Published: July 27, 2012William Wegman's Wilderness: A visit with the artist William Wegman and his dogs at their home in Maine.
By CAROL KINO
ONE sunny morning last month the artist William Wegman led me into the woods surrounding his lakeside retreat here, along with his Weimaraners, Bobbin, Candy and Flo. “This is one of my favorite paths,” he said, as he passed an old garage. “It’s filled with haunted little things.”His route led to a junked 1950s Buick and an even older pickup truck and sedan, which looked as if they’d been gathering leaves and rust since the Hoover administration. After noting that the Buick was his “favorite relic,” Mr. Wegman reminisced about the time he had walked miles into the wilderness, only to discover an abandoned couch.
This disjuncture between nature and the man-made is something Mr. Wegman, 68, prizes about the area, and his own wry humor is the hallmark of his work, which is so diverse that it should be hard to characterize. But to the wider world, he is known as the guy who makes large, colorful photographs of dogs dressed as things like fashion models and fairy tale characters. Though he has produced many different sorts of dog-free artworks in many different styles throughout his long and successful career, including paintings, drawings and collages (as seen in his 2006 Brooklyn Museum retrospective), the art world knows him as a dog photographer too. Even his much-admired conceptual videos and photographs of the 1970s often feature his first Weimaraner, Man Ray.
But now the show “William Wegman: Hello Nature,” through Oct. 21 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Me., aims to shine light on a less obvious aspect of Mr. Wegman’s oeuvre. Its ostensible focus is his attachment to the western mountains of Maine, where he has summered for over 30 years. Yet the true thread running through it is Mr. Wegman’s lifelong fascination with nature itself, and his affection for the many ways it has been revered, romanticized and interfered with by human beings.
“Growing up in rural Massachusetts before anyone I knew had a television set, I spent most of my time in the woods,” Mr. Wegman writes in the show catalog. “The earliest painting I remember making was of a duck and a rock with a question mark.”
The oldest work on display is a deadpan photographic diptych from 1971, in which Mr. Wegman and a woman mimic fishing and ice-skating in his studio. The latest is one of his so-called postcard paintings from this year, in which one or more tourist postcards blossom into a fantastical oil-painted scene. (In this case a picturesque lake becomes a flooded house.)
In between come photographs of dogs, costumed or blending into the landscape; totemic alphabets made from photographs of plants and leaves; and all manner of paintings, drawings and collages. The museum is also screening Mr. Wegman’s short film, “The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold” (1995), a detective saga based on the Hardy Boys and shot in and around Loon Lake, in which dogs play all the roles.
The show has been in the works since 2009, when Kevin Salatino, until recently the museum’s director, moved here from Los Angeles. (He now directs the art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.) Mr. Wegman’s Los Angeles dealer, Marc Selwyn, mentioned that the artist spent summers here and suggested the two collaborate on a show.
Mr. Salatino’s plan was to exhibit the early conceptual work. But when he and Diana K. Tuite, a curator at the museum, began visiting Mr. Wegman at his studio in Chelsea, the idea of a “nature-centric” show emerged, Mr. Salatino said. “I realized that this was an aspect of the work that had never really been thought through thematically before,” he added. “But it weaves its way through everything, even the early conceptual work.”
Inevitably the show also became autobiographical, and the catalog is essentially an artist’s book. Part field guide, part memoir, it’s filled with Mr. Wegman’s youthful artwork and family photographs, as well as an essay about his early aesthetic tastes, back when he was making watercolors of his dog in the woods, painting American Indian alphabets using pigment extracted from berries, and admiring the sensuous brushwork in the Breck Girl ads.
“So many people would be inclined to suppress the naïveté of their worldview,” Ms. Tuite said. “But in Bill’s case he wears it so proudly, almost so much so that it is kind of a conceptual move in and of itself.”
In person Mr. Wegman, who seems kindly and dryly humorous at once, also affects a certain degree of naïveté. For one so famous he’s surprisingly self-effacing, quick to compliment others and to claim he doesn’t know much about anything. He also loves reminiscing about his childhood. In an interview in his studio, as the dogs snored on a couch, he talked about his first trip to Maine in 1958. Then 14, he had driven up from East Longmeadow, the small Massachusetts quarry town where he grew up, with slightly older boys to fish in the Rangeley Lakes. “It took really a long time to get up here,” he recalled. “Then we hit a rock.” They were rescued by the proprietor of a lake club, who put them up in one of his log cabins for a week while the car was being fixed. “It was a very memorable trip,” Mr. Wegman said.
Years later, in 1979, halfway through his second marriage, and just as his large color Polaroids of Man Ray were starting to bring him fortune and fame, he returned to Rangeley with a new fishing buddy, and rented a cabin at another camp, York’s. Before long he had bought the cabin, the tennis court and, by 1989, the main lodge itself. Today, this is where he lives part-time, with Christine Burgin, his wife of 17 years; their children, Atlas, 17, and Lola, 14; and the dogs of course. The lodge’s main room still looks much as it did in the ’70s, he said, with a looming fireplace, light fixtures made from birch branches, and taxidermied bison, moose, elk and caribou heads on the walls. Every surface seems to be packed with sporting equipment, memorabilia, artwork and books. His studio occupies a third of the building.
York’s is where he found his way back to representational painting, in the mid-1980s, after Man Ray’s death. “I loved painting,” he said. “That’s why I went to art school. But soon after I got to art school I stopped, because painting was dead in the ’60s.” At first he was so self-conscious that he painted on the back of the canvas. But soon he was working fluently, in a variety of styles, including cartoonish caricature and brushily expressionistic figuration.
York’s was also the place where, in 1987, Mr. Wegman made his first photograph of his second Weimaraner, the slinky, almond-eyed Fay Ray, by a brook in a Wonder Woman mask. A few years on it also played a pivotal role in his romance with Ms. Burgin, then an art dealer in SoHo.
Soon after they began dating, the couple traveled to Maine so that Mr. Wegman could work on his “Field Guide to North America and Other Places,” an edition of 20 unique artists’ books, several of which are included in the current show. Packaged in a plywood box and wrapped in a piece of Buffalo plaid blanket, sort of like an L. L. Bean take on the Duchampian valise, each contains about 20 loose double-sided pages of photographs, collages and multimedia works on materials like paper, bark and felt, creating a gentle parody of centuries of nature writing. Mr. Wegman made his first postcard painting for these books, and almost every one includes a photograph of a half-naked Ms. Burgin, brandishing a toy tomahawk as she runs into the woods.
Mr. Wegman said her help was crucial: “I was making lots of pictures. I had things all over the place. She would help make it neat, neat, so I wouldn’t get too flummoxed.” (She now oversees his projects, alongside her own business.)
Ms. Burgin saw the project as a field guide to Mr. Wegman, who “has a million ideas a minute” and “things going in every direction,” she said. The guide, she added, “was a key to Bill in some way, like a key in a map, and I think this show is too.”
During the ’90s, as they were having children, Mr. Wegman focused much of his energy on children’s books, featuring Fay and her descendants. The woods and the town of Rangeley often served as his set. Now, four generations of Weimaraners and one generation of Wegmans later, he continues to find inspiration in the locale — and so do his dogs. In Maine, he said, they behave quite differently from the way they do in the city. “In New York you can call them or have someone drop something, and you can get a surprised look,” he said. “But here you get a waft of some scent that makes them really open up in a different way. They kind of lead with their noses.”
One might say that Mr. Wegman does too. He’s now working on a series of postcard paintings on wood, which he started here last year. Although he’s not quite sure what to make of them yet, “Maine is a place where I’m willing to try anything,” he said. “Things emerge in a very unique way up here.”
