David who? Milne at the Met.

Some artists' work, like certain wines or cheeses, doesn't travel. Why is unclear, although it seems to have less to do with merit than with such intangibles as connections, relationships with dealers and collectors, self-presentation, the state of the art world, and national interest. Even in today's apparently borderless world of websites and assiduously attended art events in places you have to look up in your atlas, there are still artists, however celebrated at home, whose reputations remain local. David Milne, an inventive modernist painter whose career spanned roughly the first half of the twentieth century, is a case in point. In his native Canada, he is a major force who figures prominently in any account of the country's art. His vibrant, pared-down landscapes, interiors, and still lifes are prized by Canadian museums; discerning collectors compete for them. Yet in the U.S., Milne's name elicits blank stares from just about everyone but specialists in the early years of American modernism, and some of them may look a little vague, too.

This is probably the place to admit that I am not entirely objective about this. For complicated reasons, my first curatorial position was at a Canadian museum--I was the only American on staff--with a couple of good Milnes. They captured my attention immediately because they were among the only works in the collection that had anything to do with the art history I had been taught at Barnard and Columbia. The reason for this, which makes Milne's insular reputation especially puzzling, is that he spent literally half his working life in New York State. Born in 1882 in a log cabin in a deeply rural part of Ontario, he moved to New York in 1903, aged twenty-one, and remained in the city until 1916, when poverty forced him and wife to move upstate, to Boston Corner, a small town in Columbia County. Milne lived there until 1929 when he returned to Canada. He spent a year or so in Toronto, from 1939 to 1940, but otherwise lived in a succession of small Ontario towns, in pursuit of Thoreau-inspired, rigorous isolation--more or less. He died in 1953, just short of his seventy-second birthday, in a part of the province only slightly less rural than where he was born. If you subtract Milne's roughly eighteen-month stint in the Canadian army (after the Armistice, from 1918--1919), which he spent painting battlefields--followed by a short stay in Ottawa--that works out to twenty-four years as an artist in the United States and twenty-four in Canada. Admittedly, Milne's countrymen took their own sweet time about acknowledging this gifted painter's importance. He spent most of his lifetime ignored by his compatriots, apart from a few dedicated patrons, but he now has the status of a national treasure. Why, when he is now acclaimed in Canada, is he all but unknown in the U.S., where he was formed as an artist?

It's not that Milne was peripheral during his American sojourn, particularly during his New York years. Soon after arriving in the city, he enrolled at the Art Students League to study painting and illustration, and stayed connected with the school for about three years. (His first training as an artist, before he left Canada, had been a correspondence course offered by a New York art school.) By 1909, he was exhibiting with some regularity and attracting a certain amount of favorable notice from New York reviewers, although he supported himself as a commercial artist, painting posters and sign cards for shop windows, and occasionally doing illustrations. It's clear from Milne's work of these formative years that he paid attention to whatever modernist art he could see in New York--at places like Stieglitz's gallery--yet even though many of the artists of the Stieglitz inner circle, such as Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Arthur Dove, were roughly his contemporaries, Milne never seems to have had any contact with them. Still, he was one of a small group of New York artists who submitted work to the hastily assembled selection committee of the American section of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art--the legendary Armory Show--and one of the very few chosen to exhibit work along with the invited Europeans and Americans. Milne showed two oils and three watercolors in the American section, in the company of such colleagues as Stuart Davis, William Zorach, and Marguerite Zorach.

