Prendergast paints the city beautiful

The productive career of the American artist Maurice Brazil Prendergast is difficult to categorize. Some of his watercolors and paintings can be allied with a specific style, while others fall outside the prevailing artistic trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An exhibition on view at Adelson Galleries in New York City from May 16 to June 20 surveys Prendergast's career in terms of the themes and subject matter that preoccupied him during the course of his life. Entitled Maurice Prendergast: Paintings of America, the show comprises more than fifty watercolors and oil paintings.

Prendergast embarked on his career in Boston at the turn of the twentieth century, when the cities of the United States were undergoing a sea change. It was an era in city planning often referred to as the city beautiful movement, which had as one of its central aims the transformation of sprawling urban centers into total works of art where architecture, landscape, and transportation networks were hanmonious.

Practitioners such as Frederick Law Olmsted had been developing parks for Boston and New York City with the single purpose of providing beautiful open spaces accessible to the entire population, especially the impoverished who could not afford to escape the sweltering heat of summer. Prendergast found ideal subjects in these parks, which comprise one of the thematically arranged sections of this exhibition. These paintings of urban and seaside parks often include a park bench or an orange-red umbrella; New England barbors, villages, and rocky shores; and finally children at play and women by the seashore.

The Canadian-born Prender-gast moved with his parents to Boston in the late 1860s, and there, after leaving school at age fourteen, he worked in a commercial art firm. From about 1891 to 1894 he was in Paris, where he took his first formal art lessons. Further European travel during the course of his life left an indelible impression on his work, particularly the painting of the symbolists, impressionists, Nabis, post impressionists, pointillists, Paul Cezanne, and Henri Matisse. Prendergast always took a keen interest in the art world around him, and after observing what other artists were investigating, he would reassess his own output, frequently going back and reworking paintings he had finished years earlier. He was constantly experimenting; for as Marsden Hartley remarked: "Maurice was a person of fiery enthusiasms as regards painting. It was the one thing worth doing in life--it was the means of life to him." Prendergast was a member of the group of avant-garde painters known as the Eight, and he moved to New York City in 1914, one year after the celebrated Armory Show in which he had exhibited.

In the years preceding his death in 1924, Prendergast, like his contemporaries, was increasingly drawn to abstract art. Thus the very subjects that intrigued him for much of his career became his point of departure for works that celebrate color, form, light, and composition. These paintings are about painting and demonstrate Prendergast's infatuation with what was new in the world of art around him.

The catalogue of the exhibition contains essays by Warren Adelson, Pamela A. Ivinski, and Nancy MowLl Mathews. It may be ordered by telephoning 212- 439-6800.

RELATED ARTICLE

Bathers, by Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1924), c. 1912. Oil on canvas, 22 by 34 inches. Private collection.

The Stony Beach, Ogunquit, by Prendergast, 1896-1897. Signed "Prendergast" at lower left. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 28 7/8 by 14 inches. Private collection.

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