Bulliet grew up in
Corydon, Indiana and graduated in 1904 from
Indiana University Bloomington. For nine years he pursued a
journalism career in the city of
Indianapolis. When Robert Mantell, the head of a
Shakespearean touring theatre company, remarked that he liked Bulliet's theater reviews, Bulliet offered to become his press agent. Bulliet traveled in advance of the company throughout the United States and Canada during a period of nine years, except for one year when he was a regional
publicist for
D. W. Griffith's
silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915). After a brief return to newspaper journalism in
Louisville, Kentucky, Bulliet moved to
Chicago to edit
Magazine of the Art World, a weekly periodical published by the
Chicago Evening Post.
Art criticism remained his primary occupation even after the
Post was assimilated by the
Chicago Daily News in 1932. Bulliet played a role in popularizing of modern art in the
Midwestern United States, and in organizing Chicago's independent artists, who felt snubbed by the conservative tastes that dominated the
Chicago Art Institute.
Personal life He was married to southern Indiana artist Katherine Adams Bulliet; they had one son, Leander Jackson. After the death of his first wife in 1947 he married Catherine Girdler Bulliet. C. J. Bulliet is the grandfather of
Columbia University historian
Richard Bulliet. For a time his lover was the painter
Macena Barton, who once challenged his assertion that no woman had ever painted a worthwhile nude. == Books ==