Colby-Sawyer College will celebrate William Holst, award-winning artist and former chair of Colby Junior College’s art department, at The Brush that Perceives the World: A William Holst Circle exhibition. 

The exhibition, which opens with a reception 4-6 p.m. Thursday, July 2, at the Davidow Center for Art + Design, will run through Friday, Aug. 28. 

Professor Jon Keenan, the Sonja C. Davidow ’56 Endowed Chair of Fine Arts, said honoring Holst’s considerable legacy was one impetus for the exhibition.  

“We have a strong history of the arts at Colby-Sawyer, and he built the program,” Keenan said of Holst, who led the art department from 1948 to 1977. 

Holst graduated in 1934 from the Massachusetts College of Art then worked as a commercial artist, served in World War II and taught at the University of Florida before joining Colby Junior College.

Under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann, Holst transformed from a representationalist “who could draw like Raphael” to an abstractionist. 

In addition to showcasing Holst’s works, the exhibition will feature pieces by two of the many artists Holst positively impacted: alumna Frances (Roberts) Wilson '55 and painter and Holst scholar Andrew W. Young. 

"The gallery is a teaching gallery. Through exhibitions, we can celebrate creativity and the arts, bring people together and build community,” Keenan said. “I want this to be something that people can learn from and be inspired by.” 

Young was introduced to Holst’s art when his wife Stefanie brought home three of Holst’s paintings. 

“When she announced to me that she bought a couple of paintings, my response was, 'What do you mean you bought a couple of paintings? I get the walls and you get everything else.'"

Young said his wife responded, "‘And you’re not going to like them. They’re abstract.'” 

Turns out, Young did like them. 

“I thought they looked like Franz Kline. What fascinates me is how Holst was every bit the painter that the most famous abstract painters are (I think) and he is substantially unknown,” said Young. “His are among our favorite paintings. They are powerful.” 

Young, who for years painted figuratively, was subsequently moved to begin abstract painting.  

“Distilled, I want to make a coherent, forceful, balanced, non-representational impression of as much of the whole of something I can based on a process and without a lot of clutter,” he said. 

Young also became a Holst scholar.  

“I could find very little on Holst, and somehow the strength of the work coupled with that enigma provoked me,” he said. “For 20 years, I’ve been trying to shine a light on William Holst’s paintings. This is a monumental step in that direction. I am thrilled that Jon is including me and my paintings [in this show] ... it’s a giant cherry on top.” 

A scholarly essay that Young wrote about Holst for the exhibition follows this article. 

Wilson, who has 12 paintings in the exhibition and planned to attend the opening, died in May at the age of 90.  

Marion Wilson, one of Wilson’s four daughters, said her mother loved Colby Junior College and Colby-Sawyer, and often talked about Holst being a major influence in her life.

“I think my mother really was inspired by color and shape and space. And the form itself was almost secondary. I think that's probably the lesson from Bill Holst,” she said. 

“I'm an artist, also. My mother was such an inspiration in freedom and experimentation. She lived her whole life that way. She believed everyone was an artist and that it was just about unlocking the inner artist. That’s a wonderful lesson to have from your mother.” 

 

The Brush that Perceives the World: A William Holst Circle 

 

By Andrew W. Young

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Artists … make gestures of care and repair, or they merely try to beam out an electrifying personal and strange signal that wakes up the receiver for a moment — one weird moment that could shift the sense of things, and thereby the world, even if only slightly. This sounds urgent to me.” — Amy Sillman 

 

Student/Teacher/Artist 

Charles W. Hawthorne, father of the legendary Cape Cod School of Art and the son of a Maine sea captain, said two things that resonate with, if not portend, William Holst’s arc: “A great painter is always a student” and “To see things simply is the hardest thing in the world.” 

Let’s examine Holst (1912-1995), the student, teacher and painter, and his curiosity that led to seeing things simply. 

