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While thru-hikers of the Appalachian Trail pop bottles of celebratory champagne at the summit of Mount Katahdin, the mountains do not end their journey there. They scurry north through New Brunswick, hang a sharp right somewhere in Quebec, then east, east, east they build themselves up, running with one final crash into the sea. And where at last the waves fan out from the cliffs, we find the three-sailed fishing boats of Gaspé, drifting silently through the night. In a 1946 letter to Albert Reese, Bernece Berkman-Hunter described her aim to make a series of serigraphs “expressing the life of the upper Gaspésian French fishermen.” She wasn’t the first artist to be captivated by the stark drama of the region’s winding peaks: the 1920s and 30s had seen Georgia O’Keeffe, Milton Avery, and Paul Strand each make the same pilgrimage north. All of these artists, in their own ways, seemed to recognize this was a landscape yearning to be abstracted; for O’Keeffe in 1932 and Berkman-Hunter in the mid-1940s, Gaspé represented a unique turning point in their respective artistic trajectories, their paintings from these periods clear precursors to a new phase. “Fishermen Awaiting Dusk” is the fourth installation in Berkman-Hunter’s Gaspé series. Though her earlier portrayals of blue-collar men from the 1930s had an obvious dynamism to them (see, for example, “South Side Series #7”), “Fishermen”’s composition is explosive by comparison. The body of a fishing vessel cuts swift diagonals across the lower right, sending the barge barreling straight towards the viewer. Bright little flags whip off the stern while seabirds circle impatiently above, vying for an unearned snack. Amidst the hull-full of slashes and undulations of saturated golds, reds, blues, and greens, we find the gray-black namesakes of the title, two fishermen hunched and color-drained. Though the title seems to indicate the anticipated end of a long day’s work, fishing was Gaspé’s main industry (“The whole land lives by and for fish,” Marvin Breckinridge wrote of it in a 1937 Vogue article); when the herring became scarcer around mid-July, work was untethered from the daylight hours, stretching far past sunset and into the next sunrise. Pairs of fishermen floated through the small hours, taking turns sleeping while the other kept watch, their stiff, tanbark-blackened nets billowing behind them, passively catching whatever the current brought. At the top of the central mast in “Fishermen” is a curious detail, a black and blue mass that coils and spools out, flowing on the wind like a sheet or a sail. The people of Gaspé were prone to a certain mythologizing, claiming that while God was creating the world, one of his angels, holding a heap of mountains in his apron, tripped and spilled them all along the peninsula. To borrow from another myth, then, if it was Helios’s chariot that drew the sun across the sky, perhaps it is Berkman-Hunter’s hand that acts as his counterpart in this painting, pulling the veil of a dark unknown over the canvas. Though Berkman-Hunter eventually returned to New York City, she carried that thread with her, delving into a more complete abstraction in the decades to follow, her mind and her art remaining with the sea. “Fishermen Awaiting Dusk” is on loan courtesy of Clifford Law Offices for Madron’s current Bernece and Ethel exhibition, on view until November 22nd. Visit us weekdays between 9AM and 4:30PM to see it in person (or join us November 14th for Lincoln Park Art Night!)
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