Freedom Sugar and Acid Baths in Maine

Colby College Museum’s summer shows are smart and packed with good art.

E nough of Cassatt, Degas, and Impressionist Paris already. What was happening in Fryeburg, Maine, you’re asking. In the 1860s and 1870s. There, neither a boulevard stroll nor a chanteuse warble nor a swig of absinthe was to be had. Early in Eastman Johnson’s life, rural, tiny Fryeburg, in western Maine, and Augusta, the capital, were his frame of reference. Johnson (1824–1906), born near Fryeburg, was the portraitist and great painter of scenes of everyday life once known as America’s Rembrandt for the composure of his figures and his muted palette of sienna, vermillion, yellow ochre, and cobalt.

Johnson is best known to American art-history buffs, but in that confined realm, he’s as essential as Homer, Whistler, and Eakins. In his many hundreds of portraits and genre pictures, Johnson visualized a national zeitgeist starting in the days before the Civil War and going through the Gilded Age. Most of the sensate among us know his Cranberry Harvest, from 1880, a Nantucket scene and hard to beat as a tribute to rural life.

Johnson topped the New York art establishment, an elite well mixed with the social, economic, and political worlds. He never forgot his Maine roots, though. As part of our yearly Maine vacation, we stopped at the lovely, art-packed Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville to see Eastman Johnson and Maine.

In the 1860s and ’70s, he drew off and on from Maine life and imagery to explore nationwide themes. He visited Maine to see family but also to refresh his conception of country life. Too much New York degrades a healthy soul. Fryeburg is still tiny and still rural but packs a punch as the site of Maine’s biggest agricultural fair, running yearly since 1851. Bulls, pigs, oxen, sheep, rabbits, and goats strut their stuff. There, “bollocks” isn’t a statement of ridicule. They are on parade and to be celebrated in all shapes and sizes.

The museum exhibition isn’t big — about 30 objects in two galleries — but it’s a curatorial master class in developing and enriching art in the permanent collection. The star of the exhibition is Party in the Maple Sugar Camp, from between 1861 and 1865, owned by the museum. Yes, it’s a party and it looks like a bacchanal, with dancing locals who might be high on life or buzzed by a maple-sugar high, but a splash of hooch makes for willowy moves, too. Like most Johnson paintings, it’s much more.

The party is called a sugaring off. In northern New England, running sap from sugar maples is the first sign of spring, far more reliable than Groundhog’s Day. It might snow a few, or even many, more feet — the sap tends to start running in March, when nights are cold and days are in the warm 40s — but the end of winter is nigh.

We learn that Party in the Maple Sugar Camp is one of 25 or so oil sketches for a complex eight-footer that Johnson planned, a scene depicting the sugaring as a rural New England cosmos. Measurement and Contemplation and On Their Way to Camp, both loans in the exhibition, are smaller oil sketches of other figures who would have been in the finished picture. On Their Way to Camp is very finished and might have been, in Johnson’s view, ready to sell. The first depicts two of the scraggly sugar makers who would have supervised and augmented the bubbling pot, a 24-hour-a-day task. The second enlists teens to transport a barrel of sap in a sled while a small child rides the barrel like a pony. Country life has legs, we see. Every age has a part.

Johnson was a very political artist. He started as a Washington portraitist of the high and mighty in D.C. Negro Life at the South, the 1859 painting that made him famous, parsed the delicate dance of life for blacks in the capital right before the Civil War. He was a passionate Union supporter. In developing his sugaring artworks, Johnson hoped to advance maple sugar, made into cakes of hardened, fully evaporated sap, as a symbolic, if not practical, alternative to cane sugar.

Maple sugar was, Johnson believed, free sugar. Cane sugar came mostly from plantations worked by slaves, not only in the South but in the Caribbean. Johnson, adept, smart, and subtle, often equivocates, gives multiple sides of the story, and comes out not black-and-white but gray, where a country as big and various as ours often finds itself. Maple sugar, he knew, would never be the nation’s sweetener of choice. It couldn’t be mass-produced. There’s more than a touch of nostalgia in his work.

