Current Exhibitions
Interpretations of Landscape: F. Ronald Fowler
February 4 - March 18, 2012
Artist’s reception, February 10, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
F. Ronald Fowler is known for working with a multiplicity of subject matter concurrently. The exhibition features his recent paintings.
Fowler graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in New York City and began his career as a book illustrator with figurative work for several major publishers. He has over 30 books and book jackets to his credit including projects as diverse as school textbooks for Watson Guptill to illustrations for The Reader’s Digest. He has also produced limited edition, special event, and theatrical posters.
In the early 1980s, after many years in New York, Fowler visited Provincetown and never went home. Like so many artists before him, he was inspired by the light of Cape Cod and he began to explore the possibilities of realist landscape and seascape in oil.
At the same time, Fowler also continues to do figurative drawing, painting and commissions and produces his “visually appealing ... delicately allusive” (New York Times) color-based abstractions. He was one of the earliest artists profiled in the book New American Paintings and has shown his abstractions in the Laguna Beach Gallery on the West Coast, in the Chuck Levitan Gallery in New York City, and in juried shows around the country.
Image: "Slicky Slide Dune"
John Joseph Enneking & Joseph Eliot Enneking
from the Morris Cohen Collection of the CCMA permanent collection
January 28 - April 1, 2012
This winter, visitors will again have the opportunity to view the work of John Joseph Enneking and his son, Joseph Eliot Enneking. These paintings were given to the museum from the estate of the late Professor Morris Cohen.
John Joseph Enneking (1841-1916), American landscape painter, was born of German ancestry, in Minster, Ohio in 1841. Enneking was a plein-air painter and his favorite subject was the twilight of New England. During his lifetime, his work was known and admired all over the country. He enjoyed a distinguished career as an artist and served as president of the Boston Art club.
His love for landscapes point to the role he played in American art history as an important link in the chain connecting the early French Impressionists to the American Impressionist movement. His first European trip, from 1872 to 1876, gave him the opportunity to study the established academic methods and the flowering of French Impressionism – almost a full generation before his work influenced the men and women who comprised the Boston School.
Enneking cared passionately about unspoiled landscape. He became an active conservationist, and was elected to the position of Park Commissioner in Boston. The quality of his work and his personal humility are demonstrated by the fact that he declined Childe Hassam’s invitation to join the group of Ten American Painters. In 1915, a dinner was given in his honor at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Over 1,000 people attended, and Enneking was crowned with the victor’s laurel wreath by Cyrus Dallin, the sculptor whose Appeal to the Great Spirit stands in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Joseph Eliot Enneking (1881-1942), studied with his father and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Joseph DeCamp, Frank Benson and Edmond C. Tarbell. He was an impressionist painter who recorded the New England landscape and was known for his sun-splashed landscapes.
The scientific world knows the late Professor Morris Cohen as the father of modern materials science, the winner of the Kyoto Prize and the National Science Medal. He was also an art collector, and this collection of work that he left to the Cape Cod Museum of Art attests to the fact that he was able to bring to his collection the same characteristics of discernment and enterprise that define his scientific career.
Dr. Cohen was drawn to Enneking’s work because he found it visually compelling. The ability of an artist to attract and hold the viewer’s attention across generational frontiers is one key element in defining the success of the artist’s efforts. During his lifetime, Enneking was an extraordinarily successful painter whose work was known and admired all over the country. However there is another factor of importance and that is the contacts made by the artist during his lifetime, his influence on other practitioners, and their influence on him.
Images: Left "Forest Pool"; Right: "Obersee"
Recent Gifts and Acquisitions from 2011
January 21 - February 12, 2012
The works of art in this exhibition are a sampling of gifts and acquisitions accepted during 2011. Included are paintings, sculpture and works on paper. Some of the artists represented are John Babineau, photography; William F. Boogar Jr., bronze sculpture; Craig Brodt, ceramic sculture; Peter Busa, silkscreen print; Robert Cormier, pastel; Emily Farnham, watercolor; Arnold Geissbuhler, ceramic; Xavier Gonzalez, oil; Lena Gurr, linotype; Megan Hinton, oil; Harry Holl, ceramic; Gerrit Hondius, ink with watercolor; Irving Kriesberg, pastel; Arthur McMurtry, oil; Elliot Orr, watercolor; Aiden Lassell Ripley, oil; Umberto Romano, oil; and Rose Ann Samuelson, acrylic.
