Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“He lives in a museum – alone – and likes it. Keeps snakes as pets, is fanatically interested in primitive things and does all his creative work at night. He doesn’t make preliminary studies. He begins his pictures by completely finishing the head of the central figure; until this is rendered to his entire satisfaction he will not touch the work elsewhere.” E. W. Watson, Forty Illustrators and How They Work, 1946.
Known for his paintings of prize-fighting, psychiatric wards, military and circus scenes and lithography of epic compositions, Robert Riggs (1896 – 1970) had a highly successful career as an artist, especially in the 1930s and 40s. His famous work “The Brown Bomber,” showed the victory of boxer Joe Louis over Max Schmeling and earned Riggs election to New Yorks venerable National Academy of Design in 1946 and he became an associate member in 1949. The New York Art Directors Club awarded Riggs their Gold Medal for Excellence every year for ten years on the trot.
Born in Decatur, Illinois Riggs ran away from home as a young man and travelled America with a circus. He studied at the James Millikin University in Illinois and at age 19 won a scholarship to the Art Students League, a prestigious school in New York. Riggs secured work as an illustrator for the ad agency N. W. Ayer & Sons in Philadelphia. His work for the agency was interrupted by a call up for army service in World War I. Riggs served with a Red Cross hospital unit in France. He made numerous sketches of wounded soldiers, and the horrific scenes he witnessed likely influenced his later penchant for the grotesque and violent within his work. After the Armistice Riggs stayed in France, studying at the Académie Julian, a private art academy popular with Americans. On returning to the United States, he returned to his job at the ad agency. He later taught at the Philadelphia College of Art, now called the University of the Arts.
A visit to an exhibition of lithographs by realist artist George Bellows in 1931 inspired Riggs to make his own prints of the boxing subject matter for which the older artist was famous. In 1933, he had a solo show of his lithographs at the Frank Rehn Gallery in New York. Then Riggs turned to the circus subjects for which he is most well known, creating a series of fifteen prints. He later made four important lithographs for pharmaceutical manufacturer Smith, Kline and French Corporation on the theme of modern medical practice. His most distinctive work perhaps, is his unflinching imagery of mental illness and domestic violence. Dark, grainy, shadowy lithographs were a vogue style of the period, but Riggs’s work had a peculiar, palpable tension, like the pregnant moment before sudden brutal violence kicks off.
In 1924 Riggs took a break from doing the commercial work he’d always “loathed”. He left America to travel, making watercolor paintings of scenes in North Africa, China, Thailand, and the Caribbean islands.
The two images above are typical of Rigg’s usual subject matter: boxing & circuses.
Riggs made 84 prints in two decades, most of which were produced between 1934 and 1936, when the straitened economic conditions of the Great Depression made the relatively low cost of prints popular.
In short his art was singular and distinctive, as grim, oppressive and threatening as the Depression era he worked in. One look, and you could tell it was a Riggs.
Riggs suddenly stopped making lithographs in 1950, only producing black and white drawings for reproduction in print. By 1961 Riggs was a teacher at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts). He was there just 3 years, leaving in 1963.
All of which makes the massive departure of his strange magnum opus, the Legends of The Lenape series (below) all the more mysterious. The series is now held by the Smithsonian, but there’s nothing there that explains Rigg’s huge shift in style and subject matter four years before his death.
A trawl though online art forums shines a little more light on Robert Riggs in the mid-60s when he created Legends of The Lenape Indians. Around Germantown, he was notorious for his love of snakes – perhaps a throwback to his circus days – a number of which reptiles he kept at home as pets. He was a collector of European, Asian and African artifacts and his studio was stuffed full like a rag tag museum. Riggs was active in the local Germantown Boys Club where he worked for many years with an Indian lore group. He was passionate about, and expert on, Lenni-Lenape lore, culture, and language.
“We lived in Grumblethorpe, a historical house on the corner of Queen Lane and Germantown Avenue, just around the corner from the club.”, says Eric T. Andersen a former member of the Indian Dance Group Riggs ran at the Germantown Boys club, “To this day, I have my card from the club, and the key to Riggs apartment. Fond memories of getting painted up, making knives, clubs, dancing, the big show where we went to Atlantic City, shooting pool, putting mouse scalps on toothpicks as our trophies in Riggs “office”. In Riggs apartment: shrunken heads, african shields, spears, the boa on the railing, upstairs the Legends of The Lenape as Riggs was finishing them off hanging up overhead. I used to watch him work later, after he had his leg amputated, still going strong. It was a life experience, and I have many fond memories of that time.”
Another Boys Club member, Robert Winder remembers the “strange food Mr Riggs would have for us”, chocolate covered ants and rattlesnake meat.
A year or two after finishing Legends of the Lenape, Riggs died. In 1970, at the age of 74.
From the series Legends of the Lenape Indians.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
From the series Legends of the Lenape Indians.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
the Spirit Forces of-the World He Lived In. From the series Legends of the Lenape Indians.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
And Are There Now. The Pleiades. From the series Legends of the Lenape Indians.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Thereinafter Deeply Revered.
From the series Legends of the Lenape Indians.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
From the series Legends of the Lenape Indians.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Robert Riggs. ca. 1966.
Graphite and scratchwork on prepared paperboard.
Smithsonian American Art Museum.