Maine: A Legacy in Painting, 1830 to the Present

Spanierman Gallery, LLC, is pleased to announce the opening on October 11, 2005 of Maine: A Legacy in Painting, 1830 to the Present, an exhibition of ninety paintings that reveal the myriad of ways that the state of Maine has inspired artists for over 175 years. A reception to be held on the evening of October 11, and proceeds from the sale of works from the show, will benefit the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, which lent twenty-three works from its collection to the exhibition, providing key images by many of the best-known artists associated with the state. A catalogue with a scholarly essay by Dr. Bruce W. Chambers, and over eighty full-page color illustrations, is available from the gallery for $65 (ppd, please include sales tax).

The breadth of this exhibition and its in-depth catalogue provide an opportunity to consider the identity of Maine as exemplified in its artistic representations, reflecting what Dr. Chambers has described as a land of contrasts, a “country of mythic forces and primordial conflicts,” including both “violent storms and placid waters,” “fleeting summer pleasures,” as well as “fishing shacks, lush summer gardens, and granite summits.” The artists represented include George Bellows, Frank Benson, Albert Thompson Bricher, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Fitz Henry Lane, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Fairfield Porter, Edward Potthast, Edward Redfield, Max Weber, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Newell Convers Wyeth, and Marguerite and William Zorach.

Maine, as Dr. Chambers has written, “is not like any place else. As if by magic—or divine intent—its storms are more powerful, its mountains more primordial, its seas more imposing and mysterious, its people hardier, and its flowers more colorful, than anywhere else on earth. There seems to be a special joy attached to Maine, a magnetic attraction not only to its unique beauty but also to its soul-cleansing power. No artist who has ever painted in Maine has left there unchanged.”

The dramatically different impact of the state on its artists is reflected in some of its earliest portrayals, including Charles Codman’s romantic fantasy, Pirate’s Retreat of ca. 1830, depicting a blasted, half-barren landscape of rocky cliffs, steep mountains, and tumultuous skies, and Alvan Fisher’s Sutton Island, Mount Desert (1848), showing a calm sail-filled bay and leisure-seekers enjoying boating and basking on a sunny shore. In a work of 1856, the noted Luminist Fitz Henry Lane represents a middleground between these extremes, capturing sailboats plying turbulent seas, while the Owl’s Head Lighthouse in Rockland rises reassuringly from a green headland in the middle distance.

Among the show’s highlights is Winslow Homer’s Prout’s Neck (ca. 1883), a plein-air watercolor, probably painted during the first of the artist’s many summers in Maine. The image reveals the spontaneity of Homer’s methods, while his expertly configured composition and sensitive transcription of light and atmosphere underscore not only his mastery of his medium but also his affection for this stern and heroic landscape. Childe Hassam also sought fresh subject matter when he, like Homer, visited Maine for the first time in the summer of 1883. His destination was the weather-beaten and granitic Appledore, in the Isles of Shoals, where between 1889 and 1894, he returned seasonally to visit the poet Celia Thaxter and paint images of her garden. In Isle of Shoals Garden (ca. 1895), Hassam evokes the halcyon mood of summer leisure, featuring the tangle of wildflowers in Thaxter’s garden, set in a plot that seemed natural, but was, in fact, carefully tended.

In addition to Impressionism, two other divergent artistic modes were simultaneously applied to the landscape of Maine at the end of the nineteenth century. The Luminist tradition of Lane was continued by such artists as Alfred Thompson Bricher, whose spare, horizontal compositions of coasts from Portland to Grand Manan, rendered from the 1870s through the 1890s, feature crystalline waters and glowing light, while also contributing to the growing image of Maine as a pleasant summer vacation retreat. The tranquil, poetic aspects of the Maine landscape drew the attention of artists in the Tonalist mode who combined the influences of the French Barbizon School with that of the art of James McNeill Whistler. This approach is reflected in the in Bruce Crane’s Cottage at Sunset (ca. 1900-10), in which he showed architectural and natural forms appearing to lose definition in the sun’s afterglow, and Hermann Dudley Murphy’s Surf at Ogunquit (ca. 1907), portraying a vast open sea and sky reduced to Japanese-print inspired harmonized bands of color.

Among the many locales in Maine that have drawn artists, the remote craggy island of Monhegan, ten miles from Port Clyde, has been one of the most compelling since the beginning of the twentieth century. “This is the real thing,” Robert Henri wrote to his parents immediately after arriving on the island in 1903. “It is a wonderful place to paint—so much in so small a place one can hardly believe it.” Henri’s Study for Storm Tide (1903) and In the Woods (ca. 1918) exemplify the vigorous, physical way that he handled paint in a direct response to his sites. A similar energy, propelled by the bracing and invigorating experience of Monhegan, is reflected in the works of Henri’s friends, including George Bellows’s Through the Trees (1913) and Edward Redfield’s Manana from Smutty Nose (1926), as well as in the forcefully painted works of the veteran Monhegan artist Abraham Bogdanove. Rockwell Kent, also a friend of Henri’s, is represented by Lone Rock and Sea (1950). Rendered after a thirty-year absence from the island, the painting’s spare, hard forms represent a heightening of the physical clarity of Kent’s earlier works.

