Chapter Three: A Passion for the Arts

Chapter Three of “Gus and Julia Bowe, Remembered”

As told by William J. Bowe, drawn from his January 29, 2021 interview with his cousin Tony Bowe.

Table of Contents

An Acquired Love of the Arts

Poetry, Opera & Painting: The Freborgs, Joan Mitchell & Claes Oldenburg

Near but Far Away: Catching Up with Claes Oldenburg

Arts

Summary

This chapter considers how Gus and his brother Bill, raised in modest immigrant circumstances, came to embrace opera, poetry, and painting as adults. It traces the family’s connection to painting through Julia’s sister Dodie and her artist husband, Stanley Freborg, and through their Elm Street neighbor, the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, and closes with the family’s long devotion to opera, including Gus’s role as an arbitrator in an early dispute at Chicago’s Lyric Opera.

The Narrative

An Acquired Love of the Arts

Gus and my father came from second generation immigrant parents of very modest circumstances. It’s interesting how two men who grew up that way ended up so invested in opera, poetry, and painting, with frequent trips to Europe in their younger years. They certainly didn’t inherit anything from their widowed mother. The family had struggled after their father John Bowe died in 1910. The boys were still young at the time and their sister younger still. I think a large part of their development was simply a general appetite for interesting things. Gus in particular was a Renaissance man. It was no accident he ended up late in life Chief Justice of the Municipal Court of Chicago, a published poet, president of the Chicago Bar Association. Both men were prominent, well-respected lawyers, with broad cultural interests throughout their lives. The arts, to which they’d had no exposure to as children, opened up to them like a great feast as they got older. Also, both of them married bright, intelligent women who were interested in a wide variety of things themselves. Julia and my mother Mary both had a broad education of their own. Between Gus and my father’s Jesuit education, and my mother and Julia’s own Catholic education, both couples were ready for whatever cultural feasts came their way.

Poetry, Opera & Painting: The Freborgs, Joan Mitchell & Claes Oldenburg

On the painting side, Julia’s sister Dodie was married to the artist Stanley Freborg. He had studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before spending World War II as an Army Air Force reconnaissance officer in the Mediterranean theater. I remember him telling me about the bombing raids on the Nazi oil fields at Ploiesti, in Romania. After the war he worked for a time as a real estate broker in Arizona before returning to his artistic interest. In the 1950s, he and Dodi moved to the art colony at Provincetown, on Cape Cod. I remember visiting them at Six Cook Street there when Stan studied under Hans Hofmann. Hoffman was a master of the Abstract Expressionism movement that was taking shape in the 1950s. Dodi took up a paintbrush herself, and notably painted with bolder colors than Stan. This family connection gave Julia and Gus an entry not just into opera, which they already loved, but into the changing world of postwar painting. There was a wonderful abstract piece that hung over a sofa in the 4D living room, La Tour de France, painted by Joan Mitchell, often grouped with the second generation of the great Abstract Expressionists, and one of the few women of stature of that era able to carve out a career of note.

Near but Far Away: Catching Up with Claes Oldenburg

Julia and Gus also had a good relationship with their Elm Street neighbor young Claes Oldenburg and his family. Oldenburg’s father had been the Swedish consul in Chicago. Oldenburg, a year ahead of their son John at the nearby Latin School, went on to become a world-renowned sculptor. He became known for his public art near the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, a giant lipstick on tank treads by Yale’s Beinecke Library, and his Chicago Baseball Bat Column, just west of the Loop. I met him just once when he paid a visit to 1120 to pay a courtesy call on Julia and my mother, two widows by then who were roommates once more. He couldn’t have been more personable, and I thought it decent of him not to forget his now elderly neighbors.

Arts

All the Bowes loved opera. In the 1930s they traveled frequently to Europe in the summer, when the courts were closed. Julia and Gus would typically go in June and July, my parents the two months after. When the Lyric Opera got its start in Chicago in the 1950s, there was a dispute over who would manage the company. Gus, president of the Chicago Bar Association in 1955 and 1956, had a reputation as an arbitrator for exactly this kind of significant dispute. He was known to be independent, fair, plain-spoken, with the kind of reasoning you understood even when you disagreed with the outcome. In the Lyric dispute, he came down squarely on the side of Carol Fox, who went on to a long and successful career as the Lyric’s Managing Director. That was Gus’s first engagement with the Lyric Opera outside the Civic Opera House.

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