Reviews and Praise

Below is a selection of direct quotes about O’Callahan’s exhibits from art critics during the 1920s-30s.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday, Oct 5th, 1924:

Impressions of Current Exhibitions (O’Callahan’s first one-man show in America)

“Visitors to the 1923 Carnegie International will however remember that one of the present canvases was shown there, the same one which incidentally brought forth one of the few laudatory remarks which Augustus John passed on the exhibit. Mr. O’Callahan has returned with all the hallmarks of French contact. He has happily adjusted the formula to suit what is an individual and strong talent. He has gotten the best of the movement, seriously gone in for form and design, and never for a moment losing sight of the fact that he can at the same time be pleasantly representative without being stale and academic. His figure compositions are handsome in design, he has a poetical quality of imagination and his color has warmth and luminosity.”

Hartford Courant, Monday, October 6th, 1924:

New Yorkers Admire O’Callahan’s Pictures - Hartford Artist’s Oils Exhibited at Babcock Galleries.

“Art lovers at New York are finding this winter, among the various gallery exhibitions, one which is pleasingly different and artistically charming. There is a variety, simplicity, vigor, and nice use of colors in the paintings of Clinton O’Callahan. One critic writing of this exhibition for the New York Evening Post says in part: ‘Mr. O’Callahan’s work is bold and vigorous and done in big patterns. There are lovely passages in these canvases and the still lifes show beautiful color sequences and subtleties.’ There are eighteen pictures including the big canvas of the Carnegie show. At the Bath, which has received so much appreciative comment and of which the Post critic says; ‘It is an original and powerful conception, finely executed.’ Provincetown Fish Wharf is of particular interest to New Englanders because of its warmth, sympathy, and discriminating treatment of a scene that is familiar and suggestive of a life and work that is passing away. O’Callahan’s Rue de Vaugirard is another type of picture no less admirably executed.”

The Paris Herald, property of the New York Herald-Tribune, 1925

“For the past six years the American painter, Clinton O’Callahan, has been quietly at work in his Paris studio. There have been, I suppose, few workers in the arts here in Paris who have talked less and worked more. He has explored a number of fields too. When he went back to America last year for a one man show at the Babcock Galleries in New York, he took with him scenes of Paris, of Marseilles, of towns in Brittany, large compositions involving nude figures and numerous still life studies. When he came back to Paris, he left all these canvases behind and his studio at 14 rue Boissonade is now filled with the work he has done since his return. There are nude studies developing the compositional values of unusual positions and subtle color combinations. There are flowers and vases in delicate gradations of colors and several interiors notably fresh in color and design. Since the period of his earlier work, O’Callahan has progressed definitely toward simplification in his painting. He has never been captured by any of the eccentricities in experimentation. His is rather a simple and unobtrusive search for freshness in painting. His process of simplification seems to have been not so much a process of elimination of detail as the putting down of that which registers most naturally and unforced to the painter’s eye.”

The Hartford Daily Courant, Sunday, Jan 30th, 1927:

France Gets One of His Pictures - Clinton O’Callahan

“Clinton O’Callahan of Paris, formerly of Hartford, who is now visiting his mother, Mrs. Sarah O’Callahan of Marshall Street, was one of the foreign artists who was invited to contribute a picture to the Salon du Franc held recently in Paris. The pictures contributed were to be sold at auction and the proceeds turned over to the ‘Fund for Saving the Franc.’ Mr. O’Callahan has received word that his picture, ‘The Girl in the Green Robe,’ was acquired at the sales by the French Government and he has received an official letter of recognition by Marshal Joffre. Mr. O’Callahan is one of the committee and organizers of the ‘Group of American Painters and Sculptors in Paris’ whose recent exhibition at the Durand-Ruel galleries in Paris attracted such wide attention. The group is invited to the Brooklyn Museum for April and later will show throughout the United States. Mr. O’Callahan is on the board of governors and is chairman of the art committee of the American Art Association of Paris. He also is a member of the Salon des Indépendants and the Amis des Montparnasse. He is a regular exhibitor at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Tuileries.”

