Donald Stoltenberg | Building His World | Cape Cod Museum of Art

DONALD STOLTENBERG

Building His World

Dennis, Massachusetts

DONALD STOLTENBERG

Building His World Deborah Forman

ESSAYS BY

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

Roger T. Dunn David Zeni

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Exhibition Sponsored by

Funding for this catalogue and a significant donation of artworks for this exhibition were provided by Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

Cover: Untitled (St. Pancras Station, London), 1972, oil on canvas, 32 x 46 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

Inside Cover: House in Harwich, 1991, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

Back Cover: Ship on High Seas, 2001, oil on canvas, 33 x 43 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf. © 2022 by Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Massachusetts

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ������������������������������������������������������������� 2 Introduction Benton Jones ������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3

Donald Stoltenberg | Building His World Deborah Forman ������������������������������������������������������������������� 4

Every Day with Donald Stoltenberg Deborah Forman ������������������������������������������������������������������� 9

Knowing Donald Stoltenberg Dr. Roger T. Dunn ��������������������������������������������������������������� 10

Shipmates David Zeni ������������������������������������������������������������������������� 12

Catalogue of Art ��������������������������������������������������������������� 14 Exhibition Checklist ��������������������������������������������������������� 42

Spire Under Scaffolding, n.d., oil on canvas, 39 x 23 inches.

Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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s Director of Art, there are many people to thank, beginning with Deborah Forman, guest curator, who worked diligently on every aspect of the exhibition and the catalogue, ensuring its success. Her comprehensive essay of Donald Stoltenberg for the catalogue provided insight and analysis of his art.

As a member of the museum’s exhibitions committee, Deborah proposed an exhibit of the work of Donald Stoltenberg, whose innovative art, she expressed, has been underappreciated.

Donald was a good friend of the museum and he and his domestic partner, Kenneth Swallow, donated a number of his works to the museum’s collection before he died in 2016. I am indebted to him for his contributions.

I extend my appreciation to his good friends Dr. Roger T. Dunn and David Zeni for sharing their stories of Don, as he was known to them, and contributing perceptive and heartwarming personal essays to this catalogue. Their writings draw a picture of Don as an artist and a dear friend. The museum is supremely grateful to Professor Dunn and Howard John Stapf for their generous financial support of the catalogue and for the donations from their personal collection of eighteen artworks by Don. My many thanks go out to Mr. Zeni who has lent a large artwork and videos of Don to the exhibition.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to West Branch Capital LLC for supporting the arts in our community and recognizing the historical significance of Donald Stoltenberg’s works by providing the exclusive Sponsorship for this exhibition.

The Brewster Ladies Library, where some of Don’s archives are located, provided access to the library’s extensive collection, which provided Don’s personal information for an essay in the catalogue. I want to thank Joan Pernice, president of the library board, for her help in facilitating this effort and for loaning several of his notebooks for the exhibition.

Don was active with The Boston Printmakers and the organization’s president, Renee Covalucci, shared recollections of her contacts with him.

Alison Caron, who designed this beautiful catalogue, was a joy to work with and we are grateful for her creative skills.

And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the support of the museum’s board of directors, and I extend my sincere appreciation for bestowing the honor to me to orchestrate Donald Stoltenberg: Building His World.

Benton Jones Director of Art Cape Cod Museum of Art Dennis, Massachusetts

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From left, Donald Stoltenberg, David Zeni and Kenneth Swallow.

Courtesy of Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

Colosseum, 1960s, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches.

Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

INTRODUCTION Benton Jones

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o approach the art by Donald Stoltenberg for the first time is breathtaking.

His view of the engineered marvels — ships, bridges, railroads, and architecture — that occupied so much of his work resonates in a way that will likely give many viewers a new approach to seeing manmade creations. Many of us may pass by a bridge, an elevated train, or a railroad station and just take note of its practical use. But Donald Stoltenberg saw the beauty, the majesty, and the artistry of these structures, which he focused on in his paintings. Looking at his work, it is likely you will have a sense of the deep feelings he imbued in them.

Influenced by Paul Cezanne, Lyonel Feininger, Precisionists Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, and his Bauhaus education in Chicago, Don emphasized the geometric and abstract foundations of manmade structures. He beautifully painted the facets of light that stream through architectural forms. The sharp angles and prismatic transparencies that illuminate his art produce dramatic effects and a sense of movement. Even a still building has the dynamism of a moving object, creating

Donald Stoltenberg’s drawing of his Brewster home. Courtesy of Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

an exciting experience for the viewer. He heralds the sheer power of industry, conveying the gravity and importance of these manufactured structures.

