Art review: In juxtaposed shows, Colby displays two sides of its collection
Jorge S. Arango, Portland Press Herald, October 8, 2023
On the upper floor is “Constellations: Forming the Collection, 1973-2023” while on the lower level is “Come Closer: Selections from the Collection, 1978-1994” (both run through Nov. 26). While there is overlap in the eras these shows cover, they could not be more different.
Colby is known for its collection of American art, and it shows beautifully in “Constellations.” There are big, very well-known names here: among others, Charles Wilson Peale, George Inness, Louise Nevelson, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, John Marin (an enormous collection of watercolors which, donated by his heirs to the college in 1973, formed the cornerstone of the American art holdings). But perhaps the most unexpected pleasures of the show are the odd surprises from names that are not so well known.
Take, for instance, “New England Still Life” a reverse painting on glass by Rebecca Salsbury James, dated only as “before 1940.” Rebecca who? The work is beautiful in its own right, its unusual medium, usually considered a folk art or craft that first appeared in 15th-century Europe, imparts an enticing luminosity. But the flatness of its scarlet reds and blacks and the simplification of form is thoroughly modern.
There’s good reason for this. Salsbury James was a close friend to Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, the latter showing her paintings in his An American Place gallery in 1936. This put her in the milieu of Marin and O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and other American modernists. Her first marriage was to photographer Paul Strand, and she lived out her days in Taos, New Mexico, taking her life a year after her second husband and love of her life, entrepreneur Bill James, died in 1967.
Salsbury James also did needlework “paintings” influenced by Southwest colcha embroidery. In other words, she was using traditional crafts and “women’s work” decades before it became a thing among female artists trying to distinguish themselves from the male-dominated Ab Ex movements of the 1950s and ’60s. The term “pioneering” doesn’t begin to cover her idiosyncratic oeuvre. The painting carries on a symbiotic conversation with one of Elie Nadelman’s urban folk-like dancers not far away.