:The Adirondack Museum is making a long-awaited contribution to
the scholarship of American art with its exhibition "Wild
Exuberance: Harold Weston's Adirondack Art," on view through
October 2006.
This retrospective explores the virtually untouched territory of
Weston's art, as it can be argued that his work has never had
major museum treatment. In the 30 years since the artist's death,
while many museums and galleries have shown aspects of his work,
only one exhibition was a retrospective. Of the many catalogs
published, none has offered in-depth scholarship on Weston.
According to museum chief curator Caroline Welsh, "Weston stands
apart among Twentieth Century transcribers of the Adirondacks
because his art was distinctly and ultimately his own. The field
will benefit from the critical treatment of this understudied,
but major, player in American art."
Harold Weston (1894-1972) was a significant painter, etcher and
muralist. Early in his career, critics and collectors widely
recognized that he was capturing and saying something unusual in
his paintings.
On October 1, 1923, after a long day of hiking and sketching on
mountaintops, Weston and his bride, Faith Borton, spent the night
between two of the highest mountains in the Adirondacks. The
weather had turned and they suffered through a miserable night of
rain and cold. As the morning broke they saw thick hoarfrost
covering every pine needle, twig and leaf. They hurried to the
closest mountaintop where clouds broke over them in rushes, and
glimpses of autumn brilliance became visible as the sun worked
its way through the valleys and up the sides of the mountains.
"I did four paintings in a frenzy," Weston later wrote in Freedom
in the Wilds (St Huberts, NY: Adirondack Trail Improvement
Society, 1971). "The wild exuberance of the day and
its...wilderness beauty called for a shorthand method in paint to
capture rapidly changing emotional reactions, methods that
predated abstract expressionism."
Weston did not lead other artists, nor did they lead him. He was
a fierce individualist. The critic Henry McBride, an advocate of
Modernism, called Weston "heroic" for pursuing his wilderness
solitude in the Adirondack mountains of Upstate New York, adding
that most great American artists, including Eakins and Homer,
were also reclusive.
The "rugged sensibility" that grew out of Weston's early
wilderness solitude in the Adirondacks is essential to
understanding his entire oeuvre. His early landscapes had an
expressionistic immediacy and stylized energy that made him right
at home with other Modernists, and yet his approach also defined
him as a holdout for the unifying principles that Modernism was
questioning.
Weston's ever-evolving stylistic changes, from semiabstraction to
hyperrealism to abstraction, can be disorienting, but when the
critical focus is on Weston's Adirondack work, his core purpose
is clear: the preoccupations born in the early Adirondack
paintings inform and guide his long career as an artist.
The exhibition includes a large number of loans from private and
public collections around the country, making it a rare
opportunity to see Weston's best Adirondack work. Scenes of
Indian Head, the Ausable Lakes, Chapel Pond, views from Mount
Marcy and other Adirondack icons are, in Weston's words, "hymns
to the endless glory of God."
In addition to the artist's paintings, the museum will exhibit
personal items, including Weston's easel, paint box and brushes,
sketch books, diaries, press clippings, exhibition catalogs and a
copy of his book Freedom in the Wilds: A Saga of the Adirondacks.
Objects from nature that inspired paintings such as the
worm-eaten stick for "Wood Script" and the stones that inspired
the "Stones Series" will also be displayed.
The exhibition catalog, co-published with Syracuse University
Press, is fully illustrated (116 color and 13 black and white),
features four essays, a checklist of Weston's Adirondack art
compiled by art historian Kathleen V. Jameson with Nina Weston
Foster, a chronology and a critical bibliography make this the
single source for Weston.
A documentary film, Harold Weston: A Bigger Belief in Beauty,
will be shown throughout the museum's season. The film
incorporates archives of moving and still images of the artist at
work and play, views of Adirondack scenery that inspired him, as
well as exceptional images of his art and the times in which he
lived. Book signings, lectures and art-making workshops will also
be among the special events.
The museum is on Routes 28N and 30.
For information, www.adkmuseum.org or 518-352-7311.
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