Born in 1912 and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holst graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1934. He subsequently worked in commercial art, served in World War II and taught at the University of Florida. By 1948, he was chair of the art department at Colby Junior College (now Colby-Sawyer College), a position he held for three decades. 

Holst’s life wasn’t so much a progression as a consistent state of being: student, artist and teacher, with modernism as his north star. At Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, where he taught nine summers between 1957 and 1972, he was variously a teacher, artist in residence and student. 

In addition to his education, various jobs, military service and teaching, Holst was a nationally exhibited and award-winning painter by the time he arrived at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1949. A neophyte he was not. Yet, his transformation under Hofmann’s spell from “wizard” draftsman (as his fellow artist, educator, classmate and friend Fran Merritt described him) to pure abstractionist was fundamental and complete.  

At least as remarkable as his mid-career metamorphosis is how steadfast and unflinching his ensuing effort, results and devotion were. For 45 years, with rigor and clarity, he studied, espoused and practiced Hofmann’s ideas about spatial dynamics: “push/pull,” “fathoming a surface” or “leaving the flat picture plane behind.” His painting “Suspended” was included in the Provincetown Art Association’s first exhibition in 1955 along with works by Hofmann, Hawthorne and other luminaries. Its title describes the tension in the balance of push/pull and serves as an apt metaphor for Holst’s legacy. Suspended. 

The Student 

By Holst’s account, figuration came easily to him at MassArt and he hungered for more. He bore a restlessness and had predilections for modernist tendencies. The traditional approach in Boston was academic and skills based. It lacked feeling. Holst recalled no discussion of what art was about. Within hours during his first summer on Cape Cod, he recognized Hofmann as the elixir of his cravings. Under Hofmann’s sway, Holst enthusiastically embraced invention, modulation of space and expression: slipways to nonobjective formal modernism. In a 1987 interview, Holst recounted, “The idea of a little distortion, different shades or accentuation … made sense.” 

Hofmann conducted classes in the Hawthorne Barn, formerly home to The Cape Cod School of Art. Holst spent five summers there. 

  

  

 

 

 

 

During a 1959-60 sabbatical, Holst painted and studied in France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Holland. In 1961, he took a class in painting at Haystack with Willem de Kooning’s friend and fellow Dutchman, the nonrepresentational painter Joop Sanders. That summer doubtlessly reinforced the pioneering impulses that had led Holst to Hofmann.  

Another summer at Haystack, Holst enrolled in ceramics, and a third summer he studied painting again. In her book Haystack at Liberty: From Insight to Mountain to Island, Alana VanDerwerker observes that Fran Merritt, Haystack’s founding and long-time director (and Holst’s MassArt classmate and lifelong friend), “was well attuned to the interest in abstraction permeating the contemporary art scene, and between 1961 and 1964, he invited painters Joop Sanders, William Holst, Wolf Kahn, and Fred Mitchell to Haystack” to teach, believing craft could be positively influenced by these nonobjective modernists. 
  

 

The Teacher 

According to VanDerwerker, Holst had not intended to teach, but it became the means to pay for painting artworks of his own inspiration rather than illustration. “When I was teaching the students,” Holst said, “I began to think for myself. Experimenting.” 

Hofmann had previously observed that Holst the student was “able to mingle easily with and stimulate people.” 

Holst’s teaching and learning fueled each other, and both informed his painting. 

 

 

 

Chris Cook, former director of The Addison Gallery of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, recalled that Holst provided the most thorough art education of all kinds possible (history, theory and making). Cook said that while Holst was “private and shy, if you got him worked up — he’d get revved up” and could discuss art and theory deep into the night. Cook reiterated that “Hofmann was very important to [Holst].”  
 
Prominent Canadian artist, teacher and writer Ron Shuebrook said he was “introduced to significant notions about rigorous pictorial structure and expression by William Holst. A former student of Hans Hofmann, and a painter of serious and diverse accomplishment, Holst was perhaps the first teacher of mine who seemed to fully understand the dynamic formal languages of visual art.”  
 
