The date was July 11, 1733. A date that is important in the Savannah Jewish community. It was the day that the William and Sara ships brought the first group of Jews to Savannah. Abigail Minis was on one of those ships with her husband and two daughters.The date was July 11, 1733. A date that is important in the Savannah Jewish community. It was the day that the William and Sara ships brought the first group of Jews to Savannah. Abigail Minis was on one of those ships with her husband and two daughters. They traveled with forty other Jews the largest group of Jews to land in North America in Colonial days. It had been only six months after Gen. James Oglethorpe had landed with the first settlers.

In the fertile ground of the new colony between 1733 and 1757she gave birth to seven more children. Life was looking grand until her husband died and left her a widow with eight children to support at the age of fifty-six. She did not know and would never learn to speak English well and struggled to sign her name. This would seem like a recipe for disaster. But Abigail would become one of the great ‘businessmen’ of Georgia.

Her husband left her a 1,000 acre estate to oversee. She would expand this property and develop other entrepreneurial businesses. She would maneuver the treacherous ground of the Revolutionary War in Savannah and survive. In 1763, she applied for a license to operate a tavern. She and her five unmarried daughters conducted this business until 1779. The Minis tavern would become the place for the elite of Savannah to meet. George Washington would make a stop there. It should also be mentioned that she never remarried and her daughters would never marry. This would show that they had confidence in their ability to care for themselves without a male present.

Abigail would remain an important fixture in the Jewish community. She was also a founding member of what is now the historic Congregation Mickve Israel. The synagogue is the third oldest in the United States. Her descendants have been connected with the Savannah Jewish community and Mickve Israel for about 260 years.

She supported the Patriots.  She provided provisions for American and French soldiers during the Siege of Savannah in 1779.  The Americans and French failed to retake Savannah from the British. This led to attempts by Loyalists to confiscate her property. Realizing she was no longer wanted by the British who were still in control of Savannah she petitioned the governor for safe passage to Charleston. She was granted safe passage but in somewhat of a coup considering her position she arranged for protection of her Savannah property for the remainder of the war. Before she left Savannah she brought her friend and fellow patriot Mordecai Sheftall food in prison where he was a prisoner of the British. Sheftall served as a Colonel in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War and was the highest ranking Jewish officer of the Colonial forces.

 In 1783, Abigail Minis returned to Savannah and resumed her business activities. Minis bought land constantly. She owned several garden lots in town, at least 7 farm plots outside the city and 5 hundred acres of pine land on Sapelo Island. In the end here estate would have over 2,000 acres. She would remain active in the family businesses until her death on October 11, 1794, at age ninety-three. She was buried in the Sheftall Cemetary which was once found at Oglethorpe and Bull Streets. Today only a small monument marks hers and other Jews who were buried in the now long gone cemetery.  Yet Abigail was one of the founding mothers of our state.
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​Henry Lee Mcfee was born in St.Louis in 1886. In 1907 he received a large inheritance to take up his part time hobby full-time: painting. He entered Stevenson Art School and traveled to Woodstock, New York attending the Art Students League classes offered there during the Summer. McFee would become one of the leading members of the Woodstock colony’s modernist Rock City Group which included Andrew Dasburg, Konrad Cramer and Eugene Speicher.
In 1913 he began exhibiting first in New York and later in Paris. In 1916 McFee exhibited six Cubist paintings which showed his interpretation of Cézanne and Picasso in an exhibition of American modernist art at the Forum Gallery in New York. He had his first one-person show at the Rehn Gallery in 1927 in New York City. The Rehn Gallery would become influential in his career as they would sponsor further solo exhibitions in 1929, 1933, 1936, and 1950. In 1937 he won a gold medal at the Paris Salon. During these years, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the St. Louis Museum of Art, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased McFee's canvases. He developed a style that brought the Cubist type forms of Cezanne together with moody tones and softer angles. He traveled to Santa Fe in the winter of 1926 to see the landscape his good friend Andrew Dasburg painted every winter. Dausburg, who had started as a teacher of Mcfee, would become his lifetime friend.

