Claude Buck

Portrait of a Young Man

Circa 1940

Claude Buck was born in New York City on July 3, 1890. He began his artistic studies at the National Academy of Design and was taught by artists including Emil Carlsen, George de Forest Brush, Francis Jones and Kenyon Cox. Later, he traveled to Munich for a period of study. Upon his return, he began a busy schedule of exhibitions.

Claude Buck was a leading member of the avant-garde Symbolism artists’ movement in Chicago. He moved there from his birthplace New York City in 1919. Buck was known for his "fantastic, sometimes disturbing images with allegorical and literary themes" (Kennedy 97) drawn from writings of Edgar Allan Poe, operas by Richard Wagner, classical mythology and "New Testament" writings from the Bible. In the 1920s, to earn money by gaining public favor and also expressing his increasing disdain for modernism, Buck did a number of hyperrealist portraits, figures and still lifes. These proved popular and aligned him with the opponents of abstraction and their Society for Sanity in Art movement, whose headquarters were in Chicago. Buck taught drawing and painting at the Chicago Academy For the Arts from 1921–26 and at the Art Institute, where he took over classes of George Bellows.

In New York City before coming to Chicago, Buck had a reputation as a radical artist. He took his first art training from his father, William R. Buck, from the time he was aged 3 to 14, and then until he was 22, he studied at the National Academy of Design, where he was nicknamed "Kid Hassam" because his painting reminded viewers of that of Claude Hassam. Buck worked as a scene painter in the theatre and at the Willet Stained Glass Company and began portrait commissions in 1914 to earn money. In New York, he founded a group named the "Introspectives," which reflected his own problems with melancholy during that period. Members holding their first exhibition at the Whitney Studio in 1917 were artists who expressed their personal feelings and experiences and included Raymond Jonson and Emil Armin. In this phase of his career. Buck was focused on Old World styles of Leonardo da Vinci, Ralph Albert Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder. In 1929, the Arts Council of New York voted him one of the top 100 painters in the United States. In 1949, Buck and his wife Leslie moved to California to a studio-home in the Santa Cruz Mountains and ten years later, they settled in Santa Barbara where he died on August 4, 1974. In California, he was a member of the Carmel Art Association, the Santa Cruz Art League that he served as President in 1953 and the Santa Barbara Art Association.

Although Buck spent the last years of his life in Santa Cruz, California and was considered a California artist, his work also reflected the formal New York and Munich training he received at the beginning of his career. He also was a painting instructor at the Studio School of Art in Chicago for some years and was a member of Chicago Galleries Association, Society for Sanity in Art and Grand Central Art Gallery.