Art: THE GENTLE REBEL

MAURICE BRAZIL PRENDERGAST was 64 years old and already on his deathbed when he learned one day in 1923 that Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery had given its Bronze Medal to one of his paintings. It was just about the only prize that had ever come his way, and the old man could not help being amused. “Well,” he said, “I am glad they’ve found out I’m not crazy, anyhow.” For today’s gallerygoer the wonder is more likely to be that so gentle and genteel a painter (see color) could ever have been considered a disturber of the peace.

This week the Boston Museum of Fine Arts opens a major show of 151 drawings, oils and watercolors intended to remind Americans that Maurice Prendergast was, in fact, a rebel of note. Timid by nature and without a shred of temperament, he painted a sunshine world of parks, picnics and parasols, and peopled it with a race of doll-like creatures who seemed on perpetual holiday. Yet he was the first U.S. artist to paint with broken colors, helped organize New York’s 1913 Armory Show, which clamorously launched “modern art” in the U.S. His big trouble since has been that his touch was so light and his brush so gay that not everyone has been able to see that he was a rebel at all.

Balloons & Banners. The son of an Irish-born odd-job man, Prendergast grew up in Boston, started his career at 14 as an apprentice to a painter of show cards for stores. From early childhood he had wanted to be an artist, spent his free time endlessly sketching cows. Finally he scraped together enough money to go to Paris and then to Italy. Though he attended art classes, he found his real teachers elsewhere — the 16th century Vittore Carpaccio of Venice and France’s Degas, Cézanne, Bonnard and Gauguin.

Like Carpaccio, Prendergast loved bright pageantry, and he filled his paintings with balloons, banners, swans, and outlandish animals that he simply made up. But for all the fun and fantasy, he was breaking new ground. Though he had abandoned the realism that dominated U.S. painting, he was too much of an individualist to fall wholly under the spell of the impressionists. He agreed with Gauguin that form existed not in nature but in the mind, and that form and color had a life of their own quite independent of subject matter. His apparently cluttered pictures were actually delicate mosaics in which color was used for its own sake and a carefully constructed design was imposed upon reality. As a watercolorist, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts ranks him with Winslow Homer and Marin; as an artist, the museum dubs him America’s “first modern.”

Strange Slop. As one of the famed “Eight” of Manhattan’s Ashcan School, Prendergast bore the brunt of the attacks on the 1908 Ashcan show* that marked the first revolt against the formal nudes and innocuous landscapes that dominated turn-of-the-century U.S. art. Outraged by his fantasy, critics inveighed against Prendergast’s paintings as “whirling arabesques that tax the eye.” “unadulterated slop,” and “the product of much cider drunk at Saint-Malo.” If Prendergast felt the sting, he left no record of it. His brush became still looser, his rhythms more intricate, his outlines so subtle that his paintings almost began to look as if they had been woven. But for all their technical innovations, his works con tinued to reflect a childlike world eternally at play.

In the last years of his life. Bachelor Prendergast became deaf—”so deaf.” his old friend Van Wyck (The Flowering of New England) Brooks wrote of him, “that he could not hear the knock on the door when people came to see him. So his friends took to thrusting a newspaper under the door, which they rattled back and forth till he saw it. Prendergast did not greatly regret his deafness. He said he was glad to find that people did not shout the disagreeable things they had to say. Besides, he was never too deaf to hear good news from the art world. When he was told that some young painter had received a deserved recognition, he would always say. ‘Well, there’s still hope for the country.’ ”

*Led by Robert Henri, whose goal was to catch ”the living instant” in his boldly brushed portraits, the style of the Ashcan School painters varied from John Sloan’s somber slices-of-life, the stark realism of Everett Shinn and George Luks and the darkling canvases of William (Slackens to the airy landscapes of Ernest Lawson and mystical pastorals of Arthur B. Davies. Until the 1908 show, recalled Everett Shinn many years later, “art was only an adjunct of the plush and cut glass.”