Abstract COURTHOUSE GALLERY FINE ART THREE MAINE ARTISTS Harold Garde Stephen Pace George Wardlaw Although it was soon to be superseded by an accelerating succession of artistic movements, Abstract Expressionism, to which these artists were initially drawn, was a watershed in 20th century art in that it broke down previous constraints, put a premium on individual expression, and set in motion the “no holds barred” trajectory of recent art.

–Maritca Sawin

HAROLD GARDE Winter Evening, Urban 1968 acrylic on board 48 x 48 inches NEXT PAGE GEORGE WARDLAW Color in the Hills 1960 oil on canvas 48 x 60 inches Abstract Expressionism THREE MAINE ARTISTS

Harold Garde Stephen Pace George Wardlaw

Essay by Martica Sawin

AUGUST 29 - SEPTEMBER 25, 2010

court street ellsworth maine 04605 courthousegallery.com 207 667 6611 Abstract Expressionism by Martica Sawin

The three artists whose abstract works are shown in this exhibition, were a part of the fabric of American society, had established Harold Garde, Stephen Pace, and George Wardlaw, are representative the Federal Art Project to provide employment for artists. This of a generation that grew up in the Great Depression, served in enabled thousands of artists all over the country to continue their the armed forces in World War II, and, thanks to the veterans work and resulted in a new solidarity in the artists’ community as educational benefits provided by the G.I. Bill of Rights, were able they worked together on public projects and formed organizations to attend art school and make art their lifetime profession. to negotiate with the Works Progress Administration. Coincidentally all three, in different locales, responded to the challenge of the adventurous new development in American art, To a certain extent then, the post-war artist could be experimental emerging in the later 1940s, that became known as Abstract and adventurous, yet feel part of a network of similarly daring Expressionism. individuals who might work alone in their studios but could find support via the Artists Club, the Cedar Tavern, cooperative They entered into an art world that had felt the impact of the galleries, and dozens of proliferating college art departments European refugee artists in the U.S. during the war years, among across the United States. Thanks to the exponential increase in them Mark Chagall, Fernand Leger, the non-objective painter the practice of awarding college and university degrees for studio Mondrian, and the reconstituted Surrealist group, including Max art, each of the three veterans included here was able to support Ernst, Andre Masson, and Yves Tanguy, as well as a half dozen himself by teaching while continuing to develop as an artist. knowledgeable art dealers who had fled Europe before the outbreak of war. Equally important was a legacy from the 1930s when the Federal government, recognizing that artists

Untitled Abstract 52-50 1952 oil on canvas 30 x 16 inches Harold Garde

A native New Yorker and the son of immigrant parents from Central Europe, Harold Garde (b. 1923) graduated from the prestigious Stuyvesant High School and attended City College where he was a science major with little familiarity with art. He enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1942 and was stationed in the Philippines. During his three years in the army he felt that his horizons broadened as he met and gravitated toward people interested in the arts. Learning that the G.I. Bill would provide him with an opportunity to continue his education, he decided to enroll at the University of Wyoming in Laramie with the intention of becoming a teacher. Since he had already accumulated a number of academic credits in his pre-war education, he signed up for a studio art course. It happened that the chair of the art depart- ment was George McNeil, a veteran of the Hans Hofmann School and the Federal Art Project and a forceful expressionist painter. The encounter with McNeil determined Garde’s commitment to art and started him on the way to becoming an expressionist himself. After a year McNeil was replaced by the non-objective painter Ilya Bolotowsky from whom Garde learned about structure and composition, something that still underlies even the most wildly gestural of his works. In 1948 Leon Kelly joined the faculty, 1903 bringing with him strong surrealist tendencies and a first-hand 1959 acr ylic on board 36 x 48 inches Scaped 1959 oil with fabric on board 36 x 47 inches

Private Garde in the army during World War II. Strappos

knowledge of the Surrealist refugee artists who showed at the Julian Levy Gallery where Kelly also exhibited. This meant that compressed into Garde’s studio experience were three of the major forces in the art of the day: expressionism, abstraction, and surrealism, all of which can be seen interacting in his uninhibited approach to painting. To complete his teaching credentials, Garde then attended Columbia Teachers College where he was very much in touch with the new vigorous, open-ended approach to painting that was on the rise at mid-century. His painting of the 1950s is instantly recognizable as belonging to that period of Late Summer artistic upheaval. The strong, angular brushstrokes, warring darks 1971 and lights, scrawled letters and numbers, ephemeral figures, and acrylic on board 48 x 72 inches sustained intensity of execution all are hallmarks of that time when artists faced an empty canvas and followed where the OPPOSITE impulsive action of their brushstrokes led. Now retired after a long Stillife 1967 teaching career Garde continues to paint with expressionist force acrylic on board in his studios in Belfast, Maine and New Smyrna Beach, Florida. 48 x 24 inches Morning Standing 1969 1973 acr ylic on board acr ylic on board 48 x 24 inches 48 x 72 inches Stephen Pace

