Nicolai Fechin

1877 looking for water. They made camp but the men complained of the malodorous liquid, saying it made them sick. The next morning Dunn went farther up the steep gorge to find another spring. He located it at the base of Castle Rock and on his way back to camp picked up some float bearing traces of silver. Rucker and Dunn returned to the ledge and located the first mineral claim in the gulch. Dunn little realized that he had discovered one of America's richest ore deposits. Thinking they had plenty of time to record their claim, they returned to Fort Bowie, where they were stationed.

The Apaches kept the government scouts too busy to do anything about their claim until a prospector by the name of George Warren staggered into the fort, starved and weary from a long journey on foot. Warren was told of the ore ledge. An agreement was made between the men that Ruck-er and Dunn would grub-stake Warren if he, in return for his labor, would share in all he found.

Warren's greatest curse was his love for liquor. It was during the heat of the summer when he left the fort for Mule Gulch (later called Bisbee). Walking for days across the parched, hot valley prodding two burros made him crave the "bug juice" that made men wild. He by-passed Mule Gulch and headed for the nearest border town saloon. After weeks of carousing, his brain fogged, his tongue loosened, Warren betrayed the secret. Men in the saloon kept him un-der the influence of liquor until they obtained the location of the ore body. Warren and his deceitful companions fol-lowed a pencil map made by Dunn which led them without difficulty to the exact spot. They staked their claims and had them recorded as "The Copper Queen Claim" without add-ing the names of Dunn and Rucker.

Dunn, caught by the ineffectual law of Arizona which in those days was too weak for the protection of a man's per-sonal property, sold the first claim staked in the gulch, "The Rucker Claim," for three thousand dollars. He returned to his native state of Connecticut, where he lived the last seven years of his life in seclusion. His friends never knew of his exploits or misfortunes in the West and he was later drowned in a canyon bearing his name while rescuing a friend from flood waters.

George Warren led a miserable existence, selling one rich claim after another for just enough money to buy liquor until he lost all but one third of his share of the rich Copper Queen. This too he forfeited by betting that he could out-run a horse around a post the distance of a hundred yards. Warren thought he could win by making headway while turning the post, which he did, but the horse passed him on the home stretch, thus causing him to lose what was prob-ably the richest single copper claim in the world. A million dollars against a ten dollar horse was some bet for even a wild and reckless Arizonan! Years later he was picked up from the gutter critically ill from pneumonia and carried to the hospital where he died a few hours later. The man who befriended Warren ironically enough was George Dunn, son of the man whom he had cheated of great wealth!

It was three years after the discovery of ore in Tomb-stone Canyon that men from the outside became interested. Prospectors and mining men had heretofore wanted silver and gold as copper presented great problems of smelting and transportation. After the Bisbee lode was recognized as being valuable enough to mine, it was hauled in twenty-two-mule-drawn wagon trains over miles of tortuous mountain trails to the nearest railroad. When the Southern Pacificpushed its way across the Colorado River and on into the desert, hopes and dreams of mining promoters went soaring. Eastern capital became enthusiastic and soon invested money for the development of Arizona's copper. Such was the be-ginning of the Phelps-Dodge Mining Company. They sent Professor James Douglas, an engineer of unusually broad vision to report what he found. One glance convinced Douglas that the great cave on the hill abounded in sulphide ore. He advised the Phelps-Dodge Company to buy the property, which was offered for the sum of forty thousand dollars.

In 1880 after the Copper Queen had taken more than her share of blood, death and violence she settled under the new management showing promise of becoming one of the richest copper mines in the country. In four years' time, ninety thousand tons of ore went into the smelter and twelve thousand tons of bullion came out. Each day the Modoc stage coach rattled into the raw young town with its cargo of eager pioneers, prospectors, mining men, undesirables and dance hall girls. The small settlement mushroomed into a blazing lawless mining camp typical of the legendary old West. In March of 1884 gloom settled over this ambitious beginning. Bisbee was dying. The reports had it that the ore was gone.

A stated time for further prospecting for new ore veins was set by the directors of the company, but Wes Howell, mine foreman, knew there was more copper in the rugged mountains surrounding the town. He had the reputation among his men of being able to "smell the ore." Contrary to orders he ran a tunnel in the opposite side of the cave and camouflaged it by building a tool house in front to disguise his activities. Át two o'clock in the morning of the final day, his men blasted into one of the richest and largest ore bodies ever discovered in the camp!

