Arts and Letters

I never had the good fortune to meet Stow Wengenroth, but he and his prints belong so completely with each other that to know them is tantamount to having known the man himself.

He was, I always hear, a very gentle, quiet human being. His work bears this out, for it holds a quality of extreme sensitivity to the entire natural world. Like Thomas Nason he was a superbly disciplined craftsman. Also as with Nason, his work was the outcome of his love for the earth. In his best lithographs, the earth chanced to be the State of Maine. He once said: "I love Maine so much that it will take all my productive life to express it."

This sense of love pervades his prints, holding the power to extract the essence of what he sees. He was a humble man, content with interpreting the sea and land he lived against and loved so truly. There was never a sign of his wanting to make his stamp of identity in the world. It might be said rather that his prints are a paean of praise to what he saw. But because he was the true artist, he knew that only by dedication to his medium of lithography could he pay due tribute to this sea and land. It was almost as though he considered himself essentially as a channel. He has explained to a friend: "The print will serve its purpose well if it conveys to those who see it something of the enthusiasm and pleasure that went into its making."

It is especially gratifying when an artist discovers the medium that best identifies with the subject material that most inspires and stimulates him. So we feel the lithograph is the ideal medium for Stow Wengenroth. He himself was aware of this, as he wrote: "Everything I discover in Maine fits the character, as well as the medium, of my work. I owe the discovery of both—which amounts to the discovery of myself—to Maine."

And this is true, for it is undeniably his early lithographs of Eastport, Maine, that stamp him as an artist of lasting importance. I have been looking once more at these prints, and feel deeply moved by his understanding of the terrifying majesty of the great rocks. In this early work he seems to have been the rocks themselves. Here are no photographic renderings. Rather they exemplify the structural beauty of rocks, simplified and less factual and almost as stylized as any non-objective artist of today might have created.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he yet knew he did not belong, in his creative side, to the city. But neither did he develop a concern with mankind. What inspired him were man-made forms, so that through his work we learn the beauty of the noble old houses in Maine, the lobsterman's shacks and the lighthouse, as well as his exceptional skill in portraying, in lithography, the painter-like rendering of rocky ledges in a Down East fog.

Stow Wengenroth must surely have been a quietly happy man. He was, basically, an artist of mood. The importance of design seemed to concern him little. With his amazingly trained ability to make his medium his servant, he devoted himself to showing us the elements of enduring beauty around us.

Rather than being influenced by other artists, Wengenroth seems to have been nourished by the form of the land. The rocks and sea shapes became the designs and moods of his prints. He belonged to the little, diminishing band of custodians of the permanent. These are apt to be assailed today as escapists. But they are escapists into reality, daring to proclaim values beyond passing fashion.