Out of the Heart: The Art and Life of David Ellinger

Read the article “Native Son: The Life and Art of David Ellinger” on Antiques and the Arts Weekly

Presented in the Harrison Gallery of Arcadia’s University Commons, the show is divided into three sections: early life, focusing on Ellinger’s earliest known artworks and his involvement with the Works Progress Administration; farm life, which explores his paintings of Pennsylvania German farmsteads and barns; and home life, delving into Ellinger’s paintings of household interiors, Amish quilts, and flower gardens. The exhibition also includes ephemera, including the artist’s palette and documentation of his persona as a female impersonator, who from approximately 1939 to 1953 performed as Una Hale, a stage name that appears in the title of Apfelbaum’s exhibition in homage to Ellinger and the freedom represented by his life and work. 

Among some the more significant items in the exhibition are silkscreen prints made in collaboration with Frances Lichten taken from his experience drawing objects in museum collections during the 1930s while working for the WPA. Other highlights include paintings depicting bank barns and auctions, a sketchbook containing nearly 400 drawings, and wallpaper designs made in 1927 when Ellinger was fourteen years old. 

Curated independently of the Apfelbaum exhibition, “Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger” nevertheless includes examples of Ellinger’s work that will inform visitors’ experience of Apfelbaum’s ceramic works and wallpapers, in particular his Tobacco Barn (or Yellow Barn), paintings depicting quilts, and a canvas representing a bonneted woman with a green watering can. Together, the two exhibitions serve to demonstrate the formative influence of Pennsylvania German folk art on different but parallel sensibilities.  

Major support for “Polly Apfelbaum: For the Love of Una Hale” and “Out of the Heart: The Life and Art of David Ellinger” has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from Creative Capital.

A Pennsylvania native and self-taught artist, David Y. Ellinger (1913–2003) helped popularize Pennsylvania German culture in the mid-twentieth century through his paintings of Amish farmsteads, bank barns, country auctions, and other scenes of rural life. He drew on his personal experience growing up in the vicinity of Trappe, in Montgomery County, where he worked on a dairy farm as a teenager. He also incorporated antique furniture, quilts, chalkware, and other objects into his paintings—taken from his experience drawing objects in museum collections during the 1930s while working for the WPA, first as part of the Federal Art Project and then for the Index of American Design. Ellinger was also an antiques dealer, buying and selling antiques to major collectors such as Albert Barnes, Titus Geesey, and Donald Shelley. He also revived the nineteenth-century art of theorem painting and made hundreds of examples—mostly still lifes depicting baskets of fruit—that are still highly prized today by collectors. Ellinger worked in a wide variety of media, including oil, casein, watercolor, and crayon. Earlier in his life, Ellinger was also a drag performer known as Una Hale. 

Lisa Minardi is a noted scholar of Pennsylvania German art and the executive director of Historic Trappe, home to the Center for Pennsylvania German Studies. Her previous exhibitions include “A Colorful Folk: Pennsylvania Germans and the Art of Everyday Life” (Winterthur, 2015); “Quill & Brush: Pennsylvania German Fraktur and Material Culture” (Free Library of Philadelphia, 2015); and “Pastor & Patriots: The Muhlenberg Family of Pennsylvania” (Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, 2011). She is the author of numerous books, articles, and essays on Pennsylvania German art and culture including Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015).