The masterful works of art in this collection are given even greater depth when appreciated within the context of the creator’s personal life, which includes the more than fifty years he lived in Brewster on Cape Cod. The joys of his work and the struggles that he overcame are affectionately told by the words of his close friends, Dr. Roger T. Dunn and David Zeni. Guest curator Deborah Forman provides an historical perspective, along with an analysis of his art and his influences as she celebrates his ingenuity and the originality of his approach to art.

The Cape Cod Museum of Art is fortunate to have in its collection many of Don’s most accomplished artworks, which are included in this catalogue and the forthcoming exhibition. In accordance with our Museum’s mission … to excite and inspire the imagination of all …, we bring to you the high-octane imagery of Donald Stoltenberg’s world through this immersive, retrospective exhibition.

Donald Stoltenberg, second from right in this 1955 photo, is on board the SS Ryndam, just one of his many voyages across the Atlantic. Courtesy of Holland America Line.

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DONALD STOLTENBERG Building His World Deborah Forman

Rolling Bridge (Fort Point Channel Bridge), 1977, acrylic and oil on canvas, 25 x 31 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

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onald Stoltenberg’s world is not the natural one, but the manmade structures that occupy so much of the space on our planet. His oil paintings, watercolors, and prints of land and sea are not typical images of long stretches of fields, rolling hills, mountains, forests, dashing waves, sandy beaches, or luminous ponds. Rather, his art celebrates the human creations he finds here, those engineering feats of ships, bridges, railroads, and the architectural beauties of houses and buildings, quite a few on Cape Cod, where he lived for more than fifty years. His interest in architecture and engineering informed his art. For him, these forms were as dramatic as nature’s wonders.

The art of Donald Stoltenberg (1927–2016) has a range that references the artistic trends during his lifetime, from those rooted in the Bauhaus style during his student days at Chicago’s Institute of Design. He was influenced by Paul Cezanne 4

and Cubism, as well as Lyonel Feininger and Precisionists Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. And oddly, he once said that he admired J.M.W. Turner, the British artist known for his atmospheric marine and landscape paintings, although Turner’s loosely painted works are distinctly different from Stoltenberg’s best known paintings that vigorously define the splendor of manmade structures.

In the 1950s, Stoltenberg’s work was abstract and freely painted at the time when Abstract Expressionism was the reigning movement. Several abstract oil paintings from that period (Untitled Abstraction [Yellows and Oranges], Untitled [Abstraction in Rose Colors, Mauves, and White], and Untitled [Abstraction in Blues and Violets]) show a freewheeling style, yet hint at the geometric elements that finally took hold in his work. His later expressionistic realism is a merging of abstraction with views of those achievements of human engineering, which define his inventive approach to art.

It is mankind’s creations that take up the space in Stoltenberg’s paintings. His work is about distinctive shapes and about breaking down the space into light-filled forms. His bridges (Old Colony Railroad Bridge, Rolling Bridge, Steel, and Longfellow Bridge) celebrate the dynamism of modern engineering.

Growing up in Chicago, he was fascinated by the elevated train lines running through the city. The view from below the train line, he wrote, appeared as “a lacy … structure that broke light into millions of geometric shapes.” And so he focused on the grid work under an elevated train in Third Avenue El. Not only did he look under bridges and elevated train lines to delineate their foundations, he also looked up over the roof lines of a city (Montmartre and Munich Rooftops) as he attended to the complex arrangements of vibrant forms that energize the urban environment.

Stoltenberg’s interest in seagoing vessels goes back to his boyhood and has asserted itself in his paintings of all kinds of boats, including cruise ships (he went on many cruises) and sailboats. The dramatic angles of a cruise ship luminously occupy his paintings as shown in Southampton, Europa & Empress of Britain. In Red Ferry Boat and Battleship in Drydock, you see how he has emphasized the underpinninings of the ships.

Ship on High Seas is an expression of the drama of a seafaring journey. The angular focus in Christian Radich evokes a sense of speed. And in his sailboats (Spinnakers, Version II, and Gaft Sail Study) he captures the exultation of freedom with lustrous diagonals.

Driven by a curiosity in engineering forms, Stoltenberg continued to elevate the abstract elements even after the subject took up residence.

The oval also lovingly plays a role in his work in Cleveland Arcade, Old Sullivan Square Station, Byzantine Tondo, and Untitled (St. Pancras Station, London). In these DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Cleveland Arcade, 1970, watercolor on paper, 23½ x 17½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow. works, he facets the light that streams through the architectural forms, creating sharp angles, prismatic transparencies, and an opalescence, which produce dazzling effects and lively movement, enhancing the abstract elements of the paintings. And in the two railroad station paintings, there is a sense of the excitement of travel, a venture Donald Stoltenberg clearly loved. With his interest in transportation, his art includes those stations, trains (Evening Train), and airplanes.

