Art, Land, People: The Bernard Langlais Sculpture Preserve
Bernard Langlais’ elephant and double-peace-sign-flashing Nixon PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER CROSMAN
Bernard Langlais’ homage to Christina from Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER CROSMAN
Denizens of the Langlais Sculpture Preserve in Cushing PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER CROSMAN
Old Town Canoe, ca. 1935, estate of David McCullough PHOTO COURTESY OF THOMASTON PLACE AUCTION GALLERIES
The death in October of Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the past quarter century at the New Yorker, struck me as the passing of not only an immensely talented writer but someone who knew what made art worth paying attention to in the first place. While he lived, Schjeldahl helped many of us to not so much understand the arcane workings of the contemporary art world — who can ever do that? But, rather, we accompanied him as he wandered through galleries and museums whispering his wonder at it all by means of his reliably poetic and purposely jargon-free, association-laden prose. Through what fellow critic and friend Christopher Knight called “his eloquent and lapidary observations on art old and new,” Schjeldahl posited two essential principles informing his writing: that all art is local; and the art that matters most is always personal — to the artist, and to anyone who cares to look with thought and feeling. His jewel-like articles explained precisely how this could be so, possibly to himself as much as for his readers.
“Local” and “personal” are somewhat squishy terms.
Schjeldahl’s “local” was mid-century New York City. And it was there, as a tyro critic at the Village Voice in the mid- 1960s, that he might have encountered curious wall-size abstract wood reliefs by Bernard “Blackie” Langlais, who was then showing work at prestigious New York galleries — Leo Castelli, Martha Jackson — and was included in groundbreaking group shows. But Langlais’ work did not become fully “local” and “personal” until he moved back to his native Maine, just as Schjeldahl was making his New York gallery rounds. For Langlais, the local and personal — Maine — was beckoning with an endless supply of raw material literally lying underfoot. There, he met childhood memories of the Great Northern Forest lands and the boundless possibilities for making art that didn’t seem a likely fit for the New York grid-scape — its honking, look-at-me, theory-driven, throw-away, newstyles-every-New York–minute art scene. Growing up in Old Town, Maine, Blackie would have had to memorize parts of “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline” by fellow Mainer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in grade school: poetry, myth, the primacy of nature. Langlais would have been familiar with Old Town’s internationally famous canoes directly based on indigenous Abenaki prototypes with their appearance grounded in utilitarian design. He did not need art school to tell him about the varied ways in which wood might become sculpture, but his sophisticated aesthetic was ultimately backed by rigorous training. Langlais didn’t see Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, or himself much improving on that.
His father was a local carpenter. The smell of wood, rough crosscuts, lingering dust in the air, and woodworking tools were in his very bones and blood. While his figurative work and especially images of animals, both native to Maine (bears, dairy cows, eagles) or simply appealing to his own sense of play—elephants, lions, alligators — appeared unrefined, he was no self-taught folk artist, having studied at rigorous, sophisticated art schools in the U.S. and in Europe.
For a moment, early in his career, he was Maine’s best-known native-born artist. And he continues to be among its most beloved by those who know or stumble upon his work along the backroad to his former home and studio in Cushing.
By the mid-1960s, Langlais had grown impatient with the competitive clamor and commercialism of the New York gallery world. After spending summers beginning in 1956 in a makeshift, unheated Maine cottage, barely clinging to a low bank touching the St. George River, he and his wife, Helen, also a Maine native, returned permanently to buy the adjacent 70-acre property. There, the small but more securely situated farmhouse above the river was just across from a busy access road used mostly by the rattling, gear-shredding, rust-pocked pick-up trucks of clam diggers and lobstermen on their daily runs to tidal mud flats and deep-water moorings.
In the next 11 years he would produce over 100 monumental outdoor sculptures and literally thousands of smaller works in various media.
Amidst live animals — a gaggle of geese, a well-fed horse (the American Paint breed), a small herd of goats and sheep, the odd suicidal chicken crossing the road in front of the house — an eclectic and ever-expanding garden of delights was assembled, carved, nailed, bolted, leaned up against, glued, painted, and firmly planted on nearly every open patch of ground around the house.
