BERTA WALKER GALLERIES Provincetown & Wellfleet

You are invited

OPENING in Wellfleet Saturday, June 17, 4 - 6 PM

continuing through July 15, 2017

WELLFLEET ARTISTS of the Berta Walker Galleries

Currently living and working in Wellfleet Robert Henry Grace Hopkins Sidney Hurwitz Penelope Jencks Gloria Nardin Pe

ter Watts

Wellfleet artists years past Elizabeth Blair (1908-1995) Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978) Gilbert Franklin (1919-

2004) Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) James Lechay (1907-2001) John C. Phillips (1908-

2003) Selina Trieff (1934-2015)

(AND)

Opening the following week in Provincetown FRIDAY, June 30

JOSEPH DIGGS "Life's Layers" Abstract and Figurative Paintings

The Many Languages of Landscape

VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN, BRENDA HOROWITZ, SKY POWER, MURRAY ZIMILES

WELLFLEET ARTISTS of the Berta Walker Galleries JUNE 17 - JULY 15

Reception Saturday, June 17, 4 - 6 PM

40 Main Street, Wellfleet, MA

In this exhibition, we hope you'll enjoy discovering and celebrating the work of artists from Wellfleet's past as well as those who continue to live and work here. These artists had, or continue to have, studios in Wellfleet and the exhibition includes work from as early as 1924 through to today. These artists are now part of the Berta Walker Galleries' ongoing effort to celebrate the history of American art through the lens of the Outer Cape's historic art colony, founded in 1899, and which encompasses the towns of Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet.

We are delighted to now have a presence in Wellfleet, thanks to the help of The Wicked Oyster Restaurant who made their building available, affording us the opportunity to expand on presenting the art colony's major and important American art contributions.

ELIZABETH BLAIR (1908-1995), painted her entire

life, studying half days at the Arts Students League with John Sloan while still attending high school. She went to Paris in 1931 and studied with Andre L'Hote, Louis Marcousis, and Fernand Leger. Leger rarely wrote about his students but was so impressed with Blair's work that he wrote about her, congratulating her on her accomplishments. She returned to New York and started painting in Provincetown in the mid-1940s, living in Wellfleet the summers of 1950 and 1953. She took up residence in Tepoztlan, in Mexico, in 1949, where her figurative paintings eventually moved into a semi-abstract mode in the mid-1960's. In 1985, she moved to Provence where she created some of the gouaches in this exhibition.

Blair is the mother of photographer Blair Resika and art historian Hayden Herrera, and Herrera has noted, "Blair was an expatriate even in her art. The confluence between my mother's excitement as she looked at nature and the energy with which she lay down her strokes is especially palpable in this series."

Elizabeth Blair, "Provincetown Dunes", 1948, oil on canvas, 24 x 30"

GILBERT FRANKLIN (1919-2004) was born in England and

grew up in Attleboro, MA. He came to Provincetown in 1938 to study with John Frazier at the old Hawthorne School. He always thought of Provincetown as a fascinating place, saying: "It think it's a place of freedom; people can do what they like, mostly, and other people let them do it." Franklin's father was a jeweler and so he was exposed to the tools of working with metals at a very young age. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and continued his studies at the Museo Nancional in Mexico City and the American Academy in Rome. Art writer Lynn Stanley wrote, "Touring Gilbert Franklin's studio of finished pieces and wax forms in progress, a restrained elegance and simplicity of line were evident everywhere. The features of each face were nondescript, the forms stylized; one had the sense of the archetypal body moving in time, not confined to the specifics of identity." During his long and impressive career, Franklin received many public commissions for his sculpture including pieces for the Hallmark Collection, Kansas City; the Gannett Building, Arlington, VA; the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, DC; the Harry S. Truman Memorial, Independence, MO; and the Orpheus Ascending Fountain at the Frazier Memorial in Providence, RI. His sculpture can be found in the permanent collections of important Museums across the Country, and his outdoor sculpture, Seaforms, stands at the Wellfleet Public Library.

Gilbert Franklin, Torso, 1989, bronze, 15 x 5 x 5"

EDWIN DICKINSON (1891-1978) came to

Provincetown as a young man of 20 to study with Charles Hawthorne and lived and painted in Wellfleet for much of his life. He became one of the finest of painters associated with the early art Colony. On first arriving, he had his studio at the now Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, along with his great friend, fellow painter, Ross Moffett. Moffett, Dickinson and Hopper were close friends throughout their careers. These days,

it's unusual to find a good Edwin Dickinson painting, especially like the one in this exhibition which he painted of his own studio in Wellfleet.

