Themes and Variations

Tod Lindenmuth: Paintings and Prints, 1915 - 1976

Provincetown Art Association and Museum, May 12 - July 2, 2017

Themes and Variations

Tod Lindenmuth: Paintings and Prints, 1915 - 1976

Provincetown Art Association and Museum, May 12 - July 2, 2017

PROVINCETOWN ART ASSOCIATION AND MUSEUM460 Commercial StreetProvincetown, MA 02657

508.487.1750paam.org

Etching to be used as a greeting card, E.B. Warren, undated.

Themes and Variations

Tod Lindenmuth: Paintings and Prints, 1915 - 1976

Themes and VariationsTod Lindenmuth: Paintings and Prints, 1915 - 1976

It has been just over a century since Tod Lindenmuth first came to prominence as an American printmaker. It’s not hard to

see why his work appealed to viewers then, and why it still does.

The prints effortlessly combine the strong, stripped-down vocabulary of Modernism with the familiar tropes of marine and landscape art. The result is accessible yet bracing — a blunt, poster-like vigor that sneakily gains sophistication from confident draftsmanship and subtle textures. We enjoy the wallop even as we bask in a theatrical evocation of mood no hard-core Modernist would have patience for.

Lindenmuth’s success in prints was immediate. He took up the medium in the summer of 1915, at the age of 30, accomplished as an artist but apparently lacking any formal training

in cutting blocks or making prints. Within six months, he had helped to found the celebrated Provincetown Printers group and had exhibited at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (which bought several prints for their permanent collection). Within twelve months, his prints were on gallery walls in New York, Chicago, Seattle, and a host of smaller cities in between.

Lindenmuth’s work evolved quickly. The early black-and-white prints with heavy borders and traditional woodcut textures gave way to starker, simpler images and to the multi-block color prints that became his signature style. He produced these using an interlocking set of blocks, but without a “key block” (the block that, in the classic Japanese technique, creates the black outlines within the image).

Wood also gave way to linoleum, whose flat, textureless quality he sometimes used “straight” but more often as vehicle for textures created by other means. Instead of rolling on an even layer of ink with a brayer, he experimented continually with different brush effects, with gradients (particularly in water and sky), and with shading and blending, all of which made for a fairly labor-intensive printing process.

In the hands of a moderately business-minded person, the acclaim for the prints might easily have been parlayed into a full-

time career. That did not happen. Although he continued to appear in group shows across the country, he seems never to have done any real promotion. And while he was active as a printer for three decades, most of that activity was in the first two. It may simply have been that he

lacked the patience for production work. The variety of impressions he fashioned from the same set of blocks suggests an artist who was more interested in trying another color way or

wipe technique than in boosting sales. (Although Lindenmuth did not number his prints, the evidence suggests that he made surprisingly few impressions of most of them.)

What interested Lindenmuth above all was variation, and for this his favorite

medium was clearly oils. “Painting is the whole works,” he told a reporter in 1968. “It is my hobby and my life.” He began working in oils soon after 1900 and kept at it for the next 75 years. He reacted to encroaching impecunity by painting on scavenged materials, eating almost nothing, and doing without such luxuries as cars and central heat. As his eye led him deeper into abstraction and further

Up Along, c. 1920, oil on board, 16x14.

Untitled, 1975, paper scraps on board, 18x24. Confined to bed after an operation, Lindenmuth made collages until he could return to the studio.

These images, spanning four decades, show Lindenmuth’s constant evolution of style and technique, as well as varia-tions in emphasis. In the first, the fishermen and wharves

are treated as equals. In the second, the figure is a mere ele-ment in a landscape. The focus of the third is a conversation, the fourth a collective effort: working a weir in boats.

from what the public wanted to hang in its living rooms, he divided his output: almost-scenic for the customers, almost-unparsable for himself. When the latter failed to sell, he shrugged and set them aside. (Many of the late paintings in this exhibition lay hidden in his old studio until just a few years ago.) What mattered was that he was able to keep pursuing the challenges that interested him.

The most remarkable thing about Tod Lindenmuth’s career as a painter was not its length, or even the fact that

he managed to remain creatively engaged to the last, but that he did so while painting the same small handful of subjects. Although he never ceased experimenting with new material, he mainly spent his last four decades winnowing down his subjects to the few he found truly compelling. These he returned to again and again, pushing himself to find new ways of painting them.

