After World War I: the 1920s

After World War I, the conviction that conditions could be improved was dampened by pessimism due to the scale and inhumanity of the war experience. A number of writers had served in the war, including Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson. The brutality of the war and its assault on traditions of civility affected their outlook and their subsequent writing (Conn 1989, 349).

Literature

In the United States a modernist literature was emerging, including writers such as Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene O’Neill, and Ernest Hemingway. Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) is an experimental expressionist drama. “You are all a lost generation,” Ernest Hemingway’s epigraph for The Sun Also Rises (1926), quoting Gertrude Stein, evoked the mood of his fellow expatriate writers, many of whom laid the foundation for modern American literature (Carley 2014, 4).

During the decades before and after 1913 experimental journals proliferated in the form of the “small magazines.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, edited in Chicago by Harriet Monroe, played a major role in creating an audience for modernist poetry. The Imagist strand of modernism included poets who wrote free verse and sought to create precise visual images through language. Blast, edited in London by Wyndham Lewis for only two issues in 1914-15, was the voice of a new movement in literature and visual art, christened “Vorticism” by Ezra Pound and Lewis. It published art, drama, fiction, and a variety of manifestos (the “blasts” of the title). The Crisis, magazine of the NAACP voiced the struggle for African-American identity and justice from 1910-1922. The Freewoman and its successor The Egoist addressed social, economic, and moral issues of gender from 1911-1919. The Little Review, begun in 1914, promoted modernism; most of James Joyce’s Ulysses appeared in its pages. Four Imagist anthologies, published annually between 1914 and 1917, promoted Imagism as an avant-garde movement and helped turn it into an important force in modern poetry. The first volume, Des Imagistes, was organized and edited by Ezra Pound (The Modernist Journals Project). Marianne Moore, poet and graduate of Bryn Mawr College, edited the Dial from 1924-1929.

Moore, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens published their first volumes of poetry in these years. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance produced an outpouring of prose and poetry along with debate on the issues of what constituted the art related to their heritage. Protest, pride, the legacy of oppression, and an interest in Africa variously characterized written work by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer and others.

The Little Theatre movement emerged during the same period, initially in the Midwest but before long also in the East. Community and college groups began to produce experimental drama as alternatives to the older vaudeville and to the new cinema (Ruland 1991, 270). Puppet theatre developed as one of the genres of productions by a number of Little Theatre groups (Bell 2008, 49-70). The Provincetown Players (summers on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, winters in New York City) produced some of Eugene O’Neill’s first one-act plays. In 1924 they put on O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, with Paul Robeson as the male lead in his theatrical debut (American Experience 2006). The Little Theatre Guild of New Haven built the Little Theatre on Lincoln Street (listed on the National Register of Historic Places) in 1924. The Guild was one of the most popular volunteer organizations in New Haven. Many of the Guild’s members were affiliated with Yale University, and the group was active until the opening of the Yale Drama School. During the Great Depression it briefly became a venue for the Federal Theater Project (Gold 1984, Section 8).

Throughout the 1920s, American writers resumed spending blocks of time in Europe, with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot living in England, where Eliot became a citizen. Robert Frost spent several years in England; his first book was published there. Paul Robeson found recognition of his talent in Europe, with opportunities to work, publish, and perform; he also formed his political positions during his travels in Europe (Boyle 2001, Chapters 9 and 16).

Visual art

Diverse movements in the visual arts made up a commentary on change. Artists searched for relevance in an age of industrialization, rapid technological advance, social unrest, political upheaval and violence, by rejecting traditional expression. The political and social changes in European society in the years between the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the end of World War II dramatically affected the course of modernism.[2] Although Vladimir Lenin had initially led the Russian avant-garde to believe they would be embraced by the Bolsheviks, that did not last. Wassily Kandinsky, among the leading Russian abstract artists to receive official support from the revolutionary regime, eventually exiled himself to Germany along with sculptor Naum Gabo, a founder of the Russian Constructivist movement. In Europe, other experimental movements developed. Dada, for example, was begun by expatriate intellectuals in Zurich as a condemnation of the senselessness of World War I, and was manifested in nonsensical “anti-art” and “anti-literature.” The Surrealist movement, led by poet and painter André Breton, drew on Dada’s nihilism and also relied on irrational associations to awaken audiences through shock. Cubism, developed by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, revolutionized modern painting and sculpture in its alteration of the realist point of view. Abstraction evolved in the work of Anni and Josef Albers of the Bauhaus and in the Neoplasticist movement in the Netherlands, represented by Piet Mondrian.

In Weimar, Germany, Kandinsky allied himself with the Bauhaus, the utopian design guild founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus aimed to unify architecture, sculpture and painting into a single creative expression. However, Hitler’s campaign to abolish modern art in Germany as “degenerate” included the 1933 Nazi shutdown of the Bauhaus, and forced many of its faculty and students into exile. Numerous prominent figures moved to the United States at the end of the 1930s, fleeing persecution and war. Piet Mondrian, then living and working in Paris, moved to New York in 1940 with assistance from his friend Harry Holtzman (Lansing 2013, 12). Similarly, a number of artists of the Abstract-Création group in Paris immigrated to the United States (Carley 2014, 9). The back and forth of expatriate Americans in Europe and immigrant Europeans entering the United States, produced a globalized art world.

Importance of Exhibition and Patronage

In America, the modern European cultural trends of the early 1900s were important for their liberating effect. Efforts to bring modernist ideas to the United States through art exhibits began with the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery “291,” founded in 1908, which was followed by the Armory Show of 1913. Eventually several important collections would open in new museum buildings including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA, 1929), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (1931), and the Avery Memorial at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford (1934).

As a founder of the American Photo-Secessionist and Pictorialist photography movements, Stieglitz was instrumental in elevating photography to the level of fine art, and furthered the cause of other contemporary arts with articles in his journal Camera Work (available online at The Modernist Journals Project). Founded with help from Edward Steichen, his fellow innovator in modern photography, 291 showcased young European and American avant-garde artists. There Stieglitz exhibited work of Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian pioneer of abstract art, and many of the same French Post-Impressionists, Fauves and Naïve painters whose work appeared in the Armory Show. The gallery also presented the first one-man exhibits in New York devoted to Pablo Picasso (1911), Francis Picabia (1913), and Constantin Brancusi (1914).

Stieglitz’s enthusiasm was shared in New York by two important connoisseurs, Katherine Dreier and Hilla Rebay. Katherine Dreier, herself a painter and participant in the Armory Show, engaged in many early efforts to support modern artists. She is best known for co-founding in 1920 with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray an experimental museum devoted to collecting the work of living artists. Run and financed primarily by Dreier, the Société Anonyme, Inc. was the first collection in America to call itself a museum of modern art. Despite attempts to establish a museum in West Redding, Connecticut, the Société never had a permanent location and the collection was finally given to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941. Lectures, traveling exhibits, and its final home in a teaching university, kept Dreier’s mission alive even as New York City museums like the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum began to eclipse it (Carley 2014, 5).

The Guggenheim owes its genesis directly to Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, a German painter who had been actively involved with the European avant-garde through her associations with Jean Arp and Hans Richter, among the originators of Dada, since the 1910s. Rebay arrived in the United States in 1927 and while painting Solomon R. Guggenheim’s portrait, she convinced the New York businessman to start collecting work by Kandinsky and other emerging non-objective painters and sculptors. Guggenheim’s early acquisitions served as the core of his 1939 Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York City. In 1952 it was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. (Carley 2014, 5).

Modernism found another passionate group of supporters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art was founded in 1928 by Lincoln Kirstein, John Walker III and Edward M. M. Warburg. These young men, students of Edward W. Forbes and Paul J. Sachs in their pioneering museum course, headed an enthusiastic contingent of Harvard students and art aficionados who also put on a series of exhibitions in rented space. Like Dreier, the Harvard activists focused on both Europeans and Americans, presenting early work by Peter Blume, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, Isamu Noguchi, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe. In 1930 the trio devoted a solo show to Alexander Calder’s wire constructions, and was responsible for the first public showing of Calder’s miniature moving Circus, made of wire, cork, buttons and other found objects, now on permanent display at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Weber 1992,92-98).

The activities of the Harvard group, and their mentoring by Forbes and Sachs, proved instrumental in forging places for them in America’s evolving cultural scene. When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was taking shape in 1930, all three Society founders were named to its advisory committee, along with their friend and fellow student Philip Johnson. In 1932 Johnson and the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock – another Harvard contemporary – organized the MoMA show, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. Another student, Chick Austin, became director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Walker became the first chief curator and director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Kirstein and Warburg founded the School of American Ballet with George Balanchine. Johnson curated at MoMA and later built his iconic Glass House (a National Historic Landmark) in New Canaan, Connecticut, along with a long career as a modernist and post-modernist architect and as a collector of modern art. Along with Dreier and Rebay, these figures would also shape Connecticut’s evolving history in the arts (Carley 2014, 6).

[2] This section relies on Carley 2014 for much information on the visual arts.

The 1930s – Federal government patronage during the Great Depression

During the Depression years the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted relief programs for the arts. The mission of these programs varied but generally included both employment for artists and writers, and also an idealistic and democratic goal of bringing art to the people. Beginning in 1933, an array of New Deal programs, known by a series of acronyms, included: the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP); the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts Project (known as the Section Project); and the better-known Federal Art Project (FAP), which operated under the Works Project Administration (WPA) from 1935 until 1943. The art produced by these programs is often referred to under the common label of WPA art.

