Master of Provincetown

When Painter Charles W. Hawthorne first came upon Provincetown, Mass., in 1898, it was a fishing town inhabited mostly by Portuguese who had scarcely ever seen a tourist, let alone an artist. Today the quaint town at the top of Cape Cod is a bustling art colony overrun by tourists, and no one doubts that Hawthorne--one of the great art teachers of his time--was above all the man responsible.

Last week, nearly 31 years after his death, 129 of his works were on display in a large memorial exhibition in the old Methodist Church on Commercial Street that Walter P. Chrysler Jr. bought and turned into a museum. The figures in the canvases--fishermen, selectmen, young sailors, maidens in white dresses--seemed at times as remote as daguerreotypes in a family album, but at their frequent best they proved that Charles Hawthorne is still a Provincetown master.

Color First. Hawthorne grew up in Richmond, Me., and at 18 went to Manhattan, where he got a job working in a stained-glass factory and studied art at night. He finally discovered Provincetown when he was 26, and there found all the subject matter he needed. Like the Dutch masters he admired, he painted ordinary people doing ordinary things. "There is something noble about being able to paint a dishpan that anyone would be glad to hang in a drawing room." he said.

He built a mansion on top of Miller Hill, turned its big rooms into class studios. But his classes were mostly held out of doors, where color is at its brightest.

A bulky, affectionate six-footer with a touch of the autocrat, he refused to allow his students to draw a scene and then fill it in with paint. He insisted that they see not shapes and forms but areas of color: if the color was right, all else would follow. "Think of color instead of sand. Think of color instead of clothes. Color first and house after, not house first and color after," he said. Last week his most famous student, Edwin Dickinson, recalled: "More than anyone else, Hawthorne appreciated the fact that plane relationships are better expressed through comparative values of color than through drawing." Adds Abstractionist Hans Hofmann, who became a part of the Provincetown colony in 1934: "As a painter, Hawthorne cast aside every doctrine--so that he might surpass the limitations of calculation and construction."

A Bigger Brush. So that his students would not worry too much about detail and thus lose the vision of the canvas as a whole, he encouraged them to paint with a palette knife in quick, broad strokes. "Swing a bigger brush. Have enthusiasm," he said. With most students he was rarely harsh, but to a few, his Saturday morning critiques must have been a torment. Once a young woman showed him a sentimental painting of two children playing on a beach. "I'm not going to say a thing about this picture." he said icily. Then, exploding, he roared, "This is a damnable thing!" By the time he had finished, the woman lay in a dead faint at his feet.

He did not always avoid the errors he denounced. He could be sugary at times, slick at others. But in such paintings as The Family, he had the quiet power that comes only to one who has command of his art and still sees beyond. "The artist," he told his students, "must show people more--more than they already see, and he must show them with so much human sympathy and understanding that they will recognize it as if they themselves had seen the beauty and the glory."

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