His mind’s eye was filled with piles of wood scraps and plans for both people and animals he felt the land needed. Richard Nixon is there, deep into a swampy bog; a log-like alligator doubles as a welcoming bench; massive bears rear upright on their hind legs — more surprised at their own size and each other than fierce or threatening. There is a cow with a hinged, swinging udder and various life-sized elephants with interior staircases for children to climb and survey the crowded grounds like Indian Mowglies and African Lion Kings cubs. They would see a dog with a gentle touch-activated or wind-driven wagging tail and swans accompanied by their own haughty, painted reflections.
For more than 10 years, between 1966 and his death in 1977, Langlais created his personal outdoor sculpture park, visible from the Cushing Road, now River Road.
His whimsical menagerie of critters, large and small, human and animal, painted and bare, became another idiosyncratic Maine roadside attraction. I often wondered if Langlais wasn’t consciously riffing on the long tradition of visual humor along Maine’s highways and back roads: sights that don’t quite register as punch lines until you’ve driven past —telephone poles tapped with maple sugaring sap buckets, the “airmail” mailbox set on a pole 30 feet off the ground. But Langlais’s work also insists on his subjects’ intrinsic natures — by turns playful, wild, and poignantly expressive — with a visual intelligence far greater than the sum of their many parts. His neighbor, Andrew Wyeth, appreciated Langlais’ rendering of Christina Olson’s wooden face that viewers of Wyeth’s iconic “Christina’s World” could never see in his original painting, as she turns her back to the viewer and looks toward her home — the long-empty Olson farmhouse is now open to the public just a few miles down the road. Langlais himself is still there, too — numerous wooden lions wear an unmistakable resemblance to the mane that was Blackie’s unkempt, wild hair. His art, conversing with nature and itself, is alive in so many ways.
Indeed, the Langlais Sculpture Preserve is not a museum.
Langlais died young, at age 56 in 1977, and Helen, the community’s much-loved elementary school art teacher, stayed there for more than three decades until her death in 2010.
If anything, the homestead reflects Helen’s own heroic efforts to preserve her husband’s art and legacy. Artists’ spouses and partners get too little credit for the artwork they are often the only reason continues to exist at all.
The house and its contents are much altered from the time Blackie and Helen lived and worked there. Even the outdoor sculpture is significantly changed from Langlais’ day. Many of the pieces have been moved from their original locations and extensively refurbished in a Sisyphean effort to preserve wooden artworks exposed to Maine’s long, wet winters on a former saltwater farm along an isolated bend in the river.
This ancient land where time is measured in eons speaks through the primal, raw, roughly hewn, and — for their emphatic handcraftedness — eloquent, individual personalities with which Langlais imbued the inhabitants in his special place.
Nature enacts its own conservation processes. And as the Langlaises fully anticipated and accepted, the outdoor sculpture has been subject to gradual decay and even sudden destruction over time. The site is meant to celebrate Blackie’s, but also Helen’s, sense of art, nature, and ever-changing landscape — how they inform and shape each other, and how the art will eventually return to the land it only ever temporarily occupies.
Until then, the Langlais Sculpture Preserve stands for a dynamic, living environment to engage with art — activated by visitors including and especially children, families, and other contemporary artists.
With support from the Georges River Land Trust, the steward of the Langlais Preserve, and the community, the preserve continues to be a place that children can respond to — climb on animals, make sculptures out of mud, twigs and leaves, and otherwise express their creativity through an exploration of nature. So, the Langlais Preserve is neither museum nor even a typical historic artist’s studio — preserved just as he left it.
