New exhibit showcases the long-hidden artwork of Avital Sagalyn

Geoff Bennett:

At the very tip of Cape Cod, a new exhibition is showcasing the work of an artist who spent two summers there back in the 1940s. For much of her life, she remained largely unknown in the art world, by her own design.

But now, as her paintings receive greater public attention and remarkable stories from her life emerge, including an unlikely friendship with Pablo Picasso, that is all starting to change.

GBH Boston correspondent Jared Bowen introduces us to the work of Avital Sagalyn for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jared Bowen:

This is a discovery, these works painted in 1945 and 46 here in the coastal community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, with their defining lines and bold, broad splashes of color. The artist delivers us directly into the harbor's salty air, where the dewy fog almost settles on your skin.

Christine McCarthy, CEO, Provincetown Art association and Museum: It was one of those truly 100 percent discovery moments where not just myself, but the members of our exhibitions committee, when we were looking through the proposal, we're like, why don't we know who this artist is?

Jared Bowen:

The artist is Avital Sagalyn, a painter for most of her 95 years before her death in 2020. For her, painting was a private practice. She had no interest in museums or galleries, which might tell her how to do it.

That gave her a purity, says Christine McCarthy, the longtime CEO of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, now featuring a survey Sagalyn's Provincetown work.

Christine McCarthy:

That's one of the most beautiful parts about being an artist who isn't interested in any of the commercial side of it, and I'm making this body of work because I want to record either something that moved me or moved me to make this. She's an artist that should be known. Her story is really, really good.

Jared Bowen:

That story is now being shared by Sagalyn's son, Dan, and his wife, Elaine Grossman.

Dan Sagalyn, Son of Avital Sagalyn: It wasn't until 2017 that I really got a sense of all her work.

Jared Bowen:

Although he'd always seen his mother's work throughout their family home and watched her draw and paint on family holidays, it wasn't until later in her life when Dan began to both record and fully comprehend his mother's stories.

Dan Sagalyn:

Oh, look at that, the lake.

Avital Sagalyn, Artist:

Yes, it's the lake.

Jared Bowen:

Both he and Grossman are journalists gallery. Dan is a foreign affairs producer for the "PBS News Hour," and began teasing out the details of Sagalyn's artistic life.

Elaine Grossman, Daughter-in-Law of Avital Sagalyn: She didn't want to talk about it a lot, but she felt like she was ready to share it, and that she could share it on her own terms.

Jared Bowen:

Avital Sagalyn demonstrated an aptitude for art by age 3, but hers was a childhood marked by the savagery of World War II. In 1940, her family fled their home in Belgium as the Germans invaded and attacked, dropping bombs on innocents.

Avital Sagalyn:

I remember putting my arm -- my hands over my head and becoming very religious, asking God to save us.

Jared Bowen:

The family passed through Spain, where Sagalyn's mother introduced her to old masters in the Prado Museum, as she explained to her son in this 2016 conversation.

Avital Sagalyn:

We had to see Velazquez and Goya and El Greco. Even at a very early age, I was very interested in art.

Jared Bowen:

As a teenager, she studied art in Lisbon as the family awaited visas, enabling a move to the United States.

Arriving here, she was soon featured in a student exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Elaine Grossman:

Avital painted one of the works that we think is the most moving and dramatic work of her lifetime while in high school called The Horror of War, showing this black what I think is a crow flying overhead, meant to symbolize the Nazi warplanes and very graphic details of soldiers in the foreground.

Jared Bowen:

Sagalyn wouldn't show in a museum again for 70 years and never returned to the subject of war. But she continued painting and it flourished in Provincetown.

Over two summers here, she captured daily life images, such as peers, telephone poles, and buildings, returning to paint them again and again and again.

Elaine Grossman:

Avital had a practice of doing what she called variations on a theme in almost all of her artworks, and she felt compelled to explore and explore, to experiment, to experiment using different materials, different perspectives on her subject matter, until she had finally captured what it was she was trying to say.

Christine McCarthy:

The way that she's applied the color, it's subtle. She has really created the depth within this piece, and you feel the fog. You feel the movement.

Jared Bowen:

McCarthy says she's especially struck by Sagalyn's use of the line, how such simplicity and spareness can say so much.

Christine McCarthy:

I can tell you that I have umpteen boats sunsets, but when you look at these, the dunes, even that line, like, the line is so exquisite and elegant, and it's almost like she never even lifted whatever tools she was using, whether it was a pencil or a brush. It's so lyrical.

And I think of a conductor doing this type of this with, like, a baton.

Jared Bowen:

Sagalyn was always lured by light, especially in Provincetown, where the glow from sand and sea spills into the town in ever-shifting shades. In studying the works of Turner and Cezanne, she came to revere what she called the transformative effect of light that drew her into spaces, whether a beach or Notre Dame Cathedral, to nearly divine effect.

Elaine Grossman:

She was not a very religious person, but she saw a sense of sacredness or a sense of spirit. She used to sometimes call it the essence of what it is that she's looking at.

Jared Bowen:

For Sagalyn, Provincetown was a pilgrimage. This is an arts colony where the greats have gathered, from Jackson Pollock to Mark Rothko to Helen Frankenthaler. She sought out the guidance of artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, who taught numerous soon-to-be-famous painters.

Dan Sagalyn:

She showed him her sketches and she showed him her drawings, and he looked at it and said, I can see you have your own style and your own technique. You don't need to take classes. Just keep doing what you're doing.

Jared Bowen:

And she did. After submitting two of her Provincetown paintings, she was named a Fulbright Scholar. The program was a pathway to Paris, where Sagalyn immersed herself in an artist's circle that led to Picasso.

Dan Sagalyn:

She went to the gallery to look at his work and then out came Picasso and he said, "Avital," and he gave her a big hug, and my mother was trembling because she said, here I am with the arms of Picasso.

Elaine Grossman:

They had a great many discussions back and forth and really took to each other immediately.

Jared Bowen:

Despite having Picasso as a mentor, Sagalyn continued to shun public attention, until 2019, when, at age 94, she finally consented to her first solo museum exhibition.

Now, with this second show, and as public attention expands, her legacy and work are creating a new ripple in the history of American art.

Christine McCarthy:

Now, when I see you know a fishing boat or a pier, it's going to be a Sagalyn pier or a Sagalyn telephone pole. Like, now in my mind, it's -- she's arrived here, and in such a big, big way.

Jared Bowen:

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jared Bowen in Provincetown, Massachusetts.