Picture this: A still-life arrangement fifteen feet long and ten feet high with fabric, driftwood, clay pots, cooking pans, bottles, garden tools, glass shards – and often so much more – which has been set up for you to paint. How would you go about it? You could hardly fit it all on a canvas. Would you paint just a part of it or simply be inspired by its colors and shapes?
That’s what Sam Feinstein’s art students were presented with when they gathered in his Dennis barn to study painting. But his students say the goal wasn’t necessarily to duplicate even a fraction of what they saw. His classes were not only about the art of painting. They were also about the art of life.
During the forty years Sam taught on the Cape, hundreds of students spent hours not only learning how to paint but also developing a perspective on viewing life in relationship to art.
Much of what he taught was about relationships – between shapes and colors and the flow between the objects and their colors. He did not care if his students did something representational or abstract, but for many years his own work had been abstract, vibrant with dramatic color and dynamic gestures.
Although Sam painted all the time and taught classes in New York, Philadelphia and Princeton in addition to Dennis, he refused to exhibit or sell his work during his last forty years. But since his death in 2003, his wife, Patricia Stark Feinstein, has taken on the monumental task of cataloging more than 1,400 of his paintings, drawings and prints. A retrospective of his work opened May 31 at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis.
Sam bowed out of the commercial art scene in the late ‘50s. But Pat now wants to open the door and share what she views as extraordinary. After he died, she discovered hundreds of works she had never seen, which were stored in two rooms on the fourth floor of their Manhattan brownstone. Pat organized a show in New York last year, and she has written a book, “Sam Feinstein,” about him.
Sam first came to the Cape in 1949 to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. Hofmann, a native of Germany who had spent many years in Paris, immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and brought the modern European styles with him. He went on to inspire a generation of artists, who spawned Abstract Expressionism. With the advent of World War II and the Nazi invasion of Paris, the center of the art world was transplanted to New York. Hofmann, who had a school in New York, also taught summers in Provincetown, and many artists who became famous in post-war America learned modernism from him.
Sam, who was born in Russia in 1915 and raised in Philadelphia, studied art at the Philadelphia College of Art. His early work was typically realistic, but in the late ‘30s, Pat says, his painting became more expressionistic. He was also influenced by Cubism. Picasso’s “Guernica” was exhibited in New York in 1939, and, Pat says, “You can see his work opening up as he was experimenting with painterly Cubism.”
Looking at Sam’s work, you know he was a master colorist. He saw color forms as the building blocks of a painting, Pat says. “He was working in dense, rich colors even before he knew Hofmann. So when he met Hofmann – Sam was 34, half Hofmann’s age – he had all this experience already.”
“Hofmann confirmed the path that Sam was on,” Pat adds. “He was heading toward abstraction and Hofmann confirmed it for him.” Actually, she says, the two shared many beliefs. “The ultimate goal is a spiritual expression,” she says. “Both Sam and Hofmann believed art should enhance life,” that it should “lift the human spirit, not mimic the everyday, nor emphasize the miseries of the world.”
Sam not only studied with Hofmann, he also was his friend and in 1950 he filmed Hofmann in New York and Provincetown in his classes and while he was painting “The Window,” which is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Although Sam exhibited and sold his work into the ‘50s and some of his pieces are in museum collections (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), by 1960 when Pop art was beginning to dominate the art scene, he became discouraged by the commercialism. “He got completely disgusted so he withdrew and just taught,” Pat says. “He believed art was too important to serve the marketplace.” He once told Pat, “In times like these, you have to make out of your own life a monastery.”
“By 1955 I reached a point where I decided I had it and didn’t want to go on,” Sam said of that period. “I was watching a complete decadence of what I considered to be qualities that were valid as art and that were honestly related to art rather than to entrepreneurship, which was coming into effect through Pop art and all that followed. I think Andy Warhol is a disaster.”
Pat is passionate about art – and her husband’s art, especially. “He believed human beings need to create for a logical extension of a need to grow,” she says, almost breathlessly. “We are a part of nature, and the art we create is an extension of the continuity of nature.”