As the first of these initiatives, the Public Works of Art Project originated in 1933. The primary products of the project were paintings, murals and sculptures for new and existing federal buildings. In 1934, the government also inaugurated its Section of Painting and Sculpture (later known as the Section of Fine Arts) under the Public Works Branch of the Treasury Department. The purpose of this program was to award commissions for high-quality sculpture and paintings for federal structures with the understanding that these were the “people’s buildings,” accessible to everyone. The first Section jobs were awarded based on anonymous, juried competitions favoring local artists and based on talent. Other programs focused on providing work to artists in financial need.

The Section artists based their designs on subjects like historical episodes, heroic tales and scenes of small-town America. Some of the paintings were true murals — painted directly on the wall surface using fresco or other techniques. Others, however, were done off-site on canvas panels and later affixed to the walls.

The management of art programs was sufficiently decentralized that the results varied in style, with the majority reflecting Regionalist or American Scene painting. Subject matter and style were debated, with desire to raise the exposure of the citizens to high quality art, balanced against the concern that art should appeal to unsophisticated viewers, and thus abstract styles were mainly avoided. Subjects that boosted confidence during hard times were common and many murals depicted the historical roots of communities, or the honest labors of the people. Abstract modernist art could have connotations of radical political slant, which the sponsors wished to avoid (Park, Introduction).

Inaugurated in 1935, the Works Project Administration was the largest and most ambitious New Deal initiative. As a national program, the agency operated its own projects with state and local governments, which provided a share of the costs. Cultural programs fell under the umbrella of Federal Project No. 1, including the Federal Art Project (FAP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) and the Historical Records Survey (HRS). The Federal Project No. 1 emphasized financial need. Jobs now went to teachers in the arts, playwrights, historians and researchers, orchestra conductors, actors, directors, stage and costume designers. Community art schools and theatre groups brought opportunities to learn and practice the arts. State guidebooks were written for each state by FWP writers, and the Index of American Design documented folk art and historical artifacts.

During most of the 1930s, New Deal programs cultivated multidisciplinary collaborations for a national audience. The Federal Arts Program had vastly expanded opportunities in the arts with a democratic hiring policy open to all levels of society and receptive to the country’s immigrant population. The program’s more provocative artistic and theatrical output, which dealt with the defining social ills of the age, had helped to elevate social commentary to accepted art form (Carley 2014, 20-22).

Beyond the programs supported by government, literature, drama, and cinema appealed to mass audiences in spite of financial hard times. Novels of the 1930s included a body of politically explicit novels, “proletarian literature,” and drama by playwrights like Lillian Hellmann, Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, and Marc Blitzstein (The Cradle Will Rock, directed by John Houseman in 1937). John Steinbeck’s novels Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath appeared during the decade. A modern phenomenon of the period was the emergence of photojournalism. Life and Fortune magazines hired outstanding photographers and published “picture essays” with text reduced to short captions. Books like Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces of 1937, Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus (1939), and Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (book form published in 1941), combined photography with text to dramatize the Depression era (Conn 1989,407, 416).

During the Depression period Americans first won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Sinclair Lewis in 1930, Eugene O’Neill in 1936, and Pearl Buck in 1938. This indicated that American writing was internationally recognized as a mature expression, and would be followed by Nobel Prizes awarded to additional modernist American writers William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), and John Steinbeck (1962).

Post World War II – 1945-1960s

As World War II began, graphic artists were still working for the WPA on war propaganda, but in June 1943 the agency closed, its mission ended. By the end of the war, the culture of the arts in the public and private sectors was evolving in new ways. The cohesion binding the arts on a national level during the FAP years evaporated, and individual cultural endeavors became more dependent on private philanthropy and patronage (Carley 2014, 33).

Several developments in the post-war environment gave rise to new trends in the arts and literature. The consumer culture which arose during the prosperous 1950s provided markets for advertising (Turner 2013, Introduction xxvii ff). The advertising business evolved into a major employer of writers, artists, and photographers. The fashion industry employed designers and photographers as well. Corporations and their product campaigns sponsored modern architecture for headquarters, and graphic design for branding and promotion. Magazines like LIFE, Fortune, and Vanity Fair published high quality photo essays. Magazines and the cinema employed writers for feature stories and screenplays. The sudden surge in college attendance by returning soldiers and later by their children, sparked the construction of new college campuses which in turn employed artists and writers to teach. Painters, sculptors, poets, and novelists found positions as professors and continued their creative work as well. Political and social movements including the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and anti-Vietnam War protests catalyzed artistic expressions.

Visual art

The license to experiment which was a legacy of early modernism paved the way for radical departures in art of the 1950s and 1960s, notably Abstract Expressionism, the non-representational movement that emerged in the late 1940s in New York. Artists included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Motherwell. Other art movements were Pop art, Conceptual art, and Environmental sculpture. The period of the Vietnam War provoked social protest movements which had their artistic expressions during the late 1960s and early 1970s, notably including puppetry such as the Bread and Puppet Theatre led by Peter Schumann, in which earlier traditions were revived and evolved into a new art form (Bell 2008, Chapter 6).

Literature

Modernist literature continued to deal with the themes of alienation and moral compromise in an environment of experimentation with form and language. In the 1950s the writers of the Beat generation included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and others. They lived and worked primarily in New York and San Francisco. The Beats cultivated nonconformist styles of dress and speech, and anti-materialist and often politically radical positions. Many were gay or bisexual and attacked the conformity of the 1950s, seeking individual freedom (Matterson 2003).

Novelists like William Styron, Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut used dark comedy, absurdist fable, and other post-modern techniques. James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker created a literature related to African-American life and the Civil Rights struggle. Poetry included the Beat poets and Confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Multi-cultural arts movements strengthened during the 1960s. Writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth contributed to a literature of Jewish life. Saul Bellow (1976), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), and Toni Morrison (1993) received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Connecticut – developments in art and literature – attraction to artists and writers

Connecticut already attracted artists and writers during the nineteenth century. Based on the models of artists’ colonies in France, seasonal gathering places grew up in Cos Cob, Old Lyme, and other areas of the state. The Cos Cob Art Colony at the Bush-Holley House historic site in Greenwich (a National Historic Landmark) was a gathering place for Impressionist artists from the 1890s on. They stayed in the Holley House and painted or took classes during the summer season (Greenwich Historical Society). John Henry Twachtman, Childe Hassam, and Elmer MacRae were among the prominent artists at Cos Cob.

J. Alden Weir was among the teachers at Cos Cob. He went on to purchase his own farm at Branchville in Wilton/Redding (now a National Historic Site). Weir also spent time and invited guests to his wife’s family farm, the Baker-Weir Farm in Windham (Windham Center Historic District).

In Old Lyme, Florence Griswold’s boarding house (a National Historic Landmark) welcomed boarders beginning with Henry Ward Ranger in 1899. A community of artists emerged as others purchased homes in Old Lyme and Lyme during the turn of the twentieth century period. A wave of community arts organizations, art guilds, and art leagues followed in shoreline towns and cities from Norwalk to Mystic and north to New Britain, West Hartford, and the Litchfield Hills.

Meanwhile, the prosperity of industrial Connecticut in the nineteenth century resulted in the growth of cities like New London, Norwich, New Britain, as well as Hartford and New Haven. Often sponsored by wealthy local business owners, institutions like the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, New Britain Institute (now the New Britain Museum of American Art), Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, and Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich came to support and promote the arts. Each city has a unique story behind its arts institutions, and the result is a broad network of support for the arts across the state of Connecticut.

Reinforcing the network were the colleges and universities. Aside from Yale University with its long history, the state’s colleges and art schools arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wesleyan University in Middletown, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut College in New London, Norwich Free Academy (a secondary school) in Norwich, the state normal schools (which began as teachers colleges and later became the state universities in New Haven, New Britain, Danbury, and Willimantic), the University of Connecticut (founded as the state agricultural school) in Storrs (Mansfield), the Hartford Art School (now part of the University of Hartford) – these promoted education, including specialized courses in literature and the visual arts. Many of these institutions made education available for women. They were in place to grow exponentially in the 1950s when the GI Bill enabled great numbers of World War II veterans to seek education. They grew again in the 1960s when the “baby boom” generation reached college age.

The artistic and literary communities of Connecticut in the twentieth century were characterized by decentralization. They formed a widespread network not dominated by any one large city or institution. This has been a distinguishing feature of Connecticut; it is densely populated enough to avoid isolation yet spread out enough for small groups and individuals to retain their independence.

Authors and visual artists living and/or working in Connecticut included nationally prominent figures and also a great number of locally or regionally important persons, many teaching, working in journalism, or exhibiting in local schools and galleries. The following narrative highlights some of the more widely-known art figures and a few of the less famous or locally prominent. They are grouped by theme in the following narrative.[1]

Connecticut as refuge

Literature

Turmoil overseas between the World Wars brought a sequence of notable refugees to Connecticut. One of the earliest sites where emigres settled was Churaevka, a little-known colony in Southbury, where a group of Russian intellectuals fleeing the Bolshevik revolution established a community in the late 1920s. The setting of birch trees and meadows on a hill above the Housatonic and Pomperaug Rivers reminded its literary founders, George Grebenstchikoff and Ilya Tolstoy (son of Leo Tolstoy) of the Russian countryside. The two envisioned a harmonious center for creative expression that could be a force for peace by fostering a deeper understanding of their culture. Churaevka was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Russian Village Historic District in 1988.

