When critics hinted Maurice Prendergast was getting a little repetitive as he approached 50, he could’ve hung up his brushes. After all, he’d been pretty successful. Instead, he headed back to where it all began–Paris–and came away reinvigorated with “a new impulse,” as he called it.
Today’s episode takes us to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. We’ll find out how an idea that started with Congress just before the Depression led to an official modern art museum on the National Mall!
Please stick around to the end for an important announcement about the show!
If you want to follow along, you can find it on the museum’s site.
SHOW NOTES (Transcript below)
“A Long Look” themes are “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/
Episode music
“Scenes from Childhood, Op. 15 – IX. King of the Hobbyhorse” by Robert Schumman. Performed by Donald Betts.
“Children’s Corner, L. 113 – III. Serenade of the doll” by Claude Debussy. Performed by Edward Rosser.
Both courtesy of musopen.org
“Loopster” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Artwork information
Beach at Saint-Malo
https://iiif.si.edu/mirador/?manifest=https%3A%2F%2Fids.si.edu%2Fids%2Fmanifest%2FHMSG-HMSG-66.4131 (mirador zoom-in view)
https://hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/artwork/?edanUrl=edanmdm%3Ahmsg_66.4131
Prendergast info
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/prendergast-maurice
https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.5270.html
Maurice Prendergast. Wattenmaker, Richard J, and National Museum of American Art. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994.
https://archive.org/details/mauriceprenderga0000watt/page/n5/mode/2up
Maurice Prendergast : By the Sea. Homann, Joachim. Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin college Museum of Art, 2013.
“The Early Art Education of Maurice Prendergast.” Glavin, Ellen. Archives of American Art Journal 33, no. 1 (1993): 2–12. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1557569. (JSTOR)
Hirshhorn info
https://hirshhorn.si.edu/explore/the-founding-donor
https://hirshhorn.si.edu/about-us
https://siarchives.si.edu/history/hirshhorn-museum-and-sculpture-garden
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden : The Collection. Brunet, Briana Feston, and Romare Bearden. Edited by Stéphane Aquin, Anne Reeve, and Sandy Guttman. New York: DelMonico Books, 2022.
TRANSCRIPT
Today I’m looking at Beach at Saint-Malo [san mahlo] by Maurice Prendergast.
If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/malo. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
The brilliant color of this happy-looking scene with clusters of people spread across a gingerbread-colored beach.
Eight women in the lower left and a knot of three people in lower right are closest to us so they’re near the bottom of this painting. In the far right a woman sits on the sand while another stands next to her and a final group of three is set a little further up the beach.
This watercolor is 14 in tall by 20 in wide, about the size of a poster.
The women wear long dresses and hats in bright shades of royal blue, mint green, brick red, and butterscotch yellow, some with touches of cherry red. Two of the figures on the right stand with their backs to us in matching navy blue tunics and pumpkin orange pants that look like uniforms.
The beach widens as it angles from lower right up toward the middle left of the paper and ends in a cluster of bubblegum pink, denim blue, tangerine orange, and rust-red cabanas. Above them is a small butter yellow cottage with a red roof next to a large honey-colored structure dotted with black dashes just below its roofline that suggest windows. There’s a lighthouse just to the right of that building and it looks like Prendergast started to draw a taller, second lighthouse beyond it. There’s just a thick black outline of crayon.
Dark blue water extends out from the beach to fill the middle and right sides of the scene.
There are are few boats floating on it but they’re just kind of loose indistinct white, pale blue, gold, and brown shapes. Beyond them, in the distance, is a line of dark purple hills under a narrow slice of pale green sky.
The beach and water take up the lower half of the painting and a huge bank of puffy clouds billows across the upper half. They’re the same purple as the hills underneath but get lighter towards the top with loose, watery swirls of white, gold, and mauve. Swipes of denim blue and gold fill the sky above.
Indistinct is the key word here. The people are just pale blobs wearing clothes. The cabanas, buildings, and boats are all sketchy, a little lopsided, wobbly. Some objects I can’t even guess what they are. And everything and everyone is outlined in black or dark purple, even those clouds.
That looseness and those flat jewel-toned outlined shapes all combine to create a mosaic with a light, airy, lively, happy vibe. One thing I love is Prendergast uses these little hits of bright orange across the scene, like for some of the women’s bonnets, a large round object near the center, those soldiers pants, and on one of the cabanas. And he layers patches and washes of tone on tone over the sand and sky that give a little depth.
So where is this lively scene?
MUSIC
Before we get into that, just want to give a heads-up that there will be a special announcement about the show at the end, so please stick around.
Background info approx 600 words
This is St. Malo [sahn-mahlo] on the Brittany coast in northern France. It was a popular resort and one of Maurice Prendergast’s favorite places to paint.
