The outer Cape has, for good stretches of the last century, been yeasty with artistic enterprise. Hans Hofmann taught and awakened a generation of abstract painters here, and Eugene O’Neill staged experimental theater.

Less charted was the surge in modernist architecture that took place around the mid-20th century. ``A Chain of Events: Modern Architecture on the Outer Cape,” now up at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, is an attempt to rectify that lack of attention, celebrate some of the innovative housing that was built, and urge preservationists to take on a new cause.

Curators Bob Bailey and Peter McMahon have put together a sleek, handsome show that follows the rise and fall of the functional geometries of modernist houses in Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet. Photos in color and black-and-white and models made by Ben Stracco portray simply built summer homes with broad planes, angular outlines, and modest materials that echo and update the Cape’s vernacular saltbox houses. Squatting low among the scrubby pines or projecting like an extended balcony over the dunes, these buildings harmonize with the landscape, providing still focal points around which the constant shift and swing of nature pivot.

Jack Phillips , a Bostonian and follower of Walter Gropius who owned a lot of acreage in Truro and Wellfleet, invited intellectuals from MIT and Harvard to come and make use of the land in the early 1940s. Architects such as Marcel Breuer , Serge Chermayeff, and Paul Weidlinger took their cues from Bauhaus design, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier.

Chermayeff’s signature was diagonally braced cottages, with roof lines sloping down toward each other. He fronted the studio he built in 1954 with a grid of windows and shingle panels. It’s two buildings with a breezeway, which created room for individual work and communal gathering. Chermayeff studied the psychology of social space and in 1963 published a book, ``Community and Privacy.”

Breuer, who designed the Whitney Museum, built a house on Williams Pond in Wellfleet in 1948 with off-the-shelf lumber. It, too, features two structures, linked by a deck; a cantilevered porch was the dining room. The L-shaped house Breuer subsequently built for the Wise family was a mirror image of his own. It stands emphatically horizontal, white and low on stilts over a sloping ground.

Jack Hall built a cottage for Ruth and Robert Hatch in 1960 on a grassy dune overlooking the water, on a piece of land that became part of the National Seashore. It has the gray, weathered look of many salt-and-wind-battered Cape cottages, with a flat black roof and a matrix of separate units. The Seashore now owns the building, and Ruth Hatch still summers there. A local preservationist, Gina Coyle , has worked to get the Hatch House and two other modern buildings protected historic status.

Perhaps the most prolific modern architect on the Cape was Charles Zehnder , who built more than two dozen homes inspired by a salad bowl full of aesthetics: Wright, Thomas Jefferson, Mies van der Rohe, and World War II bunkers. The Goldman House, which Zehnder built in the mid 1970s, features cylindrical decks and all-encompassing views.

Many of these houses are still inhabited by their original owners, who are aging; some are along the National Seashore, which doesn’t have the means to maintain them. Still others are threatened by soaring real estate values; lots are often bought for the land, not for the houses on them. Preservationists such as Coyle have an uphill battle to fight, but exhibitions such as ``Chain of Events” should help at least a little.

Arts and sciences

The Highlands Center at Cape Cod National Seashore does not exist yet, but a nonprofit organization supporting the drive to rehabilitate the former Air Force station in Truro into a center for artists, scientists, and educators does. In an effort to illustrate what an organization that supports both art and science would look like, the Highland Center Inc. has put together ``Cape Collision One” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis.

It’s a small exhibition featuring work by the Collision Collective, a group of MIT and Boston-area artists who make high-tech (and low-tech) art. The show is artistically clever and just plain fun, something to bring the kids too see for 15 minutes’ entertainment.

Erica von Schilgen’s ``Pulling Pears from the Pond” runs on mechanical pulleys and a push button. The pulleys set an oddball, Monty Pythonesque collage nodding and jiggling.

Similarly, Chris Fitch asks visitors to slowly turn a hand crank for his ``Tantalus Mackerel.” He lays bare all the cogs and chains the crank sets spinning, but it still feels magical to watch a bright blue fish at the end of all that machinery swim and leap toward a passing insect. Andrew Neumann pairs still photography with digital video, mounting a small screen in the middle of a photo of the sea, just at the horizon line. Both are still and quiet, but the viewer brings a different quality of looking to each.

Art and science make a natural pair, and always have—look at Leonardo da Vinci’s oeuvre. If the Highland Center ever comes to realization, it could be a fascinating lab for creativity.