Stephen Pace (b. 1918) was born in Missouri and grew up on subsistence farms there and in Indiana. There were no books or art works in their homestead nor was blank paper available, but he painted with coffee on the glass panes of the barn windows. His mother whose colorful patchwork quilts, made from worn out clothing, still embellish his home, saw a notice for WPA art classes in nearby New Harmony, and convinced fifteen year old Stephen to enroll. He proved to be adept at drawing as well as skilled in architectural rendering which landed him work in an architect’s office, and his accomplished watercolors were exhibited in New Harmony in 1939. Pace and his three brothers were all in the army by 1942 (“That’s when Dad finally got a tractor,” he recalled) but even overseas, stationed in England, he managed to make watercolors of local surroundings and show his work on the base. Landing shortly after the first Normandy beachhead, his division was fighting its way across France when he was in an accident and ended up with a broken leg and pleurisy in a hospital in Paris. Painting by the Seine one day he met Gertrude Stein who took him to visit Picasso. Released from the army he cast about for an alternative to going back to work on the

farm and decided to take advantage of the new G.I. Bill and attend Untitled Abstract 55-25 detail, 1955 oil on canvas 22 x 30 inches Untitled Abstract #61-100 1961 oil on canvas 48 x 64 inches

Stephen at his studio in Stonington, Maine. Untitled Abstract 1953 oil on canvas 16 x 27 inches

an art school about to open in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. There he met Milton Avery who was to remain a close friend and important influence. While painting the local scene in Mexico he found that he was more interested in the shapes emerging on his canvas than in realistic detail and abstraction took over. Returning to the United States he tossed a coin in a New Orleans bus station to decide whether to head east or west. East won and Pace entered into the downtown New York scene, becoming friends with , and registering at Hans Hofmann’s School. With time still left on the G.I. Bill he enrolled at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and traveled in Italy. Untitled Abstract 57-07 The large gestural abstractions that he produced in the 1950s fit 1957 oil on canvas 50 x 36 inches The large gestural abstractions that Pace produced in the 1950s fit right in with the ethos of the , yet among the torrent of brushstrokes there were occasional intimations of a landscape experience in qualities of light, density, and color.

Untitled Abstract 60-A21 1960 oil on canvas 48 x 72 inches Pam with Wine 1984 oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

right in with the ethos of the New York School, yet among the torrent of brushstrokes there were occasional intimations of a landscape experience in qualities of light, density, and color. After a decade of exhibiting with the Abstract Expressionists in major New York galleries Pace found nature forcing its way back into his paintings and since that time his colorful gestural works have been devoted to recollected scenes from his Indiana childhood on the farm and activity on the Maine waterfront. For many years he

Untitled Abstract 57-08 1957 oil on canvas 36 x 48 inches divided his time between Stonington, Maine, Manhattan, and Washington D.C. where he taught at . Now in his nineties and still painting he has returned to the locale of his youth and lives in New Harmony, Indiana. George Wardlaw

Like Pace, George Wardlaw (b. 1927) grew up poor on a Mississippi farm without any exposure to art either at home or in school. Two vivid memories that have stayed with him are of watching his mother lay out patchwork quilts, observing color, pattern, and the process of organization, and watching his father who, in addition to digging roads on the WPA, bred dogs for quail hunting, fill out the dogs’ registration papers, adding spots in the right places to give them identity. Wardlaw served in the Navy medical corps, completing the core medical training program, and was stationed at a number of different locations in the U.S. “Being in the Service got me off the farm,” he recollects. “It opened my eyes and head as I traveled around the country.” Evidently he must have done some drawing earlier in his schoolbooks because Hospital Corpsman George Wardlaw at the Naval Medical Center in San right after leaving the service he ran into a friend who asked, “Are Diego, California. you still drawing?” His friend’s suggestion that he study at the Memphis Academy of Art sent Wardlaw off to the Veteran’s Administration and in two weeks he found himself enrolled at the Academy. The faculty took an interest in him and were very supportive; he read Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art which influenced him profoundly, and when an abstract painter from New York joined the faculty, he turned to non-objective art, Mountain Man winning an award for both his representational and his abstract 1960 oil on canvas 42 x 48 inches Limb with Four Apples 1966 oil on canvas 29 x 90 inches In his series Apples Works II, Wardlaw began using simple, flat shapes paintined with primary colors. “The paintings were simplified, the shapes were flattened, the painterly brush disappeared and the dominant issues became solid shape and unmodulated color. The outlines of the apple were in biomorphic silhouette, like an echo of Matisse cutouts or Arp.” –Hugh Davies, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

