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ABOUT LOUIS GRELL

Louis Frederick Grell III

American Muralist, Painter and Art Instructor

1887–1960

Louis Frederick Grell was an American muralist, painter and art instructor whose career stretched from the art academies of Germany to Chicago’s great studios, theaters, hotels, churches and public buildings.

Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1887, Grell spent much of his youth and early adulthood studying art in Europe. After returning permanently to the United States in 1916, he settled in Chicago, where he became part of the generation of artists who helped decorate America’s theaters, hotels, restaurants, churches, banks and civic buildings during the first half of the twentieth century.

For decades, much of that career remained scattered among surviving murals, family papers, institutional archives, historic photographs and buildings across the country. Research by the Grell family is continuing to reconstruct that larger story.

From Iowa to Germany

Grell demonstrated unusual artistic ability as a child. In May 1900, at the age of twelve, he left Council Bluffs for Hamburg, Germany, where members of his mother’s family lived and where he would begin an extended European education.

His formal training included the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg and, beginning in 1908, study in Munich. His teachers and the artistic circles in which he moved connected the young American with the rigorous European traditions of figure drawing, decorative painting and monumental art.

By his late teens Grell was already participating in large decorative commissions. During a return visit to the United States in 1907, the nineteen-year-old artist undertook an enormous mural project in Utah depicting the Mormon migration into the Great Salt Lake basin—an early indication of the scale at which he would later work.

Back in Munich, Grell became associated with a remarkable circle of American artists that included E. Martin Hennings, Walter Ufer, Victor Higgins and Eugene Savage. These relationships would become important threads in his later American career.

Chicago and the Academy of Fine Arts

Grell returned to the United States in 1916. After working briefly in New York designing theatrical scenery, he moved to Chicago and joined the faculty of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

In an October 28, 1916 postcard to his sister Helen, Grell wrote from Chicago:

“I am at present in Chicago, teaching at the Fine Arts Academie. I am the main teacher and have quite a number of scholars.”

His address was Studio 14 at Chicago’s Tree Studios, where he was temporarily sharing space with his close friend and fellow Munich-trained artist E. Martin Hennings.

Grell taught figure and life drawing as well as commercial and decorative art at the Academy. During the period Walt Disney attended the school at night in 1917–1918, Grell was a member of its instructional faculty. Surviving Academy and student records have made the relationship between Grell’s teaching period and Disney’s Chicago art education an important subject of continuing research.

In 1922, Grell moved to the faculty of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught commercial and advertising art through the 1930s. His teaching career ultimately spanned decades and paralleled his work as a professional painter and muralist.

A Chicago Muralist on a National Scale

Chicago became Grell’s professional home, but his work traveled far beyond it.

His murals and decorative paintings appeared in theaters, hotels, restaurants, churches, banks, military academies and civic buildings across the United States. Among his major commissions were paintings for the Chicago Theatre, the Detroit Water Board Building, St. Louis Union Station, the Netherland Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and numerous other public interiors.

His subjects ranged from history, religion and allegory to mythology, industry and humorous scenes of American life.

Grell was not merely an architectural decorator. He remained an easel painter, portraitist and figure painter throughout his career. In 1930, his large composition Destiny received the Harry Frank Prize for figure composition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1936, Portrait of the Painter, Moessel, depicting his friend and fellow muralist Julius Moessel, received the Municipal Art League prize for portraiture.

The Pick Hotels Years

One of the largest chapters of Grell’s career is also one of the least remembered.

Beginning in the late 1930s, Grell became deeply involved with Albert Pick Hotels, creating murals and decorative paintings for hotel public rooms across the company’s expanding system.

His work ranged from serious historical and allegorical murals to an entirely different kind of project that began in 1939: the Purple Cow restaurants.

Grell later recalled that when he was first asked to decorate a Purple Cow restaurant, he hesitated because he had “never made a cartoon in my life before.”

What followed became an extraordinary recurring character world.

Across Pick hotels, Grell created scores of humorous murals populated by anthropomorphic cattle. Purple Cows cooked, danced, played music, traveled, courted one another, worked, dressed in elaborate costumes and participated in locally themed adventures. Individual murals were accompanied by comic verses, while the characters extended beyond the walls into menus, advertising, signage and restaurant ware.

Research has now identified 94 individual Purple Cow mural images across twelve photographed hotel locations, while documentary evidence indicates that the complete program was larger still.

Among the characters was Ferdinand, whose appearance has opened a new line of research into Grell’s earlier connection with Walt Disney and the visual culture surrounding Disney animation during the decade preceding the Purple Cow program.

Artist and Teacher

Grell’s commercial success never displaced his identity as a traditionally trained painter.

He exhibited repeatedly at the Art Institute of Chicago and continued producing portraits, landscapes, religious paintings and allegorical compositions while simultaneously completing large architectural commissions.

His own description of mural painting reveals how seriously he regarded the form. In a 1948 interview, Grell explained that a mural should do more than decorate a wall: through its subject it should create an “educational and human-interest effect on the observer.”

He believed murals should relate to the building or community in which they appeared—historically, industrially, culturally or allegorically. That philosophy can now be seen throughout his work, from monumental institutional paintings to the humorous, locally adapted Purple Cow murals.

A Career Being Rediscovered

Louis Grell died in 1960.

For many years, his reputation rested primarily on individual surviving murals and paintings. The enormous scope of his career—and the connections among his European education, Chicago teaching, national mural commissions, Pick Hotels work and easel painting—was largely forgotten.

That picture is changing.

Grell’s work survives today in museums, universities, churches, theaters, hotels, civic buildings and private collections across the United States. Current known locations include the Chicago Theatre, St. Louis Union Station, Kettering University, the Netherland Plaza Hotel, the Detroit Water Board Building, St. John’s Northwestern Academies and numerous religious and public institutions.

Family archives, contemporary newspapers, institutional records, photographs and surviving artworks continue to reveal projects that had disappeared from the historical record for generations.

The result is a substantially different picture of Louis Grell than the one available only a few years ago: a European-trained American artist, Chicago educator, nationally active muralist and prolific creator whose work occupied an unusually broad territory between fine art, architectural painting and twentieth-century popular culture.

About the Louis Grell Research Project

LouisGrell.com is dedicated to documenting and reconstructing the life and work of Louis Frederick Grell.

The project draws upon The Richard Grell Archival Collection, surviving Grell family papers and artworks, institutional archives, historic newspapers, photographs, architectural records and more than a decade of continuing research.

The purpose of this website is not simply to display Grell’s paintings. It is to build the missing reference framework for his career—documenting known works, identifying lost commissions, preserving primary-source evidence and making new discoveries available to researchers, museums, collectors and the public.

The research remains ongoing.

New evidence continues to change the story.