More information at http://www.paam.org/schedule.html

Salvatore Del Deo is not willing to lay it all out on the table when I ask him about the content of his upcoming talk entitled “My Life in Provincetown as an Artist, 1946-2006” this Wednesday at the Payomet Performing Art Center’s tent at the Highlands Center in North Truro.

He is willing to say a lot has changed in the 60 years since he arrived there to study with Henry Hensche in the Cape Cod School of Art.
“(Provincetown) was a place you could nourish your young talent, get mentors and live cheaply,” he says. “I think that’s gone for now.”

It will come as no surprise to hear that Del Deo, who has lived year-round in Provincetown since 1954, is displeased with the change of culture in Provincetown, which he says came about with the influx of the very wealthy, at the expense of working artists, many of whom left when the struggle for economic survival proved too perilous.
“The biggest difference today is the lack of available space for young artists,” Del Deo says. He explains the situation in Provincetown with a baseball metaphor. “Provincetown was like the farm team for painters,” he says. Now, Del Deo sees artists going directly from their creative infancy into the “big leagues” without ever having a chance to hone their skills, develop their eyes, or discover what’s really inside them as artists.

That’s not the only way sports and the art world are linked, according to Del Deo, who says that the competitive spirit seems to have overcome the creative spirit.
“It appears there’s more consciousness of marketability than there is of helping others,” he says mournfully.
In addition to the artists themselves and the real estate obstacles, Del Deo is also critical of the business end of the art world—galleries and museums.
One visible sign of the change in Provincetown is the recently renovated Provincetown Art Association and Museum, an institution with which Del Deo has been closely associated for many years.

“I served in ever capacity there, except president,” Del Deo says. “In fact, when I was a kid, I was the maintenance man there ... it afforded me an opportunity to be in the environment of art.’

While there were changes to the building that Del Deo applauds, such as the vault in the basement, which he says was badly needed and the addition of three new galleries, he is not too happy with it. He was a vocal opponent of some key design decisions, attending planning meetings early on to voice his concerns about it.
“I said ’you’re ignoring all of the landscape around you, not taking into account the motif of Provincetown… and you’re giving me a building that you could find outside of Lincoln or Concord or anywhere else in New England, or in the country. (The architect) said ’we know that, but we want to make a statement’. Well, they made their statement.”

A major bone of contention is the decision to put a school over a gallery, which Del Deo says is unheard of. He also is dismayed at the sacrificing of natural light, which he says, “people go out of their way to have new museums and new galleries with natural light.”

Although he will miss the old museum, he admits that over time the new one will blend in and he’ll get used to it.
In addition to studying with Hensche, Del Deo also attended Rhode Island School of Design, the Vesper George School of Art in Boston, and the Art Students League in New York. His work has been exhibited in New York, Boston, and elsewhere and some of his paintings are held in collections at the Smithsonian, Harvard University, and of course, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Del Deo is not only a very successful painter, he also opened one of Provincetown’s best restaurants, Ciro & Sal’s, with co-owner Ciro Cozzi way back in 1951, as a coffee shop and late-night hangout for bohemian types. The restaurant evolved into an excellent Italian restaurant that is still well liked in the community. But its culinary origins were far simpler.

“We got together and very modestly started making Italian sandwiches,” he recalls. Pretty soon, the little coffee shop Cozzi and Del Deo set up so they could support their families and lives as painters, turned into one of the most popular restaurants on the Cape.

Sal “gracefully bowed out” of Ciro & Sal’s back in 1959, to spend more time painting. In 1963, he opened his own restaurant on the west end of Commercial Street, Sal’s Place, but he left the business in 1989 to focus entirely on painting, something he says he now commits most of his days to, just about every day of the week.
He advises young painters to “stop looking for galleries, just paint.”

He assures me there is a lot more he will speak about in his talk on Aug. 23 at Payomet. Something tells me, we’ve barely scratched the surface of it in our brief interview.
If you go:
What:Salvatore Del Deo: My Life in Provincetown as An Artist”
When:8 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 23.
Whereayomet Performing Arts Center tent at Highlands Center, North Truro.
How much:$10; $5 for kids to 12.
Information:508-487-5400 or http://www.ppactruro.org

Do you know the way to NOCO?

Probably not, as it isn’t on any maps just yet. But the new name for an old arts district has Provincetown abuzz.

