The wine dark sea

The beach was an important place of inspiration to Loren MacIver and her husband Lloyd Frankenberg, especially in the 1930s, as they began to regularly spend their summers in Cape Cod starting in 1931. Frankenberg’s 1960 story, Yellow Season, details the summers (and one harrowing winter) they spent together in the little hut they built out of driftwood in Truro, Cape Cod.

MacIver’s painting of this house, called Shack, was part of her first major sale. It was one of two paintings purchased by Alfred Barr, then director of the Museum of Modern Art, in 1934.

In the late 1930s the two also began making summer visits to Key West, guided by their good friend and supporter Louise Crane. It was there, in the summer of 1939, that they were introduced to Elizabeth Bishop, with whom they would remain lifelong friends.

Shack, 1934, oil on canvas, 20 1/8 x 24", MoMA
This painting is thought to be one of the first by a woman in the MoMA permanent collection, and shows a distorted, dream-like perspective similar to what we see in the work of the surrealists. Shack presents all four walls and the floor of the structure in a two-dimensional view. We see the sparse furnishings of the shack—namely just a small bed, and the various bits and bobs which line the shelves, as well as the view out the window and door looking out to the ocean. On all four sides of the shack the sand dissolves into beachy grasses, which in turn melt into sea and sky, capturing the dreamy essence of MacIver’s Cape Cod world.

Loren and Lloyd's Hut
The shack that Loren and Lloyd made out of driftwood in Truro, Cape Cod. One of several photographs I discovered in the archive in negative form, this and the following photographs have no written date, but they were taken sometime between 1931 and 1940.

Untitled (Provincetown), ca. 1937-1939, watercolor on paper, 11 1/2 x 14 1/4", Alexandre Gallery
This drawing is one of several from this period done using charcoal and vibrant watercolor, which twist and turn everyday scenes into surreal, disjointed collections of color and line.

Elizabeth Bishop's House, 1939, watercolor and ink on paper, 11 1/4 x 13 3/4
Done also in the charcoal and watercolor style which MacIver gravitated towards during this period, this drawing shares, through a collection of distorted details spread throughout the interior of Elizabeth Bishop's Key West home. This drawing was completed in 1939, the same summer that MacIver met Elizabeth Bishop when introduced in Key West by their mutual friend Louise Crane.

"Summers we went to the Cape. Usually summer began for us on the first warmish day in April. There we lived on the twenty-five dollars a month we had scraped together. Where we were, behind East Harbor, was called “the backside.” We were across from North Truro on the bayside, then sparsely settled and without stores. For supplies, we crossed the dunes diagonally for about three miles to the paved road that led, two miles further, into Provincetown. Sometimes we got hitches along this stretch, but mostly we walked the five miles both ways. On the return we were loaded down by knapsacks bulging with food that would last us for three or four days."
Lloyd Frankenberg, Yellow Season, 1960 — Crossing the Dunes, 1933, pastel on paper, 23 x 17", Alexandre Gallery
"Summers we went to the Cape. Usually summer began for us on the first warmish day in April. There we lived on the twenty-five dollars a month we had scraped together. Where we were, behind East Harbor, was called “the backside.” We were across from North Truro on the bayside, then sparsely settled and without stores. For supplies, we crossed the dunes diagonally for about three miles to the paved road that led, two miles further, into Provincetown. Sometimes we got hitches along this stretch, but mostly we walked the five miles both ways. On the return we were loaded down by knapsacks bulging with food that would last us for three or four days." Lloyd Frankenberg, Yellow Season, 1960

Side of the hut with dunes in background

MacIver on the front step of her and Lloyd Frankenberg's driftwood shack

Seascape

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

This celestial seascape, with white herons got up as angels,
flying high as they want and as far as they want sidewise
in tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections;
the whole region, from the highest heron
down to the weightless mangrove island
with bright green leaves edged neatly with bird-droppings
like illumination in silver,
and down to the suggestively Gothic arches of the mangrove roots
and the beautiful pea-green back-pasture
where occasionally a fish jumps, like a wildflower
in an ornamental spray of spray;
this cartoon by Raphael for a tapestry for a Pope:
it does look like heaven.
But a skeletal lighthouse standing there
in black and white clerical dress,
who lives on his nerves, thinks he knows better.
He thinks that hell rages below his iron feet,
that that is why the shallow water is so warm,
and he knows that heaven is not like this.
Heaven is not like flying or swimming,
but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare
and when it gets dark he will remember something
strongly worded to say on the subject.

I selected this poem by Elizabeth Bishop to accompany this theme not only because of the direct references to visions of the sea in art and literature, but also because it shows the way in which summers at the beach played a formative role in the creative work of both Bishop and MacIver. Like Provincetown, Key West, where Bishop often summered, was a crucial hub of creative discovery and expression for American artists and poets throughout this period. “Seascape” captures, much like MacIver’s “Crossing the Dunes,” the ways in which the sea functions in these summers away as not only as the backdrop to a blissful, summer getaway, but also as a source of deep reflection on the philosophy and aesthetics of life.