From 1891 to 1914, pupils at the Art Students League of New York City, calling themselves the Society of American Fakirs, caricatured works of art exhibited in the annual spring shows of the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design. Fakir works from the league's collection were on display at New York City's Berry-Hill Galleries last fall and wilt be at The Museums at Stony Brook, New York, this spring {March 20-]une 5) in "Parodies of the American Masters: Rediscovering the Society of American Fakirs, 1891-1914." In the following excerpts of two essays from the exhibition catalog, co curators Bruce Weber (first excerpt), Berry-Hill's director of research and exhibitions,  and Ronald G. Pisano {second excerpt), an authority on  William Merritt Chase, explore the history of the Fakirs and offer insights into the works they "faked" and the significance of the group's contribution to the art world.
BY RONALD G. PISANO AND BRUCE WEBER, Pgs. 48-53&79, AMERICAN ARTIST January 1994
  Page, top: Catalog cover for the 1892 Society of American Artists Retrospective Exhibition, by Will H. Low. Low's drawing annually appeared on the cover of the society's exhibition catalog.

Fakir Emblem, by V.S. Forsythe, colored ink on paper, 19 x 19. Col- lection Art Students League of New York, New York. The Fakir mascot, originally a male burlesque of Will H. Low's drawing for the Society of American Artists exhibition catalog, was usually outfitted in a crudely patched artist's smock and oversized bow-tie cravat, carried a paintbrush and bucket, and had a jagged- edged halo of hair above his head and a devilish expression on his face.

    In the spring of 1891, a group from the life classes at New York's Art Students League decided to start an organization dedicated to caricaturing the work of those whom they were expected to revere and emulate: the Established Artists. The students dubbed their organization the Society of American Fakirs (SAF), a name that says much about their purpose. In a superficial sense, their mission was to produce fakes-burlesque approximations of important works by others-and so they were, admittedly, artistic "fakers." But the punning term they chose to describe themselves also evokes the exotic world of India or of the Middle Eastern bazaar and festival, suggesting that the young artists were not mere fakers, slavishly copying the works of contemporary masters, but were, in fact, magicians-fakirs-who brilliantly transformed their subjects.

    The word fakir also suggests the perpetual economic status of most art students. For while fakirs were popularly thought of as rnagicians- snake charmers and the like-the term specifically describes Hindu or Moslem religious mendicants. Like their exotic namesakes, the art students were, for the most part, impoverished devotees, and the feats of transformation they displayed at SAF exhibitions raised much-needed cash, just as the fakirs of India and the Middle East won donations from their audiences by dazzling them with illusions, sleight of hand, and demonstrations of physical endurance.

    From 1891 to 1906, the Fakirs held annual exhibitions of pictures and sculptures parodying the works featured in the annual spring showing of the Society of American Artists (SM) .After the SM merged with the National Academy of Design (NAD) in 1906, the Fakirs caricatured works in the academy's spring exhibition until 1914. The Fakir exhibitions usually lasted for two to five days and averaged about one hundred works. The society also organized an accompanying parade, sideshow, auction, and ball. The first two exhibitions were held in the league's quarters at the Sohmer Building. After the school's move to the new American Fine Arts Society Building in October 1892, the Fakir exhibitions were installed in the third-floor Members Room. The SAF and the NAD held their annual shows in the Vanderbilt Gallery on the building's first floor, and the Fakirs freely exploited this proximity to gain notoriety and press coverage.

    Each show had its favorite targets. In 1897, some of the most popular  works of artists were John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Miss Helen Dunham, James Carroll Beckwith's  Portrait of Laurence Hutton, Thomas Eakins's Cello Player, and Robert Reid's The Finale. Through the years the Fakirs also favored such works as Sargent's Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes and George Bellows's Forty-two Kids.

Portrait of a Tragedian, by Ernest Blumenschein, location unknown. Exhibited in the 1910 show of the National Academy of Design.

Frog With Top Hat, Eyeglasses, and Cat-Tail, artist unknown, 1910, oil, 24 x 16. Collection Art Students League of New York, New York.

    The SAF consisted of league members and students. Among the most active Fakirs were Bryson Burroughs, James Montgomery Flagg, A. Frederick Bradley, Jr., Lionel Strauss, Aime Baxter Titus, Allen Dean Cochran, George D.Dannenberg, and Harry L. Hoffman. In addition to Burroughs and Flagg, the best-known Fakirs were Georgia O'Keeffe, Andrew Dasburg, Jonas Lie, Walter Dorwin Teague, and John F. Carlson. Male students ran the SAF, but as the 1910 Fakir catalog noted, "From the start [women] showed an eager interest and enthusiasm in the Society's doings, and by their personality and industry have done a great deal in making Fakir week [a] success."