NOCO, or North of Commercial, is the idea of artist Rick Fleury, whose gallery at 268 Bradford Street sits in the heart of the newly defined arts district. While walking his dog Graham last January, Fleury’s thoughts turned to summer and how to get more visitors to his gallery, which is in the old studio of legendary Provincetown artists Ross Moffet. Getting foot traffic off of Commercial Street can be difficult. The challenge, Fleury thought, is describing where his gallery is. Like many Outer Cape residents he curled his arm upward and turned his palm in to make an impromptu map.

“And then it just struck me,” said Fleury. “I’m in SOCO.”

But then he gave it another look and realized that SOCO would be in Provincetown Harbor. He was north of Commercial. NOCO.

The more he thought of the name the more he liked the sound. But he also liked the idea. The NOCO neighborhood includes not only Fleury’s gallery, but at least 10 others, as well as the Fine Arts Work Center and the Provincetown Theater. It also includes the Hawthorne Barn on Miller Hill Road, the location where the Cape Cod School of Art, and thus the Provincetown art colony, was founded by Charles Hawthorne in 1899. For over 100 years, NOCO has been home to the heart of the arts community in Provincetown. It is the epicenter of creativity.

“I would rather be in the heart of something than on the edge of something else,” said Fleury, adding that in NOCO there are still many artists living and working in typical Cape Cod cottage studios. “There’s the old Provincetown thing going on here. This is where artists live and breathe. There is real meat in NOCO.”

The idea for NOCO is not to compete with the East End gallery district, but to compliment it, to provide an alternative. Fleury notes that in other galleries the artists may only be there for opening night, or not at all. But the galleries in NOCO are often adjacent to the artist’s studio. And the artist often works the gallery themselves, giving visitors an opportunity to talk and exchange ideas with a painter or photographer. That’s at the core of the concept of NOCO, said Fluery. The three words that best describe NOCO, said Fleury are accessible, history bound and alive, mixing tradition with innovation.

“We’re creating a forum for the arts to be alive,” said Fleury of himself and the other artists in NOCO. “I don’t think there is enough of that going on anywhere, right now.”

NOCO is about giving back, about engaging the public in the arts. Sometimes museums and galleries can seem elitist and distant. NOCO is about being welcoming and involved with the community and public. With that effort in mind NOCO Studios started Stone Soup, a weekly salon where a guest speakers engages that public in discussions about Cape Cod and the arts.

“Things are always better when we all work together,” said Fleury.

And though it is still a new concept, and name, in Provincetown NOCO is being openly embraced by other arts institutions in the neighborhood as well across town in general.
“I like the idea that there is a part of town that has more edgy work,” said Micah Malone, the director of the DNA Gallery on Bradford Street. “Any town succeeds better when it has different neighborhoods that showcase the diversity of thought, beliefs and work. I’m all for it.”
The Provincetown Theater loves the idea of NOCO, so too does the Fine Arts Work Center.

“The bottom line is that anything that promotes the arts in Provincetown is a great thing,” said Hunter O’Hanian, executive director of the Fine Arts Work Center and a member of the Economic Development Council. “It’s the most important thing we do.”
In a world that is increasingly becoming homogenized and made bland by corporate interests and culture, it is fantastic that the arts can be celebrated so specifically in Provincetown.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have individual designations in Provincetown by neighborhood,” said O’Hanian. “Really all of Provincetown is an arts district. But creating a neighborhood celebrates and creates character.”
More and more galleries are including the moniker NOCO on their business cards and store front signs.

“This is the backbone of the art colony,” said tourism director Bill Schneider. “This kind of organic arts movement shows that the arts are still very much alive in Provincetown.”
Schneider is excited by the idea not just for what it says and means about his home community, but also what it could mean for the expansion of the arts as an economic stimulant for Provincetown. The town’s economic development council has focused quite specifically on promoting and supporting the arts to expand and improve the economy of the town. NOCO is just the kind of buzz the town needs said Schneider.

“Accepting the role of the artists and giving back, that’s what its all about,” said Fleury. “NOCO is more than just art galleries, it’s being open to ideas and exchange. Its about our history and our future.”

Provincetown’s tiny East End is like Newbury Street in overdrive. The art season is at its height here, where the galleries stay open seven days a week and shows often turn over every two weeks.

