BRUNSWICK — Opening this month, an exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art will explore for the first time Maurice Prendergast’s lifelong fascination with the seaside in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The first retrospective of Prendergast’s work in over two decades, “Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea” will be on view from June 29 through October 13 and will showcase a selection of more than 90 works in a variety of media, all of which were inspired by popular summer enjoyment of the seashore.

Tracing the artist’s deepening interpretations of his favorite subject, the retrospective exhibition features works from more than 30 public and private collections and foregrounds Prendergast’s experimental style and leading role in the development of early American modernism. The installation will span five galleries, each painted differently to support the artist’s famous jewel-like colors, allowing visitors to dive into Prendergast’s fantastical world.

The focus on the theme of seaside leisure allowed Prendergast to create works of modern and experimental character shunning anecdotal subject matter in favor of formal innovation. The exhibition sheds light on the artist’s creative process by including a selection of Prendergast’s rarely seen sketchbooks and oil studies. The sketchbooks will provide visitors with an uncommon perspective on Prendergast’s extensive preparation of his compositions, highlighting his spontaneity and playfulness. In his oil sketches Prendergast heightened the sensual experience of beaches by liberating color.

Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) was one of the hordes of visitors who frequented New England beaches and resort towns between the 1890s and the 1920s. Prendergast was fascinated with modern life when it was most at ease, and his brilliant watercolors, animated oil sketches, and richly colored paintings provide insight into this age of leisure travel. Through his work, Prendergast articulated the promises of a society in “pursuit of happiness,” painting the public beaches of New England as the ideal venue for young and prosperous American society to celebrate its democratic values in communion with nature.

An opening reception and family activities will take place at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art from 6-7:30 p.m. Both are open to the public free of charge.

Fully accessible, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is open to the public free of charge from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m. on Thursday, and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday.

“No artist captured the holiday atmosphere of the New England coast better than Maurice Prendergast,” explained the exhibition’s co-curator Nancy Mowll Mathews, the former Eugénie Prendergast senior curator at the Williams College Museum of Art and co-author of the Prendergast catalogue raisonné.

“Through the scope and complexity of the works that we are bringing together, Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will illustrate how Prendergast transformed the visible reality of seaside resorts and coastal villages into an imagined, Arcadian vision all his own,” added co-curator Joachim Homann, curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will be the first exhibition to open under the leadership of the Museum’s new co-directors, Frank H. Goodyear III and Anne Collins Goodyear, who joined Bowdoin College on June 1.

“It is an honor to begin our time at the BCMA with this important retrospective of Maurice Prendergast, whose visionary and trailblazing work drew inspiration from this very region,” noted Frank Goodyear.

“Like Edward Hopper’s Maine (2011) and William Wegman: Hello Nature (2012), which explored the pleasures of summer through the eyes of insightful and rigorous artists, Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea continues to advance a fundamental part of the Museum’s mission to organize ambitious and accessible exhibitions that generate new scholarship and appeal to audiences both regionally and nationally,” said Anne Goodyear.

Among the highlights of the exhibition is a 1901 watercolor “The Balloon,” which is in a private collection and has not been included in earlier Prendergast retrospectives. The Balloon depicts a busy crowd watching a hot air balloon take-off and epitomizes Prendergast’s fascination with the new leisure activities that dominated the nation’s seashores.

Another highlight is “St. Malo,” a vibrant watercolor created by Prendergast during his 1907 trip to France. On loan from the Williams College Museum of Art, “St. Malo” and its companion pieces were heralded as one of the first American introductions of the bold coloristic styles of the European Post-Impressionist avant-garde. With The Promenade, ca. 1913 a modernist masterpiece from the Whitney Museum of Art, Prendergast responded to the paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, and others who reinterpreted the tradition of Arcadian landscapes in daring compositions. His seven contributions to the International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913, the so-called Armory Show that brought together cutting-edge art from both sides of the Atlantic, appeared very European and experimental in color and paint surface.

Prendergast was a cosmopolitan artist who trained in Paris and took every opportunity to travel to France, England, and Italy. Consequently, the sources of inspiration for his art were diverse and reached from the early Italian Renaissance to the French avant-garde. His ability to respond with a stream of innovations to art he revered earned Prendergast admirers among his peers.

In the exhibition, a group of paintings by John Sloan (1871-1951), William Glackens (1870-1938), and Maurice Prendergast’s brother Charles (1863-1948) will represent the artist’s American cohort, while oils by Frenchmen Eugène Boudin (1824-1898) and Maurice Denis (1870-1943) will provide the European context for his work. The installation of works by Prendergast’s American and European peers throughout the exhibition will further demonstrate Prendergast’s commitment to modernism and experimentation.