The gay 90's was the camp's golden era. The realm of the rich Copper Queen had been fast developing into a thriving community which outgrew itself spilling into the outlying canyons and even the valley below. No other mining camp of the old West can record such a frantic war for riches. The Copper Queen, fabled from one end of the world to the other, continued to pour forth millions of pounds ofvaluable ore year after year. Spies worked as muckers in the vast caverns and rubbed elbows with miners in the saloons learning all they could about the different claims. Not long after their withdrawal a new and powerful factor entered the Bisbee scene. Until then the Copper Queen Mining Company had had a virtual monopoly, but men from Duluth purchased a claim previously turned down by the Copper Queen Company. This claim, "The Irish Mag," named for a dance hall girl, was owned by an argumentative, hard-headed prospector named Daly who later killed a constable and fled over the mountains to oblivion. His Mexican common-law wife sold the claim to a lawyer after years of litigation, andthe lawyer in turn sold it to the Duluth men for two hundred thousand dollars. These men formed the "Calumet and Arizona Mining Company." They sank a shaft on their new property but not until it reached the seven-hundred-foot level did it reveal any prospects of ore. When the great deposit of ore was reached, the stock skyrocketed in price and millions of dollars in metal was taken from the "Irish Mag."

In 1883 a young man named Lemuel Shattuck came west to work as a cowboy on a cattle ranch in Sulphur Springs Valley. During the frenzied boom days of Bisbee he came into camp and picked up a few claims. Having no money of his own, he interested some investors from Minnesota in

BY FRANK WATERS

Nicolai Fechin is one of the greatest portrait artists of our time. For a half-century he has won renown throughout all Europe and America for his unexcelled draughtsmanship and brilliancy of color. He is also one of the finest painters of the American Southwest.

These examples speak for themselves. They express more than an amazing virtuosity of technique, a penetrative vision of the characters and scenes they portray. They betray where his heart feels home.

Fechin himself writes simply: “To tell the truth, my art belongs to this country more than to any other.” The whole course of his life points to it, like the paintings themselves.

Fechin is Russian by birth. His father's home village was Arzamas, a prosperous trading center on the Volga. For its many fine churches skilled craftsmen were neededwoodcarvers, ikon-makers, gilders and builders of shrines. In all of these crafts Ivan Alexandrovitch Fechin was pro-ficient. Soon he moved to Kazan where he married and opened his own shop.

Here, on November 26, 1881 (Russian Old Style Calendar), Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin was born. Four years later the child became dangerously ill. “It is better that he die,” the doctors consoled the weeping mother, “for if he lives this inflammation of the brain will affect both his mind and his eyes.” Their only recommendation to the parents was to pray for a miracle.

With help the miracle did happen.

The Ikon of Tischinskoya, Mother of God, was brought from its church in the Tartar settlement. Three times it was passed over the child, and touched to his stricken head. At the “touch of the ikon” the child moved, his first sign of life after two weeks of coma. Though he soon recovered, the illness left its marks. He still has the lofty forehead that drew him his childish nickname of “Baldy” when his hairline receded.

Growing up sensitive and imaginative, the boy began to draw. First landscapes and horses, then drawings of ikons In the presentation of this feature on Nicolai Fechin we are deeply grateful for the cooperation given to us by Homer E. Britzman in getting together the material representing various phases of the artist's work. Mr. Britzman, a noted collector and co-author of the book “Charles E.. Russell-A Biography” is a collector of the paintings of Mr. Fechin and has long been interested in the artist's career. Two of the paintings herein presented were borrowed from the collection of J. R. Williams. They are: “Yaqui-An Arizona Vaquero” and “Romero Miraball of Taos.” Mr. Williams has copyrights on these paintings. Mr. Britzman holds copyright on the others with the exception of “Church of Rancho de Taos,” which is owned by Lorena Montgomery, who so graciously lent it to us for this feature.

and shrines. Some of the latter, done when the boy was six years old, his father even used in his work. At thirteen Nicolai executed an original design for a new shrine. For it he was paid ten rubles-the first money he ever received for his work.

