Early folk art collecting in Maine: its contributions to modernism

Magazine Antiques, July, 2008 by Kevin D. Murphy

Largely rural until the early twentieth century--its factory towns like Biddeford and Lewiston not withstanding--the state of Maine has served as both backdrop and inspiration to many significant episodes in the history of American art. The landscape of Maine has been the theme of much art-making, while its villages and countryside provided seclusion for communities of artists who contributed to the shaping of modern art. The legacy of these collectives survives today in Maine's artist colonies, galleries, and museums.

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For early modernist artists, the landscape and culture of Maine were especially influential. Much of the state's contribution to American art has been connected with the practice of artistic retreat, something that serious artists engaged in during the nineteenth century, first in Europe and then in the United States. As much as artists on both sides of the Atlantic depended on institutions that were based in cities--galleries, art schools and societies, museums, and others--the myth of the romantic artist demanded from him or her a kind of solitary reflection that, it was often thought, could only be attained in the country. Moreover, as the processes of industrialization and urbanization chewed up the countryside in the nineteenth century, the unspoiled landscape became ever more cherished (especially by urbanites) both in its actuality and in its representation in works of art. Maine offered expanses of natural beauty to visiting artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many of those who came were in the forefront of the development of artistic modernism.

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Yet Maine's attractions went beyond the natural to encompass the cultural as well. In a sense that is similar to, for example, the coastal provinces of Brittany and Normandy in northern France, which attracted nineteenth-century artists with their barren coastlines and traditional fishing communities--seeming remnants of a long-standing culture that was threatened with extinction elsewhere in the modernizing country--so, too, Maine still had its small towns and villages where people lived and worked in ways that were outmoded in the large cities by the early twentieth century. The material culture of these communities--their houses, barns, furniture, decorative arts, and more--were admired as examples of "folk art" that was in every way in harmony with the tenets of the modernist artists who "discovered" it. Maine was one of the places where this affinity between folk and modernist art was pioneered in the early decades of the twentieth century. The state's importance as a locale where the folk tradition was reinvented for the purposes of modern art cannot be overestimated.

For modernist artists and critics, traditional culture--of which folk art was one material expression--possessed aesthetic value because of what it was not. Whereas modernists, in many instances, claimed to reject prevalent models of academic training that aimed at inculcating representational practices that went back to the Renaissance and beyond, folk culture was seen as having been insulated from the stultifying effects of academicism. It was perceived as direct and pure, stemming from utilitarian needs and making concrete natural ways of seeing the world that had not been forced into conformity with institutional standards. Thus the early artist visitors to Maine, when they weren't painting unspoiled landscapes, turned their attention to the material manifestations of traditional culture that, despite their producers' ostensible disregard for aesthetics, ended up possessing a beautiful simplicity that the work of an academically trained artist could not hope to attain.

Although artists who came to Maine from more populous parts of the United States from the end of the nineteenth century onward cannot have failed to have been impressed by some of the state's surviving high-style houses filled with elaborate furnishings and elegant portraits--all evidence of the prosperity brought by the Atlantic trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--they were just as interested in the scattered fishing villages along the coast and in small inland towns. Even if painters and photographers depicted Maine's storied mansions (for instance, the eighteenth-century Sparhawk House at Kittery Point), they just as avidly recorded the sheds and small barns erected by fishermen around the coast's harbors and inlets, like Perkins Cove in Ogunquit (see Figs. 3, 5). Such clusters of modest buildings were arguably more appealing to artists than were the fancy houses of ship captains and commercial grandees (see Fig. 8). Today, the fishermen's sheds would be considered vernacular architecture, that is to say, buildings that were the products of tradition rather than of training and practice by a professional designer. Fishing villages ended up in paintings of Maine because the simplicity of the vernacular buildings with their modest geometric masses, shingled walls, and sparse decoration appealed to artists who purported to reject academicism and professionalism in favor of direct expression. Moreover, these little barns and sheds clustered together could be seen as geometric forms. Thus, in many ways, the vernacular landscape of Maine was perceived to embody many of the characteristics of modernist art and architecture: an almost abstract geometry, avoidance of academicism, functionalism, and directness.