PICASSO AND PIE DOWN EAST: Mid-Century Arrives in Maine

I live in a typical little coastal village in eastern Maine — although 'typical' depends on one's perspective. We live here amidst achingly beautiful scenery, made only more beautiful by the clear light refracted from the ocean. We have little white houses, and we have big white houses.  We have people and institutions: Lobstermen. Carpenters. Internet tycoons. Media personalities. Doctors. Lawyers. And maybe even Indian Chiefs. Our inhabitants include a woman who has legally changed her name to Jesus A. Christ. There is music, often performed by world famous musicians, as well as Saturday night contra dances at the Town Hall (in an auditorium named for my father, who does not contra dance). A Pentecostal Church, an Episcopal Church, and everything in between. We have an extraordinary library whose shelves hold the works of scores of writers who have lived here. We have boats: Shabby dorys. Fishing boats (fewer every year). Sleek yachts (more every year).

Main Street, as it appeared before Thompson & Heywood---and before Dutch Elm Disease

 I could go on, but you get the idea. We may look typical, but we're not. Fashion is usually secondary---We dress in L.L. Bean drag against the harsh realities of our weather, and though the dress at summer parties up here might not make the Sartorialist, at a dinner party you are as likely to be seated next to someone back from a diplomatic mission to Istanbul, or an editor at a renowned literary magazine as that lobsterman — who in turn might be the son of a famous poet, or the carpenter, who might also be a Juilliard trained musician. You might even sit next to me.

We also have artists, and world class cooks. Over the next few months, I'm going to mention a few of each. Today's post is a tale that combines the two.

The Arnold Wolfers House, 1947, by Walter Gropius & TAC

 In the 1940s, architect Benjamin Thompson, as a young member of The Architect's Collaborative, was in the area working with Walter Gropius on a project for international affairs specialist Arnold Wolfers (for more about that project, click HERE). Thompson's mother Lynne, a Midwesterner gone New York, was looking for a quiet place to write and came up to have a look, and stayed.  

Maine Street after Thompson & Heywood, with Pavilion at center.  For the story of the blacksmith shop at right, click HERE

Soon, she and her partner Dorothy Heywood, heiress to the Chester Shoe Company, had purchased a traditional French style manor house along the shore, at happily depressed post-war prices. They had Thompson’s son Ben, not yet the famous architect he would become, remodel the house, until it was no longer traditional or French. Mrs. Heywood had worked for the Betty Parsons gallery, and she and Mrs. Thompson had assembled a fine collection of modern art, including works by Picasso, Rothko, Motherwell, and Klee. 

The two women had big ideas, and a desire to do good in the community. Mrs. Heywood invested in Rowantrees Pottery, a well known crafts organization that had been started by Adelaide Pearson during the Depression to boost the local economy. Thinking beyond our borders, Mrs. Heywood opened a Rowantrees showroom in New York, also probably designed by Mrs. Thompson’s architect son.

Thompson & Heywood, as they were known in town, offered to show their collection of modern art at the library as a fundraiser the likes of which the town had never seen. To temper the radical art, home-baked blueberry pies were offered as refreshment, lest the sight of all that modern art offend too many. Mrs. Thompson was an enterprising sort, and decided that it would be jolly if she were to air-freight one of the pies to Picasso ('a rising Spanish artist who is becoming well known') in France, that he might partake of it even as one of his works was being unveiled in little Blue Hill, Maine.  History doesn't record if he did so (and trust me, idle curiosity has led me to check the index of more than one Picasso biography), or if the pie, more likely, arrived smashed and runny, but one is amused to ponder Picasso's reaction.

The show was controversial — our little equivalent of the 1913 Armory Show (there tends to be a time lag up here) — and a huge success. So were the pies. Emboldened by their adventure, Thompson and Heywood decided to start a business — the Rowantrees venture in New York had already folded — one that would combine art and food, as their fund raising exhibit had.

Architectural Drawing for the Pavilion, shows the complexity of Cooper Milliken's design (Courtesy Maine Historical Society, Eaton Tarbell Collection)

The pair purchased an old storefront on the village Main street, and added to it one of the most radical buildings of its day in Maine. The effect on the village was electric.  People either loved, or (mostly) hated it.  The architect was Cooper Milliken of Eaton Tarbell and Associates and The Pavilion, as it was called, gave yet another aesthetic jolt to a village hitherto known best for its simple 19th century white houses. Neither woman cooked, but Thompson learned, and took to it as a duck to water. 