Sam’s paintings give a strong sense of exuberance and spontaneity. “He wanted them to appear fresh,” Pat says, yet he worked on most of them for years. Also an artist, Pat taught art history for many years at Riverdale Country School, a private school in New York. She also taught with her husband. Since she retired a couple of years ago, she has been devoting many hours to his work.
Only once in the last forty years did Sam make an exception to his rule of not exhibiting. In 1986, he had a show at Harry Holl’s Scargo Pottery in Dennis. Holl and Sam were good friends – “my best friend,” Holl says. They met in 1951 at a cocktail party. Sam had been summering in Provincetown but wanted to find somewhere else on the Cape, Harry says, because he felt Provincetown had become too commercial. Harry found Sam a place on Whig Street in Dennis, where Sam had his home and studio and taught for all those years.
“I never knew anyone who could talk about abstract art in such a clear way,” Harry says. Some of that was recorded on a film done at the time of the 1986 exhibition at Scargo Pottery. On the film, Sam talks to Harry and Paul Fitzgerald, of Cummaquid, a friend and husband of one of Feinstein’s longtime students, Bunny Fitzgerald.
Bunny, a former flight attendant, studied in Sam’s Cape class for twenty-six summers. That first day of class each June, she says, was full of anticipation of what he would put together for that monumental still life.
The arrangements “looked like a nervous breakdown happening,” says Bonnie Brewer, a former schoolteacher who lives in Dennis and studied with Sam for seven summers. “The objects looked as if they were thrown together, but he carefully orchestrated the relationships so you could see the flow of forms and colors. It was like a dance.”
Bunny also talks about the flow between the shapes and colors and the variety of odd items that made up the arrangement. “Half the things in the still life came out of my yard sale,” she jokes. Besides the pottery and glass and fabrics, there could be a broken beach chair, a deflated beach ball and often a dryer hose that would meander like a snake through the arrangement.
“He instilled in me a love of color and to really try to look at things in terms of color relationships and color proportions.” Bonnie says. He encouraged his students to “let the paint tell the story.”
“He said the shapes would come out of the colors. He would talk about building up various colors in layers to give them electricity,” Bonnie says, and the thick accumulation of paint and the heavy textures on his canvases were a lesson to his students. “He just really wanted the paint to come alive and evoke a story for the painter and the viewer. He was the best teacher I ever had. He was a ‘Wow.’”
While his students were working, Sam would read to them, something about Picasso or Rembrandt or an article from Scientific American or The New Yorker, Bonnie says. “He was trying to connect the dots between all disciplines. He was trying to make us see that all life is interconnected with art.” Science, history, philosophy, literature and poetry were included in Sam’s talks while his students worked, Pat says. “He wanted to provide a context for the work the students were doing, relating their work to art history, so that they weren’t working in isolation but were part of a continuity.”
“He had such incredible gifts,” Bunny says, “to explain abstraction.”
Michael Pearson, who studied with Sam in the late ‘90s, also talked about his teacher’s eloquence. “I would not be where I am today if it weren’t for Sam,” says Michael, an artist who owns the Harvest Gallery in Dennis. Sam taught him “how colors affect us emotionally” and “how to draw a kind of life force from a painting.”
Every summer, students would be invited to Sam’s studio to see what he was working on. “Talk about a religious experience,” Bunny says. “The paintings just glowed. The beauty of the paintings, the purity of the paintings, the way he talked about them, brought us to tears.”
In cataloging her husband’s work, Pat says she is intent on “caring for them.” She’s had to stretch canvases that had been unstretched and stored for years. There was the need for conservation of the works and framing them. She had to haul down large works from that fourth-floor brownstone and arrange shipping.
After all these years, Pat is considering selling some of his works “to provide funds to care for the rest of it.” And, of course, she would love to see some more of his paintings in museum collections.
But for now, you can hear a sigh of relief and see a dash of glee in her expression in appreciation of the completed book and the show at the Cape museum – just a few blocks away from where he worked in Dennis all those years.
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