Maine’s Farnsworth Museum Marks Its 75th

It’s adding contemporary art to its old favorites.

G reetings from Maine and Mount Desert Island, home to Acadia National Park.

Earlier this week I wrote about the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish, N.H. New Hampshire’s only national park, it mostly celebrates Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture. The astonishingly good and various artist lived in Cornish. Acadia is God’s sculpture and, I believe, the grandest national park east of the Mississippi.

We usually drive straight from our home in southwestern Vermont to Mount Desert, so the premium’s on getting here. This year, we stopped in Portland so I could fathom the Portland Museum of Art’s expansion plan and then in Rockland to visit the Farnsworth Art Museum. The Farnsworth collects and interprets American art with a twist. It’s the art of Maine and art inspired by Maine, Maine the place and the idea.

It’s the Farnsworth’s 75th birthday. Farnsworth at 75 and Maine in America 2023: Celebrating the Alex Katz Foundation are two of the exhibitions on view. There’s also a show on the three generations of Wyeth artists.

The Farnsworth is in the very center of a solid, old Maine town. The museum comes from a $1.3 million bequest in 1935 from Lucy Copeland Farnsworth (1838–1935). Her father owned a general store in Rockland, but he multiplied his money through quarries, lime kilns, and real estate. Lucy, an intuitive, canny investor, multiplied it further. In the depths of the Depression, $1.3 million was mucho moolah. Aside from providing her fortune for a museum and a library and for the preservation of her home, she left the details to the living. Thus we have the wonderful Farnsworth. Over the years, it’s acquired a good collection “celebrating Maine’s role in American art,” as its mission prescribes.

Farnsworth at 75 begins with a nice surprise. I never thought about the Farnsworth as having any interest in contemporary art whatsoever. The collection’s known for 19th- and 20th-century portraits, scenes of everyday life, landscapes, and seascapes, with John Marin’s On the Road to Addison, Maine, from 1946, the edgiest thing there. Marin (1870–1953) joined the American seascape and landscape tradition — loosely, the Hudson River School — with post-war abstraction. It could be done, he proved, but past that era, the Farnsworth never dove into living artists, aside from Andrew Wyeth.

Now, the Farnsworth is probing further, with a video from 2020, Wabanavia by Jason Brown (b. 1973). Brown, also called Firefly, is a Penobscot Nation artist. Shown on a small, wall-mounted screen, his video is colorful and musical. It’s not the greatest thing in the world — it signals not a new direction but a more expansive one. Brown’s from Bangor.

There’s good work by the 19th- and early-20th-century artists Alvan Fisher, Fitz Henry Lane, Willard Metcalf, and other artists who painted Maine’s wild woods and rocky, turbulent coast. Rockwell Kent’s Maine Coast, from 1907, is the star of the first gallery. It’s a snow scene and a picture of Monhegan Island. Kent’s an uneven artist and best known for his woodcuts in the ’30s, but his Monhegan pictures convey spartan, lonely Maine better than any artist has.

There are two Maines, broadly thinking, the coast and inner Maine. Both are rough and raw, in very different ways. The coast is famously rocky, hence the term “craggy Mainer,” but Maine beyond the coast isn’t so much beautiful as vast, rural, poor, and sparse. Eastman Johnson (1824–1906) became a high-establishment New York portraitist and genre painter, though he came from Fryeburg in western Maine, where lumbering, not fishing or tourism, ruled an extraction economy that made some rich, while most just survived. His A Boy in the Maine Woods, from 1868, shows a brown, messy Maine.

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) was from Rockland, via Russia, from which her family emigrated in 1905. One of her black wood sculptures is on view. I’d use “rough” or “hacked” to describe lots of Maine art, starting with Winslow Homer and running to at least the 1950s. Homer was from Boston, became famous as an illustrator working for Harper’s Weekly in New York City, but lived in Prouts Neck, near Portland, starting in the 1880s. “Rough” is the one word critics most often used to praise — or to denigrate — his work, rough in subject matter and rough in finish, as the rocks along the coast and, inland, Maine’s mountains are rough. Nevelson absorbed this aesthetic.

Farnsworth at 75 continues in a wing of the museum, down a few steps, with contemporary art. I loved it. It starts with a stained-glass window by Neil Welliver (1925–2005), a very, very good artist who was based in Maine. I know him from his dense, immersive, big Maine landscapes but didn’t know he did stained glass. Why not? What a nice surprise.