A decade ago in his Brewster, Massachusetts, home, I had the chance to spend time with Don (because I knew him and as he was known as “Don” by his friends, I have decided to take the informal approach most of the time and use his first name when it seems appropriate). I was there to interview him for a book I was writing, Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: Images of Land and Sea, published by Schiffer Publishing in 2013. I was interested to include him in the book because of his specific approach to the objects he chose to paint on land and sea, which is not typical. His story and his art in my book would extend the vision beyond the artists who paint nature. Looking at his watercolors CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

and oils, he told me, “In my work I’m very conscious of shapes and space.” It’s about breaking down the space into various shapes, about “seeing things abstractly. For a period of time I eliminated the subject, but that didn’t work for me. I like the subject too much.”

For a while I have thought Donald Stoltenberg’s art has been underappreciated. I would have expected him to have achieved greater recognition for his innovative style and contributions to contemporary art. However, beside the fact that he was not into marketing himself, as a friend of his told me, I think simply that his timing was off.

When Don was working abstractly he was swimming in the mainstream of Abstract Expressionism, which was all the rage in the 1950s. It was in 1956 that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston purchased his 1955 oil painting Third Avenue from the Margaret Brown Gallery in Boston for $450. The painting is a visceral abstraction, mostly black, expressing an urban landscape, which has some reference to the work of Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline. But Don soon began to miss the subject. By that time, Pop art had arrived and became center stage, and Don’s work is clearly not Pop. It is serious, built on the modernism of Cezanne and expressing the power of human innovation.

Donald Stoltenberg was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 15, 1927, to Leora Belitz and Hugo A. Stoltenberg, a certified public accountant. Unfortunately, Donald never knew his mother, who died in childbirth. His father remarried in 1930, and as Donald wrote in his journal (included in the archives at the Brewster Ladies Library on Cape Cod), “After the honeymoon, Dad brought home my new mother whom I liked immediately. She has always been like a real mother to me.” And so it was his stepmother, Virginia Stoltenberg, who raised him.

In 1933, the family moved to Chicago to assist Donald’s grandmother who was ill.

It was in Chicago that he developed his interest in architecture. By the time he was eight years old, he was “building small playhouses” of his own design, he wrote. “Although they were rather crude they did give me the feeling for architecture.”

These were happy times. In his journal, young Donald recalled “joyous Christmases.” He described those times as “glorious,” even though it was a difficult time in the 1930s in the midst of the Depression. But he noted, they were told “prosperity is just around the corner.”

For Donald, however, it “seemed awfully slow in coming.” Nevertheless, at Christmas, “The whole family sang and we had a huge tree and a roaring fire in the great fireplace.”

During this time, he spent summers with his maternal grandfather who had a farm near the shipyards in Manitowac, Wisconsin. It was then that he began building ship models and became interested in the industrial machinery he saw at the Manitowac Shipbuilding Company, which built many large vessels, including submarines during World War II. So Donald’s fascination with ships and machinery began in his childhood in Chicago and Wisconsin.

Young Donald fell in love with Chicago, a great city with wonderful architecture.

When he was in elementary school he was selected to attend weekly demonstrations at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later on, he spent time copying works by Cezanne and Pablo Picasso at the museum. As he told me, “My first influence was Cezanne.” It was then, he wrote in his journal, that he decided to make commercial art his goal.

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In 1940, his grandmother sold her house and his family moved to a “small flat,” he wrote. It was wartime and he and his father worked on a map of Europe, placing pins to show the positions of Allied and German troops. This project continued throughout the war until Germany surrendered in 1945. During this time his interest in ships continued to develop and he built small models of warships.

After serving briefly in the United States Maritime Service, Don attended Chicago’s Institute of Design (at the Illinois Institute of Technology), which was founded in 1937 as the “New Bauhaus” by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. It was there where the original Bauhaus principles were taught, which had a continuing influence on Don’s art. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in visual design in 1953 from the institute. The Bauhaus was a German art school, founded by architect Walter Gropius and active from 1919 to 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power and it was closed.

The program combined fine arts and crafts and became noted for its modern approach to design, merging the principles of mass production with individual artistic ideas that emphasized combining aesthetics with practical use. The Bauhaus movement had a strong impact on art, architecture, graphic design, and interior and industrial design. During its reign in Germany, artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Feininger, and Moholy-Nagy, among others, were associated with it. At the Institute of Design, Don was fascinated by Bauhaus principles, which encouraged him to probe new approaches to his art.

