Bridgeport artist works with found objects
The Lyme Art Colony has evolved from a group of artists gathered at Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme boarding house around 1900 into one of America’s most famous art centers, giving birth to both the Florence Griswold Museum and the Lyme Art Association.
Now, the two artistic institutions separated by less than 500 feet celebrate the centennial of the association’s gallery. The museum’s exhibition, “Centennial of the Lyme Art Association Gallery ,” continues through May 23.
While the museum remains focused on Impressionism, the association is devoted to representational art. “We have different missions, but it’s really nice to have this handshake that we can work together on something like this,” said Laurie Pavlos, executive director of the Lyme Art Association. “The museum has a lot of the archival material from the Lyme Art Association. We are not a museum, so we are not set to either interpret that kind of material or display it or store it.”
Though they are separate institutions, the interwoven legacy of both the museum and the association owes much to Griswold’s boarding house, which attracted famous artists. The exhibition in a reflection of both the gallery’s past and the legacy of the Lyme Art Colony painters.
“Revisiting the origin of the LAA gallery on its centennial allows us to examine the economics of art and tourism, local history, the consequences of World War I, reactions to modernism, and even censorship, as the artists chose what and who should be represented in their bespoke exhibition space,” according to the museum’s description.
Gallery manager Jocelyn Zallinger said that artists ended up at “Miss Florence’s” residence by chance and could not have found a better patron. “She was such a hospitable hostess who really cared about their artwork and who they were,” she said. “They just kept coming back and inviting their friends. They started having a summer exhibition at the library and the exhibitions became so popular thsat they thought, ‘Well, we need our own gallery.’”
Member artist and architect Charles A. Platt designed the new gallery, which after being delayed by World War I, opened in August 1921. On Aug. 14, 1921, The New York Times Book Review writer said “greater appropriateness, beauty of proportions and refinement of taste hardly could be found … Truly an artist’s gallery, built for and by and with artists.”
Designed to be a world-class gallery, Platt designed each gallery room to have large skylights to flood the spaces in natural light. “It is a really beautiful space to exhibit art and we are incredibly lucky to have that as the home of the art association,” Pavlos said.
Unlike common art terms like Impressionism or abstract expressionism, representational art is a non-academic blanket term to describe art in which objects or landscapes are presented realistically. “It’s not a specific style or anything like that, and in fact we do allow small amounts of purely abstract work, but it is just a smattering,” Pavlos said. “The vast majority of the work that is in our gallery is representational.”
The association is planning a centennial event for August. Zallinger said the summer exhibition will be called “Century of Inspiration.”
“We are asking our artists to look back at work by the original art colony for inspiration and the kind of scenes they painted: bucolic landscapes, agrarian scenes, woodland interiors, gardens, porch scenes and moonlight nocturnes, but we are not looking for them to copy them,” Zallinger said. “We just want our artists to be inspired by that and they can come up with their own interpretations of the subject matter.”