Other states might have deployed more men and guns to the Union cause than northern New England, but there, where Johnson was born and raised, Union spirit was fervent and universal. In the 1860 presidential election, every county in Maine voted for Lincoln. His vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was from Bangor and Maine’s first Republican governor. Barn Interior at Corn Husking Time, from 1860 and loaned by the Everson Museum in Syracuse, is a rare case of actual advocacy, at least for Johnson. Carved into the barn door is “Lincoln” and “Hamlon.” Johnson thus proposes that Mainers can’t spell but know how to vote correctly and with conviction. Lincoln disastrously dumped Hamlin in 1864 for the drunkard, hothead, and Democrat Andrew Johnson, who was a Reconstruction wet compared with Hamlin, who had a vision of tough love for traitors. A President Hamlin might have pushed a hard Reconstruction, but no one at the time could have been a worse president than Johnson.

Barn Swallows, from 1878, is a lovely scene of Johnson’s nephews and nieces who lived in Kennebunkport, so it’s a portrait and a scene of everyday life. A baby boom in the years after the Civil War made for a new taste for children in art, as did fresh meaning for innocence and rejuvenation after the war’s carnage. Spinster cat ladies were in very short supply while America looked forward to abundance on all fronts.

Eastman Johnson in Maine is a thoughtful slice of Johnson’s 50-year career. His Gilded Age portraits, some grand, and his New York bourgeois interiors are irrelevant. To its great credit, the museum abhors clutter and, unlike the Met, doesn’t throw loans on the wall simply because it has the power to get them. Small is often best and often the disciplined, coherent way to go.

Party in the Sugar Camp, from the Colby collection and magical, mysterious, and plain fun, is displayed in the context of amiable, agrarian-themed and aesthetic friends. The museum could easily have borrowed Sugaring Off, Johnson’s eight-foot-wide and very loose sketch for what might have been his final maple-sugar party scene. With 40 figures, it’s informative. The RISD museum in Providence owns it, so it’s nearby, but, big enchilada that it is, it would have thrown the scale and harmony of the Colby space off kilter. Curatorial restraint like this is so rare — it’s to be admired.

In the adjacent gallery, we see more context in art, all but one by other Americans, all from roughly the same period as Johnson’s Maine scenes, and all from the Colby collection. The second half of the 19th century wasn’t all harvests and hootenannies. Sanford Gifford and his Luminist confrères painted sublime, minimalist landscapes as the Hudson River School evolved, one of which is in the gallery. There’s a Western scene by Worthington Whittredge, two Winslow Homers, among them a rare portrait and a scene of women at leisure on the beach, and William Merritt Chase’s startlingly good Boy Eating an Apple. For an innocuous subject, it doesn’t lack for dynamism.

This is an inspired arrangement. The museum’s 19th-century galleries are closed for repainting and a rehang, so this space offers a cross section of what’s in storage until the fall. My only complaint is the loss — temporarily — of Whistler’s Chelsea in Ice, from 1864. There’s a Whistler portrait of a child in the Eastman Johnson space dedicated to American art in his era, but Chelsea in Ice is a Whistler triumph in tone and subtlety. As a rule, it should always be on view. And hadn’t we seen enough kids?

There are two other exhibitions on view. Surface Tension: Etchings from the Collection uses the museum’s permanent print collection to its best advantage, but, to be more fragrant, it’s an extraordinarily good look at the intricacies of etching. I’ve seen hundreds of exhibitions on the technique of printmaking, and, by coincidence, I’ve just written stories mostly about the prints by Degas and Mary Cassatt. Surface Tension is the best I can remember. “Without acid, there is no etching,” the show quotes Whistler to begin.

There are good bits on chemistry, metallurgy, and mining — nothing onerous, but art doesn’t come from happy thoughts and twitching our noses. Etchings start by coating a plate with a waxy solution. The artist draws on the treated plate. The plate goes into an acid bath that bites, or burns, the lines into the plate. He then inks the plate and runs the thing through a press. Voilà, An etching. From there, the complications and possibilities abound.

Sections display soft-ground etchings, photogravures, and aquatints — all tried and true as well as variable — and open-bite, sugar-lift, spit-bite, and lift-ground etchings, which are very modern. The Colby museum’s collection of prints by Whistler is the best in the country and well deployed as Surface Tension considers traditional etchings. Colby owns good Goyas, too, so early aquatints are covered. Goya’s granular dark and light background tones, some speckled, some coarse, create his dreamy, often nocturnal atmospheres. Aquatint involves not an etched line but sprinkled powder that, when bathed in acid, marks the plate with countless dots.