The Pavilion under construction.  The frame was entirely mortised, Japanese style

At their first opening, all was gala, and even Betty Parsons and Robert Motherwell attended.

Whether they made money, ever, is doubtful, but their restaurant was a critical success, and everyone came, even the New York Times. I remember the place well from childhood — it was like catnip to me, so exotic and unlike anything else in our world.

Interior view under construction

I remember the scent of the exposed wooden rafters, cool slate floors, a wall of glass overlooking the harbor, the wildly distorted slopes of the walls, the smells of good food, the paper shades hanging from the ceiling the big handmade jewelry worn by the owners.

1950 newspaper photo of the recently-opened Pavilion. 

Only later did I learn that those shades were by Noguchi, and came from Design Research, the famous home design business started in 1955 by Lynn's architect son, or that the very plates on which one took afternoon tea of lemon cakes were from Denmark. The art was modern, consigned from the Metropolitan Gallery in New York, the sleek home furnishings for sale were consigned from Design Research, and all of it was unlike anything sold up here before.

A letter from Lynne Thompson to her architect, announcing the arrival of new goods (from son Ben Thompson's new Design Research store in Cambridge.

All good things come to an end, and by the 1960s Thompson and Heywood, exhausted, wound down the business, and in their seventies, moved to Cambridge, leaving only one local restaurant, the TA-CO (after Theodore, Alton, Cynthia, and Olive, the owners) with its baked bean Saturdays, the Drugstore lunch counter, and the Barnacle lobster shack as dining venues. All three are still missed by those old enough to remember.  As for the Pavilion, the building that many considered 'just too New York', it was demolished in 1966.

The story would end here, except that in 1965, Thompson penned a slender cookbook and memoir of the adventure, a marvelous little slice of mid-century style, Picasso & Pie.

In it she chronicled their times in the restaurant trade, their big adventure in bringing the new to Down East Maine, and most of all their recipes, many now delightedly dated, and adapted for the limited and simple ingredients.

They are based on many sources from old Maine & mid-western favorites to then modern cuisine and range accordingly from simple to sophisticated, and are still delicious. It is impossible for me to be objective — maybe it's a terrible cookbook (I don't think so) — but it's a slice of my childhood preserved, and I love it. Copies often show up on eBay, and to my surprise, one was on Amazon recently for $90.00. 

There's much more to this tale, including the amazing building and the Design Research connection, and you can read about it here in an article I wrote for the Portland Magazine. Should it be inexplicably unavailable at the local news stands in Kansas, the article can be accessed online by clicking HERE.

We'll go out with a some recipes from Picasso & Pie (c) 1969, (Price Stern, Sloan, Publishers). Remember, they’re from the fifties. I take no responsibility for reactions from food snobs:

BLUEBERRY AMBROSIA

2.5 quarts water
Thin cut peel of one lemon
Small amount of tangerine rind
Small stick cinnamon
½ cup sugar
4 cups blueberries
2 tbs. cornstarch

Simmer the blueberries, lemon rind and tangerine rind in the 2 ½ quarts of water until the berries are soft.

Strain and put the berries through a sieve or puree them finely in a blender. Return to strained juice. Mix the 2 tablespoons of cornstarch in about 1/2 cup of water and add to mixture.

Simmer 5 minutes.

Chill to iciness and serve with whipped cream which has been sweetened to taste. Dust the cream lightly with cinnamon.

Note: This Ambrosia belongs to the scandinavian Fruit-Soup family and can be made from several varieties of fresh, canned or frozen berries. Naturally the amount of sugar added will depend whether or not the fruit base has been pre-sweetened. Freezes and keeps.

Serves 20 — when served from a punch bowl in small cups. As cold soup, serves. 20.


CHAMPIGNONS FLAMBEES (Burnt Mushrooms)

1 lb. mushroom caps
Salt
6 tbs. butter
1 cup sherry
2 tbs. brandy (or a little more)
¼ cup heavy cream (a little more)

Season carefully, washed and trimmed mushrooms, with plenty of salt.