Alatas, the printing house founded at Churaevka by Grebenstchikoff and the painter Nicholas Roerich, published a Russian-language newspaper and Russian-authored articles and books. Roerich also designed an onion-domed chapel built with financial help from Connecticut aviation expert Igor Sikorsky, who had himself fled Russia in 1919.

Meanwhile, Connecticut’s Northwest Hills were becoming home to an increasing number of cultural transplants, including a group of formerly expatriate writers who had returned to America. By the early 1930s Malcolm Cowley, Matthew Josephson and Robert Coates had all discovered the quiet town of Sherman. As writer, critic and journalist, Malcolm Cowley would continue to make a name in America. His 1934 Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas chronicles the “Lost Generation” of writers (Robert Coates, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and others) whom he knew well in Paris.

As an editor of the New Republic (1929−44), Cowley discovered John Cheever, and his introduction to The Portable Faulkner (1946) reignited the career of an author then all but forgotten. Cowley followed Van Wyck Brooks’s critical work with the 1937 publication of After the Genteel Tradition, which addressed the “unseating of the genteel tradition from 1911 to 1930.” Malcolm Cowley also played a role in establishing the League of American Writers, a voluntary association of writers, critics and journalists assembled during the 1930s.

With his second wife, Muriel Maurer, Cowley moved into a converted barn in Sherman in 1932, and their home became a haven for friends from Europe and their bohemian Greenwich Village circle in New York. In the house directly across Church Road lived Robert Coates, a prolific novelist whose early books were inspired by Dadaism, Expressionism and Surrealism. As art critic for The New Yorker, Coates would be responsible for coining the term “Abstract Expressionism.”

Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) moved to Bridgewater following his first wife’s death and his own remarriage. Brooks lived there for the rest of his life, completing his Makers and Finders series, his comprehensive history of writers in America from the early 1800s until 1915, and working on his memoirs (Oleksa 2007).

Visual arts

Cowley’s connections stretched far, and he was soon followed to the area by his artist friends Peter Blume and Alexander Calder. During a residency in Paris, Calder and his wife Louisa had enjoyed a close association with the Paris “Abstract-Création” group, which included Jean Arp, the abstract sculptor responsible for christening Calder’s non-moving sculptures “stabiles.” The Calder home in Roxbury filled with artworks by Arp and other friends: Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Roberto Matta and Joan Miró. Over the next years, with war looming, other friends began to arrive – among them, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, and David Hare – all three involved in Surrealism.

Many activities of this circle revolved around gallery owner Julien Levy, a leading champion of the modern arts in America. A resident of Bridgewater, Connecticut, Levy opened his midtown Manhattan showrooms in 1931. Levy promoted experimental work, notably including Surrealism, by representing Arshile Gorky, Calder, Blume, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Hare, Sage, Tanguy, Naum Gabo, and René Magritte.

The Calders helped the Massons find a place in New Preston and hosted André Breton, who had come to the United States from a French internment camp. Tanguy and Sage eventually moved into an eighteenth-century house in Woodbury with studios in an adjacent barn and decorated their home with Surrealist art and Mid-century Modern furnishings.

Arshile Gorky moved to an old converted barn, updated with a wall of glass by the modernist architect Henry Hebbeln, who lived next door with his wife, Jean. Life magazine photographed it for a feature story in 1946. Gorky’s studio occupied an attached woodshed.

The serenity of the Northwest Hills made the region secluded, even as the area provided a ready connection to the art and literary scene in New York City. In his 1987 autobiography, Timebends, playwright Arthur Miller noted the enchanting effects of the New England seasons, recalling the 1947 spring when, at age 33, he wrote Death of a Salesman in a shack he built for that purpose on his Roxbury farm.

For Arthur Miller, the appeal of living in rural Connecticut rested largely on a “pleasing air of relaxed decay.” However, the outside world could intrude, as when Miller and his friend film director Elia Kazan made opposing choices in responding to subpoenas by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and 1956. Their friendship and reputations were marred forever by the events (American Masters, Kazan 2003).

Arthur Miller was also impressed by the ability of the emigrés from Europe to live happily on very little money. In spite of an ambitious plan to replace his own house with a modernist design, during the period of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, Miller’s eighteenth-century house was still intact in 1964 when he was married for a third time, to Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath. She added a darkroom to the barn. Morath’s intimate images of life in Litchfield County — highlighted in an exhibit on permanent loan to the University of Connecticut Torrington Campus — establish her place in a circle of artists whose legacy of work and friendship is associated with the Northwest Hills.

Also finding a home in the Northwest Hills, Lois Lenski and her husband Arthur Covey moved to a farmhouse in Harwinton where they spent the 1930s and early 1940s, with Lois creating children’s picture books and historical fiction for young adults.

Other areas in Connecticut also provided refuge to various artists, with eastern Connecticut appealing to artists and writers like Ann Petry, Roger Tory Peterson, Edwin Way Teale, Fuller Potter, and Sol LeWitt. Several of these artists came to the eastern shoreline and interior for unspoiled natural settings, finding that by the middle of the century, locations closer to New York had become over-developed. A few local artists and writers achieved prominence, including Gertrude Chandler Warner of Putnam, whose Boxcar Children books pioneered the new genre of children’s literature in the early 1940s.

The Mohegan Tribe retained its own land and heritage in Uncasville from before Colonial times, and the work of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (1899-2005) keeping records of the tribe’s genealogy and customs, was pivotal in proving the case for Federal recognition in 1994. She promoted Native American arts and founded the Tantaquidgeon Museum with her brother Harold Tantaquidgeon and their father, John, in 1931 to preserve and share knowledge of the tribe’s traditional arts.

Hartford – Wadsworth Atheneum as cultural center – 1920s to 1940s

For a period in the 1920s and 1930s, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford led a modern art movement that transformed the region, with a cultural scene rivaling that of any city in the country. This major change in identity for both museum and city came largely at the hand of the charismatic young visionary, A. Everett Austin Jr. (known to all as Chick), who was appointed director of the Atheneum in 1927.

Virgil Thomson, composer of the modernist opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which premiered at the Atheneum in 1934, once referred to Chick Austin as a “whole cultural movement in one man” (Thomson 2002, 220). Like other leading curatorial figures of the era, Austin had been a member of the Harvard Society circle. He had joined Julien Levy, Edward Warburg, and Alfred H. Barr in the Harvard curatorial program taught by Edward W. Forbes, director of the Fogg Art Museum, and his associate Paul J. Sachs. Recommended to the Atheneum board by Forbes, Chick Austin became director of the Wadsworth Atheneum at the young age of 26 (Weber 1992, 136).

Austin mounted his first major show in spring 1928. He exhibited French Post-Impressionists, Cubists, and Fauves, a new experience for Hartford museumgoers. Austin offered an equally bold single-artist show of Edward Hopper’s paintings in 1929. A series on avant-garde European film, including Robert Wiene’s renowned expressionist experiment, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, occurred in the same season.

In the 1930s, at the height of his influence, Chick Austin continued with pioneering programs designed to add important modernist pieces to the Atheneum collections and to bring modernist programming to his audiences, often with the help of Julien Levy and Katherine Dreier. The Atheneum’s “Newer Super-Realism” (1931), conceived largely by Levy, was the first major show on Surrealism mounted in an American museum. The exhibit featured works, by Salvador Dali, Giorgio De Chirico, André Masson, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Picasso, that had never been shown publicly in America. Katherine Dreier mounted a traveling show of female artists from the Société Anonyme. The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art also supplied an exhibit featuring Buckminster Fuller’s model for the Dymaxion House, which Austin set up inside the museum.

In 1932, the museum was again at the vanguard with MoMA’s show, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. An accompanying forum involved a panel — Philip Johnson, historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect William Lescaze — who debated the legitimacy of contemporary design with the audience. In the same year, planning began for an addition to the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Avery Memorial. This would be Austin’s signature achievement, with its interior designed in the International Style under Austin’s close supervision, the first American art museum expressly designed to display modern art (Gaddis 1984).

Virgil Thompson’s 1934 modern opera project, Four Saints in Three Acts, involved a collaboration among Gertrude Stein as writer, John Houseman as director, and Frederick Ashton as choreographer. Stein’s modernist libretto perplexed the audience members, who were nevertheless charmed by the music, sets and the cast of black actors. Austin combined the opera premiere with a Picasso show mounted in the new International-style Avery Court.

In 1929 Austin married Helen Goodwin, niece of Atheneum president Charles Goodwin. One year later the couple built a new house on Scarborough Street in Hartford. A sixteenth-century Italian villa admired by the Austins on their honeymoon inspired the design. It resembled a stage set, with its façade detailed with Palladian features and viewed as the backdrop to a formal lawn. Interiors represented historical periods from Rococco to International style, showcasing Austin’s curatorial interests (Ransom 1994).

