COVERFEATURE THE PAAMPROVINCETOWN ART ASSOCIATION AND MUSEUM 2014 A Stellar Century of Cultivating Culture By Christopher Busa Certainly it is impossible to capture in a few pages a century of creative activity, with all the long hours in the studio, caught between doubt and decision, that hundreds of artists of the area have devoted to making art, but we can isolate some crucial directions, key figures, and salient issues that motivate artists to make art. We can also show why Provincetown has been sought out by so many of the nation’s notable artists, performers, and writers as a gathering place for creative activity. At the center of this activity, the Provincetown Art Associ- ation, before it became an accredited museum, orga- nized the solitary efforts of artists in their studios to share their work with an appreciative pub- lic, offering the dynamic back-and-forth that pushes achievement into social validation. Without this audience, artists suffer from lack of recognition. Perhaps personal stories are the best way to describe PAAM’s immense contribution, since people have always been the true life source of this iconic institution. 40 PROVINCETOWNARTS 2014 ABOVE: (LEFT) PAAM IN 2014 PHOTO BY JAMES ZIMMERMAN, (righT) PAA IN 1950 PHOTO BY GEORGE YATER OPPOSITE PAGE: (LEFT) LUCY L’ENGLE (1889–1978) AND AGNES WEINRICH (1873–1946), 1933 MODERN EXHIBITION CATALOGUE COVER (PAA), 8.5 BY 5.5 INCHES PAAM ARCHIVES (righT) CHARLES W. HAwtHORNE (1872–1930), THE ARTIST’S PALEttE GIFT OF ANTOINETTE SCUDDER The Armory Show, introducing Modernism to America, ignited an angry dialogue between conservatives and Modernists. Tony Vevers reminisced in THE STORY OF PAAM BEGINS during one of the most turbulent times in Amer- an exhibition catalogue at the Provincetown Art Association in 1990 that ican history. Consider that the Provincetown Art Association was founded the Armory Show “also caused a rift in the ranks of American artists who in 1914, during the summer when World War I broke out and a year after participated in the Armory Show itself. Many of them were relegated to a the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, secondary position as ‘aesthetic provincials’ by the large number of Euro- where 130 artists from Europe and America unleashed avant-garde salvos pean artists in the show—who, they feared, would take sales from them.” Of challenging the status quo of established art forms, including the newly artists associated with Provincetown, the following had work in the Armory assimilated style called Impressionism. Fittingly, the exhibition was referred Show: Gifford Beal, Oliver Chaffee, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Childe to as the Armory Show since it was held in the 69th Regiment Armory in a Hassam, Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, Abraham Walkowitz, Ambrose city-block-sized stone fortress whose cavernous halls soared well over one Webster, and Marguerite and William Zorach. hundred feet. These early artists in Provincetown drew their inspiration from the people The Armory Show set off an art war in America that prefigured the seeth- who surrounded them: a fisherman’s son embarking on his first voyage ing nationalistic antagonisms across the ocean in Europe. The Cubism on the salty sea, a woman sewing a quilt for her child, a down-and-out of Picasso, Braque, Picabia, Duchamp, and Gleizes directly challenged derelict knowing he must buck up from Ashcan angst and be strong. Their accepted ways of seeing, especially the illusions established by Renaissance inspiration was the consequence of those who looked, read, listened, and perspective. The art displayed caused a volcanic displacement of Victorian responded to the passionate effort to go beyond the mundane into some social structures, fostering profound social changes in the relations between plenitude of vital existence, some profound desire to find fulfillment in men, women, laboring masses, and political leaders. symbols of what could be. The mind-altering carnage of the First World War forced a psychological One of the founders of the Art Association, Charles Hawthorne, began shift in the very processes of our memory: extreme trauma could no longer life as the son of a Maine ship captain, and embarked on his voyage to New be accessed directly; modern awareness required the distanced, belated York to study art at the Art Students League under the tutelage of William perspective of ironic apprehension. This new perspective brought about Merritt Chase, becoming Chase’s assistant at his summer school on the a quantum shift in the way we looked at art. If time had earlier been a South Fork of Eastern Long Island. When Chase decided to close his school, dimension that kept everything from happening simultaneously, so that the young Hawthorne