The Return of the Artists: Harry Davis Jr., Garo Antreasian, and Indiana Art

Since its establishment in 1894, the American Academy in Rome has, been home to visiting scholars and artists from the United States seeking support and inspiration for their work. During the heady days of Rome’s liberation by Allied forces in June 1944, one of the academy’s former students, Harry A. Davis Jr. of Brownsburg, Indiana, a combat artist with the U.S. Army’s Eighty-Fifth Infantry Division, working under the supervision of the U.S. Fifth Army’s Historical Section, made his way to what had been his art studio just a few years before.

A graduate of Indianapolis’s Herron School of Art, Davis discovered that everything in his studio was just as he had left it, including his paintings and personal effects. He also found that his worst fears about the colleagues he had left behind had not come to pass. Although showing “distinct signs of having suffered from a lack of food,” his friends at the school “were all alive, happy to see Americans again.” With his company bivouacked on the grounds of a nearby estate, the sergeant was able to make several trips to the academy, “each time taking some of my ration of candy, for they had no sweets for several years,” in addition to other supplies.

Half a world away, another Hoosier and future Herron graduate, Garo Antreasian, a member of an Armenian family that had escaped the Turkish Genocide and made a new life for themselves in Indianapolis, sailed the Pacific Ocean aboard LST 790 (Landing Ship, Tank) as a combat artist with the U.S. Coast Guard. After delivering supplies for the invasion of the Philippines, Antreasian and his shipmates endured the hell that was the Battle of Iwo Jima, including undergoing attacks from Japanese kamikaze pilots. Antreasian, the son of a tailor, had to do double duty while on his ship, serving as a gun controller at any time battle stations were called. “There was certainly no time to draw—only time to observe and respond for the firing of the stern guns,” as well as “everything on and off the ship as far as the eyes could see and as much as my mind could absorb and retain,” Antreasian recalled.

Antreasian jotted down what he had seen and remembered in a small notebook he kept in his pocket. “These notes and my memory were invaluable when I could finally begin painting, usually long after we had departed the scene of action,” he said. Antreasian would retreat to his studio, located below decks in the forward gun munitions locker. There, under the glow of a hundred-watt bulb and a constant heat of more than a hundred degrees in the tropical climate, he stripped to his waist and set out to do his artwork. Often, his sweat dripped onto his paintings.

The son of an itinerant minister, Davis, like Antreasian, endured less-than-ideal circumstances to pursue his art while overseas. Coming across some Italian women harvesting a wheatfield, he attempted to capture the scene on canvas. In a letter to his family, he noted:

My easel was at times a chair, while again, a tripod arrangement upon which the canvas was hung. At no time was I able to get suitable lighting conditions, working in a tent, sitting on my cot. The canvas for my painting was originally shielding some soldier from the elements, a salvaged shelter half, a half-section of the small pup-tents. . . . Vibrations in the air were strong enough that the canvas quivered like a drum struck with a heavy blow.

 Davis compared what he and his fellow combat artists did with another profession— historian. “We saw things as they were and we put them down, very much as a Historian would record the events that occurred,” he recalled. “Some of my drawings had to be very factual and maybe they are not art but I feel they tell the story.”

As for Antreasian, he lamented losing some of his work due to wartime censorship. After completing several paintings and drawings, he packaged them to transfer along with his ship’s mail to the flotilla’s command ship. There censors and press officers examined them “to determine what spin to attach to individual pieces before transmitting them to Washington.” Several paintings Antreasian had completed showing the deadly Japanese kamikaze attacks against U.S. ships at Iwo Jima had been destroyed by the censors, deeming it “unwise for the public moral to be confronted by news of such unimaginable behavior.” He learned what had happened to his creations only after the war’s end.

Upon the completion of their military service, both artists returned to Indiana and set about to make their mark on the state’s artistic heritage—as teachers at Herron (Davis taught there for more thirty years; Antreasian for sixteen years) and through their art. Antreasian stayed in Indiana until 1964, when he took a post as a professor at the University of New Mexico’s art department, earning accolades for helping to revive lithography in the United States through his work with the Tamarind Institute. “I’ve devoted my life to art and its teaching,” Antreasian recalled, “to me it represents a daily challenge—a challenge to express successfully that which I feel deeply and visualize in my mind’s eye.” He left behind in the Hoosier State a series of important public-art projects, including murals at Indiana University, a mosaic floor at the Holcomb Observatory at Butler University, and a mosaic mural of Hoosier favorite son Abraham Lincoln at the Indiana Government Center.

