Top: Saul Fussiner beside By The Sea. Bottom: 4th of July Parade, Deer Isle. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In a quiet hallway off State Street, the painting is so whimsical it catches a viewer off guard. It’s the Fourth of July on Deer Isle, but something—many things, in fact—is out of the ordinary. On the road, the same blue as the wide Maine sky, fantastical characters have gathered in knots of color, dressed as if they have stepped right out of a storybook.
Beside an old Model T, Snow White raises a hand in the air, paying no mind to the three green men behind her. Further back, a huge, glasses-clad puppet walks forward, a pair of white heels just visible beneath its skirt. Across the street, a fiddle player lifts the instrument to his chest as a motorcycle revs behind him. If a viewer leans in close, they can almost hear the music.
4th of July Parade, Deer Isle—and many scenes like it—have come to 360 State this summer, in a solo exhibition of the late Howard Fussiner’s work that doubles as a celebration of his life. Fussiner, who for 28 years taught painting at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), made New Haven his home from 1960 to the time he died in 2006.
Since his death, his work has lived with his son Saul Fussiner, a Hamden-based storyteller and teacher at the ACES Educational Center for the Arts. Now, it is getting some love thanks to “BACA West,” a satellite of the Branford Arts & Cultural Alliance (BACA) on the first floor of the luxury apartment building. The exhibition runs through August 31.
“He took this philosophy of always looking forward, and never being satisfied with his work,” said Saul on a recent walkthrough of the gallery. ”I just hope his work continues to live on in the world. When he was alive, he was showing all the time.”
Together, the paintings tell a story of the elder Fussiner’s life in and well beyond greater New Haven, which was his home from the 1960s until the early 2000s. Raised in the Bronx, Fussiner first fell in love with painting as a young kid, when a neighbor’s subscription to Art News ended up in his hands. The issue included a profile of the French painter Pierre Bonnard, who at the time was still very much alive.
Bonnard, a founding member of the French group Les Nabis who worked from the last quarter of the nineteenth century up through his death in the middle of the twentieth, was remarkable for the periods of art history he straddled, which at the time were coming one after the other after the other, and sometimes overlapping.
By the time he died, he had lived through and been active in multiple movements, including Post Impressionism and Modernism (he also sat plenty out), and watched France brave not one but two World Wars, with all the rude and irrevocable changes that they brought to Europe. He died in 1947, just two years after a then-young Fussiner returned from fighting in the Pacific Theater during World War II.
Fussiner, it turned out, was totally transfixed with his work. From Bonnard, he ultimately learned about Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, giants of European Modernism who loomed large (and still do) in all of his work. Like Bonnard, he also fell in love with Katsushika Hokusai, learning about the traditions that ran through Japanese woodblock printing and the master’s soaring artwork.
As a young adult, Fussiner served in the Second World War, then went on to Cooper Union and New York University, for both undergraduate and graduate work. Around that time, he also worked with German painter Hans Hofmann (and American artists Robert Gwathmey and Hale Woodruff), and a person can see their impact moving through some of his work.
At moments, it is all of these influences that sing out most loudly, announcing themselves in sprawling landscapes that echo Cézanne's obsession with Mont Sainte-Victoire, or nod to the fact that he and the late Constance LaPalombara were very much contemporaries. In his 1962 Salt Water Farm, for instance, Fussiner has created an image unstuck from space and time, in which the trees blur into brilliant orbs of green, blue-black and orange around the farm’s buildings.
Along the ground, the grass seems smudgable, painterly; a creek is just the suggestion of a creek, with a ribbon of dark blue that runs through it. The farm’s buildings, meanwhile, appear almost soft and bendable, drenched in a nostalgia for work made closer to the turn of the century (some of Fussiner’s work feels indebted to Marsden Hartley, whose life in Maine predated his time there only by a few decades).
So too in, Cloud, Coast or Rock Beach with Figures. In later works, like Fussiner’s 1995 Shore, Yellow Sky, something has shifted: the rocks are more angular, more declarative, with a sense of space that has totally shifted. Looked at from just the right angle, it seems like a hand is caressing the beach, with gem-colored rocks in green and purple.
But here, he is all water and sky, his eyes trained on the long beach, the tall, blurred pines, the gentle undulation of a white cloud on the horizon line. In the years before it was painted—by then, he was teaching at SCSU— Fussiner would have been teaching at Morehouse College, where he overlapped with Babatunde Olatunji, Major Owens and Maynard Jackson still in their student days.