DNA Gallery is back up to speed, after hitting a bump last year as director Nick Lawrence focused on his New York gallery and several artists left to open their own space. The strong group show there now ranges from abstract digital photography to lush landscape painting.

Vermont painter Eric Aho’s spectacular large-scale landscapes of melting ice, all painted outdoors, could swallow you up. He’s a gestural painter, not afraid of broad, dramatic strokes that bracingly straddle representation and abstraction. ``January Floe” depicts breaking ice in the foreground with thick, luscious brushstrokes that could have been made with a house painter’s brush. In the background, scratches in wet paint convey bare trees. Aho’s tones are no less vibrant than his gestures: His white is buttery with sunlight; the still water anchoring the canvas’s center is a chilly blue-black.

Dutch artist Tjibbe Hooghiemstra’s landscapes make a strong counterpoint—internal and contemplative compared with Aho’s theatrics. Hooghiemstra’s small drawings on linen brood with dusky atmosphere. He works in charcoal and crayon, barely hinting at the outlines of a scene—in ``Harbour” we see the shape of a boat and a horizon line—but the dusting, scraping, and dripping of dark moods dominate the image.

Francie Randolph’s encaustics look like close-up visions of cells clustering. Randolph applies wax tones, then melts and scrapes, creating a luminous buildup of colors. ``Coral Series #13” has three pale green cells with chilly blue borders; the nucleus of each glows like a hot blue flame.

The duo of Katleen Sterck and Terry Rozo photograph things—their first baby shower, the interior of a Spanish chapel—and then put the images through digital filters that distort and obscure them into abstraction. These are most effective when there’s still a hint of the original source; in ``Spanish Chapels to First Born (Untitled #14)” you can make out wooden ornamentation in the chapel, kaleidoscopically swooping and breaking up. That satisfying tension between the final image and what it portrays can slip away too easily when the artists push the abstraction too far.

Expressing the abstract

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum’s splendid new wing hosts an exhibition of the late abstract painter William H. Littlefield’s work; it’s a companion show to a retrospective at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. James R. Bakker curated both.

Born in Boston and schooled at Harvard, Littlefield settled in Falmouth. He went from being a figurative painter who worked for the WPA to being a moderately successful Abstract Expressionist.

The PAAM show includes several photographs of the artist by Fred McDarrah , a onetime model for Littlefield who went on to become a Village Voice photographer. Some of Littlefield’s correspondence is also on view, so we get a taste of the man as well as the artist.

The paintings evolve from those still partly figurative—``Double Identity” (1950) has two figures, one behind the other, seemingly trapped in an abstract web—to the purely abstract. It’s fascinating to watch Littlefield surrender to line, color, and form. ``Several Clown Heads” (1954) features a looping, criss crossing yellow line, textured with sand, and glowing tones inside the loops. It looks almost like stained glass.

By 1962, with the lovely ``Autumn Wind,” Littlefield integrated the three-dimensional quality of his figures with the passages of bright, dancing color that typified his abstract paintings. Pillowy, almost fleshy forms fold into one another in a giant, fluid embrace.

Playing it straight

The show at Rice/Polak Gallery will appeal to those who prefer straight-out representation. Lisbeth Firmin’s bold street scenes feature dramatic chiaroscuro and forms created from blocks of color. ``Yellow Raincoat” has the sidewalk shining in a loose grid of wet squares. The foreground is all gold, from the light in a window to the broad expanse of a woman’s back, garbed in yellow.

Nick Patten’s quiet, uninhabited interiors are the opposite of Firmin’s energized canvases. Patten, using the geometry of open doors, slatted chairs, and bay windows, creates in his paintings a place for contemplation. ``Returning” has us looking down at the floor beneath a window; blinds hush the sunlight reflected on the wood. A lamp and a chair come in from the sides, framing a place where a child might choose to play alone.

David Mitchell’s ceramic torsos, also up at Rice/Polak, are embarrassing. Mitchell is a good craftsman: The figures are convincingly human, and their patinas are lovely. But he cuts the nude males off at the thigh and, ridiculously, just above the chin, and contorts them in dancerly twists and thrusts. It’s as if he’s trying to imbue them with myth and romance. In today’s age of irony, they’re just laughable.

Evidence legal pads. Check. Black, thick pens. Check. Clear, green plaid Scotch tape. Check. “When I’m writing I have very much a ritual that I follow,” says John Waters as he takes a break from settling into his summer home in Provincetown, Mass. “I get up every day at 6:15, and I read newspapers and drink a lot of tea.”