Saute in a chafing dish in butter until brown.

Pour in Sherry and simmer until nearly dry.

Pour brandy over mushrooms and light.

When flame has gone out, stir in cream.

Serve with a green salad.

Note: If sherry does not cook down fast enough, pour off, and add again after brandy has burned off. Serves four.

COUNTRY WEDDING CAKE

(Recipe from Mrs. Lawrence Pickering, Deer Isle, Maine). To our way of thinking, the best and most satisfactory cake we have ever tasted IN OUR WHOLE LIVES!)

1 ½ cups sugar
¾ cup shortening (1/2 cup better and ½ cup vegetable shortening A MUST1)
3 eggs
2 ¾ cups cake flour
2 ¾ tsp. baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla
½ teaspoon lemon extract (more if your extract is old)

Cream shortening.
Add sugar slowly, and beat until light.
Add sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk — starting with flour and ending with flour. (the hard and fast rule here is that you add one-third of your dry or your liquid each time, mixing just enough to moisten before the next addition).

Mix as little as possible.

Bake in a tube pan for about an hour.

Oven set at 350 degrees.

Or, this recipe fills two ½ lb. pans.
Cool on rack, and powder with powdered sugar.

NOTE:  This article originally appeared in New York Social Diary (www.newyorksocialdiary.com)

ART: MR. BLANEY OF IRONBOUND, AND HIS DISTINGUISHED FRIENDS

The cliffs of Ironbound Island, in Frenchmans's Bay, with the hills of Mt. Desert Island in the background

Maine, thanks to the quality of its remarkable light and scenery, has long had a significant place in American art,  particularly and not surprisingly, landscape painting. From Alvan Fisher in the 1830's, to Fitz Henry Lane, Frederick Church and Thomas Cole in the mid 19th century, to John Marin,  Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, and Thomas Bellows in the 1930's,  to William Kienbusch, Fairfield Porter, and of course, those damned Wyeths, in the 50's and 60's, many of America's best painters have passed through and left a record of our landscape as they saw it.   I have long intended to do a series of posts about the artists who have left their mark up here in our part of Maine, Down East of the Penobscot River, and today I offer the first story, about Dwight Blaney of Ironbound Island, and a few of the friends who visited him there.

Bronze bas relief portrait of Dwight Blaney by Bela Lyon Pratt (American 1867-1917).  In his hands, Blaney holds palette and brush, and in the background are the cliffs of Ironbound Island.

Dwight Blaney was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1865.  After attending the Chauncey Hall School in Boston, he trained as an architect, and worked for a time as a draftsman in the firm of Peabody & Stearns.  Deeply influenced by the impressionists, particularly Monet,  on a European trip, Blaney was one of the earliest of the American painters to use the new style.

 Dwight Blaney.  View from Ironbound Island To Frenchman, Oil on canvas, 1908

After marrying an heiress to the Eastern Steamship fortune, in 1880s, financial constraints were lifted, and Blaney, a convivial man of many interests, was free to pursue these with vigor.   He was one of the earliest collectors of American antiques, beginning in the 1880's, and a founder of the Walpole Society, that most exclusive of collecting clubs, whose ranks were to include Wallace Nutting and later, Henry Francis DuPont.  He was one of the first to buy and restore an early American house as his country home (in Weston, Massachusetts) His fascination with exploring the shell middens left behind by the ancient Native Americans led to one of the finest collections of artifacts of its day, and which later constituted constituted the first bequest to the new Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor when it opened in the 1920's.  After purchasing Ironbound Island, in Frenchman's Bay 3 miles off Bar Harbor as a summer home for his family, he spent the summer of 1904 studying the land snails of the Island.  From 1901-1909 he dredged Frenchman's Bay for marine mollusks, eventually identifying 149 varieties.   Two of these were new varieties, which were named for him:  Tonicella blaneyi (a chiton) and Oenopota blaneyi (a gastropod).  In 1904, he studied the land snails of Ironbound, and in 1916, he and Frederick Loomis Brewster, a palenontologist, extricated 23 varieties of mollusks from pleistocene clays on Mt. Desert.  He sailed.  And, he painted, maintaining a studio on Ironbound in the summer, and the rest of the year at the Fenway Studio in Boston from 1906-1943, a year before his death.  

