It might be difficult to imagine, but on Route 41 just north of Great Barrington you will find an enormous collection of paintings, drawings and prints by one of the greatest artists you have never heard of.
Harold Baumbach (1903-2002) was a genuine original. Nine years older than Jackson Pollock and the same age as his close friend Mark Rothko, he never became an Abstract Expressionist. In fact, Baumbach was an artist so committed to his own individuality that he makes his more famous contemporaries – who are routinely celebrated for their innovative independence – seem a little like followers of stylistic fashion.
In truth, there was a perversity to Baumbach’s independent streak. Pretty much self-taught, his earliest works reveal him in the thick of the same artistic and social milieu as Rothko, his other close friend Adolph Gottlieb, and their mentor Milton Avery. He could not have been closer to what would become the epicenter of modern art – the great theorist of Action Painting Harold Rosenberg actually gave him his first set of paints – but when his pals began to find their paths into abstraction, Baumbach stuck doggedly to his painterly but unmistakably figurative style. His heroes were Bonnard and Vuillard, and it was under their influence that he would spend his summers painting landscapes in our part of the world.
Baumbach would eventually become a gifted abstractionist, but typically not until the wind of artistic fashion began to shift. By around 1960, Abstract Expressionism was increasingly seen as a tired mannerism, and younger figurative painters – many of whom would become known as Pop Artists – moved to the fore of critical and public attention. As they flourished, Baumbach continued to plough his own eccentric furrow, producing magisterial pictures like Composition in Black, Yellow and White which might be taken for a great Abstract Expressionist painting, except that it was made decades too late.
There is a Baumbach Self Portrait that probably dates to about 1930. It shows the young painter staring somewhat unnervingly straight out of the canvas: this is not someone who is going to take any nonsense. It would seem to be an accurate portrayal, for Baumbach was as combative in his relationships with the people around him as he was in his painting. He quarreled with other painters, fell out with his dealers, and would actually refuse to sell work to collectors whom he felt did not appreciate it adequately.
Though he had 21 solo shows in New York City, it is almost as though he wanted to avoid success, and he came close to doing so. Individual paintings are in the collections the Whitney and the Hirshhorn Museums, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art holds a collection of his papers, but to be frank, Harold Baumbach is absurdly underappreciated. He does not even have a Wikipedia page.
Now his son, the celebrated novelist Jonathan Baumbach, has set about doing something about this. Baumbach junior has been a summer visitor to the Berkshires for many years, and he and his wife recently sold their Brooklyn house and moved to Housatonic full time. With some of the proceeds from their house sale they have constructed a new building on their property. This is the
Baumbach Gallery. It provides storage for something like 200 canvases and innumerable prints and drawings, and a showroom for their exhibition and sale. But Jonathan Baumbach’s task has been rendered more difficult not only by his father’s irascibility, but also by his indiscipline. Most of the paintings are untitled and undated; nothing is even organized, let alone archived. What Harold Baumbach urgently needs is some serious scholarship. Not necessarily from MoMA or the Whitney, or even the Clark, but if you know a bright PhD candidate looking for a subject, tell them that you have found it, right here in Housatonic.
Harold Baumbach’s career did not conclude happily. He eventually achieved what was perhaps his most successful work relatively late in life. In pictures like Secrets of Nature he would eventually combine the strengths of his abstract and representational canvases, but he was unable to pursue this rich direction for long. Tragically, he lost his sight in the late 1980s, and after two years trying to paint from memory, he eventually gave up.
Ironically, given Baumbach’s absence of a legacy among younger painters, his family has become something of an artistic dynasty. Not only is Jonathan the acclaimed author of Babble and B – A Novel, he is also father to the yet more celebrated Noah Baumbach, director of The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Frances Ha, and the just-released While We’re Young. It is entirely possible that Harold Baumbach’s work will finally receive the attention it deserves not merely because of his son’s efforts but because his grandson has won precisely the sort of fame that he himself disdained. That would indeed be a cruel twist of fortune.
The Baumbach Gallery is at 241 North Plain Rd, Housatonic, MA, 01236. It opens to the public on Saturday, May 23 with a reception from 12:00 – 6:00 p.m. Thereafter, it will be open by appointment (telephone: 413-528-2997).