The purpose and intention for the Langlais Sculpture Preserve is therefore as active space in which to explore how art can be made to touch nature as the reverse mysteriously happens, too. This is how Langlais and Schjeldahl believed great art becomes meaningful, even essential — local and personal — the dooryard décor of childhood memories and imagination. At the preserve there is a strong sense that the Langlaises would have loved the inevitability of visitors arriving with smiles — “Look, dear, that bear has painted toenails!” — and leaving in wonder at a world where the art that looks back at you, familiar, natural and as magical as a walk in these special woods. Lions and tigers and, well … Blackie, by a star-washed, sidereal sea, asking the wood what it wanted to be, if only for a little while.
For more information on the Langlais Sculpture Preserve, visit: georgesriver.org/langlais-sculpture-preserve.
Christopher Crosman is a former director of the Farnsworth Art Museum. He lives in Thomaston.
“Local” and “personal” are somewhat squishy terms.
Schjeldahl’s “local” was mid-century New York City. And it was there, as a tyro critic at the Village Voice in the mid- 1960s, that he might have encountered curious wall-size abstract wood reliefs by Bernard “Blackie” Langlais, who was then showing work at prestigious New York galleries — Leo Castelli, Martha Jackson — and was included in groundbreaking group shows. But Langlais’ work did not become fully “local” and “personal” until he moved back to his native Maine, just as Schjeldahl was making his New York gallery rounds. For Langlais, the local and personal — Maine — was beckoning with an endless supply of raw material literally lying underfoot. There, he met childhood memories of the Great Northern Forest lands and the boundless possibilities for making art that didn’t seem a likely fit for the New York grid-scape — its honking, look-at-me, theory-driven, throw-away, newstyles-every-New York–minute art scene. Growing up in Old Town, Maine, Blackie would have had to memorize parts of “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline” by fellow Mainer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in grade school: poetry, myth, the primacy of nature. Langlais would have been familiar with Old Town’s internationally famous canoes directly based on indigenous Abenaki prototypes with their appearance grounded in utilitarian design. He did not need art school to tell him about the varied ways in which wood might become sculpture, but his sophisticated aesthetic was ultimately backed by rigorous training. Langlais didn’t see Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, or himself much improving on that.
His father was a local carpenter. The smell of wood, rough crosscuts, lingering dust in the air, and woodworking tools were in his very bones and blood. While his figurative work and especially images of animals, both native to Maine (bears, dairy cows, eagles) or simply appealing to his own sense of play—elephants, lions, alligators — appeared unrefined, he was no self-taught folk artist, having studied at rigorous, sophisticated art schools in the U.S. and in Europe.
For a moment, early in his career, he was Maine’s best-known native-born artist. And he continues to be among its most beloved by those who know or stumble upon his work along the backroad to his former home and studio in Cushing.
By the mid-1960s, Langlais had grown impatient with the competitive clamor and commercialism of the New York gallery world. After spending summers beginning in 1956 in a makeshift, unheated Maine cottage, barely clinging to a low bank touching the St. George River, he and his wife, Helen, also a Maine native, returned permanently to buy the adjacent 70-acre property. There, the small but more securely situated farmhouse above the river was just across from a busy access road used mostly by the rattling, gear-shredding, rust-pocked pick-up trucks of clam diggers and lobstermen on their daily runs to tidal mud flats and deep-water moorings.
In the next 11 years he would produce over 100 monumental outdoor sculptures and literally thousands of smaller works in various media.
Amidst live animals — a gaggle of geese, a well-fed horse (the American Paint breed), a small herd of goats and sheep, the odd suicidal chicken crossing the road in front of the house — an eclectic and ever-expanding garden of delights was assembled, carved, nailed, bolted, leaned up against, glued, painted, and firmly planted on nearly every open patch of ground around the house.
His mind’s eye was filled with piles of wood scraps and plans for both people and animals he felt the land needed. Richard Nixon is there, deep into a swampy bog; a log-like alligator doubles as a welcoming bench; massive bears rear upright on their hind legs — more surprised at their own size and each other than fierce or threatening. There is a cow with a hinged, swinging udder and various life-sized elephants with interior staircases for children to climb and survey the crowded grounds like Indian Mowglies and African Lion Kings cubs. They would see a dog with a gentle touch-activated or wind-driven wagging tail and swans accompanied by their own haughty, painted reflections.