Mcfee was married to Aileen Fletcher Jones for twenty years (1916-1936). The marriage ended abruptly when he eloped to Savannah with her niece Eleanor Brown Gutsell. McFee enjoyed Savannah and soon set up a studio there, while also spending time in San Antonio and Woodstock. In 1938 he started an art school in Savannah where he taught local artists in his studio. Also in 1939 McFee, who was obviously becoming a much sought after teacher, was appointed Director at the Witte Museum School of Art, sponsored by the San Antonio Art League. McFee left Savannah in 1940 when he was offered a teaching position at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. McFee became known as one of the important painters and foremost teachers in Southern California. He was the inspiration for an entire generation, first at Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles and from 1943 until his death at Scripps College in Claremont. His paintings continued to be collected by other institutions such as the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Museum of Art. McFee would die in 1953 at his home in California.

Mcfee had a studio and home on Factor’s Walk in Savannah for over ten years. He would become the first of the Cotton Row Painters of Savannah. It would be his studio that Alexander Brook would acquire after he left. The various Cotton Row Painters would exist from 1930 to the 1980s. The large, cheap and ‘derelict’ cotton warehouses that overlook the Savannah River would be the perfect space for art studios. This period only ended when River Street was developed in the eighties. Ann Osteen would be the last remaining Cotton Row Painter after the development.
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But for fifty years the old abandoned cotton warehouses of Savannah were a hotbed of creativity and artists. In 1978 the Savannah College of Art and Design would be founded here in Savannah and they would continue the tradition of artists being inspired and honing their crafts by the beauty and cultural milieu of Savannah.
 

Alexander Brook was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 14, 1898. He was the youngest child of Russian immigrants. At the age of twelve, Brook contracted polio and was bedridden for almost one year. This year would find him dropping out of school and beginning to start a self-education program. In 1915 he enrolled in the Art Students League. His time there was filled with close friendships and the artist Peggy Bacon his first wife.
 
In 1923 he met Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and helped to organize the first exhibit at the Whitney Studio Club. He continued to work under Juliana Force the director of the club for three years  (1924-1927). The club would become the Whitney Museum of Art in 1931. He won awards from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie International Exhibition (he won second prize losing to Pablo Picasso). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to travel to Europe. Upon returning from Europe he taught at the Art Students League for four years.
 
In 1938 Brook first came to Savannah. He lived here in a former cotton warehouse (that also housed his studio) on the Savannah River. He would maintain this studio for ten years. He painted scenes from Yamacraw Village. One of the paintings Georgia Jungle was awarded first prize at the Carnegie International exhibition. Pablo Picasso was not available that year. Throughout his career, Brook tended to favor melancholy subjects saying, “I find . . . that I am more concerned, both sympathetically and aesthetically with the simpler and sadder things about me.” This interest is reflected in the dark palette of grays and browns that Brook often used to convey emotion in his paintings. 
 
 
In 1940 he divorced Peggy Bacon and returned to Savannah with his new wife Libby Berger. This marriage ended to and he returned to New York teaching at his alma mater, the Art Students League. In 1944, one would assume much to the amusement of the Savannahians, he returned with his third wife, artist Gina Knee. It was during this time that an art colony of sorts was established on River Street. Painters such as Andre Ruellen and Hattie Saussy were in the mix. Brooks and Knee continued to exhibit in New York and California. They also became avid supporters of the theater and library in Savannah.
Brook painted many portraits and genre scenes for his own pleasure as well as commissioned paintings during his time in Georgia. Brook exhibited his work here in Savannah. He also produced two covers for the Saturday Evening Post.  In 1948 Knee switched from water colors to paint with oils. She enjoyed the ability to correct her brushstrokes and start [re-dos]. She wrote oils ‘allowed her new ways to explore texture, color and brushstrokes that she no longer felt "in tune with watercolor painting at all when I attempt it."
The couple left Savannah in 1948 and purchased a home at Sag Harbor on eastern Long Island, New York, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Brook died in 1980. Brook's work is found in numerous museum collections, including Telfair Museums, Morris Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art Butler Institute of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and not surprisingly the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Brook, Knee, Bacon, Saussy, Ruellen all have works in the Telfair Museums. They were all involved in the heady times of the Cotton Row Painters of Savannah. As discussed in the last blog William Scharf would take over Brook’s studio continuing the creative intellectual times of the Cotton Row Painters with such people as Augusta Oeschlig and Pulitzer Prize winner for literature Conrad Aiken.

