The gallery at the New York Studio School on West 8th Street was empty of people when I visited Provincetown artist Pat de Groot’s posthumous survey exhibition, “Sea Smoke,” the day after Thanksgiving. It was a fitting context to engage with the stark beauty of her paintings and drawings, which require the viewer to exercise the same quiet focus that de Groot summoned when making her pictures. The understated setting added to the sense that she’s a hidden treasure. The museums farther uptown might have been filled with tourists, but anyone who knows de Groot’s work understands that her glistening, jewel-like paintings can rival those of many of the world’s more lauded artists.
“She was one of the least careerist people I ever met,” said Wellfleet artist Helen Miranda Wilson in a panel on de Groot hosted by the Studio School. An unpretentious authenticity undergirded her life and work. She left behind a privileged life in New York to live a modest one in Provincetown, where she taught herself to draw and paint through an intense commitment to carefully observing a limited number of subjects: cormorants, the sea, and the sky.
This exhibition presents a wide range of de Groot’s work. It’s organized into three sections: one room with samples of her early design work and drawings; a lobby area with paintings of the sea — all small but various formats; and two rooms presenting her 12-by-11-inch paintings of Cape Cod Bay. These are the crown jewels of the exhibition and of de Groot’s creative output. Beautifully curated by Kara Carmack, the display of these paintings is as airy and open as the landscapes they depict.
One wall is particularly austere: it contains three predominately white paintings, a black painting, and a gray one. Although de Groot worked at a remove from the larger art world, her paintings are not disconnected from it. Carmack says she was attracted to how de Groot’s “distillation of form and idea spiraled out into a conceptual project,” noting parallels with the work of Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. De Groot’s white paintings of snow or fog covering the bay most clearly recall Ryman. They insist you pay attention to the materiality of the white paint and the various ways it can move across a surface to build a painted object, not just an image.
Winter Night, a black painting, demands intimacy. Like the experience of stepping outdoors at night, this image requires an adjustment of vision if it is to be fully perceived. It asks the observer to slow down, to sit with the image, to make out the distinction between the blue-black sea and pitch-black sky, delicately stippled with wispy clouds. A gauzy beige color scraped across the bottom of the panel succinctly describes an illuminated shore at night. The painting embodies a delicacy in its carefully observed, subtle color, but, like much of de Groot’s work, it was created primarily with a palette knife, which tempers the painting’s ephemerality with a rough, matter-of-fact touch. These aren’t sentimental pictures of the sea. Rather, they convey a vision that’s multifaceted and complex.
De Groot was born in London in 1930 to Ernald W.A. Richardson, who came from landed gentry, and Evelyn Weil, whose grandfather was Isidor Straus, an owner of Macy’s who died on the Titanic with his wife, Ida. To escape World War II, de Groot was sent with her younger brother and a caregiver to live with their uncle in Englewood, N.J. “I was an angry kid, and wild. You grow up somehow,” she said in a 2013 interview with Jennifer Samet published in Hyperallergic.
In 1953, she earned a degree in literature from the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently worked for the Paris Review and then as a book designer for Farrar, Straus & Giroux (a relative co-founded the publishing house). In Provincetown, she met Nanno de Groot, a painter of Dutch origin, whom she married in 1958. They settled here, first living in a tiny shack in the West End and then in the East End in a house designed by Pat. Nanno died of lung cancer in 1963, shortly after they moved into the house.
DeGroot began pursuing art seriously after her husband’s death. “I got a vicarious trip off of Nanno’s painting; I didn’t have to make art — he did that,” she told Samet. She took years teaching herself to draw, focusing on seagulls, black ducks, and then — most enduringly — cormorants. She drew in her kayak so she could closely observe the birds drying their feathers on Provincetown Harbor’s breakwater.
The Studio School exhibition features a selection of these 11-by-14-inch ink drawings arranged in a grid. Like the sea paintings that dominated her creative output later in life, these drawings are variations on a theme. She used one color and one format — constraints that draw the viewer’s attention to the variety of poses, personalities, and forms of the birds. Her gestural marks and silhouetted forms recall traditional Asian art — not surprising, given de Groot’s deep connection to Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. The power of concentration and the bodily gesture of the hand lead the way. Restraint, discipline, and expression exist in equal measure.
DeGroot, who died in 2018, didn’t transition into oil painting until later in life. All of the paintings in the exhibition are from the 1990s and 2000s and, like the cormorant drawings, they exist within strict parameters. They are all images of the water and sky as viewed from her house overlooking Cape Cod Bay.
After Nanno’s death, her home became a gathering place for artists. It was where she played bongo drums with the painter Bob Thompson and where she made space for artists to have studios on the second floor — including Richard Baker, for whom she planted tulips to paint. Georgia Marsh, another painter, lived with her for years.
“She would always have dinner ready for me when I came home, so I didn’t have to cook,” Marsh remembers. “She said, ‘You just keep working. Work until it’s dark. Don’t worry about it.’ ” John Waters, Philip Hoare, and Mary Oliver were other figures in de Groot’s orbit.
When she was painting, she tuned out other people. She remained in the house, looked out her studio window, and focused on the horizon. There are no people or signs of human civilization in these pictures. They are clearly separate from her active social life, says Carmack.
The profundity of these paintings lies in the fact that they’re so limited in scope yet so expansive. Some images read as clear representations of the seascape she observed, such as Spring Green. With pitch-perfect precision, she captures how the colors of the ocean reflect depths of water, time of day, weather, and the season. In Sunlight, Gray Sea, de Groot flicks paint across the surface of the panel. It acts like the sunlight in the image, flickering across the surface of the sea.
Others are more abstract, like Sea Smoke, a painting from 1994 with the same title as the exhibition. The image of smoke rising from the sea is untethered to a shoreline; the emphasis here is on color and mark-making.
These paintings embody de Groot’s experience of being closely attuned to the world outside her window. Moon Before Dark captures red moonlight spreading like fire across dark, velvety blue water. Viewing the painting is an electrifying experience. For a moment, one feels transported to De Groot’s studio by the sea: she invites us in.
Sea Smoke
The event: An exhibition of artwork by Pat de Groot
The time: Through Jan. 20
The place: New York Studio School Gallery, 8 West 8th St., New York City
The cost: Free
