Domestic Scenes As Seen by an Outsider
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            Russell Cheney was to the manor born, in 1881, in the 45-room home of his family in South Manchester, Connecticut. The family’s money came from Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company, one of the largest silk manufacturers in the U.S. until the mid-20th century. Cheney had all the advantages an artist could wish for, studying at the Art Students League of New York, the Académie Julian in Paris, and privately with William Merritt Chase, among others. He traveled back and forth to Europe, painting in France and Italy. It was on a transatlantic voyage aboard the Paris that he met Matthiessen in 1924.

            Despite these advantages, Cheney was somewhat late to arrive on the scene of the New York art world at age forty in 1921. But after his launch, he enjoyed exhibitions in New York, Boston, and West Coast galleries. Today, in addition to the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, other museums that own his paintings include the Wads-worth Atheneum, the Smithsonian, the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, and the university collections of Harvard and Yale. (Both Cheney and Matthiessen attended Yale as undergraduates, and Matthiessen spent his professional life at Harvard.)

            As captured in its title, Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting, the Ogunquit exhibit’s overarching premise is that Cheney should be considered a Modernist painter, even if he resisted the pull of abstraction that dominated painting at this time, and his subjects tended to be domestically oriented, such as his and Matthiessen’s homes in Maine and Boston. This exhibit is also the first in which a catalog with color images of Cheney’s work has been produced. (Disclosure: I contributed an essay to this catalog.) Two themes stand out: Many of his landscapes, interiors, and still lifes hint at the hidden status of gay people and same-sex relationships; and his portraits of working-class men are often slyly homoerotic, and are nearly always sympathetic.

            Cheney has not been identified with any one school of painting, which no doubt has complicated his standing in the art historical canon. His paintings bear the hallmarks of impressionism, with quick brushwork that captures the impression of a scene or subject; post-impressionism that toys with perspective, mass, and fundamental shapes; Fauvism, marked by bold and surprising use of color; and regionalism, with its emphasis on rural landscapes and folk art.

            This palette of styles comes into pleasing play in any number of genres in the Ogunquit exhibition, including interiors (Windows by the Sea, 1940s), still lifes (Larkspur, 1934), and landscapes (Back of North Church (Summer), 1936), and Back of North Church, Ports-mouth, N.H., 1936). The effects that arise from these works are often unsettling or disorienting, but compelling nonetheless. There are many scenes of Cheney and Matthiessen’s home in Kittery, Maine, which they shared from 1930 to 1945. But the viewer would never know this explicitly. In Windows by the Sea and Larkspur, two empty chairs suggest the couple without showing them. These same paintings depict rooms that open into other rooms that cannot be fully seen, a “circumscribed view of domestic life,” as Kevin D. Murphy points out. But even landscapes such as the two North Church paintings, which portray a stereotypical white church so common in New England, place the viewer in the back of the church, adopting the perspective, in Murphy’s words, of “a marginalized viewer.”

            Another important theme in Cheney’s work that the Ogunquit show brings out clearly is his penchant for portraying working men, sometimes homoerotically. Kenneth Hill and Howard Lathrop illustrate this point. Both men are quite handsome, and Kenneth Hill is especially sexily presented, with a cap pushed back on his head that’s cocked to one side, crossed legs, and a cigarette between two slender fingers of one hand. Howard Lathrop depicts a Portsmouth fisherman who holds his gloves rendered in a phallic shape just above his waist. But Cheney goes beyond romanticizing working-class men. He and Lathrop were friends. They went to boxing matches together (Cheney was fan), and they once took a road trip together along the Maine coast.

            Another strong portrait in the show is Nelson Cantave (1940), who was born in Haiti, also quite handsome, and worked for Cheney and Matthiessen, cooking and cleaning. In the painting, Cantave sits at a table slicing carrots in the townhouse on Beacon Hill where Cheney and Matthiessen shared another home. Cantave casts a sidelong glance at something or someone outside of the frame. With this one gesture, Cheney brings a sense of unease into the domestic setting, a feeling that may have been very familiar to a person of color in New England in the mid-20th century.

            Beginning in the early 1940s, Cheney’s career stalled, largely due to his alcoholism. He was in and out of several sanatoriums for about three years, including Baldpate Hospital, where he would set up his easel and paint in the hospital kitchen at night. During this time, there were still a few exhibitions of his work, and while the critics didn’t enthusiastically greet him as they had in the 1920s, several readily acknowledged his talent, including Margaret Breuning in the New York Journal-American, who felt that each of Cheney’s paintings reflected “a new experience, a swift response to a pleasurable emotion.”

            Perhaps the value of this exhibition is captured by Matthies-sen in a review titled “Our First National Style,” of a book about Greek Revival architecture. In the piece, Matthiessen notes that the Greek Revival movement was not characterized “by the dominance of a few big Easterners, nor of a few big cities, but by the simultaneous flowering of hundreds of local centers.” Years later, the message for us is that smaller, regional institutions like the Ogunquit Museum of American Art can bring to light regional artists like Russell Cheney who capture the reality of our collective cultural experience in a way that great museums in New York or Los Angeles may not. At a time when American culture is deeply divided or fragmented, artists and institutions that help us find common ground along these secondary roads are to be cherished.