Observations about the Cape Ann Art Scene, Then and Now
August 7, 2024
By Peter Littlefield
I have lived through two great artistic scenes in my life, one was in NYC in the 1980's and the other is now, in Gloucester. They have something in common in the way the artists' individuality combines with a certain devotion to the community.
Fig. 1. Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002), New England Ladies, 1925.
We're lucky to live in a time of creative flowering here. There's a ferment on Cape Ann that is, to my mind, quite unusual. It is quirky and sometimes takes digging out. You have to look around a bit to see what's happening. So, let's celebrate this special moment! Because they don't come that often.
And the artists here—along with the larger community that interacts with them and loves them—look to the Cape Ann Museum to be adventurous in the way it engages their work. Because of its centrality in Gloucester, the museum has a special opportunity as well as a responsibility to illuminate the art-life of Cape Ann as it's happening and to provide the platform it deserves. This is indeed a creative act in itself.
Over the years I've watched the Cape Ann Museum develop from a rather stodgy repository into a dynamo for cultural exploration. I understand that it needs to look for popular shows that reach out to a wide range of people. The Hopper show was great. But the exhibitions I especially pay attention to demonstrate the huge depth and variety of art on Cape Ann, especially contemporary art. Giving this work a spotlight is crucial, so that Cape Ann residents can recognize it as something special of their own.
Commentary on the Current Show at CAM
Fig. 2. Helen Stein (1896-1964) , Portrait of Marsden Hartley, 1934.
The Cape Ann Museum is now exhibiting a rich survey of women artists, titled Women Artists of Cape Ann, 1870-1970, and I do have a quibble with the show. The museum’s main gallery is indeed filled with works from the 1870-1970 era. But there's actually a much larger exhibition of art—throughout the rest of the museum's third floor—by women working up to the present.
I brought up the discrepancy with Oliver Barker, CAM's Director. He explained that the museum only had the resources to research a representative selection of artists and their work for the 1870-1970 period, which involved borrowing pieces from outside the museum and from the James Collection (many of which are promised gifts to the museum). The works from 1970 to the present come from CAM's holdings and are meant to be only a limited selection.
Nonetheless, it seems too bad to have to present the artists working today as if they were secondary. The exhibition as a whole is a powerful picture of the development of Cape Ann's creative life up to the moment we live in, when much ground-breaking art is being made.
Impressions
The main gallery explores Cape Ann's long line of women artists, from Audella Della Hyatt (1840-1932) to Theresa Bernstein and Mary Shore, ending around 1970. To my mind, Bernstein is one of CAM's most important artists. Her New England Ladies [fig. 1] is a signal painting in the collection.
I love Helen Stein's portrait of Marsden Hartley [fig.2]. It seems to look into his character and triggers thoughts about Cape Ann's creative milieu in another era.
Fig. 3. Emma Fordyce MacRae (1912-2000), Boys on Harbor Rock (undated).
There is a portrait by Mildred Jones (1899-1992), a wonderful painter I only learned about from the James Collection exhibition last summer. There are two gorgeous paintings by Jane Peterson (1876-1965). I especially like View of Rocky Neck, Gloucester, in gouache, which captures Gloucester's working waterfront in Peterson's distinctive style.
Emma Fordyce MacRae's Boys on Harbor Rock [fig. 3] has a beautiful stillness. The figures, buildings, and boats—arranged around a body of water—all seem equal in relation to the environment, in a way that seems influenced by Japanese art.
Fig. 4. Mary Shore (1912-2000), Untitled, c. mid-20th century.
There are several works by Mary Shore in different media. I was fascinated by an oil painting and two collages in a kind of Paul Klee-like style [fig. 4].
Fig. 5. Margaret Fitzhugh Browne (1884-1972), Emily "Bonnie" Browne, the artist’s sister, (undated).
Several paintings bring up memories of my childhood, growing up in Annisquam. Rosamond Smith Bouve's (1876-1948) portrait of Wilder Smith is such a beautiful depiction of a young man. As an old man he chased me off Squam Rock more than once in the middle of the night. And there's the finest painting by Margaret Fitzhugh Browne I've ever seen [fig. 5]. I wonder if its simplicity and directness of feeling has to do with the fact that the sitter was her sister.
Post-1970 Artists
In the hall outside the main gallery is a selection of work done after 1970 by artists no longer living: Nell Blaine (1922-1996), Erma Wheeler (1915-2005), Judith Goetemann (1926-2019), Mary Rhinelander McCarl (1940-2021) and others. Across the hall, side by side with the older work, is a gallery full of art by women artists who are alive and doing important work now: Susan Erony, Ruth Mordecai. Gabrielle Barzaghi, Juni Van Dyke, Elynn Kroger, Dawn Southworth, Celia Eldridge, Clara Wainwright, Elaine Wing, Judy Rotenberg, Debbie Clarke, Pat Lowry Collins, and Diane KW.
Fig. 6. Ruth Mordecai, Homage to Matisse, 2016.
Separating the new work from that of the past in different galleries is an interesting way of highlighting the way the art and the artists have changed over time. It shows the development of Cape Ann's creative culture and the women artists who have played a central part in it. To different degrees, the artistic vision of the artists working today is transformative. They revision the world in ways that deserve to be understood as part of the shared life of Cape Ann.
I've picked out work by four artists to discuss, but this is not to exclude the others. I urge you to come and explore for yourselves. Ruth Mordecai has two oil paintings in the exhibition—Homage to Matisse [fig. 6] and Homage 2—that respond to a series of bas relief sculptures by Matisse called The Back Series. If you compare Matisse' sculptures to Mordecai's paintings—which I did when I got home—you can see that she has transformed them in her painting process. Mordecai captures the dynamic form of the body in her painting in a way that is powerfully sculptural. You almost want to dance with the figures (or maybe wrestle...).