Many of the artists found in the Telfair Museums collection came to them through an artist’s personal connection with Savannah. Gari Melchers was married to a Savannah woman named Connie Lawton, Kahlil Girbran’s matron of his art was married to a Savannah man, Helen Levitt’s sister is a Savannah resident, the Kirk Varnedoe Collection is in honor of the Savannah native who was the Curator of the MOMA, and so the list goes on.  This is the case of William Scharf who recently died in January of this year.
William Scharf was one of our great Abstract artists. He was there for the tail end of the beginnings of the movement and was at the vanguard of the second wave of Abstract artists. He was discovered by none other than NC Wyeth who assisted him in entering Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His works are found in the permanent collections of dozens of important institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. His art is well known. Since 1950 his work was being shown in some exhibit somewhere. Although he never achieved the popularity of some of his peers he was well known as the artist’s artist.
 Part of his recognition was due to his teaching jobs at some of our greatest art institutions. For three generations of artists he was their teacher.  In 1964 he began his teaching career at the MOMA. He would go on to teach at the School of Visual Arts, San Francisco Institute of Fine Arts, the Pratt Institute, Stanford University and the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco. He finished his career of teaching at the Arts Students League which he began in 1987 and continued until he died in January of this year. His teaching career will extend his legacy not only in his art but in the many students he shepherded as they found their way in the art world.
 Scharf is often categorized either as an Abstract Expressionist or as a Color Field artist. He is considered an Abstract Expressionist because he moved to New York in 1952 to be a full-time artist. There in New York he became caught up in the Abstract Expressionist’s Movement that was still in its peak years. He also met and became a lifelong friend of the great Color Field pioneer Mark Rothko in the 1950s. Rothko mentored Scharf and instilled in him an appreciation for the emotive power of color. This relationship that extended to their respective families too would lead Scharf to help with the Rothko Chapel in Houston. This is considered a holy shrine to Color Field painting, and one of the most important destinations in the world for lovers of abstract art.
In 1966 Scharf began working in the former studio of Alexander Brook, another noted painter who for a brief spell led an art colony here in Savannah. Scharf’s
space was in an abandoned cotton warehouse on River Street. This made him what I call one of the Cotton Row Painters of Savannah. He would be there every summer until 1985 dividing his time there with teaching at the San Francisco
Art Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Why did he choose Savannah? One reason: he married Savannahian Sally Kravich. Another reason may have been the intellectual climate of Savannah was flourishing during this time. Many artists of the previously mentioned art colony were here. The Preservationists Society was well established here. While here he would meet and befriend Savannah’s Pulitzer Prize for literature and poetry winner Conrad Aiken. He would also give personal lessons to one of Savannah’s great artists Augusta Oeschlig. One can only imagine the other Savannahian’s paths he crossed while living here. We do know he was inspired to start his scroll paintings while here. Two of his paintings are in the Telfair Museum Collection.
Christopher Rothko (the son of Mark Rothko) eulogized Scharf with a story of a time he had spent with Scharf on Tybee Island. In the story his and Scharf’s families were having a wonderful day at the beach when Scharf began to swim out in the ocean which had particularly choppy waves that day. He asked Sally, his wife, should he be swimming so far out in the ocean. She said it was okay. But Rothko was nervous and gravely concerned when he could no longer see Scharf. In fact he would not see Scharf for another thirty minutes before he saw his steady and firm stroke making his way back to shore. Coming out of the ocean Rothko was amazed but his family and others were nonchalant. This was the way of Scharf; he was constantly doing amazing things in his teaching and his art. And those who followed his work just grew to think amazing was a normal occurrence for a man such as Scharf.
And maybe this is a metaphor for Savannah too. We treat the history of Savannah and this place of moss, architecture, artists, squares, ships, and culture, which is often amazing, as just ordinary.