This exhibition, co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Williams College Museum of Art, features over sixty paintings and watercolors by American artist Maurice Prendergast (1848-1924).

Maurice Prendergast's life coincided with an era of enormous change in artistic styles in Europe and the United States. Trained in Paris in the 1890s, when the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists was still controversial, Prendergast rapidly developed his own individual style as a painter. As Milton W. Brown wrote in 1990: "Until recently, Prendergast's reputation has been based largely on his late, more monumental decorative styleÉ.But if one considers the entire span of Prendergast's art, it covers a broader and more varied range, from urban genre to formal composition, from realism to symbolism, from the delicate transparency of watercolor to the opague vigor of oil, from the perceptive recording of visual phenomena to the synthetic creation of fantasy". This exhibition traces the full range of Prendergast's artistic development, from scenes of 1890s city life, to stylistic and technical explorations of the 1900s-1910s, to increasingly abstract and symbolist works of the 1920s.

Maurice Prendergast, On the Pier, Nantasket, c. 1900-05, watercolor and pencil on paper, 12 1/8 x 18 7/8 in., © Addison Gallery of American Art

Maurice Prendergast: Learning to Look celebrates the mastery and skill of this important early 20th century painter. It also emphasizes the significance of Prendergast's work in the collections of a number of teaching museums across the country added through the efforts of his brother and sister-in-law, Charles and EugŽnie Prendergast. The Addison Gallery and the Williams College Museum of Art drew on their own resources and those of other academic museums to explore the many ways Prendergast's art may be used in "learning to look."

Maurice Prendergast, Fantasy, c. 1914-15, oil on panel, 22 x 26 in. © Williams College Museum of Art

The four sections of the exhibition address four primary approaches used in teaching with art: the study of cultural history, technique, style, and symbolic interpretation. Labels written by educators from Williams College and Phillips Academy demonstrate how artworks can be used to learn across academic disciplines. For example, Catherine Tousignant, an English teacher at Phillips Academy, writes, "I have found it very helpful to guide first-time readers of certain modernist fiction (by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or William Faulkner, for example) into the strange and alien territory of these novels via modernist painting".

Maurice Prendergast: Learning to Look is the third and final installment of a series of exhibitions funded by The Henry Luce Foundation under its American Collection Enhancement Initiative. The goals of the Luce project have been to bring works in the Addison collection together with American art in other academic museums, in order to increase visibility for our collections and to focus efforts on exhibitions that celebrate the essential teaching role our institutions play. Additional support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. John M. Woolsey Jr.

Maurice Prendergast, Four Dancers, c. 1912-15, watercolor and pencil on paper, 8 3/4 x 11 5/8 in.,
© Williams College Museum of Art