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea features a number of works from the BCMA’s own collection in addition to loans from over 30 American private and museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Phillips Collection, and the Addison Gallery, among others. The Williams College Museum of Art, home of the Prendergast Archive and Study Center, is the principal lender.

This major exhibition has been made possible through the generosity of The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts. Additional support has been provided by the Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust, The Robert Lehman Foundation, and individualdonors.

About Maurice Prendergast

Maurice Prendergast (American, 1858-1924) was born in Newfoundland and grew up in Boston. He worked mainly in watercolor and monotypes, as well as in oil. His Post-Impressionist style—bright colors, flat patterning and rhythmic compositions—was influenced by an early apprenticeship to a commercial artist, studies in Paris and an extended journey through Italy. Sojourns in Normandy and Maine were also significant, as coastal scenes of leisure became his primary subject. Prendergast took part in pivotal exhibitions of modern art, including the exhibition of The Eight at Macbeth Gallery in 1908 and the 1913 Armory Show. His work was successful with early collectors of modern art in America and continues to be highly sought after today. Prendergast’s watercolors and paintings are represented in most major collections of American 20th-century art. Exhibitions of his art have been popular with American audiences ever since the 1890s.

About the catalogue

A fully illustrated and beautifully designed catalogue, published by DelMonico Books-Prestel, will accompany MauricePrendergast: By the Sea. The book will present new scholarship by some of the leading Prendergast scholars, such as Dr. Nancy Mowll Mathews, the recently retired Eugénie Prendergast SeniorCurator at the Williams College Museum of Art and co-author of the Prendergast catalogue raisonné, and Dr. Richard J. Wattenmaker, former director of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. It will also offer insights by leading curators who discuss Prendergast’s work from unusual perspectives; additional authors are Dr. Trevor Fairbrother, nationally recognized independent scholar and curator; Dr. Joseph J. Rishel, Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Painting before 1900 and Senior Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection and the Rodin Museum, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Dr.Joachim Homann, curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Twenty years after the last retrospective exhibition, this exhibition and catalogue will introduce a new generation of readers to Prendergast’s experimental and innovative art by focusing on his seaside work.

About additional exhibitions and programs

On Saturday, June 29, Nancy Mowll Mathews, co-curator of Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea and former Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art, Williams College Museum of Art, will deliver the exhibition opening’s keynote address. “Sea Change: Prendergast, Maine, and the Coastlines of Modern Art” will take place at 5 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center, Bowdoin College.

The first two weeks of Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will coincide with the final days of Per Kirkeby’s first American retrospective, on view through July 14. Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture, organized by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. introduces American audiences to the Danish artist Per Kirkeby (b. 1938), one of Europe’s most celebrated contemporary painters.

Katherine Bradford “August” on view from June 29 through September 2, will feature the painter’s recent works, which can simultaneously be read as hilarious, catastrophic, decorative, and sublime. Bradford’s paintings are concerned with the ocean, populated by boats and bathers, as a metaphor for the vagaries of modern life. Like many maritime artists before her, Bradford enjoys capturing waves with vigorous brushstrokes, but does not aim for realistic depictions. Bradford is a New York-based painter and also a long-time member of the Maine arts community.

Opening August 8 is Imago and Persona: Portraits from Antiquity, an exhibition exploring the traditions, styles and techniques of portraits from the ancient world. From profiles carved in relief and painted on vases to figures molded in terracotta and portraits sculpted in the round, the exhibition includes a range of art representing the ancient cultures of Egypt, Assyria, Cyprus, Greece, and Rome.

About the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Frank H. Goodyear III and Anne Collins Goodyear joined the Bowdoin College Museum of Art as co-directors in June 2013. Previously, Frank Goodyear served as curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Anne Collins Goodyear served as curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery. She is also president of the College Art Association. The couple was married in June 2000. As co-directors, they split some duties and share others, pioneering a new management model that provides significant strengths across both operational and curatorial areas.

Thecollections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art are among the most comprehensive of any college museum in the United States. Collecting commenced 200 years ago with a major gift from the College’s founder James Bowdoin and his family that included Gilbert Stuart’s magnificent portraits of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The Museum is housed in the landmark Walker Art Building, designed in 1894 by Charles Follen McKim. Located on the historic quadrangle of Bowdoin College, the building is graced by murals by John La Farge, Kenyon Cox, Elihu Vedder, and Abbott Thayer. A 2007 renovation and expansion provided a stunning setting for objects as diverse as monumental Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud, Iraq, European old master paintings, and works by American modernists. The Museum is the centerpiece of Bowdoin’s vibrant arts and culture community and offers a wealth of academic and educational programs. The Museum is also a prominent summer venue for major exhibitions such as Edward Hopper’s Maine (2011) and William Wegman: Hello Nature (2012). Both shows garnered national and international attention and were favorites with many thousands of visitors.

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