The magazine of the.visual arts July August 1981 $3 .50 Portrait: Art of the American Southwest Reassessing Lichtenstein, by Lawrence Alloway Henri Matisse and Dance, by Carter Ratcliff Summer Art Colonies John Perreault on Usable Art Photographs of Liberty in the Making Lannuier Furniture Painting on the Straw Hat Circuit At the turn of the century, American artists fleeing the summer heat established a string of lively art colonies from New York to Maine. by Karal Ann Marling route. Unspoiled scenery-sandy shut down and the farming of mountain beaches, opalescent wetlands, virgin rock was as unprofitable as it was tedi- Art journals used to succumb every Au- forests-was paramount, along with ous. The Catskill meadows seemed to gust to a delightful form of summertime the sleepy, backwater loveliness of an- be awaiting discovery by a founding madness-the special art colony issue. cient villages, where the odd studio sky- colonial father. Along with coat and tie, the dourest of light piercing the roof of barn or fish Thoreau could have been writing the critics shed all pretense of aesthetic house did nothing to ruin the illusion of script for the New England art colonies rigor to celebrate the latest squabbles, bucolic peace. in 1849, when he predicted great days fads, and fancies of the "Straw Hat Cir- The locations of the eastern colonies ahead for Cape Cod: "It only remained cuitThe art world hit the road for a were-still are-extraordinarily beau- to make these towns easy of access by traditional holiday spin through the tiful, which is why artists flocked to rail to turn the outside world toward Muses' seasonal campgrounds on the them in the first place. In the 1890s, the them for a summer resort." The tracks eastern seaboard. The hammockbound heat of city summers and artistic pen- entered Provincetown in 1873, acceler- tourist, lazily perusing the Magazine of ury conspired with that beauty to create ating innkeeping into a full-fledged Art or The New York Times Sunday sup- these edens. At the same time, troubled industry and saving the town from plement, could count on several regular small-town economies and improved inglorious decay; the cod-fishing busi- stops in the course of this vicarious public transportation helped set a ness had peaked in the mid-eighties and excursion along the "Coast of Bo- recurrent pattern for many out-of-the- slumped thereafter, while the whaling hemia." The Catskill Mountain art col- way hamlets to become art colonies. fleet had fallen victim to the introduc- ony at Woodstock, New York was one Summering in lovely rural settings, tion of petroleum. The painter Charles high point of the annual tour; so was where the temperatures and the prices W. Hawthorne, furiously squinting picturesque Old Lyme, Connecticut. were low, and the quality of milk and into the opulent Venetian light of the And farther north, in Massachusetts, produce high, became part of the late afternoon, his easel battened down the caravan always paused at Province- American way of life. Artists clustered against sea breezes, presented a strange town on Cape Cod and Rockport on in sweltering flats in and around the spectacle there in 1889, but he was by Cape Ann. Sometimes, too, there were Sherwood Studio Building on Fifty-sev- no means an unwelcome mirage. side trips to remote beauty spots like enth Street were every bit as susceptible Hawthorne opened the Cape Cod New Hope, Pennsylvania; Eastport, to the call of the countryside as their School of Art, America's first perma- Maine; or Laconia, New Hampshire. blue-collar neighbors. During the early nent, independent summer art school, Whatever the particular season's 1900s, Woodstock natives would be de- at Provincetown in 1899. Primarily de- itinerary, a fixed inventory of "colo- lighted to see them stream northward: voted to genre painting and the study of nial" charms was invariably found en the local bluestone quarries had been the figure in outdoor light, Haw- Above: As Henry R. Poore's The Fox Chase suggests, the appeal of the straw hat circuit was partly social. In the mantelpiece painting in the Griswold Mansion, the Old Lyme gathering place of American Impres- sionists, Will Foote leads a race; Willard Metcalf sketches behind a sprinting Henry Ward Ranger; a cow poses for William Howe; a half-nude Childe Hassam shocks MatildaBrown. 190I-05. Oilon panel, 5 1/2x104". Lyme Historical Society. Left:Childe Hassam 's 1908 Bridge at Old Lyme is awash with natural light. Oil on canvas, 24x2 7". Georgia Museum of Art, Athens. Right: Like other summer groups, this Provincetown sketching class accepted women more eagerly than city academies. Detail. Private collection. American Art Colonies for juried winter shows in the city. And, unwittingly perhaps, they aided the cause of group solidarity not only by identifying exhibitors as members of a defined colonial entity, but also by com- municating internal stylistic develop- ments with seismographic sensitivity. Summer annuals fostered regional styles, and an egalitarian, contentious drive to experiment when questions of what to paint started to give way to ran- corous disagreements over how to paint. The magic Ranger discovered on his Connecticut coast, the enchantment Hawthorne found on Cape Cod, were even powerful enough to sustain the colonial esprit de corps throughout the bitter crisis of Modernism. Ideas possess as potent a magic as scenery, however. