Photographs Courtesy of Archives of University City Public Library
In the spring of 1914, 13-year-old Viola Myers sat down at her desk in Pensacola, Fla., with a sheet of plain stationery and wrote a letter to French ceramist Taxile Doat:
"I like to paint flowers best," she penned in round, schoolgirlish script. "Can a girl with one hand do that kind of work? I would like to make it my life work. Will it take much money to learn, and how shall I begin? I am what the world calls poor."
Her "mama," she said, had read about Monsieur Doat and his Art Academy in University City, Mo., in the Woman's National Weekly.
Doat replied a few days later, his letter typed, as always, on the reverse side of the stationery. Certainly a girl with one hand can paint "flowers, ornaments, and figures on dishes and vases," he told her, but U. City Pottery was now "a private factory for industrial purposes," not a school, and he must "have a worker well accustomed to these pottery works." Which, conceivably, excluded one-handed 13-year-old girls.
Six years earlier, when U. City founder and women's magazine mogul Edward Gardner Lewis was feverishly organizing his People's University, there would've been room for Viola, or any other 13-year-old girl who liked to paint flowers best. From 1909 to 1912, the university offered free and unlimited classes to women, mostly by correspondence. They could study French, journalism, history, painting, sculpture, or practical stuff from partnering institutions like The Women's College of Scientific Dressmaking, The Root School of Apiculture, and the Chicago Kindergarten College. The catch: It was open only to members of the American Woman's League.
The league was founded in 1907 as a ploy to rebuild E.G. Lewis' magazine subscription base after the postmaster general took umbrage at his use of free rural-route delivery; he felt Lewis' titles, including Woman's Magazine, Farm Woman's Journal, and Beautiful Homes, looked an awful lot like ad circulars. After Lewis was indicted for mail fraud for creatively bending this rule, among others, University City Publishing Co. was restricted from sending and receiving mail for a short spell, which decimated the company's subscription base, not to mention its bank balances. Once Lewis' enormous mailroom reopened (5,000 letters a day had been standard), he had to find a way to lure his readership back ... and make some money, quickly.
The league helped him succeed on both counts: membership was $52 (about $1,200 today). Or a woman could sell $52 in subscriptions in one year—520 of them, at 10 cents per. It was a formidable goal, but Lewis asked his readers what they wanted in exchange for selling subscriptions. The overwhelming response: education. And Lewis, whose pyrotechnic rhetoric usually overshadowed the results, actually delivered.
If Lewis saw beekeeping-classes-by-mail as a great incentive for ladies to sell subscriptions to his magazines to their friends and neighbors, the centerpiece of his campus— the Art Academy—was a pet undertaking. He hired Eames & Young to design what looked like a little sister to Versailles. A few years prior, while laying the footings for one of his publishing buildings, Lewis' work crew uncovered a vein of pure white kaolin clay— ideal for art porcelain—and Lewis decided U. City would be the next Staffordshire or Meissen. He and his wife, Mabel, evicted their chickens from the backyard coop and set up a potter's studio; Lewis taught himself to throw pots with Taxile Doat's textbook, Grand Feu Ceramics, and announced that "University City in America—the City of the American Woman's League" would become "the center hereafter of the ceramic art for all the world."
When Lewis opened his academy, he was determined to hire Doat. He lured the artist away from his atelier in France and the porcelain factory in Sévres—where Auguste Rodin once worked—with a first year's salary of $10,000, access to $100,000 in materials, and his own high-fire kiln. Though he'd later find himself firing cheap, molded ivory porcelain toilet sets to raise money for the academy, Doat was at first encouraged to make "grand statements in clay"; one of his first pieces out of the kiln was the 20-inch Telephone Vase, paneled with dark-green cartouches painted with low-relief scenes of cherubs chatting into candlestick telephones, showing off Doat's mastery of the pâte-sur-pâte technique—think cameos and Wedgwood—his specialty at Sévres.
Once Doat was secured, Lewis approached Adelaide Alsop Robineau, one of the bestrespected American ceramists of the time. She had supported herself doing china painting, one of the few appropriate artistic outlets (and sources of income) for Victorian ladies. Robineau then founded a potter's studio, as well as her own magazine; Keramic Studio was to pottery what Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman was to Arts and Crafts furniture. Her husband, Samuel, prepared her kilns and translated Doat's essays into English for Keramic Studio, the seed that would become Grand Feu Ceramics. When Robineau learned Doat would be teaching, she immediately accepted a post. Though sculptor George Julian Zolnay was dean, the faculty was mostly ceramic artists, including English potter Frederick Rhead and St. Louis china painter Kathryn Cherry, whose classes were some of the most popular offered.
The Art Academy also offered the peculiar service of firing ceramic pieces sent in by mail, owing to the fact that a great many league members lived in far-flung spots like Peck, Idaho, and Marshall, Texas. Mrs. Mary Ross, who traveled to U. City from Marshall, was one of these and sent in a little vase that Doat praised mightily, never mind the diction or punctuation:
I received your very interesting vase
with this three decorative and spiritual panels.
charming subject: the storks.
fictional^
Well packed it arrived without incident.
Three days upon firing. I send back to you nicely
fired. you will see yourself that some parts of
your paste on paste, were too thin.
This work is a beautiful result
for whom which I congratulate you.
