Biography
Merton Clivette — born Merton Clive Cook on June 11, 1868, in Portage, Wisconsin — was one of the most singular figures in the history of American art. He was, in roughly chronological order: the son of a British sea captain who studied Classics at Oxford and an Iroquois-French-Scottish poet who would become a founding member of the Seventh Day Adventists; a circus runaway at age twelve; a champion juggler, knife thrower, slack-rope walker, and shadowgraphist; a quick-sketch artist for the San Francisco Call; a student of Auguste Rodin; a vaudeville star on the Orpheum Circuit billed as "The Czar of Necromancy" and "The Man in Black"; a Greenwich Village bohemian who ran an antique store called the Bazaar de Junk; a published author; the husband of a clairvoyant and the father of a girl who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sappho; and a painter whose work was exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum, and included in MoMA's landmark 1930 exhibition alongside Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, and Mark Tobey.
His works hang today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, and the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.
And then, like the magician he had always been, he disappeared. For nearly ninety years his paintings lived in private collections, unseen by critics or scholars. It is only now — through the efforts of Four Riders LLC, representing four generations of the Clivette family — that the full scope of his achievement is being understood.
Origins: Iroquois, Scottish, French, and the Wyoming Frontier
Clivette's origins were as improbable as everything that followed. His father — a retired British sea captain who had studied Classics at Merton College, Oxford — married a woman of French, Scottish, and Iroquois Indian ancestry who was herself a writer and poet. When his father died and his mother underwent a religious conversion, twelve-year-old Merton left home and joined a traveling circus. He spent five years touring the American West, Canada, and Mexico — doing shows for army forts, railroad workers, and on Indian Reservations — before settling in San Francisco in the mid-1880s as a reporter and quick-sketch artist for the San Francisco Call. He learned to read and write in a newspaper office and never attended formal school. He met Frederic Remington — the first serious artist he had encountered — and was inspired.
The Performer: Orpheum Circuit to the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune
In 1891, billed as "Clivette, the Man in Black," he joined the Orpheum Circuit — the premier American vaudeville booking network. His datebook from the 1890s, preserved in the family archive, records performances across America and Europe: the Central Opera House, the American Roof Garden, the Grand Northern in Chicago, the Royal Birmingham in England, Blackpool, and venues across Australia and Singapore. The trade publication Mahatma described him as "one of the greatest illusionists in the world" — hypnotist, phrenologist, palmist, juggler of extraordinary precision.
Before the vaudeville years peaked, Clivette had already encountered the defining artistic influence of his life. During his first European tour in 1889–1890, he studied under Auguste Rodin in Paris, painting a portrait of the sculptor described by contemporaries as the greatest portrait ever made of him. Rodin's understanding of form as force and movement — not as fixed outline — took deep root.
When Clivette arrived at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris for his 1927 solo show — the gallery of Cézanne and Van Gogh — he told the critic Felix Fénéon that "juggling six knives 40 feet in the air while balanced on the back two legs of a chair on a tightrope was very good practice for a modern painter." It was completely true.
Greenwich Village and the Theory of the Eternalist
When the family settled in Greenwich Village around 1907, Clivette began painting full time — producing over a thousand canvases in oil and gouache across the next twenty years. From studios at 1 Sheridan Square, West Broadway, and 92 Fifth Avenue, he developed a body of work spanning Vamp series portraits, Native American figures, jungle animals, fish, seascapes, still lifes, and horses. The family also ran the legendary Bazaar de Junk antique store at 1 Sheridan Square, organized civic events through the Greenwich Village Historical Society (founded by Catherine Parker Clivette), and published pamphlets and poetry. Clivette was later remembered as "The Father of Greenwich Village."
"The spiritual truth of the moving form is a changing mass of light, reflection, vibrating color and LIFE. When a form is moving — like a fish, for example — you cannot give the vibration of light on that form by adhering to a line to produce the fish."
— Clivette, What Clivette Has Added to the Realm of Art
Recognition: MoMA, Paris, and the Critical Consensus
The years 1926 to 1930 brought a cascade of recognition. A solo show at the New Gallery on Madison Avenue in January 1927 triggered coverage in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the New York Sun (Henry McBride: "Clivette the Impressionist"), the New York Evening Post ("Artist Wins Fame After 70-Year Bid"), and the Art Digest ("Clivette Arrives with a Boomity Boom"). Maurice Sterne compared his self-portraits to Cézanne. Paul Manship called the work "God! How beautiful — fantastic — wonderful." The Milwaukee Journal described him as "the man Kipling meant — the one who used a brush made from a comet's tail."
His 1927 Paris show at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune resulted in a work purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum. Henry Rankin Poore, in his 1931 book Modern Art, Why, What and How, argued that Clivette had been working out the same theories as Matisse — before Matisse. In December 1930, the Museum of Modern Art included him in "Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans" alongside Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Mark Tobey.
The New York Times called him "the forerunner of Soutine." Katharine Sterne of Gotham Life wrote that his portraits were "less transcriptions of physical appearance than penetrating pictures of a soul." The Los Angeles Times, in its 1931 retrospective, concluded: "The old acrobat has something many better painters lack."
Disappearance and Rediscovery
Clivette died on May 8, 1931, at sixty-two, his estate valued at $2,000. He left instructions that his ashes be scattered from the Statue of Liberty to the four winds. Without a gallery estate or institutional champion to sustain his reputation, his paintings slipped quietly into private collections. His name became critical shorthand — the New York Sun noted in 1937 that a painting showed "vivacity somewhere between Chase and Clivette" — but the man himself was forgotten.
Four generations of the Clivette family have refused to let him stay forgotten. Theodore P. Aiken — Clivette's grandson and Juanyta's son — wrote the definitive biographical sketch. Louise Lieber, granddaughter-in-law and sculptor, produced the scholarly art-historical essay placing his work in the lineage from Whistler to Abstract Expressionism. The current estate, represented by Four Riders LLC, has digitized over 300 primary source documents, commissioned a biography (Michael MacBride's The Great Clivette, 2022), and staged the first major exhibition of Clivette's work in nearly a century at Denenberg Fine Arts in Los Angeles in 2023.
Art historian Louise Lieber's judgment remains the most precise summary of where Clivette stands:
"When we compare his painting with his contemporaries, he looks out of place: too bold, too loose, Clivette doesn't fit in his own timeframe.
He fits in ours."