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2 gosnold street |
"Biggest Art Colony in the World at Provincetown"
Boston Globe, 1916 In 1916, the Boston Globe Sunday magazine caught on to the fame of the small Cape town. The article described the feel of Provincetown in those times, with several active schools of art and inexpensive studios full of young art students. The establishment of art colonies had been a phenomena specific to parts of Europe, but when newly constructed railways opened up the tip of the Cape for travel in 1873, artists began to follow the summer vacationers to the coast. One of the most famous, Charles Hawthorne, established the Cape Cod school of art in 1899. Influenced by the French Impressionists and German Romanticists, he would encourage his students, painting from a brightly illuminated model sitting clothed out of doors, to "go out like a savage, as if paint had just been invented." Conducting his classes on the beach or the wharves, the style he sought was one that showed "the beauty of one spot of color coming against another." One of his most popular teaching assistants, Henry Hensche, continued the Cape Cod School's Impressionist tradition after Hawthorne's death in 1930. The Provincetown art colony was just beginning its growth when Hawthorne founded his school, and soon others opened for business. One was the Modern School of Art, run by Bror Norfeldt, William Zorach and Marguerite Zorach, Frederick Burt, who were concurrently all active Provincetown Players. The Players, a group of writers, playwrights and artists, lead the emerging effort to create a socially aware national theater. One of the first plays to be written and performed by the Players, Change Your Style , reflected the tension that came to exist between Hawthorne and his contemporaries (termed the 'conservatives') and the 'modernists' (or 'futurists'). Stated one of the 'modernist' characters (modeled after Bror Norfeldt) to an artist known for his conservative portraits: "I'm sorry, Mr. Crabtree, that we artists are hurting the picture business." Norfeldt is also accredited with the invention of a new technique in printmaking that made it possible to use a number of different colors on the same woodblock, greatly facilitating a previously time consuming process. Through this white line color process , cuts in the woodblock outlined shapes, that were separated on the print by thin white lines. The technique was original to the Provincetown Printmakers, whose body of work, produced by artists such as Blanche Lazzell, Tod Lindenmuth, Agnes Weinrich, Oliver Chaffee, and Ethel Mars, remains well respected in the field. The rift that was to develop between the 'conservative' and 'modern' styles played out nationally at the notorious 1913 Armory Show in New York. Featuring the works of Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keefe, Paul Cezanne, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and several Provincetown artists, (including Oliver Chaffee, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Abraham Walkowitz, Ambrose Webster, Marguerite and William Zorach) the show definitively brought modern art to the US at last. Locally, the Provincetown Art Association became the forum for the then current debates between conservatives and moderns. Founded in 1914, the Association had as its president the fiscally aware banker William Young, and as vice presidents the heads of the three most prominent Provincetown art schools at the time: Charles Hawthorne, William Halsall, and E. Ambrose Webster. With its membership nearly doubled by 1917, the original goals of the Association evolved. Initially meant to house a permanent collection of works, regular exhibitions, slide lectures and discussions were eventually introduced. The structure of the governing and advisory bodies of the Association was such that many of the same individuals who had founded the Association (many of them W.W.I expatriates who were in keeping with Hawthorne and other 'conservatives') remained in power for the next six years. In 1926, the 'moderns', led by The challenge to styles that had posed as the 'American Art' of conservatives (portraiture, romanticized landscape paintings, modifications of well established European styles) continued, however. Following the Depression, artists such as Edward Hopper and Frederick Waugh turned towards more urban scenes, and away from the nature that had originally attracted artists to Provincetown. When Hans Hofmann arrived in Provincetown in 1934, his school of Abstract Expressionist art continued this sharpening of focus onto the human experience. In search of things ultimate and universal, the Abstract Expressionists' cosmopolitan perspective made such things as the establishment of a national art seem absurd. Jackson Pollock, one of Hofmann's contemporaries and occasional Provincetown resident, noted that to make the attempt was analogous to "the idea of creating an American mathematics or physics ... The basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any country." Provincetown's size and location are no obvious indication of its intimate involvement in many of the discussions that were occurring in the art world in the early decades of the 20th century. Yet the many and varied artists that took up residence or vacationed here continue to make their rich heritage known. Through organizations such the Cape Cod School of Art (still very much in existence), the Fine Arts Work Center, Heritage Museum, and the extensive network of art galleries scattered through the town, Provincetown remains a place "to draw the artists and those interested in the arts closer together."
By Denise Bilbao
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