Provincetown
Gallery Ehva
Contemporary & Early Provincetown Art
Ewa Nogiec, Director
Winter hours:
Fri, Sat, Sun Noon-4pm
provincetown
contemporary artists
James Bakker
Rachel Brown
Daniel Cleary
Barbara Cohen
Tamar Cohen
Didier Corallo
Daniel Dejean
Tasha Depp
Donna Dodson
Rob DuToit
Jenny Fragosa
Lorrie Fredette
Wendelin Glatzel
Suzanne Harding
Myrna Harrison
Alicia Henry
Jenny Humphreys
Leslie Gillette Jackson
Jane Kogan
MP Landis
Bill Liebeskind
Virginia Luppino
Jay McDermott
Kevin McDermott
Andy Moerlein
Ewa Nogiec
Fawn Potash
Richard E. Smith
Sterck/Rozo
Lisa Ventre
Michael Walden
Rob Westerberg
Special Collection:
Richard Baker
Sculpture Garden (outside):
Whale Tail: Greg Clemence
Wind: Donald Gerola
"Diana Godess of the Hunt": Jerry Holmes
Phil Smith, Show Installations
74 Shank Painter Road
P.O. Box 1426
Provincetown, MA 02657
508-487-0011
508-776-4856 (cell)
www.galleryehva.com
art@galleryehva.com
AMPLE PARKING!
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Visit great sites about art & Provincetown:
William Harry Warren Bicknell | Joseph Birren | Evelin Bodfish Bourne |
Peter Busa | Frank Carson | Oliver Chaffee | Dorothy Lake Gregory |
Marion Hawthorne | Blanche Lazzell | Joseph Kaplan | Karl Knaths |
Doris Lindo Lewis | William Littlefield | Dorothy Loeb | Olga Sears |
Marcus Waterman | Agnes Weinrich | D.C. Wyman
William Littlefield (1902-1969)
1902 Oct. 28 William Horace Littlefield born in Roxbury, Massachusetts,
1919 Fall Begins his study of drawing, and later painting, in private lessons with Adeleine Wolever, an enthusiast of Impressionism who had studied with the Boston painters Benson, Woodbury, and Tarbell, Takes art history, life drawing, and art technique and technical classes at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard’s art department at the time, but continues his private lessons with Wolever until 1923.
1923 Sends his drawings watercolors for critique to William Zorach, from whom he buys woodcuts.
1924 May Graduates with an A.B. from Harvard. He shares a studio apartment with British painter and printmaker S. W. Hayter, at 23 Villa Chauvelot in the 15th. Whereas Hayter had become a modernist, Littlefield at this time neither adopted modernism nor was accepted into its circle of adherents and advocates. Applies for a 1929 – 30 Guggenheim fellowship in painting and is turned down.
1929 June Returns to the United States, that summer spent painting in Falmouth, with his parents at 29 Depot Ave. Paints Buoys, Woods Hole.
Winter ‘29–‘‘30 In Boston living at his parents’, 20 Chapel St., Brookline. Later moves with them to 43 Binney St., Boston, which becomes the winter location of Annie Littlefield’s Longwood Riding Stable.
1930 Becomes acquainted with Lincoln Kirstein, editor of Hound & Horn and director of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, where Littlefield is shown in June.
Nov. 25 Finishes commissioned full-length portrait of Lincoln Kirstein as a barefoot sailor.
1934 February Portrait of Eric Schroeder in a Persian robe, commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein.
October At Kirstein’s request, does stage sets for Serenade and Mozartiana, the American Ballet of New York’s first production, performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.
1946 Converts the carriage barn at 29 Depot Ave., Falmouth, into his studio and redoes the other half of the building into a permanent residence where he lives when not in New York City or Provincetown. Gives up the family residence at 43 Binney St., Boston.
