Braving a Storm
John Worthington Gregory’s 1935 lithograph, Storm Over Provincetown, depicts several small homes in a village being threatened by lightning and an impending torrent. The winding dirt road bends inwards, carrying a solitary figure back toward shelter—along with a viewer’s eye. High levels of contrast in the piece serve to dramatize the moment, where some portions are cast in bright light and others shrouded in deep shadows. There is also a stark difference in its forms: the houses and human figure appear to be unmoored amidst the tumultuous landscape, both storm clouds and the ground itself swirling like a body of water, casting things about. As in Stephen R. Ronay’s The Life Boat, a theme of finding safety during a storm evokes the felt experience of 1930s America. Gregory returned to the theme of safe haven in a similar 1938 lithograph titled Just a Crooked House at Twilight—Provincetown.
The New England coast along Cape Cod was a region known for extreme weather and catastrophic events; it also had an unusually strong community of artists called the Provincetown Art Colony, with more than 300 artists and students traveling there by 1915 (Ahrens). Depression-era art by Gregory and others shown below, all of whom received FAP support, evoked a variety of chaos that struck at everyday life. Using their regional vernacular, Cape Cod artists pictured storms that may have looked very different elsewhere, but were all encompassed by the same national conditions. Gregory’s glimpse of Provincetown alludes to some prior activity, but we seem to have just missed it; we are left to wonder how everyone else is dealing with the storm. Whereas large scale WPA murals were filled with bodies, easel art and prints could better match the scale of private lives among the public it was being created for—those small, lighted windows implying lives inside the houses. Although today his name may have been swept along in the current of history, Gregory’s art was and continues to be a staple in the Provincetown community and speaks to the unifying and comforting qualities of New Deal artists’ work, during a time in which it was desperately required. To borrow the title of his1937 self-portrait: “A Work of Art is the Trace of a Magnificent Struggle.”
Works Consulted
-- Ahrens, Nyla. Provincetown: The Art Colony; A Brief History and Guide. 2000. Link
-- Wood, Muriel. “Cape Cod’s ‘Rembrandt.’” Yankee 18.8 (Aug. 1954): 64-66. Link