After his graduation in 1953, like so many artists before him, Don took off for Europe, where he sketched and painted the architecture in various places. After four months, he returned to America and soon found work in Boston designing packaging at the Container Corporation of America. Continuing to paint, he became enamored with architecture, and notably the elevated trains to Charlestown and South Boston. He attended to the rivets, bolts, and girders, the underpinnings of these structures. And he found galleries to exhibit his art at the Margaret Brown Gallery and later the Kanegis Gallery, where he had a string of sellout shows. Boston Globe critic Edward J. Driscoll wrote in the January 3, 1968, edition about Stoltenberg’s “powerfully expressive style.” And, “In his new showing, there’s water, water everywhere.” The water, Driscoll wrote, “is laced with fast-moving sailing vessels, their sails full blown by offshore winds as they ply the briny deep.”

In Boston, Don met Kenneth Swallow, a banker. The two lived together as domestic partners in Boston and later on Cape Cod, where in 1958 they purchased an 1850s house in Brewster. While the house, which was in primitive condition, was renovated, they lived in a loft on Commercial Wharf in Boston. From this location Don had a view of the Boston waterfront and the ships he saw there, which only expanded this interest that began when he was a boy. He is well known for his radiant paintings of sailing yachts and cruise ships. His views of Queen Mary 2 and Queen Elizabeth 2 are from unusual angles, just as they are in his paintings of bridges and elevated trains. During Don’s many cruises with Ken, he had the opportunity to paint all angles of the ships, zeroing in on details that created commanding compositions, which again and always emphasized the geometric elements. His notebooks, in the collection of the Brewster Ladies Library, are filled with 6

his sketches in charcoal and watercolor, often studies for larger works, which attest to his devotion to art even when he was on vacation. Don, it seems, was always working.

By 1960, he was able give up his work as a graphic artist and devote full time to his fine art. And in 1968, Don and Ken made the move to the house on Satucket Road in Brewster, where they lived the rest of their lives. When not in Brewster, they traveled often to foreign shores, where in England, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, among other places, Don found inspiration for his art and sketched and painted while there.

Like many artists, Don taught oil painting, watercolor, and printmaking at a number of art schools, including deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and on Cape Cod at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Falmouth Artists Guild, and Cape Cod Conservatory in Barnstable; and he was visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

In addition to his oils and watercolors, Don pioneered the printmaking technique known as collagraphy. Although some artists create a plate with scraps of paper and fragments of other objects as if they were making a collage, Don’s approach was specialized.

One method was to build up a plate, such as Masonite, with a liquid medium like gesso or glue or an acrylic modeling paste. The material could then be molded or cut into a variety of surfaces. Other items he may have used included silk organza, nylon net, gauze,

St. Mark’s, Venice, 1987, collagraph on paper, 25 x 31 inches.

Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Evening Train, 1974, collagraph on paper, (10/50), 21 x 143/4 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow. metal foil, metal or plastic tapes, newsprint, tissue paper, and Mylar. When completed, the plate was inked and printed as a relief or intaglio plate on a press in editions, as are other print forms, such as lithographs and etchings. In 1975, Don wrote a book on the subject, Collagraph Printmaking, published by Davis Publications, Inc., of Worcester, Massachusetts.

The intricacies he achieved in his collographs Steel (Railroad Bridge), St. Mark’s, Venice, and Evening Train, are vivid examples of his amazing skill with a difficult medium.

Don is also the author of The Artist and the Built Environment (1980), also published by Davis. In this book he celebrates the art of the “built environment,” writing of “the buildings, transportation, and engineering works around us.” In the book’s introduction, he presents his concepts of an artist’s goal: “It is the artist’s function to examine, digest, and interpret our surroundings, to give us ways to react to them, evaluate them, and, in various ways, to come to terms with them.” Which is CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

exactly what artists do whatever their method. Don continues: “The artist can point out beauty where there seems to be none …” Considering this, it is true that many of us look at a bridge or the underside of an elevated train or the girders of a building in construction and not even take a second look. Don saw more and rigorously and sensitively painted his interpretations: “The artist can help us to digest or grasp the welter of confusing and diverse forms that our increasingly built-up environment throws at us.” It is about intensifying “the moods or qualities that reveal the means to see, enjoy, and appreciate our conditions.”

As he told me that day in his studio, “I have learned to look at the world abstractly. It’s a spatial thing, about looking at the parts and how they come together.”

