INTERVIEW: New PEM show reexamines maritime artistic history
Photo:
William Formby Halsall (1841-1919), Vigilant in last days Race against Valkyrie, 1893, Oil on canvas, 19 × 29 1/4 in. (48.3 × 74.3 cm), Peabody Essex Museum, Gift of Frederic A. Turner, 1961, M10946 © 2020 Peabody Essex Museum. Photography by Kathy Tarantola / Provided by PEM with permission.
Daniel Finamore is the co-curator of the new exhibition In American Waters: The Sea in American Painting at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. His initial inspiration for the show came decades ago, and little by little he has been making mental notes and putting away ideas for the future. Now, that show is running at PEM through Oct. 3 — an exhibition that gives viewers the rare chance to see a diverse cross-section of American artists and how they respond to the changing, transformational waters that hug each coast of the nation.
This is a perfect exhibition for PEM because the museum sits only a few blocks from a historic harbor, and the institution’s history is inextricably tied to the maritime culture of the Northeast. For Finamore, it’s all in a day’s work.
“I have a very quirky kind of job as the curator of maritime art and history,” Finamore said in a recent phone interview. “It’s a strange, narrow niche, but it’s one that’s very distinctive of the Peabody Essex Museum and this portion of New England where people really love the sea and the heritage of seafaring. So I’ve been organizing maritime-related exhibitions, art and history, for many, many years, and one of my agenda items has always been to broaden the scope of what people perceive as the impact of seafaring in American life.”
Finamore said that over the years he would witness wildly different interpretations to the museum’s seafaring collection. Some people would walk into the building and scope out large paintings of ships, while others would couple their art appreciation with comments about the intricacies of the technology on display in each painting — musings about rig types and wind and weather.
“Anybody who didn’t see that sort of felt alienated by it,” he said. “Oh, I guess this stuff must not be for me. I don’t get it. And I really wanted to break down those barriers of what constituted a statement about the marine, and it wasn’t just for specialists. So as I worked on all these various projects, I sort of kept a file of paintings and other objects that I thought really spoke to the subject, but in ways that I wasn’t able to utilize for so many of my other projects. So when the time came to really address this full force — how can we redefine the role of the sea in American painting? — I had something like 30 years of background research to start drawing from.”
In American Waters is co-presented by PEM and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Finamore, who serves as PEM’s associate director of exhibitions and curator of maritime art and history, was joined by Austen Barron Bailly, of the Crystal Bridges in Arkansas, as co-curator of the show.
“That’s a museum that’s only 10 or 11 years old, but it is a very important museum for American art,” Finamore said of the Crystal Bridges. “And they have been collecting very assiduously before the museum opened but also in the last 10 years, and they were never collecting with an eye for maritime subjects specifically. But when they hired a new chief curator, who had been our curator for American art, [Bailly] looked through the collection … and realized there’s loads of marine themes here, and they’re different than the expressions that we collected very explicitly and intentionally in Salem. So they never really had the eye for it specifically, but within American art, if you cast your net broadly, there’s so many ways that the sea impacts American identity and American visual culture and the way artists have looked for an emotional response to the American environment. And so the show is composed of paintings from the Peabody Essex Museum collection and the Crystal Bridges Museum collection, and then we went much farther afield and borrowed from I think 37 other lenders for the show.”
What Finamore found was that many American artists were not considered marine specialists because their so-called claims to fame were portraiture or cityscapes or nostalgic images of Americana, but after taking a deep dive into their respective oeuvres, there is ample evidence that more American artists should be celebrated for their seafaring images. And those who are known as marine specialists should be reexamined, in Finamore’s estimation.
“Oh, Fitz Henry Lane, he just paints the seascape,” Finamore said. “Oh, James Buttersworth, he only paints yacht races, but that’s not true. They painted other things, but also people who we’ve always associated with mainstream American art … have also painted seascapes and have also painted things that directly address their own personal histories. Georgia O’Keeffe went to the coast of Maine every year for many years, and she loved the beach. Jacob Lawrence was in the Coast Guard, I believe, and he spent years at sea. He understood the impact of what it’s like to live on a ship, the social hierarchy and the integration that is necessary, the mutual reliance that people have on one another as they’re living out their specialized roles onboard the ship. And so that mentality definitely influenced his perspective on the rest of his life and on his art in a very important way.”
Sometimes Finamore will sneak into the exhibition space at PEM and gauge the reactions of passersby. He enjoys watching the patrons take in each painting with a different perspective. For example, there is a centering point at the beginning of In American Waters featuring William Charles Richards’ large painting of a surf rolling right at the viewer.
“It’s technically excellent and just as an evocation of the sea,” he said. “It’s incredibly effective. You stand there, and you feel like you’re about to get pounded by a wave. But it’s also a painting that has no historical narrative. It has no vessels of specific type that are telling us a specific story. It’s not being set in history or a specific event or even a location frankly. It’s just the coast of America, and so it doesn’t matter where you’re from. It doesn’t matter what period of time you’re interested in. … You don’t feel alienated by a painting like that. It draws you in.”
He added: “The show is intended to tell stories of Americans in the maritime world that aren’t usually part of the art historical narrative, so maritime historians are social historians and well aware that some histories of Americans are told better than others. … People chose to paint certain subjects more frequently than others, and many of those are stories of American dominance on the seas, American successes, naval activities and so on. But then there are these undercurrents of stories that impact all Americans and are the specific histories of many, many Americans — the story of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century in the steerage of big steamships and ocean liners, the Middle Passage transport of enslaved people from Africa and from the Caribbean into the United States. There aren’t a lot of paintings that addressed these subjects, so we really had to work hard to find those, to represent the wider swath of true history of Americans’ involvement with the sea.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
In American Waters: The Sea in American Painting, co-curated by Daniel Finamore and Austen Barron Bailly, runs through Oct. 3 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Click here for more information.