Image: Robert Cormier, "Man with a Fur Collar"
Bill Armstrong: Photography
December 17, 2011 - February 12, 2012
The photographs by Bill Armstrong in this exhibition are works commissioned by Christopher Hyland. The commissions came about for various reasons: the three figurative abstract Jeffersons because Hyland was interested in having the multiple aspects of personality manifest in photographic art; the three figurative abstract athletes to celebrate the Olympics and sport in general and the degree to which excelling in sport transforms the athlete and the viewer. Hyland commissioned the abstraction of Copley's painting, because of the seminal position of the African, poised at the center of the painting ready to rescue Watson, a white boy of English ancestry and because Hyland's friends, Julia and Alice Meyer, brought him to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to see the painting which their mother had donated to the museum in honor of her husband, Ambassador George Von L Meyer. Most importantly, Hyland commissioned the triptych of The Last Supper in response to Pope Benedict XVI's request for contemporary art and because of Hyland's particular interest in Transubstantiation, transformation.
Three of Armstrong's Mandalas, for Hyland, were included because they represent three universal forces often found in major belief systems throughout the world. The fourth Mandala was selected because it was chosen by Hyland who felt it represented the quintessential abstract photograph, and subsequently by Aperture for the front page of its seminal book on abstract photography. The final one was selected because, to Hyland, it was the first figurative abstract he had seen that merited attention and recognition.
Bill Armstrong is a New York-based artist who received a BA in Art History, and an MBA from Boston University. His works have been shown across the country as well as abroad. His photography has a very unique quality to it; Armstrong plays with his photography, often manipulating the image through a number of different processes including photocopying, blurring or even changing and re-photographing a picture to create images that are very different from their original state. His photographs include both abstractions and images of figures.
Elizabeth Chater, Printmaker
December 17, 2011 - February 19, 2012
Elizabeth Chater was born on August 10, 1914 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother had studied art with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown and the family summered on Cape Cod. In 1995, until the end of her life, Elizabeth lived and worked on Cape Cod, studying at the Cotuit Art Center and she had many local exhibitions of her work.
In my artwork I try to maintain a vision that is both alive to the world around & aware of a visual aesthetic that is strong & vibrant. The integration of these two elements is what interests me most. I find that working in a variety of media keeps my thinking alive. One type of work helps the other & keeps me aware of form as well as content. By constant re-evaluation, I try to bring each work to a good resolution. I love the contrast of character in a variety of face – the drama of everyday life is what motivates me.
My purely abstract paintings are expressions of the joy of color movement & a kinetic sense of music & dance. I like to make us aware of the aesthetic qualities in the life all around us. My prints & collages are done in a variety of media – some in silkscreen alone & some with silkscreen & acrylic or pastels. I sometimes add color to the hand printed woodcuts. The mono-prints are of two kinds – some done on a zinc plate with oil based inks and stencils; other made on ½” plastic sheets painted with luma paints or crayons. They are printed in a press on wet Arches paper – the strong pigment creates a glowing mono print and may be enhanced later with more color. The colloges are of variety of things – old canvases – torn prints on Japanese paper-hand paper with silkscreen prints on top – nylon mesh screening or found objects.
-Elizabeth Chater
THE ART OF CAPE COD - 200 YEARS
Ongoing/Rotating from the Permanent Collection
Artists have come to the Cape Cod region since the early 19th century. Beginning with John Audubon in 1835, men and women of talent and imagination have been attracted to the light, the lifestyle, and the totality of the area’s varied visual experiences. In recognition of this, the Cape Cod Museum of Art features the exhibition, The Art of Cape Cod – 200 Years.
The exhibition drawn from the museum’s collection – with a few strategic borrowings from distinguished local collectors – gives gallery visitors a summary tour of the art of our region. Of special interest is the work of Marcus Waterman (1834 – 1914). Waterman graduated from Brown University in 1857 and traveled extensively, painting in Europe, Algeria and California as well as Provincetown. Waterman had a photographic memory and pursued his own vision which often included images from his imagination as in his Algerian-inspired Arabian Nights series. Waterman realized that the Provincetown dunes could stand as proxy for the Algerian desert and rather than traveling to North Africa, he painted many of his Orientalist works in the outermost areas at the tip of Cape Cod.
Image: "In the Dunes" by Marcus Waterman, 1908
FORMER EXHIBITIONS: click here