Art patron James Thrall Soby complemented Austin’s role. As Austin’s unsalaried adviser and curator, Soby was an important collaborator at the Atheneum during much of Austin’s tenure. As a pioneering collector of modernist art, Soby often loaned pieces to the museum’s exhibitions. In 1935 James Soby moved from West Hartford to Farmington, where his collection found a new home in a wing designed by Henry-Russell Hitchcock for the Greek Revival-period farmhouse. A standing mobile by Alexander Calder on the nineteenth-century wellhead gyrated whenever a bucket was lowered into the well (Weber 1992, 306ff).

Austin’s exhibitions inevitably generated controversy. During his seventeen-year directorship he often encountered budget and trustee problems. Austin, however, regarded controversy and debate as essential to an educated viewpoint  (Weber 1992, 158ff). His multi-faceted programming, unprecedented in Connecticut museums, derived from the opinion that a broad fusion of the arts delivered a more valuable experience than any one discipline on its own.

The Colony Phenomenon: Art, Theater, Film, Music, Literature, and Craft

While the Wadsworth Atheneum brought attention to the modern arts in an urban setting, Connecticut’s long history of grassroots art clubs, summer stock and concert organizations in small communities grounded the twentieth-century cultural scene in tradition. Many of Connecticut’s best-known and most deeply rooted arts groups originated as part of seasonal colonies. Most art and theater groups operated on low budgets, and many found homes in recycled barns and other abandoned buildings, which suited their improvisational character.

Many groups were also progressive, offering novel programs that laid the foundation for permanent audiences. The Mystic Art Association (1913), Lyme Art Association (1914), Silvermine Guild of Artists (1922), Kent Art Association (1923), New Britain Art League (1928), and West Hartford Art League (1934), count among early arts groups that are still active. The Lyme Art Association (Old Lyme Historic District), the Silvermine Arts Center (Silvermine Center Historic District), West Hartford Art League (Buena Vista Local Historic District), and New Britain Art League (Walnut Hill Historic District) are all in designated historic properties or districts.

In the Connecticut story of twentieth-century arts, the Silvermine Guild of New Canaan, Norwalk, and Wilton is noteworthy for its early multidisciplinary embrace of the arts and contemporary media, including graphic and industrial design, commercial and book illustration, cartooning, dance, concert music, and film. The guild grew organically from informal critiques begun in 1907 on sculptor Solon Borglum’s Wilton farm. It started with a nucleus of people who had studied together in Paris or New York. Among them, Daniel Putnam Brinley, a landscape artist, printmaker, muralist and stained-glass designer, had grown up in the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich. As a young man in Paris, Brinley co-founded, with Edward Steichen and John Marin, the New Society of American Artists (1908).

Greatly impressed by the avant-garde work he had seen in Europe, Brinley developed a distinctive blend of Impressionism and modernism in his own work. In New York, he showed work at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 and the 1913 Armory Show, where many of the first Silvermine members met as exhibitors. His wife, Katherine Sanger Brinley, was a fiction and travel-book writer.

In 1924 the Silvermine Guild of Artists formally incorporated as an educational non-profit dedicated to fostering art appreciation and cultural growth. Classes started in a barn relocated to the guild’s current site on Silvermine Road in New Canaan. In an early presentation of film, the guild hosted a screening of Nanook of the North (1922) by Robert Flaherty, America’s first full-length documentary maker. Readings organized by cartoonist Clifton Meek also became the basis for a coffee-house known as the “Village Room,” an informal forum for new ideas that continued for many years.

The writers and painters, printmakers and others representing the guild’s pre-World War II years are too numerous to list, but some stand out as examples of how membership reached beyond the traditional visual arts into new media and genres. In addition to painters and printmakers, there were talented commercial illustrators and cartoonists. Writers included Richardson Wright, the editor of House and Garden and popular author of books on gardening and the simple pleasures of country life. Ruth Vassos was the first acknowledged female science fiction writer in America. Ruth’s husband, John Vassos, served as guild president periodically from 1930s to the 1950s. Vassos’s career as artist, industrial and graphic designer, illustrator and architect was amazingly rich, and also evocative of his era. Vassos spent his early years in Boston assisting the renowned set designer Joseph Urban at the Ziegfeld Follies, before opening a design studio in New York in the 1920s. Under the spell of Art Deco, Vassos synthesized a streamlined graphic aesthetic and explored the themes of speed of technology. His plan for documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s studio in the Chrysler Building incorporated machine-age materials supplied by her clients, including Pittsburg Plate Glass and Alcoa Aluminum. A 40-year client relationship with RCA involved designs for radio and television cabinets, some of which were featured in the “Radio Living Room of Tomorrow” at the 1939 World’s Fair. Illustrated books produced by Vassos with his wife were another specialty. Some were graphic adaptations of Oscar Wilde works, while others, like Phobia (1931) and Humanities (1935), explored the modernist themes of alienation, war and the homogenizing effect of mechanized technology.

The guild’s theatrical troupe, the “Silvermine Sillies,” active from 1925 to the 1940s, owed its success to the local pool of multidisciplinary talents. Members wrote, directed, designed, and performed an eclectic repertoire of burlesque reviews, operatic divertissements, satirical skits and original ballets staged with modern music and choreography.

In the 1930s the experimental film program continued with works by Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau and Abel Gance. Later, in 1957, Cocteau and Léger, with help from Paul Bowles, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, would collaborate with Dada artist Hans Richter in 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements, partially filmed on Richter’s lawn in Southbury. The 1938 Silvermine Music Festival made news as the first outdoor concert ever presented by the New York Philharmonic. The event also featured an exhibit of contemporary painting, sculpture and ceramics.

 In some ways, the leading character in Silvermine’s cast of thousands was not any single guild member, but the picturesque scenery of the area. The setting inspired painters and writers. A memoir by Adeline Hawkes, The Broom Behind the Door, recounts her life growing up in several local landmarks, including the Borglum farm. Children’s writer Edward Eager, also a television lyricist, set three books in Silvermine. Faith Baldwin, a popular author of light fiction, modeled her imaginary location “Little Oxford” on the village as well.

Silvermine also owes much of its present charm to guild members Frank Townsend Hutchens (landscape artist and portrait painter) and John Kenneth Byard (museum consultant and proponent of the Colonial Revival). An inn and teahouse opened by Byard helped to make Silvermine an early tourist destination. The efforts of the two to purchase substantial acreage and renovate derelict mill buildings rank among the state’s early private historic preservation achievements.

The New Deal and Public Projects for Art, Writing, and Theater

The financial security of organizations like the Silvermine Guild was almost always tenuous, and even more so during the years of the Great Depression. Help came for many members of the guild, and for hundreds of others in Connecticut, in the form of the federal relief projects.

The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) funded artists and created art in public buildings. The Civil Works Administration (CWA) and various emergency relief agencies addressed the economic need of commercial artists and designers with recording projects that employed draftsmen, illustrators, writers, and photographers.

Visual arts, cross-disciplinary projects, and literature

New Haven ranked as an early beneficiary of project funds under the PWAP directorship (1933–35) of Theodore Sizer, associate director of the Yale University Art Gallery. As funding became available, New Haven’s mural program endowed some of the city’s public buildings with frescoes and painted wall panels. Primarily devoted to historical and literary scenes, the wall painting projects engaged the community in the PWAP by involving parents and schools in related research projects. “The whole community becomes mural-conscious,” reported a 1934 Christian Science Monitor article describing how children watched wide-eyed as artists worked on a scene from Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, designed by Salvatore DeMaio for the New Haven Public Library (Trout 2006).

Across the state, murals were prepared for new and existing post office buildings, funded by the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts. These paintings and others – often in school buildings and libraries – represented scenes of Connecticut history and of local agriculture and industry. For example, Harold Barbour’s scene of the Portland brownstone quarry, still extant at the Brownstone Intermediate School, is a unique representation of a now-vanished industry. Next door, Austin Mecklem’s painting of tobacco farming in the Portland Post Office preserves a record of this distinctive local agriculture. In New London, Thomas LaFarge’s murals show scenes of whaling, dramatically composed to fit the horizontal format of the upper wall areas surrounding the public hall of the 1933 post office building (listed on the National Register). Vito Covelli of Barkhamstead painted easel paintings which were distributed to schools and hospitals around the state. While the majority of the artists were men, eight of the twenty-five Connecticut post-office paintings were done by women: Alice Flint in Fairfield, Victoria Hudson in Greenwich, Elizabeth Shannon Phillips in West Haven, Mildred Jerome in New Milford, Ann Hunt Spencer in Southington, Suzanne McCullough in Thomaston, Nena de Brennecke in Windsor and Amy Jones in Winsted.

The inclusive, cross-disciplinary approach of Project No. 1 put a new focus on performance and programming. The goals were to create artworks, but also to expand audiences and engage members of the public. WPA performers frequently entertained audiences in public parks, orphanages, settlement houses and prisons. During Connecticut’s 1938 Christmas season, Federal Music Project (FMP) groups presented 29 musical programs, including concerts by WPA bands on the Waterbury Green and a performance by the 80-piece Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra for residents of the Hillside Municipal Home, a poor farm in that city. A holiday extravaganza in Hartford the same year not only involved the services of a FAP artists, hired to create a life-sized nativity grouping, but also the talents of a FMP children’s chorus, which presented a concert with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. The idea for a life-size nativity scene that could be enlarged periodically came from James Dillon, director of the city’s WPA recreation division of the Hartford parks department. Vincent and Girard Rossi, sculptors and stone masons, created figures for the nativity, first displayed in front of the Old State House in 1938 (WPA Art Inventory).