Dwight Blaney.  Ironbound Island, Oil on canvas, 1910

Although the idea behind Ironbound Island was an idyllic summer life, without the pressures of fashionable resorts, the Blaneys were nevertheless a wealthy couple with position, and Ironbound was only three miles offshore from Bar Harbor, then at its height as one of the country's most fashionable watering places.  The Blaneys partook of the social life there, their presence at parties and as patrons of events duly noted in the Society pages of the New York Times. When the fashionable world came to Bar Harbor, an invitation to Ironbound often followed. and the Blaney's guest book recorded visits by leading society figures, famous writers, a prince (Rainier I of Monaco, who came to see Blaney's famous collection of shells), and most importantly, many of Blaney's fellow artists.  And what artists they were.  Below a few of the paintings of Ironbound created by Blaney's friends on visits to his magical island:

John Leslie Breck, American 1860-99, Cliffs, Ironbound Island.  Oil on canvas, 1898.  Breck, a friend of Monet, and part of the group of painters at Giverny, is considered to have been the first American Impressionist

 

Childe Hassam, American, 1859-1935.  Sunset, Ironbound Island, Mt. Desert, Maine, 1896

 

Child Hassam.  Portrait of Edith Blaney, Pastel on paper, 1894.  This portrait shows Mrs. Blaney at rest with the island garden behind her.  The book in her hand, charmingly, is Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden, about Thaxter's own garden on Appledore, illustrated by Hassam, and published that same year.

William McGregor Paxton, American, 1869-1941.  Oil on canvas, 1916.  This portrait shows Blaney's younger daughter in front of the drawing room fireplace of the main house on Ironbound, long since burned, with some of Blaney's antiques collection on display.

And there were others, including, in 1920 and 1922, John Singer Sargent, who was visiting his cousin Mary Hale at her Bar Harbor summer home, and no doubt touching base with his many clients and subjects in the summer colony.  He went out to Ironbound to stay with the Blaneys for a few days and produced seven paintings and sketches while there, of which these two below offer a seldom seen side of Sargent at rest with friends.

John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925. The Artist Sketching.  Watercolor on paper, 1922.  This virtuoso portrait is of Dwight Blaney at his easel on the shore at Ironbound Island

 

 John Singer Sargent painting aboard the Blaney yacht Irona, off Ironbound, 1922.  Notice the umbrella for shade lashed to Sargent's leg.

John Singer Sargent.  On the Verandah (Ironbound Island, Maine).  Watercolor on paper, 1920 or 1922.  This serene view depicts the Blaney family (left to right, daughter Elizabeth, Dwight Blaney, Mrs. Blaney, and daughter Edith) at leisure on the porch of the commodious farmhouse style cottage Blaney designed for Ironbound.

Although the main house burned many years ago, the island remains, with other structures, with conservation restrictions,  in the hands of the Blaney family, and is private.

 

Personal History:  After Blaney's death, the Dilettante's father, in the market for a boat, happened to go out to Ironbound to look at Blaney's boat,  Irona, a classic 38 footer with cabin, and purchased it.   On one mid-summer afternoon  in 1953, my parents--my mother nine months pregnant---were on that boat when it became clear that perhaps outer Blue Hill Bay was not where they should be.  Fortunately, it was a fast boat, and the local hospital is only a few hundred feet from the town dock, so I was not born on  Irona, after all  Many years later, I chanced to go out to Ironbound twice, once as the guest of a mutual friend of the Blaney's, who had been loaned one of the houses there for a long fall weekend, and again time with another friend who was visiting the Blaney's daughter Elizabeth Cram, then in her 80's.     It was a distinct pleasure to have her show me, in the amazing Ironbound guest book, along with sketches by the many famous artists to visit the island, the photos of my father taking away  Irona some 35 years earlier.  

Yesterday I asked my father about Irona, and he replied, deadpan, 'yes, handsome boat.  We had a lot fun with it, your mother and I.  Probably would still have it if you and your sister hadn't been such expensive children.  Particularly you."