REVIEW: Art at Peabody Essex Museum | Hasten to Hassam

CHARLES HASSAM SURVEY AT PEM 2016

American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isle of Shoals at the Peabody Essex Museum is one of the best exhibitions I saw this year. Go. You will come nearly as close as any observer can to feeling the rapturous meeting of an artist’s take with the shimmering world.

Hassam’s paintings don’t reproduce well in books, or photography. They need to be addressed– sized up, walked towards. Inhaled.

This approach is beneficial even if you study just one. But my, what luxury seeing so many in one place at one time.  Again and again, the show brought forth connections and insight.”Funny, I hadn’t seen that before,” I found myself thinking, “Artists Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud are coming to mind.”

The exhibition features more than 40 Hassam oil paintings and watercolors of the eastern seaboard dating from the late 1880s to 1912–an Isle of Shoals painting reunion, with secrets revealed. 

The Peabody Essex Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art co-organized and partnered with marine scientists at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Cornell University, and the University of New Hampshire. Their new research examined all the sites on the island, and Hassam’s painting process. I liked the research, the pacing of the installation, and the thoughtful viewshed. Besides the two museums, loans came from near and mostly far such as: private collections from coast to coast (which I’d never see);  the Portland Museum of Art; Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis; Yale (Sinclair Lewis gifted that one to Yale!); Wichita Art Museum; Toledo Museum of Art; Smith; Smithsonian; and the National Gallery of Art.

Basically all painting is abstraction: I relished the chance to study so many in one spot.

I was not a fan of the piped in sound, nor all the wall paint choices as my senses were already acutely challenged by observation. My disdain for the canned ambient sound was so distracting, I had to take a break. On my second visit, the scent of coconut wafted out the entrance. My goodness, have they piped in fake scent like a boutique hotel or experiential attraction, too? They hadn’t. It was my overreaction in the wake of another visitor’s adornment, a lingering fragrance, perhaps sunscreen on a summer day.

Tucked away within the Hassam exhibit was a good photo installation of Alexandra de Steiguer’s work as the Isles winter keeper– for 19 years! For anyone who wondered more about life as a keeper after reading The Light Between Oceans, de Steiguer wrote about her real experiences here, http://connected.pem.org/alone-on-an-island/. It’s beautiful!

More photos of the Hassam installation at the Peabody Essex Museum:

“During his first summers on Appledore, Hassam stayed near to the places favored by his close friend, Celia Thaxter (1834-1894).”

http://celiathaxtergarden.com/