Arts & Leisure
"Painting Summer in New England" at the Peabody-Essex Museum
By Rose Safran
"Open your eyes wide, get the local tang. There's as much of it right here in Maine as there is in Monet's Normandy." - Hamilton Easter Field, founder of the Ogunquit Art Colony."What" - painting. "When" - summer. "Where" - New England. That's a broad category for an exhibition curator to undertake. One might even say it's a non-theme for an art exhibit - just a gathering together of paintings of time and place. New England is America's historic summer land, and as such has beckoned artists since the 19th century to paint, teach, learn, relax, co-mingle, find inspiration, even buy houses in which to settle and live - some permanently. Summer art colonies proliferated throughout New England: Ogunquit, Monhegan, Provincetown, Cape Ann, Cornish, White Mountains, Old Lyme, Cos Cob, Greenwich are some of the better-known destinations.
Guest curator Trevor Fairbrother, formerly of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a recognized art historian, who is comfortable with American art of various periods, selected 112 paintings by 83 artists for this exhibit at the Salem, Mass., Peabody-Essex Museum. The artists' connections with New England were sometimes as all-year residents, other times only part of the year. Some of the artists such as Norman Rockwell, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer are household names; others are relatively unheralded, generally better known regionally than nationally, such as Gloucester's Nell Blaine and Portland's Brett Bigbee. Artists from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries artists are included. Maine and Massachusetts are heavily represented, in particular the Boston School of artists.
Courageously, the curator has arranged his selections in juxtapositions that appear, at first glance, randomly positioned. There is no chronological order. There is no apparent conceptual order. Realism neighbors with the abstract - and oddly, does so comfortably. Throughout several contiguous galleries in the Museum's new wing appear many summertime themes pertinent to New England such as beaches and seascapes, farms, plant life, architecture, urban areas, people in settings and figurative studies, but there has been no attempt to group art accordingly. Instead, there are "links" as well as subtleties, such as the feeling of warmth that a sunny day evokes, connecting two seemingly disparate works of art. Or, a festive celebration. In the final gallery of the show, the sea is dominant.
I had the good fortune of having the curator guide me (and other press members) through the galleries to understand the "why" of this adventurous exercise in "hanging" a show.
"See that spit of land beyond the beautiful women," commented Fairbrother, pointing to Frank Benson's lush "Summer," a 1909 painting depicting four gorgeous young women (two of them his daughters) clad in white and positioned atop a Maine cliff overlooking the sea. Then the curator turned to an impressionist seascape, a 1907 oil by Willard Leroy Metcalf, and had us realize that the same land appeared therein and was, in fact, painted at the time Metcalf was visiting Benson on North Haven Island.
In one gallery, Fairbrother pointed to Edmund Tarbell's "Mercie Cutting Flowers" of 1912 in which the artist painted his daughter and subsequently to Philip Leslie Hale's "The Crimson Rambler" of 1908, explaining that these two artists along with Benson completed the triumvirate teaching at Boston's Museum School. But in the same gallery was a different approach - Fairfield Porter's 1965 portrait of his wife Anne, clad in a white dress, was positioned in front of a white clapboard background, the white-on-white effect modernist in its stark simplicity. Summer white becomes the unifier: purity of artistic expression, of person, of summer days.
If there is a strong thread running through the paintings selected, it is "happiness." Summer implies a freedom from winter cares and concerns, fun time, leisure activities, relaxation, festivity, celebration, cutting loose, family get-togethers, reflection, even a reawakening of the spirit. Milton Avery's 1943 depiction of his 10-year-old daughter on a Gloucester, Mass., beach, a study in pink with gulls in the distance, some shells in the foreground, certainly comments on a child's summer contentment. Then, there is Norman Rockwell's "Going and Coming" - a whimsical Saturday Evening Post two-level illustration of a large family traveling in a car for a day's outing, its upper half, the "going" aspect depicting a smiling father and mother, the lower half the returning parents with tired "have had it" expressions. Too, there is William Meyerowitz's "Gloucester Humoresque" - a veritable circus of artists, perhaps representing the Rocky Neck colony in Gloucester in 1923.
Maine, glorious in interpretation and diversity, is everywhere. We enter one gallery to meet a massive Neil Welliver-style woodland, with vertical tree barks, fallen twisted limbs, rocks dappled with peek-a-boo pinkish light. In another gallery, occupying an entire wall, summer shouts at us through Alex Katz's 1999 20-foot-wide beach panorama featuring people at play in the water and on the sand; it's quite a contrast to Charles Woodbury's 1900s depiction of Ogunquit Beach, a relatively quiet seascape with two bathers. Literally exploding with Maine motifs is N. C. Wyeth's 1925 vista of Port Clyde, "The Harbor at Herring Cove," which is topsy-turvy jammed with birds, houses, docks, boats, active people, lobster traps. Another viewpoint lies in the surreal summer depicted by Ogunquit painter Kuniyoshi's fanciful swimmer, mermaid-like in the foreground, with a suspended lighthouse island behind the flamboyantly depicted lass. Rockwell Kent's Monhegan sunset, loaned by Jamie Wyeth, with its huge hot flaming sun sending shadows beyond houses points to the exquisite contrasting light Mainers frequently enjoy.
The curator included two Winslow Homer paintings - both enchanting: "The Artist's Studio in an Afternoon Fog" an 1894 oil on loan from the University of Rochester and an earlier oil, the privately owned "The Sand Dune" of 1871-72 in which a woman's long bluish shadow is cast down from a high dune.
A hybrid of old friends blended with new discoveries, of great and minor works of art (I'm sure purists will question some of the curator's decisions!) of the obvious and the obscure, this unusual exhibit is more than "a pretty picture show" - full of surprises, it's revelatory, and is best approached with an exploratory attitude and an open mind.
"Painting Summer in New England" runs through September 4 at the Peabody-Essex Museum in downtown Salem. The museum is open daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A 134-page illustrated catalog of the exhibition is available. For further information, call (866) 745-1876 or visit www.pem.org.
See next week's edition of The Independent for a special look at China and the PEM.
