William Melton Halsey

William M. Halsey (1915–1999) was an influential abstract artist in the American Southeast, particularly in his home state of South Carolina.

He attended the school from 1935 to 1939.

His work was included in the annual International Exhibition of Watercolors, the Art Institute of Chicago (1939, 1941–43).

In 1939 upon completing his study at the Museum School of Fine Arts, he was awarded a James William Paige Fellowship for 24 months of study and travel in Europe.

With the outbreak of World War II on the horizon, Europe was not an option.

As an alternative he was allowed to go to Mexico.

He and his new wife, Corrie McCallum, sailed for Veracruz and then settled in Mexico City.

The change of location to Mexico had a profound influence upon the young artist.

Surrounded by weaving, pottery, and the colorful scenery in Mexico, he was drawn to this country and its ancient cultures.

This interest only became deeper and more profound during his life.

The young couple returned to South Carolina along with their first child, Eleanor Paige Halsey.

Halsey took a teaching position as the director of the art school at the Telfair Academy (now the Telfair Museum of Art) in Savannah, Georgia.

In 1939, having just graduated, he was offered a one-man exhibition at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he also completed a series of frescoes.

In 1945 the family, which now included their son, David Ashley Halsey, moved back to Charleston.

Halsey became the director of the art classes held at the Gibbes Art Gallery (now Gibbes Museum of Art).

Halsey chose to settle and to continue his artistic career in his hometown.

He was represented by the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City (1948–53).

A third child, Louise McCallum Halsey, was born in 1949.

During that time he befriended Merton Simpson, a young African-American teenager with an immense amount of talent.

Due to segregation, Simpson was not allowed to take art classes at the Gibbes Museum where Halsey taught, so Halsey provided private instruction.

After Simpson graduated from high school in 1949, Halsey, his wife Corrie McCallum, and former director of the Charleston Museum Laura Bragg sponsored Merton Simpson's first solo art show.

Two receptions for the art show were held, "one for whites and one for whites who didn't mind coming to a reception with blacks."

In his later works Halsey used fabrics from Africa that were packing materials around sculptures Simpson imported and sold in his gallery.

The two artists maintained a lifelong friendship.

His mural studies for the Baltimore Hebrew Congregational Temple were included in Synagogue Art Today at the Jewish Museum, New York City (1952).

He had work in the Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings (1953).

A mid-career retrospective was held at the Greenville County Museum of Art in 1972 and then traveled to the Gibbes Museum of Art (formerly the Gibbes Art Gallery), Charleston, South Carolina, and the Florence Museum, Florence, South Carolina.

William Halsey was born in Charleston, South Carolina.

His talent was evident at an early age, and he was encouraged by his mother, Eleanor Loeb Halsey.

His first instructor was the local artist Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was one of the leading artists in the Charleston Renaissance.

Another early influence was the local artist Edward I. R. Jennings, who had studied in New York City with Arthur Wesley Dow.

It was from Jennings that the young Halsey learned about what was happening in the realm of modern art.

After high school Halsey attended the University of South Carolina for two years.

Realizing he was only interested in art, he sought another place to study where he could maintain his singular focus.

He moved to Boston to study at the Boston Museum School (now called the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

His courses at the school were rigorous and included anatomy, perspective, composition, and drawing.

He developed an interest in fresco and became sufficiently trained to be able to teach this technique at the school.

In 2006 in a tribute for the catalog William Halsey: Mastery of the Modern, Merton Simpson wrote "I had the good fortune of growing up in Charleston when he was the top artist in the region, what a blessing."

Halsey was chosen for many honors throughout his long career.

While still a student at the Museum School of the Arts, Boston, a painting of his was selected for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.