This autumn marks a pivotal moment for the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA), which will be open past summer for the first time, in the winsome seaside town of Ogunquit, Maine. A series of exhibitions focusing on both the permanent collection and contemporary art highlight this ambitious move forward. “Ever Baldwin: Down the Line” and “Networks of Modernism: 1898-1968” posit Modernism as a starting place for explorations of place and psyche.
From the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, a large concentration of artists’ studios, galleries, workshops, and experimental art schools existed in Ogunquit’s Perkins Cove fishing village; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art opened nearby in 1953. Since that time it has been a seasonal museum, its summer-only status reflecting the ubiquity of Maine’s vacation culture. This year it will extend its season to November 12, emphasizing a new level of seriousness and ambition under Executive Director Amanda Lahikainen and Curator of Modern and Contemporary American Art Devon Zimmerman.
Founded by painter Henry Strater, OMAA holds a collection of Modernist artworks that reflect a specific historical current in American Art. Often nervy, frequently painted with heavy shadows and unapologetic gestural mark making, OMAA’s collection of paintings form a powerful narrative of turbulence and searching in the American vision. As a counterpoint to the rawness of the paintings, much of the sculpture at OMAA is geometrical, balanced, and hypnotically smooth. In conversation with this work, contemporary art in temporary exhibits fills the Eastern side of the museum, a windowed wall looking directly out at the ocean. Those currently on view pose questions about the dialogic nature of such traditional practices as painting and sculpture in historically crystalized periods, and asking how they intersect with contemporary art in both form and intention.
The OMAA permanent collection is intense and revelatory in “Networks of Modernism: 1898-1968.” Fizzing with the anxious energy of the early- to mid-twentienth century, paintings from that time period dominate this powerful show, curated by Dr. Zimmerman with selected work from the collection. Marsden Hartley’s Still Life with Eel, from 1917, sets the tone as a visionary, shamanic fable about a flower and a fish, anchored in an abstract compositional matrix. This narrative sensibility is reflected in the Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s peevish fantasy The Bad Dream (1924), while the scratchy attack of paint on surface is reflected in Walt Kuhn’s Sleeping Girl (1922) in which the aggression of the dark, zigzag shadows beneath an exhausted dancer seem to deprive her of rest. Nervous balances of darks, lights, and bright colors underscore more stories of labor and movement in Jacob Lawrence’s Carpenters (1977), Margeurite Zorach’s Sawing the Logs (1940), Channing Hare’s The End of Summer (1953), and Charles Augustus “Gus” Mager’s Cave Men (1930). Weirdness, tension, and off-kilter near-balance mark these paintings, all featuring characters on the brink of physical and/or mental collapse and all using aggressive material technique to get there. By contrast, sculptures like Adolph Dioda’s sandstone Antelope (1950) are almost obsessively harmonious and still, their surfaces smoothed and polished into silence.