Waters starts his workday two and a half hours before McDonald’s stops serving breakfast: at 8 a.m. Over the last year, Waters, 60, has been compiling notes for a film, but he won’t reveal details.

“If you’re working on something and you talk about it before it happens it’s like trying to get pregnant when you don’t; not that I would know,” he says.

Every Waters’ film, from 1964’s “Hag In a Black Leather Jacket” to 2004’s “A Dirty Shame,” has been an originally off-kilter piece and “a satire of a particular genre film.”

“It’s my job to think up weird things,” he says.

Developing the quirky alliterated-named characters (Dawn Davenport, Penny Pingleton, Motormouth Maybelle) in hit films like “Hairspray” and “Cry-Baby” is the simple part. It’s the plot that Waters slaves over. “Unfortunately, the plot is what makes a hit movie,” he says.

From a murderous matriarch in “Serial Mom” to a young photographer in “Pecker,” Waters has crafted peculiar plots, but none that have could be labeled “gay” - not even 1972’s “Pink Flamingos.”

“You might think ‘Pink Flamingos’ started with a gay audience, it didn’t at all,” Waters says. “It started at a angry, hippie heterosexual audience that were punks that didn’t even know it. I’ve always said that my audience is minorities that don’t fit in with their own minorities.”

Even with the gay-themed films he’s seen, especially romantic comedies, he hasn’t been impressed. “Gay is not enough,” he says, laughing. “Some gay films are as bad as early black films. They’re as embarrassing. Just ‘cause a movie is about a homosexual doesn’t mean it’s good or bad.”

Waters doesn’t believe, though, that all gay filmmakers just make queer-themed flicks. “I don’t think all the filmmakers I know that are gay necessarily want to be in the gay ghetto of just making gay films,” he says.

Although Waters may not shoot LGBT films, he lives in the gay ghetto of Provincetown, where he says it would be redundant to have a Pride festival. “What would be the point?” he says. “It’s the gayest town in the whole world I think.”

Waters doesn’t display the knife used to slay Dottie Hinkle in “Serial Mom,” or any other memorabilia from his movie sets, in any of his three homes. “I used to when I was younger,” he says, “but I think as you get older you don’t want your work in your house.”

Instead, his home in Baltimore, Md., where he grew up and which often serves as the location for his films, is smattered with fake food inspired by a trip to Tokyo where there’s an entire street dedicated to his collection. “I like the ugly things, like one meatball, or an old carrot, or a piece of cheese, or pickle or an egg,” he says.

In Provincetown, where he treks via bicycle, the residents are used to Waters’ presence each time he strays from Maryland and his apartment in New York. “I hear them say, ‘John Waters!’ but I’m a block away,” he says. “I’ve been coming here for 43 summers, since I was a senior in high school. They’re used to seeing me here.”

But busy bee Waters can’t often stop and chitchat, although he has taken a breather to autograph a tampon. “Oh, I’ve signed that,” he says. “I’ve signed asses, dicks, tits. Now they get them tattooed on afterwards.”

Waters points out that the first woman he autographed on a private area with a felt tip pen, and who later had it tattooed on, is from Ann Arbor and recently wrote him to affirm her presence at his one-man show, “This Filthy World.”

“People have had part of my script on their leg, like dialogue,” he says, “so they’re human scripts.”

While Waters is easily recognized by his thin, Little Richard-inspired mustache about a centimeter above his upper lip, don’t expect him to shave it off anytime soon. “I think there would probably be a mark there, it might be like white, kind of where the sun never shines,” he says. “I guess I would shave it off if I ever committed a crime and had to go underground.”

Although known for being a filmmaker - the “ultimate voyeur and control freak” - Waters also has acted. In 2003 he played Pete Peters (note the alteration), a paparazzo celebrating the death of Britney Spears, in “Seed of Chucky,” the fifth installment of the “Child’s Play” series.

In the fall he’ll film a part for the Court TV program “Til’ Death Do Us Part,” playing the Groom-reaper and also narrating the program. On the show, the bride and groom slay each other. “I’m the only guest that knows that they’re gonna do it,” he says.

With oodles of projects in the works, “Hairspray” still raking in dough in theaters (and becoming a “big Hollywood” movie starring John Travolta and Queen Latifah) and “Cry-Baby” being adapted into a musical, Waters doesn’t plan on packing up his legal pads or black, thick pens yet.

