The Screen Show

The Farnsworth Art Museum has recently acquired two early twentieth-century folding screens: an eight-panel oil on board painting, Manship Toasting the Angels done in 1923; and a three-panel oil on canvas painting by Carrol Thayer Berry with a fanciful view of Camden harbor done in 1930.  

Folding screens were especially popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, serving typically as room dividers and often used by their owners to dress or undress behind.  Prominent artists, architects, and designers in both Europe and America experimented with the format, including James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Dewing, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Thomas Hart Benton, Donald Deskey, Ansel Adams, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney, among many.

The museum’s two screens will serve as a departure point for an exhibition of contemporary interpretations of the screen form. Artists and artisans working in Maine submitted proposals for folding screens which were then reviewed by a jury including Chief Curator Michael K. Komanecky.
The jury selected works for this show from the following artists:

• Industrial designer Allison Davis of Rockland, Maine
• Textile designer Gigi Aea of Camden, Maine in collaboration with cabinet maker Owain Harris.
• Artist and frame maker Johanna Moore of Farmingdale, Maine.
• Graphic designer Laurie Downey of West Baldwin, Maine in collaboration with woodworker Ryan Rhoades.
• Assemblage artist Susan Levett of Tenants Harbor, Maine
• Painter Alla Broeksmit of Brooklin, Maine

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Barry Faulkner, “Manship Toasting the Angels,” 1923, oil on board, mounted and hinged as a screen, 6 x 10 ft. Collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum, museum purchase with support from the Friends of the Farnsworth Collection, 2008; 2009.1