The research component of the program yielded monographs on all aspects of American life, including folklore and the first ethnic studies to reach a popular readership. A Federal Writers Project (FWP) effort, Connecticut: A Guide to its Roads, Lore, and People (1938), was one of a series with a book for every state. The Census of Old Buildings (1934-37) recorded photographs and descriptions of 5,000 historic structures; the census is still used by historians today.

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP), directed in Connecticut by Gertrude DonDero, was responsible for hundreds of productions, both classic and experimental, involving some of the most innovative staging of the time. John Houseman, who had made his 1934 directorial debut at the Wadsworth Atheneum with Four Saints in Three Acts, received his early training as part of the FTP. Established playwrights like Eugene O’Neill contributed to the effort by offering to reduce royalties. It was in this way that O’Neill’s Emperor Jones (1920), which traveled across the country during the 1930s and starred Paul Robeson in one of his early roles, also reached an enthusiastic audience in the Atheneum’s Avery Memorial theater. The Little Theatre on Lincoln Street in New Haven was another venue for FTP productions.

Project No. 1’s Federal Art Project (FAP) operated under a national director, Holger Cahill, a museum curator and folk art expert. The FAP emphasized three specific areas: art production; art education; and art research, the last achieved primarily through the Index of American Design (1935-42). Following Theodore Sizer in his PWAP role, Wayland Williams of the Yale Art Gallery served as the FAP Connecticut director. The state divided into three project districts: New Haven (New Haven and Middlesex Counties), New London (New London and Windham) and Hartford (Hartford, Litchfield and Tolland Counties). Fairfield County was originally under the New York program.

By the end of 1937, the Connecticut FAP had distributed 165 easel paintings, murals, memorial tablets and sculpture pieces in Connecticut. Most wound up in state and federally funded schools, hospitals (for veterans and the disabled), sanatoriums; the State Teachers Colleges in New Haven, Danbury, New Britain, and Willimantic; and the Connecticut State Library. The mural for Teachers College of Connecticut (formerly New Britain Normal School and now Central Connecticut State University) by artist in residence Milton Rockwell Bellin, depicted members of the student population.

According to the WPA Art Inventory Project at the Connecticut State Library (http://wpa.cslib.org/), the Connecticut project employed about 150 artists over the course of its life and produced 5,000 murals, crafts, posters, signs, photographs and works of sculpture and easel art. The Connecticut effort employed a sizable number of immigrants, with notable input from the state’s Italian-American population, along with many graduates of the Yale School of Fine Arts, Bellin included.

The sculpture, paintings, and crafts were often the subject of exhibitions intended to publicize the project and showcase hometown artists. A 1936 show by the Society of Connecticut Craftsmen in Granby, for instance, presented woodenware, furniture, rugs and light fixtures made locally. Hartford’s Board of Education Building later hosted a presentation of still life and landscape paintings by fifteen Connecticut artists, which were to be permanently allocated to schools. Teachers visiting the exhibition were invited to select paintings for their own classrooms. 

Owing to its structure, the Federal Art Project was more localized than the Treasury Department Section projects in the way it connected artists to state and community interests under the supervision of local and district authorities. Organization of the groups, and therefore their effectiveness, varied greatly, and newspapers filled with complaints about inequitable quota distribution based largely on politics.

Norwalk and Westport had particularly efficient organizers, and both towns were able to assemble collections of WPA art. The Norwalk FAP murals now constitute one of the largest collections on public display. Local artists also benefited from the efforts of the Westport Art Committee, founded in 1934 to administer the New Deal public works projects, initially under the regional supervision of Julianna Force of the Whitney Museum of American Art. That year the town appropriated $3,000 for support of the program.

A bulwark of support for the local art community, the Art Committee encouraged all professional artists to apply for the first PWAP and Treasury Section mural projects, whether or not they had work. This strategy was specially designed to mitigate the embarrassment of those who were truly desperate. Forty local artists, including the prolific Westport muralist Robert Lamdin, responded to the first call, and schools, the library, and town hall were all endowed with public art as a result.

The Westport FAP effort also encompassed the photographic work of T. O’Conor Sloane, Jr., who captured 100 images of old houses in town. Aluminum school-door panels, titled The Evolution of Writing, for Bedford Elementary School and a fountain assembly for the Greens Farm School were the work of Garret Thew.

As art by and for the people, FAP works reinforced the program mission with “American” themes depicting real people — workers, farmers, families — in familiar settings. The spirit of American Regionalism, associated with such figures as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry (a resident of Westport for some years) celebrated the virtues of rural, small-town America. Many of the Connecticut works captured glimpses of everyday life — for example, George Earle’s Bridgeport Parking Lot, Bellin’s Esso Tanks and Trucks, and Beatrice Cuming’s scenes of New London — or depicted notable local New Deal projects, as in Howard Heath’s watercolor series of the Merritt Parkway construction. Heroes of our state history (Nathan Hale and Roger Sherman), inventors and manufacturers (Eli Whitney and Samuel F. B. Morse) and manufacturers (Charles Goodyear and Oliver Winchester) earned their place in Connecticut works as well.

Adherents of the Social Realism movement also acknowledged the poverty, racism and social inequality that contributed to a fractured, often desperate, population in American society during the Depression. In his mural cycle The Arts of Life in America, Thomas Hart Benton, an artist who crossed from American Regionalism into Social Realism, confronted viewers with themes of isolation and homelessness. Benton painted the murals for the Whitney Museum in 1932. They were acquired in 1953 by director Sanford B. D. Low for the New Britain Museum of American Art in a prescient investment of $500 (NBMAA 2010).

The Index of American Design, an ambitious documentation of America’s “usable past,” consisted of 22,000 images of objects of popular, practical, and folk art depicted primarily with detailed illustrations. Culled from private and museum collections, the portfolio represented an extensive selection of America’s cross-cultural heritage. One of Connecticut’s contributions was a seventeenth-century carved Hartford chest from the collections of the Yale Art Gallery, rendered by Harold Merriam. A rendering of a folk-art gate, an original nineteenth-century piece by Hobart Victory Welton of Waterbury (now in the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, along with Welton’s carved stone watering trough), also found a place in the portfolio (Mattatuck Museum collection and archives).

The Index of American Design was noteworthy for employing commercial illustrators. Because the drawings required an absolutely uniform, almost photographic, technique, artists working on the portfolio often required special training. After Connecticut instructors achieved the necessary proficiency, they helped train artists from Vermont who traveled to Hartford for an intensive three-week program.

Thanks to the WPA educational component, hundreds of Connecticut citizens also participated in FAP-sponsored art and art history classes. Classes were held state-wide in libraries, boys’ and girls’ clubs, churches and museums, including the Wadsworth Atheneum. Children and adults often experienced their first exposure to original artworks through these programs. Lectures and classes promoted personal interaction with leading figures in the arts and letters at a time when such contact outside of college seminar rooms was relatively rare.  

Fairfield County: From Colony to Suburb

Fairfield County, the state’s most southwestern and densely populated county, has long been recognized as a crossroads of creative and intellectual endeavor that has attracted writers and artists since at least the late 1800s. Such creative types were attracted to the area because of its scenic shoreline and quaint country villages. It has its cities: industrial Bridgeport and corporate Stamford. Even so, there is still New England character and beautiful rural landscapes. The county has earned a name for affluence and sophistication, offering a lively forum for intellectual exchange. Yet a pervasive sense of the simple life associated with colonies like Silvermine and early artists’ communities in Westport and Weston also survives.

Paralleling demand for an attractive suburban lifestyle, Fairfield County’s reputation for culture developed steadily along with an increasing population in the years before and after World War II. A cover story on Fairfield County in the August 8, 1949, issue of LIFE magazine publicized that reputation. According to the 11-page feature, “Country Home of Smart New Yorkers,” an influx of urbanites to the state’s attractive and increasingly affluent southwestern towns was supplanting a prior migration to Westchester County and Long Island’s “swank” North Shore. “Today it is in Fairfield County that New Yorkers sail their boats, ride their horses, drive around in their station wagons and lead a luxurious rural life,” the magazine announced.

Resident artists had made the area chic. Westport, readers learned, was probably home to more professional artists in a 25-mile radius than any comparable spot in the country. “Many of them buy old farmhouses, which they remodel at great expense, with all the original charm.” A photo essay devoted to notable residents pictured actress Eva Le Gallienne napping on her Westport lawn, having just finished an appearance at the Westport Country Playhouse. Illustrator Stevan Dohanos, a well-known Social Realist who had worked on WPA post office art projects, posed while working on a scene of Easton’s Congregational church. Helen Hokinson was photographed at the “English” country house, where she drew her “famous cartoons of fat and fatuous ladies” for The New Yorker magazine. 

Yet even as they enthusiastically described the area, LIFE writers conveyed a somewhat contradictory image of it. On the one hand, Fairfield County was synonymous with luxury and smart society. On the other, there were as many “idea people” as those with money, with plain living a chief attraction. It was that conflicting combination of qualities — country chic and country shabby — that made Fairfield County so alluring (LIFE 1949).