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, NY, Sunday, April 24th, 1927:

Work of Paris American Group Is Shown at the Brooklyn Museum

“Clinton O’Callahan is known to visitors to the Carnegie International and if I remember correctly, held a one-man show at the Dudensing Galleries several seasons ago. He is one of the most individual of the expatriates, and I believe is still young enough not definitely to have stamped himself as such for all time. He paints large, luscious nudes in exotic surroundings with a Gauguinesque simplicity. His ‘Anecdotes of the Sketch Class in the Grand Chaumière,’ are witty and well-composed canvases.”

The New York Times, Sunday, April 24, 1927

Brooklyn Museum Source: The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, Vol 14, No 3 pp. 105-110 (JSTOR)

“Clinton O’Callahan, one of the active members of the group, leavens his work with a liveliness of spirit that shows itself in such scant detail as may be permitted a modernist living outside the Matisse orbit. His dreamy girl sits posing two oranges, one on top of another, with the tips of fingers long and strong and slender. She herself is a solid piece of masonry, with the interlace of boughs from a shrub in a pot at the left of the design, the neat pattern bordering the dish containing a further supply of oranges, the whirling scroll of ribbon at the girl’s stout throat, the rings on her finger, all tell with a keen gayety of international surplusage in the general effect of simple compact realism. Any middle-aged observer, however, sympathetic to the stark quality of young art, must feel the benefit of such discreet and modest ornament. Mr. O’Callahan entertains his public, and his public will love him for it, especially as he employs so polite a method. His two studies of a sketch class at work are quite as discerning and revealing as any versions of similar subjects made in New York. His students, fat and thin, old and young, show personalities as various as in any of our presentations of the life class at the League; but he suffers them gladly. Not once does he turn and rend them. He has, it is apparent, a soft heart and a wise head and a lovely gift of harmonizing unlike things in spacious composition. One suspects that he has sat at the feet of the Venetians, an inference not too astute if one glances at this ‘Odalisque’, with black slave, balcony and crimson drapery complete.”

“A paragraph or two is quoted in the catalogue from a preface to the Paris exhibition written by C. Ciolkowski. What he says is worth repeating, for the impression conveyed of the general quality of the group and its reception of French critics: ‘The diversity of tendency in the work of these men,’ he says, ‘will give a good idea of the eclecticism of the modern school of American painting and of its importance in the artwork of today. It is exempt from all sentimental or anecdotal preoccupation and is never anything but painting pure and simple. They have passed the stage of experiments and searching and their work gives an impression of confidence and capability which has given to their exhibition a perfect and extremely interesting harmony and an extraordinary sense of balance.’

The Hartford Daily Courant, Sunday, December 21, 1930:

Four Modern Artists Will Exhibit Here - Showing by Painters, Well Known in City, to Open at Morgan Memorial Monday

“The artists are Milton Avery, Clinton O’Callahan, Aaron Berkman and Russell Cheney. All have shown their work at exhibitions of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. It is the first time that a group of so-called former Hartford moderns will be privileged to exhibit their canvases at Morgan Memorial under the auspices of the museum.

A. Everett Austin Jr., director of the museum said that the museum was pleased to offer such an exhibition which he considers will serve as a contribution toward the stimulation of local talent. “This exhibition along with that of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Salamagundians, and the Hartford Women Painters give an adequate cross-section of local, artistic ideas,” Mr. Austin said.

Mr. O’Callahan in recent years has spent much of his time in France where he studied, exhibited, and became affiliated with numerous Parisian Art Associations. His work is well known in Paris and was recognized when the French Government acquired one of his canvases.

Mr. Avery, Mr. O’Callahan and Mr. Berkman began their painting careers here, all three having studied at the CT League of Art Students which still functions for the benefit of embryo artists.

Mr. O’Callahan studied here with the late Charles Noel Flagg and later with Charles Hawthorne and Charles Guerin of Paris. He has exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, Salon des Tuileries in Paris and in this country at the Carnegie International, the Brooklyn Museum, The Babcock Galleries in New York and the Connecticut Academy.”