Davis had a successful teaching career as a professor of painting and drawing at Herron. He also continued to paint, producing more than 500 works featuring endangered historic buildings throughout the state. “Most of the work is because I feel a need for it,” Davis said. “Somebody ought to record it. The old landmarks are disappearing so fast.” David Russick, director of the gallery at Herron, who organized an exhibition of Davis’s works in 2006, pointed out that the Hoosier artist “painted buildings the way many portrait painters do people. He captured the spirits of the buildings, not just the brick and mortar.” As Davis’s wife, Lois, a fellow painter, remembered, her husband “just fit in with the Hoosier picture—not fancy.”

Both Hoosiers displayed an aptitude for art at an early age. “Ever since he was old enough to hold a pencil,” Davis’s father told a reporter, “he has been drawing likenesses of people.” Although local schools offered neither art nor manual training courses, the senior Davis noted that his son filled their house with “model stage coaches, airplanes, and boats of beautiful craftsmanship which he did just to satisfy the creative urge and to amuse himself.” 

Mildred Smith, who taught Davis Latin at Brownsburg High School, remembered that for an open house at the school he drew a large picture for her classroom depicting Roman chariots and charioteers. “I thought it was the most wonderful painting,” said Smith. “I wanted to keep the picture, but that little stinker wouldn’t give it up.”

In 1933 the young Davis entered the Herron School of Art at 1701 North Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis, supporting his education by winning several scholarships. It was a time of great changes for the school that came about under the leadership of its director, Donald Mattison, a New York artist and teacher. Faced with budget troubles and a declining enrollment, Mattison trimmed the Herron faculty and altered the school’s curriculum so that during their first three years students followed a similar course of study with an emphasis on a firm grounding in drawing, composition, and painting.

During their fourth year, students could pick a specialization, including painting, sculpture, commercial art, or teaching. Promising students were able to win scholarships for a fifth year of postgraduate training. “The art school must become the clearinghouse wherein those found unfit for professional work are eliminated,” Mattison observed. “Cold facts, as to proficiency must be recorded and ranked by percentages. Authoritative recognition of the true professional student must exist and adequate instruction must be provided for the deserving students.”

As a boy, Antreasian developed twin passions—reading and drawing. “To draw,” he recalled, was something he “accepted unthinkingly as a natural function of self, no different from blowing my nose or putting on my clothes.” One of his grade-school teachers, Helen Earhart, who had attended art school, became the first person to encourage him to begin to think about art “as more than just something that was fun to do.” She talked to his parents about encouraging their son’s protentional, and Antreasian’s father took him to Indianapolis’s best art store, the Lieber Art Emporium, to buy an oil painting set, housed in a fine rosewood box. “That tiny, polished box became the equivalent of Citzen Kane’s sled Rosebud,” Antreasian remembered. In addition to painting, he drew objects from observation, including “coaster wagons, shoes, hats, toys, houses and kitchenware,” and by doing so became aware of “the problems of perspective and proportion.”

Antreasian continued to grow as an artist while at Arsenal Tech High School, where he came under the tutelage of teacher Sara Bard, whose forte was watercolors, often exhibiting her work at the National Academy. Antreasian noted that the training at the school was done with a “professional attitude,” and he and other students were encouraged to reach such art journals of the time as the Magazine of Art, Art News, and Art Digest.

Bard also tasked her students with exploring projects outside of their normal interests. Noticing some old lithography equipment, she assigned Antreasian and a few of his fellow students to see what they could accomplish. They plodded ahead through “trial and error” and “great agony,” Antreasian remembered. “Throughout a whole year, I don’t think we produced one print, but we were hooked from that point.” At the time, the art of lithography—the process of drawing images on polished limestone with a grease pencil, wetting the stone, applying ink that clings to the grease, then using a press to imprint the image from the stone onto paper—had nearly “ceased to exist” in the country, he said, with “little reliable literature in English . . . available, and equipment and teaching resources were scarse.”

Fortunatley for Antreasian and his friends, they discovered a commercial printing house in Indianapolis, Oval and Koster, which specialized in large posters and calendars. “As luck would have,” Antreasian noted, “Mr. Oval was a genial old gentleman, who had apprenticed as a child in Germany and who was quite fond of relating his early experiences in the medium.” The old lithographer kindly answered all of the boys’ questions. “He was a good man and sensed the hunger of our quest,” said Antreasian, “and after several visits he agreed to meet us frequently at the factory on Saturday monrings to answer our questions.” Thereafter, Antreasian viewed lithography as a “magical ‘something’ that kept tantalizing me because I never could get my hands on the real story. Consequently, something about my inner being and wanting to know kept me reaching to grab a hold of something that was just beyond my grasp.”

