Edmund Brucker

Monday Morning, 1945

oil on canvas

27 7/8 x 21 1/4

James E. Roberts Fund

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Edmund Brucker was born in Cleveland, Ohio and trained at the Cleveland School of Art.  He was an accomplished painter working in a realist style when he joined the faculty of the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, where he taught until his retirement. Though he was best known as a portrait painter, Brucker also painted regional scenes in both oil and watercolor.  Many of his works combine views from sketches and drawings he made of different sites during different times of the day.  His palette of rich gray tones emphasizes design, composition and line. As a portraitist, Brucker painted Indiana governor Matthew E. Welsh as well as family, friends. He painted several portraits of African Americans, other local citizens and fellow artists.

Monday Morning is an example of the more modernist idiom Brucker experiments with during the 1940s.  Elements of cubism and a design as precise as an architect’s are present in the painting’s ruler straight lines, angularity, and compressed space.  Like other American artists of the time, Brucker painted back alleys and industrial landscapes, views which seem to capture the stress-filled American society of the 1930s and 1940s.  The bright green spot of vegetation in the center of Brucker’s subdued colors and geometric shapes stands out as a symbol of nature and regeneration amid the urban environment.  Brucker’s inspiration for Monday Morning was a sketch he made on a sunny day in the Little Italy section of Cleveland, Ohio.  Monday Morning was exhibited widely, including, in 1947 at the annual national art competition sponsored by Pepsi-Cola.

Reference

Additional information can be found in the Indianapolis Museum of Art Stout Library.