For Don, a painting or print is not particularly a representation of a bridge or ship, although there is sometimes more and sometimes less a suggestion of it. It is simply of itself, an artist’s view, which encompasses for Don a mood, a feeling, an emotional connection to what he sees as the wonders of human ingenuity. In his art, the mood may evolve slowly as we spend time looking. There is undoubtedly a sense of wonder and reverence when we look at St. Mark’s.

Like artists whose work is abstract, Don sees his art as two-dimensional, forsaking the illusion of a three-dimensional world. It is the modernist concept that a painting or a print should respect the flatness of the picture plane, the two dimensions of a canvas, panel, or sheet of paper.

Those who delight in nature’s scenic splendors may view the engineering feat of a bridge as just so much steel and girders, a necessity, but hardly a thing of beauty. But Don’s unorthodox perspectives in his paintings are just that. His compositions build from the angle and particular segment of the structure he chooses. He weaves together the various shapes and lines into an intricate, luminous pattern that heralds not only the genius of the construction but also the sheer brilliance of its form.

Looking at Don’s attention to human inventiveness in his ships and bridges and their underlying foundations, you can see how his early years in Chicago had a profound influence on him. The impact of Cubism with its splintered forms and diverse viewpoints is apparent. And you can see the references in Don’s art to Precisionists Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. Sheeler turned fractured forms into polished images of urban and industrial buildings. He found beauty in the functional design of factories, barns, and skyscrapers, at the same time honoring the underlying abstraction of his subjects. And you can find a connection in Don’s paintings to Demuth’s focus on sharp lines and geometric shapes. Don’s art also reflects his interest in Lyonel Feininger’s paintings of buildings and ships at sea, which are known for angular lines and transparent, intersecting planes.

When Don and I talked in his studio that spring day about the effects of light, the light many artists on the Cape find so enchanting, he expressed a different vision: “It’s about the way the light comes through a steel structure and breaks up the forms.” In his work, he broke up the light, creating sharp angles and prismatic transparencies, which produce dazzling effects and electrifying movement, and enhance the abstract elements. Focusing on the rudiments of architecture, Don often painted buildings 7

Sesuit Harbor, Summer, 2011, watercolor on paper, 15 x 201/2 inches.

Gift of Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf. under construction or being destroyed. So these works are about those basic shapes, the geometry, and the girders that support an edifice.

Don painted in his studio from photographs and sketches. “If I do a sketch [on site] I’m halfway there,” he told me, because he’s already decided how the composition will be shaped. Nevertheless, he added, “I recompose. I move things around.” It’s the spirit of the subject rather than an exact rendering of it that was so vitally important to him.

Although color is integral to his paintings, his approach is more about defining the forms, stretching the lines, and elevating the diagonal, which gives so much life to his work. Studying one of his pieces, he admitted, “I favor blue. And I like the color to be powerful. I’m more involved with value than hue.”

It is the shape of things and the effervescent light that dominates Don’s paintings of the modern world. Living in bucolic Brewster on Cape Cod with nature at his door, it was the architecture that enchanted him as in Untitled (House on Cape Cod) and House in Harwich. In these buildings he delineated the linear contours, always emphasizing the angular aspects as he broke down shapes with faceted planes. Not far from his home he had the waterfront on the tip of the Cape, where he captured the Provincetown shoreline with beachfront houses and, of course, the iconic Pilgrim Monument (Waterfront and Provincetown). In these collagraphs, he captures one of the mysteries that continues to be a fascination of this century-old art colony. Closer to Brewster is the harbor in East Dennis. His watercolor Sesuit Harbor, Summer sparkles in the brilliant light of a sunny day and evokes the joys of carefree boating.

Ultimately, however, Donald Stoltenberg was most intrigued by urban themes: the underside of a bridge, an ancient monument, a busy street scene, a railroad station, a 8

cruise ship, and always architecture. Those marvelous structures created by the human hand, modern engineering, and an inventive mind are what make viewing Don’s art such a beautiful and astounding experience.

When Don died in March 2016, about six months after Ken, he left more than 4,000 works: oil paintings, watercolors, and prints. His work is in permanent collections in Boston at Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library, and in Cambridge at Harvard University Art Museums and MIT Sloan School of Management. Also in Massachusetts, at Bridgewater State University, Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, and Art Complex Museum in Duxbury. Portland Museum of Art in Maine, New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, and Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, also have his work in their collections. The organizer of this exhibition, Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, Massachusetts, has more than fifty works in its collection.

