Kewpie inventor, illustrator, ‘party person’ focus of a major show at Springfield Art Museum

As part of her duties, Springfield Art Museum's curator has handled work by hundreds of artists.

Only one of those creators has ever found her way into Sarah Buhr's dreams, however.

That artist, Rose O'Neill, is mostly known as the inventor of the Kewpie doll, a fat, smiling cherub dubbed "the national dream child" by The New Yorker magazine in 1934.

O'Neill, whose habit of speaking in baby talk was reportedly so strong that it contributed to her second divorce, adapted "Kewpie" from "Cupid."

But instead of being a tricksy god of romance, like Cupid, a Kewpie is a cheerful, topknot-wearing creature who lives to get people out of trouble, not into it.

They are part of an abundant, optimistic vision of life that runs through most of O'Neill's art.

"Do good deeds in a funny way," O'Neill once wrote. "The world needs to laugh — or at least smile more than it does.”

O'Neill had deep Ozarks ties.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1874, her family began homesteading in the Ozarks in 1893, on a property that she later named Bonniebrook. She died in a Victorian house 74 years ago that is now preserved on the Drury University campus.

While O'Neill is not a name-brand artist like Georgia O'Keeffe or Frida Kahlo, her fandom stretches from Taney County to Tokyo.

It is not a lukewarm type of fandom.

"I was doing research and got hooked," Buhr said. She hails from another part of Missouri and said she wasn't too familiar with O'Neill until the art museum added some pieces to its O'Neill collection in 2013.

"I think most people who get into Rose O'Neill become huge fans," Buhr said. "There are a lot of superfans."

Now, O'Neill — who has received a small, sudden flurry of national attention in recent months with a story in Smithsonian magazine and by being included in a New York women's history exhibit — is the subject of a massive retrospective show at Springfield Art Museum that begins Friday, April 13. It runs through Aug. 5.

And while Springfield's museum is spotlighting Kewpies, it also hopes to draw attention to the broad range of O'Neill's creations.

"She was so diverse that she was an awesome woman," said Donna Timm, president of the International Rose O'Neill Fan Club.

The artist, who had a 300-acre spread near Walnut Shade along with a New York City studio, a Connecticut country home and an Italian villa on the Isle of Capri, had even more career lanes than houses.

O'Neill got her start at age 13 by winning a Nebraska newspaper drawing contest, but she also made sculpture, calligraphy, poetry, fiction, illustration and clothes.

Readers of today's best-selling graphic novels by Alison Bechdel or Kate Beaton might thank O'Neill for blazing a trail.

It is likely, historians say, that an 1896 O'Neill cartoon strip printed in Truth magazine was the first cartoon ever published by an American woman.

By her early thirties, O'Neill was twice divorced, never to remarry — a social status that meant borderline scandal in the early 20th century.

O'Neill also spoke out against uncomfortable women's fashions (it was the corseted era of "Downton Abbey," after all), championing a national contest in 1915 that invited women to design more practical clothes.

Whether working in her studios or hosting an unceasing lineup of guests at her art colony in Connecticut, O'Neill preferred to wear airy, flexible garb. She called it her "aura."

A 1968 account from the Missouri Historical Review makes much of O'Neill's "rose or wine-colored velvet flowing robes over Grecian-style gowns of peach silk."

O'Neill was also an intense political supporter of women. While living in New York City's Greenwich Village, she contributed her talents to the suffragist movement, helping secure the right to vote for New York State women following an election in 1917. (That's right: Men voted on whether women should get to.)

Some of O'Neill's posters and postcards that were designed for that suffrage campaign were recently loaned from Ozarks collections for "Hotbed," an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society that celebrated contributions by women artists and activists in Greenwich Village.

"After O'Neill made money with Kewpies, she bought an apartment on Washington Square, so she’s right there, using her art to support the suffrage movement," said Sarah Gordon, a New-York Historical Society curator.

Gordon said that O'Neill put the Kewpies' cheery image to work selling suffragism to male voters. O'Neill used the latest printing technology of the day — chromolithography — to quickly, cheaply make posters that showcased equality between men and women as a new, powerful way to support family life.

"There's a couple (in the poster)," Gordon said. "She’s got short hair, she’s wearing a flowy dress, very flowy and comfortable-looking, they're holding hands, they’re looking at each other, you can tell they're talking. They’re very much an image of a new woman, a new kind of relationship at the time, reinventing marriage, reinventing relationships."

The caption? "Together for home and family – vote yes for the woman suffrage amendment."

If all that sounds like a like a lot to take on for one person, that's because it was.

"Oh, Rose could do it all," David O'Neill, Rose's great-nephew, told the News-Leader on Tuesday. He said he lent 15 to 20 pieces to Springfield Art Museum for the show. Until October, he ran a small Rose O'Neill museum in Springfield's Galloway neighborhood.

The artist's prolific, unconventional nature — and her reputation as a highly paid commercial illustrator and doll designer, not purely a fine artist — has kept her on the sidelines of American art, said Buhr, with Springfield Art Museum.

