Provincetown patroness of art
“Mary Heaton Vorse” (maquette, mixed media), by Penelope Jencks, in the show “Mary’s Friends: An Artists Renunion,’’ at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown, Mass., through Aug. 7
The gallery explains:
“Mary Heaton Vorse (1874-1966) was a journalist, labor organizer, war correspondent and arts patron, co-founding the Provincetown Players, and donating her old fishermen’s tackle house on Cape Cod Bay in 1915 as a home for their plays. Penelope Jencks is an internationally renowned sculptor, commissioned over the years to create numerous portraits, including those of Eleanor Roosevelt, Serge Koussevitsky, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, and Seiji Ozawa.
“In her book Time and the Town Mary Heaton Vorse writes about the fascinating and very different schools of art in Provincetown in the early 20th Century — Traditionalists and Modernists She notes: ‘The profound gulf between the two schools in Provincetown is so deep that the respective members fight freely together, pound tables, and even heads...The old school shouts the loudest, but the new school flies its nose highest.”