“New projects keep me jumping,” Waters says. “I think my career is going better than it ever has.”

To check out his legion of tattooed fans visit the fansite http://www.dreamlandnews.com

This is an important and beautiful figurative expressionist painting by the New York and Provincetown artist Lester F. Johnson. It is a gouache/watercolor on paper, 18 ¾” x 23 1/4” (image), and 24”x30"(framed). It is signed Lester Johnson lower right and dated 8/1958. The picture is in fine condition and is archivally framed. It shows the usual and expected slight rippling of the watercolor medium, and what I think is the intentional drippings of the gouache paint in a manner similar to many of the abstract expressionists also painting in Provincetiown at that time. I am currently auctioning two other works by Lester Johnson on ebay now.

In May 2001 the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown published a catalogue of an exhibition of Lester Johnson’s work during the 1950’s and 60’s. This painting is obviously from that period and is similar to interior scenes facing outward toward what I am sure is Provincetown Harbor. I ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEE THE AUTHENTICITY OF THIS PAINTING.

A New York artist, known as a second-generation abstract expressionist, Lester Johnson was born to a large Lutheran family in Minneapolis. He studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and the St. Paul Art School. There he was introduced to Hans Hofmann’s teaching approach, particularly the “push and pull” effects of form and color by St. Paul teachers Alexander Masley and Cameron Booth, both of whom had studied with Hofmann in Munich. After further study at the Chicago Art Institute, Johnson moved to New York City in 1947 and became one of the first downtown loft-dwellers. He shared a lower East Side studio with Larry Rivers and attended some of Hofmann’s New York classes. Rents were cheap but Johnson was broke much of the time as he tried to support his painting through a variety of part-time jobs, including teaching art. In 1950, he and realist figurative painter Philip Pearlstein shared a studio space. Lester’s wife, Jo, had introduced the two artists at a time when she and Pearlstein were studying art history at New York University. Johnson’s various studios, on the Bowery and elsewhere, were always one flight up with a view of Manhattan’s active street life. No wonder, for over fifty years, street scenes have been a dominant part of his art. Johnson adopted the working techniques of action painting, which meant he used a great deal of paint. A tube of oil paint might be expended in seconds as he, like Pollock, physically projected himself into the work. The images that Johnson produced were not decorative, but stubbornly confrontational: oversize, brooding, thickly encrusted, scarred surfaces that were alive with recognizable objects and figures. Even today, few realize how radical it was for Johnson to depict a recognizable subject in an adamantly pro-abstract-expressionist climate. Sculptor George Segal recalled: “The Abstract Expressionists were legislating any reference to the physical world totally out of art. This was outrageous to us”. Rebellion came naturally to Lester Johnson, and he remained tenaciously outside the mainstream. Nonetheless, he produced a body of work that influenced several generations of younger painters and confounded an art establishment in need of neat categorization. He remains one of the few painters whose work holds significance for both abstract and figurative artists. Lester Johnson’s animated men and women, with all their nervous energy, yield themselves only gradually to analysis and will no doubt be reinterpreted for many years to come. His largest achievement is perhaps the degree to which each of his works is still able to convince us that the act of painting is relevant and vital. Source: Based on information from article in “Provincetown Arts Magazine,” by Burt ChernowA New York artist, known as a second-generation abstract expressionist, Lester Johnson was born to a large Lutheran family in Minneapolis. He studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and the St. Paul Art School. There he was introduced to Hans Hofmann’s teaching approach, particularly the “push and pull” effects of form and color by St. Paul teachers Alexander Masley and Cameron Booth, both of whom had studied with Hofmann in Munich.

After further study at the Chicago Art Institute, Johnson moved to New York City in 1947 and became one of the first downtown loft-dwellers. He shared a lower East Side studio with Larry Rivers and attended some of Hofmann’s New York classes. Rents were cheap but Johnson was broke much of the time as he tried to support his painting through a variety of part-time jobs, including teaching art.

In 1950, he and realist figurative painter Philip Pearlstein shared a studio space. Lester’s wife, Jo, had introduced the two artists at a time when she and Pearlstein were studying art history at New York University. Johnson’s various studios, on the Bowery and elsewhere, were always one flight up with a view of Manhattan’s active street life. No wonder, for over fifty years, street scenes have been a dominant part of his art.