Edwin Dickinson, Cove House, Wellfleet, 1941, Oil on canvas, 10 x 21"

Unlike his large studio canvases on which he sometimes worked painstakingly for decades (still remaining dissatisfied), the small landscapes were quick, immediate, and improvisational, and focused directly on the view at hand. They are masterful in capturing the atmosphere of the moment, the liquidity of light in the moment, so that the viewer is moved to an awareness of the illusive in nature. In these paintings, Dickinson stressed broad areas of color and eliminated details. He shard with the coming generation of abstract painters a commitment to emphasizing the process of painting, the gesture.How to paint, not what to paint, was paramount. A major retrospective on Dickinson was curated at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum with accompanying important catalog by our own Mary Abel of New York and Truro.

ROBERT HENRY came to Provincetown as a young art

student to study with Hans Hofmann, and many years later returned with his wife the painter Selina Trieff to live full-time in Wellfleet. Henry is a 2lst century social-surrealist, and his work is always about human relationships and conditions in society. Discussing his work, art historian Eileen Kennedy observed: "Henry appears uncategorizable to me. He is an artist statesman of our age, much as Picasso was, or Goya, but he does not confront epic conflict between and within nations in the direct way that they did. He presents the human impulse to harm and heal in the emotional atmosphere, the psychic space that human turbulence creates. He grapples with the heavyweight philosophical concerns of our times, often employing a note of humor. His more abstract works seem to me to be what so much of contemporary art is trying to express, the distillation of emotion, the spiritual and psychic space that the times we are living in have created."

Robert Henry, "In The Spiral," 2009, oil on canvas, 12 x 12"

BUDD HOPKINS (1931-2011) was a member of the

noted Long Point Gallery in Provincetown and will be featured in a one-man exhibition this summer at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, from July 21 to September 3, which will then travel to additional museums. There will also be an exhibition of his work at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown from July 28 to August 19. Both exhibitions examine his earlier years creating abstract expressionist works, through his collage-based hard-edge period to his guardians and altars, and, finally, his return to action painting with his series of "dancing guardians." Art historian John Perreault wrote, "Budd Hopkins was embedded in his time but also removed from it. His intelligence, which is clearly revealed in his writings

about art, also shines through his paintings. He was an original." As Perreault noted, "These two exhibitions for an artist of considerable talents . . . make a case for his place beyond the category of second-generation abstract expressionism."

Budd Hopkins, Study for Mahler's Castle, 1973 Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 24"

GRACE HOPKINS has been creating photographs

since 1991. She builds a highly energized visual image from a tiny piece of reality. Susan Rand Brown wrote recently in the Provincetown Banner, "Hopkins is a photographer with the eye and soul of a painter. She creates an image by isolating a fragment of something larger, perhaps a wall, textured and brightly lit, or flickering in shadow. Hopkins' images ask that we take nothing for granted. We are jolted into seeing the smallest detail, something we would rush past, as something unexpected, marvelous and . . .something quite grand. Hers is a vision rooted in a pure form of abstract expressionism [where] the viewer feels surrounded by the freshness of expressionist imagery and motion, each piece different, each piece allusive yet quite original."

Grace Hopkins, London 28, 2017, digital photograph mounted, 16 x 16"

SIDNEY HURWITZ studied at the School of the Worcester Art Museum in the 1950s where he met and was influenced by the printmaker Leonard Baskin. With a gift of technical precision, he went on to study the intricate art of etching and aquatint printmaking and received his MFA at Boston University in 1959. He spent his career on the faculty of the School of Fine and Applied Arts at BU, from which he retired in 1999. Hurwitz became fascinated with the industrial landscapes of the Boston area-warehouses, elevated railways, rooftops, and iron bridges-and focused on their intricate structures and mechanics. His series of aquatints inspired by oil and gas terminals was inspired by "the wonderful complexity of storage tanks, conveyor belts, supports, etc. that suggest the architecture of

fantastic castles or amusement park rides." He traveled frequently to London and Germany and to Bethlehem in Pennsylvania to visit their factories and steel mills, all symbols of power in the early 20th century. Now a waning industry in a changing world, Hurwitz in his art has captured and preserved the sublime beauty of these relics of our industrial past.

Sidney Hurwitz, Bethlehm XIII, Watercolor/etching, 16 x 20"

PENELOPE JENCKS is a major sculptor whose

many commissions include the Eleanor Roosevelt life-sized bronze sculpture on the Upper West Side. A student of Hans Hofmann, Jencks has been creating over-sized sculptures that depict naked adults in their middle age and older; she explains that the reason she makes them this large is so they have the same relationship to the viewer as her own parents and parents' friends did to her when she was a child and it was usual that they all went to the beach and stripped down, spending the afternoons talking music, philosophy, art. She also feels they need to be monumental to give them the same importance within the landscape. "The Beach Series II," consists of photographs taken by Jencks in which she has digitally installed her monumental sculptures "in situ". The viewer can then experience the phenomenon of these unclothed male and female swimmers and sunbathers as they would have seemed to the eyes of a child - that is to say, both completely natural and yet monumental in relation to their surroundings.