For more than 10 years, between 1966 and his death in 1977, Langlais created his personal outdoor sculpture park, visible from the Cushing Road, now River Road.
His whimsical menagerie of critters, large and small, human and animal, painted and bare, became another idiosyncratic Maine roadside attraction. I often wondered if Langlais wasn’t consciously riffing on the long tradition of visual humor along Maine’s highways and back roads: sights that don’t quite register as punch lines until you’ve driven past —telephone poles tapped with maple sugaring sap buckets, the “airmail” mailbox set on a pole 30 feet off the ground. But Langlais’s work also insists on his subjects’ intrinsic natures — by turns playful, wild, and poignantly expressive — with a visual intelligence far greater than the sum of their many parts. His neighbor, Andrew Wyeth, appreciated Langlais’ rendering of Christina Olson’s wooden face that viewers of Wyeth’s iconic “Christina’s World” could never see in his original painting, as she turns her back to the viewer and looks toward her home — the long-empty Olson farmhouse is now open to the public just a few miles down the road. Langlais himself is still there, too — numerous wooden lions wear an unmistakable resemblance to the mane that was Blackie’s unkempt, wild hair. His art, conversing with nature and itself, is alive in so many ways.
Indeed, the Langlais Sculpture Preserve is not a museum.
Langlais died young, at age 56 in 1977, and Helen, the community’s much-loved elementary school art teacher, stayed there for more than three decades until her death in 2010.
If anything, the homestead reflects Helen’s own heroic efforts to preserve her husband’s art and legacy. Artists’ spouses and partners get too little credit for the artwork they are often the only reason continues to exist at all.
The house and its contents are much altered from the time Blackie and Helen lived and worked there. Even the outdoor sculpture is significantly changed from Langlais’ day. Many of the pieces have been moved from their original locations and extensively refurbished in a Sisyphean effort to preserve wooden artworks exposed to Maine’s long, wet winters on a former saltwater farm along an isolated bend in the river.
This ancient land where time is measured in eons speaks through the primal, raw, roughly hewn, and — for their emphatic handcraftedness — eloquent, individual personalities with which Langlais imbued the inhabitants in his special place.
Nature enacts its own conservation processes. And as the Langlaises fully anticipated and accepted, the outdoor sculpture has been subject to gradual decay and even sudden destruction over time. The site is meant to celebrate Blackie’s, but also Helen’s, sense of art, nature, and ever-changing landscape — how they inform and shape each other, and how the art will eventually return to the land it only ever temporarily occupies.
Until then, the Langlais Sculpture Preserve stands for a dynamic, living environment to engage with art — activated by visitors including and especially children, families, and other contemporary artists.
With support from the Georges River Land Trust, the steward of the Langlais Preserve, and the community, the preserve continues to be a place that children can respond to — climb on animals, make sculptures out of mud, twigs and leaves, and otherwise express their creativity through an exploration of nature. So, the Langlais Preserve is neither museum nor even a typical historic artist’s studio — preserved just as he left it.
The purpose and intention for the Langlais Sculpture Preserve is therefore as active space in which to explore how art can be made to touch nature as the reverse mysteriously happens, too. This is how Langlais and Schjeldahl believed great art becomes meaningful, even essential — local and personal — the dooryard décor of childhood memories and imagination. At the preserve there is a strong sense that the Langlaises would have loved the inevitability of visitors arriving with smiles — “Look, dear, that bear has painted toenails!” — and leaving in wonder at a world where the art that looks back at you, familiar, natural and as magical as a walk in these special woods. Lions and tigers and, well … Blackie, by a star-washed, sidereal sea, asking the wood what it wanted to be, if only for a little while.
For more information on the Langlais Sculpture Preserve, visit: georgesriver.org/langlais-sculpture-preserve.
Christopher Crosman is a former director of the Farnsworth Art Museum. He lives in Thomaston.