“1922,” Michigan, oil on wood panel, Leon Makielski
Throughout his long life, Leon Makielski—Polish American son of South Bend, Indiana; Paris-trained Impressionist; U-M art instructor; friend of Robert Frost—painted tirelessly. At the time of his death in 1974, Makielski’s farmhouse, near the corner of Geddes and Arlington, was full to bursting with portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, over 3,000 in total. His fusion of Midwestern subjects with rigorous European technique won Makielski the title “Ann Arbor’s Monet.”
An impressive selection of Makielski’s landscape work can now be seen at the Michigan Art Gallery in Pittsfield Twp. This exhibit and sale, lasting until May, shows sixty-one paintings, almost all of them landscapes, painted en plein air in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. (The gallery plans another exhibit of Makielski’s European landscapes, painted during his training there between 1909 and 1913, and yet another for his many portraits of U-M faculty and other notable figures.)
The exhibit is a fabulously high-quality clearance sale. “About 80 percent of these pieces came from the farmhouse and from the berry farm,” said curator Elizabeth O’Connell. Leon’s twin sons, Ed and Don, founded the Makielski Berry Farm on Platt in 1955, and Ed carried it on until his death in 2017.
Ed’s widow, Diane Makielski, “passed away in the fall, so [the family is] selling the house. That’s when we came in,” says O’Connell, who runs the gallery for Schmidt’s auction house. “The family hung the paintings floor-to-ceiling in the farmhouse. We had to do very little restoration—it was mostly a problem of dust.”
Makielski studied under Monet at Giverny, and the Impressionist influence is easy to see. His Illinois work, painted in his twenties during summers spent at the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony, practically radiates the lazy warmth of early autumn, with brushstrokes in deep golds and greens, rendering rural Illinois haystacks in a manner reminiscent of Monet’s own Haystacks series. Meanwhile, his work in South Bend shows the Standpipe water tower and the University of Notre Dame’s Golden Dome benevolently looming over the St. Joe river in summer pastel glory, much as La Salute rises over the Grand Canal in Monet’s Venice.
The artist spent the majority of his career in Michigan, however, and it’s during this stretch that Makielski’s landscapes really sing. There is a strong sense of place in them, an appreciation of the character and natural beauty that’s still visible today between Pittsfield’s new subdivisions. In one standout piece, Makielski appears to have placed his easel right in the middle of Jackson Rd. (far less of a death wish in 1923 than it is today), depicting the rear of an automobile as it trundles away from him, under the long shadows of trees and power lines.
Makielski gave up his teaching job in 1927, only to see his waiting list of twenty-seven portrait commissions vanish during the Depression. Fortunately, the federal Works Progress Administration was hiring artists, and a particularly striking and magnetic piece is a six-foot-wide tempera study for a WPA mural that Makielski painted in the Lincoln Consolidated School (now Brick Elementary). It depicts residents gathering for a “work bee” to construct its sidewalks and running track. “It’s one of my favorite pieces,” says O’Connell. “We found it in the attic of the Makielski farm, and it took us several months to get it straightened out because it had warped a little bit.”
The pastoral richness of Makielski’s Michigan paintings demonstrates his fondness for the state, and especially for Ann Arbor, his chosen home. “There’s something in the Michigan pieces where you see his European-Midwest synthesis,” says O’Connell. “The bigness of the sky, that special lushness that you see in Michigan.”