Don’s art is in many private collections and has been commissioned by corporate clients, which include State Street Bank of Boston, Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company, Massachusetts Port Authority, IBM, Cabot Corporation, and Reader’s Digest.

Some of his paintings of ocean liners were acquired by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company and the Cunard Line.

His work has been exhibited in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Pratt Graphic Art Center, and Associated American Artists; also at The Art Institute of Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and The Print Club of Philadelphia. In Massachusetts, he exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Boston Athenaeum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Copley Society of Art in Boston, Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and Worcester Art Museum.

In 2012, Cape Cod Museum of Art featured Stoltenberg’s work in the exhibition Retrospective, Donald Stoltenberg.

His many awards include the The Boston Arts Festival Grand Prize, New England Watercolor Society First Prize, the National Historic Park Purchase Award, First Purchase Prize from Portland Museum of Art in Maine, Worcester Art Museum Printmaking Prize, and The Boston Printmakers Award.

He was a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists and life member of Boston Athenaeum.

In 2022, the Cape Cod Museum of Art organized this exhibition of his work.

Deborah Forman, curator of the exhibition, is the author of seven books on art and artists, including the two-volume history of the Provincetown art colony, Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony (Schiffer Publishing, 2011) and a series of three books on contemporary Cape Cod artists. Donald Stoltenberg is included in her Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: Images of Land and Sea (Schiffer, 2013).

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

EVERY DAY WITH DONALD STOLTENBERG Deborah Forman

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n the thousands of items Donald Stoltenberg bequeathed to the Brewster Ladies Library, a picture of the man, as well as the artist develops. There is much to learn.

The bequest consists of a multitude of items, including dozens of notebooks filled with sketches in charcoal and watercolor. Some are studies for larger works. There is also a number of finished and signed prints. The subjects range beyond his most notable work of cruise ships and sailboats, bridges, railroad stations, trains, and architecture.

There are dozens of notebooks and journals that record his daily activities as well as descriptions of his numerous travels. Inserted into his writings, both handwritten and typed, are sketches he made of the places he visited. These drawings include foreign and domestic scenic views, street scenes, lighthouses, windmills, churches, and landscapes.

His sketches show his interest in unorthodox perspectives, from under a bridge and over rooftops, and his pictures of ships often zero in on the details of engineering. These sketches were often the inspiration for his completed paintings and prints.

Although Don often favored linear, faceted angles, he also was fascinated with the rounded arches in arcades and railroad stations. There are many pictures of cruise ships from various angles, of sailboats with windblown sails, and of ancient foreign towns with church steeples breaking the horizon. A few sketches of the Provincetown shore look toward MacMillan Wharf. Drawings of animals, flowers, insects, and birds show his interest in a variety of subjects as he records the world around him and practices his skills.

Also pasted into these notebooks is a vast collection of memorabilia: many clippings from his extensive travels to England, Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland, Turkey, Greece and, of course, Paris, as well as places closer to home in New Hampshire, Maine, the Berkshires, Provincetown, and Woods Hole.

From his many cruises are Cunard Line ads, labels, and news items. He saved numerous ticket stubs to museums, theater programs, credit card receipts, baggage tags, hotel bills, maps, exhibition and class announcements. And Christmas card lists, newspaper clippings, advertisements, letters, stamps, thank-you notes, painting inventories, gallery listings, and even medical reports from his doctors.

The collection reveals a picture of Don’s tastes. Theater and the performance arts must have been a strong interest. He saved quite a few theater programs like the 1969 one from London of the Alan Bennett play 40 Years On and the 1976 program from the North Shore Music Theatre where Ginger Rogers was appearing. He collected many newspaper clippings showing people and events he wanted to remember. There is one of a young Prince Charles, another of the cast of the television show All in the Family, and one about Marlene Dietrich appearing in a television show filmed at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. He saved newspaper obituaries of quite a few Brits: playwright Noel Coward, author Agatha Christie, and actresses Margaret Leighton and Margaret CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

Rutherford. And one of his father, Hugo Stoltenberg, who died in 1976.

Most fascinating are some of Don’s entries, which tell you about his interests, preferences, influences, the joys and sorrows of his life, and small everyday details.

He wrote about trips to Boston, often for The Boston Printmakers shows and gallery openings. It seems when he wasn’t in his studio working he was traveling near and far.

He wrote about dinner engagements, out with friends and at his home. He even described the food they ate, such as “glazed ham for dinner” on Christmas Day, 1970. He welcomed guests to his home and wrote in detail when his parents visited.

