52 ProvincetownARTS 2013 artists Saturn II , 1984, mi , 1984, E logue between abstraction and figuration, the pendulum pausing someplace in between: thependulumpausingsomeplaceinbetween: andfiguration, logue betweenabstraction dia andseeing,echoingtheongoingtwentieth-century ofworking betweenways shifts thecircle(planets,moon,andsun)oval(theegg). mostdistinctivevocabulary: purest, thatcompriseher palette iconicshapesandasilver/gray elemental, through achieved vista, friends)andthegrand receives from or objects, whichshemakes, finds inantiquestores, scale(andtheuseofsmall emphasizingintimate betweencolloquialnarrative and-forth, voyages. with exotic displayingobjectsassociated passionfor curiosities,” describingthenineteenth-century and“cabinetof ,diorama, toasassemblage,sculptural isreferred vein ofworking Thisrich hangingandfreestanding. mixed-mediaenvironments, she calls“boxes,”framed E xe The intimate narrative and the wordless sublime are another way to position Halvorsen’s anotherwaytopositionHalvorsen’s andthewordlesssublimeare narrative The intimate one“style”toanother, from aback-Rather thananevolution ismore process hercreative sets Since stage three-dimensional complex, the hasbeencreating 1960s, Halvorsen d m d e di lspeth Halvorsen lspeth a , 19.5 violence toward women, the pain of separation and death. anddeath. violence towardwomen,thepainofseparation waranddisruption,ecologicaldisaster, andnow: is alsoinclusionofthehere instone.Yetallegorical andtheburnished—theeternal—set there withHalvorsen tothe isatonethatattends tunes.Theirs voice ofheavenlysilenceandcathedral lspeth Halvorsen is by an intimatean cosmos 30 by 3.5 inches By Susan R to visual art as Emily Dickinson is to poetry: the the asEmilyDickinsonistopoetry: to visualart and Brown - we see this in Halvorsen’s real-world materials (tree branches, fragments of old wharves, horseshoe crabs, fish carcasses, a tortoise carapace, female torsos, pendulant chains, and swings) contextualized to share atmospheric space with burnished aluminum, used as a painterly medium. It would be dif- ficult to overstate the tactile imprint of the Cape itself: the sea and the sky, the moon and the tides, the horizon line, the dunes, even shifting grains of sand. Ladders and swings, threaded through Halvorsen’s substantial body of work, carry their own iconography. She describes these mysterious ladders as ways to reenter her memories of growing up, as well as her daughters’ childhood (which mothers often experience as a sec- ond girlhood); the swing is an image of return; the ladder, a symbol of escape or adventure into the unknown. Persephone Gothic Picnic, 1987, mixed media, 15 by 30 by 4 inches collection robert j. lifton and Demeter come to mind, mother and daughter endlessly engaged in a ritual back-and-forth search for connection: the visit to a parallel world that lies underneath (the ladder), balanced by the return (the swing). Halvorsen’s The Whole World Is Watching was made as a protest of the US bombing of Afghanistan after the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center. It incorporates both ladder and swing to evoke a sense of meditation and reflection on the ultimate frailty and vul- nerability of the human condition. Berta Walker, close friend of the artist and owner of the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, showing Halvorsen’s work, uses words like compassion, feminine, and organic when referring to Halvorsen’s more narrative art. Walker has in mind Afghan Pieta, which features a framed newsprint photo of an ancient Afghan woman cradling an infant, centered within a shuttered shrine that contains a hidden music box (the viewer may wind it to play Brahms’s Lullaby), and The Whole World Is Watching, showing a cast female torso sheltered from flying warriors (a flotilla of horseshoe crabs, poised to strike). The Berta Walker Gallery will show these pieces, which portray the artist’s “other side,” as Walker puts it, complementing Halvorsen’s solo exhibit this year at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM). Speaking of a small fish included in her own Halvorsen box, Walker notes with wonder how “an object so small can be so monumental in its impact.” Robert J. Lifton, pioneer in the application of psychology and psychoanalysis to the field of history, admires the vision- ary quality of Halvorsen’s art and in particular Gothic Picnic, a piece he owns. Two empty chairs sit at either end of a table under a solitary ball of light, denoting human alienation. In a letter to the artist, Lifton described his professional as well as personal relationship to the work, which will be on loan during Halvor­sen’s exhibit at PAAM:

The Elspeth Halvorsen Box has iconic significance in my life. Each time I begin the Wellfleet meetings on psychology and history which I convene annually, I have it hanging in view in my study. I point to its chairs at the empty table and the mysterious ball of light above. It signifies for us the beginning of our task, that of filling the emptiness with words and ideas in a quest for illumination. The construction is the only work of art I take with me from city to city so that it can carry out its special task. Twilight Celebration, 1982, mixed media, 32 by 21.5 by 3.5 inches

