“In 1907, Prendergast was invited to exhibit
with the Eight, colleagues of Robert Henri and exponents of the Ashcan school.
Prendergast and the romantic symbolist Arthur B. Davies seem oddly mismatched
to these urban realists, but all were united in an effort to stir the American
art scene out of its conservative lethargy.
In 1913 he was invited to participate in the
famed Armory Show, which was largely arranged by his friend Davies. Not
surprisingly, Prendergast's brilliantly unorthodox offerings were decried as
resembling "an explosion in a paint factory." On the same occasion
Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was similarly deplored as
"an explosion in a shingle factory," suggesting either a failure of
critical imagination or a case of collegial plagiarism. But of the Americans
represented there, Prendergast's works were the most thoroughly modern and
postimpressionist.
Who can now pass a playground teeming with
brightly dressed children or wander through a public park where the varicolored
garb of its occupants does not call to mind the stirring images Maurice
Prendergast has left us? As Oscar Wilde once ventured, "Life imitates art
far more than art imitates life."
Emery Battis Artist Biographies for the exhibition American Impressionism: Treasures from the
Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000)