Former CJC student and painter Frances (Roberts) Wilson '55 said Holst was “way ahead of his time” and “a modern man.” While he was reserved and quiet, Wilson said he was encouraging and open: “a person that would have your back.” 

Artist Elizabeth Kasevich wrote, “I studied with Bill privately for many years, both in Exeter and in Stonington, Maine. We met when he was teaching at the Art Institute of Boston in the 1980s. How well I remember his “push-pull” and “open book” discussions as he tried to instill plastic space … I hear Bill speak whenever I paint. He was a remarkable man with a rare zest for life.” 

Former CJC student and weaver Sarah Haskell shared, “Bill could see my potential in ways I could not … I was lucky to be in his circle of light, creativity and love.” 
 
VanDerwerker said Holst “spoke the way he painted and taught — with care.”  

Painter Arthur Yanoff said, “Bill gave stunning lectures to a group of us at an art school and in studios … Bill should be better known both as a painter and an inventor of the Holstian theories.” 

The Artist 

 

 

The untitled painting above brings to mind dealer, curator and collector Kevin Rita’s response to Holst: “perfect expression ... perfect restraint.” It is refined yet primal, simple but rich. Rita identifies in Holst a “very analytical approach with sensual results.” (It is also interesting to note that Hans Hofmann’s influence is palpable in this piece.) 

In the introduction to The Extreme of Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, editor Mira Schor defines “the epitome of a ‘painter’s painter’ — one who knows painting to the core of his being and who is devoted to its traditions, history and practice above and beyond all personal ambition.” Holst, student/teacher/artist, was a painter’s painter. Cook’s estimation above concurs, as does a chorus of others. As Haskell said, “As a professional artist, Bill modeled perseverance, commitment and vision.” 

But, to invoke W.B. Yeats, what of the dancer and the dance? Former CJC student and printmaker Carol Lummus shared the following quote from Flaubert: “‘Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ That was William Holst. Period.” In other words, Holst the person (dancer) was quiet and reserved while Holst the artist and educator (dance) was bold, unflinching and groundbreaking. 
 
Holst said, "Nothing in isolation is absolute ... Hofmann put it this way, a thing’s meaning constantly changes according to relationships; this thing is small in relation to this but large in relation to that. It's like a symphony as moment after moment unfolds and builds. You're always working with tensions and variables."  

In an interview in the 1960s, Holst said his paintings became simpler in form the longer he worked on them. For an article in the Colby Courier in 1962, Holst quoted Hofmann saying, “It is more important to make the most of the least — not the least of the most.” The following progressive pictures illustrate the process of addition by subtraction and what CJC alumna and painter Anne Neely identifies as Holst’s ability to reduce something “to its most essential form.” 

 

 

  

  

 

This process recapitulates Holst’s evolution as artist, student and teacher from representationalist to abstractionist inspired by Hofmann. The object in the painting dissolves in the same way Holst’s figurative drive slipped away. Provincetown painter Paul Resika refers to Hofmann’s lesson: “There are no ‘things’ here, only forceful relationships between formal elements ... With Hofmann you had to draw forces; there were no things.” “No things” amounts to nonobjective. 

Holst focused on, drew from and distilled the underlying energies in both occupied space (positive) and the void (negative). In Hawthorne’s vernacular, Holst came to see things simply. 

  

 

Lummus celebrated “the essence of all the Hofmann theories in William Holst’s black and whites … Bill took all he had learned: reduced, simplified and became a poet with his brush. He found color in black and white.”  

Speaking of Hofmann’s theories, what’s the hubbub about plasticity? There are ambiguities in plasticity as there are, almost by definition, in Hofmann’s push/pull, and the two are intertwined. Holst defined the concept as “the pictorial means that brings the flat surface into a three-dimensional reality — commonly called plasticity.” 