Penelope Jencks, Table I, 2008, Bronze, 64 x 54 x 28"

JAMES LECHAY (1907-2001) was a painter of

figures, landscapes, cityscapes and still lifes who played a notable role in the tradition of avant-garde painting in New York and in the Midwest. An artist who defied categorization, he assimilated the precepts of modern European and American art, evolving a spare, semi-abstract style with expressionist overtones; as Lechay himself put it, he was an "abstract impressionist" who followed his own artistic agenda throughout the course of his career. Before his death, Lechay had numerous one-person exhibitions with Berta Walker Gallery, and he will be the subject of a one-person exhibition this summer at the

Provincetown Art Association and Museum from June 23 to August 20, curated by well-known Wellfleet artist, Megan Hinton.

James Lechay, Aegean Seascape, 1989, Casein on paper, mounted, 21 1/2 x 33 1/2"

GLORIA NARDIN is both a painter and

photographer. She was born in New York, studying art at Cooper Union and photography with Sid Grossman and Berenice Abbott, but her studies were interrupted by WWII. She first came to Provincetown in the mid-1940's and stayed in a little shack off Bradford Street. Nardin has always painted and taken photographs, even in her early teens. She recently received a major photography exhibition at The Wellfleet Preservation Hall and was included last summer in the BWG Provincetown Gallery's "Naughty Nineties" exhibition of active ninety or older artists involved with the Gallery. Gloria met her husband, the painter Peter Watts, in 1969 while working at Columbia University as curator of the Slide Library in the Art History Dept. They married, and moved to Wellfleet, where they have lived year-round for over forty years. "After raising four children as a single parent, I then began painting and photography again. I was painting a lot during this time, sometimes incorporating paintings as backgrounds for still-life photos. Today, I paint mostly from imagination and memory and enjoy it all very much!"

Gloria Nardin, Still Life with Watermelon, oil on canvas, 26 x 40"

JOHN C. PHILLIPS (1908-2003) majored in Fine

Arts at Harvard and then went to Europe where he studied with Fernand Leger and Andre L'Hote. Later in his life he returned to Harvard to study design with Walter Gropius, and was an artist throughout his life, painting for the greater part of his 95 years. He lived during the summers in a home in the Truro/Wellfleet woods beginning in the 1930's, and lived in Wellfleet year-round from 1936 to 1945. Here he designed and built houses, had a turkey farm, painted, and was an avid printmaker, developing pioneering methods in intaglio printmaking.

He is the father of photographer Blair Resika and art historian Hayden Herrera. The watercolors in this exhibition were made in Wellfleet and Herrera has observed that "a deep love and knowledge of nature, honed in the Wellfleet Woods, emanates from all of his work."

John Phillips, Untitled (Verso), c. 1942, watercolor, 15 1/2 x 22 1/2"

SELINA TRIEFF (1934-2015) was proclaimed "an American

original" by New York Times art critic John Russell in a review for her premiere exhibition at Graham Modern Gallery in New York. Born in Brooklyn in 1934, she studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and in Provincetown, with Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College, and Morris Kantor at The Art Students League. She moved to Wellfleet full-time with her husband, the painter Robert Henry. Trieff generates allusively gripping figurative compositions, abstract images in oil and gold leaf, richly pensive, introspective, strangely self-like. The subjects are distilled to their essence in rich fields of color and reveal an entrenched passion for the push/pull technique of painting she first learned from Hans Hofmann. Trieff goes back to the same format in her work, but each return is a different experience, an ongoing meditation of the human spirit through color and paint. "The figures are guarded, but they are also vulnerable," Trieff says. Like the artist in the harsh world of earthly experience, they

are archetypal pilgrims wandering, searching for a home place. Maureen Mullarkey in Arts Magazine wrote: "Her life's work is a metaphorical, painterly cosmos that unsettles and delights at the same time."

Selina Trieff,Two Women In Red, oil on canvas, 36 x 30"

PETER WATTS first came

to Cape Cod as a student of Laforce Bailey in 1954, living at first in Provincetown and working at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and moving to Wellfleet in 1970. He has spent most of his adult artistic life developing a deep understanding of the landscape he has lived in and painted for decades, creating his own personal iconography in his painting with fresh, deeply understood perspectives on how to approach his subject. He has said that his paintings "condense the richness of the landscape of Wellfleet. At one time, I was more interested in the landscape itself. Now, I look at how an abstract element of a landscape feels." Art critic Margaret Sheffield has noted that Watts "expresses thought, emotion, and mood through color combinations," working with high contrast and simplified form. And gallery owner Berta Walker has said, "Peter's paintings impart the spiritual abstracted light of a Rothko painting." A sophisticated painter of seemingly simple subject matter, Watts has said, "I am building a painting with as little form as is possible. The viewer will find a small truth in the work and if this happens, the painting is successful."

