Niles Spencer

NILES SPENCER'S work came to maturity in the early 1920's. Born of Yankee stock in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he found in the old seacoast towns of Maine and Cape Cod a favorite theme for his early work. His most characteristic subject, however, was to be the urban scene, the factories, skyscrapers, bridges, warehouses and dwellings of the city, which his quietly searching, intense vision distilled in precisely simplified forms. From the beginning he loved New York, and it was the abstract pattern of the city rather than the life of its inhabitants that moved him. His unpeopled canvases have the strength of understatement, a feeling for design that is both sensitive and profound, and a muted poetry of color.

Spencer was born in 1893 and studied from 1913 to 1915 at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. During a brief stay in New York in 1915 he studied with Bellows and Henri at the Ferrer School, and the following year he went to New York to live. Summers, and a number of winters as well, were spent on the coast of Maine at Ogunquit, where he lived in the artists' colony at Perkins Cove started by Hamilton Easter Field.

In 1921-22 and again in 1928-29 Spencer lived in France and Italy. In 1923 he joined the Whitney Studio Club and showed there till 1930. Two one-man shows in 1925 and 1928 won him recognition and a firm place in American art, though he did not hold another one-man show until 1947. A commission from the Section of Fine Arts of the Treasury Department for a mural for the post office at Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, was completed in 1937. His paintings are owned by major museums throughout the U.S.A.

From 1923 till about 1940 Spencer divided his time between Provincetown, Massachusetts and New York, where he lived in the old Washington Square section he painted so often. After 1940 he made New York his permanent home, but again sought out an old seacoast town, Sag Harbor, Long Island, for the summers.

Spencer's untimely death in 1952 interrupted a powerful series of canvases devoted to the theme of industrial America, paintings increasingly abstract in feeling though they never lost their frame of reference in nature.

Spencer: The winters at Ogunquit [in the early 1920's] came as a revelation. I had more or less expected bleakness, cold and lonely isolation, but the actuality was quite different. The storms, the clear cold sunlight and especially the quiet silvery gray days when the sea, sky and land achieved a tonal relationship, made the bright blue, the lush green of summer seem crude and far away. . . . Contact with the winter scene, when the underlying structure of the whole landscape stood out so clearly, affected the whole direction of my future work. It left me with the obvious but basic conviction that wherever art ends it begins with nature.

The term realist as it is applied to contemporary painting has acquired a number of contradictory associations. These should be made clear if the aims of present-day artists are to be understood. . . . The deeper meanings of nature can only be captured in painting through disciplined form and design. The visual recognizability is actually irrelevant.

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