When Antreasian entered the Herron, he discovered that while the school still had lithography equipment, it had discontinued classes on the subject. Mattison allowed him the freshman to use the equipment in the evenings and on weekends and “just to fool around.” Antreasian learned all he could, piecing together information by studying print collections at several museums. “I simply had to know,” Antreasian recalled. “By hard-headed stubbornness, a lot of strenuous effort, and countless trivial errors, I was able to slowly find my way.”

Graduating from Herron in 1948 following his war service, Antreasian joined the school’s faculty, adding printmaking courses to its curriculum. Married on May 2, 1946, to Jeanne Glasscock, and with a young son, David, born soon afterward, he realized his family could not survive financially on his meager teaching salary and income from his paintings and prints. Antreasian began painting murals for hire, with his first, depicting major landmarks in Indianapolis, finished for the new WFBM television studio, in 1952.

The popularity of this mural (today located at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis), led to other projects, including an invitation from Indiana University in Bloomington to produce what came to be six murals about the history of the university above its Wright Quad Building’s large dining hall, a space covering more than a thousand square feet. The murals covered the years 1820 to 1850, 1850 to 1900, 1900 to 1920, 1920 to 1938, the modern concept, and the mid-twentieth century.

The assignment presented several challenges. As he explained:

To begin with, the work had to be done on site. Because of its height, a special scaffolding was necessary for me to execute the paintings. There was no simple way for me to back away to view the accuracy and progress of the work. As work began, it proved necessary to climb up and down the scaffolding ladder quite frequently to check the clarity of details from floor levele. These adjustments often required enlargement of drawing or exaggeration of color.

He noted that he and the graduate students from IU’s Fine Arts Department who assisted him worked even while meals were being served in the dining hall below them. Antreasian said that many people would be “surprised how many good suggestions we got from students who inspected the murals while they ate.”

Months before starting work at IU, Antreasian studied the university’s history in order to decide what and who to depict. He examined photographs, talked to numerous school officials, and read books. “One of my most difficult problems was to gather information about buildings that no longer exist,” Antreasian told a reporter. “I usually was able to find plenty of written material on these buildings, but to find information that would depict them was something else.” Finished with his studies, the artist spent six months drawing exact miniatures of the murals to guide his painting. With the work started, Antreasian spent three days a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—in Bloomington until the work was done.

Antreasian also had to devise new paint formulations to ensure the mural’s permanence, working with the Permanent Pigments Company to formulate “a paint customized to my requirements. The rest is history: this was the beginning of the Liquitex brand of acrylic paints.” Antreasian began his work in September 1956 and completed the murals in April 1957. Antreasian estimated that using Liquitex cut down on the time spent painting the murals by more than 30 percent—quite a saving on a work that contains fifty-seven different scenes and 110 figures.

The artist’s final public-art projects came in 1958 and 1959. One of these efforts, designing the terrazzo atrium floor—titled Zodiac—for the Holcomb Observatory on the Butler University campus, went smoothly and received wide acclaim. The other project, a regional competition to design a mural for the entry hall at the Indiana State Office Building around the theme of Abraham Lincoln’s youth in the state, using as inspiration his quote, “Here I grew up,” tested his resolve.

Antreasian’s concept for the mural centered on a series of vignettes featuring, as he noted, “a pensive Lincoln in various activities, floating supplies down the Ohio River, studying on horseback, practicing oratory in the bushes, and as a towering mature statesman.” The artist connected these locations by using the flow of the Ohio River between Pigeon Creek and the Anderson River. He also decided that instead of using paint, the mural should be a mosaic built from glass tiles imported from Murano, Italy, eventually numbering more than 300,000 pieces in eighty-seven different hues in its finished form (seventy feet by twenty-five feet) at a cost of $35,280.

(A Herron graduate, Ralph Peck, completed the mosaic mural’s fabrication, working on it at his Mooresville, Indiana, studio. According to an article in the Indianapolis Star, he and an assistant affixed the glass tiles to the “reverse side of a drawing made on a large roll of paper. This ‘cartoon’ was cut into sections, which were carefully coded and later affixed to the marble wall with mortar.” It took a year for them to do so.)

In addition to the technical challenges of fixing the glass pieces to a “honey-colored travertine [marble] wall,” Antreasian nearly became a victim of political infighting between different gubernatorial administrations. The Antreasian mural and a bronze Lincoln statue by Herron instructor David Rubins had been approved by a State Office Building Commission originally appointed by Republican governor Harold Handley. A new administration under Democratic governor Matthew Welsh objected to the project’s cost, believing the money should be spent on social-welfare programs. A. Reid Winsey, an outraged member of the jury that had been responsible for selecting Antreasian and Rubins, wrote the governor that “beautiful buildings demand the decorations indicated. The mural mosaic and the Lincoln statue which we selected would be a credit to any building and any state, and I feel that cutting cultural corners like this does much to throttle art in Indiana.”

