Summary: The development of acrylic solution paint is shrouded in mystery. Magna was a substantial shift in pigment/binder paint systems. It was used by several well known artists. However, it was short-lived. Today Magna is a historical footnote used to describe some remarkable achievements exclusive to the use of this type of paint in works of art produced in the middle of the 20th century.
In reflecting on a pivotal moment in the development of art materials, one of many instances comes to mind. I am writing about this particular one because I realize that Syntax of Color recipients spans a tremendous generational segment of time. Some of you are still art students while others are seasoned painters with many years of experience. Let us explore the history of a paint that had a profound but short-lived impact on contemporary artists of the 20th century.
I thought of a moment when the art materials world made a fundamental change in direction that bridges both worlds of younger and older artist. That common ground is the realm of acrylics. Even if you do not paint in that medium, you will appreciate this story. For some, it may be nostalgic and for others provide a window into the inner workings of the paint industry. The fundamental lesson is that the commercial paint trade is the foundation for the art materials produced and marketed.
A sad but true story is told of the dispute between Thomas Edison and the equally brilliant Nikola Tesla who both battled for dominance in the early years of generating and distributing electrical current. Their commercial fight may have been the earliest example of the “Sony Beta versus JVC VHS” video cassette format dispute.
While we acknowledge Edison’s contribution by inventing the incandescent light bulb, had it not been for Tesla’s development of alternating current power generation, the practical use of electricity would have been stymied. Edison’s design relying on direct current would have been impractical, to say the least. If Edison had won the battle for electrical generation, every neighborhood today would have had to have a power-generating station within it. Direct current could never be transmitted over long distanes. We certainly would live in a much noisier, more polluted world than we do now if Edison had his way.
One might think that the invention of something as important as the first acrylic solution paint would be well documented in the annals of art material history. As you read on it will become obvious that it was not. In many ways, it became the “Sony Beta” video format that faded away in history.
Our story starts with a paint maker named Leonard Bocour. Leonard and his cousin Sam Golden collaborated to make oil paint. The early history of Bocour’s color making endeavors is documented in Leonard’s own words. We have the great fortune to be able to access his oral history recorded by the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Unfortunately, that oral history was recorded many years after Bocour started his paint company so the details, the names of key individuals, and the overall sequence of events are bathed in a historical fog. Some of the transcription of the Smithsonian interview comes across as a stream-of-consciousness catharsis with characters appearing and disappearing along with a host of disjointed ideas, dates, and places. However, it is all cemented together by copious name-dropping. Famous artists come and go in Bocour’s life. Some play major roles, while others only have cameo appearances.
While the history of the Bocour brand is filled with a vast number of products typically produced by many large art materials manufacturers, the one paragraph of the interview I focused on is when Bocour described that he was inspired to use acrylic solution media to make paint.
We are most familiar with acrylic paints as dispersions. The acrylic component that forms the basis for the binder is not dissolved into a liquid, but rather it stays together as a sphere-like object that forms links with neighboring spheres when the fluid components in acrylic paint evaporate. Without the fluid, the spheres would huddle together and stick to nearby spheres to form a consolidated mass that would not function as a paint binder. Acrylic dispersions are like sand suspended in a fluid solution. The sand does not dissolve in the liquid component.
Solution acrylic systems use polymers dissolved in a solvent. In acrylic solution paint, when the solvent evaporates, the acrylic polymers form a film. Solution acrylics are like sugar dissolved in water. If the sugar water solution were applied to a surface, once dry, a film of sticky sugar would evenly coat the surface. Another difference between solvent-based acrylics and dispersions is that they use different resins to create the paint binder.
The story proceeds that Leonard Bocour, the successful maker of oil paints, was visited by an artist who brought a bottle of honey-like resin and asked for it to be combined with pigment to be made into a usable paint. Bocour was no stranger to hand-making paint. His company was built on the foundation of hand-ground colors. Even without understanding the chemistry of the material, he could employ his years of experience of how paint should look and feel when pigment is ground with a binder, regardless of the type of medium employed. Perhaps instinctively, he mixed the mystery acrylic substance with white pigment. One might assume he chose white as his first trial pigment because if you could not make a usable white paint out of the binder that the artist brought to him, you might as well not go any further. Bocour noted how clean and bright the white paint looked in comparison to the same pigment mixed with linseed oil.
What I find intriguing is not just the identity of the mystery artist who presented Lenny Bocour with the challenge of making paint out of the material he gave to him, but more importantly, where did this mystery artist get the acrylic solution medium? It’s not like they sell this stuff on nearly every street corner.
Jan Marontate who did extensive research on the subject and interviewed Lenny, indicates that this mystery artist encounter took place after the end of World War II, c. 1947. It falls in line with Sam Golden’s arrival at Bocour since it is cited that he witnessed the mystery acrylic encounter and Sam started at Bocour’s paintworks in 1946. Later in her thesis Jan states that Bocour started to experiment in earnest with acrylic solution materials around 1947. It must have been challenging to create workable acrylic solution paints because earnest marketing of a ready-to-purchase line of acrylic solution paints by Bocour did not come about until 1953.
The mystery artist who Bocour dimly recalls much later in his life as someone named “Tony,” becomes merely a documented footnote in an oral interview. The only other opinion of the event comes from Sam Golden, his business partner in the Bocour paint-making enterprise. He believes the mystery artist was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) era painter named Michael Lenson. For being somewhat unknown, Lenson has fairly well-documented life. He was a realist painter, born in 1903 in Russia. He came to America in 1928 and struggled to find work and a life that did not involve the risk of starvation or freezing to death in the winter while living in New York City. He moved to New Jersey around 1936. He was able to gain acceptance to the WPA mural projects and supported himself for several years doing murals in places that included high schools and the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, NY. After that, he took up teaching positions at several New Jersey art schools, including the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, Rutgers University, the Montclair Art Museum and Fairleigh Dickinson University.
I cite the background regarding Lenson because it did give him the time, geographic location, and opportunity to come into contact with Lenny Bocour and Sam Golden. What is missing is the motive. Nothing in the brief biography of Lenson, written by a custodian of his estate and an art dealer as well, indicates that he sought what would have been cutting-edge art materials at the time, in order to conquer some technically insurmountable problem with painting murals or easel pictures. Being a realist, he seems the least likely candidate to embrace ultra-modern materials. Educated in Europe and being a painter of figures in a mural tradition, he does not strike the average art historical reader as being in need of a revolutionary new paint medium. Although the mural tradition has looked to some interesting new materials for mural painting because quick drying time and weather resistance is an important factor for some painters.
So if the story is true, Michael Lenson “finds” an acrylic solution medium and has the bright idea to bring it to Lenny Bocour to turn it into paint. A lot of unanswered questions revolve around this story if one takes the position that Bocour and Golden took a cutting-edge material and quickly saw this as a miracle of modern chemistry that could be used to make an entirely new type of paint. The timeline for the development of solution acrylics indicates that Bocour and Golden did not capitalize on this opportunity to become a front-runner in the fledgling acrylic paint industry. I don’t find evidence that Bocour and Golden viewed this acrylic material as a substance that was exceptional or special in any way. The story they tell has an indication that the resin was known to them but when posed with the task of turning into a usable paint, it intrigued them more as an intellectual challenge to see if it could be done rather than a hot commodity that if successfully turned into a usable paint would blow up the art materials industry. End of Part 1.
Syntax of Color
Keywords: Magna acrylic solution paint Leonard Bocour
Unraveling the Legacy of Magna Acrylic Solution Paint: Leonard Bocour
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