Robert Hamilton | Paper Moon

Robert Hamilton: Paper Moon

by Suzette McAvoy

You say it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me

One of the most idiosyncratic and noteworthy artists of post-War American art, Robert Hamilton (1917-2004) taught painting and drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design for thirty-four years. Yvonne Jacquette, Richard Merkin, George Lloyd, and Dean Richardson were some of his many students. For Hamilton, who flew over 100 missions in WW II as a P-47 fighter pilot, earning him the Distinguished Flying Cross, the picture plane was a stage for depicting invented narratives brimming with humor, pathos, and an unquenchable zest for life. His experiences during the war profoundly influenced the imagery in his paintings, which often feature figures from history and from art, bon vivant characters and animals, blithely enjoying life and defying the inevitability of death.

Trained academically at RISD as an undergraduate before the War, Hamilton studied under John Robinson Frazier, whom he called “one great teacher.” Frazier, he said, “taught Eakins,” and Hamilton’s early paintings reveal his adeptness at figurative realism. Returning from Europe after the War, Hamilton was recruited to teach at the college beginning in 1948. “I got on a train and went to Providence,” he later recounted. “I took a look at myself, and I knew there was no point in being Eakins or John Singer Sargent. I had to be anything else. Since I was crazy about Jazz from the minute I heard it in the 1930s, I knew that the life of Jazz was spontaneity and improvisation. I said to myself...your pictures have got to be spontaneity and improvisation.”

Coming of age aesthetically at the height of Abstract Expressionism, Hamilton was keenly aware of the movement and while he embraced its general tenets, “I couldn’t let go of certain objectives, like a consistent light, and objectives like balance of volumes, balance of form, and negative space.” He was drawn instead

to the figurative abstraction of Francis Bacon, who was “the truest improvisor in my view.” He also admired the work of Max Beckmann, “the absolute top influence,” whose paintings taught him “there’s nothing in the world that brings color to life like a big whack of black next to it...black is what makes his color so delicious, so juicy, so wonderful.”

During the 1950s and 60s, Hamilton exhibited widely at galleries and museums in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, and elsewhere, and in 1974, he was artistin-residence at the American Academy in Rome. By this time, he had established a particular, individualistic method of painting that he essentially followed for the remainder of his career. “When anything became possible, and the future opened right up, was when I found a system of putting down a lot of exciting abstract expressionist paint and covering it up with a coat of lamp black, and then, uncovering, and when I uncovered it, after a while, it looked like something.” Using the side of his hand as a squeegee, followed by brushes, and sometimes paper towels to imprint a delicate pattern, Hamilton coaxed figures, settings, and action out of the blackness and the recesses of his consciousness.

Theatrical and cinematic in scope, each composition, ranging in scale from 16 inches square to more than six by eight feet, functions as a stage, “a place for something to occur...little pictorial events, little plays.” References to art history, his favorites were Piero della Francesca and Velázquez, popular culture, Jazz, sports, comics, especially Krazy Kat and Little Nemo in Slumberland, and his war experiences abound. Stalag Luft III, the prisoner-of-war camp that held captured Western Allied air force personnel, and the subject of the film The Great Escape, makes repeated appearances. As does the artist’s snub-nosed P47 Thunderbolt, both in its “serious” form, and later, “before I knew it, it was a toy...zipping along a few feet above the ground.”

In his characteristic make-do fashion, Hamilton mostly used house paint from the local hardware store, stretching his own canvases or more often working on Masonite panels. He fabricated and painted his own bespoke frames, adding a Baroque, old-world flair to his dreamlike compositions. In the late 1970s, he largely withdrew from the art world, choosing to exhibit his work primarily at The Octagon, an eight-sided gallery he built on his property in Port Clyde, Maine, where he and his family had spent summers since the 1950s, and where he lived full-time after retiring from RISD in 1981.

“What neither he nor anyone familiar with his work could have predicted was how much his paintings now strongly resonate with the current contemporary art scene, including the work of such interiorizing, untamed, new imagist painters as Amy Bennett, Katherine Bradford, and Peter Doig,” wrote Chris Crosman, former director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in 2020. Crosman, who knew Hamilton personally, organized one of the artist’s last institutional exhibitions at the Farnsworth in 1999. Fiercely independent and battling reduced vision from macular degeneration in his later years, Robert Hamilton adopted the motto, “If you’re falling off a cliff, you might as well try to fly, you have nothing else to lose—I love that, I’ll be passing that on.”

Note: All quotes by the artist from Robert Hamilton: Maine Master (2001; 27 min.) documentary film, Kane Lewis Productions and the Union of Maine Visual Artists.

Like spindrift blowing across an ocean ledge in Muscongus Bay, his was a world of shifting, floating recollection, never to be fixed or finished, warning of unfathomed depths and pulling, cross-tidal currents.

The work of Robert Hamilton has rightly been called “the best kept secret in Maine.”

—Chris Crosman

Robert Hamilton, Dream ’44, 1991, Oil on canvas, 29 × 39 ¼ in.

Robert Hamilton

Born 1917, Seneca Falls, New York; died 2004, Port Clyde, Maine

Professor of Painting, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, 1948-1981

Artist in Residence, American Academy, Rome Italy, 1974

Rhode Island School of Design, BFA, 1947

Captain, United States Air Force, fighter-bomber pilot, 1943-1945

Art Students League, New York, NY, 1940

Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, 1935-1939

selected exhibitions

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2026

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME, 2011

St. Gaudens Memorial, Cornish, NH, 2005

BigTown Gallery, Rochester, VT, 2005

Leighton Gallery, Blue Hill, ME, 2001

Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI, 1999

Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 1999

Frick Gallery, Belfast, ME, 1994

Icon Gallery, Brunswick, ME, 1990, 1995, 1997

Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI, 1986, 1994, 1997, 1999

Lily Iselin Gallery, Providence, RI, 1982

Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA, 1966, 1968, 1969

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1967

DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, 1961, 1963, 1964

Kanegis Gallery, Boston, MA, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962

A.D. White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1960

University of Illinois National, Urbana-Champaign, IL, 1959, 1960

Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, 1959

Cambridge Art Association, Boston, MA, 1958

permanent collections

The David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI

M.I.T. List Art Center, Cambridge, MA

DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Tougaloo College Art Collections, Tougaloo, MS

Ewing Gallery of Art & Architecture, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, TN

Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME

Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME

Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI

grants

Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation

Pollock-Krasner Foundation