Art: Mavericks

In the Hudson Valley’s Catskills where Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle rolled ninepins with gnarled mountain gnomes for 20 years, there was great to-do last week. Woodstock’s famed colony of artists, authors, actors, musicians, dilet-tantes and onlookers was preparing for its annual Maverick— Festival, a day-&-night bacchanale to which annually troop thousands of non-colonists to see arty fun. As the day (Aug. 29) approached indications were that in a long-standing feud between colonists and townsmen, the townsmen were for the moment a little ahead.

Woodstock’s feud typifies the sort of feeling that usually arises where city people congregate in the summer in the name of Art.

The feud roots go back even to the founding of the colony. In 1902 three young friends, Hervey White, the late Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Bolton Coit Brown, fired with a dream that Poet-Painter William Morris (1834-96) had outlined to Whitehead at Oxford, started tramping through the eastern U. S. in search of a model site for an art colony. White and Whitehead roamed the Carolinas, but it was Brown who discovered Woodstock.†He sent for his friends. Ten thousand dollars was put up with which to buy land but the stolid Dutch farmers were as testy then as the merchants are now. For a long time many refused to sell. When the land was at last procured, cottages, studios and an inn were erected. Nearby a farm was laid out to feed the colonists. Besides painting, classes in furniture-making (later dropped), rug-weaving, metal-working and pottery were instituted. The farmers’ attitude is indicated by a Le Gallienne anecdote: “One of them recently interviewed as to what he thought of the artists when they first came . . . replied, ‘Wall, to tell the truth we thought they was a bunch of wild Indians and maybe some of them still is. In those days they’d take a canvas out into the field and begin painting on it. First, they’d put a dab of paint of one color and take about ten steps back to see how it looked . . . and by the time that picture was finished what with all the walking back and forth to look at it —there wasn’t nothing left of the vegetable garden the artist was tramping on.’ ”

The principals are F. Gardner Clough, Hervey White & friends v. Woodstock’s Respectables (local residents who are not artists, who frown on Art). Chief enemy of the Respectables is Clough, for though White was founder of the colony and instigator of the Maverick Festival, Clough’s press and marital activities have drawn most venom from churchgoing Woodstock merchants. He is editor of the Woodstock bulletin, a journal of Woodstock’s art votaries,— therefore chief spokesman and defender of the colonists against “the hypocritical piety of Christians.” When, at the 1929 Maverick an anonymous fiat from a “Committee of Fifty” warned that offenders against Woodstock’s rustic peace would be summarily dealt with by the Law, Editor Clough did some quiet investigating. Raucously in the next bulletin he exposed the “Committee of Fifty” as being only Four, gleefully he named names.

This year there were rumors that the Town Board was finding a way to put an end to the Maverick Festival.

To this threat Impresario White made clarion answer. He declared that this year’s Maverick would be “the most stupendous spectacle ever seen in America.” According to tradition it will be held at full moon in a long mountain meadow. It is strictly in costume, the more outlandish and inane the better. Lunches are packed, fires are kindled, and as the afternoon’s spectacle progresses, sitters (thousands come, anyone who has the price of admission) munch and watch. The colonists sell their batiks, paintings, arty gadgets. Newsboys hawk a special edition of the bulletin. Late in the afternoon a costume promenade winds infor-mally up & down wooded slope and dale. In the evening the campfires glow and a pageant is enacted. Always there has been a midnight costume ball but this year it was called off to placate (and fill with triumph) the townsmen. As the night wears on, tippling, done at first covertly, becomes rowdy. In the cold light of morning the sun rises on dead ashes and a dwindling Woodstock. Art’s autumnal migration back to the city is underway.

* “Maverick—an unbranded animal, esp. a motherless calf, formerly customarily claimed by the first one branding it.” (Webster.)

†In his sentimental monography Woodstock, An Essay (1923) Poet Richard Le Gallienne describes Brown as a second Balboa, misquotes Keats: “[Brown] stood looking down on Woodstock. . . .

‘Like stout Cortes, when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific.’ ”

* Contributors are Shaemas O’Sheel, Henry Morton Robinson, Richard Le Gallienne, Poultney Bigelow, Harry Hibbard Kemp, J. P. (“Showgirl”) McEvoy. Other denizens of the Woodstock colony: Alexander Archipenko, Eugene Speicher, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, James Thomson Shotwell, George Barrere, Lya DePutti, Blanche Yurka.