"Rose O'Neill is not so well known nationally because she was involved in so many things," Buhr said. "It sort of fragmented her legacy. Lots of people advocated for part of her legacy, but there wasn't a concerted effort to unite all aspects of her life."

Until now.

Titled "Frolic of the Mind," Springfield's O'Neill exhibit will include 150 works. Some were lent from far-flung museums, including the Smithsonian, others from private collections in the Springfield area. Some items came from Bonniebrook, the restored O'Neill house 7 miles north of Branson that is now a museum.

Buhr has been working on "Frolic of the Mind" for the past four years, a length of time that's not uncommon for putting together a show of this type.

For example, Buhr examined 150 original O'Neill illustrations in the collection of The Huntington, a library and art museum in San Marino, California. Springfield ended up borrowing 10 of them for "Frolic of the Mind."

Many of these pieces date from O'Neill's six years as a staff illustrator at Puck magazine — a publication as well known at the turn of the 20th century as GQ today.

"The readership was almost entirely men," Buhr said. "Women did work at Puck, but they were in the bindery department. They did not produce content."

Women illustrators who wanted to be part of that era's golden age of magazine publishing were employed by titles like Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping.

"Illustrating was seen as a legitimate job for women," Buhr said. "They could work at home. That protected their virtue."

But for O'Neill to break into Puck was "unusual," Buhr said. She got the job just a few years after arriving in New York City at age 19.

Buhr said the illustrations O'Neill made for Puck covered a range of topics: women and children, the western expansion of the United States, Native American scenes and race relations.

She signed many of her illustrations at the time "O'Neill Latham," Buhr said, using her first husband's last name. O'Neill was the primary breadwinner for the couple.

Springfield Art Museum also borrowed O'Neill works from Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Many of these were sketches of family members that date back to O'Neill's days as a child prodigy — "things she did at 13, 14," in Buhr's words.

When Rose was young, the O'Neills moved from Pennsylvania to a sod house on the prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska.

O'Neill's father was a Shakespeare-quoting would-be bookstore owner who steeped his children in reading. Her mother commuted into town to earn money for the family.

"Rose’s father was a stay-at-home parent in the 1800s, very unconventional," Buhr said. "He declared when she was a teeny child that Rose would be an actress. Her sister was already a painter."

Rose's sister Lee went on to study with the Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla and settled in California.

By age 13, it was clear that Rose's talents also lay in the in visual arts. She never went to art school, but she taught herself to draw by looking at pictures in her father's books.

A lack of formal training didn't stop O'Neill from writing, either: Her first book, "The Loves of Edwy," was published in 1904. Her great-nephew, David O'Neill, said she wrote it at Bonniebrook and made 65 original illustrations to accompany the story.

"She was thirty years old, successful, beautiful, and surrounded on all sides by unceasing hosannas of adulation," wrote The New Yorker about that period of O'Neill's life.

During those years, O'Neill often retreated from New York's hustle to the "forest primeval" of the Ozarks, as she called it in one of her letters.

"Rose O'Neill is among those authors to leave town early this season," reported the New York Times Saturday Review of Books on July 3, 1909, in a brief item that ran beside an update on Mark Twain.

"Mrs. Wilson, as this author is known in private life, has a ranch, Bonniebrook, in Missouri, where she is now enjoying her vacation, miles from a railroad and all other signal points of civilization."

It was likely on that trip when O'Neill came up with the Kewpie concept: They were first published in the December issue of that year's Ladies' Home Journal.

In the next few years, Kewpies became "the most widely known cartoon character until Mickey Mouse," wrote the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Like the work of Walt Disney, O'Neill's vision for Kewpies could hardly be more American.

She once wrote, "I have tried to put into the little fellows, and make them show forth, the national naiveté, jocularity, amiability, adventure, philosophy, and benevolence."

In 1912, a German company began manufacturing bisque Kewpie dolls.

The merchandise made O'Neill heaps of money.

The month after Kewpie dolls went on the market, O'Neill received $5,000, Ozarks Alive blogger Kaitlyn McConnell reported, quoting a 1913 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story.

That's a monthly income worth more than $127,000 in 2018 dollars.

As an illustrator and writer, she was already making $20,000 per year before America fell under the Kewpie spell — more than half a million dollars, in today's terms.

By age 60, O'Neill's Kewpies had earned her more than $26 million in today's money — economic value generated by a woman who once wrote, "I have no system and hardly any intelligence about my work."

Some days, she surged ahead with work for long hours. Other days, she rode on horseback near Bonniebrook or swam in nearby Bear Creek.

Perhaps predictably, once she found success, people came to O'Neill asking for help.

"It's sort of a sad story," said Buhr, with Springfield Art Museum. "She was so generous. She was an empathetic person at her core. Eventually, she was almost penniless at the end."

But while the Kewpie money flowed, strangers wrote to O'Neill telling of their struggles. After she bought Castle Carabas, her Connecticut house, would-be artists took advantage of her "boundless hospitality."

"It is a well-established fact," wrote The New Yorker, "that guests invited for a weekend remained two years."

O'Neill made friends easily. Buhr said that in a letter, O'Neill described meeting the poet Witter Bynner at a gathering in her New York City home.