Portrait of Young Miss C., by William Merritt Chase, gelatin printing-out paper. Photo courtesy The William Merritt Chase Archives, The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York. Gift of Mrs. A. Byrd McDowell. When Chase exhibited this painting in 1898 at the Society of American Artists exhibition, it appeared as in the photo above.
Photo Lee StalsWorth

Artist's Daughter in Mother's Dress (Young Girl in Black), by William Merritt Chase, ca. 1899, oil, 60'/8 x 363/,6. Collection Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966. Sometime after James Montgomery Flagg pointed out the awkwardness of the chair in his caricature of the earlier version of this work, Chase literally painted the chair out-no doubt realizing how clumsy it looked.

Portrait of L'il Miss Chair, by James Montgomery Flagg, 1898, watercolor, 15 x 93/8, Collection Art Students League of New York, New York, William Merritt Chase's original work on which this "fake" was based portrayed his daughter with her arm resting awkwardly on a chair, Flagg's work portrayed her picking up the chair as if to throw it out of the composition. In addition, Flagg signed the work "Willie Chaste," creating a pun on the title and the artist's name.

    The practical aim of the Fakirs' festivities was to raise money for scholarships. The proceeds from catalogs, admission to the shows, tickets to the balls, and the auctions of the works themselves were distributed among students who otherwise would have been unable to continue their studies at the league. The American art collector Samuel T. Shaw was the Fakirs' major benefactor. Beginning around 1895, he gave purchase prizes for the three best works in the annual show. He acquired additional pictures and sculptures at the auction. Most-perhaps all-of the works in the Fakir exhibition at Berry-Hill Galleries and The Museums at Stony Brook were once owned by him and given to the league as a gift. He gave a purchase prize at the SAF from 1892 to1906, and the Fakirs caricatured the winning pictures.

    The stairway and halls leading to the exhibition were decorated with wild abandon. They were also the venue for the sideshow, which was offered in the first two or three days of the exhibition. In the Fakirs' early years, the sideshow consisted primarily of plays written about the instructors and their methods of teaching, but by around 1900 it had become an ambitious and vivacious affair.

    The Fakirs would drum up attention by mounting a parade in the league's neighborhood. The procession was headed by the Fakir Band, celebrated for its "weird costumes" and "equally weird music." The Fakir Band also played during recesses at the Fakir Auction, which was held on the final afternoon or evening of the exhibition. The auctioneer and his attendants dressed in comic costumes. In some years well-known artists contributed original drawings to be auctioned off, among them James Montgomery Flagg, Kenyon Cox, Frank Vincent DuMond, and Herman Atkins MacNeil. The Fakir Ball usually took place the night after the auction. Attendees dressed in costumes mimicking works in the SAF or the NAD exhibition, and a prize was given for best costume.
    The SAF started out informally and evolved into an ambitious and complex organization; by 1914 more than sixty individuals were involved in the planning and production of the annual exhibition, decorations, sideshow, band, auction, ball, and catalog. By 1915, it had all become too much. That year, the student body vetoed the exhibition and all related activities save for the ball, which continued unti11917. In May 1916, a retrospective exhibition of the society was held at the Salmagundi Club. Two years later the group officially disbanded, reportedly because most of the male students had left for service in World War I. Years later, the publication of longtime league superintendent Christian Buchheit's reminiscences of the Fakirs in the winter 1931-32 issue of the periodical The League inspired a brief revival of the group. An exhibition was mounted at the school in April 1932 and featured pieces from Shaw's collection as well as parodies of works in the NAD's 1932 show.

These Stylish Suits/$49.98, by James Montgomery Flagg, 1898, watercolor, 12'/,6 X 77/.. Collection Art Students League of New York, New York. This caricature of John Singer Sargent's Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes was the only one to survive of the thirteen shown in the 1898 Fakir exhibition. When Sargent's work was originally exhibited, one critic proclaimed that the treatment of the costumes "might stand alone as a sample of the painter's brush-work." Perhaps prompted by this comment, Flagg painted his caricature, substituting clotheshorses for the figures and suggesting that Sargent's virtuosity in rendering his sitters' clothing was achieved by sacrificing any expression of their personalities.

Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes, by John Singer Sargent, 1897, oil, 84'/. x 39'/. Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Bequest of Edith Minturn Phelps Stokes,
 

    In 1946, more than fifty years after the founding of the SAF, the illustrator James Montgomery F1agg, an early member of the group, assessed the current art scene. Referring to what he called "surrealism" and "post-surrealism," he complained, "So these artists pin a pair of red flannel drawers, a kippered herring, a broken clock, a sponge full of vermifuge, a broken skull, and a staring eyeball onto a canvas." Flagg then commented on the ironic parallel this had to the Fakirs: "At the Art Students League when I was a lad, some of the students contrived just such monstrosities each year in a crude burlesque of the Spring Academy: But they didn't call it art! They called them fakes." In retrospect, the similarities between the work of the Fakirs and that of the later movements in modern art- particularly Dada and Surrealism- is quite remarkable. The major difference, however, is that the Fakirs created their "artwork" in jest, as a means of burlesquing specific works  of established American artists, especially those of their own teachers; in contrast, modern art, introduced to America in a comprehensive way by the Armory Show of 1913, was intended to be serious.

The Pot of Boston, by James Montgomery Flagg, 1898, watercolor and gouache, 155/, X 8'/2. Collection Art Students League of New York, New York. Mocking John White Alexander's Isabella & the Pot of Basil, Flagg portrayed the young woman as an old spinster holding a pot labeled "Baked Beans." His title refers to Boston baked beans.

Isabella & the Pot of Basil, by John White Alexander , 1897, oil, 75'/2 x 353/4. Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. Gift of Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow. Shown in the 1898 Society of American Artists exhibition, this painting was based on a poem by Keats in which a young maiden's lover is murdered by her two brothers near Florence, and she keeps his head in a pot planted with sweet basil.

    The Fakirs reigned supreme for nearly a quarter of a century, causing havoc each spring. However malicious some of their pranks might have been, the established artists generally took them in stride. Just what was the specific nature of these fakes perpetrated by the self-proclaimed "Society for the Promotion of Cruelty to Art"? In their catalog for 1900, it was explained: "A Fake is a cold, cruel, remorseless, malicious, ridiculous swipe on the hard labor of some defenseless' American Artist' A Fake is the exaggeration of some striking feature in the original picture. It may be an intelligent criticism or it may be a flamdoolery."
    The variety of expression in the Fakirs' works, both technically and stylistically, was great; and the severity of the critical comments contained in their burlesques ranged from the very mild to the clearly ridiculous. Their creative energy was boundless. In the exhibition of 1901, two students provided very different treatments of the same subject, John White Alexander's painting A Ray of Sunlight. In the original, a beautiful woman is seen gracefully playing a cello. In one Fakir version this image has been converted into a poster for a dance, depicting a rustic man as the musician and
titled Bring Your Feet to the Dance. A second takeoff, awarded first prize in the Fakir show, was the work of "Miss Le Bourgeois." In this imaginative creation, appropriately titled An X Ray of Sunshine, the Fakir recreated the original but placed behind it the woman's skeletal structure, which was revealed by a strong light that showed through the surface of the composition.

    At times the Fakirs were rather lenient in their parodies. In the 1910 show, one of the Fakirs' renditions of F. Luis Mora's painting Restaurant was actually commended for looking just like the original, suggesting that the student had equal skill-a comment in itself. In fact, when the cunning Fakirs "borrowed" one of Childe Hassam's paintings, The Garden, from the SAA exhibition and inserted it into their own show, the jurors awarded it an honorable mention for looking just like the original.

The Mirror Signal, by Irving R. Couse, location unknown. This painting was shown in the 1907 National Academy of Design exhibition.

    In many instances the Fakirs based their humor on distortions of facial and bodily features. The first prize of the Fakirs' 1898 show had been awarded to an artist whose "fake" was a takeoff of John Singer Sargent's portrait of Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes, which had itself been criticized for the unusual elongation of the figures.

Untitled (possibly called Union Signal), by Harry B. Baker, 1907, assemblage and watercolor and gouache, 203/4 x 283/4. Collection Art Students League of New York, New York. According to a review of the show in which this work appeared, it originally included not only the real tomato soup can attached to it now but a whiskey bottle as well.

Cleverly, the Fakir, Lewis Bundy, utilized a convex sheet of zinc to parody the effect of the original, titling it As in a Convex Looking Glass.

    Generally, malice was aimed at satirizing artists' renditions of ideal female beauty, rather than making fun of individuals at their personal expense. The artists whose works were quite naturally parodied were those who made this subject a specialty .Among the most frequently selected were Charles Courtney Curran, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Irving R.Wiles, and especially John White Alexander. Influenced by the aesthetics of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, symbolist painters, and the undulating lines of art nouveau, Alexander painted pictures that were particularly vulnerable to caricature, manifested in a wide variety of forms. His painting The Pot of Basil inspired several "fakes" in the 1898 show.
    In 1900, the third prize was awarded to an intricate contraption. This work, done by Arthur Spear and Everett Warner , was a takeoff on John La Farge's painting The Goddess of Divine Contemplation.