Joseph Pollet was born in Albbruck, Germany, and immigrated with his parents to America at age 14. He began his serious art training at the Art Students League. There he met teacher and mentor John Sloan who declared that Pollet was “an extremely gifted landscape painter.” Evidence of this may be found in the 1923 review by The New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell who called the artist “Van Gogh’s brother” (Joe was age 27.)
By 1926 his work was being shown in Alfred Steigletz’s legendary Downtown Gallery. The next year he had a solo show at the Whitney Studio Club, forerunner of the Whitney Museum. Two years later he won a major prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition. His old friend John Sloan declared that Pollet was “the great white hope of American art”.
In 1929 Pollet taught an art class at Byrdcliff. He returned to Woodstock in 1932 and bought an old farmhouse off Route 212 (Artists’ Road). From that time on he divided his time between Woodstock and his studio at #3 Washington Square (other residents included Edward Hopper and Paul Resika.) After World War II Pollet befriended the most important members of the abstract expressionist movement as well as artists Stuart Davis and Alexander Calder. In fact he was a charter member of the Eighth Street Club, the head of the abstract movement throughout the 1950s. Pollet was accepted and respected by the group even though he never wavered from his own style of expressive realism. In 1941 Pollet was uniquely suited to help settle a raging dispute that had split the Woodstock Artist’s Association into warring factions: Modernists verses Traditionalists. In 1945 he acted as Director of the Sawkilll School of Art, also in Woodstock. Local note: Pollet’s first wife, Emily, married Rolph Scarlett.
These two paintings demonstrate the artist’s love of paint and textured surfaces. Sure brush strokes create well-balanced yet informal compositions using humble rural subject matters. –JC