August 14, 2003

100 Years Ago, When the Arts Found Woodstock

OODSTOCK, N.Y., Aug. 9 — What do Bob Dylan, Milton Avery and Chevy Chase have in common? All at one time or another hung out at Byrdcliffe, the original Woodstock arts colony.

Byrdcliffe began in 1903 when the son of a millionaire Yorkshire textile baron, Ralph Whitehead, and his American wife, Jane Byrd McCall, founded an art colony in the hills above Woodstock, intending to create a subsistence community of craftsmen. They made paintings, pottery, textiles, jewelry and furniture, and even dabbled in free love.

A century on, the town of Woodstock is celebrating Byrdcliffe's anniversary with a touring exhibition covering the early decades of the colony. The exhibition is produced by the Woodstock Guild, which owns and maintains the property in collaboration with Cornell University's Herbert F. Johnson Museum, and will travel to Cornell, the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, the Albany Institute of History and Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the New-York Historical Society.

"This is the first comprehensive exhibition organized by scholars to look at the art and history of Byrdcliffe," said Carla T. Smith, the executive director of the guild, who has been working on the show for almost six years. "Surprisingly, it's a story that not too many people know about."

By all accounts, Whitehead was an idealist. He studied at Oxford with John Ruskin and was influenced by William Morris, who believed that "the fault of modern society lay in the separation of work from joy, and of art from craft," as Harold Osborne, an art historian, put it. The solution: head for the hills, or at least somewhere conforming to the conditions best suited to good work in the arts as laid down by Ruskin in "Modern Painters." Basically, the place had to look like Tuscany.

After false starts in Italy, California and Oregon, Whitehead decided to try his luck in the Catskills. Beguiled by the area's natural beauty and proximity to New York, he bought 1,500 acres around Mount Guardian on the outskirts of Woodstock, a farming village. He called it Byrdcliffe, combining his wife's middle name, Byrd, and the second half of his middle name, Radcliffe.

The local farmers were more baffled than anything else by Whitehead's arrival, although the unpacking of a ceramic relief of the Virgin and Child (now above Whitehead's grave in the Woodstock Cemetery) created some consternation among anti-Catholic residents. They thought he was an emissary of the pope.

Whitehead dedicated his fortune to the colony, constructing around 40 chalet-style arts and crafts buildings in the first few years. He built an art school, a barn, a library, cottages for the staff, an inn for visitors and students (the fee was $5 a week), and his own house, White Pines, with a panoramic view of the Catskills. He also built Woodstock's first tennis court, for exercise was an important part of his philosophy.

Next he hired a group of like-minded teachers and craftsmen in various disciplines. Among them were Hervey White, a novelist and poet; Bolton Brown, an artist and professor of art at Stanford; and Bertha Thompson, a silversmith. He also attracted famous visitors to the new colony, like the suffragette and author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the naturalist John Burroughs and John Dewey.

Whitehead saw the community as a training ground for the future indoctrinators of alternative lifestyle philosophy. He was interested in having families come to the colony, where their children could live a healthy outdoor life and gain an aesthetic appreciation from an early age. He intended the community to become self-sufficient through the establishment of a working farm and the creation of well-made, attractive objects that could be sold in New York. Handmade furniture was to be the mainstay.

Byrdcliffe was also a haven for liberated artistic women. Encouraged to come to the colony by Whitehead and his wife, who was a painter and musician, women were involved in all aspects of colony life.

"The women of Byrdcliffe were among the first liberated women in America," said Les Walker, a local historian. "It was one of the few places creative women who didn't want to be housewives could go in those days."

Zulma Steele was the most impressive of the early Byrdcliffe painters. She came from New York as a student in 1903 and remained until 1928, living in a cottage with her friend Edna Walker.

But within a few years of its founding, the colony started to break apart. The furniture proved too time-consuming and costly to be commercially viable, and disagreements between Whitehead and others emerged over how the community should be run. Many artists left, setting up studios in Woodstock.

White, the novelist and poet, was among the first to leave. He went on to found his own art colony, Maverick, whose music festivals were precursors of sorts to the one in 1969 named for Woodstock but held at Bethel, N.Y..

Alf Evers, who is nudging 99 and is the author of the major history of Woodstock, attended many of the early Maverick festivals.

"There was a lot of drinking, mostly local cider, and men dressing up as women and women dressing up as men," he said. "One year I even saw a goat floating about with its horns painted blue."

There is a panoramic photograph of a Maverick party at the Center for Photography in Woodstock, one of the local stops for the centennial exhibition. It's a rousing picture of revelers in wigs and medieval dress, circa 1920.

Aside from furniture, architecture was Byrdcliffe's main artistic legacy. "Byrdcliffe architecture is unique in that it incorporates the ideals of both the British and American Arts and Crafts movements, with a bit of a Swiss-chalet influence thrown in," said Nancy Green, a curator of the exhibition with Tom Wolf. "If you think about what was being built in, say, Newport at the time, those mansions with all that marble and gilt — and Ralph probably could have afforded something like that — then you get a sense of just how radical Byrdcliffe was."

Despite the ravages of time, around 30 of the original cottages and studios are still standing. Two are in private hands; the rest are owned and maintained by the Woodstock Guild as accommodations for artists, musicians and writers. Right now, a Spanish theater troupe is here, along with several writers and artists.

The Woodstock Guild inherited Byrdcliffe in 1976 from Peter Whitehead, Jane and Ralph's son. Peter stayed on at Byrdcliffe after the death of his parents, renting out cottages and studios during the summer months for minimal amounts to artists, musicians and writers. Chevy Chase, Eva Hesse, Bob Dylan and Milton Avery were among the more famous tenants.

"Woodstock wouldn't be Woodstock without Byrdcliffe," Ms. Smith, the guild's executive director, said. "Byrdcliffe brought the first artists here, and although they might not have stayed very long at the colony, they came down the mountain into town and stayed, and brought more people here. It forever changed Woodstock."