American Monotypes from the Baker/Pisano Collection | Page 41

Eugene Higgins (American, 1874–1958)
Shadowy Forms, n.d.

Monotype, 8 3/8 x 5 3/4 in.
Collection of The Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York. Gift of
the Baker/Pisano Collection, 2001.9.135

Like many Americans who wished to become artists, Eugene
Higgins went to Paris where he studied art at both the École
des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. It was in Paris that
he learned of J. F. Millet and Honoré Daumier, artists who
painted the world of peasants and the disaffected. This world
greatly informed Higgins’ work, but while it was a distinct
view, it attracted a limited audience of American art collectors.
Still, Higgins’ shadowy forms and dark palette were seen as
forceful and profound, and he carved out a place for himself in
the American art scene. In November 1909, Alfred Stieglitz
mounted an exhibition of the artist’s drawings and monotypes
at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (known by its
street address, “291”). As the Stieglitz gallery confirmed the
importance of photography as art, so too, by this exhibition it
confirmed the importance of the monotype as art. The Stieglitz
exhibition attests to Higgins’ small but important role in the
American art scene of the early-twentieth century.
NOTES:
Kiehl, “Monotypes in America in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries,” in Painterly Print, 186–187.

T H E E XH I BI T I O N

37