Steffen Thomas: The "Last Damn Expressionist"

In the miniscule hamlet of Buckhead, Georgia, barely an hour's drive east of Atlanta, stands the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art. Within its walls, the low-lying building offers the visitor an extraordinary exhibition of contemporary art: sculptures, paintings, drawings, and artifacts. It is a collection of some of the best works by Steffen Thomas, the late German-American sculptor and painter who considered himself "the last damn expressionist."

The first time I wound my way past pastures, woods and marshes, I wondered how this unspoiled patch of nature could support a museum with modern art. But I soon realized that these tranquil environs are the most appropriate setting for the creations of a man who was as colorful, ebullient, eccentric, and contradictory as is his art. What's more, as soon as I entered the building I knew I would finally make good on a promise to myself: I would write Steffen Thomas' story. It is a promise that goes back half a century, to the day I first met the artist.

The year was 1960 and Atlanta was in bloom. Spring had arrived with an explosion of colors. Dogwoods spread white umbrellas above pink cushions of azaleas; yellow jonquils edged emerald lawns, and from every yard tulips and hyacinths celebrated in red and blue the return of a singeing sun. As Goethe's Faust muses in his Easter soliloquy on the rebirth of life, what nature cannot cover from her palette, she borrows from "the colorful masses that escape narrow alleys, dark halls and the churches' venerable night."

That day in Atlanta, the colorful masses celebrated Easter by escaping to elaborate garden parties. Lily white, of course. Colored were only those who waited on them. Sweating in candy-striped seersucker suits, the gentlemen sipped bourbon with Coke while the ladies clutched glassed with pink punch in white-gloved hands, smiling sweetly from beneath hats that resembled eighteenth century floral still-lives. It was at this kind of party that I met the artist.

The New World was quite new to me then. I had arrived only a few months earlier from Munich (via a ten-hour flight on a propeller plane with a fuel stop in Newfoundland) and was still suffering from the aftermath of culture shock. Energized by the economic engine of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder, Germany's economic miracle of the late fifties, Munich was considered the secret capital of the German Federal Republic. Heavy postwar construction had restored the town's historic center that consisted of medieval gates, gothic towers, Renaissance palaces, baroque churches, and neoclassic buildings. A lively hub of international tourism, Munich that offered not only museums, theaters, and concert halls, but an exciting nightlife in the student quarter of Schwabing that was as popular as the Hofbräuhaus, the city's oldest and most advertised beer hall.

Growing up in Germany, I had been exposed to art at an early age. My mother was a gifted amateur painter and my brother a frustrated artist, who, when he did not earn his living constructing homes and buildings, painted and sculpted. As soon as post-war conditions allowed, our teachers supplemented lectures on history, art and science with excursions to the Bayerische Staatsgallery and the Deutsche Museum. During my teenage years, I spent countless hours admiring the wealth of gothic, Renaissance, and baroque paintings in the Alte Pinakothek and the wide-ranging pallet of 19th and 20th century masters in the Neue Pinakothek. I routinely assessed the worthiness of a male companion by his willingness to view an exhibition in the Haus der Kunst or visit a recently restored castle. Years later, my studies of history, classics and art, and my four-year tenure at the Staatliche Kunsthalle (federal art gallery) in Karlsruhe only deepened my love for art.

In contrast to Munich, Atlanta seemed like a faded movie backdrop to "Gone With the Wind." A provincial town of less than half a million inhabitants, its charm lay in a network of side streets around Peachstree Road that displayed magnificent mansions shaded by magnolia trees and surrounded by manicured lawns. The center of Atlanta had grown around the 19th century railroad crossings and in the early sixties consisted of an assortment of stores and office buildings anchored by two large department stores: Rich's at the southern edge and Davison's at the northern. Even Saturday nights, downtown was deserted. People enjoyed a night out at restaurants like "Mammy's Shanty" or "Johnny Reb's" where traditional Southern fare—catfish, fried chickens, barbequed ribs—was served with pots of steaming coffee. "Colored" waitresses, wrapped in headscarves and wearing yoke-like wooden nametags around the neck, provided for an atmosphere of "genuine" Southern charm.

