Henry Keller

b. 1869 — d. 1949

A leader of the Cleveland modernist movement, Henry Keller grew up in the city and enrolled in the Western Reserve School of Design for Women in 1887. In 1890 he went to Karlsruhe, Germany, for a year of study with Hermann Baisch. Unable to find a teaching position after returning to Cleveland, Keller worked for eight years at the Morgan Lithograph Company, where he specialized in designing circus posters. In 1899 he returned to Germany to study at art academies in Düsseldorf and Munich. In 1902, after receiving a silver medal at the Munich Kunstakademie’ s spring exhibition, he returned to Cleveland. Around 1903 he began teaching at the Cleveland School of Art, first as a part-time watercolor instructor, then as full-time instructor of decorative illustration. He also taught private classes on family-owned farmland in Berlin Heights, Ohio, during summers from 1903 to 1914. In the 1910s he championed the cause of modern art through lectures and teaching. He exhibited in the Armory Show (1913) and the annuals of the Carnegie Institute of Art in Pittsburgh. The Cleveland School of Art sponsored several solo exhibitions of his paintings. He exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1919–50) and in annuals at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. When he retired from the Cleveland School of Art in 1945, Keller moved to San Diego, where he died. Transformations in Cleveland Art. (CMA, 1996), p. 232