Fig. 7. Juni Van Dyke, Nettings, 2021.
Juni Van Dyke's two small, minimalist pieces, Nettings and Trap—in pastel and ink—just knocked me out. In Nettings [fig. 7], a little white net, juxtaposed to a large dark red rectangle, is so incongruously distinct, exquisite, and anachronistic, it struck me like Zen koan. In its tiny tensions, it seemed to echo in the quiet of the mind.
Gabrielle Barzaghi's two drawings of the Dogtown woods, Stump [fig. 8] and The Stream and Susan Erony's Winter [fig. 9], though different in style and feeling, distill the beautiful and forbidding quality of Cape Ann's natural world into visions of the mind, in the same way that Marsden Hartley transformed the rocky moonscapes of Dogtown.
Barzaghi's two drawings - in pastel - are related. In what must be fall, an eerie, rushing stream penetrates a terrain of phantom-like trees, boulders, and a tangle of grass and organic growth, both deathly and life-giving. I have a visceral reaction to the drawings, having spent a lifetime in these woods, where, indeed, Barzaghi lives. The paintings draw you into a heightened dream-like sensitivity, where a stump sitting on an island seems deeply lonely.
Fig. 8. Gabrielle Barzaghi, Stump, 2012.
(Full disclosure, Barzaghi and I are working on a project together.)
Fig. 9. Susan Erony, Winter, 2009.
Susan Erony's Winter combines burnt paper and acrylic on canvas. It is just one of the most extraordinary paintings CAM has. Only the late paintings of Fitz Henry Lane are as numinous. The low winter sky presses down on an expanse of ocean-rounded stones as if they were the ocean itself extending towards the horizon: bone-chilling, impossible to traverse, and yet penetrated by light, just as in a grey Gloucester day...
I seldom feel that the seascape paintings that have piled up here over the years get inside the strange contradiction of hard rock, sand, bramble, water and sun, dank cold and humid heat that add up to the feeling of Cape Ann. The works by Barzaghi and Erony do, just as Hartley's Dogtown paintings do.
All of this work is radical, by women at the height of their powers. It challenges you to look more deeply. I think it is some of the most important art in the museum's collection.
So, I would have titled the show something like, “Women Artists of Cape Ann, Past and Present" or even "Women Artists of Cape Ann, The Past Meets the Present."
The Community of Cape Ann Artists
Jon Sarkin (1953-2024), photo credit: Michael Wiklund, Palate & Palette.
One feature of the Cape Ann artist community is the openness of the exchange among very different kinds of artists. I'm amazed at the way, over a very long time, Cape Ann's sea faring, island soul has attracted and nurtured a community of creative souls who love it, live in it and make art out of it. We've just lost one of those Gloucester geniuses—Jon Sarkin [fig. 10]. It was so moving to see the outpouring of love by a huge variety of people who visited him in his studio and felt close to him. Jon was not just a genius; he was an embodiment of Gloucester's genius. For Gloucester has always had a special way of gathering its residents around a sea of dreams.
CAM has made great strides in twenty years, but I'd say their work is just beginning. I'd like to see them hire a contemporary curator whose only job is to explore the living artistic community. (And that is to take nothing away from the magnificent work Martha Oaks has been doing, along with Leon Doucette.) This endeavor is not just for the artists; it's making the most of our unique shared culture. For what we have here is rare.
The Gloucester Art Scene vs. The East Village Scene
There is one big difference between Gloucester’s current art scene and the East Village of the 1980s. When an artist, gallery or performance appeared in some East Village store-front or loft, it was written about in the Village Voice, Soho Weekly News, Art Forum, or NY Times. Gallerists like Holly Solomon or the Met's contemporary curator and Warhol pal, Henry Geldzhaler, would come to see it. Or Joseph Papp. It wasn't hard to find a platform. There are such extraordinary artists here! I want to applaud CAM and anyone else who shines a light on them. This is a partial list of the groups that support the creative life of Cape Ann:
Cape Ann Museum, Matthew Swift Gallery, Jane Deering Gallery, Manship Artists, Mercury Gallery, Cape Ann Collectors; Rocky Neck Art Colony, North Shore Arts Association, Rockport Art Association & Museum, the Experimental Group, and the artist collective, Scribble; Gloucester Writers Center, MAGMA, Jonathan Bayliss Society, Dogtown Books, The Bookstore, Windhover, Lane's Coven, Gloucester Stage, The Cut, The Rhumb Line, Cape Ann Cosmos, Creative County, Berkshire Fine Arts, Wonderland, The Gloucester Daily Times, Good Morning Gloucester, the Gloucester and Rockport Cultural Councils, Gloucester Cultural Initiative ...
The list is much longer of the legion of people behind these organizations—and those working independently—who support artists, writers, and musicians, produce their shows and write about them. Their efforts are themselves a work of love and of art.
And then, of course, there are the artists...
©Bing 2024
Peter Littlefield is a playwright / director / dramaturg. He helped start the Pyramid Club in NY's East Village, where he performed many original shows. He staged his adaptation of Dogtown Common at Windhover for the Gloucester 400+ celebration and, with Gabrielle Barzaghi, has made a follow-up for the White-Ellery House, an installation of her drawings called The Resurrection of Judy Rhines. With Christopher Alden, he co-directed Peter Pan at Bard College and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Handel's Partenope at the English National Opera. His new movie, god's mom, is a metaphysical mystery.