His article “Modern Art and Photography” published in Highlights of Photographic Art edited by B. Vincent Abbott, Boston
1947 Becomes co-founder and co-director of the Cape Cod Art Association, Hyannis, Mass.
Summer At Depot Ave., Falmouth. .
July – Sept. Attends Esteban Vincente’s Highfield Art Workshop in Falmouth, where De Kooning is guest lecturer and Gottlieb, Hofmann, Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, Reinhardt, Rothko exhibit.
Fall Rents studio at 119 Stanton St., lower Manhattan, his first of two winter residences he keeps in New York City; becomes pupil of Morris Davidson
1952 January First New York City show since 1932, at Contemporary Arts, which reveals his departure from traditional work into “semi-abstract space composition having simultaneous surface and depth relationships.”
Fall The Club, a membership organization of mostly 10th Street scene Abstract Expressionists, formed with Littlefield’s participation.
1953 January Writes “Is There a New American Art,” a polemic with Thomas Hess’s catalogue introduction to Willem DeKooning’s show of the Woman series, and submits it to ARTnews, which rejects it.
February Submits to ARTnews a polemic about Harold Rosenberg’s “The American Action Painters,” which is also rejected.
The Club rents a space at 39 East 8th St., the first of its several locations, followed by 818 Broadway (1955), 20 East 14th St. (1957), 73 4th Ave at 10th St. (1958), 150 West 15th St. (1959). Littlefield becomes its “administrator” and/or “secretary treasurer” over the years.
1955 Defines himself as an Abstract Expressionist. “Recent Paintings.” at Regina (May) and Brodley (Nov.) galleries, NYC.
1959 Feb. – March One-man show, “Paintings 1956/1957/1958,” at Nonagon Gallery, 99 2nd Ave.
July – Aug. His collection of second- and third-generation Abstract Expressionists exhibited as “The New American Painting — 10th Street, N.Y.” at the Cape Cod Art Association. Over the next nine years fails to find a home for collection and it’s sold off in his estate sale.
August Begins a weekly column of art criticism called “Art Corner” in the Falmouth Enterprise, which continues off and on, mostly in the summer and fall months, until his death.
1960s His life is increasingly devoted to exhibition hanging, judging, art criticism, and local administration on the Cape, while continuing to stay in NYC in the winters. The Club dissolves in the early ‘60s.
1969 July 4 or 5 Dies at 29 Depot Ave., Falmouth, Massachusetts.
[courtesy James R. Bakker Antiques, Inc. http://www.bakkerart.com]
William H. Littlefield & Ed Widmayer, May 4, 1951 and January 1952 A collaboration. A Fiction of Calculated Answers - Of such is said he is one who cares not what fictions her introduces into nature provided his calculations answer, ( an artist is always calculating without knowing that he is - Picasso) / Chintamani - A mythological jeni with powers to grant desires
Oil on canvasboard, 24 x 20, $1800
"Scandinavian Interlace" from Willem de Kooning untitled abstraction 1955 oil 79 x 69 Solomon Guggenheim Museum WHERE ONLY MORAL GESTURES ARE UNETHICAL" dated 12/29/63
Timid and Fearful (the crow's feet are around his eyes) 1/16/57
"Still Life" dated 6/14/52 and inscribed "An unconscious memory of Le Petit Dejeuner by Juan Gris (1887-1927)"
Free Art in America. It was first shown at the East Hampton Gallery, 22 West 56 St., NYC in the Spoof Art Show from Jan 28-Feb 14, 1954. Littlefield titled and inscribed on the verso, "The best things in life are free. Collage from Picasso 'Florence' 9/27/63"
One Possessed, mix media on canvas, April 7, 1955, $1,200
Interior with Victorian Chair, watercolor and ink on paper, 1934, $750
William H. Littlefield, A Retrospective 1902-1969
Catalog from exhibition, published by Cape Cod Museum Of Art, 2006
available at the CCMA and Provincetown Art Association and Museum
to download pdf document click here