Atlanta's cultural high lights were far and few. There was the High Museum of Art, then a couple of rooms in an old mansion displaying a handful of notable paintings and sculptors; the Cyclorama, a circular canvas depicting the Civil War Battle of Atlanta (badly in need of restoration); Stone Mountain, an enormous granite mountain whose exposed face showed the unfinished portraits of the "Three Heroes of the Confederacy." The Episcopal cathedral in Atlanta's fashionable Buckhead section was still a wooden structure, and the Moorish-style Fox Theater on Peachtree and Third Streets, a segregated movie house. African-Americans had to scramble an outside staircase to be allowed to watch a movie from the "rogue" gallery on the third tier. Jim Crow still reigned supreme.

Yet, without being quite aware of it, the city moved slowly but inevitably toward political and social change. As the civil rights struggle geared up in earnest and Martin Luther King, Jr., drew international attention to the South, Atlanta's city fathers conspired to make theirs "a city too busy to hate." As demonstrations and lunch counter sit-ins became a national embarrassment, threatening capital investment and business expansion, commercialism quietly took the air out of bigotry. Next to new six-lane highways and glass-lined office towers economic growth spread the seeds for acceptance and tolerance.

Nevertheless, the elite remained entrenched in tradition. For the most part, Atlanta's society viewed art as something that came from the Old Country, had to be at least a hundred years old, and frequently shimmered in high gloss from coffee table books. Contemporary art was regarded with suspicion, if not contempt. Steffen Thomas, the German-born sculptor and painter, a social maverick and stout individualist, never quite managed to fit into the circle of white-gloved Daughters of the Confederacy and string tie-wearing politicians. Bible thumping fundamentalists had as much use for his work as did snuff dipping Gold Old Boys.

When I first met Steffen Thomas, he lived in his Stone Mountain home some twenty miles northeast of the city. A narrow road cut through cornfields and pine woods, bypassing dilapidated farms, rustic villages, and the quarry at Stone Mountain. At the foot of the granite mount an unpaved lane opened onto a landscaped clearance that Thomas called his "Sculpture Garden." There, between blooming bushes and clusters of trees stood sculptures of varying sizes and forms: carved from stone, poured from bronze, or hammered from iron. A moat-like trench, resplendent with mosaics, displayed a gigantic reclining figure, "The Monument to the Brotherhood of Man." Sitting on a hilly incline stood Thomas' house, a stone structure that struck me like an amalgam of a ski hut, a medieval castle, and a fortified pioneer cabin turned art gallery. Thomas had built the rambling home with his own hands and the help of his family. (When I lived on the Italian Riviera years later, I read a newspaper clipping from The Atlanta Constitution that announced the sad news: "Hand Built Stone Home Crumbling To Developers.")

Even more impressive than the architecture of the home was its décor. Everywhere the eye turned reigned color and form. From the bay windows to the ceiling lights, and from the gigantic fireplace to the round balcony overlooking a grassy clearance, the walls were covered with paintings, drawings, and prints. Hand-decorated furniture stood between stone figures, marble busts, and metal sculptures. Tables, sideboards, and shelves were enhanced with paintings and mosaics. All contemporary, and all unique. Faces changed to linear abstractions; flowers exploded into rays; nudes twisted into sensuous lines. A tree became a metaphor for life; a child, the extension of her mother's limbs, and like images from obscure mythology, male figures sprang from the earth or burst from the sky. Each piece exuded an energy that often bordered on bombast, but, paradoxically, exhibited harmony and gentleness. The impression of home and garden was one of total emergence in art — reminiscent of early German expressionism and the Bauhaus movement.

I remember standing in Thomas' living room, electrified. How was it possible that in a provincial town deep in the South—where restaurants were not even allowed to serve a glass of wine with a meal—could an artist create works of such originality? How could he live and toil amid bigoted politics, restrictive conventions, and stifling middle-class conformity? How could he survive without compromising his individuality and integrity? At the time I was too young and inexperienced to look beyond the obvious. I did not know enough about the human soul, its drive toward the divine, and its yearning for eternity. I did not yet realize that the desire to create is stronger in the artist than in the engineer, or even the museum director. And I had not yet understood that what the average person considers ego, eccentricity, or idiosyncrasy is the artist's weapon in his quest to outwit time.

