Flood, fire, earthquake, drought…few things capture the collective imagination more than the subject of disaster.
The Fire at East Orrington by Waldo Peirce, 1940. Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine.
For those traveling in New England this winter, an exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, presents all those calamities and more—especially the habitually haunting theme of shipwreck—in paintings, prints, photographs, and other mediums. There’s the tragedy of the Royal Tar, for instance, a paddle steamboat en route from New Brunswick to Boston by way of Portland, carrying elephants, camels, horses, and other circus animals, which caught fire, killing some thirty people and almost all the animals.
But in some ways the show is remarkably uplifting. “What really struck me in researching our ship portraits,” says the exhibition’s curator Angela Waldron, was how many vessels “actually repeatedly survived the most severe weather conditions and only came to harm when the most perfect storms of weather and human error came into play.” The painting that gave rise to the exhibition, she adds, depicts a success story—Augustus Buhler’s Shipwreck off Cape Ann, which portrays the February 28, 1902, rescue of the crew of the stranded British tramp steamer Wilster. “The painting has all the tragic elements of disaster—the pathos, the tension, the anxiety, the weather,” Waldron says, “but despite the odds and the total wreck of the steamer, all hands on deck were saved.”
Altogether, despite the terrible mayhem depicted, the show proves rather cathartic. “Art provides observers with the voyeuristic thrill of enormous despair without having to experience it firsthand,” Waldron says, and “disaster has shown itself to be egalitarian in principle—it often strikes indiscriminately, regardless of who or where you are.” Standing before these works invites visitors to reflect on their own experiences, disasters large and small, which in itself can be cathartic. And, Waldron says, “as documents of dreadful moments in time, artworks serve as a tribute or memorial to the victims of what went wrong, and hopefully ensure it will not happen again.”
Art of Disaster • Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine • to April 23 • farnsworthmuseum.org