Peter Watts, 2012, Salt Marsh, oil on canvas, 12 x 42"

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

PROVINCETOWN GALLERY

June 30 - July 22 Joseph Diggs "Life's Layers", abstract and figurative paintings The Many Languages of Landscape: Varujan Boghosian, Brenda Horowitz, Sky Power, Murray Zimiles July 28 - August 19 Budd Hopkins* (1931-2011): Full Circle Edgy Women of BWG: Sue Fuller (1914-2010) Ione Gaul Walker (1915 - 1987) Grace Hopkins, Blanche Lazzell (1889 - 1978), Erna Partoll, Agnes Weinrich (1843 - 1946) August 25 - September 16 Romolo Del Deo Upon the Flowers of Our Lips bronze sculpture James Lechay** (1907-2001) paintings Nancy Whorf (1930-2009) "Our Town" paintings

WELLFLEET GALLERY July 22-August 12 Paul*** and Blair Resika Tepoztlan, paintings, pastels and photographs Gilbert Franklin (1919-2004) Figuring in Bronze, sculpture Cape Modernists: Gerritt Beneker, Byron Browne, Oliver Chaffee, James Floyd Clymer, Dorothy Lake Gregory, Marsden Hartley, Charles Heinz, Charles W. Hawthorne, Hans Hofmann, Ione Gaul, Karl Knaths, Blanche Lazzell, Lucy L'Engle, Ross Moffett, Vollian Rann, Carl Sprinchorn, Agnes Weinrich

August 26-September 16 Birds, Bees and the Sea: Gallery artists including Donald Beal, Varujan Boghosian, Salvatore Del Deo, Joseph Diggs, Rob DuToit, Ed Giobbi, Elspeth Halvorsen, John Kearney, Judith Katz, Susumu Kishihara, Anne MacAdam, Danielle Mailer, Dana McCannel and others *In collaboration with PAAM exhibition, 7/21-9/3 **In collaboration with PAAM exhibition, 6/30-8/20 ***Paul Resika will also be featured at the Fine Arts Work Center Hudson D. Walker Gallery, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown July, 2017

Gallery Hours

Berta Walker Gallery Provincetown 208 Bradford Street, Provincetown

May 25 to July 31: 12pm to 4pm, Closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays August: 11am to 5pm, Closed Tuesdays

Berta Walker Gallery Wellfleet

40 Main Street, Wellfleet

May 26 to June 30: 11am to 4pm, Closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays

July & August: 11am to 4pm, Closed Tuesdays

Often by chance -- Always by appointment Ample Parking

"Berta Walker's gallery mission is voiced in the motto that has guided her over the years, 'Presenting the History of American Art as seen through the Eyes of Provincetown'. She aims for nothing less than documenting the role that artists associated with Provincetown have played in the major movements in American art...making the past vital to the living artists she represents, replenishing the present with a curatorial finesse that is highly regarded." Andre van der Wende, Provincetown Arts Representing: Donald Beal, Varujan Boghosian, Romolo Del Deo, Salvatore Del Deo, Joseph Diggs, Rob Du Toit, Ed Giobbi, Elspeth Halvorsen, Robert Henry, Brenda Horowitz, Penelope Jencks, David Kaplan, Judyth Katz, Anne MacAdam, Danielle Mailer, Gloria Nardin, Erna Partoll, Sky Power, Paul Resika, Peter Watts, Murray Zimiles -- Estates: Gilbert Franklin, Dimitri Hadzi, Budd Hopkins, John Kearney, Selina Trieff, Nancy Whorf -- Photography: Grace Hopkins, Susumu Kishihara, Dana McCannel, Blair Resika, John Romualdi, John Thomas -- Masters in Our Collections: Gerritt Beneker, Byron Browne, Oliver Chaffee, Edwin Dickinson, James Floyd Clymer, Jim Forsberg, Dorothy Lake Gregory, Marsden Hartley, Charles Heinz, Charles W. Hawthorne, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Ione Gaul Walker, Karl Knaths, Blanche Lazzell, Lucy L'Engle, Ross Moffett, Vollian Rann, Helen Sawyer, Carl Sprinchorn, Agnes Weinrich. -- Provincetown Folk Art and Ancient African Carvings and Bronzes