ProvincetownARTS.org 53 Varujan Boghosian, well-known sculptor and cura- to open her boxes to a third dimension of space, tor of Halvorsen’s PAAM exhibit, An Intimate Cosmos light, and, later, music. (May 31–July 7), intends this exhibition as an From the vantage point of Provincetown extended homage rather than a career survey, arts, it is not possible to consider Halvors- and plans to include Gothic Picnic, a piece en’s importance, as artist and center of he, too, greatly admires. “The absence a family of artists, without including of the figure is like an altar-piece with- her well-known family. There is art- out the arches,” he told me. Boghosian ist-daughter Tabitha Vevers, who in also speaks of Halvorsen’s integrity and 2009 was given a mid-career retrospec- “spectacular simplicity . . . There is a tive at the deCordova Sculpture Park purity in the work of certain artists, and Museum (traveling to PAAM), like Myron Stout, Naum Gabo, and and has shown her work extensively. Elspeth Halvorsen—looking at their Documentary photographer Stepha- work [we sense] a quality of light, a nie Vevers, the older daughter, makes feeling of distance and space.” Even the her home in New York. titles are evocative: other pieces Bogho- Halvorsen’s husband, Tony Vevers sian selected emphasize a cosmic silence, (1926–2008), remains the center of her including Mother Moon, Transit, and Time and life and art. Sharing a circle of friends, Silence, Minimalist masterpieces in which life they exhibited together from their earliest as we know it is stripped to its elements: floating years in Provincetown; then, from the early circles, horizon, tides, and the air we can almost 1990s, museums and galleries deliberately showed breathe, buoyed within a soft and changing light. their work side by side (the Cape Cod Museum of Halvorsen’s is an art form closely linked to and Art mounted Two Themes: Elspeth Halvorsen and Tony : though not widely Vevers in 1991); the synchronicity exhibited, sculptural assemblages of geometric shapes, light, and by Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and coloration is startling. When a , meticulously stroke in 1994 impeded Vevers’s balanced compilations of objects mobility, they remained insepa- that read like dreams, make the rable. Halvorsen entering gallery point. is the best- openings alongside Vevers with known name within this genre. a his cane and, ten years later, in a generous sampling of Halvorsen’s wheelchair was a common sight; singular, visionary pieces was it would always be Tony and Els- shown in Image in the Box: From peth. For a period of time after Cornell to Contemporary at the Hol- Vevers’s stroke, Halvorsen con- lis Taggart Galleries in Manhattan structed a series of boxes titled (November 2008–January 2009), Waiting I, II III, IV, containing positioning her constructions with low-relief metal birds in profile, those by Cornell, Pierre Roy, Lucas emblems of hope and waiting, Samaras, and others. which seem to pull in light. Her Halvorsen was unaware of exhibit at PAAM is dedicated to Cornell’s work when, spending the memory of her late husband. winters in Indiana doing land- A Vevers painting—with its scape paintings and studying unornamented, flattened forms, photography in the late 1960s usually figures set within a muted (her husband held a position as landscape, each equally important art historian at Purdue Univer- (or equally unobtrusive)—is often sity in Indiana from 1964 into described as radiating luminosity, the late 1980s) she happened to achieved through thinly applied see a friend’s experiment with a paint: that these two artists grew three-dimensional box construc- together in their search for the tion. It was a Eureka moment: spiritual dimension in art is no sur- immediately she recognized the prise. To talk to Elspeth now is to potential of the box as a vehicle, experience Tony’s close presence. a stage in which to create a story, Her voice lifts when she speaks of an imaginary world. “I went home him; death has not severed their and immediately started making lifeline. constructions: it was a revelation, Their home is filled with fam- the possibilities seemed infinite,” ily art and photographs spanning she says, “and I’ve been doing it four generations. During late sum- ever since.” Eventually the boxes mer and fall 2012, we sat down to developed strategic openings, or talk in the brightly lit living room “portholes” in their roofs and of their modest home in the East walls where a beam of light would End of Provincetown, off Bradford focus upon the interior stage. Street, purchased in the mid-

With mirrors and other metallic (top) Mother Moon, 1986, mixed media, 24 by 24 by 4 inches 1960s from artist Mark Rothko, reflecting surfaces, she was able (above) daughters of the moon, 1988, mixed media, 36 by 21.5 by 4 inches a story unto itself. A young Elspeth