Glancing from one piece to the next, I wondered what Steffen Thomas' style was. Fauvist? Expressionist? Cubist? Abstract? I later would learn that he was influenced by all of these movements, but would remain at heart an expressionist with all its derivations. As if he had read my thoughts, Thomas walked up to me. Middle-aged, slim, and of medium height, he sported a shock of brown hair that was barely tinged with gray. As his sky blue eyes examined me judiciously, he extended his hand and gave me a polite smile: "Is this your first time visiting us?"

By then, he had spent more than thirty years in America, but I still detected a German accent tinted by Bavarian dialect. "I just arrived from München a few of months ago," I explained in German, purposely adding the same Bavarian coloration to my speech.

At that, a wide grin spread over his face and his eyes lost that skeptical sharpness. "Come and take a look at my studio," he offered. "Maybe you'll find something you like"

Struck by the versatility of his work and flattered by his attention, I followed Thomas’ animated explanations as he pointed to a small sculpture here and a large painting there. Sadly, I could afford none. Already then Thomas demanded a respectable price for his work that he based on his own evaluation of its importance. But since my husband had returned to graduate school in his hometown and I had accepted a job as a typist, our income barely covered the expenses for food, rent, and the recurrent repairs of a dilapidated '51 Chevy. What I did take with me that day was the feeling of having met a remarkable artist and a magnetic personality whose life and work so intrigued me that I promised myself to write the story of his life some day.

Since the late thirties, Thomas had dreamed of finishing the gigantic carving on the face of Stone Mountain, originally begun in 1917 by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. By the late 1940s, Thomas had made a name for himself as one of America's foremost sculptors with commissioned portrait busts of celebrities and the sale of his plastic art. His carvings and castings were as varied in style as in subject. Unencumbered by ideology, he executed commissions that ranged from a bust of George Washington Carver, the African-American scientist par excellence, to a heroic statue of Georgia's racist, four-time governor, Eugene Talmadge. Like his versatility, Thomas' competence was beyond doubt. Toiling for two years over the colossal bonze of the Alabama Civil War Memorial for the National Military Park in Vicksburg, Mississippi, he succeeded in giving it the elegance and romantic drama reminiscent of Eugene Delacroix. At the same time, he was equally successful in pouring and hammering ultramodern silver and brass utensils for communion ceremonies for a large Episcopal church. Yet, the selection committee for the Stone Mountain Memorial Park excluded Thomas from the competition to complete the carving on the mountain and dismissed his plans and models as "too controversial."

Like all human endeavors, art is political. But Steffen Thomas was no politician. With his unapologetic honesty he had ruffled too many feathers and rubbed too many influential people the wrong way. By questioning accounting methods of public funds for public works, he had drawn the ire of the Stone Mountain Planning Committee, and by hinting at sweetheart deals for artists with political clout—or a history of robust donations—he had alienated what he called the "art bureaucracy." His proud nature, explosive temper, and cutting wit hardly furthered the political process of public acquisition or civic display of his work. Even some of his former enemies conceded in private that it was his blunt flamboyance and his sensitivity to critical evaluation, rather than his artistic ability that impeded his rise to greater prominence. As one put it, "Steffen was his own worst PR man."

By the mid-seventies, Thomas had sold his Stone Mountain property and moved into Midtown. Purchasing two houses near Piedmont Park, he remodeled them into a studio and exhibition hall—with a small apartment for himself and his wife—and connected both through walkways, gardens, and an Italian-style piazza. By then, he had disposed of most of his large sculptures, selling some and donating others. The "Trilon," a heroic-size, triangular brass sculpture, for which he was awarded the 1976 Atlanta Urban Design Commission Award of Excellence, ended up as a public fountain that Atlanta's city fathers placed at the entrance to Ansely Park, across from the High Museum of Art.

During these years, my life had turned from a nomadic student existence (switching continents repeatedly) to that of an American suburban housewife. While my husband threw himself into the demands of his career, I fulfilled the traditional role of a wife and mother, rearing three young children and managing a busy household. After an extended sabbatical in Italy had exposed us to "la dolce vita," I decided to parlay a hobby into a business and opened a small wine import firm. At a time the South awakened to the joys of "red wine, white wine and pink wine" (available in oversized jugs with screw-on tops) European quality wines had not yet found recognition, let alone popularity. The cases of samples in my cellar gathered dust. Upon receiving an invitation to view Steffen Thomas' new art-filled home and studio, I selected a bottle of wine as a token of our appreciation, an exquisite estate-bottled Riesling, an Auslese from the Moselle.

