Eugene Paul Ullman was an American painter whose career spanned the first half of the twentieth century. A student of American impressionist William Merritt Chase, Ullman painted portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, earning critical recognition at a relatively young age, and exhibiting throughout the United States and Europe. Beginning in 1902, his work was included in annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and within a few years his work was chosen for the annual exhibitions of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Today, Ullman's paintings are held by the Brooklyn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Museum of Franco-American Cooperation at Blérancourt, and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Ullman was born in New York City in 1877 to Bavarian immigrants Sigmund and Pauline Ullman. The Ullman family owned a successful ink factory, providing their son with sufficient financial resources to pursue a lifelong career as a fine artist. Ullman's education at Columbia University Grammar School was followed by business training and, finally, enrollment at the Chase School, where he studied painting under William Merritt Chase in Manhattan and at Chase's Shinnecock, Long Island summer school. It was at Shinnecock that Ullman met his future wife, artist and author Alice Woods (1871-1959). Ullman soon graduated from student to teacher at the school, which became the New York School of Art in 1898 and later evolved into Parsons The New School for Design.

Ullman began travelling to France in 1899. He briefly joined the atelier of James Abbott McNeil Whistler through an introduction from Chase. In 1903, Ullman moved to Europe and married Alice Woods in Belgium. The following year, Ullman received a Bronze Medal at the St. Louis Exposition and met up with Chase in Munich. In 1906, he was awarded a Temple Gold Medal of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and painted Chase's portrait. Ullman curated an exhibition at the American Art Association of Paris in 1914, which included works by Henri Matisse. He was made an associate member of the Société des Beaux-Arts, but later resigned in protest of the society's restrictive admissions standards.

Ullman's expatriate associates in France included Arnold Bennett, Ezra Pound, Alan Seeger, Booth Tarkington, and siblings Leo and Gertrude Stein. Stein featured Ullman in early drafts of "Moral Tales of 1920-1921," but their friendship experienced a rupture and he was subsequently excised from the published version. During the First World War, Ullman sought to volunteer with American Ambulance Field Service (later, American Field Service). He was unable to fulfill the necessary mechanical requirements, but eventually contributed to the war effort as a hospital carpenter, possibly at an American Ambulance facility, and through fund raising activities.

Following his divorce from Woods, with whom he had two children, Allen (1905-1971) and Paul (1906-1944), Ullman married Suzanne Lioni (1899-1950) in 1927. Pierre Lioni Ullman, the donor and annotator of the Eugene Paul Ullman papers, was born in 1929. Because of the German invasion of France, the Ullmans (Eugene Paul, Suzanne, and Pierre), accompanied by Paul and his family, left for the United States in 1940, settling in Manhattan before buying a farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut. Paul, an artist and illustrator who had spent much of his life in Europe, also brought his family to Connecticut.

Eugene Paul Ullman participated in the founding of the Four Arts Aid Society alongside sculptor Cecil Howard, and was made honorary president. The organization's mission was to aid artists who remained in Nazi-occupied France. Meanwhile, Ullman's son, Paul, volunteered to return to France with the American Field Service's ambulance corps, and engaged in confidential work on behalf of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1944, prior to the Normandy invasion, Vichy-controlled militia shot and captured Paul when he parachuted behind enemy lines. He subsequently died in custody. Eugene Paul later received the Croix de Guerre from the French goverment on his son's behalf. Paul Ullman was also posthumously awarded the Bronze Star Medal by the United States government.

After the war's conclusion, Eugene Paul Ullman returned to France where, predeceased by Suzanne, he died on April 20, 1953.

The donor and annotator of the Eugene Paul Ullman papers, Pierre L. Ullman, is a graduate of Yale University, Columbia University, and Princeton University, from which he earned a doctorate in romance languages in 1962. He currently holds the title of professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and has published extensively on Spanish and Portuguese literature.

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Sources

Moralde, Jocelyn Guzman. 2000. Process and Repose: Paintings by Eugene Paul Ullman. UWM Art History Gallery. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Ullman, Pierre L. 1984. Review Essay: Eugene Paul Ullman and the Paris Expatriates. Papers on Language and Literature, 20 (1), 99-118.