The family was in dire straits. Every summer Ivan Alexandrovitch sought work in the neighboring villages, and took little Kolia (the diminutive for Nicolai) with him. There was his father's fortress village of Arzamas; and across the Volga was Pushkarka, the first military settle-ment on the wild Tartar border, built by Ivan the Terrible in the fifteenth century. He visited Kushnia where his uncle lived; knew Yagodnaya Slobada where Grandmother Fiokla sat alone in her log cabin; watched the bears come out of the woods to slaughter cattle in Lipska. Deeper in the dark forest he saw the wild Tartar tribes of Cheremis, Chiuvash and Mordva with their ancient pagan gods and mysterious secret sacrifices.

How the boy loved these somber forests, the villages of the stout moujiks, and the Tartar tribes! All his life and work were to be influenced by them. And never was he to find their equals save in the high pine forests of the Colorado Plateau, the old adobe villages, and the Pueblo, Apache and Navajo tribes of the American Southwest.

But it was 1894; Nicolai was thirteen years old, and ready to begin his life work.

The Art School of Kazan had just opened. It was a branch of the celebrated Imperial Academy of Art of St.

Petersburg (now Leningrad), and it offered a six-year course to qualified students. Those who could afford it paid tuition; others received scholarships. Ivan Alexandrovitch promptly enrolled his talented son.

Ivan Alexandrovitch, unable to find work, was forced to leave Kazan. His destitute wife separated from him and returned to her parents in another town. Nicolai was left alone.

Sharing “a long, unfriendly room in an old deserted house” with two comrades, he completed the rigorous course and was sent to the great Imperial Academy of Art in St. Petersburg. There was nothing then like it in the world. The Academy was under the direct supervision of the Ministry of the Imperial Court of Czar Nicholas, and its object was to develop art throughout all Russia. Only the most talented applicants were selected. All their expenses were dfrayed during the arduous seven-year course. But every half-year their work was carefully graded, and not until the seventh year were they allowed private studios. The final test was a competitive exhibition. On this gala day everyone of note came to view the pictures-the nobility, Academy officials, members of the Imperial Court, even the great Czar Nicholas himself. Only if the student passed did he receive the coveted degree of “Artist,” and possibly one of the traveling scholarships with a purse of 2,000 rubles.

In 1901, at the age of nineteen, young Fechin began his great adventure. For the first few years he worked in open classes, passing periodic examinations in anatomy, perspective and history of art. For his examination in anatomy under the feared Professor Zaleman, he made more than 300 drawings to win the highest grade. He then was allowed to choose his own master: the renowned Ilya Repin who in the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 had introduced contemporary Russian art to the West. The last two years Fechin worked alone, responsible only to himself. His technique changed. His own style finally evolved.

For his final competitive exhibition in 1909, Fechin painted a large canvas, “Gathering the Cabbage Crop,” which portrayed a Cheremis scene near Pushkarka. It won him his official degree and a traveling scholarship through Europe.

In high heart, a recognized artist after fifteen years' work, Fechin wandered leisurely through Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and France. But in Paris, the mecca of all artists, the perennial peasant became homesick for his dark Slavic forests and native villages. He fled back to Kazan. Here as a state teacher, he could be free to paint as he chose.

Curiously enough success followed him. Two of his large paintings had been sent to the International Art Exhibition held in the famous Munich Glaspalast, and that same year his work appeared in America for the first time at the International Exhibit of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In both western Europe and America Fechin was greeted with instant acclaim. Among such distinguished contemporaries as Claude Monet, Pisarro, Gaston Latouche, Sisley and John Sargent, he won his first prizes and medals; his genre compositions of peasant life aroused controversy; his palette knife technique earned him the name of the “Russian Dareist.” He was called a “moujik in art,” the “Tartar painter.” International Exhibitions everywhere-Venice, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Pittsburgh-sent him invitations to participate. W. S. Stimmel, an American art collector, began to send for his paintings. Nicolai Fechin had made his name as an artist.

Nothing for a time marred his quiet life. In 1913 hewas married to Alexandra Belkovitch, the daughter of his old friend and founder of the Kazan Art School. With the birth of his own daughter, Eya, a fresh new stream entered his life. But peace was not to last.

World War I, then the Bolshevik Revolution. The old Imperial order of the Czar was demolished. The new Soviet order of Stalin was not yet born.

