Carl Gordon Cutler is an example
of a painter who began in the genteel Salon milieu who grew into
a modernist later on in his career.
He was born in Newton and graduated from Newton High School.He
attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the
late 1890s at the time that the institution's faculty favored
the Bostonian tradition of portraiture in oils which derived much
from the work of European Old Masters. Later he was a student
at the Acadimie Julien, Paris, where he met with some success
and periodically exhibited work in oils. Even at this early date,
Cutler reveals a special interest in color, while most Salon painters
maintained a naturalistic palette of grays, yellow ochers, dull
reds, and brown hues. However, it was not until he had been back
in the States for several years that Cutler's mature style began
to develop.
On his return to Boston, he took rooms at the Fenway Studios,
where he worked until 1941. He also kept a studio in South Brooksville,
Maine.
In 1913 Cutler formed "The Four Boston Painters" with
Academie Julien alumni Maurice Prendergast, E. Ambrose Webster,
and Charles Hovey Pepper. Later in 1913, Cutler exhibited two
oils in the Armory Show. This groundbreaking exhibition featured
the work of American artists alongside masterworks of the major
European Modernist movements such as Cubism and Fauvism. Many
American painters, including Cutler and his fellow "Four
Boston Painters," were inspired by what they saw in the Armory
Show to break free from what they perceived as the bourgeois traditions
of American painting. From the work of John Marin, the Zorachs,
and Marsden Hartley, Cutler gained valuable insight into what
would become his two greatest artistic passions: the medium of
watercolor and the landscape of Maine.
It was not long after the Armory Show that Cutler made his first
painting trip along the coast of Maine, and by the mid-1920s he
had dedicated himself solely to picturing the Maine landscape
in his plein-air watercolor style. His Maine watercolors met with
considerable critical acclaim; soon he had established himself
as not only a popular and successful artist, but also a well-respected
theorist on the subject of color in painting. His 1923 book Modern
Color describes a detailed system involving a scale of 168 pigments;
he explains how to mix pigments so that they imitate the appearance
of natural light.
by 1920 he joined with four other Boston painters who were also
using watercolor in innovative ways: Charles Hovey Pepper, Marion
Monks Chase, Harley Perkins and Charles Sidney Hopkinson. They
called themselves the Boston Five and over the next 15 years,
they exhibited their works together at the Boston Art Club, Vose
Galleries and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Until his death
in 1945, Cutler used this technique to produce hundreds of sensitive
and immediate views of well-loved spots such as Mount Desert,
the Camden Hills, Deer Isle, and Eggemoggin Reach. He continued
to exhibit in the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia,
yet his inspiration was to be found almost exclusively the dramatic
landscape and the rich artistic tradition of Maine.
He spent the last 30 years of his career focusing exclusively
on watercolors of the Penobscot Bay region.
