A Brush With the Past

Ask Dan Robbins about his contribution to 20th century culture--and what it says about art in this country--and he’ll chuckle. Then he’ll shake his head.

It was slightly more than a half-century ago that Robbins came up with an idea that was to shake America. It was a concept that became as big as poodle skirts or air-raid drills back in the 1950s.

The idea was the paint-by-numbers kit.

Paint by numbers is suddenly a hot topic again, thanks largely to a new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, titled “Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s.”

The show, though, is just part of the revival. There was also an article in Smithsonian magazine. Collectors are shelling out big money for vintage paint-by-numbers paintings and kits on EBay. And there is renewed interested in Robbins’ 1997 book, “Whatever Happened to Paint-By-Numbers?” (Possum Hill Press), which is selling well again. “You wonder . . . what happened?” Robbins says, smiling. “Fifty years happened. Time happened. Now it’s paint-by-numbers as a collectible. It’s kitsch.”

The Smithsonian exhibit showcases the fad in an art gallery-type setting, with more than 200 paintings (some done by well-known personalities of the day, others from collections across the country) as well as paint-by-numbers kits and other memorabilia. “It’s been very interesting for me, really, to go down into the hall and see people contemplating these paintings,” says William L. Bird, curator of the exhibit and proud owner of some 30 paint-by-numbers pieces mined from thrift shops, flea markets and estate sales over the years.

Of course, there’s more to the show than viewing J. Edgar Hoover’s rendition of “Swiss Village” or Ethel Merman’s “Old Mill.” Bird’s goal was to give visitors an idea of how paint-by-numbers paintings--sold under the slogan “Every Man a Rembrandt”--fit the times and fit into the lives of the people who painted them.

“This is a hobby for people who had newly found leisure time and typically had a home to decorate, perhaps for the first time,” Bird says. “And they had the income to do it. But yet paint-by-numbers is a compromise between a desire to be creative and the need to earn an income to keep a roof over our head.”

Robbins, 76 and still working as a freelance artist and designer, started with the idea that there’s a little bit of artist in all of us, then expanded on it. “I always said that paint-by-numbers wasn’t art. But it gives the individual the experience of art,” he says, sitting in his Oak Brook, Ill., basement. (“This is not a studio,” he insists. “It’s a basement, and I just happen to work here.”)

“Most people would be scared to death to pick up a brush and try to paint. With paint-by-numbers, you have the outline and the premixed paint, and it takes the fear out of it. It gives people the feeling that they created something themselves.”

Robbins was working for the Palmer Show Card Paint Co. in Detroit in 1949 when he came up with the concept. OK, he doesn’t take full credit; part of it goes to Leonardo da Vinci.

“Leonardo studied patterns--he studied weathered buildings, burning embers, falling snow,” Robbins says. “One thing he did was to give his students numbered patterns and ask them, what can you do with this? And they’d paint them.”

It was a small step from the children’s coloring books Robbins already was designing for Palmer Paint to a kit for adults, with little numbered containers of paint and pictures broken down into numbered sections. He pitched the idea to company owner Max Klein, who wanted to see an example.

“In 1950, abstracts were kind of hot, so that’s what I did,” Robbins says. “It was 12-by-16 and I did it in 22 colors.” That first painting, known as ‘Abstract No. 1,’ didn’t grab the boss, or any other employees who critiqued it, for that matter. “Max told me he hated it, that abstracts were crap,” Robbins says. “He hated the painting but loved the idea.”

So Robbins scrapped “Abstract No. 1”--it was later issued anyhow--and went back to the drawing board. He came up with a painting of fishermen in boats (“The Fishermen”). Klein loved it and they were on their way, selling more than 12 million Craft Master paint-by-numbers kits by 1954 and millions more until the fad started fading in the ‘60s.

“It has survived in spite of all the criticism from art teachers and artists,” says Robbins, whose favorite painting is a version of the “Old Mill” that was done by his mother (it’s hanging in his basement). “We have had slings and arrows from all directions.”

But they also had their fans. Still do. Grant Richey, an actor from Minneapolis who admits to being “a huge collector of junk,” has more than 75 of the paintings, most from the 1950s, in his collection. His most recent purchase was also his biggest--a copy of “Abstract No. 1” that he paid $500 for on EBay earlier this month.

He had seen a copy of “Abstract No. 1” a year ago but it wasn’t for sale. His interest was rekindled when he saw the piece pictured in the Smithsonian magazine article. “I was on a mission,” he says. “The next day I saw it on EBay, and I said, ‘I’ve got to bid on it.’ Five hundred bucks, and that was the reserve. I figured I wouldn’t get it, but I did.”

Before the recent upswing in interest, Richey was accustomed to paying 50 cents to $5 for a paint-by-numbers masterpiece. Those days are gone.