Since Thomas' sculptures were still out of our price range, we viewed his flatwork, a breathtaking array of oils, acrylics, water colors, drawings, and woodcuts. As my glance fell on a canvas—a gold and purple daisies scattered acrylic—I heard him chuckle: "Oh, you couldn't afford that!" I only nodded and mumbled, "Probably not." At that, he grabbed the painting, shoved it into my arms and said, "Let's trade: art for wine and wine for art."

I soon learned that the mercurial, tough, bombastic, and egocentric artist possessed a child-like generosity that he displayed only to those who had passed his test of honesty and "true love for art." (According to close friends, love for his art.) Those who did not, left feeling put off, if not angry. Diplomacy was not part of his vocabulary. Direct and open to the point of insult, he only dealt with two categories of people: friends and foes. However, once a friend, the friend was one for life. Although all of Thomas' relationships were clouded by occasional conflicts, his loyalty to his family and friends was legendary; as was that of his family and friends to him.

Thomas made frequently news with his work, was occasionally at the center of a controversy, or sometimes simply offer fodder for gossip. There exist numerous articles about his artistic exploits, his political views, his controversial pronouncements, and his philanthropic acts. He was known for taking in stray dogs and rescuing mistreated farm animals. But adopting an ailing lion cub from the local zoo was one of his more dramatic feats. He nursed the fragile cub into a stately young lion that trailed him through the house and studio like a puppy. When the youngest Thomas daughter visited with a friend from college, she found the full-grown wildcat

As I later discovered reading his journals and correspondence, when it came to emotional issues involving his family or close friends, the flamboyant and extroverted artist was shy, if not secretive. He wrote loving letters to his wife, but rarely discussed his feelings for her with others. While his early journals reflect romantic dreams, he remained discrete about the object of his affection. His loyal wife was equally reserved about divulging details about their relationship and only reluctantly released his love letter seven decades after they were written. The Thomas children knew him as a strict, hardworking, and fair father, but they also had reasons to fear his rages that sometimes followed professional rejections and financial stress. While Thomas shared his frustrations with his wife, to the world he presented the proverbial stiff upper lip. As a man, he was not immune to feminine charms, and as an artist, he reveled in the limelight of admiration, especially during social gatherings.

Ten years after my last encounter with Steffen Thomas, my life took a fundamental gyration. I got divorced, completed a master's degree in journalism, and began a career as a freelance writer. Interviewing him for one of my first articles on art, I was struck not only by the enormous productivity of Steffen Thomas the artist, but the wide range of interest of Steffen Thomas the man. His intellectual curiosity and his philosophical pondering were startling. He was well-informed on local, national, and international events; knew of the latest cultural trends; opined on art, music, and education, and freely peppered his conversation with quotes from the Bible, Shakespeare and Goethe. While he talked, his record player churned out tunes by Mozart. At one point, the final chorus of "The Abduction from the Seraglio" drifted through the room bright with the light that flooded through curtain-free bay windows. Suddenly he raised his hand in mid-sentence and began to recite the words: "Nichts ist so häßlich wie die Rache, großmütig sein und ohne Eigenlust verzeih'n." (Nothing is as ugly as revenge, be generous and without self-love forgive).

When the music stopped, he looked at me. "This and the chorus of Zoroaster's priests from the ‘Zauberflöte’ are my favorite pieces." Then he launched into a lengthy monologue on the need for the human soul to forgive hurts and slides and rise above anger, resentments, and hurt pride. Above all, he admonished, man must forego the primitive desire for revenge, because those feelings are only based on self-delusion and the lust for power and control. He looked at me and he added gravely, “Revenge destroys the soul while forgiveness ennobles it.”

I was touched and perplexed. Mozart's "Abduction" and "Magic Flute" were also two of my favorite operas and I had always been impressed by the humanistic message in both.

"Listen to the words," he insisted. "Without forgiveness, there can be no spiritual growth. Without spiritual growth, there can be no art. And without art, man has no soul."

At that, my first meeting with Thomas came back to me, as well as the feeling of being overwhelmed by the man and his art. Would this be the time to begin with interviews and research for his biography? Should I take the plunge to start with that project now? Though challenging, I knew it would be rewarding. Since Thomas had discussed his work and his thoughts and feelings about art in countless interviews and speeches, there would be little trouble discovering the "real" Steffen Thomas.

