By Michele Karlsberg—
Michele Karlsberg: Richard Mohr’s The Splendid Disarray of Beauty: The Boys, the Tiles, the Joy of Cathedral Oaks— A Study in Arts and Crafts Community revives from obscurity the story of the California artists Frank Ingerson (1879–1968) and George Dennison (1873–1966). In August 1910, they began 55 years of love and life together by launching, as their honeymoon project, a freestanding summer art school. Tucked away in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Cathedral Oaks school was bohemian in lifestyle but rigorously followed the teachings of the dean of American Arts and Crafts design, Arthur Wesley Dow.
Please enjoy the following excerpt from The Splendid Disarray of Beauty:
The Cathedral Oaks summers-only art school (1911–1914) was also the home and studio of its impresarios, George Dennison (1873–1966), its manager; and Frank Ingerson (1879–1968), its director and principal instructor.
Ingerson and Dennison are two of the most extraordinary people you have never heard of until now. Arguably, they were America’s first gay couple—pairing in the very moment when it first became culturally possible for them and those who knew them to conceptualize their actions, feelings, and commitments as exemplifying what a couple is. In short, they had a common law marriage acknowledged as such by their social world, even if the law would have to play catch up.
They lived together for fifty-five years, from 1910 to 1966, in a relationship indistinguishable from those celebrated in the twenty-first century by The New York Times’ “Vows” column. Their friends and the Northern California community in which they lived, regularly spoke of them in terms that framed them as paired members of a family.
Most commonly, their friends and community members affectionally called them “the Boys.” Their Academy Award-winning friends Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, in print, called the Boys, in addition, their uncles. A quarter of a century after the Boys’ deaths, their next-door neighbor from 1948 to 1968 was asked, at age ninety, about the Boys’ families; he pauses, reflects, and reports, “The family, well, it was between the two of them.” The local newspaper presented the men to the public as being “as ordinary as a pair of old shoes.” A couple of sweeties. The Boys were the shock of the ordinary.
The art school was their honeymoon project. Its name, Cathedral Oaks, in part, alludes to the cathedral arches formed by boughs of live oaks that created a bower embracing and towering over their home, studio, and school, but more so to the sacred valuings of love and beauty that were nurtured there.
The book is in part a redemptive project—to bring the school back into art history. After the school closes, though its effects across the state persist, it itself drops into total obscurity. The school goes unmentioned in the numerous obituaries the men received in Bay Area newspapers.
Art schools aren’t sexy; glitz and glamour are. Many of their friends glittered, were stars, and it is this aspect of their lives that prompted much of the media attention they captured. In addition to their life-long friendships with de Havilland and Fontaine, they had equally abiding friendships with such art world luminaries as the Lotte Lehmann, Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Yehudi Menuhin.
But the men themselves always managed to hover just below international stardom, partly because they never promoted themselves—always others—partly due to bad luck, and partly due to their shift after Cathedral Oaks to conservative and often overwrought styles. As a result, upon their deaths—Dennison at age 93 in 1966, Ingerson at 88 in 1968—they, like their school, fell into total oblivion.
Richard D. Mohr is an academically trained author with extensive journalistic experience and literary flair. He publishes books in three widely diverse fields: ancient Greek metaphysics, especially Plato’s; American ceramics, especially from the Arts & Crafts period; and gay studies along with queer theory, focusing on ethical, social, political, and legal issues. https://tinyurl.com/4dxjjtc2
Mohr will be at the New Museum Los Gatos on June 11 and 15. https://www.numulosgatos.org
Michele Karlsberg Marketing and Management specializes in publicity for the LGBTQ+ community. This year, Karlsberg celebrates 34 years of successful marketing campaigns. For more information: https://www.michelekarlsberg.com
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Published on April 20, 2023
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