Date: Fri 25-Jun-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: JUDIR

Quick Words:

Woodstock-Bruce

Full Text:

Woodstock Art Colony At The Bruce

(with 2 cuts)

GREENWICH, CONN. -- The Bruce Museum will exhibit "The Woodstock Art Colony,"

from June 26 through October 17. The exhibition presents the work of over 25

of the leading artists who were active in Woodstock, N.Y. from 1900 to 1950.

The core of the exhibition will be works generously lent from the collection

of the Woodstock Artists Association, with supplemental loans from the Whitney

Museum of American Art and private collections.

The exhibition is curated by Hollister Sturges, executive director of the

Bruce Museum, and includes such artists as Leonard Ochtman, later to become a

Cos Cob Impressionist, Birge Harrison, George Bellows, Eugene Speicher,

precisionist George Ault, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Doris Lee, and Milton Avery.

Since the rock festival of 1969, Woodstock has been renowned as an icon of

counter culture. But its history as a flourishing art colony dates back to the

beginning of the century.

The founding of the arts colony is marked by a specific date, 1902, when Ralph

Radcliffe Whitehead and Hervey White selected the town of Woodstock to foster

a settlement, school and community of artists and craftspeople.

Whitehead, a student of John Ruskin and an advocate of the ideas of William

Morris' Arts and Crafts movement, partnered with White, a novelist and social

worker, and Bolton Brown, a printmaker, to plan a utopian community for

artists. They chose Woodstock because of the beauty of its landscape in the

Catskill Mountains and its proximity to New York City.

Whitehead bought 15 hundred acres of land below the face of Mount Overlook. He

constructed houses and studios for artists and artisans and facilities for

furniture making, pottery, weaving and painting. He called the community

Byrdcliffe, a derivative from his middle name "Radcliffe" and that of his

wife, Jane Byrd McCall.

Woodstock soon attracted artists throughout the year, some making the scenic

hamlet their permanent home, others spending summers there. The famous Art

Students League in New York City established a summer school there from 1906

to 1922 and opened its doors again after World War II, from 1947 to 1970.

Democratic, free-spirited and bohemian in character, Woodstock became a center

of artistic activity, reaching particular prominence in the 1920s and 1930s.

Unlike most colonies where artists band together and work in one prevailing

style, Woodstock is noted for its diversity of expression, strong

personalities, and ideological clashes.

In 1919, traditionalists and modernists united to found the Woodstock Artists

Association, established for the purpose of organizing exhibitions. Held

during the summer, when the New York galleries were relatively inactive, the

shows presented work by many prominent artists residing part time in

Woodstock.

"The Woodstock Art Colony" opens with the poetic landscape of Birge Harrison,

Leonard Ochtman and John Carlson, all prominent teachers in the neophyte

colony in its first decade. Harrison, who had studied in Paris in the company

of John Singer Sargent, came to Woodstock in 1904 at the invitation of Ralph

Whitehead as the first painting instructor in the Arts and Crafts Colony in

Byrdcliffe.

Working in a refined, tonalist style, he excelled at rendering the subtle

moods of nature. He was the first painting instructor at the summer Art

Students League, a position he held until 1911 when he was succeeded by

Carlson, best known for his broad brushed forest scenes.

By World War I, a new generation of artists challenged the standards of beauty

set by Harrison and Carlson. The young rebels experimented with a range of

styles, from the exuberant expressionist canvases of Andrew Dasburg and George

Bellows to the hybrid modernist experiments of Konrad Cramer and Yasuo

Kuniyoshi.

One of the most radical modernists to make Woodstock his home was German-born

Konrad Cramer. Familiar with avant-garde currents in Europe, like the Munich

Blaue Reiter group, he worked in many media -- photography, lithography,

etching and painting -- and pioneered abstract work. He adopted the stylistic

innovations of cubism to the landscape motifs of Woodstock in such works in

the exhibition as "Barns and Corner Porch" and "Country Store."

After teaching at the summer school of the Art Students League, the

Pennsylvania Impressionist Charles Rosen made Woodstock his permanent home in

1920. He, too, favored local subjects, like the now destroyed "Fireman's Hall"

in Woodstock, executed in a simplified cubist realist style, strongly

influenced by Cezanne.

The best known artist to settle in Woodstock was George Bellows. In 1920, and

every year until his untimely death in January 1925, he spent the summer and

early fall months there. He purchased property next to the lot of his close

friend Eugene Speicher, and designed and built a home in only four months.

He depicted many local sites, including a famous picnic scene showing friends

and family at nearby Cooper Lake. He is represented in the exhibition by

"Mountain Farm," singular for its brash color and vigorous brushwork. His

glorious career was cut short when he died of an emergency appendectomy in

California.

In the Depression decade of the 1930s, the artistic pendulum swung away from

modernism toward representational painting. Artists of different stylistic

persuasions practiced varying modes of realism to depict typically American

subjects and themes addressing social concerns. This turn toward a realism in

celebration of America was reinforced by patronage programs of the New Deal.

Woodstock artists received considerable support from such government

commissions. In this exhibition, images of a cement quarry, coal mine, and

reservoir dam represent the wave of industrial American subjects that became

so popular in the 1930s.

The high reputation Woodstock achieved in mainstream American art is

underscored by the awards given at the prestigious Carnegie Institution

exhibition in 1944. Woodstock artists Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Marion Greenwood, and

Doris Lee won first, second and third prize respectively, edging out honorable

mention winners like Stuart Davis.

Greenwood's career was divided between her study of Mexican mural painting,

her public commissions for the United States government and her figurative

work in the 1940s in Woodstock. In the exhibition she is represented by

"Summertime," the image of a pensive young black woman leaning out a window, a

painting similar to her award-winning "Mississippi Girl" exhibited at the

Carnegie.

One of the most original artistic personalities to settle in Woodstock was

Doris Lee. She achieved national celebrity in 1935, when her painting

"Thanksgiving" -- a view of a farm interior -- won the Logan Purchase Prize at

the Art Institute of Chicago. Mrs Frank Logan, the sponsor of the prize, was

so outraged by the critic's choice that she launched a protest campaign

calling for "sanity in art."

Many of Lee's works are realistic, capturing the unpretentious charm of rural

life with wit and humor, such as "Spillway" in the exhibition. Other works,

such as "Young Harpist," adopt the flat shapes and rhythmic patterns of "folk"

or "primitive" art to yield sophisticated compositions.

Her reductive forms have a kinship with the simplification of other Woodstock

paintings in this exhibition, "The Bridal Watch" by Rollin Crampton, "Early

Morning" by Kuniyoshi, and "Dark Birds, Dark Sea" by Milton Avery.

Emphasizing diversity, the preamble of the Woodstock Artists Association's

first constitution stated that its purpose was "to give free and equal

expression to the `Conservative' and `Radical' elements because it believes a

strong difference of opinion is a sign of health and an omen of long life for

the colony."

Although of many different stripes, Woodstock artists are united in responding

to the strong sense of place that marks the local landscape. The boulder

strewn face of Overlook Mountain, the area lakes and streams, the red barns

and farms and the seasonal changes are the repeated motifs of painters

practicing in very different styles.

The Bruce Museum is located at 1 Museum Drive and is open Tuesday through

Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm; Sunday, 1 to 5 pm, closed Mondays. The museum is

accessible to the handicapped. For information, 203/869-0376.