the arts on Nantucket
the 1950s
by marli guzzetta
My fourth night on Nantucket, I previewed a play on the second floor of the Methodist Church, where the

Theatre Workshop of Nantucket moved their operations two years ago and erected their stages and red curtain, their shrine to Dionysus, near the shrine to God waiting for its Sunday curtain call on the ground floor. Main Street was empty when I came out of the church's double doors and through its Ionic columns and down its footworn white steps to the cobblestones along Main, which was often empty in April, when I arrived on island from Florida to work as the arts editor for The Independent.

Those first few days, Nantucket felt like something I'd imagined into existence, especially at night, when I was the only one on the street, and it was silent until a breeze came and made a sound, like a great kiss blown by some ancient good-hearted mariner buried below the surface of the ocean that surrounds this island. I felt haunted by Nantucket in the most beautiful way. A part of me felt like I'd moved into one of my dreams, and I wondered, "What is this place with theatres in churches and movies in restaurants and two drug stores side-by-side?"

To try to learn as much of its history as possible, which I see as my ongoing homework, is a big job - requiring interviews, photocopies, books and microfilm - and it's one that I may never finish. But for now I wanted to share with you a little of what I've learned: a brief, multi-part, decade-bydecade history of the way we were, the Nantucket arts community, from the 1950s to the fin de siecle. I could never get everything in - I don't purport that this is an exhaustive history. But as far as histories go, it's a start.

THE 1950S To understand the foundation laid by and for the arts community in the 1950s - a foundation that exists today - it's necessary to first consider the years after the turn of the century and before WWII.

Nantucket's isolation (and desolation) since the decline of its whaling days had kept it untouched and therefore preserved, making it a favorite "secret" vacation spot for well-heeled North Easterners until the 1920s, when artists wanting a little piece of paradise arrived in increasingly greater numbers, especially after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 sparked the Great Depression.

Broadway actors decamped to 'Sconset in the warm summer months when the Broadway theatres closed, and visual artists like Frank Swift Chase, Tony Sarg and Florence Lang found a unique muse in Nantucket. Lang and her husband, Henry, even began buying 'waterfront property' - shacks that they converted to Spartan studios, which were often rented by students taught by Chase, most of whom were women. This small school of painters - who would wear dresses to sit on the grass and paint en plein air - included Margaret Underwood Davis and Ruth Haviland Sutton.

In 1930, even though the rest of the country was economically depressed, the island had enough artists and enough patrons to support its first Sidewalk Arts Sale, founded by Maud Stumm.

In 1943, Easy Street Gallery, which Florence Lang had opened in 1924 and operated as a social hub as well as arts gallery, closed when she passed away.

In the void left by the closing of the Easy Street Gallery, the Artists Association of Nantucket was founded, and the Kenneth Taylor Galleries opened - both in 1945.

Top, from left: Reggie Levine; George Vigouroux outside the Lobster Pot Gallery; Polly Bushong and Bobby Bushong. Above, left: C. Robert Perrin painting on South Wharf.

The only gallery on island, Kenneth Taylor Galleries, filled Easy Street Gallery's place as Nantucket's artistic headquarters - hosting concerts and readings as well as art exhibitions for artists as big as Edwin Dickinson and as local as the fledgling Artists Association of Nantucket (which began in its lower gallery) and for the AAN's alterego, "the 45 Group." With members like Charlotte Kimball, Elizabeth Saltonstall, Louise Emerson and Margaret Carpenko, the 45 Group consisted of artists championing work that was more experimental than the art favored by the AAN at the time.

Enter the 1950s: America's post-war gravy train was making regular stops on Nantucket, and the artists of the once sylvan and seaside holdout were organizing to capitalize on the island's new growth.

The Kenneth Taylor Galleries had become established enough to designate $100 to $150 "grants" to island artists. Limited in number, these grants went out formally through the Artist-Patron Plan and also sometimes informally to artists whose names had been pulled from a glass jar - including, one summer, Kahlil Gibran's nephew.

"During the 50s, most members of the art colony, except for a few, were not Nantucketers," said Nantucket Arts Council President Reggie Levine, whose family began summering on Nantucket in the 1930s. "They came here for the summer, and they left. Now, it's obviously different."

In the summer months in the 1950s, the front page of the Inquirer and Mirror trumpeted weekly theatrical productions at Barn Stages Theatre (located on North Liberty Street), Straight Wharf Theatre and, occasionally, the Yacht Club and Sconset Casino. These shows received regular reviews in mainland papers like The New York Post, The Boston Herald and The New York Times.

Renovated in 1950, the Dreamland Theatre showed moving pictures on Nantucket, and the Nantucket Community Orchestra got its start.

C. Robert Perrin opened his gallery on South Wharf in 1956.

By the end of the decade, the demand for entertainment grew to sustain events in unexpected venues, a tradition that continues to this day. In 1958, the Unitarian Church began its "Celebrity Concert Series"- an ancestor of its ongoing Noonday Concert Series (for which Judith Cohen performs this Thursday). In 1959, the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed on Nantucket for the first time, holding their recital at Nantucket High School.

Possibly the most important developments of the 1950s, however, were the formation of the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this week (see page 25) and the opening of the first galleries on South Wharf - C. Robert Perrin's gallery in 1956 and the Lobster Pot Gallery in 1958.

"The Lobster Pot became a very important moment in the history of art on Nantucket," said Levine, who was just a young man at the time, introduced to the arts community through Kimball and the 45 Group. "Whatever one might have said about the quality of work at the Lobster Pot - because it ranged from good to not so good - it was professionally run, and George Vigouroux, who was the owner, and his staff really made it the thing to do. They pushed art into the upper social level of Nantucket and made it a really important ingredient in the social life on this island. The openings on Friday night were packed with people, most of them moneyed - people who really basically never gave art a thought on Nantucket, they never paid attention to what was going on, which meant the art community was denied patrons with money. But then

George did it brilliantly. He came from the theater. He was a good looking man. He'd married a wealthy woman. He lived high, wide and handsome."

In the 1950s, the arts community thrived because of its characters, people like Vigouroux and like sibling artists Bobby and Polly Bushong, who were friends of Levine's. (In my hypothetical dinner party of Nantucket people living or dead, the Bushongs are must-haves.)

"Bobby and Polly were just the most charming, wild, funny people. Oh, the antics," said Levine, who remembered Polly's cherished party trick, what Levine calls "one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen."

"Polly was famous for this character she created, Nora Pratt. She would get up from the party and leave, saying she had to get to another event, then get into these outrageous outfits with buck teeth, dressing like a woman one would assume to be in her late 70s, and then come back 30 minutes later. And unless you knew, nobody recognized her," Levine said. "And she would sit down and have these outrageous conversations with people. They never saw her before in their lives, and she knew everything about them, where their tattoos were and when they last did it and where and with whom."

As remarkable as she was, Levine said, Bobby had the one up.

"Nobody outshone Bobby, not even his brilliant sister, because Bobby was without a doubt the greatest character on the island," said Levine. "He was a wit, with a mind that was so quick, and his play on words, his observations about people, his comments about people - they were outrageous. He knew a lot and he knew how to make it funny. He needed quite a few victims. ...But he made fun of himself, and that's what saved Bobby. That's what made him palatable."

Amazing that all these big personalities in the arts community could exist on such a little island and not mix with the year-rounders - but, Levine maintained, there was "a cleavage."

"The two groups didn't know the other existed. The artists were more aware of the townies than the townies were of the artists - still they never meshed," said Levine.

But that would begin to change in the liberated '60s.

Next week: All ridiculousness breaks loose in the 1960s.

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