Charles DuBack (b 1926) first came to Maine from New York City in the mid-1950s, proving to be a turning point in his artistic career. Like many New York artists, DuBack originally planned to spend a summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture but eventually established a lifelong love of the Maine landscape.
On view at the Portland Museum of Art, October 10⁊anuary 3, “Charles DuBack: Coming to Maine” features 20 paintings and collages focusing on DuBack’s rarely shown but pivotal work from the late 1950s. The exhibition is complemented by a small selection of his more recent watercolors from 1998 depicting the woods that surround his home in Tenants Harbor.
These two bodies of work, although separated by decades, are related in conception and are the result of DuBack’s response to the Maine landscape. This is the museum’s first exhibition devoted to that seminal period when New York postwar Modernism arrived in Maine.
A devoted modernist inspired by the earlier paintings of Picasso and Matisse, DuBack was equally involved in the emerging color-field and Pop art movements of the day. It was these early works that first brought him critical acclaim in New York. His later watercolors translate his early love of color into a patchwork of bright brushwork that verges on abstraction.
DuBack, who had shared a New York studio with sculptor Bernard Langlais and painter Alex Katz in the 1950s, was part of a group of artists who all settled in mid-coast Maine as summer residents. These artists were drawn initially to the landscape, but soon expanded their interests to the human figure and to the traditional culture and history of Maine. Over the years, DuBack, who is an avid fly fisherman, has developed an especially intimate knowledge of the Maine woods. With an artist’s eye for defining color and shape, he translates that visual understanding into works of art that convey the vibrancy and animation of nature.
There will be an opening celebration with Charles DuBack and curator Susan Danly on Saturday, October 17, at 11 am, free with museum admission. Meet in the auditorium to hear about DuBack’s process and inspiration; continue the conversation during the reception to follow in the museum’s McLellan House.
Portland Museum of Art Seven is at Seven Congress Square. For more information, www.portlandmuseum.org or 207-775-6148.
