40 Years of Collecting
Cahoon Museum of American Art, Cotuit, MA • cahoonmuseum.org • Through December 23, 2024
This year, the Cahoon Museum of American Art marks its 40th anniversary. In 1984, the museum opened in the former home and studio of folk artists Ralph and Martha Cahoon, and embarked on assembling a permanent collection. To celebrate the milestone, the museum has brought forth from storage an enticing array of works in varied media, with varied themes, stretching from the 1850s to the present.
With its maritime focus, the first room opens with Sunset in the Arctic by William Bradford, a Hudson School artist who ventured to the Arctic several times in the 1860s, which portrays a white colossus, amid pink-hued clouds, towering over the sailing vessels at the horizon. Alongside Bradford’s painting Bradford’s Iceberg, a small ceramic sculpture by the contemporary artist Valerie Hegarty mimics the behemoth, only it’s melting off the frame. The demise of the seemingly indestructible iceberg conveys that all things great and small contend with nature’s flux and fragility.
In the idyllic, Pissarro-like scene of Duxbury Clam Digger, Daniel Santry portrays the hard edges of the working man’s humble life. For Cape Cod vistas, there’s the chockablock Provincetown Waterfront by the early Modernist Nancy Ferguson and Daisy Hughes’ boldly rendered Cape Cod Dunes. In Truro-based Robert Cardinal’s remarkable Three Boats, sky and sea—without horizon—are one bright blue, ethereal space, imparting an abstract feel.
The homespun theme of the second room embraces folk art by pairing the classic portraits by Ralph Cahoon with Dorothy Davis’ later day paintings of young children. The room nods respectfully to Impressionism with Paul Moro’s thickly painted Gladiolas and Zinnias, a still-life blaze of lush flowers—even the table seems to shimmer—and with the calming In the Hills and the energized Trout Brook by the masterful American Impressionist John Enneking.
The depiction of a quaint mid-20th-century town in Cotuit Port Crossing by Wilson Barnett is balanced by A Matter of Time, Marieluise Hutchinson’s bucolic scene with a hint of Hopper.
Displayed in the museum’s intimate historic wing, the small yet wide-ranging exhibition is a prideful expression of the care and commitment that enabled the museum to grow its collection for the benefit of Cape Cod and beyond.
— Jack Curtis