Johnson adopted the working techniques of action painting, which meant he used a great deal of paint. A tube of oil paint might be expended in seconds as he, like Pollock, physically projected himself into the work. The images that Johnson produced were not decorative, but stubbornly confrontational: oversize, brooding, thickly encrusted, scarred surfaces that were alive with recognizable objects and figures.

Even today, few realize how radical it was for Johnson to depict a recognizable subject in an adamantly pro-abstract-expressionist climate. Sculptor George Segal recalled: “The Abstract Expressionists were legislating any reference to the physical world totally out of art. This was outrageous to us”.

Rebellion came naturally to Lester Johnson, and he remained tenaciously outside the mainstream. Nonetheless, he produced a body of work that influenced several generations of younger painters and confounded an art establishment in need of neat categorization. He remains one of the few painters whose work holds significance for both abstract and figurative artists.

Lester Johnson’s animated men and women, with all their nervous energy, yield themselves only gradually to analysis and will no doubt be reinterpreted for many years to come. His largest achievement is perhaps the degree to which each of his works is still able to convince us that the act of painting is relevant and vital.

Source: Based on information from article in “Provincetown Arts Magazine,” by Burt Chernow

Lester Johnson art on eBay

Producer Curt Richardson has announced that Cirque Jacqueline, Andrea Reese’s acclaimed one-woman play that was first seen in August, 2005, will return to Provincetown in a limited engagement from August 21-27, 2006 at The Art House, a new 120-seat theater located at 214 Commercial Street.

“New York Actress/Playwright Andrea wrote and performs in Cirque Jacqueline, a compelling one-woman drama that reveals the real Jackie who hid behind a carefully constructed public persona. Ms. Reese combined her theatrical experience with extensive research on Jackie O. and a startling resemblance to the icon to create Cirque Jacqueline,” state press notes. The play is directed by Charles Messina.

Messina’s credits include: Writer/Director of Mercury: The Afterlife and Times of a Rock God (Sanford Meisner Theater and The Triad Theater, NYC), Writer/Director of Actor Found Dead (John Houseman Theater, NYC), Writer of Spy The Movie, Director of Rockaway Boulevard (Lion Theater, Theater Row, NYC), Writer/Director of The Great Divide (The Triad Theater, NYC) and Director of The Accidental Pervert (The Triad, NYC).

Appearing in the play in a surprise cameo is Paul Urban.

All shows are at 7pm except 8/27 at 5pm. Tickets are $20, and $16 per ticket for groups of 10 or more. Tickets are available at http://www.capetix.com or by calling 1-866-811-4111. For more information on the show, visit http://www.jackieoshow.com . The running time is 85 minutes with no intermission.

A fine, carefully printed impression of this important American early modernist woodcut.

Although the print is annotated with a number, we believe this is probably not evidence of the size of the edition (and this misnumbering of prints was not unusual at that time); in fact this print appears to be exceedingly rare. When Lindemuth’s daughter was interviewed for the artist’s file for the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institute) she noted that this print was “one of the few color wood blocks I’m aware of, it’s of the fish hauling runways in Provincetown in 1917.”

A variant of this print (from the collection of the New York Public Library), without the background structure (the runway, in fact) is pictured in Una Johnson’s American Prints and Printmakers (page 14). There it’s called “Low Tide.” (We have another Lindemuth print which he titled “Low Tide” which bears no resemblance to either of these.)

Lindemuth, a painter, was one of a number of American artists (including the Zorachs, Max Weber, BJO Nordfeldt) who were influenced by European Modernim and Japonisme, and who made woodcuts (often in Provincetown) in the 1915-1925 period; these were in many respects the beginnings of American Modernism.

Note: All my auctions are no reserve. U.S. shipping and insurance free. Inquiries are always welcome. The authenticity of all prints is fully guaranteed, as is the satisfaction of the buyer; if not completely delighted with this print for any (or no) reason a full refund including any shipping costs will be given on its return.

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This is the Sculpture category in the Art Section of the Provincetown Journal and all visitors are welcome to register as members and use the “Add your own entry” link to post a information about your sculpture art and it will show up in this Section. The work does not necessarily have to be from Provincetown but should have some ties to the town. 

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This is the Paintings category in the Art Section of the Provincetown Journal and all visitors are welcome to register as members and use the “Add your own entry” link to post a thoughts, artwork descriptions with prices, questions, comments, and the like so they will show up in this Section.