Terry Winters, Leonardo Drew, Richard Serra, Julie Mehretu, and many other post-1970s artists did wild things with their metal plates and acid baths. Almost every object in the show has a clear, revelatory label explaining the artist’s technique. Drew’s CPP1, from 2015, started as two rubber floor mats, which, since they’re industrially produced, should be without lines or specks, but nothing’s perfect. He transferred their subtle, tiny imperfections onto a plate bathed in a series of acid baths, one or two cutting more deeply, and one with aquatint added. The artist then brushed and spooned egg whites to create lines that look like cracks, and globs that look like craters. Printed in blue, the etching — and it still qualifies as an etching — seems like a pair of images of outer space.

Amy Sillman’s R & E, from 2007, started as a plate covered in aquatint. She applied a second layer of soap, fat, and white pigment that acted as a permeable barrier during the acid bath. The look suggests brushstrokes. This takes experimentation and a love of arbitrary results, but it works.

The college museum is a teaching institution, and at Colby, professors of art history and studio art are part of a single art department. This means that everyone’s invested in technique. Surface Tensions excels on every front, but I know I learned a lot, and I started my academic career as a print specialist. Sometimes I look at an etching made by a young artist and wonder what makes it an etching since my foundation in etching connoisseurship is the work of Rembrandt, Goya, and Whistler. Over the past few years, technology has revolutionized etchings, as well as artists and printers who are more than willing to push boundaries.

The exhibition does what college art museums try to do sometimes and often fail. Surface Tension is meaningful to beginning students, art lovers, artists, handy people of all stripes, academics, and the random art critic.

I didn’t know much about Martha Diamond (1944–2023), who painted abstract cityscapes inspired by New York, where she lived. We can’t know everything, and often a little knowledge is a bad thing. I thought of Diamond as part of what I call the Thick Paint School that includes Joan Mitchell, Jules Olitski, Alex Katz at times, and Frank Auerbach. No Spatula Left Behind might as well be this school’s motto.

This is mean of me, ring of truth that it might have, and, in the case of Diamond, unfair, as I learned in Deep Time, a survey of her work done by the college museum and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.

Diamond paints thick and big, but she once said, “If I express anything, it’s how the brush works.” She does indeed use big brushes, as do house painters, but she handles them with slashing subtlety. Much of the work in the show depicts tall Manhattan buildings at night. Interior lights shine through windows. We humans see everything at weird angles and in fragments, since everyone in New York is always on the move. Her nocturnes are ghostly and remind me of Oscar Bluemner’s architectural nocturnes. During the day, her architectural metal and glass shimmers. Sometimes the city looks like a mirage.

Diamond doesn’t suffer entirely from gigantism. Some of her work is big, but she works in different scales. I initially thought Deep Time had too many objects. But having spent lots of time looking at her spooky buildings and thick, sure paint surfaces, I can’t think of much that’s tangential. Diamond lived in New York but was a trustee for years of the Skowhegan School, the school and art colony very close to Colby. Skowhegan has done as much as Winslow Homer and the craggy Modernists such as Mainer Marsden Hartley and mostly Mainer John Marin to make Maine, at the edge of the country, an aesthetic powerhouse.

The museum’s clearly conscious of balance. Balance! How radical! Alas, it is. The Colby museum spans the centuries. There’s something for everyone, and what’s on view in the temporary shows and in the permanent-collection galleries expresses the museum’s scope, depth, and history. No single theme hogs the place.

The museum forefronts art, not wacky, puerile, hate-America-most politics. It’s rearranging its collection of American art for the first time since 2013. Judging from what I’ve read from the college’s press office, the Colby curators aren’t taking a hatchet to the art, as did the Portland Museum of Art and the Peabody Essex in Salem, Mass., when they redid their American spaces. The results there are galleries as vapid as they are imperious and angry.

Last year I wrote about Colby’s astounding gift of time, money, and talent aimed at making Waterville, its home, thrive. The center of this small city of 15,000 looks both modern and spiffy with new buildings, many that are parts of the college, and as inviting as the real Maine. The college is a big draw in terms of employment, but the art museum and, now, the center of Waterville are culture hubs for central Maine.