The Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick To Show "Edward Hopper's Maine"

Written by Daniel Dickerson Sunday, 24 April 2011 00:39

Brunswick, ME.- From July 15th until October 16th, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick is presenting "Edward Hopper's Maine". This is the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Edward Hopper’s artistic production in Maine between 1914 and 1929. While there has been no shortage of exhibitions devoted to Hopper, very little attention has been paid to the fruitful summers he spent here. Indeed, Hopper summered in Maine nine times, painting and sketching in Ogunquit, Monhegan, Rockland, Cape Elizabeth, Two Lights, and Portland, among other sites. Many of these early plein-air oil paintings have rarely been exhibited. Bringing together approximately 90 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, this exhibition offers a crucial reassessment of the significance of this period for the artist’s later body of work.

Edward Hopper's Maine is organized in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art. This exhibition will feature works loaned from many public institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Harvard University Art Museums, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, as well as from private collections. Edward Hopper’s Maine will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue published by Delmonico Books – Prestel. Renowned Hopper scholar Carol Troyen contributes the lead essay, and other authors include actor/writer/collector Steve Martin; Curator of Drawings at the Whitney Museum, Carter Foster; and poet and translator Vincent Katz.


The exhibition will provide an exhaustive look at Hopper’s work during this period. Hopper’s Maine paintings span two critical decades of the artist’s career, yet have never been studied as a unified body of work and are often overlooked in favor of his better-known paintings from the 1930s forward. This longoverdue exhibition will present Hopper’s Maine oeuvre together for the first time,  reexamining and demonstrating its significance to his later production. The Bowdoin College Museum of Art will be the exhibition’s sole venue. “Maine was a font of inspiration for Hopper, a respite from New York City, and the place where he established the iconic style for which he is known,” said Kevin Salatino, Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and co-curator of Edward Hopper’s Maine. “The exhibition will reconsider this important moment in Hopper’s artistic development, while enabling the public to see these works collectively in the very place that inspired them.” Hopper spent nine fruitful summers in Maine, in the resort town of Ogunquit, on the beautiful island of Monhegan, and in the maritime communities of Rockland, Cape Elizabeth, and Portland.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art was originally founded on the basis of a donation of European paintings, Old Master drawings, and family portraits given by James Bowdoin III and his family in 1811 and 1826. Initially, the collection was housed in a sequence of different campus locations until the Walker Art Building was completed in 1894. Included on the National Register of Historic Places, the handsome structure was given to the College by Harriet and Sophia Walker in honor of their uncle Theophilus Walker, a Boston entrepreneur and businessman. The Walker sisters were encyclopedic collectors and supporters of art education. They selected the renowned architect Charles Follen McKim, whose firm McKim, Mead and White also designed the Boston Public Library, The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and the Brooklyn Museum, among many other important commissions. A landmark building in the history of museum architecture in the United States, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is one of the few remaining structures in which the architectural and decorative ideals of the late nineteenth century are so fully realized. The Museum’s façade is based on Renaissance prototypes with a grand stair leading to a dramatically shadowed loggia. On either side are bronze statues of Sophocles and Demosthenes, copies by Sabatino de Angelis, a nineteenth-century Neapolitan sculptor of ancient originals. Two large lions, taken from those at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, stand guard on either side of the stair.


The Museum’s original interior consisted of a central rotunda surrounded by three tall, skylit galleries on the entrance level. The dramatic rotunda is capped by a high coffered dome, below which are four large semicircular murals by the leading painters of the American Renaissance: Elihu Vedder, Kenyon Cox, Abbott Thayer and John LaFarge. The mural scheme called for each artist to paint an allegorical representation of one of the four cities perceived at the time as most central to the development of western art. The paintings were commissioned by McKim, who believed in the unity of the arts, and constitute an extremely important ensemble of architectural decoration. In 1974 the Museum’s lower-level spaces were renovated and expanded, when Art Department offices and activities moved next door to the Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed Visual Arts Center. The Museum’s current renovation respects the history and integrity of the original building, while providing new spaces and systems in keeping with twenty-first-century standards. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.bowdoin.edu

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