MAINE
Dorothy Eisner: Paintings 1951–1983
Ogunquit Museum of American Art • Ogunquit, ME • www.ogunquit.org • Through October 31, 2008
Dorothy Eisner, Carousel I, oil on canvas, 40 x 40", 1978. |
In 1992, the Farnsworth Art Museum introduced the painter Dorothy Eisner (1906–1984) to a Maine audience. The exhibition, Dorothy Eisner: Paintings & Collages, paid special attention to work related to Great Cranberry Island off the Downeast coast of Maine, where the painter summered from the early 1960s until her death (she was introduced to the island by painters John Heliker and Robert LaHotan).
The twenty-nine pieces in the Ogunquit Museum show offer a broader sample of Eisner’s work, in terms of both timeframe and subject matter. The earliest work relates to fly-fishing excursions the painter went on in the 1950s with her husband, John McDonald, a historian of angling. Trout in Moon (1954) displays her spirited approach to motif, energized by her association with the New York art world (and evolved from an earlier semi-social realist mode).
Establishing a summer studio in Maine, Eisner turned to her surroundings for new subjects. She painted portraits of fellow island artists, including next-door neighbor William Kienbusch. Among her most memorable images was a series of paintings related to croquet. She depicted players preparing to strike the ball, and also the mallets and lawn chairs.
Back in the city, Eisner took her prompts from a variety of sources. In Circus (1978), a rider hovers in the air off the back end of a white horse, as if in mid-leap—a wonderful bit of legerdemain. The inanimate comes alive in a striking depiction of rearing horses in Carousel I (also 1978). Collage offered Eisner another means for fulfilling her vision of the world around her. In Camp Basketball (1971), the aesthetic borders on cubism.
Nearly a quarter century after her death, an ever-widening audience is viewing Eisner’s engaging work. ACME Fine Arts in Boston has been representing Eisner’s estate for the last several years, while the 2006 exhibition Brushes with History: Leon Trotsky and the Dewey Commission of Inquiry, at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, featured her depictions of the trials in Mexico City in 1937.
—Carl Little
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