A giant squid seems to erupt from the floor of the gallery. Not far away, another wooden figure, more abstract, takes on a shape that could be leaning into the wood’s natural form and could have deviated far from it; from the finished product, it’s hard to say. Close by, there’s an abstract canvas with the contours of a cityscape, the hulking buildings rising from streetlights into darkness, all of it reflected in water. Unifying these works — by William Kent and Leo Jensen — are both the aesthetic sense of the era in which they were created and a more universal spirit of exploration. They’re what happened when the artists making them tried new things.
The pieces are part of “Avant Colony: Unearthing the Westbrook Gallery,” running now on the second floor of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art at 51 Trumbull St. through March 31. Curated by Eric Litke and Peter Hastings Falk, the show is a fascinating glimpse at a group of artists active over a half century ago whose works are redolent of their time period, and whose concerns as artists parallel many of the concerns the art scene in New Haven has today.
As an accompanying note explains, the show “presents the early history of an artist-run gallery and performance space on the Connecticut shoreline — the Westbrook Gallery, founded in 1956 by West Haven native Aage V. Hogfeldt (1925 – 2014) a World War II veteran and 1951 graduate of the Yale School of Art.” The show includes six artists “who constituted the Gallery’s core active group in the early years of 1956 – 64”: Hogfeldt, William Kent, Leo V. Jensen, David T.S. Jones, William Skardon, and Robert Alan DeVoe.
“Through paintings, works on paper, three-dimensional works, and artist books — as well as printed ephemera, period newspaper articles, photography, and accompanying essay — this exhibition is the first to explore this group of artists and their interest in formal innovation, collaboration, and exchange of ideas.” One gallery also presents 1960s paintings “by a contemporary of the group, artist Ruth S. Tyler (1922 – 2006) including works last seen publicly at the Ely Center in 1963.”
The show is also one of a few in the area tied to a look back at the Westbrook Gallery and its artists. Both the Florence Griswold Museum and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum are hosting shows of Leo Jensen’s works. The Mattatuck Museum features a show of works by artist Dalia Ramanauskus. And the New Haven museum is scheduled to open a retrospective of William Kent — who was also the John Slade Ely House’s first curator — in the spring.
As interesting as the art itself are the various newspaper clippings and other ephemera offering the history of the gallery. A 1961 article from the New Haven Journal-Courier (founded in 1848, absorbed into the New Haven Register in 1987) features a photo of the then-eight-year-old gallery and a tantalizing lede: “An old discarded ice house, a great deal of vision and years of backbreaking work have been some of the ingredients that have gone into the birth of the Westbrook Art Gallery. Without doubt, the most important of these ingredients has been the determination of the owner, Aage Hogfeldt, who wanted to build a gallery where professional artists could have true freedom to create without hindrance.”
The gallery, the article goes on to explain, featured indoor and outdoor shows of painting and sculptures as well as musical performances. It also “pioneered a new art form, the slideopera,” in which a musical score and text readings were performed alongside a slide show. “There is no question that the gallery promotes experimentation and creativity. The air positively vibrates with new concepts and new ideas … some successful, some not.” But the (unnamed) reporter’s admiration for the gallery is clear, as ample inches are given for Hogfeldt to explain his goal of breaking away from the idea of a formal art gallery, “where the charter members follow a stereotyped pattern and remain a close little clique with their backs turned to the outside,” and instead plunge headlong into “blending art, music, dance and poetry in complete artistic freedom.”
The Westbrook gallery was a studio as well as an exhibit space. “It is not unusual to find artists engrossed in their work or to find a flutist curled up practicing behind one of the large statues in the gallery,” the Journal-Courier reported. “While may visitors to the Gallery will find it ‘too far out’ for their tastes … we found paintings and sculpture that we thought bizarre at first glance, but that were refreshing and understandable when ‘given half a chance.’ ”
David T.S. Jones
Untitled.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to give the pieces in the show more than half a chance. That’s in part because whatever ideas in the pieces seemed “too far out” to the reporter in 1961 aren’t so far out for us now. Like much art, writing, and music from the 1960s that has by now been quite thoroughly digested in the maw of culture, what seemed to artists then like launching into the unknown looks now like, well, art from the 1960s, a time when many artists questioned what art was, expanded the definition of what could be called art, and pushed and pulled at its many forms, continuing to move away from representation and toward various kinds of abstraction, and getting more into dialogue with the materials they were using.
The Westbrook artists are part of that general tide. More than any particular piece, what hit this reporter was the sheer volume of pieces and the obvious energy that went into creating them. The sense is palpable that a group of artists got together all the time and pushed each other to make the best pieces they could, and some of that energy is reignited just by putting the art of various artists together in the same gallery.
Ruth S. Tyler
Yum-Yum ("Last Supper").
Wisely, the exhibition broadens the context of the Westbrook Gallery artist by including more of their contemporaries who were working in the New Haven arts scene — including some who shared addresses with them. That the “core group” of Westbrook artists was all men isn’t simply circumstantial; they were, as the curators put it, a “boys club.” So one gallery includes works by Sandra Swan and Dalia Ramanauskas. Swan was married to Westbrook artist William Skardon and had her own artistic life apart from him. Ramanauskas, an artist in her own right, married Leo Jensen in 1958 and said of the Westbrook crew, “I was never invited to participate.”
Another gallery features the work of Ruth S. Tyler, who was also active in the New Haven scene at that time. Her powerful, pointed, vibrant pieces — in this reporter’s entirely subjective estimation, the most vital art in the entire show — led Kent, as the curators put it, “to invite her to be the first female member of Kent’s Professional Artists of Connecticut (PAC) which had been formed as an expressly male-only group.”
As part of her PAC activities, Tyler showed up for a boycott of the New Haven Arts Festival, a juried show at the time. PAC members boycotted “on the grounds that the Yale School of Art exercised undue influence on it,” as the curators state.
The photographs from the protest help drive home the parallels to today, in artists boldly staking their turf in New Haven and carving out space of their own. The curators are right to show that the Westbrook Gallery artists had their flaws, but that their revolutionary spirit made them bold creators, come what may. They made a place that they owned, in which they could show their art, without worrying very much whether people got it or not. Artists today face the same kinds of problems, in needing to find space for their work and articulate a new set of concerns. That this finds echoes in local history is perhaps both a source of inspiration and despair.
But the deeper lesson in the Westbook Gallery story is as valid as ever: in the end, the important thing is to keep making art. You can’t control the art market, or how many people come to a show, or how your art is perceived. But none of that matters very much as soon as the brush hits the canvas.
“Avant Colony” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through March 31. Visit ECOCA’s website for hours and more information.
WOW!
ARTISTS BOYCOTT THIS FESTIVAL really rings home.....
New Haven really needs to look at itself and it's supposedly 'inclusive' and 'well-funded' arts organizations.
The same 'sentiment' that bore this message is the same reason for the splintered, self-serving, connected administration of the arts that persists today. What one class of people did to another is being replicated with the roles reversed, and no real sense of community at the center. It is all entitlement.
It is also the same sentiment that created the 10year Independent Local Arts festival, IDEAT VILLAGE.
The City REALLY hated that idea of public inclusion, or maybe it was just me!!!!
Let's face it.....
THIS 'CROWD' HATES COMPETITION!
Thanks for showcasing that photo, Brian... it speaks deep truth!
Now if Helen Kauder would resign from Ely House, as she promised, we might really be getting somewhere with 'the arts' in this town!