work. “I wanted to do something different in my life. I’ve always been a spiritually concerned person and for me abstract art is an embodiment of the spiritual.” In 1951 he moved to the University of Mississippi where he was teaching. He later enrolled in the MFA program and studied with Jack Tworkov in 1954 and with David Smith in 1955. Asked whether he did sculpture with Smith, he replied that he had always worked three dimensionally as well as in two dimensions and that he had become skilled in metal- smithing and had established a program in metal working at the University of Mississippi. Through Tworkov he became familiar with Abstract Expressionism and his painting of the 1950s reflects that movement’s forceful gestural paint application and all-over energizing of the canvas surface. Another significant fac- tor in his formation was living in Oxford, Mississippi, devouring Faulkner’s writing and admiring his ability to focus on the local and regional while giving it universal resonance. Wardlaw feels George Wardlaw working on a large canvas for his Apple Series during the late 1960s. Yellow Sunset 1997 acrylic on wood panel 48 x 72 inches Wardlaw’s shaped paintings from 1999-1980 are abstract paintings primarily about a coastal environment.

that Maine, where he has spent many summers and has made many photographs of its coast, has served something of the same purpose for him, “as a spiritual magnet” and a visual theme which can be used to point to other meanings. After teaching and at the same time earning a degree at the University of Mississippi, Wardlaw taught at Louisiana State and was at the State University of New York in New Palz when Tworkov invited him to join the faculty at Yale. In 1968 he moved to the University of Massachusetts where he chaired the art department until his retirement in 1990. His works in the present exhibition are land- Mountain Climb scape-inspired, but the compositions reflect an abstract underpin- 1960 oil on canvas ning and the paint is loosely brushed on in shimmering color 42 x 47 inches areas that recall ’s abstractions of the 1950s. Hudson Hills 1959 oil on canvas 67 x 61 inches

Across the River and to the Sea 1959 oil on canvas 64 x 59 inches

OPPOSITE Hill and Sea 1959 oil on canvas 58 x 64 inches Although it was soon to be superseded by an accelerating succession of artistic movements, Abstract Expressionism, to which these artists were initially drawn, was a watershed in 20th century art in that it broke down previous constraints, put a premium on individual expression, and set in motion the “no holds barred” trajectory of recent art. And it drew worldwide attention to previously ignored American art, as befitted the country that had emerged from World War II as a pre-eminent power.

How does one account for the attraction that a free-wheeling approach to painting held for this generation of veterans? First of all hundreds of thousands of Americans had been taken from rural and small town life and sent across oceans to wage all-out war in places they had never heard of, dislodging traditional Untitled Abstract 55-25 assumptions and expectations. Secondly, two terrifying visions 1955 had opened before them—the absolute evil humans were capable oil on canvas of when the grim evidence of the Holocaust emerged and the 22 x 30 inches knowledge, brought home by Hiroshima, that the human race now Untitled Abstract 59-08 held the capacity for its total destruction. Along with the latter detail, 1959 went an awareness, brought home by the atom bomb, that matter oil on canvas was synonymous with energy. These factors were not necessarily 68 x 40 inches uppermost in consciousness, but they mitigated against a return to the mentality and the artistic styles of the 1930s. HAROLD GARDE Tower detail 1967 acrylic on board 72 x 48 inches

Critic and art historian Martica Sawin attended the University of Iowa when the art department was filled with returning veterans. In the 1950s she covered the New York galleries as a contributing editor of ARTS and correspondent for Art International. For thirty years she taught and chaired the art history department at Parsons School of Design. She is the author of Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, and of many monographs on contemporary artists, among them Stephen Pace.

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