Art colony

Art colonies are organic congregations of artists in towns, villages and rural areas, who are often drawn to areas of natural beauty, the prior existence of other artists, art schools there, or a lower cost of living. They are typically mission-driven planned communities, which administer a formal process for awarding artist residencies. A typical mission might include providing artists with the time, space, and support to create, fostering community among artists, and providing arts education, including lectures and workshops.

Early 20th century American guest-host models include MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Two primary organizations serving artist colonies and residential centres are Res Artis in Amsterdam, and the Alliance of Artists Communities, in Providence, Rhode Island. Taiwan's Intra Asia Network is a less formal body working to advance creative communities and exchanges throughout Asia. Collectively, these groups oversee most of the world's active artists' colonies.

Some painters were renowned within artistic circles for settling down permanently in a single village, most notably Jean-François Millet at Barbizon, Robert Wylie at Pont-Aven, Otto Modersohn at Worpswede, Heinrich Otto at Willinghausen, and Claude Monet at Giverny. They were not necessarily leaders, although these artists were respected and held a certain moral authority in their respective colonies. There were also regular 'colony hoppers' who moved about the art colonies of Europe in a nomadic fashion. Max Liebermann, for instance, painted at Barbizon, Dachau, Etzenhausen and at least six short-lived Dutch colonies; Frederick Judd Waugh worked in Barbizon, Concarneau, Grèz-sur-Loing, St Ives and Provincetown in the United States; Evert Pieters was active at Barbizon, Egmond, Katwijk, Laren, Blaricum, Volendam, and Oosterbeek; Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes painted at Pont-Aven, Zandvoort, Newlyn and St Ives.

Art colonies initially emerged as village movements in the 19th and early 20th century. It is estimated that between 1830 and 1914, some 3,000 professional artists participated in a mass movement away from urban centres into the countryside, residing for varying lengths of time in over 80 communities. These colonies are typically characterized according to year-round permanence and population size. Thus, transient colonies had annually fluctuating populations of artists, often painters who visited for just a single summer season, in places, such as Honfleur, Giverny, Katwijk, Frauenchiemsee, Volendam, and Willingshausen. Semi-stable colonies are characterized by their semi-permanent mix of visiting and resident artists who bought or built their own homes and studios. Examples would include Ahrenshoop, Barbizon, Concarneau, Dachau, St. Ives, Laren, and Skagen. Finally, stable colonies are characterized by their large groups of permanent full-time resident artists who bought or built their own homes and studios, in places such as Egmond, Sint-Martens-Latem, Newlyn, and Worpswede.

While artist colonies appeared across Europe, as well as in America and Australia, the majority of colonies were clustered in the Netherlands, Central Germany, and France (encircling Paris). Overall, artists of thirty-five different nationalities were represented throughout these colonies, with Americans, Germans and British forming the largest participating groups. This gave socialising a cosmopolitan flavour: "Russia, Sweden, England, Austria, Germany, France, Australia and the United States were represented at our table, all as one large family, and striving towards the same goal," the painter Annie Goater penned in 1885 in an essay on her recent experiences at one French colony.

Villages can also be classified according to the nationalities they attracted. Barbizon, Pont-Aven, Giverny, Katwijk, Newlyn, and Dachau drew artists from around the world and had a pronounced international flavour. Americans were always a major presence at Rijsoord, Egmond, Grèz-sur-Loing, Laren, and St Ives; Grèz-sur-Loing went through a Scandinavian phase in the 1880s; and Germans were the largest group after the indigenous Dutch at Katwijk. On the other hand, foreigners were rare at Sint-Martens-Latem, Tervuren, Nagybanya, Kronberg, Staithes, Worpswede, and Willingshausen, while Skagen hosted mainly Danes and a few other Scandinavians.

The greater number of early European art colonies were to be casualties of the First World War. Europe was no longer the same place socially, politically, economically and culturally, and art colonies seemed a quaint anachronism in an abrasively modernist world. However, a small proportion did endure in one or another form, and owe their continuing existence to cultural tourism. The colonies of Ahrenshoop, Barbizon, Fischerhude, Katwijk, Laren, Sint-Martens-Latem, Skagen, Volendam, Willingshausen, and Worpswede not only still operate in a modest fashion, but run their own museums where, besides maintaining historic collections of work produced at the colony, they organise exhibition and lecture programs. If they have not fared as well, several former major colonies such as Concarneau and Newlyn are remembered via small yet significant collections of pictures held in regional museums. Other colonies succumbed during the late twentieth century to cultural entrepreneurs who have redeveloped villages in the effort to simulate, within certain kitsch parameters, the 'authentic' appearance of the colony during its artistic heyday. This is not always successful, with Giverny, Grèz-sur-Loing, Kronberg, Le Pouldu, Pont-Aven, Schwaan, and Tervuren probably being among the most insensitively commercialised of the former art colonies.

An art commune is a communal living situation colony where collective art is produced as a function of the group's activities. Contemporary art communes are scattered around the world, yet frequently aloof to widespread attention due to displeasure or discomfort with mainstream society. In the 1960s and 1970s art communes such as Friedrichshof (also known as Aktionsanalytische Organisation) flourished. Creative art was enthusiastically produced within such groups, which became gathering points for the counterculture movement.