Community of artists and writers

Westport was an unpretentious town in the early 1900s, when George Hand Wright – painter, printmaker, and illustrator – and his wife, Anne, moved into a rundown farmhouse in what was then a fishing village. Wright opened his studio to informal gatherings, and he remained dean of the local art colony until his death in 1951. His friend and fellow villager, Robert Lawson, children’s book author and illustrator, later recalled that Wright embodied the “inner Westport” of quiet hospitality, lasting friendships, complete devotion to art and “gracious homes salvaged from the past” (Tarrant 1985, p. 13).

As the Westport colony grew, friends gravitated to particular neighborhoods. Sculptors James and Laura Fraser gathered with others near the Weston border, an area still so rural that people generally got around the neighborhood by horse. Another cluster in the area of King’s Highway and Ludlow and Wright Streets, included Percy Anderson, a men’s fashion illustrator, and the Russian painter, sculptor and printmaker Ossip Linde, who dressed in spats and bowler for visits to New York galleries. Yet another cluster located on Bridge Street by the Saugatuck River and near Compo Beach. There artists found kindred spirits in two eminent figures of the era: Arthur Dove, a pioneering American abstract artist, and American Impressionist Karl Anderson, an exhibitor at the 1913 Armory Show.

Fairfield County’s chic reputation arguably began in the winter of 1920, when F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald arrived at the Compo Beach section of Westport on their honeymoon. Scott Fitzgerald was then enjoying the success of his first published novel This Side of Paradise, recently published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. While staying in a Revolutionary War-period house near the shore, the couple entertained literary visitors, including writer and social critic Edmund Wilson; drama critic George Jean Nathan; and Van Wyck Brooks, critic, biographer and longtime resident of Bridgewater. Around the same time, Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner’s editor who had discovered Fitzgerald, moved into a Greek Revival-style house in New Canaan (listed on the National Register of Historic Places). “It has the face of a Greek temple and the body of a spacious Connecticut farmhouse,” Perkins wrote to his protégé upon his acquisition of the house in 1924. Years later Edmund Wilson, another writer shepherded into print by Perkins, would edit Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up (1945).

In 1922 Eugene O’Neill took up residence in Ridgefield at a place called Brook Farm, remaining for five years. Meanwhile the Fitzgeralds’ neighbor in Compo, John Held, Jr., one of the best-known magazine illustrators and cartoonists of the day, was at work on characters like his “Held Girl,” the short-haired flapper, complete with rolled stockings and cigarette holder, who immortalized the same Jazz-Age spirit that Scott Fitzgerald captured with his novels. Fitzgerald’s 1922 collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, had a jacket designed by Held.

Other artists migrating from New York included photographer Edward Steichen, who in 1929 purchased a 421-acre property he called Umpawaug in West Redding; Artist and collector Katherine Dreier settled in West Redding as well. Hilla Rebay gave up her studio over Carnegie Hall in New York City and settled into a Victorian farmhouse in Greens Farms, Westport, which she called Franton Court. Rebay hung a selection of canvases by Chagall, Léger and Kandinsky — all frequent visitors — added fashionable furniture and finished off the décor by installing her massive collection of books, which she meticulously lined up according to the color of their bindings.

Famous Schools with Famous Teachers

A year after LIFE featured Fairfield County on its cover, Collier’s Weekly in 1950 devoted another feature to what editors called “probably the most fabulous collection of artists ever assembled under the same mailbox” (Morse 1950). This collection comprised the faculty members of the Institute of Commercial Art (1948), the brainchild of Albert Dorne and Edwin Eberman. An illustrator for Collier’s and other magazines, Dorne was the marketing genius of the two, and envisioned the new enterprise as a way to reel in would-be commercial artists and capture an untapped market of so-called amateur “Sunday painters.”

The pair’s premise was that anyone who wanted success should learn from people who already had it. Dorne assembled the school’s original “Twelve Famous Artists.” They included Dorne himself, Austin Briggs, Stevan Dohanos, Robert Fawcett, George Giusti, Peter Helck, Fred Ludekens, Alfred Parker, Norman Rockwell, Ben Stahl, Harold Von Schmidt and Jon Whitcomb. The school set up headquarters in the former Sasco Mill building on the Westport/Southport line and began targeting prospective applicants with magazine ads. Once accepted into the course, students received an official portfolio filled with advice on everything from the proper workspace and pencil size, along with a lesson plan and assignments, to be sent in for critiques and hand-drawn responses.

The response was huge. One thousand people enrolled in the first year, and in the institute’s ensuing decades of operation, its enrollment outdistanced that of all other art correspondence courses of the day. The success of the Famous Artists School, as it would eventually be called, depended largely on the reputation of the faculty, with Norman Rockwell as the most famous name. Austin Briggs was an accomplished cartoonist, who drew “Flash Gordon,” during the 1940s. Al Parker’s illustrations appeared in nearly every major popular magazine, from House Beautiful to Ladies’ Home Journal, for which he produced some fifty covers.

The founders followed with more schools based on the same idea: the Famous Writers School in the late 1950s and the Famous Photographers School in 1964. A Famous Artists Cartoon Course was added in the 1960s as well. Those endeavors also had impressive names attached to them. The Famous Photographers School claimed premier portrait photographer Bradford Bachrach and Margaret Bourke-White, then a resident of Darien. The guiding faculty at the Famous Writers school consisted of yet another Famous Twelve, representing the fields of fiction, non-fiction, humor, sports, television and advertising writing: Faith Baldwin, John Caples, Bruce Catton, Bennett Cerf, Mignon G. Eberhart, Bergen Evans, Rudolf Flesch, J. D. Ratcliff, Max Shulman, Red Smith and Mark Wiseman. The faculty was headed by Rod Serling, known for The Twilight Zone.

If it seems improbable that luminaries like Bruce Catton (Pulitzer Prize winner for A Stillness at Appomattox in 1953) and Bennett Cerf (founder of Random House publishing company) were taking time to grade the thousands of aptitude tests pouring in, let alone personally follow students through a course of study, actually they weren’t. In 1970 an exposé of the Famous Writers School by investigative journalist Jessica Mitford in The Atlantic revealed what already seemed likely. Most of the famous names on the masthead were merely figureheads (Mitford 1970).

The tarnished name of the Famous Writers School did not affect the general reputation of Fairfield County for cultural activity. By the mid-century Westport alone professed to have more resident artists and writers than any comparable-sized town in the country. Fairfield County was equally well known for its commercial and fine artists, along with the dozens of novelists, poets, critics, essayists, biographers, and playwrights.

Most lived and worked quietly: Howard Fast, Lawrence Riley, Barbara Tuchman, Anya Seton, all of Greenwich; Erskine Caldwell and Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Darien; Helen Keller in Easton; Ann Parrish, Hume Cronyn, and Jessica Tandy in Redding; Irene Kampen, Robert Lewis Taylor, and Clare Boothe Luce in Ridgefield; and Max Wilk and Peter DeVries in Westport. Some stayed for decades, while others came for shorter stays. Flannery O’Connor boarded from 1949 to 1951 at the Redding home of poet and critic Robert Fitzgerald, where she wrote Wise Blood. Fitzgerald himself later moved out of Fairfield County to Hamden.

Book illustrators and commercial artists were also well represented. Johnny Gruelle, of Raggedy Ann fame lived in Silvermine and later in Wilton. Richard and Patsy Scarry, authors and illustrators of popular children’s books, attracted a circle of artists and publishing friends to Ridgefield. Robert Lawson and Hardie Gramatky, successful children’s book author/illustrators, were in Westport. Maurice Sendak lived and worked, writing and illustrating his children’s books, first in Rowayton, a section of Norwalk, and later in Ridgefield.

There were also a number of cartoonists, including an influx of artists from the Disney Studios in the 1940s. Mel Casson, creator of “Redeye,” a parody strip of a 19th-century Native American tribe, lived in Westport for forty years. Among others in the area: Alex Raymond, creator of “Flash Gordon,” “Jungle Jim,” and “Rip Kirby;” Tony DiPreta of Greenwich, who worked on “Mickey Finn” and “Rex Morgan, MD,” among many other strips; Peggy Bacon, satirical caricaturist and Ridgefield native; another Ridgefield resident, Wayne Boring, an artist on “Superman,” Hal Foster of “Prince Valiant” and political cartoonist Gill Fox, both of Redding; and Mort Walker of “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois Fame,” of Stamford. Another legacy of the area is the series of 164 stamps commissioned from seventeen Westport artists by the United States Postal Service’s Citizen Advisory Council between 1959 and 1998.

Twentieth-century Fairfield County derived its identity and character from the very diversity of its population. Writing about Westport in a 1996 New Yorker piece, Barbara Probst Solomon suggested that the appeal for artists and literati in the earliest days was the lack of an entrenched society (Solomon, Barbara P. 1996). It was easy for this “new class of bourgeois outsider-insiders” to fit in, averred Solomon, because they didn’t actually need to.

