Stanley Hess

Stanley Otto Hess (1923–2019) was an American artist and educator active in Oklahoma and Iowa. He is best known for his paintings, which often featured double images, and for his handcrafted musical instruments.

Early life and education
Hess was born in Weatherford, Oklahoma in 1923. The second of nine children, he was raised in Anadarko by Catholic parents. He briefly attended St. Patrick's Indian Mission School as one of a few white students in his class, an experience that left a lasting impression. He graduated from the Anadarko public schools in 1940. During World War II, Hess served in the Pacific (1943–46), fighting in the Battle of Villa Verde Trail. After the war, he returned to Oklahoma where he married Mildred “Millie” Elmenhorst, a student nurse.

Hess studied art at the University of Oklahoma (OU) under Emilio Amero, a prominent figure in the Mexican muralist movement. He earned a BFA degree in 1948 with a major in mural painting. He completed an MFA degree in 1950, as one of the first graduate assistants at the OU School of Art, directed by Oscar Brousse Jacobson.

Teaching career
Hess first taught as a special instructor at the University of Oklahoma (1948–50). After a stint in commercial design, he taught for one year as an instructor in art at William Woods College (Fulton, Missouri). In 1951, he joined the faculty of Drake University where he taught graphic design, lettering, printmaking, painting, and related subjects. He was active in faculty governance and student affairs, and was promoted to full professor in 1962. He also served as superintendent of the annual Art Salon at the Iowa State Fair for 18 years (1952–70). Hess taught at Drake University for 34 years, raising a family of six along the way. He is credited with building up one of the finest graphic design programs in the region. In 1969, Hess received the annual award for extraordinary undergraduate teaching.

Art work
Hess was active in a variety of art forms throughout his lifetime. During the early decades of his career, he produced numerous murals, lithographs, woodcuts, drawings, and sculptures, in addition to paintings. His commercial art was featured in Life, Time, Fortune, and Newsweek and he designed numerous brochures and programs for events at Drake University. Hess was also fascinated with letters as an art form. He created his own type design called Hessans, which was a prizewinner in the International Typeface Competition (1971). His book The Modification of Letterforms (1972, 1981) explains the history and design of each letter of the alphabet. Hess also developed his own phonetic alphabet of 40 characters that he named Tempered Notation, designed to align written and spoken English.

Mural art
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hess took on numerous mural commissions for businesses, churches, hospitals, schools, and care centers in central Iowa. He worked in a variety of mediums, including mosaic, acrylic, ceramic tile, brick, plexiglass, and stone. His designs were influenced by the Mexican Modernism of Amero, as well as Jean Charlot, who included him in a select group of assistants to execute Inspiration of the Artist, a fresco for the Des Moines Art Center (1956).

The Riverfront YMCA was a major project showcasing five of Hess’ murals, including two exterior brick walls that were the first of their kind and drew national attention (1957–60). He created the Stations of the Cross in glass tile mosaic for St. Theresa Catholic Church (1958–59) and painted the Corporal Works of Mercy in the lobby of Mercy Hospital (1959). His other murals included National Travelers Life Company, Iowa Power and Light Company, Iowa Lutheran Hospital, St. John’s Lutheran Church, and many others in Des Moines and nearby communities.

Hess was recognized for his mural art by the Iowa Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1963. Many of his murals have not survived though many remain. When the Riverfront YMCA was demolished in 2015, modified replicas of the exterior brick murals were installed in the new YMCA building. The Story of Power was moved in 1971 to the Des Moines Science Center, now the Bergman Academy. The mosaics in St. Theresa’s Catholic Church also remain intact.

Paintings
Hess painted throughout his lifetime. He often chose religious or biblical subjects, as well as scenes of childhood and everyday life, including Judith Holding a Censer and Garage Sale. Many of his works depicted Native American themes, notably Early Oklahoma. He also painted portraits of numerous iconic figures ranging from Marcus Aurelius to Marilyn Monroe. In his early career, Hess worked in watercolor, oil, caseins, and egg tempera, before turning almost exclusively to acrylic on gesso hardboard panels.

Hess frequently played with illusion and layered imagery. His double-image paintings present shifting scenes, depending on the viewer’s vantage point. When seen from a distance, one large image dominates. But smaller, component images emerge at close range. This signature technique was prompted by Hess’ experience as a muralist, which required the same attention to scale and distance. Hess also experimented with panoramic and vanishing perspective, and occasionally painted on accordion-pleated panels to create two different scenes, visible from two different angles.

Stylistically, Hess’ paintings are in the figurative tradition and have been characterized as magic realism. His work has also been called surrealist, but Hess preferred “illusionist" to describe his style. The influence of American regionalism and the Mexican muralists is evident in much of his work. Although his technique evolved over the course of his career, Hess generally painted with careful precision, using rich colors and somewhat flattened, geometric forms.

Musical instruments
During the 1970s, Hess turned to making musical instruments from the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. After engraving scrimshaw on ivory recorders, he was inspired to make his own from a variety of woods. He crafted dozens of recorders by hand in his home workshop, ranging in length from six inches to six feet. He finished each one with ornamental carvings of musical, mythical, and other whimsical figures. Hess similarly designed replicas of early stringed instruments – predecessors of modern violins and guitars – including the pochette, mandora, cittern, viol, and baryton. He sometimes added decorative inlay on the body, and carved three-dimensional double images on the pegbox. Hess also made several Appalachian dulcimers and a 17th-century harpsichord.

Altogether, Hess made more than 60 musical instruments over two decades. He took pains to ensure their historical and musical accuracy, studying period artwork and musical texts, including the Syntagma Musicum, a reference work from the early 1600s. Lacking any schematics, Hess developed the mathematical formulas needed to design his own working scale drawings. His instruments have been widely recognized for their artistic and educational value.

Later life and legacy
Hess retired from Drake University as professor emeritus in 1985 and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. When his first wife died (1991), he married Tulsa widow Joanne Meillier (1992). He remained active in his home studio well into retirement, amassing nearly 200 paintings and making musical instruments, until Parkinson's disease curtailed these pursuits. Hess died on March 9, 2019, at the age of 95.

Hess’ art works and instruments were exhibited widely, notably at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1978). He received many awards, including Best of Show for The Echo (1955), held by the Philbrook Art Museum. His works were also held by the Container Corporation of America and are currently represented in the National Gallery of Art, the British Museum, the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, and the Brunnier Museum, among others. In 1997, Hess donated more than 50 of his handcrafted instruments to the Mabee-Gerrer Museum in Oklahoma, where the collection is a teaching tool for musicians and historians.

Publications

 * Hess, Stanley. “An Apology for the Carved Recorder”. American Recorder, vol. 9, no. 2, 1968, pp. 42–47.
 * Hess, Stanley. “Dulcimer Peg Box: Designer Proposes One-Sided Solutions." Fine Woodworking, Summer, 1978, pp. 77–79.
 * Hess, Stanley. “Tone Building, Figuratively Speaking, with the Baroque Recorder”. American Recorder, vol. 21, no. 2, 1980, pp. 55–59.
 * Hess, Stanley. The Modification of Letterforms. 2nd ed. rev., Art Direction Book Company, 1981. ISBN 9780910158039