Milne's work of the time was more daring than that of many of the other Americans selected by the last-minute jury. His watercolors, with their clear, brilliant hues, their detached spots of color, and their staccato rhythms, have little in common with--for example--Davis's dramatically lit, Ashcan School-type pictures. Milne seems closer to John Marin and Maurice Prendergast, both of whom were included as invited Americans in the Armory Show and with whom Milne exhibited in watercolor society shows in New York and Philadelphia. Milne shared Marin's interest in evoking the perceivable world in terms of simplified, economically suggested planes, although he never shattered forms as completely as the older painter did in his Cubist-inspired images. Milne's early affinities with Prendergast's brand of Yankee Fauvism are even more striking. Both men's paintings are notable for their briskness and brightness. Just as Prendergast did in his lively images of densely populated streets, parks, and beaches, Milne translated crowded cityscapes and urban landscapes into simplified, flattened patterns in which figures and setting become interchangeable--rhythmic dapples of clear color.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the young David Milne was very much part of the conversation about modernism that engaged his forward-looking American colleagues during his years in New York. That Milne was a player and not just a bystander was brought home vividly twenty years ago when he was included in an ambitious exhibition "The Advent of Modernism: Post-Impressionism and North American Art, 1900-1918," organized by the High Museum, Atlanta, which traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. But this was the last time Milne was seen in New York, apart from my having included him in a group show of landscape painting I selected for the Grace Borgenicht Gallery a few years later, until November 2005. Now, if you're curious about what Milne's work looks like, and you're not planning a trip to Canada any time soon, you can see "David Milne Watercolors: 'Painting Toward the Light,'" a fine, informative selection on view at the Metropolitan until the end of January 2006. (1) Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, and shown earlier this year at the British Museum, the show is a splendid introduction, nicely edited to emphasize the painter's strengths and downplay the more problematic aspects of his achievement.

At the Met, the exhibition begins, for the benefit of local audiences, with a selection of sparkling New York streetscapes, many of them of the immediate neighborhood of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, near the studio where Milne and a fellow artist ran a "showcard"--window sign--painting business. Carfare and Hastings's beaux-arts masterpiece, the New York Public Library, had recently opened, and Milne painted the vehicles (both horse-drawn and motorized), in front of the building, along with the crowds on the sidewalk and steps, and the elegant lions. He painted the interior of the library as well, and traveled to Coney Island and the Bronx to paint fantasy architecture and parks. In other vivid pictures, Milne turned rooftops, street corners, advertising posters, hansom cabs, and clusters of women in big hats into pulsing tapestries, woven out of broadly applied color, copious amounts of white paper, and fragments of line. These vibrant little paintings have echoes of Bonnard's and Vuillard's views of Paris streets, which date from about a decade earlier, but they are mostly about the energy and rawness of an American city. Everything in Milne's New York watercolors seems in flux, unstable, as if the patches of color might come loose from their moorings.

When Milne turned his attention to the world of nature in his park scenes or the landscapes he executed after his move to Boston Corner, the same pictorial energy obtains. Cursive "chains" of strokes, illuminated by abundant flickers of white paper, suggest the movement of light and air through leafy trees. The contrast between the low, densely wooded hills around Boston Corner and the region's large open farmland, fields, and ponds gave Milne one of his most potent motifs, and one that would recur throughout his career. By the time he moved to Boston Corner, Milne had detached line and color from description, and fused the two into his fundamental pictorial tool. Masses and planes are suggested by broad, repeated, detached colored lines that momentarily combine to create zones of unexpected hues, while reserved "lines" of white paper set up unifying rhythms. Milne seems to have learned from Matisse how to use large amounts of black, disembodied by "escapes" of white edges, to suggest brilliant light, although he is also capable of using untouched expanses of white paper to the same end. Sometimes, but not always, those expanses of white can stand for snow, just as those dry strokes of tawny red, dull green, and black can stand for autumn color--but don't count on it; Milne is never a literal painter.

Milne's lack of interest in the literal was, in fact, part of what ultimately assured his place in the Canadian pantheon, but initially it set him apart from most of his fellow artists north of the 49th Parallel, particularly from the locally acclaimed painters known as The Group of Seven. (There were more than seven of them, but that's another matter.) The Group of Seven's highly stylized studies of wind-gnarled pines, rugged rocks, and tangled underbrush, compounded of a rough and ready post-Impressionist touch, realist observation, heroic aspirations, and Art Nouveau design, had become Canada's "official" imagery. Milne's "cool" paintings, by contrast, offered a vision of the landscape, even after his return to Ontario, completely unlike that of the Group of Seven's muscular wilderness. That his images, no matter what their subject, were always both more restrained and more abstract than those of his enthusiastically received Canadian colleagues undoubtedly contributed to his lack of recognition during his lifetime. (His notorious thorniness probably didn't help, either.) Milne's sense of place was no less acute or deeply felt than the Group's, but it was always tempered by his sense of pictorial order and was transformed by his belief in the autonomy of the finished picture.