Here, there’s no suggestion of that busy, loud life. Instead—and maybe like New Haven, where we worked out of the third floor of the family’s Everit Street home—the landscape paintings are overwhelmingly serene, even meditative. No wonder, then, that they are a theme he returns to over and over again, from his undated Beach Scene, Reflections to Flye Point I, painted just a few years before his death.
A viewer can see why there was an exhibition of his Maine landscape at the Maine Jewish Museum in Portland two years ago; they are lovely, with a sense of calm that radiates beyond the canvas.
What comes through most strongly, meanwhile, is his commitment to wonder, particularly in his documentation of friends and family members, of the vast and astounding natural world, and summer parades in Deer Isle, Maine. For decades, the town and the state—which has been a haven to artists like Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, and Andrew Wyeth—functioned as a sort of second home for him and for the family, particularly during the summers.
In his Maine paintings, a viewer can see him experimenting in real time, from wide, melty brushstrokes to portraits of his family and kids that bring the world sharply back into focus.
“In my work, I usually invoke the spirit of joy and celebration,” Fussiner told the writer (and former Best Video director) Hank Hoffman shortly before his death in the early 2000s (a profile of Fussiner now lives in Hoffman’s collection of essays, Artists Next Door). “At times I've spoken in a darker minor mode. Since life and art are a combination of joy and sadness, I choose mostly to be on the side of joy, and the work is weighted that way.”
There is something both whimsical and reverent in many of these works, completed in a place and around people that Fussiner loved dearly (Fussiner traveled to Europe and the U.K. as well, but very few of those paintings are included in this show).
In his By The Sea, which is undated, Fussiner’s wife, the now-late Barbara Bank Fussiner, stands on a long stretch of beach, her children at her feet as sand and grass mingle in the wide open space around her. She’s with a friend, chatting, but there’s a sense that the moment transcends normalcy, from the way the paint is layered to the blue tint of their unfinished faces.
In the parade scenes, many of which are also undated, he takes an entirely different approach, leaning into the vibrant noise of what it means to be alive. In 4th of July Parade, Deer Isle, for instance, a sort of magic and mayhem unfolds as a grassy field sprawls out in the background, the houses angular as they rise among the trees.
Alongside the expected patriotic mishegoss—flag-patterned t-shirts, star-festooned motorcycles, an Uncle Sam look alike over in the corner—there’s the sense of having stepped into a fantasy world, where a brush with Snow White or a black-clad wicked witch is just par for the course. In the back of the group, a giant puppet becomes a nod to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, which relocated to Deer Isle from Belfast, Maine in the early 1960s.
For those in the know, it’s also a game of eye spy: there’s the painter Stephen Pace on one side of the street, dressed in a blue t-shirt, the painter and printmaker Leon Goldin on the other, in a pair of red suspenders. These artists, who also died in the first decade of this century, were Fussiner’s contemporaries and friends in a small, tight-knit town known for its creative output.
“He liked the cacophony of them [the parades],” Saul Fussiner remembered, adding that it seemed of a piece with his father’s love of the composer Charles Ives.
Here, a viewer can see Fussiner’s love for Gauguin, and maybe also the painter Émile Bernard (particularly from their Brittany years), but also something of his own making, a certain Fussiner-ness that is recognizable once a person glimpses it. That’s true again in pieces like Parade with Dogs and Brown Horse, in which the pedestrianness of a parade or street scene is interrupted by little, wild details: a shrunken, canary-yellow bird’s head atop a set of shoulders, a woman in colonial garb, a sea of faces that feel like they are on the edge of blurring together.
While Maine is very much a main character in Fussiner’s work, the impact of New Haven on the artist—and his impact on the city in return—feels very much like it lives on through the show. Since Fussiner’s death in 2006, many of his New Haven contemporaries have also passed away, including LaPalombara, Bernard Chaet and Christina Spiesel. In that sense, the show captures a specific slice of city history, focusing almost entirely on his creative output as a way to tell the story of who he was.
Perhaps also for that reason, there’s a sense that this work should be out in the world, well after the exhibition has ended. While Saul has cared for it with all the effort and precision of a museum curator—climate controlled storage, with viewing space built in—he likes knowing that pieces are making their way out into New Haven, and far beyond it too.
Anytime a piece sells, he said, he finds it interesting that different people are drawn to different periods in his dad’s oeuvre. It’s one of the ways he stays connected to his spirit.
“I feel like it’s more alive and he’s more alive when I keep selling the work,” he said. “It makes me really feel like he’s alive.”
