By Isabel Currier
From our June 1972 Issue
Bernard Langlais has earned his secure place in the top rank of Maine artists by living and working in a wonderland of his own creation. Today, his works are among the most sought-after in the state, and Langlais has been the recipient of a flood of honors — the latest of which was the just-announced award of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Most of these tributes came to him after he’d planned and produced a series of distinctive works of art for the sheer joy of creating them.
Having acquired in 1966 an 80-acre farm in Cushing, about three miles from Thomaston, Langlais proceeded to adorn house and outbuildings — as well as the surrounding land — with an array of gargantuan wood reliefs and three-dimensional sculptures that comprise the most informal and probably the most memorable art gallery that viewers have ever seen. Although the effect has been a benign gesture towards the passing public, Langlais’s purpose was simply to experiment with gigantic wood sculptures now that he had ample space to do so.
The place had been a farm, long uncultivated, and the land looked lonesome without animals other than his own household pets — cats, a dog, a goat, and a pony. He’d been absorbed with wood reliefs, some so small as to be minute, and with “the life of its own” that wood displayed — dependent on texture, age, degree of weathering, and arrangement of grain. “All I really care about is work,” he said, “and being alone to do it. It’s a selfish point of view, but necessary to the artist, to whom work often is just thinking. Looking out of the windows and thinking, I had the notion of putting some larger-than-life farm animals on the side of the barn — sort of in memory of the creatures that once lived here, but also because I’d enjoy seeing them myself.”
He shrugged powerful shoulders and a characteristic smile of self-amusement lighted his usually grave, strongly determined features. “I love animals,” he said, half-defensively. “The thing grew as I realized that I could have any kind of animal that ever roamed the earth — maybe some that never existed — on my farm if I wanted. But I often start a totally different work on impulse, just as a change of pace, so I’ve done people and other subjects in wood as well as animals. I use mostly Maine wood — pine and spruce — and who’s to say the sculptures aren’t as native to Maine as I am?”
First to catch the incredulous eyes of passers-by is a 13-foot-tall wooden horse which, at close view, is seen to be hobbled firmly in a cement base. Nearby is a massive group of football players tangled in a scrimmage that loses none of its vitality for being wooden. Flanking this group, a cluster of vertical poles match in size but are unrelated in the individual carvings and colors that embellish them.
It’s necessary to wander past all this, through the farmyard, to see the sculptures of sheep and cattle which, like the horses, are several times normal size. Some are placed as wood reliefs on the side of the barn. Between, behind, and on the buildings are also outsized elephants and giraffes, prehistoric creatures that defy identification, a family group of 14 monkeys, and an infinite variety of cats and birds. The latter range from small winged followers, at rest in the shadow of more mammoth sculptures, to a great eagle, with feathers formed of myriad and intricate bits of wood, outspread over a doorway.
The cats include the entire feline family: panthers, tigers, leopards, and lions, both in relief and in three dimensions. “I’ve done well over a hundred lions.” The self-mocking smile flashed again. “Perhaps because I was born under the sign of Leo the lion.” Langlais himself has a leonine mane of hair, now shot with gray, which won him the enduring nickname of “Blackie” in his Maine youth.
No two of Langlais’s legion of lions are identical: some are primitive in execution, some fantastic and humorous, and others abstract or classically representational. A crouching lion guards a path leading into the woods, and there is an impulse to cry a warning when a live pony emerges from the shade, brushes its flank carelessly against the lion’s glinting mane, then lazily forages the grass in front of the wooden menace. But the sense of phantasmagoria in this matchless wood-sculpted “zoo” becomes awesome in a magnificent relief of a jungle, inhabited by dozens of intertwined specimens of wildlife. A sculptured elephant bears a howdah into which people can — and do — climb for a better view of the incredible volume and variety of Langlais’s work. The elephant’s stomach also serves the artist as a storage space for wood or finished sculptures that should not be exposed to further weathering.
One extraordinary piece is a three-dimensional copy of the figure in the painting Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, a fellow resident of Cushing. “I did it because I thought it would be interesting to see Christina’s face. My friend Andy Wyeth said I should use the field across the road to display the sculpture in a closer semblance of the painting’s background, but I thought that would be too close to imitation.” Hence, the startling likeness of Christina, with her young features carved in wood, remains at home in the upper reaches of Bernard Langlais’s private world.
