John Ross Key's world's fair paintings

Magazine Antiques, March, 2004 by Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.

By December 1898 Key had made quite an impression in Omaha, and an exhibition of his Trans-Mississippi paintings was held in the building of the Omaha Evening Bee. (12) At this time business interests in Omaha formed a company to create a second Omaha fair in 1899 using the existing buildings. The Greater America Exposition, as this fair was called, named Key as art director in charge of assembling a collection of important American and European paintings in the Fine Arts Building. The Greater America Exposition could not repeat the success of the Trans-Mississippi. It was bedeviled by financial problems and low attendance from the beginning, and Key had difficulty providing an interesting art display. By September the art exhibition had attained "a satisfactory state of artistic completion," in the words of a reporter from the Omaha World-Herald, and Key could be seen painting "large pictures of the World's Fair ... quite undisturbed by the throng of visitors attracted by 'a real working exhibit.'" (13)

Key's paintings of the Greater America Exposition have all disappeared, but a remarkable collection of his works depicting the next American world's fair, the Pan-American Exposition, held in Buffalo in 1901, has survived in the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. Taking its cue from the Greater America Exposition, the Pan-American Exposition was conceived as a celebration of the contributions made to civilization by the relatively new cultures of the Western hemisphere. The city of Buffalo was emerging as an important commercial center whose economic prosperity was being fostered by its position as a transportation hub on the shore of Lake Erie and its proximity to the abundant hydroelectric power that had recently been developed at Niagara Falls.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Organizers of the Buffalo fair sought to distinguish it from the previous expositions by creating buildings inspired by the Spanish renaissance, both because so many Western hemisphere cultures had Hispanic roots and because the architecture itself had a festive playfulness, appropriate to a world's fair. Appointed director of color, the New York artist Charles Yardley Turner (1850-1918) imposed an allegorical color scheme on the buildings. Bright red buildings, emblematic of primitive man, housed the artifacts of early man, while neighboring buildings, each one in a more subtle color than its predecessor, dramatized the transition to high civilization. The resulting ensemble was christened the Rainbow City. (14)

Sometime in 1901 Key arrived on the scene, apparently working as a freelancer, and embarked on an ambitious series of paintings depicting the fair. By October fifteen of them had been completed and were exhibited in the rotunda of the Buffalo Public Library (now the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library), where they received an enthusiastic endorsement from the Buffalo Morning Express. After noting that the artist had made his reputation as a painter of the Chicago and Omaha expositions, the writer took note of "the immense scope of the subject and the difficulties it presented," and praised the artist for his "painstaking" effort in producing paintings that give "a vivid idea of the exposition." (15) Early in 1902 the Buffalo Historical Society (now the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society) purchased these paintings. They resemble Key's depictions of the other fairs, with visitors portrayed in animated foregrounds setting off middle grounds of splendid buildings in a high-keyed palette that captures the energy and optimism of the event. A typical example is Machinery and Transportation Building (Pl. VI), which shows this major attraction with its Spanish mission facade and towers. In the foreground is the Court of Fountains, and at the far left is the Temple of Music in an Italian renaissance design embellished with Moorish flourishes. The Temple of Music was the building in which President McKinley was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz (1873-1901) on September 6, 1901, but no hint of this tragedy can be found in Key's colorful rendition.