“SUMMER SEAS, MONHEGAN,” by Jay Hall Connaway. “Maine and America in the Twentieth Century” is now open at the Wiscasset Bay Gallery in Wiscasset.
“Maine and America in the Twentieth Century” is now open at the Wiscasset Bay Gallery in Wiscasset. The exhibition explores the development of modernism in American art during the late 1920s through the 1950s.
A number of works by New Hope Pennsylvania artist John Fulton Folinsbee are featured in the exhibition. Folinsbee’s “River Lane” shows the artist’s evolution away from American Impressionism toward Modernism and the influence of Cezanne in the painting’s form and structure.
By the mid-1930s, Folinsbee was summering near Wiscasset on Montsweag Bay. Important works from the Maine period include “Storm Over Chewonki” with its ink black sky and “Goose Rocks Passage” with its luminous seas and sparkling white waves accented by an orange channel marker.
Slightly further north and 11 miles out to sea, Jay Hall Connaway was living on the remote island of Monhegan. Highlighted in the exhibition, “Summer Seas, Monhegan,” was painted on a blue-sky day in 1947. Despite the artist’s remote location, he made frequent trips to New York City where he had many one-man shows at Macbeth and Milch Galleries.
Arriving on Monhegan Island that same summer in 1947, Morris Shulman (1912- 1978) brought a new type of modernism to the isle. Several large caseins on panel by Shulman capture the fauna and floral life abstracted into vigorous brushstrokes of color.
Other American and Maine artists whose works are explored in the exhibition include Robert Beauchamp, Abraham Bogdanove, William Lester Stevens, Reuben Tam, Morris Blackburn and James Fitzgerald.
“Maine and America in the Twentieth Century” will be on display at the Wiscasset Bay Gallery, 67 Main St., Wiscasset through Sept. 30. For more information, call (207) 882-7682 or visit the gallery’s website at wiscassetbaygallery.com. The Wiscasset Bay Gallery is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and is located in Wiscasset village.
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