Maurice Prendergast

WHILE THE New York realists were continuing the naturalistic tradition of the nineteenth century, in Europe the modern movement was evolving a new concept of the nature of art: not as representation of reality, but as creation in the language of form, color and design--a visual language as directly sensuous as music. Of this revolution the first American pioneer, and for years the only one, was Maurice Prendergast.

Of mingled Irish and French ancestry, born either in Newfoundland in 1859 or in Boston in 1861 (no one knows which), Prendergast was brought up in the latter city. He and his younger brother Charles, the woodcarver and decorative artist, were devoted, and spent most of their lives together. With no regular art training, Maurice as a boy began to sketch outdoors. About 1892 he went to France for three or four years; and it must have been then that he got to know the art of Cézanne, whose first American admirer and champion he became. For years he had little recognition. Included in the famous 1908 show of The Eight, his work was the most violently attacked: one reviewer called it "an explosion in a color factory." His first success did not come until the Armory Show. His last ten years were spent in New York, where he died in 1924.

In early years Prendergast worked mostly in watercolor; all his subjects were outdoors, and he could not afford oil paints and canvas. His favorite motifs were the parks and playgrounds and bathing beaches in and around Boston, with gaily dressed women and children --pictures full of sunlight, air and breeze, the color and movement of crowds, flags flying, dappled light and shade--a holiday spirit as fresh and simple as a child's. These watercolors were a direct expression of the pure, uncomplicated pleasure of the eye. Instinctively Prendergast saw the world as patterns of shapes and hues pleasurable in themselves. He had a delicious color sense, a gift that cannot be learned but must be inborn, like a musician's ear. In his naive way he was doing what certain innovators abroad such as Bonnard and Vuillard were doing--taking the impressionist discoveries of light and color, and creating with them an art of free form and mood.

From the early 1900's Prendergast worked more in oil, on a larger scale and in more complex compositions. His subjects remained the same, but were now less specific: women and children in parks, among trees, with glimpses of distant water and ships sailing--an idyllic world pervaded by the lyricism of youth, of springtime and summer, yet with a twilight mood, as evocative and haunting as the music of Debussy.

His style grew constantly freer from naturalistic limitations. The picture was now conceived as an overall design in harmonic color and rhythmic line. The paint was applied in varicolored touches, producing an interweaving of hues like the woven threads of textiles--a highly personal development of impressionist technique. Prendergast loved pigment in itself, and in his hands it became sensuously enjoyable. Through the years his innate color sense grew both richer and subtler, and his later paintings had the muted splendor of faded tapestries.

Though he was never a powerful designer in round form and deep space, Prendergast's art was purely plastic. There was a fundamental difference between him and most of his American contemporaries: with them the physical elements of painting were means to achieve representation, with him they were integral parts of plastic design. He was the first American artist of his time to see the picture as a physical object having its own order and harmony--a concept which has governed modern art for the past half-century.

Prendergast: "The love you liberate in your work is the only love you keep."

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