Dated Web objects 1920-1959

Charles Prendergast

Date: 1920

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1992.59

Text Entries: This type of monumental carved, gessoed, and painted wooden chest (one of three made by Charles Prendergast) has its origins in Renaissance Italy, where an elaborately carved and decorated chest, or cassone, was often given to a woman upon marriage as a container for the bride's dowry. Beyond their utilitarian uses as household furniture, cassone chests often were intended to suggest the wealth and social status of the owner. Elaborately decorated and guilded surfaces and intricate carvings impressed upon the viewer the grandeur of all that the chest might contain. Charles Prendergast's twentieth-century version of the cassone-style chest was commissioned in 1920 by collector and founder of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Lillie P. Bliss who had already acquired several frames and a panel painting by Charles. The chest's design combines gracefully fanciful imagery derived from the disparate influences of classical mythology, Christian symbolism, medieval Italian painting, and near eastern art. Static poses and frieze-like compositions recall ancient Egyptian imagery, while haloed figures suggest Christian iconology (the fourth panel on the front side is identified as the Annunciation by an inscription beneath). The four niches of stylized profiles of male and female figures on the chest's backside allude to the tradition of medieval and Renaissance court portraiture. Yet this chest, like many of Charles Prendergast's creations, integrates the modern into the traditional to create a unified, aesthetic design.

Charles Prendergast

Date: 1927

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Kraushaar Galleries, New York

Object number: 2012.1

Text Entries: The David C. Driskell Center. <i>American Landscapes</i>. (exh. cat, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park). College Park, MD: The David C. Driskell Center, 2021. Ill. p. 85 (color). <br><br>

Charles Prendergast

Date: 1938

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1992.61

Text Entries: As wood carver, frame maker, and craftsman, the artist Charles Prendergast (1863 - 1948) responded to the rise of the machine age by celebrating what new technology would ultimately deny: the art of the hand crafted object. The youngest of the Prendergast brothers, Charles gained his reputation in Boston at the turn of the century as a frame maker. He not only filled commissions for local collectors, but often framed the paintings of his brother, Maurice, with whom he lived and shared a studio space. His hand carved frame designs drew upon a range of influences and styles, from the eccentric curvatures of the baroque to the crisp lines of the Art Nouveau. Unlike the elaborate and mass-produced Victorian frames that mindlessly reproduced historical models, Charles Prendergast's frames were created on commission, and designed specifically for the object they were intended to surround. Like other proponents of the Arts & Crafts movement with whom he was strongly aligned, Charles unites in his work the process of design and execution, reviving the artist's role in the creation of a uniquely original object unmarred by the ubiquity of machine and production-line uniformity. By 1912, Charles was regularly experimenting with a wide range of materials and formats, many of which incorporated ancient methods with modern sensibilities. He began to make panel paintings, a process that engaged the carving and guilding skills he acquired as a frame maker. In his wood and gesso panels, Charles introduced color to his repertoire of carved and guilded design. His earliest works in this medium (made between 1912 and 1925), such as the chest now on view, recall a medieval aesthetic in their stylized and linear figural representations, and are said to have been made during Prendergast's "celestial period", known as such for his frequent use of gold leaf, which in medieval panels, was used to represent the spiritual or the heavenly. His later carvings, such as Three Sketches, often combine such ancient compositional components as earth-tone color schema, horizontal banding, and flattened, linear compositions with modern-day subjects depicting girls with balloons and women and men in modern dress enjoying everyday leisure activities. Charles Prendergast's experiments in this ancient medium constitute a move unprecedented among his peers, and in his new approach to art, Prendergast had neither direct contemporary examples to emulate nor young artists following his course. Yet his work is very much synchronous with modernist impulses. A careful consideration of subject matter and presentation suggests that Charles's work, although divergent from his contemporaries in medium and style, reflects a similar conceptual approach to the works pursued not only by his brother, Maurice, but the larger circle of the American avant-garde. In his convergence of periods and styles, Charles Prendergast looks back to artistic traditions of the past, and forward, with an eye to the universal-in this he resembles his European contemporaries, Cézanne, Gauguin and Picasso among them, who also looked to the art of primitive and ancient cultures for inspiration.