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and Tony were alerted to the property by Jack and Wally Tworkov. “The house was set far from the street, and in the middle of a treeless, sandy yard,” is how the eighty-four-year-old Halvorsen describes their first look at this hidden property, which, a half century later, now sheltered by lilac bushes and tall pine trees, retains an aura of New England humility. The house had a large “artist’s studio” (Rothko’s) on the second floor; a second studio was added for Halvorsen. Rothko was very eager for the artist-couple to buy his house (“He didn’t like living so far from New York, that’s why he sold the house”), even offering a second mortgage. Money for the down payment came from the sale of one of Vevers’s significant early paintings to Modernist architect Charles Zehnder. “Rothko was very good to us: he was inclined to befriend younger artists. He said, ‘But one of the things you have to promise is that you’ll never change the kitchen,’ so narrow you can hardly turn around. We promised,” Halvorsen said with a laugh. The kitchen remains as it was. She and Vevers met while both were visiting Maine’s isolated, rocky Monhegan Island, long known as an artists’ haven. When Halvorsen was twenty-two, she was in Paris studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and then became, as she puts it, “very ill with pleurisy” upon returning. After six months in a hospital in White Plains, New York, not far from her family home in Purdys, New York, her mother suggested going to Monhegan Island to regain her strength. So in July 1953, mother and daughter, both artists, set off to paint. “The first night we arrived,” she explained, “everyone was invited to a ‘dance evening’ given at the tiny school building. As soon as we sat down, three young artists [Vevers, Stephen Pace, and another] walked in. Tony had on a cowboy hat, a kerchief, and cowboy boots. My mother said something like, ‘The Three Musketeers: which one do you like?’ And I said, ‘The cowboy, the one in the middle.’ The next thing I knew, Tony came over to ask me to dance. Six weeks later, we were married.” “He had come there to paint,” she told me. “Together, we started to do woodcuts on the island. I had never done woodblocks before. He had his tools and ink rollers with him, but no ink. We found some old boards lying around; Tony made ink from the ‘jelly’ of the local seaweed, pressing it to get the jelly out, and combining it with ordinary ink. We carved several woodblocks and printed them. I still have the prints; I also have the blocks. One of his is of us standing together under a moon. Mine is of a crab with long claws stretched out on the rocks.” Halvorsen stared into space for a moment before continuing. “Soon after Tony and I met, my mother had a bad fall and we had to leave the island—there was no doctor on Monhegan. Tony and I corresponded daily. He came to Purdys, and we then went to New York, where I was to con- tinue my classes at the Art Students League. Tony had a studio in a loft on Delancey Street. On his second day home, he went to his Yale reunion. On his drive back he called to ask, ‘Will you marry me?’” Even at this remove, her joy is tangible. “And I said ‘yes’ without a moment’s hesitation. We were married in a church in Purdys a month later. My mother gave us a wedding party in the home I had grown up in.” They then (illegally) moved into Vevers’s loft, both finding work in the City Center Art Gallery, connected to connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein, an early beachhead within today’s Lincoln Center arts complex. A few months after the birth of Stephanie in 1955, they decided to leave Manhattan for the opportunity, arranged by Milton Avery, to live rent-free in a Provincetown house on the waterfront (now Bayside Betsy’s). Halvorsen came to Provincetown on faith—Tony said it was an artists’ community on the sea. In Provincetown, they reasoned, an artist could somehow survive, among artists and fishermen. It was a dream of a utopian community, away from the grit of urban life. Once in Provincetown, a spirit of gentle optimism was as natural as the jugs of wine and endless fish dinner parties they shared with artist Time and Silence, 1987, mixed media, 48 by 17 by 4 inches friends. Myron Stout (whose Minimalist aesthetic Halvorsen’s is often compared to), Franz Kline, Jack and Wally Tworkov, Elise Asher and Stan- ley Kunitz, Edwin and Frances “Pat” Dickinson, Nat Halper and Marjorie Windust, Robert Motherwell, Milton Avery, and Hans Hofmann were a few of the painters and writers who welcomed Halvorsen and Vevers. The couple would spend a week each summer on the back shore, staying at Hazel Hawthorne’s dune shack Thalassa, whose influence would later

