Maurice Brazil Prendergast
Maurice Brazil Prendergast
1858 - 1924
Painter, printmaker, illustrator and designer; brother of (2) Charles Prendergast. He moved with his family to Boston in 1868 and was working as a commercial artist lettering showcards by 1886, but his early attempts at watercolour foretold little of the talent that emerged after he travelled to Paris in January 1891. He studied for three years at the Atelier Colarossi under Gustave Courtois (1853–1923), and later at the Académie Julian under BENJAMIN CONSTANT, JOSEPH BLANC and JEAN-PAUL LAURENS. Here the influence of the Nabis and of Whistler was particularly important to his development.
In late 1894 Prendergast returned to Boston as an accomplished watercolourist. Following his work in Paris and along the Breton coast, he began to paint scenes from the life of the urban middle class. During this period (1895–8) he continued to make monotypes, a technique he evidently learnt in Paris, and began to exhibit these and his watercolours with increasing recognition in Boston’s commercial galleries. He also worked for a short time as a book illustrator and poster designer. The women depicted by Prendergast, unlike those painted by his Boston contemporaries, were rarely idle, even at leisure, and are never shown in domestic settings. They engage in the life of the city and its recreations (see fig.), as in the Stony Pasture (watercolour, c. 1896–7; Manchester, NH, Currier Gal. A.), from whose sure underdrawing and lively surface pattern of fluidly applied watercolour emerge figures of women and children. In this composition one woman rather comically balances herself with a parasol to make her way among the boulders that littered the newly laid out park. Such obvious pleasure in the bustle of a crowd is also evident in scenes at the seashore, such as Handkerchief Point (watercolour, c. 1896–7; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), seen typically from above.
During an extended stay in Italy (1898–9) Prendergast achieved an even greater assurance in watercolour and, under the influence of 15th-century Italian art and architecture, he produced a significant group of works, which focus on life in the streets and piazzas of Venice. Compositionally more daring than the seaside scenes of the mid-1890s were such pieces as Splash of Sunshine and Rain (watercolour, 1899; Alice M. Kaplan priv. col.), which display his skill at pencil drawing. He reserved white areas of paper as independent compositional elements and applied washes of colour in rhythmic patterns across a sheet full of light, atmosphere and incident within a grand public setting.
On his return to America, Prendergast held his first one-man show in 1900 at the Macbeth Gallery, New York, and began to spend more time in that city, which provided new themes for his increasingly experimental watercolours. He also became associated with THE EIGHT (II), whose members recognized Prendergast as stylistically advanced and invited him to exhibit with them at Macbeth’s in 1908. Prendergast’s contribution included small oils, begun in France in 1907 following his recognition of the art of the Post-Impressionists (particularly Paul Cézanne) and of the Fauves. In such panels as In the Luxembourg Gardens (1907; Margot Newman Stickley priv. col.) Prendergast found release from descriptive narrative. Although he continued to present his favourite seaside and park settings, his true subject was colour, rapidly painted in distinct patches to give a surface pattern to his small oils on panel and canvas. After 1908 his major works were in oil, on a larger scale than before, and he quickly gained the attention of important collectors of modern European and American art, notably Lillie P. Bliss, Albert C. Barnes, John Quinn and Edward Root.
After a second trip to Italy in 1911, Prendergast’s thoughts turned increasingly to monumental, timeless subjects that would make modern art rival the enduring historical styles of the works in museums. He studied ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Classical art as well as international folk art and children’s art to shed the conventions of the art academy and enhance his ability to achieve ‘naive’ effects. Critics admired his blending of abstract design elements with references to popular arts of needlework and storybook illustration (e.g. Decorative Composition, c. 1913–15; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. of. Art.). For a mural project he undertook with Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies in 1914–5, Prendergast elevated this naive style to monumental scale with Picnic (Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.) and Promenade (Detroit, MI, Inst. A.).
Prendergast was invited to serve on the selection committees for American and foreign art for the ARMORY SHOW of 1913 and contributed seven works done in the colourful, Expressionist style he had perfected (e.g. Landscape with Figures, c. 1910–13; Utica, NY, Munson-Williams-Proctor Inst.). The next year he and his brother Charles moved to New York and established themselves at 50 Washington Square South near New York University. Their circle included old friends from The Eight, such as William Glackens and Arthur B. Davies, as well as new friends in modernist circles, including Walter Pach and Walt Kuhn. Prendergast exhibited at the Carroll, Montross, Kraushaar, and Brummer galleries with the most progressive artists of his day and was active in the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (elected president, 1914) and the Society of Independent Artists alongside Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and John Marin.
In the last decade of Prendergast’s career, he established his signature work—the large, thickly-painted frieze of women in a park or beach setting (e.g. The Cove, c. 1918–23, New York, Whitney). These works are formulaic but nevertheless mesmerizing. Figures and space are oddly proportioned and strongly outlined. The paint is then applied in a capricious fashion as if the artist were making and changing decisions from moment to moment, brushstroke to brushstroke. It was well known that Prendergast continued to paint on any canvas in his studio, even already signed and exhibited works, gradually obliterating the original composition but leaving elements of it still visible on the surface. This metamorphic quality was one of Prendergast’s most daring contributions to the development of modernist principles in American art and may be seen as a forerunner to the painterly abstraction that appeared after World War II. In his own lifetime, Prendergast received a bronze medal in the Corcoran Gallery 1923 biennial for one of his last great oils, Landscape with Figures (1921; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.). [Carol Clark and Nancy Mowll Mathews. "Prendergast." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T069490.]
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French, 1864 - 1901
