If you are visiting Maine this summer, even if you’re just armchair traveling, you are in luck art-wise. Start with the exhibition Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art discussed here. Then move up the coast to Waterville and Rockland for the shows considered in succeeding pages.
By the middle of the twentieth century, paintings in the impressionist and realist modes, often of domestic subjects, were being greatly overshadowed by the monumental, gestural, non-figural abstract expressionist works of the likes of Jackson Pollock. Russell Cheney was one of those overshadowed artists whose works, often of homey settings along the New England coast, seemed to speak more to the past than to the future. Which is not to say that Cheney was unaffected by modern artistic trends, as is evident in Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting. Indeed, in his lifetime Cheney was generally considered “modern,” but as critical preference leaned increasingly toward more abstract art, his work began to disappear from consideration. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue seek to reassert it within the modernist zeitgeist, and, at the same time, contribute a more expansive view of art and society in the period.
Born in Manchester, Connecticut, the youngest of eleven children in a wealthy silk-manufacturing family, Cheney went to Yale, studied in Europe, and established a successful painting career, focused primarily on the people and places of New England—mainly Boston, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Kittery, Maine. His works show a range of influences, from impressionism to post-impressionism, fauvism, precisionism, and abstraction. Some, such as John’s Barber Shop (1936), display the strict geometries of traditional New England architecture also seen in the work of Edward Hopper, or, as in MacPhaedris-Warner House, Hopper’s focus on everyday streetscapes. Others, like Doorstop, reveal a kinship to works by Charles Sheeler, who moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, nearwhere Cheney had strong family ties, in 1932. Both artists had interests in early American architecture, folk art, and decorative arts, evident in the traditional carved duck decoy in Doorstop, a composition whose Sheeler-like dramatic lighting and cropping emphasize the geometries of the design elements.
Cheney died at sixty-three in 1945—the consequence of a long addiction to alcohol—at the home in Kittery he shared with his life partner, the influential Harvard literary critic and historian Francis Otto (F. O.) Matthiessen (1902–1950). After his death, Matthiessen worked hard to promote Cheney’s art, publishing a monograph on him in 1947 and collaborating with museums and exhibition organizers to mount shows of his work, but his art became increasingly invisible. After Matthiessen committed suicide in 1950, in the midst of anti-gay persecution in the United States, Cheney’s work virtually disappeared from the annals of modernism. Thanks to the Ogunquit exhibition, organized by scholar Kevin D. Murphy and his students at Vanderbilt University, and the catalogue, containing an introduction by Murphy and essays by Scott Bane and Richard M. Candee (authorities, respectively, on Matthiessen and Cheney), it is possible to appreciate Cheney’s modernity anew and to also consider more fully the milieu in which he and Matthiessen lived.
Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting • Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine • August 1 to November 17 • ogunquitmuseum.org
