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Vincent Hartgen's Maine Legacy
Establishing an art outpost in Orono
by Edgar Allen Beem
Vincent Andrew Hartgen: His Art and Legacy (Wildflower Lane Publishing, Twin Falls, Idaho, 2008. $55 softcover) is an affectionate and appreciative attempt by the artist's sons David and Stephen along with Maine art critic Carl Little to document the life's work of one of the icons of Maine art. Vincent Hartgen (1914-2002) was a fine watercolorist, a popular teacher at the University of Maine in Orono, and the founder of the University of Maine Museum of Art
In 2006, the Hartgen brothers published their mother's memoir of the artistic life, A Maine Passage by Frances Caroline Hartgen, but this ambitious new family publishing venture is a 258-page survey and catalogue raisonné of Vincent Hartgen's work complete with 48 color plates, 42 drawings and a 16-page photo album. Vincent Andrew Hartgen: His Art and Legacy is thus a work of both filial devotion and regional art history.
In his enthusiastic review of the Hartgen hagiography, Maine Sunday Telegram art writer Bob Keyes made the rather exaggerated statement that "Hartgen was arguably the most important figure in Maine art for a good 50 years." Well, we could argue about that for days, but what is true is that Vincent Hartgen was art in Orono for decades, establishing an outpost of creativity at the state university through his own paintings, his teachings, his collecting, and his sheer presence. He brought artistic flair to a campus more noted for foresters and pulp and paper engineers.
Vincent Hartgen was in the vanguard of artists who brought an artistic flowering to Maine in the post-World War II era. He came to the University of Maine to teach in 1946, that same year beginning the University of Maine Art Museum with a handful of WPA paintings. By the time he retired in 1982, the museum owned more than 4,000 objects. Among the other institutional flowers that bloomed in Maine's thin cultural soil in the post-war years were Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1946, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in 1950, Center for Maine Contemporary Art founded as Maine Coast Artists in 1952, Maine Art Gallery in 1957, and Colby College Museum of Art established in 1959.
While artists had been finding their ways to the coast and woods of Maine for 100 years, the importance of these art institutions is that they began to create an audience for contemporary art in Maine which ultimately grew into a small art market by the 1980s. The University of Maine Museum of Art relocated from the Orono campus to downtown Bangor in 2002, but it continues to circulate the collection Hartgen began throughout the state via its Vincent A. Hartgen Traveling Exhibition Program: Museums by Mail.
As an artist, Vincent Hartgen belonged to a generation of painters blessed and cursed by their devotion to fine craftsmanship. His rough artistic and chronological Maine contemporaries include artists such as William Thon (1906-2000), Andrew Wyeth (1917-), Dahlov Ipcar (1917-), Edward Betts (1920-), Robert Eric Moore (1927-2006), and Laurence Sisson (1928-), all of whom, in one way or another, created or create paintings powered by painterly special effects. In Hartgen's case, he was a master of naturalistic abstraction, conjuring woods and water and waves, pine needles and leaves of grass with a dashing, brushy watercolor technique.
The blessing of Hartgen's deft touch is that it produced elegant, evocative paintings grounded in nature yet also, in critic Carl Little's words, producing effects that were "prismatic," "fireworks," "fluid," and "airy." The curse of this methodical craftsmanship is that, as with the other artists mentioned above and many of their 20th century peers, it tended to relegate them critically to a province of art now considered somewhat old fashion. Sincerity and sentiment have long since been replaced by irony and angst as the coin of the aesthetic realm. Be that as it may, there is no denying the physical beauty of Vincent Hartgen's art or the importance of his contributions to the life of art in Maine.
(Vincent Andrew Hartgen: His Art and Legacy is available directly from the publisher by e-mailing Stephen_Hartgen@hotmail.com or at selected bookstores in the Portland and Bangor areas.)
Reader Comments
Comment from Mary Sheehan Winn on May 28, 2008
Hi Ed, I enjoyed browsing the links you included in this article. There's something about Maine that's irresistible. Mary
Comment from Ed Beem on May 29, 2008
Mary, Maine is where New York goes in the summer. They come for the landscape and stay for the life style. Ed
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