By virtue of size and heterogeneity, Fairfield County has always been able to absorb those who wanted to live there quietly, while putting the limelight on those who desired publicity. As Robert Motherwell, one of the most recognized figures in Abstract Expressionism, once remarked, “I’m treated well in Greenwich not because I’m a well-known artist, but because I drive a Mercedes-Benz down the street” (Interview with Paul Cummings, Greenwich, 1971).

Post-War Academic Connections, Institutional and Private Patronage

Following the end of the WPA and the war effort, private and institutional initiatives replaced government funding to support the arts in collecting, exhibiting, and teaching. Involvement by educational institutions and museums was important, as were initiatives like the Connecticut Artists Juried Exhibition, established in 1944 by the Slater Memorial Museum, associated with the Norwich Free Academy. The Rose Arts Festival, held annually by the Norwich Women’s City Club in front of the museum, became a venue for intriguing new talents, among them, African-American outsider artist Ellis Ruley, who was recognized by Slater Museum director Joseph Gualtieri and earned a 1952 solo exhibition at the Slater (Smith 1993, 13-27).

Visual arts

Yale University played a pivotal role in the development of Connecticut’s most significant modern art collections as the recipient of Katherine Dreier’s collection. Dreier had entrusted her Société Anonyme assemblage of some 600 works to the Yale Art Gallery in 1941 after failing to secure university support for her proposed Country Museum in West Redding. Although she was disappointed in failing to establish her own museum, her primary mission had always been to expose people to original works of art as fully and often as possible. Under Theodore Sizer’s directorship, the Yale Art Gallery offered a professional curatorial staff and a proper archival environment. In April 1950, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Société Anonyme’s first exhibition, Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp formally dissolved their organization.

After this important acquisition, Yale moved forward rapidly in its patronage of contemporary design, which flourished on campus under the successive presidencies of A. Whitney Griswold (1951–63) and Kingman Brewster Jr. (1963–77). In 1947 architect Louis Kahn had served as the first guest in the Yale School of Art and Architecture’s Visiting Critics Program. Three years later, the German painter and color theorist Josef Albers, a former Bauhaus faculty member, accepted an appointment as chair of the Department of Design at the Yale Art School. Albers was accompanied to Connecticut by his wife, Anni Albers, a former Bauhaus student and highly regarded textile artist and printmaker. The couple lived first in New Haven and later in Orange. Josef began work the same year on his celebrated Homage to the Square series, in which he used a mathematically determined format of nesting squares to explore complex visual effects created with simple shapes and complex color variations.

During his eight-year tenure at the art school, Albers developed its fledgling graphic arts program and hired some of the era’s leading graphic design masters, including Alvin Eisenman, Alvin Lustig and Herbert Matter. Eisenman served as founder and first director of the Yale graduate program for graphic design, itself the first department of its kind in a major American university. Alvin Lustig’s many accomplishments extended to distinctive modern book covers for the New Directions publishing house. A design consultant to Knoll International and former student of Fernand Léger, Herbert Matter, who had an equally distinguished career in photography, photomontage and filmmaking, introduced the first photography classes at Yale. In 1950 Matter directed Works of Calder, the first color film to showcase the artist’s sculptures, for the Museum of Modern Art. In 1954, as corporate design director for the New Haven Railroad, he also designed the railroad’s “NH” logo with its distinctive elongated serifs. One of the most identifiable graphic design motifs in America, the logo is still in use.

The Yale University Art Gallery opened its new modernist gallery addition designed by Louis Kahn in 1953. The Yale British Art Center followed with its own Kahn building in 1972. Thanks to Yale’s patronage and the university’s influence during the Redevelopment period which remade much of the city, New Haven today has an archive of art and architecture rivaling that of any city in the country. Albers himself worked on several three-dimensional pieces both on and off campus. He created a stainless steel exterior wall sculpture, Repeat and Reverse, for the 1963 Art and Architecture (A & A) Building at the invitation of its architect, Paul Rudolph (then also dean of the architecture school). Sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s work is represented in the sunken courtyard of the Beinecke Library at Yale. These works reflect a collaborative design approach typical of Yale in those years.

Another A & A Building sculpture, Untitled (c. 1965), represents the hand of Alexander Liberman, a Russian-born artist and longtime Vogue editor who lived in Roxbury. Liberman experimented with geometric slices of discarded farm machinery and other oversized found objects. Court Street Plaza near City Hall also showcases a Liberman piece. A stabile Gallows and Lollipops by Liberman’s fellow Roxbury resident Alexander Calder stands in the Hewitt Quadrangle.

Calder himself continued to be a formidable presence in Connecticut. In 1947 the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury paid homage to the artist with a solo show. Six years later the Wadsworth Atheneum devoted an exhibit to Calder and the Constructivist Naum Gabo, a fellow innovator of kinetic sculpture. By mid-century, Gabo was living in Middlebury and continuing his work on abstract three-dimensional forms fabricated with wire, glass, plastics and other unorthodox materials.

With metal newly available after the war, Calder began to gravitate toward more monumental works, which first found a market in the 1950s. Before 1966 when the Lippincott Foundry opened in North Haven for the express purpose of fabricating large-scale artworks, artists had needed to rely on industrial iron fabricators. Calder initially sought out the services of the Waterbury Ironworks, which charged him by the pound for large sheets of metal; he would arrive with an aluminum model to be enlarged in steel. A mobile Calder made for the metal-shop employees now hangs in the Mattatuck Museum.

As Calder’s works grew ever larger and more complex, the nearby Segre’s Ironworks became the artist’s primary American fabricator. Many people recall the startling sight of its Reidville Drive property, strewn with gigantic sculptures in various stages of completion. A product of the same Waterbury foundry, Calder’s 1973 Stegosaurus, an outsized concoction of steel plates in bright red-orange, is his only monumental stabile in New England. It stands on Hartford’s Alfred E. Burr Memorial Mall near the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Among other notable Connecticut commissions was a mobile for the Connecticut Bank and Trust’s Hartford headquarters and the Gallows and Lollipops piece at Yale. In the 1970s, Calder took his art into politics with posters designed for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid. Campaign materials in 1974 for Democratic Congressional Representative Toby Moffet and Senator Abraham Ribicoff also showcased the artist’s talents as graphic designer.

Art patronage

By the 1960s private collecting was becoming a renewed force in Connecticut culture as patrons of modern art like Howard and Jean Lipman of Wilton began putting together substantial private collections. Mrs. Lipman organized the Calder’s Universe retrospective for the Whitney Museum in 1977. Joseph H. Hirshhorn, a Greenwich resident in the 1960s, and Burton Tremaine and his wife Emily (a cousin of Chick Austin by marriage) were also supporters. The Tremaines had begun collecting twentieth-century art in 1945, and by the 1980s they had acquired more than 400 works by European and American artists. The artwork assembled by this Madison couple for the Miller Company in Meriden was one of the first important corporate collections in the country. Among their institutional bequests is Alexander Liberman’s Untitled at the Yale A & A Building.

Connecticut’s cultural legacy also derives from two of its most sustaining art patrons, Larry Aldrich and Bert Chernow. In 1964 Aldrich, a New York fashion designer and art collector, founded the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, where he maintained a home. It was also in 1964 that Bert Chernow, then a newcomer to Westport, began work on the Westport Schools Permanent Art Collection. This extraordinary effort represents a comprehensive survey of major currents in the contemporary visual arts with prints, drawings, paintings, wall panels and photographs by twentieth-century masters of modernism, including works by local artists. Chernow created the collection with the sole intention of circulating the works through the town’s public school system to make art available to all students.

A professor of art and art history at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Chernow also built a 4,000-piece collection of modern art, almost entirely through donations, into the college’s Housatonic Museum. Opened in 1967, that institution houses one of the largest permanent art collections in an American two-year college. Like Katherine Dreier, Chernow promoted modern art because he believed in the fundamental educational and social benefits that came from being exposed to different world viewpoints.

In a different effort of 1975, the Wadsworth Atheneum inaugurated its MATRIX gallery off Avery Court during the ten-year directorship of James Elliott (1966–76). Elliott saw the gallery as a means of sidestepping the limitations of traditional exhibits, to produce spontaneous shows that could take faster, deeper looks into contemporary trends. The name MATRIX came from Tony Smith, a pioneering figure in American minimalism whose sculpture career was launched by the Hartford museum in the mid-1960s under the curatorial direction of Sam Wagstaff. Smith’s Amaryllis, a monumental work of weathering steel was first displayed outside the Atheneum entrance in 1966 and was reinstalled in 2012. Elliott wanted to give the museum an urban edge by making the institution more appealing to minorities and young people.

The first MATRIX shows presented work by sculptor Eva Hesse, and painters Ellsworth Kelly and Sol LeWitt, the latter a Chester resident originally from New Britain, admired for his complex conceptual wall drawings. Since its first exhibition in 1975, MATRIX has presented more than 1,000 works of art by more than 160 people. The Atheneum offered many of them their first solo museum exhibitions in the United States. Around the same time, a store-front art venue known as Real Art Ways (RAW) appeared in Hartford, and has continued to sponsor new and avant-garde art installations and film, finally moving to a rehabilitated historic factory on Arbor Street (Underwood Computing Machine Company Factory, National Register).

