Ralph McGuire has come back from the dead -- metaphorically speaking, that is.

Obscurity is a kind of death for artists, isn't it? Especially for those who enjoyed the sunshine of fame, at least for a little while.

Thus it was for Ralph McGuire, who decades ago made Baltimore take notice with his charming cityscapes, bright abstractions and other unexpected interpretations of the world around him.

At his peak in the 1940s, this painter from Hampden, a fresh success in his early 30s, was one of only three artists chosen to have one-man shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A collector showed up one day and bought every piece of art in his studio: paintings, drawings, sketches, even his notes -- about 700 items for $5,000.

"I felt like a man in the opera," McGuire recalls. "I felt like singing all the time."

Such was the unpredictable and intoxicating life of success ... until his steady decline into obscurity.

These days, there aren't too many people around Baltimore younger than 50 who know who he is.

That might change: McGuire is having his first one-man exhibit in years.

The University of Maryland University College, in College Park, has mounted 31 of his pictures, spanning his career from the '40s to 1990, for a show that runs through Aug. 2.

It couldn't be in a better place. The University of Maryland Foundation has the largest collection of works by Maryland artists anywhere. During the many years, recently passed, when the Baltimore Museum of Art displayed little interest in the works of regional artists, the university quietly collected them, with the encouragement of Bylee Massey, wife of the soon-to-retire president of the college, T. Benjamin Massey. Bylee Massey finds McGuire's work "delightful," and speaks of putting some of his pictures on permanent display.

McGuire is 80 now, and his face is wizened and a little out of kilter, and his eyes are nests of fine wrinkles. His hair is steel gray; it is thick and rises in a ridge from the center of his head. His ears lean out as if they're trying to catch your attention.

McGuire is called a naive artist, meaning he paints in the flat, depthless way that untrained artists often do, though he is not without formal training.

It would be more than a stretch to compare him to Edward Hopper, but there are similarities. Like Hopper, McGuire can create powerful atmospheres through his representations of inanimate things, bricks and rubble in back yards and demolished houses, ships slumping in their berths, railroad scenes, old houses facing lonely streets.

He can evoke feelings through these scenes, empty of all human presence. These are never so powerfully melancholic as Hopper's, or as psychologically profound, but they are more likely to be winsome.

"Ralph has a gaiety to his pictures," says Dena Crosson, curator of the arts program at University College. "There is no sense of ... dark expectation."

Drawing on his background

McGuire was a city kid, which explains his affection for urban scenery. He was born in Hampden in 1917, the oldest of six children. His father was an oiler on the railroad and his mother worked in the textile mills in the Jones Falls Valley. He liked to draw as a child, then moved on to painting.

He also liked to walk, an inclination that took him all over the city and fed his imagination. "I painted everything," he said.

He especially liked views of Baltimore's docks and bridges.

After graduating from City College, he took a job at the Social Security Administration, and continued to paint in his off hours. He took a summer class offered by painters Donald Coale and Herman Maril. The latter became his mentor, guided him and critiqued his work for many years, until Maril's death in 1986.

Soon McGuire was showing in galleries around Baltimore, and he came to the notice of Adelyn Breeskin, then BMA director. She recommended him for a scholarship at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, where he studied under Karl Knaths.

Then, in 1947, came the one-man BMA show, and shortly after, the collector, a man by the name of J. Blankfard Martenet, bought his whole collection.

After that came the decline. To make extra money, he and his wife, Tobia, who studied sculpture under Henry Berge at the Maryland Institute, College of Art started a framing gallery on the top floor of an old townhouse on Mulberry Steet, right behind the Pratt Library. (They're still there -- they've been there for 49 years. They never advertise, but have a steady stream of customers.)

For the first year or so, the artist and his new art-student wife of 17 lived there, too. McGuire painted there, had a few students. Then as the family expanded with the arrival of two daughters, the framing became more necessary and ultimately their principal source of income. McGuire continued to paint, but not so much as before; nor was he selling as successfully as he once did.

About 20 years ago he was found to be epileptic. "He probably had it most of his life, but we didn't recognize it," says Tobia McGuire. "Then one day, he was holding a tray of food and he suddenly went over onto his back."

The epilepsy slowed McGuire, but it was fairly well controlled through medication. A diagnosis of dementia about a year ago has diminished his output, but he hasn't stopped.