Maurice was born in St. John’s in Newfoundland, Canada in 1858 and moved with his family to Boston when he was around 10. He got his early art training taking drawing classes in school and at the free art schools around Boston. He also spent years going out to sketch on Sundays and became a painter’s apprentice.
He definitely grew up in the right place because Boston was an arts hub, with galleries, art clubs and the recently opened Museum of Fine Arts. He got to see works by the Impressionists and watercolors by Winslow Homes and James McNeill Whistler, who became a big influence.
After school he spent about 20 years as a commercial artist creating signs and ads until he finally saved enough money to quit and become a full-time painter. His timing was great, because the public were becoming big art fans and a lot of that had to do with the Museum. Plus he was really determined: his brother Charles said,” He knew he wanted to be an artist right from the start, and didn’t let anything stand in his way.”
He took a life-changing trip trip to Paris in 1891, when he was in his early 30s. He spent about 3 years there taking lessons at the local academies but discovered he got a better education seeing everything in the museums and galleries and exploring the city, sketching the people and places he found.
As you can imagine, he was exposed to all kinds of new art! He discovered Toulouse-Lautrec’s bold colors and Pierre Bonnard’s patterns and how artists were beginning to flatten and abstract their scenes. He also learned a lot talking and sketching in the cafes with a few classmates. It was actually a couple of these friends who first took him to St. Malo one summer.
When he returned to Boston and started showing his Paris work, it was popular right away.
Maurice realized he could take everything he learned while painting along Parisian parks and the French coast and apply that to the beaches and public spaces around Boston and New England, which Americans could relate to.
He also was just fascinated by the these places where the manmade world literally ran up against nature. He started out doing serene seascapes in muted colors but eventually began pushing the envelope, creating these bustling, colorful scenes of regular people having a great time at the beach, or the park, or a city waterfront.
And he was right, the public and collectors just loved his works. But by 1907 he was was almost 50 and some critics said he was getting a little stale and repetitive.
So he returned to Paris. While he was there, he saw the astonishing work of Cezanne and Matisse. Their wild experiments with color and form gave him what he called a “new impulse.” He even went back to St. Malo that summer and painted this watercolor.
Happily, Paris did the trick. All the new ideas he’d seen confirmed that his own life-long experiments were on the right track and reinvigorated his creativity, helping him develop a new style. It just goes to show, you never too old to learn something new!
Founding of the Hirshhorn Museum
There’s a great story about how the Hirshhorn Museum was created.
It starts with Congress deciding in the late 1930s that there should be a museum on the National Mall dedicated to the art and artists of the time. But between the Great Depression and World War II, they shelved the idea.
30 years later, along comes S. Dillon Ripley, the Smithsonian Secretary who revives the idea and thinks Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s collection of modern art would be the perfect fit.
Joseph Hirshhorn was a very wealthy businessman who’d been an art lover from an early age. He and his parents immigrated to New York from Latvia when he was 8 years old and when he was a kid, he’d cut out pictures of famous paintings from a calendar his parents got from an insurance company. He’d hang them on his wall and study them for hours.
He began collecting when he was 18 after he’d been working on Wall Street for a few years. Started with a couple of prints by Albrecht Durer and originally stayed with traditional artists. But as he got older and visited more and more galleries and museums he really got into modern art. He called it a revelation. Began collecting the Impressionists and the artists who came after like Prendergast.
He also got very into living American painters like Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, and Milton Avery and over time embraced more and more experimental work by Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning.
He seemed to love the rule-breakers, the experimenters.
He was famous for visiting an exhibition and buying the whole thing on the spot. And he’d go all-in on artists he liked personally whom he saw as talented visionaries. He wanted to support them financially so they didn’t suffer the financial uncertainty he endured as a child.
However, Hirshhorn is best known for his incredible collection of modern sculptures by pioneers like August Rodin, Henry Moore, and Constantine Brancusi.
He built a huge collection no one knew about til some of it was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1962. Then suddenly, everybody wanted it! Offers came in from countries and cities all over.
This where Ripley comes in. He, along with the very persuasive President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife Lady Bird, convinced Hirshhorn his collection belonged on the National Mall. Joseph agreed to donate the collection and money to help build the museum.
So in 1966, Congress passed an Act establishing the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The idea for a modern art museum in the nation’s capital that all Americans could visit was finally realized.
The Big Announcement
And now some news my friends…
After conducting the listener survey, I had hoped to continue the podcast at least through the end of 2025, but for many reasons, that’s no longer possible. So I thought I’d go out on a high note and end the show with the 100th episode, coming next month!
I truly appreciate all of you who responded and reached out to tell me how much you enjoy the show and what it means to you. That feedback made this a very difficult decision but in the end, I’ve realized this is the right time to wrap it up.
However, the podcast will remain available and so will the website! You can revisit your favorites or maybe check out an episode from the early seasons you might’ve missed.
So, please join me next month for the finale!
OUTRO: In the meantime, you can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. Thanks for joining me!
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