The Bangor Daily News
Friday, July 31, 1998
The Bangor Daily News
Friday, July 31, 1998
A Monhegan jewel
By Jenna Russell, Of the NEWS Staff -- Visitors don't take the boat to Monhegan for the museum. They go for the cliff dramas of Burnt Head and the Cathedral Woods' sun-dappled magic. They go to crunch on gravel paths, to smell the sea and the paint in artists' studios. Eventually, they do climb the hill to the granite-block lighthouse, gazing down at the storybook view of the village. While they're up there, they wander into the 11-room museum. Once inside, they might spend a happy hour or a rainy afternoon there, in the former lightkeeper's house built 125 years ago.
The museum is a deep and dusty trunk thrown open, a communal grandma's attic. Contents range from hard science to local mythology. There's the tale of island hermit Ray Phillips, the diagram ''How Lobsters Are Caught,'' geological maps, and pictures of local birds and plants. Rooms are crammed with donated artifacts, harpoons and blubber cutters, feather dusters and parasols.
The Monhegan Museum is 30 years old this year, and the site where it stands is more authentic than ever. The Fourth of July weekend brought the opening of a new exhibition space, a historically accurate replica of the old assistant lightkeeper's house, torn down in the 1920s.
''We are a history museum,'' said Ed Deci (pronounced ''Dee-see''), president of the Monhegan Historical and Cultural Museum Association. ''Part of what we're trying to do is re-create the complex that was the Monhegan Light Station. We were committed to expanding in a way that would preserve its integrity.''
The specific expansion plan came to Deci in a ''light bulb'' flash, inspired by one of the island's best-known artist alumni, appropriately enough. The museum president saw the future in Edward Hopper's ''Monhegan Lighthouse,'' painted between 1916 and 1919, before the demise of the second dwelling.
''I was looking at a reproduction of the painting when it dawned on me,'' he said.
The goal of the building project was exact reproduction - nothing approximate. Builders used the remains of the old foundation to locate the new structure on the right spot. Old Coast Guard drawings were used to replicate the dimensions of the house. A storage shed behind the house was also re-created, and an ell where museum staff now have their offices.
''I like the fact that they recycled, in a way,'' said Carl Little, an arts writer on Mount Desert Island who spoke at the museum dedication.
Earle Shettleworth Jr., director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, praised the building at its July 5 dedication, calling it ''a faithful replica'' with ''handsomely chaste lines,'' a ''jewel'' in the crown of buildings on Monhegan's highest point.
The addition, approximately 1,200 square feet in all, is about half display space, which Deci said is informally dedicated to the visual arts. It is the first time the museum has had a modern gallery. The space contains an inaugural, summerlong show of borrowed work by painter Rockwell Kent. (See review adjacent).
Next summer, the white clapboard, red-roofed house will be used to show some 20 paintings with links to Monhegan, artwork left to the museum two years ago in the will of Maine art collector and philanthropist Elizabeth Noyce.
''The focus of the building will be on art, but art as part of the history of the island, not art for art's sake,'' said Deci.
Art and history are intertwined on Monhegan, the ''artists' island'' where Hopper and Kent are just part of the story. Robert Henri, George Bellows, the Wyeths and dozens of others have painted there for the light, the cliffs, the transcendent isolation. Today, the tradition continues, and artists can be seen toting easels all over the island.
''I love the fact that you can trace the history of American art on one small island off the Maine coast,'' Little said. ''I don't think any other island can make that claim in the U.S.''
Inside the new building, the design by Camden architect Christopher Glass caters to art, with two rooms lit by high dormered windows over hard pine floors. White-painted metal beams top the wall between galleries. Paintings hang on one side; historic photographs and documents tell Kent's story on the side opposite.
Earlier this month, a white porcelain pitcher of blue and purple lupines sat next to the guest book in the entry hall. The new-building smell was still strong, and visitors could imagine themselves looking at freshly painted canvases in Kent's own island studio early this century.
''Artists come and paint in Maine, and often they pack up the work and take it back to New York and it's never seen here,'' Little said. ''This museum is a model for shifting that flow.''
Coming up the hill for the first time in four years, summer visitor Jed Davis of Fayette was surprised to see the expanded lighthouse complex. He remembered the museum as having the feel of ''someone's house circa 1910.''
''I think it's great for them to have a space suitable for showing good art,'' he said.
''It's amazing the number of people who don't realize it wasn't always here,'' said a museum volunteer. ''It's the way it sits in its place here.''
Three years ago, the volunteer said, few people on Monhegan believed the addition would happen. The project was generally regarded as ''one of Ed's fantasies.''
Deci is wiry, blue-eyed, a well-known psychologist and researcher in his other life, off-island. His career goes unmentioned during an interview on a rock outside the museum. He has led the nonprofit museum association since it was formed in 1983.
For the first few years, the group focused on restoring the existing buildings, he said. By the early 1990s, the need for more space had been recognized. The building fund began five years ago with an islander's $20,000 bequest.
Three years ago, Noyce agreed to match pledges up to $250,000, and by fall 1996, most of the money, about $400,000, had been raised. Construction began last May, led by Monhegan contractor Victor Lord.
Visitors have been amazed that such fire-powered fund raising could take place on tiny Monhegan, with its remote location 10 miles offshore and its year-round population of fewer than 100 people.
Deci said 50 or 60 people volunteer each summer at the museum, where there are 6,000 annual visitors between July 1 and the end of September. Donations are encouraged, but there is no admission fee. The museum's collection is made up entirely of gifts.
Bringing the work on the site to perfect closure, the museum association secured ownership of the granite lighthouse structure through the Maine Lights Program earlier this summer.
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