Odon Hullenkremer

later Hullenkremer recalled that, upon seeing the skinny youth, the Emperor exclaimed, “You mean to tell me that painting was done by this kid!” Then the aged monarch laid his hand on Odon’s shoulder and said, “Boy, if you keep this up you will be a great painter some day.”

Having earned such a remarkable honor, Hullenkremer immediately was admitted to the Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts where he began his formal art instruction in 1904. After stints at the University of Alexandria in Egypt and the Kunstgewerbe Berlin, he settled in for advanced study at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich in 1909 and 1910.

Hullenkremer’s experience in Germany led to a commission from Kaiser Wilhelm in 1911 to paint a fresco in Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Memorial Church which the Kaiser was then building on the Mount of Olives. His time in the Middle East seemed to have whetted Hullenkremer’s appetite for travel. He spent most of the next three years touring North Africa, South America, the West Indies, and finally, Canada and the United States, visiting museums and sketching the people and landscapes. In 1914, he decided to emigrate permanently, landing briefly in New York and then Toronto. After the Canadian police began to suspect (quite wrongly) that the young man with the thick accent was a German spy, Hullenkremer moved to Toledo, Ohio where he lived and painted for the next fourteen years.

During his time in Toledo, Hullenkremer studied art with Wilder Darling and took courses at the University of Toledo where he developed an abiding interest in psychology and the social sciences. Rather than being a diversion from his art, he saw these studies as a way to deepen his artistic vision. Hullenkremer had long since specialized in portrait, figure and genre painting, and increasingly felt that he needed a more thorough understanding of both the mind and body. Typical of the methodical and scientific way he approached all things in life, Hullenkremer wanted to systematically identify the underlying principles of human reasoning, emotion, intelligence and motivation. He felt an individual’s psychological make-up greatly affected that person’s physical appearance. Therefore, knowledge of psychological principles would enable him to see and reveal the deeper truths about the people in his paintings.

As important as psychology was to Hullenkremer, it was only half of the scientific base he established for his art. Of course, all trained artists of his time made careful study of human anatomy, but Hullenkremer carried his interest in physiognomy much further, into the realm of physical anthropology. He was not just interested in the form and structure of the “typical” human body, he was concerned with the myriad physical differences between individual subjects and between people from different countries, cultures and ethnicities. Just as psychology affected the body’s appearance, Hullenkremer felt that our bodies are a part of our character. In order to accurately portray a subject, he needed to understand both body and mind and their intricate relation to each other. Or, as he once said, “To express what is writ in the body, not just in the heart and mind”.

Hullenkremer carried his scientific bent to the technical side of his painting, as well. He developed a color theory that he referred to as a “tonic” system based on musical scales. Although he never wrote or spoke much about this theory, he did reveal that its key element was the “scientific control of greys.” Hullenkremer felt that the bright palette favored by modernist painters—especially the emerging abstract expressionists—could not possibly result in accurate representations of the human body and the natural world. Instead, he favored a palette in which saturated colors were carefully moderated with grey, giving him a tonal range that he felt actually existed in nature.

Having created a solid basis for his art, and developing it into a successful portrait career during the 1920s, Hullenkremer’s teacher felt it was time for him to return to Europe to continue his progress with other instructors. In 1928, he returned to the Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts, then taught for several months at his Munich alma mater, and in 1929 won a scholarship to Academie Julien in Paris. Throughout 1929 and 1930, Hullenkremer traveled between Paris, Munich and Budapest to study with favored teachers as he felt it impossible to gain everything he needed from just one school or instructor. As he later said, “France taught me modeling, Germany taught me color, and Hungary taught me draftsmanship.” Hullenkremer’s second round of European study culminated with his diploma from Academie Julien and the Grand Prize Medal in the academy’s annual competition which drew students from 22 countries.

Back in the United States in 1931, Hullenkremer resumed his schedule of gallery exhibitions, and in 1932 was invited to show his work in Denver. While on a side trip to New Mexico, he was so taken with the people and landscape that he decided to make an extended visit to area. He recalled having met an artist from Taos who told him that the artists in Santa Fe were just “pink tea,” and the “real artists” were in Taos. However, Hullenkremer could not find a suitable studio space there, so decided to check out the scene in Santa Fe. He soon befriended the artist Gerald Cassidy who helped him find a studio, and in 1933 Hullenkremer began his working visit to Santa Fe. That “visit” lasted 43 years.

Hullenkremer quickly gained a reputation as a leading portrait and genre painter in Santa Fe. He established his home and gallery at 820 Canyon Road, where he happily welcomed friends, tourists, and the many foreign dignitaries the town sent his way because he was fluent in six languages. In addition to gallery and museum shows in New York, Miami and other cities, Hullenkremer’s work appeared in four one-person shows and eighteen group exhibitions at Santa Fe’s Museum of Fine Arts between 1931 and 1975. During the 1930s he worked on a variety of WPA projects, completing murals for Conchas Dam Visitor Center and Conchas Dam Church (now a New Mexico State Park,) Carrie Tingley Hospital in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (now relocated to Albuquerque,) and the public libraries in Galveston, Texas and Raton, New Mexico. Hullenkremer also contributed to the renowned Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design in New Mexico.

During Hullenkremer’s most active years in Santa Fe, the art scene in northern New Mexico was dominated by the proponents of Modernism. The likes of Sloane, Dasburg, Adams, and Blumenschein made the region a haven for both students and established artists who subscribed to this new and ever-changing way of thinking about art.

Hullenkremer never bought into the trend. Not only was he distrustful of the modernists’ stripped-to-essentials representations of people and landscape, he did not consider their abstract work to be art at all. Indeed, Hullenkremer became an outspoken critic of Modernism, holding fast to the European academic tradition of realist painting in which the essence of a subject is expressed through form and detail. If he could be demanding—even caustic—with his fellow artists, he also was his own severest critic. He was a perfectionist, lamenting how much time was required to accomplish “true advancements” in art. For Hullenkremer, those advancements meant building and improving on tradition, not breaking with it.

Hullenkremer’s emphatic willingness to carry the banner of traditional realism certainly put him in the minority of Santa Fe artists of his day. Although celebrated in Europe and in demand across America, Hullenkremer’s work did not fit the prevailing mood in Santa Fe, and he has not enjoyed the notoriety of the region’s modernist painters. Nevertheless, his paintings always sold well, and he continued to receive many portrait commissions. A thirty-inch by twenty-four-inch portrait was valued at $7000 in 1973. By the late 1940s, Hullenkremer was financially comfortable and in a position to reduce his painting schedule, which he did in favor of his other great passion: volunteering for the American Red Cross. In the last two decades of his life, Hullenkremer taught Red Cross lifesaving courses, gave painting instruction at his studio, and enjoyed lounging with friends at La Posada where he maintained a rotating exhibit of his work.

Also during those final years, accolades and honors for a lifetime of brilliant painting came to Odon Hullenkremer. The honors of which he seemed most proud were the citations in American and European biographical dictionaries and art history references. Most likely, he felt these books not only recognized his skill and accomplishment, but gave him a permanent place in the long tradition of realist painting that he so loved. For him there could be no greater honor than being credited for living a life that helped advance that tradition. Odon Hullenkremer died on January 26, 1978.