There are no signs to proclaim this exclusive territory, or to threaten trespassers, because Langlais’s live-and-let-live personality is more inclined to casual welcome than to posted threats. As the Langlais wonderland grew, so did the number of visitors, drawn by the astonishing display of art along an otherwise ordinary country road in coastal Maine. “I didn’t intend to make the place a museum, and of course it isn’t,” the artist said. “But I’d never forbid anyone to look around and I don’t bother those who want to do so. Generally, they don’t bother me because I do most of my work in the mornings and people, out for a drive, usually stop in the afternoons.”
Most visitors are hesitant and courteous; many are knowing followers of the arts, impressed by Langlais’s unique conceptions and mastery of a beautiful simplicity of treatment. Children are quick to recognize the unaffectedness of imagination made tangible at what some have called “the giant’s place” — an accolade to an artist whose love for children, though the Langlaises have none of their own, has inspired him to create sculptures upon which youngsters may climb and play.
Highly developed technician in the arts though he is, Langlais is never guided merely by craftsmanship, since he believes the essence of all beauty in art is to be achieved through simplicity. This concept matches Mr. Langlais’s personality, which is completely unaffected in its childlike candor. He is a man whom fellow Mainers would describe as “common,” in the complimentary sense of being without pretense or pose. His strong features are also gentle, almost wistful in repose, and the direct appraisal of his brown eyes might be disconcerting if it were not lightened by a smile that begins in his eyes. The artist’s soft voice is also sparing of speech: a stranger asking if it’s permissible to look at the sculptures might be answered with a monosyllabic, “Sure.” Nevertheless, Langlais has a flowing eloquence in discussing ideas, most of which he already seems to have accorded much thought.
That he is essentially a thoughtful man is revealed in his methods of work. His famous commission from the town of Skowhegan for the largest (62 feet) wooden Indian in the world was begun with weeks of research into the folkways of Maine Indians — although Langlais grew up in Old Town and had a neighborly knowledge of the Penobscots on Indian Island, some of whom were his classmates at school. Aided by the Maine Department of Indian Affairs, tribal historians on the Maine reservations, and Wendell Hadlock, director of the Farnsworth Art Museum, in Rockland, Langlais learned that all area tribes had been unwarlike fishermen and hunters before the colonists came. Hence, the Skowhegan Indian holds not a bow and arrow but a fishing net and a spear, and his dress is characteristic of his ancient tribe and its symbols.
The great wood Indian — and, in fact, all of Langlais’s immense sculptures — was made in sections to be disassembled for traveling to its permanent site. “I make nothing that I can’t handle alone,” Langlais said, “because most of my work has to travel to art shows or to purchasers.” Langlais has had 28 one-man shows and almost 40 displays in group shows during the past 10 years. These were held throughout Maine and New England and as far west as California. One required transporting his work to France for a show in Paris.
Commissions, of which Langlais has no less than six at the moment, have included such purchasers as a dozen or more leading American museums, the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens, and knowing private art collectors: Nelson and David Rockefeller, Richard Saltonstall, Robert Montgomery, and Willard Cummings, among many others.
Currently, Mr. Langlais is particularly happy in taking the component parts of his finished sculptures on their journeys himself. After his 50th birthday, he decided to buy a success symbol — the first brand-new automobile he’d ever owned. It’s a new Chevrolet station wagon. “The carrier on the top is extra,” he said. “Handy for toting my work around.”
Born on July 23, 1921, Bernard Langlais was the oldest of 10 children. His father had settled in Old Town as a carpenter, so that wood, which was to become Bernard’s ultimate artistic medium, certainly was important in his background. His mother, who came from Canada and is still living at the family home in Old Town, insisted that her oldest son must go to high school, but Bernard was far from happy in following her wishes. He wanted to be an artist from as early as he can remember, and there were no art classes at Old Town High, though the four years became endurable to him through woodworking classes. “I could hardly wait to finish school and get out of Maine,” he recalled.
One reason for this urgency was his youthful sensitivity to a certain prejudice against French-Canadians, from which he suffered during school years. “I developed such a mental block against speaking French that I couldn’t remember a word of the language for years after I’d left Old Town.”
He headed for Washington and the Corcoran School of Art to pursue his modest ambition of becoming a commercial artist, earning his way by a variety of odd jobs usually sought by struggling young artists. Then World War II interrupted his study with a six-year hitch in the U.S. Navy, during which Bernard painted decks and equipment as well as portraits and “just about anything that would make a picture.” He also lost his trauma against his parents’ mother tongue during the war. While in European waters, French films were often shown aboard ship to entertain the men. “Nobody jeered or belittled the language, and first thing I knew I was translating for the other boys. I’ve been proud of being bilingual ever since.”
