There is so much to fear. Hard-won progress in civil rights, reproductive rights, and gender equality has rapidly eroded; we are beyond the overture of a climate catastrophe; war and atrocities go on unabated; the nation’s highest court of law is debased; and many voters, perhaps a majority, are ready to choose dictatorship over democracy.
Here on Outer Cape Cod we take refuge in and celebrate our openness, our spectacular environment, and the thriving artistic and cultural life that surrounds us. But we would do well, as Josephine Boyle suggests in her reflection on Forum 49 in this week’s Arts & Minds section, to think about how the spirit of one remarkable Provincetown summer 75 years ago might be brought back to life.
The year 1949, when artists, designers, writers, and intellectuals came here for two months of exhibitions and public discussions, was also a time of high anxiety. The horrors of World War II were fresh, and Stalin was reshaping Soviet communism. The forum “captured a moment seized by uncertainty, in which nothing artistic, political, or intellectual seemed clear,” Boyle writes. “No one now creates with joy,” said Robert Motherwell, “on the contrary, with anguish.”
“In this incredible chaos,” said architect Gyorgy Kepes, “we are almost lost people.”
The forum, created by poet Cecil Hemley, painter Fritz Bultman, and playwright Weldon Kees, was an interdisciplinary, international effort to create a new artistic reality out of that chaos. It turned out to be the seminal event in the revolutionary movement called Abstract Expressionism.
Let us pause for a moment to think about this startling fact: at a critical turning point of 20th-century history, many of society’s leading artists and thinkers converged on a small town at the end of a sandbar — this place, our home — to change the course of that history.
According to Boyle’s account, Forum 49 was plagued by controversy, as the avant-garde focus on abstraction was by no means universally admired. Traditionalists like Charles Hawthorne, who headed the Provincetown Art Association, rejected it, and the association refused to host the events. But the forum was a huge success; 500 people were turned away from the first night’s gathering.
Forum 49 is the inspiration for this summer’s Forum 24, a series of events being organized by the Provincetown Art Gallery Association. We hope to be there when gallerist Mike Carroll asks a July 31 panel, “What Is an Artist?,” reprising the famous opening event of Forum 49.
On that first evening, Hans Hofmann, a champion of the new abstract art, won over the crowd with his closing speech, according to art historian Jennifer Liese. “Let the youth of America speak,” said Hofmann. “Let a free press and a creative critic speak. Long live the arts and the artist in a free future.”
We are at another turning point, and it is alarming. But we must insist on a free future — one that this matchless place gives us the power to imagine.
