Artist Avital Sagalyn escaped Nazism and lived to be almost a century old, but her work rarely appeared in public settings — by her choice. Now, a museum in Provincetown, where she spent two summers as a young woman, is honoring her with a new show.
A collection of the late Amherst artist’s work will be on display at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) through Sunday, Aug. 2, with an opening reception on Friday, June 26, at 6 p.m. The show, “Avital Sagalyn: Mid-Century Provincetown,” will include several dozen drawings and paintings that she created in Provincetown during the summers of 1945 and 1946.
Chris McCarthy, CEO of PAAM, found Sagalyn’s work especially impressive as a longtime resident of Provincetown.
“The piers, the boats, the sunrise, the moon — that all becomes things that you see all the time. But for someone who is here for not a very long period of time — and they’re very ethereal, the works — she really captured a moment where you can say, ‘I’ve seen that. I understand what she was looking at and why she did what she did, but with such an elegant line,’” McCarthy said.
Sagalyn, who died in 2020 at the age of 95, led a storied life. In 1940, when she was a teenager, she and her family had to flee Belgium due to the Nazi invasion, traveling through France, Spain and Portugal before settling in New York City. She graduated from Cooper Union and won a Fulbright scholarship to study painting in Paris in 1949, where she became friends with Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși.
Sagalyn returned to New York City a few years later and taught classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a few years. She married off-Broadway producer and actor Robert Sagalyn in 1955, and moved to Amherst with her family in 1967. There, she served on the committee that hired the first director of what is now the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and helped select the artwork the museum should purchase.
She continued to paint throughout her life. In 2017, her son Daniel Sagalyn decided to catalog her work and interview her for a biographical website.
“I started going through her work and finding, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe this work exists; I can’t believe that work exists,’” he said.
His wife, Elaine Grossman, also helped with the project. “It’s like a producer working with a correspondent,” he said. “The producer does the script work, but the correspondent really takes it to the shining level.”
It wasn’t until 2019, however — more than half a century after Sagalyn moved to Amherst — that she had her first solo gallery show, which was at the UMCA.
“She privately was very proud of the art that she did. She knew that she was an artist of talent, and she had the confidence, and you can see that, I believe, in looking at the artworks themselves,” Grossman said. Still, Sagalyn declined to market her work and put a spotlight on her artistry until very late in her life.
“She was a really complex person, and part of that was a sense of reserve and not wanting to promote herself and not having any interest in being famous,” Grossman explained. Keeping herself from having a higher-profile art career was not “a loss for her in any way. She felt liberated by that decision not to market her work.”
Daniel Sagalyn recalled that his mother’s decision to avoid galleries was, in part, because she didn’t want to flirt with art dealers and gallery owners to give her work traction, but also because she didn’t want to create work under a deadline or to appease the whims of the market.
“She didn’t want to be influenced by what would sell,” he said. “She didn’t want gallery dealers to tell her, ‘Oh, paint larger, paint more like this.’”
“She was a completely free artist,” Grossman agreed. “She felt that her creativity could just come out onto the canvas or onto the page, and there was no issue of anyone telling her what to do.”
Jenny Lind, the collection manager and registrar at the UMCA, knew Sagalyn for decades and helped prepare and install the works in the 2019 show. She remembered Sagalyn as “an artist’s artist,” “a bright light, very intellectual,” and someone who “made deep connections with people.”
“It was a little intense, trying to give somebody the show that really expressed what her art was … but she was a delightful soul and had lots of stories and loved hosting people and sitting and talking about her life and past and the people she met,” Lind said.
“I think if she were of a different generation, she would have really excelled in the art world,” Lind added. “With the right promotion, we would all know her name.”
Admission to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum is $15 for general admission or free for PAAM members and children 17 and under. It’s also free to the public from 5 to 8 p.m. on Fridays. The museum is open Wednesday through Monday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Fridays. For more information about Avital Sagalyn, visit avitalsagalyn.com.