His last two group shows were about a decade ago, one at the Bauhaus Gallery on Charles Street and the other in Maryland Art Place on Saratoga Street. In 1985 he displayed about 30 pictures at a Unitarian Church in Lutherville, and Tobia McGuire showed her pottery.

A matter of composition

"I love bridges for their composition," McGuire says. "They have very distinct composition. You can put people on them, and under them, and trains going over them."

He speaks in this artless way about the purposes behind his art. He is asked about a still life on the wall, without title (as most of McGuire's pictures seem to be). It was done in 1949. The objects in it include a menu, a wineglass on a tabletop, fruit, water glass, a human hand and a playing card, the ace of spades. Why the ace of spades?

McGuire shrugs. "I thought it would make the picture more interesting."

The College Park show is rich in the paintings that are most emblematic of McGuire's work, things like "Scene of Hawkins Point," 1970s; "Harbor at Night," 1940s; "Sunset Over City," 1990s; and other pieces that reflect the preoccupations of his long life.

"These pictures," says Crosson, the curator, "depict a time in Baltimore that is past."

Though he has not been producing much, the pieces he does these days are unlike anything he's done before. In the last decade, he has begun doing collages and assemblages of finely carved and smoothed pieces of wood. The paintings are more abstract, the colors more vivid. His drawing is different, too: He has a tremor in his hand, and as a result a squiggle in his line. It's an interesting touch.

Hate to lose their art

Being artists, both of them, the McGuires have a proprietary attitude toward their work. Tobia McGuire, especially: She does not like to see it depart. Once, she was sitting in a friend's house, a collector, who owned a number of her husband's pictures and assemblages. Her eyes lighted on a painting of a flock of colorful birds on a beach.

"I felt I really liked it," she said. "So we bought it back."

Maril, McGuire's late mentor, would occasionally buy back his own pictures. Maril kept meticulous records of the hundreds of ++ paintings he had sold. McGuire is very much the opposite of meticulous: He would give pictures away, sell them for small amounts to friends or anyone who expressed an interest. Because so many were untitled, they were impossible to keep track of.

At last count, 13 of them are held by one of his most faithful patrons, Dr. John Lewis Holland of Homeland, who bought three this year. He began acquiring them in the mid-1970s.

"I like the subject matter, the colors, his sense of design," says Holland. "There are people who don't know anything about art who confuse him with Grandma Moses. He has a big imagination."

Then there are the 700-odd McGuire works that Martenet bought -- he bequeathed them to the BMA in 1959, and they disappeared into the storage bins there. They've never been shown.

All this seems a source of exasperation for Tobia McGuire: so much art made, so much art gone, never to be found again. Indicating the entirety of the framing gallery's two rooms, the pictures high and low, she says: "What you see is what you got. This is about all there is," not counting the pictures at College Park.

The prices on the pictures at College Park run from $2,500 all the way up to $15,000.

Why so high?

She tells of how her friend, Esta Maril, the widow of the late artist, had someone approach her once to buy a painting done by her husband of their son, as a child on a hobby horse. She really didn't want to part with it, so she set the price so high she thought nobody would ever buy it. Then somebody did.

"And you know," said Tobia McGuire. "That set the level at which Maril's paintings sold after that."

She added: "I have four of Ralph's paintings that I would price at $15,000 each. Nobody's going to pay me $15,000, so I'll be able to keep them."

The invitation to show his pictures at College Park arrived at Mulberry Street on May 5.

"I felt like jumping up and down," said McGuire. "It was a thrill and I started getting ready for the show right away."

It was good news, with more to come. There is the likelihood that McGuire will have another one-man show, including some of his wood assemblages, at Loyola College, possibly in the fall.

Meanwhile, his work soon will go on permanent display at University College, joining that of other distinguished Baltimore artists, people like Aaron Sopher, Grace Hartigan and Amalie Rothschild.

Ralph McGuire, you might say, is back.

Art exhibit

What: Ralph McGuire paintings

Where: Inn and Conference Center, University of Maryland University College, University Boulevard at Delphi Road, College Park

When: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily; through Aug. 2

Cost: Free

Call: 301-985-7822

Pub Date: 7/11/98

lTC