I remember visiting the studio of an old man who painted nothing but the sea,” Reuben Tam (1916–1991) wrote of a trip to Monhegan Island in an undated note now collected in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. “I thought of all the painters who every summer come to this island. It is as if the sea had organized some fraternity whose members had one god in common.”  

Any summer day, the island’s spectacularly varied landscape—sun-bleached village, wild roses, cathedral forest, rocky, unkempt oceanfront—is an encampment of painters in wide-brimmed hats at easels for long hours en plein air, and day trippers with sketchbooks under a shady tree. Monhegan is inhabited and visited by so many artists that no exhibition space could fairly represent the work the place has inspired; the Monhegan Museum of Art and History approach to managing this abundance is to show work by only deceased artists. Its current exhibition, Counterpoint: Artist Couples on Monhegan, brings eight friends back together again for a visual conversation full of delights and convergences, with an undercurrent of love and longing for a lost world. 

Counterpoint features paintings, drawings, prints, and sketchbooks by Reuben and Geraldine “Gerry” Tam, Marvin “Moe” Oberman and Arline Simon, Jan and William “Bill” McCartin, and Lynne Drexler and John Hultberg, who all found their way to Monhegan Island in the years after World War II. “The exhibition preserves a time when these New York City–based artists—many of whom were also teaching or working in graphic design or advertising—could spend the summer on the island,” observes exhibition curator Emily Grey. “It was still a stretch, but it was possible for some to buy a home here.” The Counterpoint artists sold work out of their island studios, with many bringing their summer art production back to galleries in New York. Summers were extremely social, says Grey, with many “excursions, picnics, and musical gatherings.” Island time was productive and rich, and the isolation was also prized. “Five months of the year I work in my studio on Monhegan,” wrote Arline Simon in On Island: Women Artists of Monhegan (UNE Art Gallery, 2007). “The rest of the time is spent in my studio in Yonkers. The contrast between these two visual and cultural locations provides constant inspiration and challenge.” And while Moe Oberman was very involved with the museum, designing the logo and planning exhibitions, island summers also provided time and space to pursue his love of painting.

Sometimes the isolation was too much—Lynne Drexler and John Hultberg began to live apart after spending a winter together on the island, with Drexler preferring to stay year-round on Monhegan. Hultberg was an acclaimed abstract painter associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, and his career blossomed during and after the Monhegan years. Last fall, two paintings from Lynne Drexler’s estate broke records at auction, bringing new attention to the colorful abstractions she created on Monhegan. 

Counterpoint draws from works loaned or donated by the artists’ families, friends, and collectors, and is inspired in part by significant recent gifts to the museum, including botanical watercolors by Gerry Tam and paintings by Jan and Bill McCartin. In a lovely generational contribution, the exhibition catalog is designed by Moe and Arline’s daughter, Emily Oberman, a multidisciplinary artist and a partner at the celebrated design studio Pentagram.

Counterpoint: Artist Couples on Monhegan is on view at the Monhegan Museum of Art and History from July 1 to September 30, 2023.