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Posted February 1, 2007
William Edwards Cook was born in Independence on August 31, 1881 and was a famed American-born expatriate artist, architectural patron, and long-time friend of American writer Gertrude Stein. He was the first American allowed to paint a portrait of a pope, an honor that resulted in great standing in the art community.
Following Cook’s 1903 departure from the U.S., he lived in Paris, Rome, Russia, and on the island of
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Famed artist William Edwards Cook
Majorca, in the Balearic Islands off the eastern coast of Spain. Today he is chiefly remembered not for his artistic achievements, but because, during World War I, he taught Stein to drive an automobile so that she could contribute to the French war effort, and because, in 1926, he commissioned the Swiss architect Le Corbusier – then a struggling architect – to design an innovative cubist home, on the outskirts of Paris, now called Maison Cook or Villa Cook.
Cook grew up in the Independence during a time when it nationally known as a horseracing center, a distinction that earned it the popular name of the Lexington of the North. The son of an Iowa lawyer who also owned a number of farms, Cook left home to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1898 and then, shortly after that, at the National Academy of Design in New York. As was customary among aspiring artists, he then moved on to Paris in 1903, where he was a student of animal painter Jean-Paul Laurens and the famous (if much maligned) French academic master, the aging Adolphe-William Bouguereau, at the Academie Julian.
A boost in Cook's career took place in 1907, when, while living
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temporarily in Rome, his request was approved by the Vatican to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X, the first American to do so. As a result, Cook was soon regarded as a young society artist, and so received a flood of requests from other dignitaries to have their portraits painted.
When Cook returned to Paris, he became somehow acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas. Consequently, the three became close and loyal friends, in part because he frequently brought influential visitors to the Saturday evening soirees at Stein's apartment, among them (as Stein reported later in her first autobiography) "a great many from Chicago, very wealthy stout ladies and equally wealthy tall good-looking thin ones." By way of her soirees and other events, Stein introduced Cook to scores of Modern-era artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Lipchitz and Robert Graves.
On a more personal level, Stein and Cook were also friends for other reasons. Shortly before World War I, Stein and Toklas ended up vacationing together on the Spanish island of Majorca with Cook and his mistress, a French artist's model and cleaning woman named Jeanne Moallic. Eventually, when the two couples returned to Paris, Cook worked in an automobile factory, then became a taxi driver, in the course of which he also test-drove Renaults. Using his taxi, Cook became Stein's driving instructor, so that she and Toklas could transport supplies for the French war effort. During this same time period, Cook may also have become a clandestine agent for the U.S. Secret Service, while continuing to work as a taxi driver. Inadvertently (as described in a piece called "A Movie" by Stein), he and Moallic apparently contributed to the arrest of U.S. Army thieves, with the result that they were invited to ride (together, in their Renault) in the famous victory parade through the Arc de Triomphe in July 1919. For several years after the war, Cook was a Red Cross worker in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union (and perhaps, as is sometimes suggested, a Secret Service source as well), providing food and other aid to refugees in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Prior to Cook's departure on that, he and Moallic were married on March 2, 1922, at an informal ceremony in which Stein and Toklas were their legal witnesses.
Cook's father died in 1924, at which time he became an heir (along with a sister and two brothers) to a substantial amount of money. In connection with the settlement of his parents' estate, as well as to enable his wife to get to know his relatives (and vice versa), the Cooks drove across the U.S., from east to west and back again, during a period of about five months in 1925, staying for one month in Independance. Returning to Europe, they decided to permanently settle in France. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz introduced them to architect Le Corbusier, then largely unknown, who, during this time, was designing a series of villas, including innovative homes for Michael Stein (Gertrude's brother) and Lipchitz himself. In 1926, they commissioned the architect to design what Le Corbusier said was the first "true cubic house," called Villa Cook or Maison Cook, on the outskirts of Paris, at 6 rue Denfert Rochereau in Boulogne-sur-Seine.
In his later life, as a friend of Stein's once noted, Cook was primarily known as "the occupant of a house built by Le Corbusier." Already dismayed in the 1930s by his continuing lack of success as an artist, he apparently gave up painting, moved temporarily in Rome, and then settled with his wife in 1936 in Palma de Majorca, in the Balearic Islands, by then a favorite refuge for expatriate artists and writers. In their declining years, both William and Jeanne Cook turned to painting, and both became active participants in the island's artistic community. He died on November 10, 1959 and is buried in above ground vaults in a small religious cemetery in the nearby district of Genova.