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Soft women among soft flowers through the filter of a soft light — “Renoir-esque” was the most reliable description critics gave to Robert Philipps’s paintings, frequently rosy portrayals of Hollywood starlets and upper-class leisure. How, then, did something as dark and strange as Soap Box Wisdom — an umbrous scene with a rabble-rousing radical at its center — sneak into a career shaped by so much decadence and glamour? Philipp’s 1937 solo show at the Grand Central Galleries in New York was when audiences first noticed a shift in his work, like a great black cloud had drifted in, a sudden chill descended (Dust to Dust, one of the exhibition’s centerpieces, is a somber portrayal of mourners gathered under a sunless sky before an open grave). Philipp’s “dominant hazy rose has been abandoned,” one reviewer remarked. Maybe his palette was headed in that direction already. Or maybe it was the death of his mother and uncle a few years earlier that caused the roses of his palette to wither. Soap Box Wisdom, created two years after Dust to Dust, was in that same family of anomalously brooding late-1930s compositions. For anyone living near Union Square in the first part of the twentieth century (Philipp’s apartment, a window-rich penthouse in Greenwich Village, wasn’t too far), the scene of an inflammatory orator vying for the attention of passersby was all too familiar. The impromptu speeches ranged from the educational to the entertaining — fiery addresses from suffragettes, impassioned spiels from prospective politicians, fervent attempts at religious conversions, and massive May Day rallies were all par for the course. But here Philipp makes the familiar a bit less so. The backdrop of New York City has dissolved into a morass of rusts and grays, as if this preacher’s power has whittled what matters in the world down to this speech, this moment. The speaker, borderline-cartoonish in his agitation, balls one hand in a fist raised to the sky; the other points emphatically toward something off-canvas, unseen. But perhaps even more relevant than what he points toward is what he is pointing away from — the threadbare American flag sagging behind him. Where the crowd’s — and Philipp’s — sympathies lie isn’t entirely clear. While the area around Union Square was historically an enclave for immigrants and the city’s working class, there are a smattering of finer hats to be found in the group gathered in this painting, suggesting a different sort of demographic might be mixed in. Perhaps it’s relevant to mention the Communist Party’s U.S. headquarters was stationed just two blocks from Union Square, and that in 1938 the House-Unamerican Activities Committee began investigating suspected ties to that party, targeting numerous individuals and groups on the Lower East Side. There was a pervasive sense of unease and mistrust; Philipp’s finger is right on the pulse. In a profile for Life in 1940, just before his drive from New York to Hollywood, Philipp mused curiously: “I don’t like my paintings to look too human. Then you miss other things.” Whether in the company of elite starlets or roaming among the working class of New York, for Philipp, the honesty was in those exaggerations. His paintings were always a little too rosy or too dark, too messy or too beautiful. It wasn’t real, necessarily. But it was true.
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