Artists fight for a fading way of life

PROVINCETOWN - Charles Hawthorne was in his 20s when he came to this remote fishing port, built a sturdy barn at the top of a steep sand dune, and established the Cape Cod School of Art, the first school in the country dedicated to the art of painting outdoors. The vibrant art scene that defines Provincetown grew from the school, which Hawthorne founded in 1899.

Generations of artists flocked there each summer to study with Hawthorne and the artists who later taught in his hilltop barn, including the influential modernist painter Hans Hofmann. Illustrator Norman Rockwell and abstract expressionists Franz Kline and Lee Krasner were among those shaped by lessons in the blazing light of the dunes.

The Hawthorne School of Art is now at risk of being swallowed by development. Since the death two years ago of artist Peter Gee a British-born colorist and the school's most recent head teacher, his widow, Olga Opsahl-Gee has faced mounting debts. She says she must sell the school that first gave the Cape its place in art history. With little time to make a deal and pay what she owes, she says she cannot hold out forever for a buyer who will preserve it.

News of the sale has sparked panic among those who love the school, where sandy paths meander through beach plum and blueberry bramble. One group of young artists is working to establish a nonprofit organization, the Hawthorne Revival Project, to raise money to buy all or part of the 3-acre campus. Other supporters are lobbying local and state leaders, searching for help in protecting the landmark property.

"Hawthorne went everywhere to find this light, the most intense light in the world, that artists have been trying to find since [Johannes] Vermeer," said Opsahl-Gee, referring to the Dutch painter who was revered for his treatment of light. Opsahl-Gee reopened the school with her husband in 1994, after it had been closed for 20 years. "That light still exists in this barn, on one of the highest sand dunes in Provincetown, and I don't know many places where it still exists . . . This situation is very serious, and everybody really cares, but no one has a solution."

Some school advocates say the furor over its future reflects renewed concern in Provincetown about surging development and other threats to the artistic heritage of eastern Cape Cod. Controversy erupted this summer in Truro over plans to build a 6,500-square-foot mansion in the middle of a rural landscape that had been depicted by realist painter Edward Hopper. In the spring, a group of Cape residents failed in their quest to secure better federal protection for a group of rustic shacks in Provincetown's sand dunes that have long been used by artists seeking solitude.

Concerned residents in Provincetown tick off a list of encroachments on the town's artistic legacy in recent years: the studio of modernist printmaker Blanche Lazell was torn down; a former home of playwright Eugene O'Neill was renovated and dramatically transformed. A barn on Pearl Street where Hawthorne's student Henry Hensche, an influential painter and teacher of color realism, instructed students for 50 years was sold and converted to condominiums after his successor ran out of money to keep up the property.

Stephen May, an independent art historian and specialist on American artists' studios, said such losses are common around the country.

"Americans knock themselves out to save writers' homes, but there's little sustained interest in saving places artists taught and painted," May said. "Surely a place where a visual artist created is at least as important, if not more so."

The barn on the Hawthorne School property was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, but school leaders say it is not protected against alterations by a private owner that could strip its character.

"Some people feel numb, because there's been so much overdevelopment already on the lower Cape," said Steve Jerome, an architectural historian and a friend of the Opsahl-Gee family. "They ask, 'Is there enough left to save?' And you look at the Hawthorne School and say, yes, there is, and isn't it about time?"

The property around the barn was 10 rolling acres when Opsahl and Gee bought it 25 years ago, but over time they sold off land to stay financially afloat. The remaining 3.3-acre property is for sale for $3.7 million, but it has also been divided into seven smaller parcels that can be bought separately, including the barn, priced at $1.2 million.

Opsahl-Gee's two sons grew up at the school. "It's hard to let go of," said the younger son, Harry Opsahl-Gee, 21, an artist and musician who lives in one of the tiny, studio sheds on the property.

Formal classes lapsed after the death of Peter Gee, who taught color theory, but young artists still gravitate to the school, where daily life is steeped in art history. Musicians jam on drums and keyboards in the barn, under high wooden rafters painted milky gray, in a space that has changed little in 100 years. Artists sculpt ceramics in a sandy hollow at the bottom of the dune, where Hawthorne taught painting classes, and old metal paint tubes still surface. Famed for the way he taught students to paint light, Hawthorne led classes on the beach. He trained his students to paint the bright highlights and deep shadows produced by the sun, instead of facial features, as a way of understanding color. His teachings, carried forward by his student Hensche, bridged Impressionism and abstract expressionism and influenced artists throughout the 20th century.

"Hawthorne's lineage was like a river flowing out into the delta, it touched so many painters' lives," said Josephine Del Deo, a Provincetown writer who has chronicled local art history and whose husband, painter Salvatore Del Deo, studied at the school. "The great significance of this barn is not just who was there, but this tradition, and the tradition needs material reference points, like the barn, to create a sense of place."

Because of rising real estate costs on the Cape, she said, the transfer of artistic traditions between generations "has almost been brought to a halt, because the young cannot live here."

One of the young artists who is raising money to save the school, Jason Lance Weisman, said he first learned about Hawthorne in his Boston art school classes and felt drawn to help when he heard about the sale.

"Artists need to find inspirational places to be, or nothing happens," he said. "We're running out of these places."

Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.