I knew the historic art in the collection. It was good to see it, though the museum’s Homer watercolors weren’t on view, but I didn’t know many of the living artists. Ann Craven’s two big portraits of robins, from 2022, were revelations. They’re gorgeous, lush, modern takes on Audubon. David Row’s Storm Warning Breakdown, from 2020, is the best abstract painting I’ve seen in a long time. Row is from Portland and spends summers on Cushing’s Island.

Contemporary artists Tom Burckhardt, John Bisbee, the wonderful Yvonne Jacquette, and Katherine Bradford have great things in the exhibition, too. In the rotunda gallery is a version of Robert Indiana’s 1970 Love sculpture. Indiana lived on Vinalhaven, an island off Rockland.

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is closely associated with the Farnsworth. There’s a separate museum building displaying his work alongside his father’s and son’s. I didn’t visit and missed by a few days an exhibition on Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. N. C. Wyeth, Andrew’s father, was a robust, rollicking artist, and Andrew certainly has his moments, but I’m not a fan. Her Room, from 1963, by Andrew, is displayed next to Lois Dodd’s The Painted Room, from 1982. Dodd’s based in Cushing, not far from Rockland, and the Wyeths were, off and on, Mainers. Christina’s World, Andrew’s most famous painting, and a very good one, is set outside a house in Cushing. Done in 1948, the painting’s at MoMA.

Her Room displays my problem with Wyeth, aside from his sameness. He’s a good artist who always adds one element too many, crossing the line between spartan and schlock. Sometimes it’s one bird too many. Here it’s the freakin’ seashell. Dodd, whose retrospective at the Bruce Museum I reviewed in June, is the better of the two. The Painted Room blows Wyeth out of the water.

Maine in America 2023: Celebrating the Alex Katz Foundation is the other 75th-anniversary show on view. I wrote about the Katz retrospective at the Guggenheim last year. He’s by no means a bad artist. He had a few good, even consequential and high moments, but for the past 30 or so years he’s been in the retread business. There’s only so often we can rubberize a tire before, well, it tires and turns tiresome and flat.

The Katz Foundation is all about His Katz. Yes, he buys work from Maine artists and gives it, through his foundation, to Maine museums, but, more often than not, the art’s beclouded by mediocrity. Museums take it, hoping to be the last chair standing — and the big legatees — when he dies, and he’s 96.

As a practiced fundraiser, I can say “been there, done that.”  I’ve heard donors I’ve cultivated bequeath millions to gin-soaked nieces, God, and a dog, as well as to museums less deserving than mine. I don’t begrudge the dog. Some donors died broke.

Back to Alex Katz (b. 1927). Celebrating the Alex Katz Foundation is mostly about celebrating Alex Katz. His own work dominates. There’s a Katz cutout of a cow, and his cutouts are original, fun, and real. I feel the cow — her body, bulk, and bovine mood. Otherwise, the Katz work on view, and it fills the first gallery, isn’t great, though I like the portrait of Rudy Burckhardt from 1980. Burckhardt, a friend of Katz’s, was a visionary artist and, with his son, Tom, and wife, Yvonne Jacquette, Maine émigrés. There’s also a nice Janet Fish painting — Fruit Juice Glasses, from 2005 — and the brilliant Bernard Langlais’s Poodle, from 1977, which has to be one of the last sculptures he did before he died that year.

The exhibition’s beautifully presented. Most Maine museums get work from the Katz Foundation, so the Farnsworth is hardly alone in saluting him. The Colby College museum has a wing devoted to Katz’s work, which is overload to the extreme, but it still does exhibitions in its main building on Katz and his foundation’s gifts.

The museum looks fantastic. I loved seeing the old favorites as well as the art of Maine now, in the 21st century, which the Farnsworth is buying and buying well. The Farnsworth has a big, distinguished collection, with many riches by Nevelson, Marsden Hartley, Will Barnet, George Bellows, and Robert Henri. It has to rotate its art, of course. I think it’s a very comfortable, satisfying place. The museum’s on Rockport’s Main Street. Unlike Camden, nearby and very twee, Rockland is a genuine Maine town, and the Farnsworth’s Maine art shares that sense of authenticity. Museum and town are perfectly simpatico.