“The Provincetown Printmakers” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is a jewel of an exhibition on a topic dear to your correspondent’s heart. The work is a gorgeous cross-section of early modernist styles in their American manifestations. The personal histories of the associated artists are interesting, and Provincetown remains an artistic center of note thanks to their studio work and collaboration.
Every MFA exhibition under the directorship of Matthew Teitelbaum is an act of culture war, but “The Provincetown Printmakers” is mostly an exception. Signage nudges viewers to “explore... the leading role women played in the creative explosion that occurred in Provincetown in the first half of the twentieth century.” But the museum leaves it at that. This was surprising, given that the Provincetown scene was full of Boston marriages. I had expected the MFA to treat the biographies with its usual leaden hand, along the lines of what viewers should expect of the museum’s upcoming exhibition “Strong Women in Renaissance Italy” (“The featured objects... tell stories about female presence and power that once went unheard, and include works made by women, for women, commissioned or collected by women, and representing women”). On the contrary, the Provincetown material is treated responsibly but not shyly.
By 1910 Provincetown had become known for its picturesque landscapes and bohemian atmosphere, attracting all manner of artists and writers. A reporter for the Boston Globe in 1916 likened its denizens to a “human flower garden.” But it was the printmakers who formed a cohesive movement. The center of that cohesion was a technical method derived from mokuhanga, such as can be seen in the work of Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, a Swede who learned multi-block color printing in the Japanese manner in England. If his print The Rock, Nahant from 1906 were surreptitiously labeled The Rock, Kamakura and attributed to Hiroshige, I wouldn’t have suspected anything off. The drawing is as sharp as needles and the coloration subtle and evocative.
In contrast to the Western method of woodcut, in which the block is sealed so as to be suitable for viscous inks, mokuhanga uses an unsized block on which the topmost pores hold a layer of pigments bound lightly in rice starch. Mokuhanga, more so than its Western counterpart, is a balancing act of paper, water, binder, color, and humidity. That Nordfeldt was able to master it without apprenticing to a Japanese workshop from the age of twelve attests to enormous ability.
Nordfeldt worked out a new method that could have been explained better in the exhibition. Instead of cutting the wood around the initial drawing, one instead cuts the drawing itself. This separates areas on the block that can be painted in watercolor without spilling across the cut lines onto their neighbors. One can then lay down a piece of paper, rub the painted area with a wooden spoon, and transfer the color. Unlike the technical demands of mokuhanga, which entails the mixing of water, pigment, and starch on the block followed by a veritable race against evaporation, one can keep up this painting and rubbing at leisure, coloring areas as needed on the same block. Also unlike mokuhanga, it only produces a single image at a time, but one of a particular character in which the drawing is preserved as the white of the paper. Hence it became known as “white-line woodcut.”
Free of mechanical intricacies and specialized studio needs, white-line was amenable to wide adoption. It subsequently entered the repertoire of Nordfeldt’s circle, including Ada Gilmore Chaffee, Mildred McMillen, Maud Hunt Squire, Ethel Mars, and Juliette Nichols. Each developed her own vision regarding the medium and its variations. The Gilmore Chaffees, expecially, are magnificent. Typical of both the method and the artist’s skill is Provincetown Christmas from around 1915, in which shoppers interact on a street lined with stores. A delightfully rendered Christmas tree can be seen through one of the display windows. As facial features are hard to capture in white-line, Gilmore Chaffee has simply painted them on, as she has the spots of a charming yellow dog. Other Gilmore Chaffees in the show, such as Sail Loft (ca. 1919), employ complex watercolor effects that make the result look as if quilted.
It’s hard to pick a favorite, but to my eye the best of them was Mars. She is represented by prints displaying more traditional multi-block methods, but ones that have clearly been informed by the white-line look. Her preference was to eliminate the drawing block so that color areas abut. One print depicts a woman in a grand floral dress working out the right-hand part of some sheet music at an upright piano. It is, without exaggeration, comparable to early Vuillard. Mars and her sweetheart from the Cincinnati Art Academy, the aforementioned Maud Hunt Squire, moved to Paris after despairing of finding teaching work in America and came to know Gertrude Stein. Hunt Squire’s Evening (ca. 1919) lands at an intriguing midpoint between American, French, and Japanese sensibilities, picturing fishermen returning to dock, they and their boat reflected strikingly in the dusk water.
Blanche Lazzell, who was the subject of a 2002 exhibition at the MFA, most completely exploits the precisionist tendencies of the white-line technique. Lazzell fled rural West Virginia to study with William Merritt Chase in New York and Fernand Léger in Paris before settling permanently in Provincetown. My Provincetown Studio (1933) deftly captures the town’s crowded architecture and nautical orientation, and the basketball hoop in the picture reminds the viewer that certain developments of Cubism could only have been advanced in America.
“The Provincetown Printmakers” is the product of a 2022 acquisition of 440 such works from the renowned collection of Leslie and Johanna Garfield. One hopes that a catalogue is forthcoming, as many of the pieces could be reproduced at actual size, and it would be of great art-historical value to describe the story of these remarkable works at book length.