In turmoil, misery and bloodshed, Fechin with his wife and child fled to the isolated retreat of Vasilievo. For seven years the little family lived in the great forest along the Volga. Years later in her little book of memoirs, March of the Past, Alexandra Fechin recalled the episode of a baby lost in the retreat from Kazan. In another she portrayed their faithful cow "Krasavka" which supplied them with precious milk. Provisions were almost unobtainable. Paint was out of the question. But Fechin stubbornly persisted in working, using tempera. Soon he developed pneumonia and was dangerously ill for weeks. In the typhoid epidemic he lost both his father and mother whom he had brought together again. Finally in 1921 the famine reached its crest on the tide of poverty and starvation.

But meanwhile the American collector Stimmel had been busy. Through the American Relief Administration, he had sent Fechin immigration papers and pleas to come to America. Worn out, Fechin put in a year securing permission to leave Russia. At last, in 1923, and as second-class passengers, the family saw rising through a thick fog the fantastic skyline of New York.

Settling down in a large studio apartment overlooking Central Park, Fechin began work at once. His first one-man show of thirty-two pictures was opened at the Arden Gallery in January 1924. Commissions for portraits began to come in at once: from Lillian Gish, movie star, in her Romola costume; Willa Cather, the novelist; W. L. Clark, founder of the Grand Central Art Gallery; John Burnham, son of the architect who had built many of New York's skyscrapers; Ralph Van Vechten of Chicago. With instant popularity came instant recognition. Fechin was awarded the first prize for portraits at the Academy of Arts, New York, in 1924, and a medal of award at the 1926 International Exposition in Philadelphia.

But as in St. Petersburg and Paris, he became ill in New York; his peasant yearning for the countryside reasserted itself. He first sought relief in Pennsylvania. The following summer he traveled across the continent to California. The third year he returned to the wilderness hinterland through which he had passed. Everything about it fascinated himthe great Colorado Rockies, the rugged plateaus of New Mexico, the tawny deserts of Arizona, with their simple, earthy people. A small group of artists gathered at Taos, New Mexico, and a studio which Mabel Dodge Luhan made available to him, decided his choice of location. So in 1927 he moved his family to Taos. Naturalized Americans now, they had found a permanent home. It was more than that. In the land and in the people Fechin had discovered the terms of his greatest appeal.

Forty-six years old, and just beginning his period of greatest productivity as a mature artist, Fechin blossomed all at once. All his feelings and facilities came into full play.

He designed and built his own house in the midst of seven acres adjoining the Indian reservation. A skillful blending of Russian, Spanish and Pueblo architectural features, every huge viga, the corbels, lintels, swinging doors, the niches for ikons or santos, Fechin hand-hewed and carved himself with the patience of Ivan Alexandrovitch. Odd pieces of wood he took time to carve into sculp-tured figures that today are in the treasured collection of Homer Britzman who has selected these paintings for repro-duction.

In back of the house Fechin then completed his own commodious studio. Out the great studio window, facing north as usual, looms pine-forested Taos Mountain, and be-hind it rise the Colorado Rockies. Falling away to south and west stretches the sage-green desert, undulant as the steppes of Russia. Down the road in a continual procession pass the simple Spanish-American villagers from Ranchos de Taos, Talpa, Llano Quemado, Arroyo Hondo and Arroyo Seco. Across the back pasture, on the old trail from the Indian pueblo of San Geronimo de Taos, file the Indians in their bright winter blankets or white summer sheets.... The same procession of our mutual neighbors, the same individual fig-ures that Fechin painted.

He could not work fast enough. Every place he went thrust at him more subjects. The patriarchal José looking over his corn milpa next door. An old-time prospector, down from the hills, plodding into the plaza with his burro. The little daughter of an Indian friend playing with a kachina, Little Kissa and Her Doll.. Out at the pueblo Warrior Chief, the old blind cacique, The Corn Dancer, an Indian Singer in white buckskin boots. A turbulent trout stream rushing through a mountain glade. The old Mission Church at Ranchos. A log cabin. A remote adobe.

Farther west was Arizona with its great cattle ranches and bluff cattlemen, more Indians, more types to paint. In California, the desert and the palms. An inexhaustible land and people; a seemingly inexhaustible painter; and one after another canvas in glowing color-portraits of South-western types that have never been surpassed. Little wonder that they won him first prize from the Academy of Western Painters in 1935.

