Philip Barter: Forever Maine highlights a choice selection of masterful works that reflect Barter’s increasingly abstract inclinations in depicting Maine landscapes, from the coastal estuaries and blueberry barrens of Washington and Hancock counties to the western mountains and lakes, and north to Hartley’s iconic Mount Katahdin. Barter also explored the world beyond Maine, painting in Spain, Newfoundland, Greenland, the American Southwest, and elsewhere, employing a palette as bold as his vision of his surroundings. Of his narrative paintings Barter says, “The narratives I paint are historical documents of the characters of Maine and the places they frequent, a roguishly, independent people whom I seek out, and try to be with, and who make this place I know the one-of-a kind place it is—forever Maine. When, in his twenties, Philip Barter (b. 1939) discovered Marsden Hartley, he felt a calling: to further the vision of the great American modernist. This was an ambitious undertaking for a brash, self taught artist from Boothbay, Maine, but Barter’s passion for Maine and its fiercely independent people gave his work a unique, unencumbered vision. Barter was prolific, and he spent a half-century painting the landscape of his home state, becoming the “painter laureate” of the region.
In Philip Barter: Forever Maine, award-winning author Carl Little traces the painter’s life from a formative trip to California in the 1960s; to downeast Maine where Barter and his wife, Priscilla, made a life immersed in art for themselves and their seven children; to critical acclaim for Barter in the 1990s and his most recent paintings from 2016 and 2017.
By the early 1990s Barter had come into his own. In a review of a Barter retrospective at the Bates College Museum of Art in 1992, Maine Times critic Edgar Allen Beem noted the painter’s progress “toward a more idealized vision of the northern landscape, a vision tempered by the spiritual simplicity of Arthur Dove and the physical simplicity of Milton Avery.” The Farnsworth Museum and Portland Museum of Art also acquired Barter’s work. He was the subject of a feature profile in Down East magazine and went national when, in January 1995, Tim Sample highlighted his life in art in one of his “Postcards from Maine” segments on the CBS Sunday Morning program hosted by Charles Kuralt.
