Finding a pile of paintings hidden in a barn and never before exhibited would make any art dealer’s heart skip a beat. It certainly did for Michael Connors, of Stonington’s EaGull Gallery.
A woman came into his shop last year, he said, and told him she had a neighbor who was thinking of selling some paintings, but didn’t know what they were worth. The neighbor in question turned out to be the daughter-in-law of the artist Carl Cutler.
Cutler, who died in 1945, was an internationally known painter, and author of a well-received book on his system for the use of color, called Modern Color, and member of the National Academy of Design. He had stored the 40 portraits in his barn in South Brooksville, where he summered. No one had seen the brown paper-wrapped paintings for over half a century.
Connors had every reason to be excited: Cutler, a member of the Skowhegan school, had studied at the Museum School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts [MFA], then in Paris, where his neighbors included Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, and where he fell under the influence of Matisse and Cezanne. Back in Boston, in 1913, Cutler formed a group, The Four Boston Painters, that included Post-Impressionist Maurice Prendergast. That year, the group exhibited their work at the landmark New York Armory show that shocked the New York art world by showing Marcel Duchamp’s revolutionary Cubist abstraction, “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
Most of the portraits were done in the 1920s, of women painted in the styles of different well-known artists. It was as if Cutler had been experimenting, trying to figure out how a number of artists achieved their styles and how they approached the use of color. Most but not all of the paintings are completed and signed. There’s a portrait of a nude in the style of Renoir, another is Thomas Hart Benton-ish, said the dealer. Several are post-impressionistic, pointillist in feeling, and there’s a European genre-type painting, done about 1910, as well as one in the style of Raphael Soyer. Then, too, there are a number of paintings of groups of nudes set against a Maine background. Connors calls them, “Sort of Greek mythological [scenes] in the Maine hills.”
Connors, who received his Master’s degree in Fine Arts, but over the years switched to decorative arts and, last year, published his study of the furniture of the West Indies, Caribbean Elegance. Realizing the importance of his find, he called his New York partner, Trudy Rosato, to confirm his opinion. An art expert who started the contemporary art department at the William Doyle Gallery, a major New York auction house, Rosato flew up to see the collection and was even more excited about the find than Connors.
“We got the paintings,” he said, “and had a New York art conservator clean and make minor repairs, then frame some of the most interesting ones.
“In a way,” he continued, “the show is a retrospective of works [Cutler] was not known for. We basically saved this collection.” Well, all but one, which is probably unsalvageable: it has a bigger-than-a-fist-size hole chewed out of it by some creature building a nest.
An intriguing mystery lies behind these portraits: Connors has no idea who the subjects are or were. Connors appears to have used local women as models. A redhead with a pale pink dress leans against a woodpile in back of a gray shingled house with green trim. Another portrait places a pensive young woman in a hat before trees, rocks and the sea beyond. The most fascinating portrait of all, though, is of a black-haired woman, one hand on hip, the other fiddling with a string of yellow amber beads. Clearly angry, she glares out beyond the painter.
Wouldn’t it be exciting, Connors thinks, to have someone come in the gallery, where the paintings will be on exhibit until September 3, and say, “That was my grandmother, and that one over there standing in front of so and so’s house was my great aunt.”