The Langlais Sculpture Preserve in Maine Pays Tribute to a Visionary

‘Blackie’ Langlais was an art-world darling in the early ’60s, and he’s getting his place in the spotlight again.

I’ ve written off and on over the years about Maine’s unique aesthetic. Mainers have a reputation as a rough-hewn, sea-sprayed, hardscrabble sort. It’s not undeserved. Aside from a thin strip along the ocean from York to L.L. Bean, home to affluent retirees and tourist hubs, Maine can be vast, lonely, blunt, and poor.

Bernard, or “Blackie,” Langlais (pronounced long-lay) was a sculptor in wood, a Maine native, born in 1921 in central Maine’s Old Town, a working-class, logging town on the Penobscot River. One of ten children, his father was a carpenter. Both parents were Québécois Americans. Langlais is well known in Maine for his cryptic, rough-hewn sculptures of animals, birds, and Indians, most life-size, but one, the Skowhegan Indian, soaring 60 feet.

In New York in the early ’60s, he was on the runway to renown for his Abstract Expressionist wall sculptures made from bits of wood he found and collected. At one point, he and Andy Warhol were both considered upcoming things, Warhol for his weird take on mass media and soup cans, Langlais for merging high New York School abstraction and folk art.

As places in Maine go, Cushing is in-between. It’s a small town of great natural beauty and quiet, touching a bay but not a tourist place. The Langlais Sculpture Preserve is part of the Georges River Land Trust. We all know about Warhol, whose 15 minutes of fame still unfolds, 60 years after he and Langlais were art-market ingénues, with auction prices in the tens of millions and a shtick everyone recognizes.

Langlais’s flameout was as extreme. By the mid ’60s, he’d left New York and settled on 90 acres, part wilderness, part farm. In his studio there, he made more than 3,000 indoor and outdoor wood sculptures. It’s safe to say he drank himself to death, leaving behind his widow, Helen, who lived there until her death in 2010. Once back in Maine, Langlais sold some of his work. He wasn’t a recluse. He was known as an idiosyncratic artist, but, in Maine, the two go together. The Skowhegan Indian, commissioned by the town’s chamber of commerce, was and still is known throughout Maine.

After he died, in 1977, Helen was the keeper of the flame, selling enough to live. What to do, though, with the Cushing house, the studio, land, and the big outdoor sculptures that Langlais had made and installed throughout the property? The Langlaises welcomed all comers, and it was an open secret that “the farm” was the place to visit in that part of Maine. The most famous sculpture there was a larger-than-life depiction of then-president Richard Nixon done in 1973. He’s frantically buoyant. Langlais placed the sculpture in a swamp.

The sculpture preserve is many things. It’s a time capsule. Langlais’s studio is tidied for the public, but it’s still suitable messy. There are plenty of large outdoor sculptures, among them Local Girl, from 1968, a riff on Christina’s World and a fun poke at Wyeth Inc.; Five Bears, from about 1975; and Hand, also from about 1975. Elephant, from 1977, is impressive. It’s abstract but looks like it’s about to lumber away. It seems less wild and more like a circus elephant. Viewers can walk inside the sculpture. There, Langlais painted bananas and peanuts, presumably the elephant’s lunch.

Helen Langlais left the house, land, and contents to Colby College in Waterville, about 50 miles north. I knew Helen. I’m not sure that she understood the perils of leaving everything to a college with a million moving parts, far from Cushing. Colby has a good museum and art department, but dealing with an artist’s studio, a chunk of land, and hundreds of objects by a local artist, many with conservation problems and installed in situ and outdoors, wasn’t in anyone’s portfolio.

I think a miraculous collaboration unfolded. “Miraculous” in that college museums aren’t famous for risk-taking, much less imagination and initiative and certainly not partnerships. The Colby museum enlisted the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan in Wisconsin, founded in 1967 as a contemporary art space with a special interest in self-taught artists and artist-built environments.

It was funded originally by the Kohler family, they of the bathroom-fixtures fortune. The family is still involved. When I was a museum director, I knew the Kohler Arts Center as a place where creativity happened. This fall, I’m planning a swing through Wisconsin and will write a story about this unique place.

Kohler agreed to handle the project, and that includes the funding and the doing of it, the daunting conservation and preservation challenges of Langlais’s work. These sculptures, made from wood, were created and displayed outdoors. Mid-Coast Maine isn’t La Jolla. The weather is both various and, at times, wretched. No one knows what Langlais was thinking when he made work so vulnerable to the elements. He might have believed that all things are destined to perish and had a chuckle over it along with another slug of whiskey.

Kohler was the essential party in an astonishingly good conservation job. The work at the preserve is weathered. How could it not be? It’s from the ’60s and ’70s. The Colby museum has been doing Langlais exhibitions and placing the immense number of Langlais’s work it now owns at museums throughout the country. Langlais isn’t going to get the recognition he deserves if his work is concentrated in one place or is known only in Maine.

The Georges River Land Trust preserves nearly 5,000 acres of land through Mid-Coast Maine. It has nearly 50 conservation easements and owns and manages 20 parcels. It now owns and runs the Langlais site, which includes great hiking trails. The land trust also runs an extensive Langlais program for local schools. Suffice to say the place is ideal for children who need to learn how expansive art can be.

