29 Facts About Wood Gaylor

Wood Gaylor was an American artist known for his colorful canvases of festive events painted in a flat, unmodeled style that struck critics as "witty" and "wisely naive".

Wood Gaylor made colored wood carvings in relief as well as colored etchings, aquatints, drypoints, watercolors, and drawings.

Wood Gaylor's work appeared in the 1913 Armory Show and many other exhibitions during the first half of the twentieth century.

Wood Gaylor was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on October 7,1883.

When he was 16, during a time when his family was located in Manhattan, Wood Gaylor left school and took work as an office boy for a company that made sewing patterns.

Wood Gaylor began his art training in 1909 with classes at the National Academy of Design and continued through 1912 by taking individual instruction from Walt Kuhn at the New York School of Art in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Wood Gaylor had two paintings accepted for exhibition at the 1913 Armory Show which Kuhn had helped to organize.

In 1917, Wood Gaylor joined Kuhn and others in a short-lived group called the Penguin Club which, like the Armory Show, aimed to provide support for artists who rejected the conservative aesthetics of the National Academy.

Wood Gaylor's painting, "Arts Ball, 1918", conveys the off-beat gaiety of this annual event.

Some months later, Wood Gaylor participated in a group exhibition sponsored by the Penguin Club.

In 1920, Wood Gaylor made a dramatic painting showing members of the Penguin Club preparing posters in aid of a Red Cross bond drive.

In 1932 Wood Gaylor showed portrait studies in watercolor and pencil along with his more familiar oil paintings of festive Greenwich Village scenes in a solo exhibition at the Downtown Galleries.

Wood Gaylor did not exhibit in the late 1930s or throughout the 1940s.

Wood Gaylor's late painting "Fourteenth Street" revisits a scene from 1917 in Manhattan and shows a social-conscience side of his approach to art.

Clearly, Wood Gaylor is equating the sordid message in the movie "Traffic in Souls" with the oppressive workload of the seamstresses, whose sweatshop labors provide the attire of the well-dressed group in the lower half of the picture.

At times a sharp social commentator, Wood Gaylor is keenly aware not only of the pleasurable pastime of movie going, but the toil of the less fortunate.

Works by Wood Gaylor appeared in group shows in 1964 and 1978 and then in another retrospective in 1979.

Wood Gaylor began in that business making line drawings like the one at left published in 1920 by Butterick's, the company where he first worked.

Wood Gaylor liked social events and had managing skills that enabled him to help run nonprofit organizations as well as business concerns.

Wood Gaylor was a founding member of the Penguin and Kit Kat Clubs.

Wood Gaylor was a founder and long-time president of Salons of America and founder and secretary of Modern Artists of America.

Wood Gaylor belonged to the Brooklyn Society of Modern Artists.

Wood Gaylor was a founder and vice president of the Hamilton Easter Field Foundation.

Wood Gaylor served on the boards of the New York City Municipal Art Committee and the Museum of Art, Ogunquit, Maine.

Wood Gaylor was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on October 7,1883.

Wood Gaylor's father ran a sequence of saloons, inns, and rooming houses along the Connecticut shore and in Manhattan.

Wood Gaylor's father stands behind the bar at far left.

Wood Gaylor had left school and was working as an office boy while living at home.

Wood Gaylor and Lawson had two sons, Wynn Lawson Wood Gaylor, born about 1927, and Randall, born about 1930, and a daughter, Isabel Dale.