“Maurice Prendergast” is the fifth exhibition of the artist’s work to have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in fifty-six years. Organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, this traveling show comprises sixty-eight watercolors, forty-eight oils, and nineteen monotypes, with alternates among the 129 catalogue entries shown at the four participating museums.[1] The catalogue[2] has been written by Nancy Mowll Mathews, Prendergast Curator at Williams, on the basis of research by the team of scholars working since 1983 on the Maurice and Charles Prendergast Systematic Catalogue Project, which has published a catalogue raisonné of the brothers’ work.[3]

The Whitney galleries, with their drab and temporary atmosphere, were reminiscent of the dismal environment in which the museum interred Demuth three years ago. Compared with the intimate setting created for Vuillard at the Brooklyn Museum, or how MOMA welcomed Matisse, the pictures looked warehoused, rather than thoughtfully installed. The labels provided no identification of the pristine frames created for those very works by Charles, always one of the enchanting grace notes of any Prendergast show. Concurrently, the Metropolitan devoted a gallery to a display of American frames, including one by Charles, and MOMAoffered an explanatory panel on the gray moldings Matisse specified for his Moroccan canvases. (It was Matisse himself who, among all the American artists he saw during his visits here, most admired Prendergast’s work.) But refinements such as these were of no concern to the Whitney overseers, for whom the