Louis Frederick Grell (1887-1960) was a Chicago based portrait artist and mural painter. Grell earned countless commissions to paint his large murals for many designated National Historic Landmark structures located in the largest American cities from St. Louis, Pittsburg, Detroit, Chicago to New York City. His murals were installed in the grandest banks, hotels, schools and churches across America. But his greatest achievement was to be found elsewhere.
Grell’s large theatre mural designs combined are unquestionably his Magnum Opus. Commissioned primarily throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s where many are over one hundred feet in length. His theatre clientele list included Paramount Theaters, Rapp & Rapp Architects and Balaban & Katz (B&K) theatre operators. When Paramount Theaters relocated its corporate headquarters to Times Square in 1926, Grell was commissioned to paint a large mural for the Grande lobby of its flagship theatre titled The Spirit of Light . When B&K designed its “Wonder Theatre” in Chicago in 1921, Grell was commissioned to paint fourteen murals for the auditorium and many others inside the building. In 1933, for the Chicago World’s Fair, B&K once again hired Grell to paint new murals for the Chicago Theatre. Grell would paint more than thrifty-five murals inside the Chicago Theatre.
Beyond his theatre mural work, Grell imagineered countless scenes for banks, hotels and private entities. This is to say something entirely unique in setting, location, time and character. The many landscape scenes existed only in Grell’s imagination until he put oil on brush and applied it to canvas. Many are based on folklore or Greek mythology and history, but its the select many pictures that absolutely only resided in his imagination that stand out. Based on a short 1895 poem and accompanying image of a weird cow, Grell would paint an estimated seventy Purple Cow murals for the Pick Hotels Corporation in the 1940’s and only make reference to this large amount of work once.
From 1916 to 1922, Grell taught art classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts where in 1917 and 1918, according to his sister Helen, Walt Disney was one of his students.
At a time when modernism was taking over the world art scene and turning its back against the old-school traditional styles, Grell appeared to ‘buck the system’ by continuing to earn countless commissions where he chose to incorporate many of those traditional figural scenes. He continued to rebel against the trends until his death in 1960.
March 2026 Ai search:
“What other artists worked with George Hamilton Thomas Studios besides Grell?
While Louis Grell was the primary muralist for the studio’s high-profile Detroit commissions, George Hamilton Thomas Studios functioned as a collaborative commercial art firm. Records indicate that several other prominent artists from the Chicago art scene worked under or alongside Thomas:
Ernest Martin Hennings : A close associate of Grell and a future member of the famous Taos Society of Artists. Hennings and Grell frequently collaborated on studio commissions in the 1920s.
Victor Higgins : Another member of the Taos Society who was part of the same Chicago artistic circle (The Palette and Chisel Club) that supplied talent for the Thomas Studios.
Walter Ufer : Like Hennings and Higgins, Ufer was a peer of Grell who worked in the same professional network of “studio-for-hire” muralists before achieving independent fame.
Anthony Spalthoff: A German-born sculptor who often handled the three-dimensional ornamentation for the studio’s projects, including architectural sculpture for theaters and banks.
The “Studio” Attribution
It is common for individual names to be missing from architectural records of this era. Because the George Hamilton Thomas Studios operated as a business, contracts were typically signed in the company name. Murals were often painted on canvas in the Chicago studio and then shipped to Detroit to be installed by local artisans, leading many historical sources to simply credit “The George Hamilton Thomas Studios” for the entire project. Walter Ufer (1876-1936) and Hennings were neighbors in Chicago before Hennings went to Europe to study. Their address is the same indicating they may have lived under the same roof in 1910 (U.S. Census report).”
(left to right) E. Martin Hennings, Louis Grell, George Hamilton Thomas and Carl Hoeckner. Likely at Oak Street Beach, Chicago, ILL 1917.
(photo credit Helen Grell).
