Salem

Artist Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858 - 1924)

Date1913 -15

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions14 1/4 x 18 1/4 in. (36.2 x 46.4 cm)
Frame Dimension: 19 3/8 × 23 3/8 × 2 in. (49.2 × 59.4 × 5.1 cm)

ClassificationsOil Painting

Credit LineHarriet Russell Stanley Fund

Terms

Object number1944.15

DescriptionAlthough Prendergast painted in oil from very early moments of his career, he increased his experiments in the medium around 1900. The seven small panels he chose to represent him in an exhibition with Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, and George Luks in 1904 at the National Arts Club in New York, differed in more than just medium from the monotypes and watercolors he had presented at the Macbeth Gallery four years earlier. Although he returned to his beloved seashore subject, which he had set aside in favor of the architectural pageantry of Venice, Rome, and New York, he focused attention in these panels on style and technique over subject and site, making his intent even more evident by titling each one "Promenade on the Seashore".
In stylistic experiments of these years, in which he organized his composition into horizontal bands, Prendergast emphasized the abstract potential of sky and water, and developed a shorthand brushstroke to represent figures and boats on the shore. His exposure to new art in Paris in 1907 reinforced and accelerated his commitment to innovation, and he brought his new work before the public through a number of important exhibitions in the first decade of the century: at the National Arts Club in 1904, The Eight exhibition at Macbeth's in 1908, as well as other independent shows in 1910 and 1911. This culminated in Prendergast's participation in the organization of the 1913 "International Exhibition of Modern Art" (popularly called the Armory Show) in which he was the only artist to serve on both the domestic and international selection committees. He also showed oils and watercolors in the exhibition, prominent among them "Landscape with Figures" (ca. 1910-13, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N.Y.), which was purchased from the show by journalist Edward W. Root, a sale that signaled new attention to Prendergast's work by important collectors of modern European and American art.
Prendergast's practice in these years was to spend part of each summer along the New England coast sketching in pencil and watercolor, filling dozens of small sketchbooks in which he also recorded visual observations and thoughts. He then reworked these ideas into oil paintings in the studio. "Salem" is one of several such paintings done in the orbit of his major Armory Show contribution. Small in comparison with "Landscape with Figures" or its related work, "The Promenade" (ca. 1910-13; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), each about thirty-by-forty inches, Salem is more the size of the wood panels, called "pochades," on which he worked outdoors as well as in the studio. The site of all three of these paintings, as well as of his highly important "Salem Willows" (1901-04; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago), is a park of the same name, identified not only by the title Prendergast gave his 1904 work but also by its prominent benches among tall trees and its distinctive harbor views.
Prendergast sought his summer leisure farther from Boston in the first decade of the century. He traveled in New Hampshire and Maine and visited fellow painter Esther Williams and her family at their summer home in Annisquam, on Cape Ann. On the coast between Boston and the more remote Cape Ann, Salem attracted many visitors in these years, as much for its associations with witchcraft and the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne as for the town's genial seaside park situated on Salem Neck. "The Willows," according to a local guidebook, was "one of the few such sites freely accessible to the public" and attracted tourists from far beyond the town of Salem, where "pleasant summer days bring thousands of visitors by water and land from Boston, Lowell, and nearer towns and cities." (1) There were restaurants and amusements for children, but the main attractions were beautiful views enjoyed in the shaded park. (2) From the diverse visual experiences we imagine he had at Salem, Prendergast chose to paint a crowd of his fellow summer tourists seated on benches, milling among the trees and enjoying the views. For the small "Salem" he reduced the number of figures, limiting them to women and focusing on a few salient postures and gestures. By doing so, he shed the sense of ebullient movement his large Armory Show canvas projects in favor of a more staid atmosphere further removed in time and place from an early twentieth-century resort community.
While brushstrokes animate the entire surface of this painting and gain attention independent of their representational function, the artist balances illusory depth and flat surface in interesting ways. Seven or eight figures create an arc from the left to the right foreground. Through varying their postures (some stand, some sit on benches, others sit or kneel and one crawls on the ground) and gestures (especially hand raised to head), Prendergast moves the viewer's focus of interest around illusory space and across the canvas's planar surface at the same time as he connects us to their humanity. Although we recognize a park scene with figures, some areas do not resolve themselves into naturalistic representation: are the strokes of paint to the left of the pink-striped tree one person or two, or only strokes of paint? In this small panel Prendergast distills observed experience through filters of more purely artistic, primarily abstract, concerns about the harmonies of shapes and colors.
Prendergast's pictorial decisions in Salem are the essence of his mature work. With them he evoked the worldly memory of a summer holiday even as his figures seem otherworldly and at timeless play, and he expressed the potential of human gesture and posture (important to an increasingly deaf artist) while exploring the free play of shape and color so that they represent both themselves and an illusion. These achievements are the foundation for his next and last decade of work as well as for his enduring reputation as a painter.
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Bibliography:
Hedley Howell Rhys, "Maurice Prendergast", 1859-1924, exhib. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1960); Eleanor Green, Ellen Glavin, and Jeffrey R. Hayes, "Maurice Prendergast", exhib. cat. (College Park: University of Maryland, 1976); Cecily Langdale, "Monotypes by Maurice Prendergast in the Terra Museum of American Art" (Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 1984); Carol Clark, Nancy Mowll Mathews, and Gwendolyn Owens, "Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné" (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art; Munich: Prestel, 1990); Nancy Mowll Mathews, "Maurice Prendergast" (Munich: Prestel; Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1990); Richard J. Wattenmaker, "Maurice Prendergast" (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).

On View

On view