As a curatorial assistant at the Colby College Museum of Art in 2007, she’d worked with some of his abstract works for a show there. Later she’d used Langlais’s (pronounced “Lang-lee”) work in graduate school projects at Boston University. But when Blunt moved into the late artist’s farmhouse on the Maine coast two years ago, charged with taking stock of the estate left to the College, she was bowled over.

Langlais Curator for Special Projects Hannah Blunt, with the sculpture Local Girl (Christina Olson), 1968. Langlais Estate, Cushing, Maine.

And now that work is out into the world.

The work of the iconic Maine artist, best known for his massive wooden sculptures of animals, was left to Colby by his widow, Helen Friend Langlais, who died in 2010. In addition to the art, the gift included the couple’s waterfront property in the coastal town of Cushing.

Bernard Langlais, Auk, 1977, painted wood, 49 1/2 x 13 1/2 x 28 inches. Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Bernard Langlais.

The gift presented both an opportunity and a challenge for Colby, which was not equipped to oversee a collection of monumental sculptures and acreage 50 miles from campus. At Blunt’s suggestion, the College teamed up with Kohler Foundation of Wisconsin and Georges River Land Trust to preserve Langlais’s legacy.

Colby will keep about 175 works, many of which will be part of a Langlais exhibition at the Colby museum opening July 19. While some works were consigned for sale, the vast majority were given to Kohler Foundation, which is preserving and distributing Langlais art throughout Maine and beyond (see sidebar). The land trust will own the 90-acres of fields and woodland, which will include a park featuring some of Langlais’s totem-like sculptures.

For Blunt, the disposition of the estate is the end of a process that began as she explored the overgrown fields, barns, and storage buildings on the Cushing property. Langlais’s home-built studios were intact, with his tools in place and some uncompleted works unchanged since the time of the artist’s death in 1977.

“When he was alive and working, nothing was ever really finished,” she said. “It was this kind of work in progress. He’d place it on a building or outside and then he’d move it. If you look at photographs of the property, things are moved around all the time. It was this dynamic ongoing process.”

The creative process was ongoing, but Langlais had found his final canvas—the farm overlooking St. George River. It was a journey that began in Old Town, Maine, north of Bangor, where he grew up.

The son of a carpenter, Langlais moved to Washington, D.C., after high school in 1940 intending to become a commercial artist. After six years in the Navy during World War II, he studied painting at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. Langlais then moved to New York City and quickly passed through several then-emerging genres, including cubism and abstract expressionism. But it was wood that inspired him, and his wooden abstract reliefs vaulted him into fast artistic company. Langlais was given a solo show by the Leo Castelli Gallery, which launched the careers of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others. “He got hot very fast, and the fame and limelight took its toll on him,” said Blunt, who has written an essay on Langlais for a catalogue to accompany the Colby show. “He was thrust into this world of parties and social pressures.”

Bernard Langlais, Horse, 1966. This massive sculpture, which overlooks the road in front of the Langlais farm, is a landmark in midcoast Maine.

And as quickly as his star rose, it began to fall. Langlais began doing figurative, representative sculptures, rather than abstract work—taboo in the art circles of the time. The couple began spending more and more time at a summer cottage in Cushing. In 1966 they bought the adjacent farm and left New York behind.

Langlais, Blunt said, turned away from the trends in the art of his time and followed what she describes as “the pull of Maine.” Instead of the galleries and parties in New York, he spent his time in the workshop behind the Cushing farmhouse and in the rustic studio above it, with its wood-burning stove.

“He made this splash, did something very innovative,” Blunt said. “He was very of the moment in what he was creating, relating to other trends going on around him. And rather than getting caught up in that and feeding off of the celebrity status and creating work that people wanted him to continue to make, he followed his instincts. What was important to him in being an artist was continuing to make work that interested him.”

Though Langlais continued to show his work, his audience changed, as did his subjects. The farm was home to livestock and cats and dogs, and soon his imaginative wooden representations as well. The new work was dismissed in art circles as folksy and craftsmanlike, but Langlais, settled into his life as artist/farmer in small-town Maine, paid no regard to the critics.

