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Maine Art Now
Edgar Allen Beem
Maine's most tireless art critic taking stock of his own moment. Edgar Allen Beem spent the 1980s reviewing exhibitions for the *Maine Times*, and this 1990 book gathers that work into a portrait of a state's contemporary art scene — its painters and sculptors, its arguments, its sense of itself against the pull of New York. It is criticism written on deadline and close to the ground, which is exactly its worth: an engaged, opinionated, first-draft history of Maine art by someone who was in the room. For anyone interested in regional art worlds and how they define themselves, it is a lively primary document.
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The author
Edgar Allen Beem (b. 1949) is a Maine art critic and freelance writer long associated with the Maine Times, and later a familiar byline in Yankee, the Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere, writing on art, architecture, and Maine life. He is the consummate insider-observer of the state's art world — not an academic art historian but a working critic, which gives the book its immediacy and its verdicts.
The book
Published in 1990 by The Dog Ear Press of Gardiner, Maine, it collects the profiles, articles, and reviews Beem wrote for the Maine Times through the 1980s. It is therefore a compilation, with the strengths (range, texture) and the limits (episodic, of-its-decade) of collected journalism.
How it has aged
As a snapshot. It captures who mattered and what was argued about in Maine art around 1990; Beem himself went on to a long career and later reflections, so the book now reads as an early station on a lifelong beat.
For more context
Beem's later essays for the Maine Arts Journal; and the wider question of Maine's place in American art, from the Wyeths to the Monhegan and Skowhegan traditions.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Edgar Allen Beem
- Publisher
- The Dog Ear Press
- Place of publication
- Gardiner, Maine
- Year
- 1990
- Edition
- First edition
- ISBN
- 0-937966-31-2
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
Places