Throughout his life, Thomas kept journals, first in German, later in English, and in his early years in a mixture of both. In fact, his first diary was written solely in Sütterlin, an outdated German script that combined Gothic, Latin, and Renaissance letters into one form. Introduced into public schools during the Kaiser Reich, the Nazis did not consider it German enough and abolished it in the early forties. Since the only children books available in the refugee camp where I staid after the war were Andersen and Grimm fairy tales, printed in Sütterlin, I begged my mother to teach me the script. Decades later I felt like Johanna Spyri's Heidi who could use what she had learned as a child. It appeared that I was only the German speaking person in the academic community of Georgia who was able to decipher Steffen Thomas’ first journal written in 1926 — in Sütterlin.

As is often the case, the best intentions will not stave off procrastination. Juggling various jobs and assignments, I kept pushing my plan to interview Thomas for the purpose of writing his biography to the back of my mind, promising myself to get to it later. But then one day it was too late. I learned with sadness of his sudden death. On a stormy January day, I attended his fare-well ceremony in a small non-denominational chapel in Atlanta’s Midtown. As I listened to the speeches, watched the sketches about his life, and joined in the laughter over his adventures, I determined to begin with my plan to write his story. However, reality has a way of interrupting the best laid plans, and the need to earn a living interferes with even the purest of intentions. Several more years would pass until a visit to the recently opened Steffen Thomas Museum served as the impetus.

The Thomas family and foremost Steffen Thomas’ widow, Sara Douglass Thomas, graciously offered me assistance in contacting friends, acquaintances and collectors of Thomas’ art. I was given free access to the archives of the Steffen Thomas Museum, where I found stacks of his diaries and boxes filled with newspaper clippings and correspondence. My interviews netted me insight into Thomas’ various periods of life, especially his early years in Atlanta. I not only studied Thomas art, but traveled throughout the Southeast to visit places where he had lived and worked. In due time, I returned to text books on history and art, and read everything I could find on 20th century art movements. I visited paper morgues, governmental archives, and libraries, where I examined original documents and copied old articles. As weeks turned into months, and months into years, I made a number of exciting discoveries: I learned that Steffen Thomas had been befriended with Margaret Mitchell and her husband John Marsh. I found out that the famous Gutzon Borglum had offered him a job to work on Mount Rushmore. And I uncovered a long-forgotten correspondence between Steffen Thomas and George Washington Carver, the inventor of peanut butter, who fondly addressed his letters to Thomas with "My beloved Friends."

To obtain judicious views on Steffen Thomas art, I also spoke to art historians, curators and artists, and contacted, among others, a member of the established Atlanta art scene. A few months earlier, I had written a profile of this man, for which he felt compelled to complement me. I therefore was rather stunned by his sobering rebuke for an interview regarding Steffen Thomas: “You are a nice lady, but can’t help you with this project. In my opinion, Steffen Thomas was a bad artist and a bad man.”

Only later would I learn that twenty-five years earlier, he and Thomas had ended what should have been an uplifting PBS program on modern art with acrimonious polemic. When Thomas heard his young, debonair debate partner dismiss his life's work in patronizing analyses, enraged, the aging artist declared the critique "a squirt of water in the sand of history that soon will disappear and be forgotten." But more than twenty-five years after this incident, and more than a decade after the artist's death, resentments still smoldered hotly.

To complete my research on Thomas’ background, I collected my frequent flyer miles and I traveled to Germany to visit town of his birth, Fürth (in northern Bavaria), and the cities where he studied: Nürnberg, and München. I was also able to interview his only surviving brother, the octogenarian Willi, who happily filled me in on their early childhood events during the Kaiser’s reign. At the archive of the Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich (Academy of Fine Arts), I found a handful, partially damaged, documents and exhibition catalogs that had survived the bombing raids of World War II. These presented me with some astonishing information: the first-year art student Steffen Thomas had been selected to exhibit with such famous artists as Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Ghogh, Edvard Munch, and other modern masters in Munich's prestigious Glass Palace that burned down in the early thirties.

After years of researching, writing, and editing, I finally completed my portrait of Steffen Thomas, the gifted artist and the colorful man, who not only experienced the major art movements of the 20th century, but who created during his eighty-four years of life a startling array of contemporary art that never strayed far from its roots of German Expressionism.