Eventually, Antreasian said, he and Rubins prevailed and the statue and mural were installed. Antreasian added that “unsurprisingly,” Governor Welsh “took all of the credit for the art projects during the dedication ceremonies.” What is not known is if this controversy played any role in Antreasian’s decision to leave Herron for the art department at the University of New Mexico in 1964. (It should be noted that his salary at New Mexico more than doubled what he had been making at Herron.) Earlier, in 1960, Herron had given Antreasian a year’s sabbatical so he could work with printmakers June Wayne (founding director) and Clinton Adams (associated director) to begin the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles; Antreasian served as its technical director. With Antreasian’s expertise to draw upon, the institute moved to the University of New Mexico in 1970, where it remains. In 1971 Antreasian, with Adams, co-wrote The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art and Techniques, the definitive work for lithography.  

Before his death at the age of ninety-six on November 3, 2018, Antreasian had returned to Indianapolis in 1994 for a major retrospective of his work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, titled: “Garo Antreasian: Written in Stone.” The museum had received a 650-piece archive from the artist. At a lecture for the exhibition, Antreasian, who had retired from teaching in 1987, told those in attendance that people often asked him where his ideas came from. “Consciously, I’m aware of many sources, but on a subconscious level I haven’t a clue what triggers a particularly significant moment over many others.” Reflecting about his career, he described it as “a fulsome life, and a lot more fulfilling than hanging around shopping centers.”  

When he mustered out of military service on November 23, 1945, Davis had returned to Indiana, earning a faculty position at Herron, where he remained until his retirement in 1983. A former colleague praised him as knowing how to “get the best out of his students. He wasn’t a soft touch. He wasn’t easy. Art was his life.” In 1948 he married Lois Peterson, a fifth-year student at Herron. “We quickly became good friends,” Lois remembered, “but I didn’t take any of his classes. He likes his students neat and dislikes walking into someone’s palette and getting paint on himself. If I had been in his class that might have happened because I’m a messy painter.”

For a time in the 1950s, the couple lived in Brownsburg and Davis, uncertain about his art and the market for it in Indianapolis, decided to supplement his teaching income by building houses. He abandoned that trade, but it left him with a strong understanding of how such structures are put together. He used this knowledge to capture on canvas the state’s historic urban architecture. Davis found himself drawn to structures possessing a wide range of shapes and the correct combination of lightness and darkness.

Davis likened his building paintings to capturing a man’s portrait. “As in the face of a man, the features of a building are enhanced, the forms strengthened and given depth by proper lighting,” he told a reporter. As in the portrait of an older person, the “lines and blemishes that come with age add character to the countenance. Some structures are more handsome than others merely because of the arrangement of shapes, just as in a human face. The weathering of many a storm, and survival against the elements, can add greatly to the fascination of an old building.” Indianapolis art critic and fellow Herron faculty member Steve Mannheimer praised Davis’s architectural paintings, calling them “perfectly measured moments of this time and this place. They are art about and completely from his and our immediate reality. They preach no moral other than the calm practice of observation.”

Until his death at age ninety-one on February 9, 2006, Davis, and Lois, produced art while working out of separate studio spaces in their two-story, shingle home on North Washington Boulevard in Indianapolis’s Warfleigh neighborhood; Davis converted the garage into his workspace, while Lois did her painting for a time in a basement studio, later moving to an upstairs bedroom. “We comment a lot on each other’s work,” noted Lois. “He will tell me what is wrong with my painting or if he looks at it and doesn’t say anything then I know it just isn’t right. He’s very careful about what he says. He will ask me for help and quite often I can pinpoint something and help him too.”

Davis was meticulous about his paintings, taking photographs of the building beforehand and making detailed sketches of the work to come. It took him anywhere from a few days to several weeks to finish a painting. He took photographs of the completed work, as well as making sure to keep careful records of where it was exhibited, any prizes it had won, and to whom he sold it to. “He loved to paint. Without it, he would have been lost,” Lois said after his death.

Talking with a reporter about his work, Davis noted that some in the art world believed he underpriced his paintings. “Maybe I do,” he agreed, “but a large part of the satisfaction to an artist is not the price, but the knowledge that other people are able to see his work.” Davis also believed that artists should never retire but must continue to paint “until they are unable to lift a brush, seeing and gathering more and more ideas to include in their work.”