Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

July 15, 2012

Wegman unleashed

People know and love the portraits of his Weimaraners, but there’s a lot more in the portfolio of this longtime summer resident of Rangeley.

By Bob Keyes bkeyes@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

When Kevin Salatino tells people about the new William Wegman exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, he often gets a blank stare in return.

When he refers to Wegman as "the dog guy," people understand the reference immediately.

Salatino and his staff at the Bowdoin museum aim to expand people's knowledge of Wegman and the span of his work in the just-opened exhibition, "William Wegman: Hello Nature." On view through Oct. 21, it includes more than 100 paintings, photographs, drawings and videos that Wegman has created over the past 30 years.

Yes, the exhibition features a healthy sampling of Wegman's widely known photographs of his Weimaraner dogs in unlikely poses. But they represent just a small slice of the work that is in this show.

"We want people to know what they are going to see," Salatino said, "but we also want to surprise them."

As much as this exhibition is about Wegman and his remarkable dexterity as an artist, it is about his relationship with Maine. Wegman, 68, lives seasonally in Rangeley. He's been coming to Maine since he was 14.

The first time he came to Maine, he drove up with a couple of buddies, one of whom had just received his driver's license. They lived in rural western Massachusetts, and were crazy about fishing.

"We read about the brook trout in the Rangeley area, and we had to experience it for ourselves," Wegman recalled during a recent interview at the Bowdoin museum.

As luck would have it, they had car troubles and were stranded. Bud Russell, a local legend in the Rangeley area and owner of some of the finest rental camps on Kennebago Lake, took the boys in. He not only arranged for the car to be fixed, but he gave the boys a place to stay for a week.

"We were the toast of the town," Wegman said. "Here we were, three teenagers from miles away, coming to Maine to fish."

And so began Wegman's love affair with Maine. As he grew older, he kept coming back. He rented places for years, and in 1979 finally bought his own camp. He and his family now spend as much time as possible at their camp on Loon Lake. The rest of the year, they live in New York.

Maine -- and by extension, nature -- has played a key role in Wegman's work, and served as a key source of inspiration.

Not too long before he bought his own camp, Wegman acquired his first Weimaraner and named it Man Ray, in honor of the artist. The dog was much happier in Maine than elsewhere, so Wegman spent as much time here as he could.

Soon after, he got another dog, which had puppies. Before long, he was making goofy photos of his dogs, which became enormously popular. So popular that in 1982, the Village Voice named Man Ray "Man of the Year."

Wegman became an international art star. He shot most of the best-known of those images in Maine.

But as Salatino is quick to point out, "Hello Nature" is not about Wegman's love affair with dogs. It is about his love affair with Maine and its influence on his art in a broad sense.

Taken together, the work in the exhibition suggests that Wegman is every bit the landscape artist as any of the best-known painters who have inhabited this state over the past century or more, including Edward Hopper, whose Maine-centered work was the subject of a Bowdoin museum exhibition last summer.

The Wegman show follows a similar theme: An internationally known artist whose works transcends Maine but is directly and deeply influenced by the state. "Once again, we see Maine serving as an extraordinary catalyst for an important American artist," Salatino said.

(Continued on page 2)

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