Also on the educational front, the state’s many local museums, and its colleges and universities supported the arts. The Progressive School of Photography in New Haven and the Paier College of Applied Art, founded in 1947 in West Haven (now in Hamden), counted among many new independent endeavors. At Trinity College, the introductory art history course instituted by Chick Austin in the early years of his Atheneum directorship remained part of the curriculum while the Hartford Art School moved in 1957 from its home at the Wadsworth Atheneum when it joined in the formation of the University of Hartford. At Wesleyan University, Henry-Russell Hitchcock headed the art history department from the 1920s until 1949, when he moved to Smith College. Wesleyan’s Davison Art Center was also building a 1941 gift of prints and photographs into a fine university collection under the curatorial direction of Gustave von Groschwitz, formerly Director of Prints and Lithography for the Federal Art Project in New York City. Wesleyan Potters, a cooperative guild of craftspeople (now independent) had its genesis at Wesleyan in 1948.

Connecticut College for Women, founded in 1911 after Wesleyan University chose to end co-education, made a major commitment to teaching art. Prominent artists including David Smalley, William Ashby McCloy, and Barkley Hendricks taught in the art department during the mid-twentieth-century period. The college, which accepted men beginning in 1969, built a modernist art center designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owings & Merrill in the 1960s. A sculpture court displays large-scale works by faculty members. The adjacent Lyman Allyn Art Museum, founded in 1926 and opening under director Winslow Ames in 1932, employed artist Beatrice Cuming in its education department while also 

collecting and exhibiting the work of the college faculty.

In New Britain, the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) separated from its parent, the New Britain Institute, and settled in a site facing Walnut Hill Park. From its start in the 1930s, the museum became a significant local institution, with art classes and a focused mission to collect American art. Director Sanford Ballard Dole Low exemplified the artist-director, contrasting with the professional curator at a museum like the Wadsworth Atheneum. Sol LeWitt maintained a life-long relationship with the New Britain Museum where he took art classes as a child and which treasures its comprehensive collection of LeWitt works.

At the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the William Benton Museum of Art dates from 1967, but has roots decades earlier in the 1933 donation of a collection by university President Charles Lewis Beach. With the post-World War II expansion of the university, the art department engaged professors including Paul Zelanski, John Gregoropoulos, and Anthony Terenzio, who taught from the 1960s on while also actively painting and exhibiting. All three associated themselves with the Mystic Art Association where they went to spend summers painting.

Also at the University of Connecticut (UConn), Frank Ballard joined the university in 1956 as a set designer and technical director. He began teaching classes in puppetry in 1964, and their popularity led to a degree-granting program in Puppet Arts which is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its MFA program. Following Professor Ballard’s retirement, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry formed to preserve Ballard’s unique archival collection of puppets. Based at the Depot Campus (the former Mansfield Training School, listed on the National Register of Historic Places) the program is a renowned educational program that makes Connecticut a national and international center of puppet arts (UConn Ballard Institute web site).

Established in the early 1960s the Ann Randall Arts Committee at the Jewish Community Center of Hartford (now Mandell Jewish Community Center in West Hartford) exemplified the many cultural contributions made by Connecticut’s private-sector nonprofits. The Randall Committee honored the memory of Ann Heilpern Randall, 1945 founder of Hartford’s Randall School of Creative Art, in supporting artists, writers and members of the theater community. The group focused on those working in the contemporary idiom who had not already achieved commercial success, by commissioning them to create works. The first artists selected were watercolorist Irving Katzenstein and oil painter Dorothy Segal.

Literature

An important chapter is the story of James Laughlin and his publishing house, New Directions, founded in the Norfolk guest cottage of his aunt (Leila Laughlin Carlisle) as an outlet for experimental literature. When he established the press in 1936, Laughlin had outlined his desire to effect a “verbal revolution” by providing a platform for familiar names like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gertrude Stein, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, who were having trouble finding publishers. The press was also principal publisher for Ezra Pound, helping to restore the poet’s literary reputation after his involvement with the fascist movement in Italy. Kaye Boyle and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both one-time Connecticut residents, were among other members of the “Lost Generation” who found a voice with New Directions. In 1945 Laughlin took a risk on Fitzgerald’s posthumous work The Crack Up when others would not publish it.

While Pound’s activities had been ruinous for his literary career, dozens of other writers, including Ernest Hemingway, had also risked reputations by becoming members of the Communist-affiliated League of American Writers, the advocacy organization that Malcolm Cowley had helped to found in the 1930s. The league had dropped its anti-war stance in 1941 and formed an Exiled Writers Committee, which helped rescue many anti-Nazi colleagues from European concentration camps. The organization fractured from internal politics under the control of the American Communist Party and was dissolved in 1942. Not all members were communist, but the FBI nevertheless considered the league the most successful of what it called “Communist front organizations.” Cowley himself resigned in 1940 because of the communist affiliation, but he still came under FBI scrutiny when serving as deputy to Archibald MacLeish at the Federal Office of Facts and Figures.

Meanwhile, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) took up investigations of communist activities following World War II. In the early 1950s, as the Cold War became a major preoccupation, the committee’s paranoid manhunt, along with that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, proved devastating to writers, musicians, entertainers and television personalities accused of leftist sympathies. Leonard Bernstein of Fairfield, and Arthur Miller of Roxbury were among those targeted. Miller had conceived his play The Crucible (1953) as a parable for parallel hunt for Communists and Soviet spies before he was called to testify.

The committee’s blacklisting of 320 people put an end to many promising careers. Among the artists who suffered severely was Paul Robeson, talented Rutgers valedictorian, football player, law school graduate, singer, actor, and civil rights activist. Like many other African Americans, Robeson had spent some years living abroad, where he formed his positions on civil rights. Because of his sympathy with socialism, along with his civil rights activism, he was put under surveillance by the FBI and his passport was revoked from 1950 until 1958, although he was never charged with any legal offense. Robeson maintained a home in Enfield from 1940 until 1953, when it was sold in part due to the financial hardship of being unable to perform in Canada and Europe. 

Fortunately, there were also positive forces at work — notably, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. The oldest annual literary award in America, the Yale series was founded in 1919. The reputation of the prize grew significantly under the judging of Stephen Vincent Benét (1933–43), then one of the most popular poets in America. The Yale competition gained an even higher profile in the late 1940s and 1950s, when Archibald MacLeish and then W.H. Auden selected the winners.

John Hollander, another of modern poetry’s foremost contributors, won the award for A Crackling of Thorns in 1958. Hollander, who taught at Connecticut College and Yale, made his home in Woodbridge.

Stephen Vincent Benét lived in Stonington in his later years. There also James Merrill, one of the most successful poets of his generation, settled in the mid-1950s. The charming and magnetic Merrill became the center of a wide circle of friends including novelist Grace Zaring Stone and her daughter Eleanor Stone Perényi, an author and magazine editor who had worked for Julien Levy in the 1940s. Among other frequent visitors were writers Alison Lurie and Elizabeth Bishop, photographer Rollie McKenna, classical pianist George Copeland, composer John Cage, and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

In 1986, James Merrill was named Connecticut’s first Poet Laureate, winning that honor over two other eminent finalists: William Meredith and Robert Penn Warren. Meredith, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress (1978-1980 – then known as the Consultant in Poetry), was a longtime faculty member at Connecticut College. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Warren was married to writer Eleanor Clark and lived in Fairfield (though his roots were as a Southern writer), where he wrote in an old onion barn. He was named the national Consultant in Poetry for 1944-45 and joined the Yale faculty in 1950. Leo Connellan, a native of Maine but long-time Connecticut resident, became state Poet Laureate after Merrill, and was followed by Marilyn Nelson, a professor at the University of Connecticut since the mid-1970s, and then by John Hollander.

Multi-media work

Less easily defined, other multi-media genres of art have come to prominence in Connecticut. Writers and illustrators of books for children and young adults have proliferated in the state, from the many already mentioned in Fairfield County, to others like Madeleine L’Engle, Lois Lenski, and Gertrude Chandler Warner, who have chosen more remote corners of the state for their homes and workplaces. The University of Connecticut (UConn) has outstanding archives on Northeast United States children’s literature as well as the nationally known puppetry program founded by Frank Ballard. Significant writers on nature and conservation have found refuge in areas of Connecticut where nature is close at hand – these include Roger Tory Peterson in Old Lyme and Edwin Way Teale in Hampton. Cartoon artists including Pulitzer Prize winner C. D. Batchelor, Martin Branner (creator of Winnie Winkle), and Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) have settled in the Connecticut Valley and shoreline, in addition to those mentioned already in Fairfield County.

As a small state, Connecticut is characterized by exceptional variety: in population makeup, in geography and in lifestyles ranging from rural and suburban to fully urban. With all this, there are places people readily identify with creative thinking — urban cultural centers like New Haven and Hartford or coastal village art colonies like Old Lyme, Mystic, and Stonington. Documenting sites, both private and public, associated with the creative process in such locales encourages understanding of Connecticut as a place. Despite its image as a staid home of tradition, Connecticut has proved receptive to innovation and experiment. Along with a group of nationally prominent figures, the state has a population of local artists. The resources documented in the Creative Places project illustrate the range and show that in Connecticut art and literature are deeply embedded in the culture. Artists and writers have done much to preserve the small town charm and urban sophistication of the state as it exists today. Katherine Dreier’s conviction that an open mind is the foundation of a civilized society is borne out by the widespread value placed on practice and appreciation of the visual and literary arts.