His decision to follow his internal muse is what makes his work distinctive—and worth continued study, she said. “I think the thing that’s exciting about him—and the thing that people maybe haven’t recognized until now and we are trying to present in this exhibition and this catalogue project—is that the seeds of that were there from the beginning. There’s this thread to follow, that that’s where he ended up, surrounded by his art and integrating his art with his life, really living in a place that was connected to his roots. You can see that thread running though from very early on.”

Tools used by sculptor Bernard Langlais in his studio workshop in Cushing, Maine.

That was one of the reasons Colby, beginning with former museum director the late Hugh Gourley, was so interested in Langlais’s body of work.

Living in the Langlais home, and spending long days sifting through the barns and workshops, dusty boxes, and drawers, gave Blunt an understanding of Langlais’s vision, she said. “I did have a lot of dreams about him. When you’re thinking about somebody all day every day, surrounded by his life’s work, it sort of gets inside of you.”

She also came to appreciate and admire Helen Langlais, who saw the significance of her husband’s contribution and spent decades working tirelessly to preserve his legacy. That effort, Blunt concluded, is in some ways just as remarkable as Langlais’s accomplishments.

Helen Langlais, she said, kept meticulous notes and records of life at the farm, including an episode in the 1990s in which she and others were preparing a sculpture of a dog for transportation to an exhibit.

“They turned it over,” Blunt said, “and a wooden bone fell out of its mouth, a bone he had stuck inside. There he was, popping up fifteen years after his death.”

Helen Langlais wrote, “One of his plans to amuse and delight us.”

Amusement and delight, say all concerned with this effort, will continue far and wide, for many years to come.

Colby College Museum of Art, Photo © trentbellphotography

From the Drawing Board to the People of Maine

More than 3,000 works of art, some of them weighing tons and standing 20 feet tall. Ninety acres of land, an hour from Colby. And all of this from an artist whose outdoor sculpture is a landmark—figuratively and literally—in the state of Maine.

The gift of the estate of Helen Langlais, widow of artist Bernard “Blackie” Langlais, was both a tremendous opportunity for the Colby College Museum of Art and a monumental challenge—met and then some by a collaboration among Colby, the Georges River Land Trust, and Kohler Foundation, which specializes in art preservation. “This was not a solution that anybody could identify straight out of the gate,” said Sharon Corwin, director of the Colby museum. “It took us a long time talking about what each institution brings to this.”

After nearly three years of hard work, the three entities ultimately brought a lot. Colby kept 178 Langlais works for its collection. The land trust will take ownership of the land and the Langlais home on the Cushing peninsula, on Maine’s midcoast, and will oversee a sculpture park there. Kohler Foundation, based in Wisconsin, undertook the ongoing process of preserving the Langlais work and distributing it to 50 recipients around Maine and three in other states. Colby will provide an online map of “the Langlais trail,” to guide those interested in the artist’s work.

“It’s in middle schools; it’s in libraries; it’s in community centers,” Corwin said. “In many ways it was the greatest thing we could have hoped for.”

The mandate was to give Langlais back to the state he loved and chose as the subject and backdrop for much of his life’s work. Kohler Foundation, which has preserved art and art environments around the country, had barely put the word out when requests from Langlais fans came flooding in.

“We did not actively go out and pursue anyone. Everyone came to us,” said Kohler Foundation Director Terri Yoho. “That was quite unusual.”

Another first was the land trust’s decision to take ownership of a property that integrates art with landscape, a concept that became more complex (Colby agreed to maintain the nine sculptures remaining in Cushing and endow the upkeep of the art there) as discussions continued. “It was certainly a leap, but we didn’t walk away,” said Annette Naegel, conservation program manager for the land trust. “We wanted to stay in the conversation.”

In the end, keeping that conversation going was crucial to the project’s success, Corwin said. After months and even years of talking to different organizations around the state, the players emerged, she said. And the three persevered until a workable plan emerged.

“We went into it thinking of what would be best for Langlais’s legacy,” Corwin said. “What would Helen want? How could this state benefit more broadly from this incredible resource? That’s part of what guided us and kept us fighting.”
She credited all of the parties for pressing on despite obstacles and no obvious answers to the challenges posed.

Said Corwin, “That they found a creative solution and the outcome was so successful—Hannah and I still pinch ourselves.”