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COPYRIGHT 1999 Smithsonian Institution
In late afternoon on icy winter days, an unearthly blue appears over Mount Ascutney overlooking the Connecticut River Valley in Vermont. The blue is deeper than any ocean, airier than any cloud. Suggestive of an infinite twilight, it seems to offer a window into some private Arcadia beyond the horizon. This cobalt color, though often captured on one artist's canvases, is rarely seen in museums. Instead, for more than 80 years, it has graced prints and calendars in living rooms, dens and especially college dorms.
"Oh, they're a-hanging Maxfield Parrish in the village," rang a witty campus ballad in the 1920s. And in prints hung on dorm walls across America, that "certain blue" framed lone women perched on rocks and draped in diaphanous gowns. Between the world wars, Maxfield Parrish was the common man's Rembrandt. When a Parrish print was placed in a department store window, crowds gathered to admire it. Hotels hung his dreamscapes in their lobbies. Housewives bought his calendars, viewed them for a year, then cut off the dates and framed the pictures. In a hustling world where skies were too often gray and gardens no bigger than a Brooklyn backyard, Parrish painted the stuff dreams are made of. His trademarks were lush gardens, ecstatic women and his famous "Parrish blue," the color skies must surely be in any Eden worth the name. At the height of his career, critics denounced his "sentimental gushings," but a Parrish print hung in one out of every four American homes.
A generation after his death, Maxfield Parrish remains one of America's best-known and least-known artists. Though his utopias still adorn calendars and posters, few people have ever seen his paintings in person. Yet the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia is currently offering a major Parrish retrospective. Going beyond the blue, the show features more than 170 works from Parrish's 68-year career. Viewers who know him only for his "girls on rocks" will be startled by the imagination, virtuosity and sheer delight of his designs. The exhibition includes his enchanting children's illustrations and magazine covers, his ambitious murals, his machine-tooled maquettes and the lonely landscapes he painted into his 90s. After showing in Philadelphia through September 25,
"Maxfield Parrish: 1870-1966" will travel to the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and then continue on to the University of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in New York.
When he died in 1966 at age 95, Parrish was "in" again. Critics hailed him as a precursor of pop art. Pop prophet Andy Warhol collected his work. And as anyone who went to college in the 1960s recalls, they were a-hanging Maxfield Parrish in dorms once again. His originals now sell for six figures, and "Parrish blue" has become a cultural cliche. Yet like his paintings, layered in coats of varnish and glaze, Parrish remains hidden beneath a veneer. Only by stripping away his keen sense of privacy can we find the artist whose works invite us into his own personal paradise.
You don't look at a Maxfield Parrish; you look into it, feeling it beckon you to enter. But while his paintings say "Come in," his life is posted "Keep out." "There isn't any story here," he told publishers who begged him to do interviews. Too many "jumped at the conclusion," he said, "that because I painted pictures of a certain kind there must be something decidedly...
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