Paul Bough Travis was born in Wellsville, Ohio, on January 2, 1891. In 1917 he graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and returned there to teach from 1920 until 1957. During that considerable period of time, most of the students at the Institute were exposed to his influence, his talent, and his particular vision. This exhibition is not so much a one-man show of his early work mounted to display this talent, as it is a record of his travels in Africa, a record that offers a rare glimpse into the process through which an artist's particular vision developed.

In one sense, a trip to Africa was unusual in 1927, and that so much remains to document the trip is unusual, too; yet, in another sense, Travis' African travels were quite traditional. Since the Renaissance, young artists have set out to broaden their out looks and gather material for their future work. Thus, none of the drawings and watercolors done on Travis' African trip and presented here are "finished" works, but rather on-the-spot studies. They, along with his photographs and his collection of tribal African art, compose the fertile ground from which much of Travis' later work would grow.

Paul Travis' trip to Africa was fundamentally a romantic gesture, fulfilling a childhood ambition "to see the land described by Stanley and other explorers of the great, mysterious continent...."1 Travis was also aware of the fascination with the primitive and the exotic current among the avant-garde European artists at that time.2 Travis' contemporaries saw their cur rent aesthetic theories reflected and manifested in African art.

But Travis' attraction was more to Africa, itself. This difference proved crucial, as Travis later explained: "Straight from the Art School and aesthetic discussion, I tried to fit the formulae of modern painting to Africa. One by one I dropped all methods as inadequate, and one by one I forgot artists whom I had ad mired . . . the scholastic researches of Picasso seemed trivial" in comparison with the overpowering reality of Africa itself. 3 Thus, the problem confronting Travis as an artist when he finally arrived on the continent he had so long desired to see was not a simple one:

"I tried to view [Africa] abstractly, to simplify the scenes to their basic power . . . Everywhere the shuttle of nature had woven a great design and I felt it was to be my problem to capture its secret. And it was here I ran into difficulties. I finally found that my most effective method was to make accurate drawings of topography, skies, trees, natives, birds, and flowers."

These drawings, which he would later rework, combine, abstract, and elaborate on to produce his "finished" paintings and prints, reveal the impact of Africa on Travis' trained eye. One sees in them not a vision of Africa shaped to accommodate an aesthetic theory, but rather, the shaping of Travis' particular vision to accommodate the natural grandeur of Africa.