The pieces on display come from more than 60 museums and private collections, including the art museums at Bowdoin and Colby colleges and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and collectors Lincoln Perry and Anne Beattie, and Stephen and Tabitha King. Opening June 7, Master of Watercolor is the first major posthumous exhibition of Hardy’s work. Mills continues, “Hardy was an accomplished artist whose exhibition history included numerous solo exhibitions in New York, and whose work was in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Museum,” and others, “but had been the focus of few museum exhibitions in Maine in recent years.” “The idea of collaborating on this project with Hardy and Johnson was intriguing.” “Several years ago, Robert Flynn Johnson approached me about guest-curating an exhibition of the work of DeWitt Hardy,” Mills writes in the catalog. (Robert Flynn Johnson’s brother Richard ’78, curator of Boston’s Sports Museum, lent work to the exhibition.) Johnson ’36 and Minna Flynn Johnson, who established an art acquisition fund for the Bates museum. Johnson and Hardy met as teenagers and the pair remained friends for life. This is his first curatorial project at Bates for Johnson, who was a longtime curator of prints at the Achenbach Foundation, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “These challenging compositions make us see his landscapes, buildings, still lives, portraits, figures and nudes in a whole new light.” “In complex and original compositions, Hardy shunned the predictable picturesque in favor of harsh but often beautiful realities,” guest curator Johnson writes in the exhibition catalog. He captures the Maine that tourists rarely see. He reveals Maine through the eyes of a year-round resident, depicting the coast, snowy inland fields and woods, everyday views of houses and factories, and local people. Hardy was also celebrated for his dedication to portraying Maine scenes and people.
Further, he possesses a knack for instilling that confidence in his best students, inspiring them to dedicate themselves to their talents and to look beyond Maine for an audience and a dialogue.“Reclining Figure on Victorian Couch” is a watercolor painting on paper, c. Something about his personal investment in the life of art communicates a sense of confidence that art is vital. Juris Ubans is a cultured man, visually literate not only as a painter but also as a photographer and filmmaker. His influence, however, has been more important than the art he has created or collected. Among the name artists Ubans has collected are photographers Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, and glass master Dale Chihuly. The exhibition features 150 works by 60 artists.
Ubans’s own expressionist paintings form the nucleus of what is essentially a salon show with Ubans as the common denominator. He studied at Syracuse University, Yale, and Penn State before coming to Maine. Displaced by World War II, the Ubans family, minus his father, made their way to the United States in 1950. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, Ubans was born to art, the youngest of three sons of Konrads Ubans, one of Latvia’s best-known painters. Juris Ubans came to USM in 1968, when it was still Gorham State Teachers College, and has been a creative life force there ever since.
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