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The turn of the century brought new faces to Cape Ann, artists whose
work signaled a real sea change. Realism was tinged increasingly with
imagination and subjectivity. These artists saw Cape Ann in ways that no
one had seen it before.
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Marsden Hartley, Rocks, Dogtown,
1930s |
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Milton Avery, Bridge to the Sea, 1937 |
In 1973, the Museum
presented an exhibition with early 20th century painters as the
focus. Although Portrait of a Place: Some Landscape Painters in
Gloucester included work by Winslow Homer and William Morris Hunt,
the show was dominated by artists who came later:
Frank Duveneck,
John Henry Twachtman, Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast,
John
Sloan, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley.
One of the most influential artists in this impressive group was Frank
Duveneck. He was born in Kentucky, but by the time he was 21, he had made
his way to Munich to study art. He was charismatic, a gifted teacher who
attracted loyal followers known in Europe and America as the “Duveneck
boys.”
Of all the artists on Cape Ann during this period, Childe Hassam was
most clearly in the mainstream of American impressionism. He returned
frequently to Gloucester over a period of more than 25 years, creating
oils and watercolors of harbors, docks and vessels that are well-known.
Among the oils is Shingling the First Baptist Church, Gloucester
(Gloucester Harbor) which hangs at the Museum. In 1918, he also
created an extraordinary series of lithographs in Gloucester, which some
critics believe to be his most original body of work.
Like Hassam, Maurice Prendergast visited Cape Ann repeatedly over a
long period of time. The Museum has two watercolors -- Annisquam,
Massachusetts and The Purple Rock: East Gloucester - which are
undated but were most likely produced c.1920. Charles Prendergast,
Maurice’s younger brother, also worked briefly on Cape Ann, and the Museum
has a small collage and watercolor from that period.
Although Edward Hopper first visited Cape Ann in 1912, a few years
before Sloan and Davis, he did not actually settle down to work here until
the 1920s. Hopper found that Gloucester’s 19th-century vernacular houses,
with their mix of Greek and Italianate styles, were a perfect fit with his
American realist sensibility. His hard edges and stark light caught the
bracketed entrance doorways, gables, window bays and other architectural
details.
Marsden Hartley also exhibited a unique artistic viewpoint in works he
created on Cape Ann during the 1920s. Hartley wandered the globe and
experimented with countless styles, always producing deeply personal work.
His best Cape Ann paintings had a single focus - the interior uplands
known as Dogtown. Hartley returned to Cape Ann in the 1930s, drawn back by
memories of Dogtown, and quickly declared, “Dogtown is mine.” What he laid
claim to was the same place Sloan had painted in 1916, a 3,000-acre
expanse of rock and boulder-strewn land which has been unhabited since the
mid-19th century. “I go alone empty-handed and sit in ‘Dogtown common’ --
a weird stretch of landscape....all boulders and scrub,” Hartley wrote in
a letter to a friend. It was his place of emotional and spiritual
rejuvenation. The Museum exhibits two of his Dogtown drawings.
Milton Avery brought a fresh touch to Cape Ann during the summers be
spent here between 1920 and the mid-1940s. Family ties to Gloucester were
strong. Avery met his artist wife Sally Michel here, and their daughter
March was born here in 1932. His Gloucester paintings cover the full range
of his development as an artist, moving from a conservative impressionism
to his distinctive mature style. By the 1930s, Avery had begun to favor
broad, flat areas of color. The Museum’s collection includes two gouaches
and an oil on canvas from the 1940s, as well as the Mother Ann
Sketchbook containing drawings Avery produced while living in a
cottage with the same name on Gloucester’s Eastern Point. |
