Edgar Yaeger

Edgar Yaeger died in 1997 at the age of 93, leaving behind thousands of completed paintings and drawings, a smaller number of reliefs and mosaics, and his legendary murals. Art historians and curators continue to wrestle with Yaeger’s placement in the modernist pantheon, seemingly disinclined to rewrite an official 20th century art narrative which largely excluded him, but institutional support – notably from East Lansing’s Kresge Museum – continues to reaffirm Yaeger’s rightful status as an unheralded modernist master. Such a stature may have been something this introspective master craftsman never expected or pursued, but it is a position he richly deserves.

The mid-1980s, however, witnessed something of an Edgar Yaeger renaissance. As conceptualism fell from style and interest in painting returned —thanks in large measure to American Neo-Expressionists such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Europeans such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke— stylistic devices favored by Yaeger came once again into vogue. Simultaneously, a Detroit-based group of Yaeger fans led by Yaeger’s friend and agent John Joseph Jr. began evangelizing the artist’s work on his behalf, a practice never undertaken in earnest by the modest Yaeger. A flurry of press attention and new public commissions followed, including an outdoor mosaic on the facade of Detroit’s Scarab Club. For the majority of his remaining years, Yaeger’s work continued to receive steady if low-key attention within Detroit and regional artistic and press circles.

Yaeger’s FAP commissioned works included murals for Detroit Receiving Hospital’s Children’s Ward, the Ford Grammar School in Highland Park, and Western Market (all now destroyed). A commission for the Detroit Public Lighting Commission, a landmark mural celebrating the historical development of electric light, was partially saved from oblivion prior to the building’s 1977 demolition and is now visible at Michigan State University's Kresge Art Museum. Surviving Yaeger WPA murals exist at the Brodhead Naval Armory (now closed), Grosse Pointe South High School in Grosse Pointe, and the University of Michigan’s West Quad Dormitory.

Nonetheless, Yaeger continued to work at a frenetic pace, completing private commissions including mosaics for churches and murals for private clients as well as an endless succession of paintings and drawings. Prizes, gallery exhibitions, and purchases continued to accrue, albeit at a lessened frequency, through the 1960s—even during the Abstract Expressionist, Pop, and Op-Art eras. With the ascendence of conceptualism in the late 1960s-early 1970s and its attendendant dismissal of both painting and representationalism in favor of pure abstraction, Yaeger began to recede into obscurity.

A confluence of factors including escalating tensions in prewar Europe and the American economic depression led Yaeger to return to the United States in 1935. Yeager settled once again in Detroit, taking up residence in his family home where he would remain for the rest of his life. Shortly after his return, Yaeger began to work on a succession of murals commissioned by Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and its landmark Federal Arts Project. While not enamored of the officially-sanctioned Social Realist style favored by program administrators, Yaeger nonetheless joined the ranks of American artistic luminaries commissioned by the FAP to create murals, paintings, and sculptures for WPA sites in Detroit and Ann Arbor.

In 1932, Yaeger won two prizes which would provide a significant boost to his budding career: The Detroit Institute of Arts’ Founders’ Society Purchase Prize and the Detroit News’Anna Scripps Whitcomb Traveling Scholarship. Apart from the increased public profile and prestige afforded by the awards, the $500 Scripps cash award enabled Yaeger to pursue his art education overseas. Yaeger departed for Paris, then still the center of European artistic activity and the home to legions of American expatriates, where he studed at the Academe Andre L’hote and the Ecole Scandinav, where he received instruction from L’hote, Marcel Gromaire and Orthon Friesz.

Neither the press nor the public ever seemed quite certain what to make of Edgar Yaeger. His talent, his commitment to craft, and his skill at integrating and adapting the prevailing styles of the day into his own signature style were always beyond question. How was it, then, that this consummate professional – a man who had studied beneath some of the art world’s luminaries in 1930s Paris and who had exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the Phillips Collection – came to spend the majority of his years living and working in comparative obscurity in Detroit, far from the art world’s bright centers?

Yaeger’s talent began to emerge in earnest during his high school years as he started winning prizes for his drawings and paintings. Scholarships enabled him to pursue his formal artistic training at the University of Detroit, the John P. Wicker School of Fine Arts, and Robert Herzberg’s Detroit School of Fine and Applied Arts. Both to economize and to support himself, Yaeger ground paints for his own use and for sale to fellow students. Concurrently, his work began to attract the attention of a broader audience of influential art patrons. Early recognition arrived in the form of acceptance into the Carnegie International Exhibition in 1930 – a show juried by Henri Matisse.

Edgar Louis Yaeger (1904–1997) was an American modernist painter from Detroit, Michigan.

Edgar Louis Yaeger was born in 1904 in Detroit, Michigan, the son of a shoe store owner and the fourth generation of his family to live in the area. Yaeger’s family was hesitantly supportive of his artistic pursuits. In the early years of his life, Yaeger learned a succession of skills from his beloved grandfather, who taught him to draw, to carve figures from blocks of soap and to paint using discarded paints found in an alley, thus laying the foundation for capabilities Yaeger would use throughout his life. By his own account, Yaeger showed little interest for any vocation apart from art; while his father was disappointed that his son wouldn’t follow him into the family shoe business, he lent his grudging support to Yaeger’s artistic pursuits, saying that so long as he was able to earn a living he was free to continue.