The Adirondack Museum is making a long-awaited contribution to the scholarship of American art with its exhibition “Wild Exuberance: Harold Weston’s Adirondack Art,” on view through October 2006.

This retrospective explores the virtually untouched territory of Weston’s art, as it can be argued that his work has never had major museum treatment. In the 30 years since the artist’s death, while many museums and galleries have shown aspects of his work, only one exhibition was a retrospective. Of the many catalogs published, none has offered in-depth scholarship on Weston.

According to museum chief curator Caroline Welsh, “Weston stands apart among Twentieth Century transcribers of the Adirondacks because his art was distinctly and ultimately his own. The field will benefit from the critical treatment of this understudied, but major, player in American art.”

Harold Weston (1894-1972) was a significant painter, etcher and muralist. Early in his career, critics and collectors widely recognized that he was capturing and saying something unusual in his paintings.

On October 1, 1923, after a long day of hiking and sketching on mountaintops, Weston and his bride, Faith Borton, spent the night between two of the highest mountains in the Adirondacks. The weather had turned and they suffered through a miserable night of rain and cold. As the morning broke they saw thick hoarfrost covering every pine needle, twig and leaf. They hurried to the closest mountaintop where clouds broke over them in rushes, and glimpses of autumn brilliance became visible as the sun worked its way through the valleys and up the sides of the mountains.

“I did four paintings in a frenzy,” Weston later wrote in Freedom in the Wilds (St Huberts, NY: Adirondack Trail Improvement Society, 1971). “The wild exuberance of the day and its…wilderness beauty called for a shorthand method in paint to capture rapidly changing emotional reactions, methods that predated abstract expressionism.”

Weston did not lead other artists, nor did they lead him. He was a fierce individualist. The critic Henry McBride, an advocate of Modernism, called Weston “heroic” for pursuing his wilderness solitude in the Adirondack mountains of Upstate New York, adding that most great American artists, including Eakins and Homer, were also reclusive.

The “rugged sensibility” that grew out of Weston’s early wilderness solitude in the Adirondacks is essential to understanding his entire oeuvre. His early landscapes had an expressionistic immediacy and stylized energy that made him right at home with other Modernists, and yet his approach also defined him as a holdout for the unifying principles that Modernism was questioning.

Weston’s ever-evolving stylistic changes, from semiabstraction to hyperrealism to abstraction, can be disorienting, but when the critical focus is on Weston’s Adirondack work, his core purpose is clear: the preoccupations born in the early Adirondack paintings inform and guide his long career as an artist.

The exhibition includes a large number of loans from private and public collections around the country, making it a rare opportunity to see Weston’s best Adirondack work. Scenes of Indian Head, the Ausable Lakes, Chapel Pond, views from Mount Marcy and other Adirondack icons are, in Weston’s words, “hymns to the endless glory of God.”

In addition to the artist’s paintings, the museum will exhibit personal items, including Weston’s easel, paint box and brushes, sketch books, diaries, press clippings, exhibition catalogs and a copy of his book Freedom in the Wilds: A Saga of the Adirondacks. Objects from nature that inspired paintings such as the worm-eaten stick for “Wood Script” and the stones that inspired the “Stones Series” will also be displayed.

The exhibition catalog, co-published with Syracuse University Press, is fully illustrated (116 color and 13 black and white), features four essays, a checklist of Weston’s Adirondack art compiled by art historian Kathleen V. Jameson with Nina Weston Foster, a chronology and a critical bibliography make this the single source for Weston.

A documentary film, Harold Weston: A Bigger Belief in Beauty, will be shown throughout the museum’s season. The film incorporates archives of moving and still images of the artist at work and play, views of Adirondack scenery that inspired him, as well as exceptional images of his art and the times in which he lived. Book signings, lectures and art-making workshops will also be among the special events.

The museum is on Routes 28N and 30.

For information, www.adkmuseum.org or 518-352-7311.