I’ve been to the preserve four or five times over the years, starting with a visit when Helen Langlais still lived there, and then after it opened as a preserve available to the public, with the outdoor sculptures restored and the studio preserved for visits. It’s very fun but also gives a thorough look at Langlais in Maine. There’s a Langlais Art Trail in Maine, developed and promoted by the preserve. There’s plenty of Langlais outdoor sculpture beyond what’s at the preserve and the Skowhegan Indian. His work pops up in places such as public libraries and town halls, too.

Langlais’s trajectory in the ’50s and ’60s is worth a look. He studied art at the Corcoran’s school in Washington and at the prestigious Skowhegan School in Maine. He also won a Fulbright to travel to Oslo to study the art of Edvard Munch. Langlais isn’t a self-taught artist, and he’s not a folk artist.

In the mid ’50s, what’s called assemblage art was very new. Think Robert Rauschenberg’s early sculptures made from everything, including bits of the kitchen sink. Langlais’s experiments with wood-scrap sculpture wasn’t radical — for an artist from rural Maine, it was a natural. Langlais’s father was a carpenter. He grew up in a logging town, in a logging state. Wood’s the ubiquitous American material. We’re one of the most forested places on earth. Coincidentally, Langlais’s first New York City home was over a mom-and-pop building-supplies store on West 28th Street in Manhattan. He got a lot of his wood scraps there.

The Langlais aesthetic, taking away for a moment his roots in carpentry and logging, starts with Winslow Homer. Homer, who painted mostly Maine scenes from the late 1880s to his death, is many things, but critics in his lifetime often use the word “rough” to describe his work. Rough in subject matter, like his fishing and woods scenes in Maine and the Adirondacks as well as his rocky coast pictures, and rough in his handling of paint. That his finish isn’t refined and his subjects unpretty defines Homer, and Maine.

Homer’s style and subjects, imbued with the look and spirit of Maine, generated a following starting with artists such as Bellows and Henri, called Ashcan artists but visiting Maine, and continuing with Marsden Hartley, Louise Nevelson, John Marin, and Fairfield Porter.

By the late ’50s, artists such as Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Richard Stankiewicz, and Allan Kaprow were using materials not considered suitable for high-end art. In 1960, the Martha Jackson Gallery’s New Media — New Forms exhibition starred some of their work. Cardboard, fabric, glass, and wire joined bits of wood as new materials suitable for what was called Junk Art. Langlais’s work was exhibited there and in The Art of Assemblage at MoMA in 1961. By then, Langlais was exhibiting at Leo Castelli’s gallery. He had his first one-man show there in 1961.

I used the term “Abstract Expressionism” earlier to describe Langlais’s wall sculptures only because they’re certainly abstract and they’re expressive of a new, unusual vision, but Langlais’s work is less gestural than, say, Pollock’s, and more deliberate. Wood is a warm, reassuring medium. Wood can’t be poured or splattered. Looking at his wall wood abstractions today, with his pieces of wood scuffed, chipped, and mellow, I think about environmental art more than the New York School.

Langlais’s style was anything but slick and ironic, and that put him at odds with Pop Art. Roy Lichtenstein’s first big exhibition at Castelli came months after Langlais’s. In 1962, Langlais had a one-man show at Allan Stone Gallery. It didn’t sell well.

Suddenly, in 1962, Langlais quit Castelli. He wrote a letter to Castelli noting that his work hadn’t been selling at a fast clip, and it would be “mutually beneficial” for him and the gallery to part. Langlais’s wife, Helen, told me years ago that Langlais wanted to do figural wood sculpture, something Castelli didn’t like or want. Castelli was neck-deep in marketing Pop Art — the last thing he wanted was what he saw as a folk artist making sculptures of bears and birds.

Langlais and Castelli were a bad fit. Castelli was urbane and image-conscious. He wanted his stable of artists to project avant-garde vogue — sleek, detached, and Delphic. He was new as a gallerist and making his own rules as he went along. He wanted a milieu among his artists. Langlais’s bits of found wood and undiluted Maine bearing and attitude put him on the margins. Hacked-wood animal sculpture pushed him into the realm of savages. Langlais had a vision. He didn’t want a dealer forcing him to change it.

I heard, and I believe this is true, that Langlais made a terrible scene in 1962 at an after-opening Castelli dinner at a fancy French restaurant. Drunk, he argued with a waiter, burst into the kitchen, and defiled the bouillabaisse with his bodily fluids, to put it daintily. An uproar ensued. For Castelli, this was a breach too revolting.

Langlais tried to market his work on his own. In 1962, Donald Judd wrote a piece about Langlais’s animal sculpture for Arts, the journal about contemporary art exhibited around the city. He compared it to folk art and work from the Arts & Crafts Movement. “The work can be rejected,” he said, adding “improvement cannot be suggested.” This sounds very insulting, but he meant that it is what it is. In 1964, Vivian Raynor, another critic, said Langlais’s animal sculptures had vitality and presence but were “a mixture of the heroic and Gift Shoppe.” Ouch.

Back in Maine, to Cushing, Langlais went. The man and his milieu, reunited, seemed suited. If you’re in Maine, forget about the cutesy vacation towns.

For a real Maine experience, visit the Langlais Preserve. I wish more not-for-profit arts groups would show the same creativity as Kohler, the Colby museum, and the Georges Rivers Land Trust. I thought Helen Langlais was a nice, naïve old lady, saddled with a difficult husband and a long widowhood. Her philosophy that everything would turn out fine found its moment. Langlais, the Maine original, has his place in the sun.