This past summer, the New Britain Museum of American Art (in Connecticut) presented an exhibition of works specifically tied to the Provincetown artist colony. The exhibition, containing works by over 100 artists closes October 16, but it will then tour the country with a stop at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, May 18 through Aug. 26, 2012. In the mean time, the exhibition book has been released and is available at a number of locations in town.
The Tides of Provincetown: Pivotal Years in America’s Oldest Continuous Art Colony (1899 - 2011) is a collection of essays about important moments in the art colony’s history, from Charles Hawthorne’s founding of the Cape Cod School of Art through today. In each period, we find Provincetown continually reinventing itself as the town changed from a Portuguese-American fishing village to its current status as a Mecca for GLBT tourism, among other things.
The book is not comprehensive, and everyone will have someone they think should have been included who wasn’t or someone they think should not have been included, but still it is an excellent resource for those interested in the history of art here.
Each of the nine chapters covers an important element of Provincetown’s rich artistic history. Former director of the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum Jim Bakker starts us off with a piece on Charles Hawthorne’s founding of the Cape Cod School of Art here in 1899. His chapter is chock full of information about the very earliest days of the artist colony – before it even was an artist colony.
Additional chapters cover the history of the Provincetown Art Association & Museum (written by its current director Christine McCarthy); the importance of Modernists Blanche Lazzell (by Robert Bridges), Ross Moffett (by local historian Josephine Del Deo), and Hans Hofmann (by Cape Cod Times editor Deborah Forman). Julie Heller and Whitney Smith give us a chapter on the Tirca Karlis Gallery, which once played an important role in the Provincetown art scene, circa the 1960s.
Of particular interest is a chapter by Elizabeth Ives Hunter, director of the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, whose own family is strongly connected to the Provincetown art scene. Her chapter, entitled “Academic and Impressionist Trends in Provincetown” sheds light on the various important players between Hawthorne and Henry Hensche. In it, she includes a wonderful partial transcript of an interview conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art with artist Peggy Bacon, who is quite candid about Hawthorne. Of his teaching method, she says, “He never said anything. He never showed you anything except that you must use this enormous palette of – God knows – forty-four different colors or something like that.” She goes on to mention that Hawthorne owned the local art store, intimating a possible reason for his insistence that students use a lot of paint and very large canvases.
Additional chapters by Forman and Alexander J. Noelle take us through the 1970s and bring us to the current day to round out the publication with thoughts about the future of our little town.
It is unfortunate that the book does not have an index, which would have made it more useful for research, but it does offer some wonderful visual examples of the art connected with Provincetown and some of the chapters will spark interest in further reading and exploration. Overall, it is an excellent resource for those new to Provincetown art history.
The Tides of Provincetown: Pivotal Years in America’s Oldest Continuous Art Colony (1899 - 2011) is available at local galleries, including the Julie Heller Gallery,
2 Gosnold St. and at PAAM, 460 Commercial St., Provincetown. It can also be ordered online from the New Britain Museum
of American Art
at shop.nbmaa.org and from
Amazon.com.
