Inventory in Context: Artists at the Shore

As long as there have been artists in New York, New York artists have been finding ways to escape the urban environment. For decades, enclaves in the Hamptons, Provincetown, Maine, and elsewhere have offered refuge away from the cold winters, humid summers, and year-round noise and congestion of Manhattan. Deep into the winter season as we are, perhaps many of us are dreaming of slipping away to sunnier climes. The three artists presented here – all based in New York – each maintained a vibrant studio practice outside of the city that fueled their creativity and provided a closer connection to nature. 

Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell kept homes and studios in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Hofmann opened his famed art school there in 1935, and spent much of his time over the next three decades in the seaside town. Among his favorite painting subjects were views of his home on Miller Hill, scenes from the docks, and the sea. Even in abstract works such as On the Shore, Hofmann communicates the roiling power of the Atlantic with gestural explosions of line and color.

This explosive power also occupied Motherwell, whose Provincetown studio faced a sea wall where crashing waves constantly sent towering flumes of water into the air. The artist encapsulates this explosive energy in his Beside the Sea series, to which In Blue Ochre with Gauloises is closely related. One can imagine Motherwell throwing paint expressively onto paper in an echo of seawater thrown into the air as it hits the harbor wall. The artist also includes personal details in the form of collaged Gauloises cigarette packaging, evoking a pensive day spent seaside.

Romare Bearden’s At Low Tide offers visions of a more tropical getaway, steeped in the bright colors of the Caribbean island of St. Martin, where Bearden and his wife had a home. The artist had made his last trip to the island the year before, and this collage, created in New York, may have evolved from a smaller piece he made there. Bearden returned again and again to Caribbean landscapes in his late life, infusing these works with a rich sensuality reminiscent of the later work of Matisse. These late landscapes, including At Low Tide, are some of Bearden’s most contemplative and poetic works.