The painter Bob Henry, a Hofmann School classmate of Holst, celebrated the “bothness” in his book For Artists and Art Lovers: A Handbook. “If you get rid of perspective,” he wrote, “forms would appear to be both on the surface and in space, and that space would be an ambiguous, breathing space.” This would have piqued Holst’s curiosity. In the magazine ARTnews, art historian James Beck dubbed a related quality he saw in Holst’s work “logical irrationality.” 

Going a little deeper, whether in romantic poetry or abstract  expressionism, pure inspiration is often mythologized. Is the artist a noble savage or trained technician? Both. While it exists, creativity is more often anchored by or built upon intentional, disciplined exertion. Hofmann said, “Genius is hard work.” Seeing simply may just be genius and is anything but simple. 

A parallel duplexity is found in a traditional versus a modern use of the term “plasticity.” On the one hand, the term “plastic arts,” as in “plasticize” or “mold,” is a traditional one used to differentiate sculpture and painting from writing. On the other hand, a 1967 Colby Courier article stated that Holst “prefers to work with simple pure colors, whose unique ‘plastic’ qualities will not be modified.” This more modern sense of plastic is the strict materiality of the paint, its insistence that it is paint. So, is it rigid or malleable? This duality is confounding, yes. The polysemy reflects the art and science of a thing, the push and pull, if you will.  

In her book Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hoffman, Tina Dickey refers to artist Allen Leepa recalling, “You had to challenge [Hofmann]. The same with plasticity. You discovered the meaning yourself.” The contradictory meanings of “plastic” may analogize the diligence of creativity and modernism “breaking the mold.” 

New York and Provincetown painter and sculptor Fritz Bultman wrote about dualities in a 1963 essay on Hofmann for a Museum of Modern Art exhibition. He discussed flatness and depth, concentration and dispersion, and what is revealed and what is veiled.  

He concluded, “That this duality should remain in the final work is also important for the beholder. It is through the possibility of multiple readings that pictorial freedom is possible thus giving the spectator freedom of choice.” In Hofmann’s push/pull, positive and negative space, and plasticity’s doubleness, Holst found the extreme of middle and achieved grace. 

Another modernist tenet is found in Holst’s nonobjectivism.  According to the exhibition essay for what was likely the last show that included Holst’s paintings in his lifetime, The Elusive Object, “In our time, we deal with art that is something and is not of something.” 

A painting being something recalls Hofmann’s proposition that an artist creates a reality.  

It mirrors Christine Gardner’s posit to Holst in an interview for Art New England Magazine, “The process of painting becomes the painting?” 

Holst answered, "I use the television analogy for my students, too. When the picture appears on the screen, it is the result of electrons being transmitted and rearranged. The artist also rearranges reality, but unlike a television set, he uses his emotions to perceive his empathy with a subject. A TV can't do that, can't relate to experience in a personal way." 

Isn’t this acutely germane in the AI age? It also both reminds us of Holst’s yearning to express and begins to describe process art. And isn’t it a way of saying “The Brush that Perceives the World”? 

The Belgian poet and art critic Emile Verhaeren said, “Seurat’s brush thinks and reflects as it touches the canvas.” Professor Richard Shiff agreed: “Each of his touches of the brush or crayon was a thought that required an additional material trial, with consequences that demanded further thought.”  

Deer Isle artist Larry Moffet similarly described Holst as methodical: painting one brushstroke at a time then considering how each impacted the whole and responded to the other. So, Holst’s brush perceives, considers, translates and articulates the world. It answers a call, sees simply and beams out a considered, clear response. Studies with Holst were profound, according to Moffet.  

Richard Schiff concluded that Seurat’s sense of reflection must itself be reflected upon.   

Holst, the student, teacher and artist, his brush and his legacy provoke the same consideration. This sounds urgent to me.  
 

Andrew W. Young is a painter and William Holst scholar. He lives in New York City and has lifelong and abiding associations in Down East (Maine) and Down Cape (Cod). Images courtesy of williamholst.info; sources include @williamholstinfo and williamholst.info.