Text of Announcement
Kenneth Stubbs
Provincetown Watercolors 1934-1964
7 September - 6 October 2007
Opening Reception, Friday 7 September, 6 - 8 PM
Kenneth Stubbs was a gifted artist and teacher who had an unwavering allegiance to modernism. In the early 1930s he studied in Provincetown with E. Ambrose Webster, who is considered by many to be Provincetown's first important modernist. Webster's Summer Art School was the first of numerous art schools on Cape Cod to emphasize a modern point of view. Stubbs was one of Webster's most important students, and Webster became to Stubbs a mentor, an inspiration, and a colleague. Like his mentor, Stubbs was dedicated to the dissemination of modern ideas through his artwork and teaching. He taught for many years at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C., and the Corcoran also became an important venue for the exhibition of his work.
In recent years the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum have mounted retrospective exhibitions of paintings and drawings by Kenneth Stubbs. ACME Fine Art has represented the artist's estate since 2002, and in 2003 an exhibition of landscapes titled Shorescapes, was the gallery's first solo exhibition of Stubbs' work. It was one of the gallery's most successful shows to date, drawing an enormously positive response from fans of more traditional forms of expression and from dyed in the wool modernists alike.
Stubbs had a fundamentally clear and consistent artistic vision; yet, he -- unlike many artists of his generation -- was able to grow artistically without ever needing to negate or reject what had gone before. The watercolors that comprise the basis for this exhibition were selected to demonstrate the remarkable arc of Stubbs' growth as an artist, and to reflect the artist's changing points of view towards the Cape Cod scenery that was so frequently his inspiration. Many of these watercolors have not been exhibited since they were painted; yet, each retains a freshness and clarity of vision that gives the entire group a timeless contemporary appeal.
ACME Fine Art and Design
38 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 telephone 617.585.9551
email info@acmefineart.com www.acmefineart.com
Front: Detail from View Through the Door, 1939, watercolor, 17" by 11.5"
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