Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
John Wallace
American; 20th-century
South Solon, ME: 1 Meeting House Road
59%
South Solon Meeting House Frescoes. 1952-57 (with Sigmund Abeles, Alfred Blaustein, Edwin Brooks, Ashley Bryan, Willard Warren Cummings, Hurwitz, Sidney, William King, Thomas Mikkelson, Anne Poor, Henry Varnum Poor, Judith Roth, and Sidney Simon)
An Art Institute of Chicago trustee commissioned a baker's dozen Skowhegan painters to decorate the interior of this 19th-century church in rural Maine. Had there been any notable artists in residence at Skowhegan at the time, the South Solon Meeting House might have been made a significant site in the history of American painting. But since the thirteen folks who got to decorate the church were middling modernists at best — the sort of artists who would've been by turns freaked out by and envious of the Irascibles — the place is, more than anything, a curio. Throughout, there's a looseness to the facture that doesn't quite gibe with the realism of the modeling; the colors are frequently loud and clashing, which contrasts well with the building's old New England austerity but which doesn't feel justified by the rigidity of most of the compositions. The flatness and the stiffness of most of the figures is uncanny: these artists were inspired by the bodies of, say, Picasso and Balthus, but had none of the sense of the overall space of a modern painting. Their backgrounds are both too naturalistic and insufficiently developed for the figures that populate them. Still, there's something worthwhile about the spectacle of a modernistically frescoed old Protestant church that makes this place worth visiting. (TFS, 2025)