When critics hinted Maurice Prendergast was getting a little repetitive as he approached 50, he could’ve hung up his brushes. After all, he’d been pretty successful. Instead, he headed back to where it all began--Paris--and came away reinvigorated with “a new impulse,” as he called it.

Today’s episode takes us to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. We’ll find out how an idea that started with Congress just before the Depression led to an official modern art museum on the National Mall!

SHOW NOTES

“A Long Look” themes are "Easy" by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/

Episode music

“Scenes from Childhood, Op. 15 - IX. King of the Hobbyhorse” by Robert Schumman

Performed by Donald Betts.

“Children's Corner, L. 113 - III. Serenade of the doll” by Claude Debussy

Performed by Edward Rosser

Both courtesy of musopen.org

“Loopster” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Artwork information

Beach at Saint-Malo

https://iiif.si.edu/mirador/?manifest=https%3A%2F%2Fids.si.edu%2Fids%2Fmanifest%2FHMSG-HMSG-66.4131 (mirador zoom-in view)

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/artwork/?edanUrl=edanmdm%3Ahmsg_66.4131

Prendergast info

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/prendergast-maurice/

https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.5270.html

Maurice Prendergast. Wattenmaker, Richard J, and National Museum of American Art. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994.

https://archive.org/details/mauriceprenderga0000watt/page/n5/mode/2up

Maurice Prendergast : By the Sea. Homann, Joachim. Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin college Museum of Art, 2013.

“The Early Art Education of Maurice Prendergast.” Glavin, Ellen. Archives of American Art Journal 33, no. 1 (1993): 2–12. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1557569. (JSTOR)

Hirshhorn info

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/explore/the-founding-donor/

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/about-us/

https://siarchives.si.edu/history/hirshhorn-museum-and-sculpture-garden

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden : The Collection. Brunet, Briana Feston, and Romare Bearden. Edited by Stéphane Aquin, Anne Reeve, and Sandy Guttman. New York: DelMonico Books, 2022.

Transcript available at https://alonglookpodcast.com/saint-malo/