7. The Death and Legacy of a Maverick Artist

The concluding chapter weighs Rimmer's recognition or historical status at the time of his death and now. His first biography, written by someone who did not know him –Truman H. Bartlett – has had a disproportionate impact on how he is seen, even today. That is, his sheer originality – attested to by students as well as contemporaries – has been largely overlooked or misunderstood. The fact that he critiqued neoclassicism has been lost. So has his strong spiritual orientation and his emphasis, in teaching and in his own work, on imagination and self-expression. Despite his attachment to subject matter as a Romantic, he can be seen as a forerunner of modernism – in purely formal terms – in his fragmented statues. These precede, by a decade, similar work by Auguste Rodin. His personal symbolism is also prescient in being evocative of the production of the later Symbolists. Fortunately, Rimmer had loyal students and friends who tried to keep his memory alive after his death. Their efforts resulted in three of his plaster-cast sculptures being cast in bronze, and a selection of his drawings exhibited at the famous 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) in New York. He also had two paintings in the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. But the fact that Rimmer did not explain his seemingly aberrant creations, and Bartlett did not understand him, has had a detrimental impact on his reputation. His importance for the period and today lies in his insistence on working solely from imagination which was a radical idea at the time. According to his thinking, the artist’s contribution in creating a work of art should be self-expression.