GLR November-December 2024

ART

Domestic Scenes As Seen by an Outsider

A N EXHIBITION at the Ogun quit Museum of American Art in Maine may finally set Rus sell Cheney on the road to find ing his rightful place in American art history. While there have been smaller shows of his paintings since his death in 1945, his work has not received the atten tion it deserves. Cheney is now more fa mous for having been the older life partner of the influential literary critic and cultural historian F. O. Matthiessen.

But after his launch, he enjoyed exhibitions in New York, Boston, and West Coast gal leries. Today, in addition to the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, other museums that own his paintings include the Wads worth Atheneum, the Smithsonian, the Port land (Maine) Museum of Art, and the university collections of Harvard and Yale. (Both Cheney and Matthiessen attended Yale as undergraduates, and Matthiessen spent his professional life at Harvard.)

S COTT B ANE

DOMESTIC MODERNISM Russell Cheney and Mid Century American Pain ti ng Ogunquit Museum of American Art (Maine) August 1–November 17, 2024

As captured in its title, Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting , the Ogunquit exhibit’s overarching premise is that Cheney should be considered a Modernist painter, even if he resisted the pull of abstraction that dominated painting at this time, and his subjects tended to be domestically oriented, such as his and Matthiessen’s homes in Maine and Boston. This exhibit is also the first in which a catalog with color images of Cheney’s work has been produced. (Disclosure: I contributed an essay to this cat alog.) Two themes stand out: Many of his landscapes, in teriors, and still lifes hint at the hidden status of gay people and same-sex relationships; and his portraits of working-class men are often slyly homoerotic, and are nearly always sympathetic. Cheney has not been identified with any one school of painting, which no doubt has complicated his stand ing in the art historical canon. His paintings bear the hallmarks of impressionism, with quick brushwork that captures the impression of a scene or subject; post-im pressionism that toys with perspective, mass, and fun damental shapes; Fauvism, marked by bold and surprising use of color; and regionalism, with its em phasis on rural landscapes and folk art. This palette of styles comes into pleasing play in any number of genres in the Ogunquit exhibition, including interiors ( Windows by the Sea , 1940s), still lifes ( Lark spur , 1934), and landscapes ( Back of North Church (Summer ), 1936), and Back of North Church, Ports mouth, N.H. , 1936). The effects that arise from these works are often unsettling or disorienting, but com pelling nonetheless. There are many scenes of Cheney and Matthiessen’s home in Kittery, Maine, which they shared from 1930 to 1945. But the viewer would never know this ex plicitly. In Windows by the Sea and Larkspur , two empty chairs suggest the couple without showing them. These same paint ings depict rooms that open into other rooms that cannot be fully seen, a “circumscribed view of domestic life,” as Kevin D. Murphy points out. But even landscapes such as the two North Church paintings, which portray a stereotypical white church so common in New England, place the viewer in the back of the church, adopting the perspective, in Murphy’s

Russell Cheney was to the manor born, in 1881, in the 45 room home of his family in South Manchester, Connecticut. The family’s money came from Cheney Brothers Silk Manu facturing Company, one of the largest silk manufacturers in the U.S. until the mid-20th century. Cheney had all the ad

Russell Cheney. Kenneth Hill , 1937. Private Collection.

vantages an artist could wish for, studying at the Art Students League of New York, the Académie Julian in Paris, and pri vately with William Merritt Chase, among others. He traveled back and forth to Europe, painting in France and Italy. It was on a transatlantic voyage aboard the Paris that he met Matthiessen in 1924. Despite these advantages, Cheney was somewhat late to ar rive on the scene of the New York art world at age forty in 1921. Scott Bane is the author of A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney .

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