ProvincetownARTS.org 55 the whole world is watching, 2001, mixed media, 28 by 50 by 4 inches be expressed in Halvorsen’s work as dreamscapes ’60s was doing landscape painting and portraits, of moonlight and shifting dune fields. mainly of children, accepted commissions from The Sun Gallery, on Commercial at the foot artist friends for practical things, such as design- This is a classic photo of my of Law Street, where the Vevers were then living, ing slipcovers for Robert Motherwell. She worked first opened in 1955, the year they arrived. Provid- during their first winter in the Portuguese Bakery mother. Elspeth looks like a ing an alternative to the Abstract Expressionism accompanied by infant Stephanie, who slept in a daimon fairy in the middle of her favored by Nat Halper’s HCE Gallery to its east, it cradle by her side. Bread was nineteen cents a loaf, attracted dynamic young artists. Founders Yvonne and diapers were washed and hung near the ovens realm—we see the large-scale Andersen and Dominic Falcone showed Jan to dry—until the kindly owner objected. Sales of Müller, , Red Grooms, Robert Frank, Les- artwork were rare, and the recycled, the made-by- piece she’s working on, and the ter Johnson, Selina Trieff, Robert Henry, Josephine hand, a sensibility that remained a component of and Sal Del Deo, and others, including Halvorsen Halvorsen’s (and Vevers’s) art, was the guiding tools, and a bit of her studio. The and Vevers, a generation drawn to the figurative aesthetic and a practical norm. hammer in front of the piece paintings then out of fashion. Around this time, A photo from this time shows the slender, Vevers, who had been painting landscapes, started delicate Halvorsen with daughters Tabitha and reveals that she holds the power to include figures, with Halvorsen as his muse. Stephanie in front and rear milk-carton bicy- Hans Hofmann’s presence loomed large: when cle-basket seats, which Halvorsen had assembled to create and destroy. The tips local police threatened to close the Sun Gallery on for the trio to get around town—to pay bills and the opening night of an exhibition of Vevers’s fig- to accept fish from the fisherman at the pier who of her sneakers show the almost ure drawings, Hofmann (with Hudson D. Walker) enjoyed befriending artists. punk nature of her outlook, gathered enough signatures on Hofmann’s hur- This peek into the past, Halvorsen in front of riedly scribbled manifesto—more mini-lesson on a Commercial Street shop with Stephanie and eschewing fashion and expense, the nude in Western art—to quiet the censors. The Tabitha, presents this modest, soft-spoken yet “manifesto,” on a fragment of cardboard signed determined artist in her element. She and Vevers and perhaps the continuum by all the major artists in town, has been kept with were often sighted biking down Commercial as between studio and garden. The so much else that carries the Vevers’s family his- well. Even today, Halvorsen continues to get tory, and the art history of the town. Vevers was around town on her rusty bicycle, jumping on photo also shows her in all-white to become revered as the art historian of Province- and peddling like a teenager. town; he and Halvorsen experienced much of this The Sun Gallery closed in the early 1960s; for clothing, typical for much of her history firsthand for over a half century. Halvorsen, it occupies a small line in a four-page For Halvorsen, Vevers, and their friends, mak- résumé that includes solo and group exhibi- career. —Stephanie Vevers ing art was what mattered; laboring jobs, while tions, honors and awards, and representation in taking away from studio time, carried no stigma. museum collections. During the 1970s, she was Vevers, a Yale graduate, was grateful for construc- involved with the Provincetown Group Gallery; in (Opposite) elspeth hALVORSEN in her studio in 1995, with her tion jobs; Halvorsen, who during the 1950s and the late 1980s she founded Rising Tide Gallery, sculpture odyssey photo by vincent guadazno

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Love Lock, 2011, mixed media, 7.5 by 15.75 by 3 inches

located on the ground floor of today’s Schoolhouse Center for the Arts. The family shows, including Family Values: Tony Vevers, Elspeth Halvorsen, & Tabitha Long Point Gallery, where Vevers and many others were showing, including Vevers (curated by Ranalli, Suffolk University, 2002), The Vevers Family (Berta Judith Rothschild, Carmen Cicero, Varujan Boghosian, Paul Resika, Fritz Walker Gallery, 2009), and Four Generations (Rising Tide Gallery, 1991), Bultman, and Robert Motherwell, was on the building’s second floor. which featured Halvorsen with her daughter Tabitha; her mother, landscape When Long Point included nonmembers, Halvorsen’s boxes were shown; painter Colette Finch Pratt (1902–2001); and her maternal grandmother, she was invited to become a member in 1997. The building was sold later British figurative artist Rene Finch Sund (1876–1954). Sund spoke out for that year and both galleries were forced to close. Halvorsen was a staple the “modern” movement in art and is noted as a voice for women’s greater at Tirca Karlis, the Cherry Stone, PAAM, the Cape Cod Museum of art, inclusion in London’s lively post–World War I gallery scene in Katy Deepwell’s and the Berta Walker Gallery. Numerous gallery permutations featured scholarly text Women Artists Between the Wars (Manchester University Press, artists and their families working and showing together, sharing hangings, UK, 2010), alongside Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The generations of openings, and many picnics on the back shore. women artists linked through Halvorsen were included as well in the mid- Linking the generations through art and exhibitions is a familiar experi- ’90s traveling exhibit Relatively Speaking: Mothers and Daughters in Art. ence for Halvorsen. The most recent of these was The Tides of Provincetown, curated by the New Britain Museum of American Art in , which traveled (2011–2012) to Wichita and Pittsburgh, and to the Cape Cod Museum of Art. Artworks by Tabitha Vevers, her husband, Daniel Ranalli, Tony Vevers, and Elspeth Halvorsen were hung in close proximity, emphasiz- ing similarities and dissimilarities in materials (shells, horseshoe crabs, snails, sand, rope) and approach (classical references, scale). And there were other