sought similar seaside inspiration and started his a single view could be held in a steady frame, then Cubism collapsed the own school in 1899 in Provincetown, where he ran the Cape Cod School of steady frame into the bewildering experience of multiple perspectives, Art until he died in 1930. He attracted hundreds of students and inspired apparent all at once. other accomplished artists to start their own art schools, including Ross The Provincetown Art Association was founded by artists eager to ally Moffett, George Elmer Browne, E. Ambrose Webster, William and Margue- themselves with their innovative peers, even if they disagreed politely or, rite Zorach, and B. J. O. Nordfeldt. When Hawthorne first arrived, no arts just as often, less politely. The prominent artists Charles Hawthorne, Oscar organizations existed to anchor the community. By 1915, the year after the Gieberich, William Halsall, Gerrit Beneker, and E. Ambrose Webster, along Art Association was founded, the Boston Globe declared in a now-famous with several local business men and women, including William H. Young, headline: “Biggest Art Colony in the World in Provincetown.” joined forces to create a new and vital organization dedicated, in the words Hawthorne sought out sea-surrounded Provincetown, a place where art- of its 1921 mission statement, “to exhibit and collect artworks of merit, ists could live on little money and savor the simple satisfactions of stunning and to educate the public in the arts.” These artists awakened to an under- natural beauty, abundant bounty from the ocean, stimulating company, and standing that they shared a common cause, a desire to transform a personal the creative freedom to devote concentrated time to painting. The light was ambition into something transcendent, utilizing the power of their medium irradiated with refractions off the water, bouncing off the gleaming white clap- to concentrate the available into something equal to their aspirations. Their boards of houses, and enriched by the miles of sand running along beaches wants and wishes, their utopian desires, and their ultimate satisfactions and rolling across parabolic dunes. Sand, the principal component in the sought realization by overcoming a blank canvas or sheet of paper, with making of glass, amplified the atmosphere with its crystalline quartz mole- rhyme, music, and emotional resonance. cules; photographers found they had to set their f-stops at higher registers. PROVINCETOWNARTS.ORG 41 During his outdoor classes, often held on the bay-side beach, Haw- artists who formed the nexus of the now-famed Provincetown Printers, which thorne, dressed in white from head to toe, balanced an enormous palette, fostered the white-line woodcut as a way of printing multiple colors on a ergonomically curved to function as an appendage of his being. Students single block, were Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire. Anarchists, socialists, watched spellbound as he built up a portrait without a skeleton of drawing, Freudians, feminists, and free lovers, drawn together by common impulses, instead creating structure by placing “spots of color” next to each other in congregated in the Village and sought a summer refuge in Provincetown, the manner of harmonious musical notes. Frequently, he used local people as which was sometimes referred to as “Greenwich Village-by-the-Sea” or models, not only in his classes but also in his own portraits, where, curiously, “spaghetti with clam sauce.” he began first by delineating the eyes—which was contrary to his method of Now-famous names found themselves sharing the informal proximity of instructing his students to paint the model, wearing a broad-brimmed hat or Provincetown’s European-like ambience: journalists John Reed, who wrote shielded from the sun by a parasol. He also demanded the use of a palette Ten Days That Shook the World, and Mary Heaton Vorse, who wrote the classic knife to indicate the general tonal relations of the figure, leaving details portrait of Provincetown, Time and the Town, which so vividly brought the of the face indistinct, shrouded in what became known as “mud heads.” period to life; magazine editors Floyd Dell and Max Eastman and Eastman’s Hawthorne’s teaching advocated spontaneity. He urged students to wife, the crusading lawyer Ida Rauh; the innovative theater designer for the “make a lot of starts.” He urged boldness, freedom from timidity, and the Provincetown Playhouse, Robert Edmond Jones; the groundbreaking Post- expression of big emotions. He was a large man, barrel-chested and thick- impressionist painters Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Bror Nordfeldt, necked; he was the chin-up champion in a contest held across the street and Marguerite and William Zorach; writer Hutchins Hapgood, who wrote