The desire of the realists of the 1920s and 1930s to chronicle the character of American life led a number of prominent artists to Maine. Edward Hopper summered in the state between 1926 and 1929, painting in Ogunquit, Rockland, and Cape Elizabeth. His interest in the sun-struck and idiosyncratic geometries of weather-beaten buildings, derelict boats, and isolated rocks is apparent in works such as Schooner’s Bowsprit (1926) and Lime Rock Quarry No. 1 (1926). In a view of Ogunquit, entitled Perkins Cove Fish Houses (1926), the modernist-influenced Niles Spencer expressed his affection for this picturesque village in a Cézannesque image, showing buildings along the shore within a complex geometric configuration. A different sort of realist, Newell Convers Wyeth focused on illustrative work. He created The Bateaux on the Dead River (ca. 1930) for the dust jacket of Kenneth Roberts’s first novel Arundel, a compelling account of the amphibious assault upriver in bateaux and canoes, led through some of Maine’s deepest wilderness by Colonel Benedict Arnold.

Modernists also ventured to Maine, including, most importantly, Marsden Hartley and John Marin. Hartley’s sense of the land’s enduring strength is evident in a series of small jewel-like panels he painted between 1906 and 1909 near Center and North Lovell, which were the subject of his first one-artist show at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, held in May 1909. The pair of works in this exhibition, Song of Winter, No. 3 (1906-1908) and Song of Winter, No. 6 (1908-1909), reveal the approach that would emerge in the well-known images of Maine that Hartley would paint later in his career. Three watercolors by Marin, each executed during a different decade of his life, demonstrate his own lifelong devotion to Maine, and especially to its coasts.

Other progressive Maine artists include Carl Gordon Cutler, an innovative watercolorist who visited the Penobscot Bay region in the 1920s and 1930s, and Stephen Etnier, a Kent student who settled in South Harpswell in 1926, whose works, such as Mid-Channel Bell (1954) convey an eerie intensity in their utter calm and changeless light. Fairfield Porter, who had summered in Maine since his childhood, also found personal inspiration in his surroundings, creating such lyrical images as Beach Flowers No. 2 (1972) and Seascape (1974). Among Maine’s most beloved modernists were William and Marguerite Zorach, who became permanent residents of the state in 1923, acquiring a farmhouse in Robinhood Cove, near Georgetown. William preferred watercolors, Marguerite, oils, but both emphasized spontaneity of execution as the most effective means of emotional and symbolic expression.

Such an awareness of the dimensions of experience beyond pictorial fact also marks the work of Maine’s most famous living artist, Andrew Wyeth, represented in the show by Dry Well (ca. 1958) and Christina’s Teapot (ca. 1968), both double portraits of a kind that perhaps only Wyeth could produce, inanimate yet full of life, simple, yet eloquent. Andrew’s son, Jamie Wyeth shares his father’s sense of the evocative, as demonstrated in Lighthouse Iris (2003) and Screen Door to the Sea (1994), a portrait of one of the island’s teenagers standing just inside an ajar screen door, bathed in brilliant light.

The rich heritage of Maine’s art influences are perpetuated in the works of contemporary artists, including Ann Lofquist, of Brunswick, whose Through a Glass Darkly (2000) is possessed with an air of inexplicable mystery, recalling the Tonalist tradition, and the Connecticut painter Peter Poskas, a visitor on Monhegan regularly since the 1990s, whose work evokes that of Andrew Wyeth, as in Stanley’s Colors (2005), in which a harsh and penetrating light are key actors in a “portrait” of one of the by-now-familiar fish houses across the harbor from Manana.

In this expansive survey, a vision of Maine as truly a land of contrasts emerges, conveying a sense of why its offerings have drawn the hearts and minds of so many of America’s finest artists.

Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce its participation in the Ninth Annual Boston Fine Art Show, to be held, November 10-13, 2005, at the Cyclorama (Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street). The art show’s gala opening on Thursday, November 9, from 6 to 9 pm, will benefit the Wang Center’s education program, “Suskind, Young At Arts.” On view at our booth will be works by Albert Bierstadt, Arthur Wesley Dow, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Willard Metcalf, William Paxton, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and many other noted artists. For additional information, please contact David Major (davidmajor@spanierman.com) or Katrina Thompson (katrinathompson@spanierman.com) or visit www.FineArtBoston.com