(ABOVE) stephanie (left) and tabitha vevers, c. 1960 photo by tony vevers (right) Elspeth halvorsen and tony vevers, provincetown, 1986 photo by renate ponsold

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My mother became swept away by pho- FROM SILVER TO ALUMINUM created an artist’s book documenting its somber tography when my sister, Stephanie, and I transformation from homestead to gravel pit. were in elementary school. She had always As I look back, it was a transformation that been a painter, from before she met my foreshadowed her own transition from photog- father, Tony Vevers, through their early days raphy to ceramics to sculpture, from narrative to together in New York and then on the Cape. a kind of symbolic abstraction. Those enormous One day, after my father had started teaching mounds of gravel reappear in the loose sand of at Purdue University in Indiana, she signed up her later box constructions. for a photography course. The next thing we My all-time favorite photograph of hers, knew, she brought home a Rolleiflex camera titled Rocking Horse, presages the symme- and converted the bathroom into a makeshift try and shallow space of the worlds she would darkroom. Returning home from school, I’d begin to create with aluminum, sand, and often have to call out, “Mum, is it safe?” and found objects. The arch formed by the horse’s wait to catch her between prints in order to body, the swirl of his neck against his torso, the open the door to pee. I would be greeted by the intensity of his eye as the center point of the smell of chemicals, the subdued amber glow of image, and the grid of the wire fence are all the safe light, and my mother’s excitement at echoed in the curves, spheres, glass lenses, win- the magic of an image conjured out of silver dows, and ladders of her sculpture. Indeed, the on paper. silver-coated paper that is used in black-and- The spare midwestern countryside was white photography finds its analogue in the foreign and fresh to all of us. During her pho- burnished aluminum and near-monochrome rocking horse, c. 1967 tographic excursions, Mum became friendly palette that have been the most consistent ele- with a farmer and his wife and their gritty, yet ments in her work over the past forty-five years. gracefully tended sheep farm. She eventually —Tabitha Vevers

the mid-1990s about his own process, working with collage during a time when he was disassem- bling (literally cutting out parts of) earlier work, using strips of painted canvas to evoke a sense of geological time. In Vevers’s case, what mattered was the layering, the nod to earlier inspiration as a means of invoking history, material or per- sonal; an especially poignant journey when what lies beneath remains unseen. Throughout her half century of making boxes, Halvorsen too has continued to invoke this spirit of pentimento. To treasure Tony’s memory, and to unite their work, Elspeth has recently salvaged scraps of watercolor paintings from his studio that he had torn and saved from their Monhegan days, perhaps for future . When we view her oeuvre from a distance, from landscape and portraiture to the luminous tonal- ities and shapes that seem to emerge from spools of memory, we can feel this bedrock of family con- nection, layered firmly and lovingly throughout her work. (left to right) Elspeth WITH HER DAUGHTERS, tabitha and stephanie, 2012 photo by irene lipton SUSAN RAND BROWN profiled the painter Lillian Orlowsky for the 2004/5 issue of Provincetown Arts, and has since written about artists Ellen LeBow, Barbara Through the long, cold Provincetown win- E. Cohen, Mike Wright, Sky Power, Marion Roth, Breon ters, Halvorsen remains busy in her studio, often Dunigan, and Christina Schlesinger. Brown began writing finding inspiration in boxes that call to be disman- about the arts in the 1970s, and has profiled many of the tled and reassembled. The genius of Outer Cape’s major artists for the Provincetown Ban- involves a constant openness to transformation of ner (and its predecessor, the Provincetown Advocate). the ephemeral. I am reminded of something Vevers She has spent summers in her family’s Commercial Street said in an interview with Townsend Ludington in home since the 1960s.

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