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Jul 08, 2023

Vineyard summers gone by

Works by Adolf Dehn at Creekville Art & Antiques give us a taste of how it used to be. “The very act of drawing made me participate in the life around me.” So said Adolf Dehn, draftsman, lithographer,

Works by Adolf Dehn at Creekville Art & Antiques give us a taste of how it used to be.

“The very act of drawing made me participate in the life around me.”

So said Adolf Dehn, draftsman, lithographer, and watercolorist. A collection of his work is on display at Creekville Art & Antiques in Menemsha. They represent a period of three years, from 1933 to 1935, when Dehn spent summers in Chilmark and Gay Head, as it was then, living in a cottage on Chilmark Pond.

He was a friend and colleague of Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, Georges Schreiber, Boardman Robinson, Thomas Craven, and other influential artists, writers, and intellectuals who left their city apartments every summer for rustic outbuildings with no electricity or running water.

There is not a lot of written or documented information about Dehn’s time on the Vineyard, so looking at the art he created over those three summers gives us most of what we can piece together. The work he did here was pencil, charcoal, or ink wash drawings, easily transportable, some serving as studies for the lithographs he would make after he returned to his winter life in New York.

Henry Adams wrote a very readable biography, “The Sensuous Life of Adolf Dehn, American Master of Watercolor and Printmaking,” that gave a few pages to Dehn’s Vineyard summers. He had arrived here with his lady friend of the time, a poet named Eileen Hall, later Eileen Lake. There are six pages of sketches in Adams’s book of her reading or sunbathing, lovely, simple sketches of Hall in various attitudes, some nude, others with her clothes on. One in particular shows Dehn’s sense of humor. “I Can Help You Carry Things” depicts him walking onto a beach, bent almost double as he carries Hall, who is sitting on his back reading her book, while his hands are full carrying the blanket, the food, the drinks, and he has her cat in his mouth.

At Creekville, “The Latin Lesson” shows Hall and Dehn in beach chairs with a large book between them. Hall had a penchant for hats, and you will see her wearing a particularly fetching polka-dotted one, sitting with her back to a stone wall, reading or writing.

Most of the drawings, though, are landscapes of up-Island roads, fields, and beaches. They all show up-Island as it was then, rural and remote. Most of them are ink wash drawings that give an idea of what his lithographs look like. They are all black-and-white, with dramatic effects of light and shadow, combining large abstract shapes with stylized marks of his design that describe grasses or foliage or water or clouds or the air surrounding an object.

“Waves, South Beach, Chilmark” is a composition of roiling waves and billowy clouds, scrubbed and white shapes that mirror one another, divided by a dark horizon line. It is drawn on paper that is a sort-of paper bag brown. Working on that mid-value is very effective, allowing the range of lights and darks that Dehn used to sit bravely on top of the warm background.

“Menemsha Bight and Basin” is as dark and cold and silent as “Waves” is filled with light and energy. The sand looks like it could be snow instead, icy, reflective, a sharp edge against the darkest water. Dehn’s mark-making virtuosity is apparent; spots and scratches create a misty aura, as though looking through a diaphanous fabric as the sea lays back at the horizon, and grays become the sky.

There are different renditions of the Robert Vincent House, near where Dehn spent his summers. One of Dehn’s pencil drawings, “Robert Vincent House off State Road,” shows a long vista down a hill, perhaps the view from his window. The pencil drawing from 1934 has an airy, gestural quality, neither studied nor overly rendered. It is a loose sketch.

In contrast, a larger ink wash drawing uses a broad range of richest, darkest blacks to the lightest pale wash of clouds overhead. The views are similar, but here Dehn has focused more on the foreground. Blots and drawn lines add detail over and within broad areas of dark or mid-value grays. The clouds are barely painted with gouache, lighting the sky. It is there to see how Dehn used razor scratches, wide areas made by dragging the flat edge of the blade across the surface, giving a textural quality he felt was important to a painting. Much of his reputation is from these technical innovations; Dehn may be the most influential artist you have never heard of.

He was in Vienna, then Paris, in the 1920s, where he drew the louche habitués of cafes, theaters, jazz clubs. His friends were poets e.e. cummings and Scofield Thayer, artists Guy Pène du Bois, Constantin Brancusi, Jules Pascin, Stuart Davis, Reginald Marsh, and many others. He gradually turned his full attention to lithography, working with master printer Edmond Desjobert. Returning to the U.S. as the Nazis were rising to power in Europe, he lived between New York City and his family’s farm in Minnesota.

In the late 1930s, he began painting watercolors that proved popular with collectors. He developed a set of tools similar to those he used in his lithographs. Dehn was influential for the ways he used dampened or wet paper, for scraping, erasing, wiping, gouging, sanding, sponging, scumbling; using any tool he found in any way he could to make ink and paper produce the effects he wanted. He was especially fond of single-edge razor blades, and used them to make every sort of mark, from wide scrapes to the narrowest slits of lines. This was true for any medium he used. Lithographs. Watercolors. Drawings.

His books, “How to Draw and Print Lithographs,” written with Lawrence Barrett, and “Watercolor, Gouache, and Casein Painting,” published in 1950 and 1955 respectively, were well-regarded by artists, printers, print experts, art dealers, educators, and students at the time. They included pages of charts and boxes, illustrating the different effects he could get with his assortment of tools. He believed that information should be freely given, rather than “the lithographic craftsmen in the past who guarded their secrets closely.”

As Abstract Expressionism became the dominant art movement in America, the structured realism and technical orientation of artists like Dehn seemed old-fashioned. And yet Philip Eliasoph, in his book “Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan,” wrote about “Central Park, NIght” printed in 1946, “Dehn’s lithograph allows us to recognize how his scenic art of yesteryear was actually foreshadowing innovative techniques employed by later generations of artists. Attempting to deconstruct the white-hot phosphoric emission of light in the nexus between treetops and street illumination, Dehn uncannily demonstrates a prescient appreciation for abstraction. Billowing auras of light mediate between nature and architecture, reminding us of Mark Rothko’s floating passages of veiled nothingness.” That’s quite a laudatory assessment for an artist previously considered an old-fashioned Midwestern Regionalist.

Dehn’s work is in most important museum’s collections. Since many are now online, you can look them up. New York’s Metropolitan Museum notes that “Spring in Central Park, 1941,” is one of the most popular and recognizable images in their collection. Dehn’s lithographs and watercolors are still studied for his technical achievements, as well as for their imagery that depicts a place and time.

Doug Seward, owner of Creekville Art & Antiques, called his collection of Dehn’s lithographs “a cross-section of the 1930s in Chilmark, a snapshot of that period.” Doug grew up in Menemsha, son of Bill and Barbara Seward, who owned the Menemsha Store. He has a lifetime of stories and information he generously shares with visitors.

The same can be said of Jane Slater. She ran her antique business, Over South, in the building that now houses Creekville. She and Doug both told me a story about one of Dehn’s beach scenes; when she saw it, she said, “That’s me there, my mother, Rita Benton, Jessie Benton, hanging out at King’s Beach.”

My visits with Jane and Doug gave me a lot of information for this article. Sitting in Jane’s cozy living room or on a chair inside Creekville listening to their reminiscences filled my head with images of the Vineyard as it was. It was living history, vivid and rich, some of the best afternoons ever. I thank them both.

Creekville Art & Antiques, 8 Basin Road, Menemsha. Open through Oct. 15. Call for more information and hours: 508-645-7949, or 774-563-3874.