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, driven by the sorcery of Ruskinian idealism, colonized an expectant Woodstock in 1902. Scion of a wealthy English family, Whitehead came to Mount Overlook, New York with the hope of providing a counter- Above: In his Parody of Fauve Painters Who Exhibited at the Armory Show, cultural utopia. But the factory system Woodstock artist Robert Chanter took the conservative side in the feud between Modernists did not crumble when his handcrafted and traditionalists. 1913. Oil on masonite, 3 7 1/2x45 Woodstock Artists' Association. 1/2". "Byrdcliffe" furniture -skeptics dubbed his enterprise "Boredstiff" thorne's courses proved an instant suc- ized the hard times Lyme had suffered -emblazoned with wan renderings of cess with amateurs and budding profes- since its glory days as a seaport. The Catskill flora, reached the marketplace. sionals alike-particularly with wom- mansion's colonnade wavered precar- Competitive capitalism did not melt en, whose easy assumption of equality iously and its lofty halls were populated away under the blazing logic of his with men recorded in colonial annals by a tribe of mongrel cats. The "Holy cooperative tracts. His own hired colo- contrasts sharply with their marginal House," as resident landscapists later nists drifted away, vexed by having to standing in urban academies. The came to call it, was home to the last of perform Morris dances on demand for Cape Cod School of Art enrolled hun- the ancient Griswold line, the super- the edification of visiting socialists, dreds of eager students annually for annuated "Miss Florence." When this irked by endless hours of "ennobling" thirty years, and provided the economic lady accepted Ranger and his friends as labor among the cows, irritated by work base and the artistic reputation from paying guests, she was becoming sustained only by firkins of sticky mead. which a Provincetown colony grew. housemother to· the American Barbizon By 1906, defectors from utopia had Often the advent of a landscapist and godmother to the elegiac tonalist made Woodstock a typically unregi- goaded a slumbering village into resort paintings that were to enshrine Lyme mented colony awaiting the evolution- status. Henry Ward Ranger, patriarch on the summer pilgrimage route. ary perils of boisterous students, wild- of the Old Lyme colony, was such a fig- Lyme invented the summer annual, eyed rebels, tipsy tourists-and a ure. How he happened to quit his train with the first all-colony exhibition of gabled gallery on the village green. in 1899 at the point where it connected 1902, held in the Phoebe Griffin Noyes These quaint buildings, housing the with the Lyme livery rig is lost to his- Library. This innovation spread with local artists' association and proclaim- tory. Perhaps fate intervened; since his lightning speed. In the days before for- ing the existence of a unique local students days in the Fontainebleau for- mal art associations with rules and ju- school or style of art, were a feature of est, Ranger had been looking for a cor- ries grew up around summer exhibits, any colony worthy of the name. By the ner of the New World that might recap- these shows were exceptional in allow- 1920s, in fact, an epic construction ture the hazy magic and smiling sum- ing younger residents-many of them boom threatened to rouse America's mer fellowship of Barbizon, Sevres, women-an unprecedented degree of Kelmscotts and Barbizons from their and St. Cloud. uncensored exposure to a largely sym- patented, rustic somnolence. In 1921 He found a new magic in the glacial pathetic tourist clientele. The annuals Woodstock artists broke ground for a hills, lowland estuaries, and salt mead- gave both newcomers and veterans a neo-Georgian gallery; Provincetown ows of Lyme and in the Griswold Man- chance to test the critical waters with an artists remodeled an authentic colonial sion, whose stunning disrepair symbol- out-of-town rehearsal of work destined house on Commercial Street; Old 34 Portfolio july I August 1981 Greenaway gowns who dispensed their nervous colonial confreres up and pearly Lyme mode, and the very notion hand-painted seashells, beaten copper down the coast wonder where it would of trademark regionalism had become bracelets, and pickled limes. The Mav- all end. Their Market Fairs, their Motif matters of antiquarian curiosity.