Down East Books
$40.00
Accessible Look at Monhegan’s Art
Art books often intimidate people who have not already committed years to roaming the world’s finest art museums, absorbing hour upon hour of docent lectures. They can feel like unwanted homework, leaving you feeling like an uncomfortable guest caught in the crossfire of pretentious cocktail-party conversation. A delightful, new coffee-table book, The Art of Monhegan Island, aspires not to impress the cerebral world of the art expert, but to celebrate the mystique of a small, remote island that has inspired every school of American art for the past 150 years. Page after page, the images laid out by picture editor Arnold Skolnick evoke the sound of roaring surf against rock, the scent of pine in isolated woods and the vision of light shimmering through misty skies.
Coexistence between painters and fishermen has long been a tradition on Monhegan, located 12 miles from Port Clyde, midway between the mouths of the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers. “This was really the most daunting book I’ve worked on because the master list of artists who have worked on this island was more than 250 names long,” notes Little. “So I tried to select the artists who had made a concrete commitment to the island.”
The Art of Monhegan Island includes 113 paintings, drawings and prints by over 80 artists from the 19th and 20th centuries, from Robert Henri, George Bellows, Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper to Jamie Wyeth, Hans Moeller and Reuben Tam. The captions accompanying the images are excerpts from the work of Rachel Carson, Louise Dickinson Rich, Kate Cheney Chappell and Jan Bailey. From page to page, the art and passages provide a charming tour of enduring island landmarks, including Pulpit Rock, Seal Ledges, Squeaker Cove, Cathedral Woods and Monhegan’s companion island, Manana.
Artists appear to be so plentiful, so much a part of the community living on this particular island that, come the height of the summer season, they frequently become part of the landscape — on page 17, for example, Eric Hudson’s 1905 painting of “Maude Knowlton and Alice Swett Sketching” illustrates just this phenomenon. A visitor to Gull Rock on a sunny island this summer, 100 years later, might witness exactly the same scene (minus the two women’s copious layers of Victorian-era clothing, of course).
The fishing community is frequently depicted. George Bellows, for one, was so happy living on Monhegan that he played the snare drums for the Monhegan Marching band and captured prayer meeting in his lithographs. Different artists seem to witness routine tasks by fishermen — sawing wood on the beach, hauling lobster traps or playing cards on a cold winter’s day — in completely different, entirely unique visions. “The islanders themselves have a respect for the artists,” says Little.
Virtually every style in American Art of the past 150 years is represented on these pages, but the underlying thread of their inspiration is the isolation and magical beauty of Monhegan. All the “Ashcan” painters famous for their sooty, realistic depictions of urban life painted quite differently on Monhegan. Rockwell Kent’s depiction of the headlands inspired him to paint one way, while Reuben Tam enjoyed the same scenery with an entirely different result — and then it’s startling, mere pages later, to realize that just two years ago, Philip Frey and John LeBlanc viewed the same setting yet again through completely fresh, new artistic eyes.
Sally Noble writes for Working Waterfront and Island Journal.