Clik here to view.
Hervey White by Wang Jida, study for a life size bronze. (photo by Dion Ogust)
The great tragic sculptor John Flannagan, three of whose rarely seen works are serving as centerpieces of the ambitious Music in the Woods: One Hundred Years of Maverick Concerts pair of exhibitions opening with joint receptions in the Towbin Wing of the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum and Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild’s Kleinert/James Arts Center on Saturday, loved music from his orphaned childhood. As well as the wild opportunities Maverick founder and visionary Hervey White gave him.
“He belonged to no one and at the same time to whoever could catch him,” White said of the Maverick Horse, a concept he’d been playing with for well over a decade when he paid Flannagan 50 cents an hour to hew an 18 foot statue of the same name for placement in his Maverick Concert Hall.
He could have been speaking of Flannagan, who would go on from his work in West Hurley to productive stint in Ireland and suicide before he turned 50. But also the entire arts community White helped steer through theatrical pageants, wild anarchic money-and art-making schemes, and a music series that lasted on in that strangely solid concert hall to this very day.
Curated by Susana Torruella Leval, a part-time Woodstocker for 40 years, Metropolitan Museum board member and director emerita of New York’s Museum del Barrio, the combined exhibits brings together a wealth of historic and contemporary artistic works to mark the importance of music in Woodstock’s history of the past century, as well as bringing together three of the town’s top arts organizations just as they did with some regularity 100 years ago.
Back in those days before recorded music became ubiquitous, or jazz and pop music began its spread and seep beyond cities, chamber music was a key sign of cultured life. First at Onteora Park and other regional summer creative hotspots, then later at Ralph and Jane Whitehead’s home in the Byrdcliffe Colony, afternoon concerts became a must for visiting artists and their patrons. Not long after starting up his Maverick Arts Colony rival to Whitehead’s experiment, which had first brought him to town, White realized classical music could help him pay his bills. Which then led him to larger ideas for theatrical pageants, casts of hundreds and then thousands, and the entire Maverick Festival phenomenon (and later formula) for which he would eventually become legendary.
What comes through in the new exhibit are the ways in which all the arts intermingled in the early, creatively fecund years of the last century. Artists made sets, played music on the side, danced and acted. Musicians inspired writers. Clowns such as Chaplin, Keaton, Landon and Lloyd, as well as Woodstock’s own Wilna Hervey, befriended Thomas Mann and Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinski and violinst Albert Einstein. And in Woodstock, everyone tried to capture Hervey White whatever way they could, like that Maverick Horse he long revered and captured several times in epic poems and other works.
What lasts, as well, is a sense of just what an art work White’s hand-built-by-many Concert Hall on the Maverick property is, and what a loss his quarry and later festival theater, all bark and forest-like roof over dirt floors, still is.
Through everything, the rougher Catskills quality that the Maverick brought to the Woodstock aesthetic shines through like a beacon for newer artists now drawn to the area for its potential as well as heritage.
Among the works on hand are painted and photographic portraits of Hervey White by Bolton Brown, Harry Gottlieb, Konrad Cramer, Peggy Bacon and others; portraits and vintage photos of the musicians who came to town, and often stayed, by Robert Chanler, Antonio Borone, George Bellows, and Konrad Cramer; quick sketches of musicians in performance by artists John Fenton, Andrée Ruellan, Julia Santos Solomon and others; drawings and prints, sculptures and paintings by Woodstock artists that keep capturing the changing yet unshifting essence of the town; and various images of the concert hall itself by a wide range of photographers from Cramer and Alfred Cohn to Howard Greenberg, Dion Ogust, and Noritaka Minami, recent recipient of funding from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, through the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, for capturing the forest temple to music now.
The materials in the exhibition are drawn from private collections in and around Woodstock, as well as from the town’s public collections and archives, Maverick Concerts, WAAM, the Alf Evers Archive of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, the Woodstock Public Library, and the Historical Society of Woodstock.
Music in the Woods: One Hundred Years of Maverick opens at both the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts and WAAM’s Towbin Wing with a grand reception 5 p.m.-7 p.m. Saturday, July 25, then stays on view through August. Curator Susana Torruella Leval will give a talk reflecting on the concept of the “Maverick spirit” at 2 p.m. Sunday, July 26 at WAAM.
Woodstock Artists Association and Museum is at 28 Tinker Street in Woodstock and the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts is at 34 Tinker Street. For further information, call 679-2940, 679-2079, or see either http://www.woodstockguild.org or http://www.woodstockart.org.