Where some artists worry too much (or worse, too little) about finding a voice, Lindenmuth had the happy ability to explore influences without fearing he might succumb to them. “Painting is painting” was a phrase of his. To him, a style or technique was less an expressive choice than a tool for finding new paths into old material. The result is a painter whose stylistic influences are many, diverse, and obvious, yet whose work is always entirely his.

This exhibition, as the first to draw from Tod Lindenmuth’s entire mature career, provides viewers the opportunity to get a much more accurate sense of his project as an artist and how it evolved over a lifetime. We can see where he found strength and sustenance in variation and where in constancy. And we can see not only the tremendous range in his work, but the unity of vision that becomes clearer with each variation. — Josiah Fisk

LEFT Making a “squib picture”, 1950s. RIGHT Squib picture, c.1930. The plein air habits inculcated by his teachers gradually gave way to quick sketches for studio work. Lindenmuth would set out with scraps of paper and card stock — often old envelopes or packing materials — and a “squib”, a very short, fat stub of pencil.

Studio portrait, New York City, c. 1925.

With Ross Moffett, 1936. The booklet in Lindenmuth’s hand is the catalog for that year’s PAA exhibition.

Tod Lindenmuth, 1885 - 19761885 Born Raphael Leroy Lindenmuth, May 4, Allentown, PA. Grows up working in the photographic studio of his father, A.N. Lindenmuth, also a painter.

1903 Begins art studies at the Chase School in New York. Later studies with Robert Henri and, in Provincetown, E. Ambrose Webster and George Elmer Browne.

1913 First summer painting trip to Provincetown. Admitted to Salmagundi Club, New York City.

1914 Sails to France for a planned three years of study with Browne. Forced to return six weeks later as WWI erupts.

1915 Spends six months in Provincetown, exhibits oils in the first PAA annual exhibition. With 12 other artists, founds the Provincetown Printers.

1925 Meets watercolorist and etcher Elisabeth Boardman Warren, who had “fallen in love” with his paintings. They are engaged within weeks and marry that fall, settling in Provincetown year round.

1926 Circulates a petition, with Ross Moffett, demanding PAA not discriminate against Modernist members. The “Traditionalists” and the Modernists hold separate exhibitions for the next ten seasons; Lindenmuth is sometimes in both shows.

1934 Moves winter studio to St. Augustine, FL.

1940 Moves summer studio to Rockport, MA.

1976 Works until felled by a stroke, November 4. Dies November 6, St. Augustine.

E.B. Warren around the time of their marriage. Her teacher, W.H.W. Bicknell, introduced them two days before she planned to leave for home.

COVER PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM Untitled (detail), c. 1920, oil on canvas, 26x38. Untitled (detail), c. 1925, oil on canvas, 25x30. The Back Yard (detail), 1919, ink on paper, 16x13. House-tops and the Harbor (detail), c. 1955, oil on canvas, 30x24. OVERLEAF, LEFT PANEL Tod Lindenmuth in his studio, near Jacksonville, FL, 1973.OVERLEAF, RIGHT PANEL Village Street (detail), c. 1965, oil on board, 24x32.FAR LEFT, ABOVE TITLE Rooftops (detail), c. 1945, ink on paper, 14x12.ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT Along Side, c. 1930, heavy ink on paper, 10x8. Untitled, c. 1940, oil on board, 18x24. At the Wharf, c. 1970, oil on board, 18x26. Untitled, 1976 (Lin-denmuth’s last completed painting), oil on board, 11x13.

©2017 Josiah Fisk and Miranda Fisk. All art and photos from private collections.

LEFT TO RIGHT The Harbor in Winter, 1927, oil on canvas, 20x30. Aggregation of Crustaceous Equipment, c. 1950, oil on board, 22x28. In From the Trip, c. 1960, oil on board, 24x32. Weir Fishing, c. 1970, oil on board, 22x28.

PROVINCETOWN ART ASSOCIATION AND MUSEUM460 Commercial StreetProvincetown, MA 02657

508.487.1750paam.org

Etching to be used as a greeting card, E.B. Warren, undated.

Themes and Variations

Tod Lindenmuth: Paintings and Prints, 1915 - 1976