As Mildred began to explore her new St. Louis neighborhood with easel and paints she discovered her next subject, a small church cemetery. “I’d go out and take my lunch,” she recalled 40 years later. “It was a little cemetery and I’d sit on a tombstone to eat my lunch. In those days you could do that because not many people painted German churches.
“That’s the way it looks but it’s kind of modernistic.”
In January, 1935, her “German Church” appeared in a juried national exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum. The daily St. Louis Star-Times reproduced the oil painting and the accompanying newspaper article identified Mildred among nine St. Louis artists and 40 “nationally known artists invited to exhibit” at the Annual American Show. The museum’s senior lecturer was going to give a walk-through presentation on the winning entries. “I told her I had a picture in the show and I was going,” Mildred later recalled. “Silly fool, I should have kept quiet. I might have learned from her. Instead, I heard very nice things. It didn’t amount to much as far as criticism is concerned.”
A St. Louis art critic said her painting had the “rarefied quality of stained glass.” Another called it “bleak and austere, in dull and sharp grays.” A third review described the colors as “faded red and oyster gray, executed with perspective askew in the modern manner.”
