It’s astonishing to think that the painter James Fitzgerald, the subject of “The Odyssey of James Fitzgerald” at the Monhegan Museum of Art & History (through Sept. 30) is so little known.

Since the museum’s establishment of The James Fitzgerald Legacy in the early 2000s and the commencement of its catalogue raisonné project (spearheaded by Robert Stahl, who has just published a second book, “James Fitzgerald: the Watercolors”), some 2,400 works have been identified.

His skill as a painter, as well as his dedication to the purity of materials and processes, was extraordinarily impeccable. Yet, though Fitzgerald’s works are in prominent collections across the country – Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth, The Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian, the deCordova, MFA Boston, and on and on – they are rarely exhibited.

Then again, it isn’t surprising at all. The least thing with which Fitzgerald occupied himself was fame. Reclusive and socially abrupt, he refused to promote himself or his work, believing, he once said, that “All of that will be taken care of after I’m gone.” More fundamentally, what interested Fitzgerald was not the actual depiction of the sea, fishermen or gulls – pictures for pictures’ sake. His desire was to convey the authentic inner life of things; not something that was easy for everyone to see or understand.

In Stahl’s first book, “James Fitzgerald: The Drawings and Sketches” (2017), he cites a quote the artist jotted into a sketchbook: “The rhythmic spirit of movement underlying the actual reality of things has always been the goal of the highest art.” Stahl also writes that Fitzgerald “was quoted by a friend as stating: ‘Realism is a blind alley, a form of philosophic ignorance that believes what you see is reality. If that were so, there would be no reason for painting. Simple realism isn’t enough.’ ”

This was precisely what Jackson Pollock attempted to capture with paintings like “Autumn Rhythm” of 1950. Certainly, Fitzgerald knew of the Abstract Expressionists (he died of a heart attack at 72 in 1971). Since seeing the show, then, I’ve been wondering why he never made the leap into pure abstraction, especially because he came so close. His refusal to do so may have also been out of sync with prevailing movements of the times. But I’m getting ahead of myself …

The earliest influences on Fitzgerald, who was born in South Boston in 1899, were painters like Edmund Tarbell, Arthur Wesley Dow and Winslow Homer. Both Dow and Homer abstracted images to some extent, so Fitzgerald may have developed his tendency to distill forms to their essence during his formative art studies.

He visited Monhegan Island in 1924, but then enlisted as an able-bodied seaman, intending to travel across the Pacific. Instead, he got waylaid in Monterey, California, by Martha Graham Dance Company member Margaret (Pegs) Mathers, whom he married, and became part of a circle of creative thinkers that included John Steinbeck, marine biologist/ecologist/philosopher Ed Ricketts, and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. It was here that he deepened his study of Eastern art and philosophy, which would inform his work for the rest of his life.

There are various works from his Monterey period in the Monhegan Museum show. We can see in a painting like “Palominos” (1932) his grasp of the light and sun-crisped hills of Northern California. And in “Cypress” (1934) his interest in Asian art is undeniable. If “Cypress” weren’t signed by Fitzgerald, you could swear it was a Chinese ink landscape.

In fact, there are far later landscapes here that reveal his lifelong preoccupation with Asian painting. Perhaps none is more emblematic – or more beautiful – than “Storm Clouds, Katahdin” of 1952. Those unaware that it is a peak in Maine (one he depicted so often that it became like Mont Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne, another of his favorite painters), you would easily mistake it for an ethereal Chinese painting.

He returned to Monhegan Island in 1943 to live. What he brought to the familiar subject matter that had also occupied George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent and many others who painted here is thoroughly unique. Certainly, the Asian sensibilities remained. But his compositions seemed to become more and more simple and essential – human, natural and animal forms distilled to a blocky, chunky density that conveyed the ruggedness of both the landscape and the people and fauna that inhabited it.

It’s clear this was a way for him to convey a sensation or phenomenon rather than a dutiful depiction of life in a seaside town. There is plenty of accuracy in a painting like “Oncoming Gulls,” particularly the bird in the foreground, which is doing that awkward, clumsy thing gulls do – webbed feet akimbo to the left while the wings are obviously headed right. Or there is “Silvery Sea and Gulls” in the entry of the adjacent history museum building, into which Fitzgerald incorporated silverleaf to convey the effects of moonlight on the birds and sea.

Yet flying birds isn’t really the subject of either, except on the surface. What we most intuit is the sensations of swarming and flight. Further, in “Oncoming,” close inspection reveals the composition to be a mass of triangles (beaks, webbed feet, crooked wings – even the negative spaces), or rectangles that at times become elongated triangles (the individual feathers of the wings). It would have been a minor leap to total abstraction from here. If we squint our eyes at this work, it dissolves into a cacophony of pyramidal shapes floating freely in a field we formerly knew as sky.

The same happens with my favorite painting in the show, “Plowing Katahadin,” an oil on canvas from 1960. We absolutely decipher a farmer and his horse-drawn plow. But, again, shapes are simplified to the barest necessity for representation. What we instantly feel, however, is the power of the horses. Fitzgerald is way past the more literal depiction of “Palominos” of 30 years before. Instead, he concentrates on the beast’s most muscular features: the hind quarters.

It resembles Caravaggio’s “Conversion on the Way to Damascus,” scandalous in 1600 for its depiction of St. Paul, thrown from his steed, staring up at the horse’s posterior. Like Paul, the farmer is almost parallel to the ground (unrealistically), a miniscule figure compared to these enormous haunches. Fitzgerald isn’t painting a man plowing a field; he’s painting equine force and strength, which literally seem to be dragging the helpless farmer along. It is a powerhouse of a painting. And as Fitzgerald did in a work exhibited here last year, “At the Graveyard,” he composes it with a one-point directionality that feels almost Baroque in its forward motion.

Why did Fitzgerald stop short of abstraction? My hypothesis: in order to convey the inner essential energy of something, he still felt he had to retain the actual thing it was referencing. If his seagulls were just a flurry of triangles in space, how would anyone understand what he had done? Had he stayed in Monterey, it might have been different.

In “Irish Coast” (1966) Fitzgerald paints shafts of sunlight emerging from the clouds over Great Blasket Island in Ireland. Each shaft divides into three colors: yellow-orange at the sky, beige-y gray as it passes in front of Blasket and red-brown as it falls into the ocean before a darker foreground island. This, to me, presages Richard Diebenkorn’s work during the Bay Area Figurative Movement in the way it breaks down landscape elements into distinct planes. Eventually Diebenkorn surrendered completely to abstraction. Directed by his impulse not just painting a picture, but to depict phenomena (here, the way the landscape colors single shafts of light), Fitzgerald might have too.

It is well worth visiting Fitzgerald’s studio to also understand his meticulously purist approach to his art. There, in the studio he purchased from Rockwell Kent, we see stacks of handmade Whatman paper (rare even then, but he refused to use machine-made versions). We also find jars of a painting medium he reproduced from formulas used by da Vinci, Titian and Rubens, among others, a toxic, combustible concoction of linseed oil, beeswax and lead monoxide that he boiled at 500 degrees. He did this on the beach so he could kick it into the ocean in the event that the solution exploded. He also finagled shipments of authentic Chinese inks from an American art dealer in China.

Hopefully this show, combined with Stahl’s weighty and authoritative double-volume works, and the efforts of the Fitzgerald Legacy Foundation – with Dan Broeckelmann (Fitzgerald’s grandnephew) at the helm – will bring new awareness of this iconic artist.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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