‘The Natural State’ At Flanders Nature Center—

Preserving The Artistic Legacy Of Natalie Van Vleck

By Shannon Hicks

WOODBURY — Flanders Nature Center has been in existence since 1963. It is a nature preserve, land trust, and a center for environmental protection that, while being headquartered in Woodbury, also encompasses a total of 1,300 acres of land in Woodbury and neighboring towns Bethlehem, Middlebury, and Southbury.

When she founded the nature center four decades ago, Natalie Van Vleck (1901–1981) expected the land to serve as a passive sanctuary. When her parents first purchased ten acres of land along Flanders Road in 1926, it started in motion events that led to Natalie inheriting her parents’ land, purchasing her own tracts of land (including 75 acres along Church Hill Road), and farming the land with sheep and turkey until her death on December 25, 1981.

During her lifetime Ms Van Vleck devoted much of her energy to farming — her sheep flocks were reportedly considered among the five best east of the Mississippi River — while also dedicating as much time as possible to a natural talent with art. When she moved with her parents from New York to Woodbury, Ms Van Vleck was an accomplished artist. She spent two decades embarking on a “serious” art career, yet still enjoyed painting out of the limelight well into her later years.

Two years after moving into Woodbury she inherited money from the May family of New York, which allowed her to build an artist’s studio near the intersection of Flanders and Church Hill roads.

That studio today serves as the Welcome Center for Flanders Nature Center, and is currently home to only the second major exhibition of Ms Van Vleck’s works since her death. “In The Natural State: The Nude in the Art of Natalie Van Vleck” offers the rare opportunity to view 21 of Ms Van Vleck’s works — paintings, drawings, pastels, and woodcuts.

(Last year Flanders hosted “Picture Perfect Woodbury: Natalie Van Vleck,” a collection of regional views by the artist. That show was part of a regionwide “Picture Perfect” series made up of eight exhibits with works of leading American artists, with all works created between 1790 and 1940, and all images depicting northwest Connecticut.)

The reasons for this summer’s show, says curator Marc Chabot, are multiple.

“Nudes comprise a significant portion of Natalie’s production, and these haven’t been previously exhibited, aside from one, to my knowledge,” Mr Chabot said. “One painting, ‘Sisters,’ was included in a 1932 show in SoHo, and at that time it was labeled Precisionist or Realist. It’s a Cubist work, as is most of her work of that time period.

“Second, mastery of the nude figure has always been a benchmark for an artist,” Mr Chabot continued.

“And third, what is not nature if not the nude?” he challenged. “There is nothing less pretentious, more basic, and more natural than the human body. It’s the conduit through which we express the world.”

In his essay for a catalog prepared to accompany “In The Natural State,” Mr Chabot also extolled the importance of recognizing the beginnings and evolution of the painter’s style from academic to Cubist-Expressionist, and then to the Precisionist-Regionalism of her “mature late style,” he wrote.

The exhibition allows viewers to discern the rigorous training Ms Van Vleck received while attending the Art Students League.

Finally, the collection of works also shows Ms Van Vleck as a nontraditional woman in a traditional time. She was, wrote Mr Chabot, “a feminist who favored men’s clothing. Strong willed and self reliant, she farmed the land and traveled the world alone. Most of her nudes are female, and most of the best exude an earthy self-confidence or a classical monumentality as they pose in her studio, wander rocky terrain, or cavort in some dense forest.”

“Strong and vital, they reflect Natalie Van Vleck’s forward vision, imagination, and experience,” the essay continues. “Her nudes offer an intimate glimpse into her character as a woman and artist of striking and uncompromising abilities.”

The majority of Natalie Van Vleck’s oeuvre was unfortunately sold off in auction in 1992, which leaves Flanders Nature Center with a huge hole in the heart of its preservation efforts. Not only are many of Ms Van Vleck’s original paintings now in the hands of private collectors, the records from the auction conducted 22 years ago are so sketchy that the location of most of those paintings is almost impossible to track down.

“We’re hoping that a show like this will encourage owners of Natalie Van Vleck works to contact Flanders Nature Center, perhaps to loan pieces for future shows or at least to allow documentation of her works,” said Mr Chabot, who has been working on researching and cataloging Van Vleck artwork for a number of years. He has been the curator for Flanders for three years, on the art committee of FNC since its formation in 1997, and interested in the work of Ms Van Vleck since attending the Litchfield Auction Gallery event in 1992 that broke up the Van Vleck collection.

“Seeing all of that work together was a revelation,” said Mr Chabot. “I have since that time been trying to put that collection back together.”

Mr Chabot has been aggressively researching where the Van Vleck works went after the auction, and cataloging all of his information. To date he has located 120 works in 55 private and public collections.

“It’s a lot of work but it’s also fun,” he said, “It’s great when you make a phone call and you discover another one.”

The catalog he created for the Flanders exhibition offers color reproductions of all of the works in the show (a first for Ms Van Vleck’s paintings), an introductory essay and a brief biography of Ms Van Vleck, and detailed notes about every work that is in the show. Mr Chabot’s work is the first new examination of Natalie Van Vleck’s work since 1992, when Peter Falk wrote an essay prior to the Litchfield auction.

Many of the works in “In The Natural State” are being exhibited for the first time. Many have been restored and stretched for the first time, according to Mr Chabot, in 80-plus years.

“This is really a cool show,” continued Mr Chabot, who is also an artist. “When you see these works in her studio, which is a thing of rustic beauty, it’s perfect.

“The interior looks very Arts and Craft,” he continued. “She was a very Renaissance woman. She made her own frames.”

Mr Chabot actually met Ms Van Vleck years ago. The naturalist Duncan MacDougal visited Mr Chabot’s fifth grade class, and then led the class on a field trip to Flanders Nature Center.

“She was a character,” laughed Mr Chabot. “We didn’t know quite what to make of her. She was in her mid-60s by then, dressed like a man in her tweed jacket and even looking a little like a man with her short gray hair.

“She was a feminist,” he added admiringly. “She was ahead of her time. She was a very forward-looking painter.”

Although Cubism was well established during the 1920s and he was meeting Ms Van Vleck four decades later, Mr Chabot says “it still was an act of courage for her to paint in this manner.

“I’m not a chauvinist,” he says quickly. “But the women were very much in the minority in the art world and I’m just pointing that out.”

The exhibition’s dates, which originally had the exhibition closing at the end of this month, have been extended to September 30.

“This gives the public more time to see these paintings [before they] go back into private collections or storage,” Mr Chabot said this week. “It is the first and last time for quite a time they will be seen together, except for the new catalog.”

“In The Natural State: The Nude in the Art of Natalie Van Vleck” can be viewed Monday through Friday between 10 am and 5 pm until September 30. The Flanders Nature Center Studio Welcome Center is at the corner of Flanders and Church Hill roads. Call 203-263-3711 for additional information.