Museum of Art Exhibition October 20
Contact: Kathryn Jovanelli at 207.561.3352
Bangor, Maine
— The University of Maine Museum of Art is pleased to present two printmak-ing exhibitions as part of Celebrating 200 Years of Printmaking in Maine and in collaboration with The Maine Print Project. Richard Estes: Prints and John Marin: A Print Survey will draw from the museum’s important and extensive print collection as well as from numerous loans. The exhibitions will feature prints made by Marin throughout his career and by Estes from the 1980s to the present. Both artists, known for their interest in urban landscapes from Paris to New York, were nevertheless influenced by their relationships to Maine. The Museum of Art will also present Bernard Langlais: Abstract Wood Reliefs, 14 works by Maine artist Bernard Langlais. These relief sculptures, from the late 1950’s – early 1960s, employ simple forms and a limited palette and predate the carved, assembled figurative imagery he is known for.
John Marin
A Print Survey
In the cities of the early 20th century, John Marin (1870 -1953) observed “great forces at work”; it was that force Marin deftly captured in his etchings of Paris and New York. The University of Maine Museum of Art will present a selection of etchings, hand-printed by Marin, of these urban visions.
John Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1870. A self-described failure at business, Marin initially considered becoming an archi-tect, working from 1893 -1995 as a freelance architect. During this time Marin became in-creasingly interested in sketching and enrolled in art school. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1899 -1901 and the Art Students League in New York during 1904. In 1905 Marin went to Paris, where his father helped finance his art career. Within a year of moving to Europe, Marin began etching. Drawing upon his earlier attempts at architecture he etched scenes from the city. Marin, wanting to capture the spontaneity of the scene, often etched directly on to copper plates, thereby leading to final prints that were the mirror images of the actual cityscape. From Paris, Marin also visited Amsterdam where he made numerous etchings and paintings, and later traveled to London and Venice. During his Venice trip, Marin honed his technique of capturing his impressions of a place — its life — rather than just an accurate, but lifeless, copy of a group of buildings. As time went by, he began to shed the more architectural concerns of representation and focus on just the essentials of a building; after 1908 his etchings became more loose and freeform. Marin often worked through his ideas with preliminary versions. An accomplished printmaker, he often used a single plate to experiment with various meth-ods of printing and would often mark the prints with his evaluation or notation (e.g. A1, Best print, a Beaut, etc.) Marin adopted the practice of etching his name and the date directly into the plate; those prints that did go out into the art world were usually signed in pencil. After Marin met Alfred Steiglitz in 1909, he returned to the United States where the photographer served as his patron. That same year Marin had his first solo exhibition at Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession Gallery but returned briefly to Europe in 1910-1911 before settling permanently in the US. Steiglitz became an early collector of Marin’s plates, proofs, and etchings and his extensive collection is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. John Marin lived in Cliffside, New Jersey from 1916 until his death in 1953 while spending his summers in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, the Delaware River country and Maine. Most of all he loved the coast of Maine, summering in Small Point or Deer Isle and from 1933-1953 at Cape Split.
Richard Estes Prints
Meticulous, grand, and authoritative, Richard Estes’ (born 1932) prints of cityscapes at once recall the tradition of the Old Masters, reflect Pop Art’s rendering of the everyday, evoke Cubist approaches to the “reality” of a subject, and yet remain completely modern. There is serenity in the scenes, a captured moment, frozen in time, when one imagines being the only person left to wander the city. Subversively appealing at first glance, Estes’ visions might suddenly create a moment of panic when it becomes clear that you are alone in this vision. It is that starkness, that lack of human presence that belies his oft-applied designation as a Photo-realist. While his paintings and prints are certainly photo-realistic, the absence of the human element perhaps in some way aligns his work more closely to conceptualism or minimalism. Estes regularly uses his own photographic compositions to work from when creating a painting or print, sometimes combining multiple images to use as a model for the final work. Through this composite process, Estes creates a scene more “real” than what could be captured in a single photograph of a location. The prints featured in this exhibition are as subtly layered and vibrant as his well-known paintings, depicting urban landscapes from New York to Salzburg.
Richard Estes was born in Kewanee, Illinois in 1932. He received his first oil painting set as a child and later attended the Chicago Art Institute. In 1956, Estes moved to New York to work as a freelance illustrator for various magazine publishers and advertising agencies. Eventually he pursued a full-time career as a fine artist, creating mostly figurative studies. In the early 1960s he began painting urban landscapes, first with the inclusion of human activity and later without. Estes’ first solo show was in 1968 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. Since then his work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. His work can be found in public and private collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Neue Galerie der Stadt Aachen, Ludwig Collection, Aachen, Germany; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; and the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.
Bernard Langlais Abstract Wood Reliefs
Bernard Langlais (1921 – 1977) was born in Old Town, Maine. Although he had no formal artistic training in high school, he decided on a career as an artist from a young age. After six years of naval service during World War II, he attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and received a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, an event that changed his focus from commercial to fine art. Skowhegan gave him a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum School, where he studied with the famed German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann. In the early 1950s Langlais traveled to Paris to study at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study the works of Edvard Munch in Norway.
Langlais’ experiments with wood began in 1956, when he returned from Norway and bought a summer cottage in Cushing, Maine. During renovations to the cottage, he rebuilt an interior wall by piecing together scraps of wood. Langlais found the work invigorating and inspiring, and continued to create abstract wall reliefs that he showed to great acclaim in New York throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. These seminal works seem to unify a serial use of wood elements with discreet uses of color. The works celebrate their process of construction. Works from this series were included in the important assemblage exhibition New Forms — New Media at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960, as well as a solo exhibition at the ground-breaking Leo Castelli Gallery in 1961. While he continued to develop his technique in what he called “painting in wood,” figurative imagery began to dominate his work. By the time Langlais moved to Maine
full-time in 1966, he was making room-sized wall reliefs, which soon grew into monumental statues that still populate the yard around his home in Cushing. He died in 1977, leaving a lasting legacy in the arts of his native state.