He often recorded the weather. In mid-summer 1970, he wrote from his home in Brewster: “The very cool weather continues. The maple trees, wisteria vines, the privet, and the grass are all as luxuriant as we’ve ever seen.” On New Year’s Day, 1971, he noted that it snowed all day. Despite the snow, he and his partner, Ken Swallow, drove from Boston to Brewster.

On New Year’s Eve, 1979, he wrote that they went to dinner in Hyannis for “Black Forest Steak dinner and then home to watch the [1933 film] Song of Songs.” Don and Ken spent the next day with “a game of Scrabble and tea on a beautiful, still, sunny afternoon.”

That January, 1980, was: “A green winter … no snow at all so far …” And then later that month: “We drove up to Quadrum Gallery in Chestnut Hill Mall to deliver a mass of prints (they sold about $7,000 worth of stuff before Christmas including final payment on a watercolor).”

There is so much more but I will conclude with this one: His 1980 New Year’s resolutions: Say no more often … stop trying to please everyone.

Stop doing boring things … hire work done you don’t enjoy.

RELAX … work on ship models, matting and framing things for the house … woodworking.

EXERCISE EVERY DAY … MEDITATE EVERY DAY. Less TELEVISION. Do more DIRECT DRAWING and PAINTING. Devote more time to being a good companion.

And on the top of that list: Let go ... if an idea doesn’t work after a few trials ... STOP … don’t be stubborn … go onto something else.

That “something else” took him far, to a prolific output of art by a man devoted to capturing the world around him, specifically human engineering feats: ships, bridges, railroads, and various forms of architecture at home and abroad, all celebrating the abstract elements that are the foundation of these grand structures.

9

KNOWING DONALD STOLTENBERG Dr. Roger T. Dunn

I

Montmartre, 1988, collagraph on paper, 231/2 x 20 inches.

Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

n the year prior to Donald Stoltenberg’s death, he asked me to go through the art in his studio with him. It was an unusual request since, like many artists, he kept access to his studio restricted. When invited in, it was to be shown a few things only, most often his recent endeavors. But now I was to help him sort through the scope of his long artistic career, much of it stored wherever the space allowed, overwhelmed as it had become with his production. The large 642-square-foot studio had been added on to the Brewster house in 1968, nearly fifty years before, and was almost as tall as the nineteenth-century, twostory home, though it was a single soaring space open to the roof rafters. A single, wide, tall window looked out to the expanse of the backyard. Skylights overhead provided additional 10

light. Half of one studio wall was reserved for his work on oil paintings; I never knew him to use an easel. Missing now was the large printing press that had long dominated the central space, though the massive work table, which was always behind it remained. From that press, Don had produced thousands of prints in the collagaph technique that he had pioneered and taught to others during his many years as instructor at the school of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and about which he wrote Collagraph Printmaking (published in 1975 by Davis Publications, Inc., Worcester, Massachusetts).

Our sessions in that studio were several in number, each rather short because the process quickly wore him out. In addition to being quite ill, it was obvious that looking back on his career was touching him deeply and exhausting him not just physically but also emotionally. Don told me wistfully that he had only recently sold his printing press.

It became clear that he was beginning to close down his beloved studio in which he had spent the greater part of his life. These studio visits began while his partner of more than sixty years, Kenneth Swallow, was succumbing to his own illness, which was the impetus for Don to have me help empty the studio with Ken’s strong encouragement. I was rather confused about my role in this, especially as Don was insistent that I fill my car with more and more of his art each time I visited. I had begun to suspect, as I found out for certain sometime later, he and Ken had made me heir to almost all of the art that remained in the studio, hoping that I would pursue ways to find appropriate homes for it. In fact, I began that effort while Don was still alive.

After Don’s death in March 2016, the process of emptying the studio continued, and that of the house as well. The executor of the estate, David Zeni, and I went through everything and continued to be awed by the amount and quality of creative work produced by one individual, our good friend. A storage room with racks off the studio was packed with oil paintings. Behind the door of every cabinet in the studio were stacks of collagraph prints and watercolors. A large metal trunk contained dozens of sketchbooks filled with beautiful drawings and even more unframed watercolors. A loft overhead had several dozen more works, many of which were collagraphs and watercolors framed for exhibitions. I was astonished to go through some drawing boards leaning against a wall to find one behind all the others that had a stunning full-sheet watercolor still taped to it. Signed and dated 1994, it was a dramatic and richly colored treatment of one of Don’s favorite subjects, the Old Colony Bridge in Boston (now gone). Once finished, the watercolor had been left on the board on which it had been painted in a pile seemingly forgotten for twenty years! Under the eaves of the house itself were stacks of oil paintings dating to Don’s early career, mostly in the abstract style of that period of his work dating back a half century. Happily, most had survived in good condition over the decades while enduring summer heat and freezing winter temperatures.