"He showed up at her apartment in Washington Square on a hot night in the summer," Buhr said. "(O'Neill) convinced everyone to change into Grecian robes. They recited poetry, drank iced Rhine wine, sang songs and stayed up till dawn dressed in togas. He (Bynner) had just met them all."

"She was like the party person," Buhr said. "You’re just so fascinated, you’re drawn to them. I came across stories like that from others who knew her. They were just sucked in."

People "sucked in" by O'Neill included those in the French art world. As early as 1906, she was the first American woman elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, meaning she had fewer hoops to jump to get her work into the organization's notoriously picky Paris art shows, called "salons."

That was an achievement in the art world of that era.

"The Impressionists were not permitted to exhibit in that salon," said Art Haseltine, a Springfield collector and O'Neill fan. "Not long after that, here we have Rose O’Neill permitted to be exhibited in the salon. It’s extraordinary."

Some O'Neill art shown in Paris will be included in Springfield Art Museum's upcoming show, said Buhr, the museum curator.

In 1921, O'Neill exhibited what some critics have called her "serious drawings," the "Sweet Monsters," at Galerie Devambez in Paris, where O'Neill is rumored to have hobnobbed with Auguste Rodin, the sculptor who made "The Thinker."

The following year, the same art was shown at a gallery in New York.

The Sweet Monsters drawings — inspired by mythology and the depths of O'Neill's dream life — were a hit back in the Roaring Twenties. Buhr said two Paris museums each bought an O'Neill drawing.

But for people drawn to the Kewpies' sweetness and light, the monsters can be kind of a lot to deal with, despite their transatlantic pedigree.

"The first time I saw Sweet Monsters, I thought 'oh my, oh my — what was she thinking?'" said Timm, the president of the International Rose O'Neill Fan Club. "But the more you learn about Rose, the more you understand where she was coming from, where she was in that time in her life."

A somewhat erotic sculpture with similar themes, "The Embrace of the Tree," brought about a similar reaction when it was displayed near the College of the Ozarks chapel in the early 1990s, said Susan Scott, director of the Bonniebrook Historical Society.

"It caused such a fuss," Scott said. Some students' parents were scandalized. "It ended up in a warehouse temporarily. People still ask a lot of questions about it."

Scott oversees the restored Bonniebrook property north of Branson. She said the sculpture is now displayed in the setting O'Neill chose after bringing it from Connecticut in 1937.

"It's Greek mythology," Scott said, "and that kinda weirds people out a bit, like the Sweet Monsters kinda weird people out."

Not everyone is weirded out, though.

Haseltine, the Springfield art collector, said O'Neill's serious art and magazine illustrations prompted him to start buying pieces, some of which he's loaned to Springfield Art Museum for the current show.

Haseltine said he's never attended a Kewpiesta, the annual spring convention and trading session held in Branson by the International Rose O'Neill Fan Club.

Still, he gets Kewpies.

"The Kewpie part funded her lifestyle," Haseltine said, "which if that hadn't happened, a lot of stuff wouldn't survive."

This year's Kewpiesta is slated to begin April 19, said Timm, the club president who helps run the event.

Despite a global decline in doll-collecting in which doll enthusiasts have seen their collections sell for 35 to 40 cents on the dollar, original Kewpie dolls still hold much of their value, Timm said.

Kewpiesta soldiers on. Timm said when the event began in 1968, 600 people attended. She expects at least 120 this year.

O'Neill's biography may hold the key to her future cultural relevance, as much as the dolls.

Vernon and Marlys Jordan are Des Moines, Iowa, collectors who also loaned objects for the upcoming Springfield exhibit. They've collected O'Neill books and letters, among other items.

"What I become fascinated with is the lady herself and the life she led," Vernon Jordan told the News-Leader. "The more you learn, the more you’re fascinated. It's quite a life for a person to live at that period of time. She was far ahead of her time, especially as far as the role of women goes."

At Springfield Art Museum, Buhr said that she's organized "Frolic of the Mind" to appeal to as much of the public as possible.

"We have a little bit of everything," she said. "My hope is that people get a full sense of who she was. She was an eternal optimist."

It's O'Neill season

"Frolic of the Mind: The Illustrious Life of Rose O'Neill"

Springfield Art Museum, 1111 E. Brookside Drive, sgfmuseum.org

The exhibit has an opening reception April 13, 5:30 to 7 p.m., and runs through Aug. 8. A one-woman play, "Saving Rose O'Neill," written and performed by Marcia Haseltine, will be performed at 7:30 p.m. April 13 and 14 and at 2 p.m. April 15. Free admission.

Bonniebrook Open House

Bonniebrook Historical Society, 485 Rose O'Neill Road, Walnut Shade, roseoneill.org or search "Rose O'Neill and Bonniebrook Museum" on Facebook.

April 21 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The open house at the all-volunteer restored O'Neill house includes tours, musical performancesand art talks. Free admission.

Kewpiesta

Westgate Branson Woods, 2201 Roark Valley Road, irocf.org/kewpiesta

April 17-22. Much of the annual Branson Kewpie festival is open to the public. This year's theme is "A Visit to Kewpieville."