What's in a Name?

In the arts, there have been many persons who have used professional names other than that given to them at birth.  The use of a pseudonym is perhaps most prevalent in Hollywood, where actors have chosen working names which, like John Wayne (Marion Morrison) and Cary Grant (Archibald Leach), were better signifiers of the masculine, leading roles for which the movie studios cast them, or those like Helen Mirren (Ilyena Vasilievna Mironoff) and Ben Kingsley (Krishna Pandit Bhanji), whose names were changed to make them less ethnic and more palatable for the Americentric audience.  Musicians frequently use stage names or nicknames, like Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey), Sting (Gordon Sumner), and Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield), and authors too are famous for making use of nom de plumes, such as George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), and Richard Bachmann (Stephen King), to name just a few.  Most recently, the extremely successful, British YA author J.K. Rowling was in news for releasing a piece of adult crime fiction under the name Robert Galbraith, a deception she used to relieve herself of the stress fan expectation often incites (incidentally, "J.K." is another pseudonym - the publishers thought the non-gender specific initials might encourage sales when her books were first published.  The "K" actually stands for nothing, as Ms. Rowling does not legally have a middle name, though she has recently declared that the "K" is for "Kathleen").

But what about artists?  How often do artists make use of an assumed name?

There are certainly artists who are better known by other names.  Rembrandt and Michelangelo are two historic precedents of painters being associated with a single name, while Pino and Donato are more contemporary examples of the same practice.  Some artists, most assuredly, have decided to use different names depending on the nature of their works, choosing one appellation for their commercial art, while another for their gallery work;  I still cannot conjure up Malcolm Liepke without first thinking of Skip Liepke, the nickname by which he went during his earlier, also-successful, illustration career.  And artist Tom Kidd is another who comes to mind, as he has variously used his own name, Gnemo, and Newell Convers (a nod to N.C. Wyeth) depending on the projects which were at hand.

There is, however, one artist who lives online, in books, in auction houses, and in museums, under two different names, who never intended for his separate identity to exist.  What is most surprising – and confounding – is that the simple mistake which led to the second persona should still go on, uncorrected, 70 years after the artist's death, and more than 100 years after the initial misappellation.

It was during the second half of the 19th century, when serious art students commonly traveled to Paris to further their studies, that a singular painter from Missouri was mistakingly split into two artists - one an American, and the other a Frenchman.  When the prodigiously talented American Richard Edward Miller (1875-1943) arrived in Paris in 1899, he immediately fell in love with the creative culture, and made France his home.  His summers were spent in Giverny, teaching visiting students from Mary Wheeler's art school in Rhode Island, while his winters were spent in the city, teaching at the École Colarossi.  So ensconced had Miller become in France, that his students applied a French flair when pronouncing his name ("Millaire")¹, and in an article on American artists working in France which appeared in a 1909 issue of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Miller was included only as a footnote; the author, Walter Pach, admired Miller, but did not consider his art fundamentally American.²  Ricahrd Miller became a true expatriate, and for many years, only returned to the United States for brief working visits.  If World War I had not arisen, it is likely that Miller would have remained in France for the remainder of his life or as long as the country would have had him.

In 1909, Miller and Frederick Frieseke, a peer of his from the Giverny Group of American painters, were given special invitation to exhibit at the Eighth Venice Biennale.  Between the two artists, they showed 28 paintings³ in a room – adjacent to the American pavilion – which had been reserved just for them.  The critics praised the paintings, and so taken were the Italians with the artworks that the Modern Art Gallery of Venice purchased Miller's Il Bagno – a seated nude bathing by lamplight – directly from the show.⁴  For Miller, it was a great honor and a great success, and this is probably why he willingly overlooked the small error in the Biennale's official program;  the Italian printer, perhaps thinking Miller – who signed his paintings either "R.E. Miller" or just plain "Miller" – was actually a Frenchman, had listed him as Richard Emil, rather than Richard Edward.  It would have been costly to reprint the pamphlets, and really, what was the damage?  Who would have expected that both names would have continued to exist, side-by-side, a century later.

Why this particular mistake should have endured so long is a mystery.  The two-man show at the Venice Biennale of 1909 was an important event in Miller's career, but it was far from the only honor Miller was to receive:  that a particular brochure should be responsible for branding him with a new name is surprising.  Perhaps the rather consistent misuse of "Emil" was a scholarly mistake, and was never an issue during the artist's lifetime.  If it had been common while Miller was alive, and it had bothered him, he certainly would have commented on the fact, as he was not one to hold his tongue.  Or perhaps for a man who was certainly a Francophile, he would have welcomed receiving a French name, and therefore being more fully associated with the culture he loved.

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