As installed in New York, "David Milne Watercolors" is weighted toward works made before the painter abandoned the U.S. to return to Canada--the selection varies at each showing--but it's clear that the modernist attitudes he adopted during his New York years affected him pretty well for life. This ability to extract long-term aesthetic benefit from even brief but significant encounters seems a phenomenon peculiar to Canadian artists, at least for Milne's generation and those immediately preceding or following. In spite (or because) of the lack of opportunities to see vanguard art in Canada and, until fairly recently, the difficulties of travel over daunting distances, a surprising number of good, independent-minded Canadian artists managed to sustain whole lifetimes of aesthetic commitment after fairly limited, but intense, direct experience of adventurous art. A few years of study in France, a year at the Art Students League, a season's study with Ozenfant, a week's trip to the Art Institute of Chicago provided foundations that allowed some of Milne's countrymen to forge, as he did, distinctive conceptions of what a work of art could be, quite independent of the artists who set the standard for Canadian painting in their time.

Which is not to say that Milne's work remained unchanged over the years. In a sense, the development of his painting suggested by the watercolors at the Met can be seen as paralleling his physical withdrawal from the world of adventurous art he had inhabited as a young man. As he retreated to more and more remote places, he retreated, to some extent, from the modernism of his youth. In his last years, he experimented with a loose, washy watercolor technique and a more naturalistic, sketchy approach seemingly at odds with the spare images that preceded them; line, once again, becomes descriptive, rather than an essential building block of these late pictures, although it remains a carrier of color. (There is, within this body of late works, a series of "fantasy" paintings, many with religious overtones, that the New York version of the show mercifully downplays.) But nothing about Milne or his art can be neatly categorized. Contradictions are at the heart of his life and his art. Despite his self-imposed distance from the art world, he maintained an impassioned correspondence about art with a few close friends. Even here, there are apparent inconsistencies. Milne's letters argue for the merits of Clive Bell and Roger Fry's ideas, yet he also admired John Ruskin, whom Bell and Fry loathed. Milne often spoke of the importance of a dispassionate view of nature in the making of art--a position that seems amply borne out by the cool, economical watercolors of his years at Boston Corner and his first years back in Canada--and frequently discussed the painter's need for distancing himself, both in order to experience what Bell called "aesthetic emotion" and to make images that would, in turn, produce that emotion in the viewer. But Milne was also a great admirer of Thoreau, whose transcendental view of nature precluded this kind of detachment. It's possible, in fact, to see Milne's evolution not as a withdrawal from modernism but as the gradual revelation of his mystical side, to the point where it overwhelmed all other concerns. Yet even this is not entirely accurate. Milne's energetic early pictures are too emotionally charged, some of his late ones too formally surprising, to accommodate this simplified view.

Seeing more Milnes might help make his personality as a painter clear and help to explain some of the inherent contradictions in his work, but for the time being, we'll have to make do with "David Milne Watercolors" and its well-illustrated, informative catalogue. The handsome volume brings together essays by half a dozen well-known Canadian art historians, all of whom have written extensively on Milne in other contexts--which gives you some idea of his importance north of the border. Together, the show and the catalogue are not only a useful introduction to a painter who deserves to be better known in the country where he worked for half his professional life, but they should also whet the appetite of anyone who pays attention. Maybe it's time for some ambitious museum to organize a really comprehensive overview of the early days of American modernism.

(1) "David Milne Watercolors: 'Painting Toward Fire Light'" opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on November 8, 2005 and remains on view through January 9, 2006.