small fee to have people pose because he did not work from photographs. Burkhart also had an eye for city art – junkyards, old RR locomotives and he started painting scenes from his neighborhood. “Beauty is everywhere,” he often said.
In 1934, he received a commission from the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project for a mural over the auditorium at Central High School. His only direction was to paint something about “music and rhythmic structure.”
EB created a 13 x 70-foot mural, known as Music, which featured young men in tuxes and young women swaying close to each other in skintight evening gowns, each curved in motion dancing and playing musical instruments. It was painted on seven canvases and took Burkhart twelve months to finish. He was paid $3000.
Unfortunately, in 1938, the school principal at the time, deemed the mural too risqué and inappropriate for young minds. He ordered the mural be painted over with what was estimated to be eight to ten coats of paint. The controversy reached the national stage with articles in Art Digest, Arts News and Newsweek.
Sixty plus years later, with COSI moving into the old Central High School, a CPS staffer uncovered evidence of the buried treasure from documents in a file cabinet. Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center was notified. Under the supervision of art conservators, 1000 art students were unleashed, tasked with restoring the mural. They literally worked inch by inch for six painstaking years. In 1999, the mural was fully restored and was moved to a new home for all to see at the Columbus Convention Center.
In 1939, Emerson (34) married 21-year-old model and art lover Mary Ann Martin, who he’d known since she was fifteen. They bought a home at 223 Woodland Ave on the short East side. She settled in to managing his affairs and scheduling their social life.
Emerson’s work & his mouth continued to attract controversy. There was the Mame Thurber (mother of James) rejection of her portrait and there was the media feud with an OSU professor over the merits, or lack thereof, of modernism’s emergence in the art world.
Emerson, an avowed atheist, was called lively, articulate, witty, philosophical, a party animal, and a Columbus institution. He and his work were a big deal in Columbus Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s. He exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Butler Institute of American Art.
In 1955, his young wife Mary Ann tragically died suddenly at the age of 37. She had predicted her own early demise. And then, later that same year, his only brother Paul died when he fell out of a haymow and broke his neck.
Shortly thereafter, the Columbus Art League decided not to display his work at an upcoming show. The art world was transitioning into modern abstract art, so his paintings of scenery and portraits were deemed outdated.
Furious, Burkhart decided that he would host his own open house at his 22-room home in retaliation. He hung his paintings in every room. Thousands of people came. It was front page news on both local newspapers. He was interviewed in his living room by local tv. It went so well, Burkhart decided to host an open house every year. It became the highlight of the city’s social calendar.
Burkhart travelled around the world a couple of times with philanthropist Karl Jaeger’s ‘Study as you go’ school as artist in residence. Twenty 17-year-old boys & girls were picked every year for the prestigious nine-month trip. The students lived with residents and were taught by prominent local teachers as well as by four staff teachers traveling with them.
His favorite subject was himself. He had more than 250 paintings of his various faces, each representing a different human emotion. Burkhart also painted a young Queen Elizabeth and poet Carl Sandberg (the latter of which Burkhart kept for himself). He painted and fished in Delaware County. “There’s enough beauty just in Ohio for me to spend my entire life painting here,” he said.
In late 1969, Emerson Burkhart hosted one final open house at his home. Three days later, he suffered a stroke and died on November 12 at the age of 64.
Burkhart’s work resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian and numerous museums throughout Ohio including the Columbus Museum of Art and a permanent exhibit at the Ohio History Connection.
Burkhart had discussions with the director of the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts about hosting an Emerson Burkhart evening. A year after he died, one hundred sixty of his paintings occupied seven gallery rooms and drew a packed house.
Sources: Remembering Emerson Burkhart by Tom Thomson, The Short North Gazette, www.shortnorth.com; Broad & High with Audrey Hasson, Nov 27, 2014, Reflections of an Artist, www.youtube.com; Columbus Neighborhoods: Emerson Burkhart, Dec 22, 2016, WOSU Public Media, www.youtube.com; Emerson Burkhart and the Works Progress Administration, Aug 4, 2013, www.ohiohistory.org; Emerson Burkhart, Historic American Painting, Keny Galleries, www.kenygalleries.com; Music, an Emerson Burkhart mural, https://columbusconventions.com; Emerson Burkhart, 78 Artworks at Auction, www.mutualart.com; Artist Emerson Burkhart, The Historical Marker Database, www.hmdb.org; A historical guidebook to old Columbus by Bob Hunter, 2012; More on the Burkhart mural by Sally Helms, Columbus Monthly, March & May, 1982; Famed Artist Burkhart Dies, Nov 12, 1969, Columbus Dispatch; Education: Study As you go, https://time.com; Karl Jaeger (educator), https://grokipedia.com; Featured picture of 34-year-old Emerson Burkhart taken on Nov 5, 1939, courtesy of the Columbus C-J and the Columbus Metropolitan Library.