Back at the Corcoran School after his discharge, Langlais won a summer scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. The heady air of his homeland, along with the enthusiastic encouragement of Willard Cummings, founder of the Skowhegan School, diverted his path into serious art for its own sake. After the first summer at Skowhegan, he entered Brooklyn Museum Art School on a scholarship, returned to Skowhegan for another summer, then spent two years as an art student in Paris under the G.I. Bill. A Fulbright Scholarship for two more years of study in Norway completed his formal training.
Meanwhile, Langlais had met a young student of singing named Helen Friend in New York City, who interested him particularly and who happened to hail from Skowhegan, Maine. They married while he was studying in Norway and, on their return, purchased a summer cottage in Maine and adopted the habit of coming home every summer. Since they settled permanently in Cushing, Mrs. Langlais — also a lover of children — teaches the first two elementary grades in the local school.
At the time he returned from Norway, Langlais had a growing reputation as an abstract painter, both in oils and in watercolors. But the house they’d bought in Maine was in sad disrepair and Langlais — who had worked as a carpenter (also as a post-office clerk, apartment painter, and printer during the lean years) — undertook to restore it himself. The process of renovating left a lot of scrap wood on his hands, and, thriftily, the artist began to fashion bits and pieces into wood reliefs. Naturally given to experimentation, he suddenly found wood a more meaningful and intimate medium for artistic expression than paint and canvas ever had been. The 12 years he’d devoted to painting now seemed an apprenticeship that had led him to a far more creative and versatile means of bringing a sense of life to his ideas. He became enchanted by the different effects to be obtained from bits of wood that were new or rotted, stained or burned, painted or lacquered, and, above all, weathered.
Back in New York that winter, the Langlaises rented a studio over a lumberyard, where again he had access to scraps with which to continue his experiments. His wood reliefs were shaped and nailed or glued to a wooden backing an inch or two thick. Through the years he has developed so great a variety of techniques that it is difficult to describe his general process. He tries to work with natural wood and let it acquire a patina by weathering. If the effect he is aiming for doesn’t work, he might achieve it by staining or bleaching, burning with a blowtorch — or even by coloring with paint as a last resort. All of the sculptures designed for outdoor showing (the Skowhegan Indian, for example) are preserved by methods basically similar to those used for telephone poles (creosote) or boats (varnishes or lacquers).
After that first year of intense work with his new materials, Langlais had a one-man show of wood reliefs in a New York gallery that resulted in his work being snapped up by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other buyers.
“I became a scavenger of wood, just as my mother is a scavenger of wool for braiding rugs or knitting garments.” Now that he’s permanently back home in Maine, Langlais roams the shore for driftwood, haunts lumber yards for scraps and shavings, and has made countless friends who bestow wood on him through the sheer excitement of wanting to see what Langlais will do with it. Once a stranger came to his door with a chunk of teak. Another time a boatyard sent a wooden mold which had been used in constructing a fiberglass yacht, and Langlais turned it into the basis of his Noah’s Ark. He has made a beautifully artistic whale out of toothpicks and the mane of one of his many lions was achieved with chips of wood.
The artist never knows what new piece of sculpture or wood relief he may make until he sees the wood and begins working it. His one great conscious purpose is to avoid cleverness, repetition, or imitation. Within the Langlais workshop and inside his home are works of art so varied that one wonders how this shaggy man with the unhurried movements has been able to produce so much and in such size.
During one period when he was sculpting portraits in wood, he did a notable head of Charles de Gaulle, not flattering to the late premier of France, but instantly recognizable. Langlais’s droll creations are as numerous as his dramatic ones, yet he has never planned a deliberately humorous piece. It happens that his own omnipresent humor, as irrepressible as his constant need to work, may take over and turn a work in hand into understated drollery.
Occasionally, his self-jesting becomes the perfect retort to an insensitive visitor, fortunately a rare type. Recently, a man he’d never seen before wandered among the dooryard sculptures, staring with a mixture of disinterest and superiority. He saw the artist at work through the open shop door and asked impertinently, “What do you call this place anyway?”
Langlais allowed himself a moment’s thought, then replied softly, “Home.”
Bernard Langlais continued making art until his death, in 1977. When his wife, Helen, died in 2010, their estate, including the Cushing property, was bequeathed to the Colby College Museum of Art. In 2015, the Georges River Land Trust acquired the property and opened it to the public two years later. A graveled quarter-mile path winds past the dozen remaining giant sculptures, including the inaugural horse and Christina Olson. An interactive map details the locations of other Langlais works throughout the state.
