Creative Places is a project to identify sites, including buildings, structures, and landscapes, associated with the work of twentieth century visual artists and writers in Connecticut. The project’s period of significance is from 1913 through 1979. Many of the individuals identified in the project have been documented through previous biographical and critical studies. However their relationships with a town, state, and region have received less attention and often little documentation. The study of how place played a significant role in creative work, and how the artists and writers in turn influenced communities in Connecticut, forms the subject of this project.

Modernism is a collection of twentieth-century art movements which arose in both Europe and the Americas, and many examples of modernist work are associated with places in Connecticut. Due to the international character of modernism, some works of art or texts, though created within Connecticut, may not have a direct association with the state, while others are intimately connected with the places of their creation. Creative Places documents Connecticut modernism by linking twentieth-century cultural figures and their work to the sites in the state that are closely identified with them. This essay provides context – the artistic and literary background – and describes the range of places that are associated with the artistic and literary work of modern artists and writers in the state.

The modernist art movements occurred in response to changes that characterized the twentieth century. These changes began with the brutal experiences of the First World War and followed with the rise of totalitarian governments in place of monarchies that had been overthrown. Industrialization, urbanization, technological advances, social unrest, political upheaval, and violence were occurring globally – in Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as in the United States. Visual artists and writers, responding to the changed environment, rejected traditional modes of expression. Instead, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, and many other short-lived stylistic and philosophical movements, emerged in painting and sculpture, while new media and disciplines including photography and graphic design arose as art forms. Themes of alienation and moral compromise found their way into literature and the stage in novels, plays, and short stories, while the formats of poetry altered drastically with the freedom to abandon traditional meter and rhyme. Imagist poetry focused on close observation, description, or evocation of real objects.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, of 1913 in New York City marked the beginning of the modern period in the United States. It involved a public exhibition of contemporary visual art of Europe and the States. This was paralleled by developments in literature, of which the initial publication of Poetry magazine in Chicago in the same year was a key event. The careers of many key figures of the modern movement were finished by the end of the 1970s, while cultural and political movements associated with modernism were ending as well, and so 1979 forms an appropriate end date for the Creative Places project.

For a number of reasons, Connecticut attracted visual artists and writers in the twentieth century. The state is located in close proximity to two major urban centers of artistic activity – New York City and Boston. Transportation, by railroad and later increasingly by automobile, made Connecticut convenient as a living and work place for artists and writers who needed easy connections with New York or Boston. Connecticut towns and rural areas provided a range of scenery from the beaches and harbors of the southern coast, to lakes and mountains in the northwest hills, and to rolling farmland in the northeast. They also provided quiet and privacy for creative work.

An established network of artists’ colonies had already developed in the late 1800s, bringing seasonal residents to areas including the shoreline, the northwest hills, and the Connecticut River valley. Artists of the Impressionist movement spent the summer seasons painting in colonies such as Cos Cob and Old Lyme. Citizens in a number of medium-sized cities, which had grown prosperous through the development of industry in the previous century, supported cultural institutions like museums, universities, and community art leagues. In addition to these cultural institutions, the decline of small-scale agriculture after the Civil War resulted in a supply of under-utilized historic farmsteads which were available for re-use at affordable cost as artists’ homes and studios. America’s early years had also become an accepted and cherished historic past, with the buildings of the Colonial period acquiring a desirable cachet for their honesty of structure or their connection with the nation’s founders. While some modernists built new homes and studios in contemporary styles, a great number chose to recycle existing buildings, variously restoring and remodeling, or building anew in the fashionable Colonial Revival mode. By the end of the project period, visual artists, writers, and other creative professionals had made themselves at home in nearly every part of Connecticut – rural areas, small towns, and cities.

The sites identified during the Creative Places project (the “Project”) are places throughout the state of Connecticut that are significant to the production of creative work during the Project time period. These places include facilities such as artists’ and writers’ studios as well as community ateliers, schools, and colleges where artists and writers developed their craft through teaching and exhibitions. Places also include landscapes, both natural and built, that directly inspired artistic or literary work; and public buildings or spaces where site-based public art is permanently on view. Programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other Depression-era initiatives have left a legacy of art in public buildings and resulted in the development of community art schools.

The visual arts and literature represented in the Project include a variety of media and genres. Visual artists documented in the Project have worked in the following media: painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, illustration, design, crafts, and textiles. Writers represented by places documented in the Project have worked in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism. Inter-disciplinary work has included cartoon art, puppet theater, children’s literature, nature and conservation art and writing, environmental sculpture, and Depression-era projects – murals sponsored by the WPA, the National Index of Design, and the WPA Guide to Connecticut. Connecticut residents were at the forefront of developments in several of these genres, particularly puppetry, children’s literature, and nature and conservation. Some significant figures in the art and literary world were of lasting importance primarily for their supportive or transformational roles in the arts – as museum or gallery directors, program administrators (e.g. for WPA programs), educators, publishers, even fabricators of large-scale artworks. They collected and preserved exhibition catalogs, art collections, published books, and fabricated artwork in a number of significant museum buildings.

The most iconic genres of modern art reflect the influence of European work which came to Connecticut through the migration of artists in both directions across the Atlantic. The new visual work was often abstract or otherwise non-traditional; in literature, “stream of consciousness” prose and free-verse Imagist poetry offered new styles of introspective psychological exploration.

Equally important during the early years of the Period, figurative art and narrative writing emerged from Mid-Western American Regionalist and Social Realist painting, from Muckraking journalism, and from a Progressive political and labor movement that peaked before World War I. With old moral and religious certainties in doubt, the arts of the first decades of the 1900s represented the new world-view of a society changed by the Industrial Revolution, and demoralized by the traumas of war and economic depression, but also liberated from the conservatism of the Colonial past. Artists searched for an authentically American voice with which to make a uniquely American historical tradition. People of varied ethnicities, gender, and economic and social backgrounds found their creative voices in a variety of media. The new arts of photography, graphic design, and cinema grew rapidly during the 1930s. Writers and photographers were put to work during the Depression and produced documentary and theatrical work. Full-length feature films often made use of novels for plots and themes, and design, direction, and cinematography evolved into new fields in the arts.

Artists and writers shaped the state of Connecticut in the twentieth century by assuming a prominent role in the culture and economy. As the state’s agriculture and industry declined in importance while the population increased, particularly after World War II, university education, businesses like advertising and magazine publication, and the art collectors’ market, increased in importance. Artists and writers found places to live and work, and re-made old structures into new places as homes, workspaces, and galleries. Natural scenic landscapes as well as the historic built environment were integral to the appeal of Connecticut to these new occupants. Documenting the places associated with the artists and writers working and living in Connecticut focuses attention on this transformation of the state. Looking at these places provides a picture of a small state with no single dominant center of creative activity but a dispersed web of varied hubs throughout the state. The decentralized nature of the state’s communities and its varied geography provide a balance between solitude and community that is quite different from the dominance of neighboring New York and Boston over their regions. This is a distinctive characteristic of Connecticut. The role of twentieth-century artists and writers in appreciating the uniqueness of local character, and making themselves at home in small communities, set precedents for ongoing efforts to maintain the vitality of the state’s diverse communities and landscapes. The Creative Places project documents the impact of modern art and literature on the buildings and landscape of Connecticut as well as the impact of Connecticut on the arts.