I regret sincerely that you are not able to work
here with us. you should become quickly a good
worker on this kinds of
precious works.
The value of this vase, is only $100
if it was perfect
If the white paste on paste was
a little thicker his value should be
doubtful double. trusting you are well.
I am cordially yours
T.
She replied:
My delight that the vase came from the kiln in such good condition was very great; but that it was only mild compared with that I felt upon receiving your kind words of encouragement and praise. To have you call my work "beautiful" was a great reward in itself and one for which I had hardly dared to hope.
She promised to focus on her pottery; she was trying a new vase, "a large one, from twenty to twenty-four inches high—now I feel sure you are going to laugh, but all right. I shall not be surprised. You see, I am ambitious."
Doat was not loose with his compliments, either; Irene Charlesworth, an honors student from Stewart, Tenn., sent in a small piece modeled on the nursery rhyme "Little Miss Muffet," along with a study of two elderly women. "In the 'muffett,' the idea, the pose and the size are well, but the neck, the legs and the coat are not finished in the modeling," he told her. "That is the fault of all sculpture of Mr. Zolnay," he sniffed, dismissing both teacher and student. He did not even suggest improvements for Autumn Leaves and, in fact, hated the title too:
The name observation for the group 'autumn leaves.' furthermore this inscription is not very complimentory for these two ladies to call them: autumn leaves, it is to say: you are almost dead, go away like an autumn leave.
I should suggest:
The old comrades.
or: Remembrances.
or. The Sweet past etc.
TD.
But neither harsh criticism nor the $52 membership fee kept women away. In 1910, league membership ballooned to 100,000, and the organization took in more than $1 million. To celebrate, Lewis invited the American Woman's League to a convention in U. City. Not surprisingly, Lewis used it as an opportunity to show off his beloved Art Academy with a grand parade down Delmar featuring floats built by each department, including painting and weaving. Whether he meant what he said when he addressed the convention—that "if things are going to come in this land or any other land, they are going to come through woman"—it was true that the Weekly had become one of the only sources of international news for poor, rural women. Providing a free education, too? Unthinkable.
It was a funny triumph for a guy who started out selling bug poison. In 1895, Lewis fled to St. Louis from Tennessee after the sheriff of Nashville shut down his Corroco Co., manufacturer of "delicious Corroco tablets" (said to alleviate the ill effects of tobacco, though not the habit itself) and Anti-Skeet, a combination of saltpeter and bug powder packaged as "six neat tablets, put up in an attractive slide box," that, when lit, created a cloud of smoke said to repel "mosquitoes, moths, gnats, etc. in a delightful and harmless aroma." Lewis managed to slip out with a case of Anti-Skeet and promptly motored to where the mosquitoes— and customers—were plentiful. After some success with another product called "Wonderful Bug Chalk" (which didn't kill roaches, but gave them seizures), Lewis picked up a folksy women's periodical, The Winner, changed the name to Woman's Magazine, and applied his trademark combination of hyperactivity, flash, and hyperbole. Soon, so many subscriptions rolled in that the mailroom girls stopped counting the dimes and instead took bags of them to the bank each night to be weighed.
Lewis, alternately a magazine publisher, cigar salesman, pyramid schemer, real-estate developer, patent-medicine salesman, taxidermist, and failed cork-fiber magnate, was an aesthete who loved money. His most beautiful building was his "People's Bank" in U. City, a re-created Egyptian temple outfitted with an enormous safe, built to function as a postal bank for Lewis' rural readers. When the money poured in, bundled up in newspaper (and once tied up in a plaid work shirt and suspenders), that irascible postmaster general shut it down, and Lewis used it instead to house his $10,000 customized Goss printing press. Like Bug Chalk, the Woman's League— though it tapped into very real longings—was just a bit of salesman's poetry, destined to burn out like so many flash-paper stars.
A century later, the most vivid symbol of the spirit behind the People's University Art Academy is not the building itself, though thanks to Wash. U., it's still full of art students. It's not Zolnay's lions, or the earthtoned gourd vessels and sparkling starburst vases Doat fretted over before returning to France in 1914. It's Adelaide Robineau's scarab vase, which Art & Antiques called "the most important piece of American ceramics in the past century." Robineau created it in 1910, in response to Lewis' directive to make "grand, public statements in clay," and spent a thousand hours carving scarabbeetle patterns on its surface. When it came out of the kiln cracked, Doat encouraged her to toss it. Instead, she repaired the fissures with bisque paste and refired it. It went on to win the Grand Prize at the 1911 International Exposition of Decorative Arts in Turin, Italy. Robineau's formal title? The Apotheosis of the Toiler. It was a tribute to all the anonymous thousand-hour workers: the artist's apprentice; the craftsman unrecognized as an artist; the mother who affords extra flour and sugar by daubing cherry blossoms on mass-produced porcelain plates. And perhaps also a 13-year-old girl in Florida, sitting at a rickety table on the screened-in porch, a paperweight on her page to keep it steady, doing her best to faithfully render the trailing trumpet honeysuckle in her backyard.
Stefene Russell is St. Louis Magazine's culture editor. She recommends David Conradsen's beautiful University City Ceramics, published for the 2004 Saint Louis Art Museum exhibit of the same name, and she thanks Susan Rehkopf, archivist for the Historical Society of University City, for her assistance with the story and the photographs.
