In the winter of 1915, a group of innovative artists in Provincetown began making white-line woodcuts, an experimental, hand-pressed color woodblock print. Instead of using several blocks of wood to apply different colors to a sheet of paper, these printmakers gouged lines in the wood to keep colored forms separate, enabling them to make prints with a single block — even if completing a print still took several impressions.
The tiny fishing village, with its incandescent light bouncing off both the ocean and Provincetown Harbor, had been attracting artists at least since Charles W. Hawthorne opened a school of art there in 1899. By the mid-1910s, it was abuzz with artistic enterprise. There were at least five art schools, and during World War I American artists fleeing Europe set up shop there. “Biggest Art Colony in the World at Provincetown,” a Globe headline trumpeted in 1916.
A group of close to 50 sparkling prints at the Museum of Fine Arts in “The Provincetown Printmakers” tells a small-town tale of abiding partnerships in a creative hotbed at a pivotal moment in art history. It also reflects particularities of Provincetown: its cheek-by-jowl architecture, docks and ships, and its open arms for edgy women artists and same-sex companions.
Eleven of the 13 artists featured are women. Bror Julius Olsson Nordfelt, thought to be the inventor of the white-line woodcut, is here with some Japanese-influenced prints made in the 1900s.
Also here is the group’s leading light Blanche Lazzell, who was the subject of a 2002 show at the museum. “The Provincetown Printmakers” shifts focus to several other innovative printmakers. The exhibition is drawn from a substantial recent acquisition from the trove of the late Leslie and Johanna Garfield, pioneer collectors of Provincetown prints.
Lazzell is still on view, and her star shines bright.
“Blanche Lazzell, I feel, is an incredibly undervalued artist still,” Edward Saywell, the MFA’s chair of prints and drawings, said in an interview with the Globe. “She was one of the first experimenters with abstraction in the States at a time when it was challenging to be a woman artist and an abstract artist.”
Printmaking is a wonky medium that often hinges on technical finesse, with control of ink, or paper alignment as sheet meets newly inked block again and again. A case with one of Lazzell’s woodblocks “Two Boats/ Low Tide,” a different scene carved in each side, is on view here to give a sense of the process. She considered the blocks works of art in themselves, Saywell said.
Artists coming from Paris brought Cubist abstraction and Fauvism’s dazzling palette to the Cape. Lazzell’s sunny prints, such as “Provincetown Back Yards,” turned an abstract lens on the familiar streets and piers of the village. The scene is utterly recognizable, but Lazzell’s dynamic composition — attuned to rhythms of line, plane, and color — sets the eye careening from the slope of a green roof to the plummy side of a house to yellow buildings leading like a pathway to turquoise water.
Mildred McMillen’s works take a similar ride: all wild angles and tilting planes, but minus the colors. In her brilliantly graphic linocut “The Attic Window (Portrait of Ada Gilmore in Her Studio),” white light and black shadow bounce through a giant window onto a canvas. Ada Gilmore Chaffee, McMillen’s longtime partner, stands in a smock, hands on her hips, assessing her work on its easel.
The two became friends at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906 or 1907. They lived and worked together in Paris and Provincetown, although Gilmore married painter Oliver Chaffee in 1925.
Prints by McMillen and Gilmore Chaffee hang close by, and It’s fascinating to compare them: McMillen’s linear, black-and-white architectonics; Gilmore Chaffee’s figures and stories, with softer, curving lines and sweet colors, such as in a bustling, convivial sidewalk scene, “Provincetown Christmas.” She used watery ink, saturating her prints with tone, but it was likely to run — a risk with white-line woodcuts, in which the gouged contours of the prints needed to stay ink-free.
McMillen’s stark palette and Gilmore Chaffee’s vivid characters come together in their collaborative “Christmas Greetings” depicting them lounging before a stove with their cat, Pico.
Pride at the MFA, an event on June 9, features gallery talks on this show by Saywell. There’s plenty to talk about. McMillen learned woodblock printing, the curator said, from another Provincetown printmaker, Ethel Mars. Mars and her lifetime companion, Maud Hunt Squire, also came to the Cape from France, where they attended Gertrude Stein’s salon.
“They are the subject of a groundbreaking queer poem by Stein, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,’” originally published in 1922, Saywell said. “It’s one of the first times the word ‘gay’ is used to describe a lesbian relationship.”
Squire’s color woodcuts, such as “Clamdiggers,” in which men carry bright buckets and eye reflective puddles at low tide, capture the scenes of the town with eloquent, economical forms.
Not all the works in “The Provincetown Printmakers” depict Provincetown; some were made before the artists even got there. But the village is as much the star of this show as the artists — its charm and conviviality recognizable in the prints more than a century later. It was a cradle for community, collaboration, and invention.
THE PROVINCETOWN PRINTMAKERS
At Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., through Oct. 15. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.
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At the MFA, ‘The Provincetown Printmakers’ leaves a lasting impression - The Boston Globe
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