No art critic yet has "explained" Fechin's phenomenal brilliancy of color and technique. But any friend who has been on a picnic with him, or any subject who has posed for him, knows how closely the man and the artist coincide.

Fechin is of medium build, with a peculiar quickness and simple directness in all his movements. He has a wide and protruding forehead, high Mongolian cheek-bones, and nar-row, quick eyes. Compactly one piece, he is as sparse of speech as of line. His diet is as frugal as his palette; he neither smokes nor drinks. All his life he has preferred the company of simple people, loves the outdoors, and abhors cocktail parties. He reads little and always paints only from life. And with the same quick coordination of movement and savage directness with which he lunges at a canvas, he drives his car at breakneck speed through city streets.

One summer Fechin visited Jim Williams, the famous Western cartoonist, on his K 4 ranch near Prescott, Arizona. He ate and rode horseback with the hands, intensely interested in watching them break some broncs.

A favorite visitor on the K 4, Fechin painted two canvases while there, and three black-and-white sketches of Jim and his family. One of the paintings was a portrait of a young Spanish-American girl: Senorita Roybal. An old-time cowhand known as "Yaqui" then offered to pose, and strutted up in his finest duds. But no! Fechin sent him back to put on his old work harness, and did the fine painting reproduced here, Yaqui-An Arizona Vaquero.

Another great admirer of Fechin's work is Frank Hoff-man of the Rocking Horse Ranch near Taos, a "cowboy artist" of the West in the tradition of Charlie Russell and Remington, a famous illustrator for forty years, and a superb painter in his own right. It was Frank's opinion on the reproductions of drawings for Fechin's album, I remember, that Fechin wanted most.

Still another was the late Ralph Meyers, the noted Indian trader, who used to show Fechin's paintings in his shop. One thing especially they had in common-their love and delight in shaggy, half-wild burros. Fechin is the only painter I know to use them as a favorite subject.

The unhappiness of a divorce interrupted for a time Fechin's portrayal of his loved Western milieu. With three selected students, he traveled south through Mexico. He began to draw again. Pencil, charcoal, crayon. Faces of old beggars, young chamacos, women swathed in black cotton rebozos; faces of cholos, mestizos, Indians; the face of all mixed-blood Mexico. Without the rampant color and vir-tuosity of technique which have made his paintings famous, these stark charcoals reveal the superb draughtsmanship underlying all his work.

In the summer of 1938, Fechin sailed for the Orient on a Jap freighter with a collector and dealer of Oriental art. Traveling through Japan, collecting batiks in Java, they finally settled in a small native compound on the island of Bali. The lush tropical foliage, the brilliantly colored sarongs, the texture of sun-warmed skins-here indeed was color for a master of color!

But already the fingers of Japanese penetration were closing over the archipelago. Under the clouds of World War II, Fechin returned to America. Settling down in Santa Monica, in southern California, Fechin resumed his painting of the Southwest, winning the Adele Hyde Morrison Prize at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1943.

So Nicolai Fechin has been painting since the age of fourteen. He is seventy this year and still painting. He has had no schools to found, no theories to expound, no fads to indulge. He has been content to paint, and to let his paint-ings speak for him.

How they shout and sing! No man living has his intensity of color. Few can equal his masterful draughtsmanship. Whatever his medium, whatever his subject, Fechin's work is stamped with his immediately recognizable style. And yet, with a paradox rare in art, his paintings have been so immediately appealing that it has been more and more unneces-sary to send them to exhibitions. They have been bought by collectors nearly as fast as he could paint them.

Just what is it in them that already has spanned the world and half a century, and continues to speak to an in-creasingly appreciative audience with an authoritative voice which trumpets into the future? What do his paintings say?

Fechin's work is divided into no periods. It recognizes no national boundaries, favors no caste. Fechin does not paint his own moods and fancies. He paints people. That is what they say: the truth of our common humanity speaking from the hidden realm of character revealed in the tilt of a nose, the flicker of an eyelid. Portraiture is the keynote of Fechin's art. Even his still-lifes and landscapes are portraits too-portraits of a land inseparable from its children, in the eyes of a child of the soil.

These, the faces of our Southwest, Fechin has loved and painted best. Their portraits will be long cherished.