Avital Sagalyn: Mid-Century Provincetown

Avital Sagalyn: Mid-Century Provincetown showcases more than three dozen works by perhaps one of the 20th century’s most adept and exciting artists, who spent the summers of 1945 and 1946 as a young painter living at the northernmost tip of Cape Cod. One of the exhibition’s delightful surprises is that most visitors probably have never heard of her.

Avital Sagalyn (1925-2020) was at the time a fine arts student at Cooper Union in New York. And it was in Provincetown that she embarked on a work that helped her win one of the first-ever Fulbright awards to study painting in Paris, in 1949. While painting in Provincetown, Avital found herself enamored with light and fog, immersed in natural and architectural wonders, and confident in her quest to find the very essence of her chosen subjects through painting and drawing them. This creative reverie, so evident in her works, would later be reprised in Paris, where she was befriended by artists including Picasso and Brâncusi. By the mid-1950s, though, she had declined exhibition offers from top New York and Paris galleries in favor of marrying and starting a family. She continued to be a lifelong artist, but had quietly stored away her early works. All but a small handful of these pieces were never discussed nor saw the light of day –until her son discovered them beginning in 2017. Avital died six months after the University Museum of Contemporary Art in Amherst, Mass., held a major retrospective of her works in 2019.

Avital Sagalyn: Mid-Century Provincetown, curated by art historian Betsy Siersma, surveys Avital’s drawings and paintings mainly in ink, and sometimes gouache or oil, all variations on what remain iconic Cape visions today – the tempestuous water, the historic wharf, fishing boats and shacks, the rocky shoreline and mammoth sand dunes. These are joined by selected works on related themes that the artist completed later in life. Nearly all the curated works are making their public debut at PAAM. Taken together, this exhibition invites us to rediscover what was then mainly a Portuguese-American fishing community, seen through the eyes of a woman whose interpretations look entirely original and fresh some 80 years later.

PAAM CEO Christine McCarthy recently described her first reaction upon reading Siersma’s exhibition proposal and viewing images of Avital’s Provincetown works: “Who is this artist? And why don’t we know enough about her? Because the work was that powerful.”

To learn more about the late artist and her work, visit www.avitalsagalyn.com

This exhibition is generously supported by Seamen’s Bank Long Point Charitable Foundation.

Image: Avital Sagalyn, Boats along Provincetown Shore, 1945-46, Ink on paper, 8 7/16″ x 10 7/8″