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Despite the dramatic evolution of style and subject matter in Don’s sixty-year career, all the works from earliest to most recent were united in a love of structure, architectural, or otherwise engineered. Even the early abstractions were about constructed forms in illusionistic space. These were based on the Bauhaus style that was taught at the time he studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where Bauhaus professors and students had been invited after fleeing Nazi Germany. Don had told me of his admiration for the rigorous Bauhaus style, based as well on a Cubist analysis of form, notably seen in many works by Lyonel Feininger, the Bauhaus artist Don most admired. He also had a love of works by those American artists involved in compositions of simplified structures, particularly those

by Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. Such artists were featured in Don’s book, The Artist and the Built Environment (published by Davis Publications, Inc., in 1980), in which he also illustrated and discussed examples by fellow Boston-area painters and printmakers.

For Don, the creative experience itself was the end-all, often leaving the resulting art production to languish as he moved on to the next project, as was the case of that watercolor left taped for two decades to a drawing board on which the work had been done. I never knew him to be the kind of artist who would aggressively self-promote despite the great confidence he had in the aesthetic and monetary value of his work. Those marketing efforts would take precious time from his studio and he regarded the job of seeking sales and exhibitions as great inconveniences. Nevertheless, not long after he settled in Boston from the Midwest in 1954, his work as a young artist received considerable recognition. In 1957 he won the Grand Prize of $1,000 (equivalent to about $10,000 today) at the premier regional art event of the time, the Boston Arts Festival. The Museum of Fine Arts had bought one of his works in the previous year, and he was represented by the prestigious Kanegis Gallery on Newbury Street, which also handled works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Joan Miro. By 1960, he was able to quit his job as a designer at Container Corporation of America to become a full-time studio artist. Not long before, this increasing financial success allowed him and Ken to acquire the house in Brewster, fulfilling a dream because of their love of Cape Cod. Thus in his Cape Cod studio, Donald Stoltenberg had the opportunity, so rare for any artist, of devoting himself entirely to his art, and he did so throughout his career with incredible dedication and time commitment that resulted in a prolific production of oil paintings, watercolors, and original prints. He was able to devote so much time to his work because Ken was equally committed to making it possible by doing virtually everything tasked with their lifestyle: house repairs, shopping, banking, cleaning, and cooking, but mostly providing inspiration and support.

With Ken’s final illness and death, Don’s great artistic energy and momentum abruptly stopped. David Zeni and I were present with Don when the hospice nurse informed us that Ken’s time was over. That was in September 2015. Hours before, Don had gone over to Ken’s hospital bed, which had been brought into the central room in their house, to express thanks for all those years they had together and for what Ken had meant to him, affirming his abiding love. Don died just a few months later. In the meantime he wandered in his studio bereft and without focus. His muse was gone. They both died in CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

the house in Brewster that they deeply loved, the greater part of which was the addition they made for Don’s studio.

Looking back over the years, I remember when I first met Don. It was in 1974 when I was curator of the Brockton Art Museum (now the Fuller Craft Museum). We were co-jurors of the Boston Printmakers exhibition, which was to be shown at the museum.

In a subsequent job as art dealer that I had for four years, his work was included in what I sold to corporations in Boston, and that’s when I was first invited to his house and studio. There was a great demand for his art in those settings and in those years of economic prosperity. For example, an engineering firm appropriately acquired one of his immense bridge paintings to feature in the entrance lobby. His images of ships and sailboats were much sought after, as were his prints of the coastline of Cape Cod— always with a line of cottages or other structures in the foreground or background.

Private collectors and museums were acquiring his art as well. It seemed in the 1970s and into the 1980s that nearly every Boston-area gallery and independent dealer wanted Don’s work in their inventories.

Thus my relationship with Don began first on a professional level but quickly became a personal and very important friendship for years after. My partner, Howard John Stapf (John) and I developed a wonderful relationship with Don and Ken, lasting for about forty years. When it began in the mid-1970s, it was in those times when same-sex relationships, no matter how strong or long-lasting, were not to be openly revealed. So when a like situation could be intuited and confirmed, it was very, very special. It remained so for the four of us in the decades of change and gradual acceptance. In various activities and explorations, Don and Ken shared with John and me their beloved Cape Cod, and we made several trips with them to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Block Island. Don’s fascination with the sea was a very prominent part of his life and art, the reason he had chosen Cape Cod as his home, and something he dearly enjoyed sharing with his friends.

Central to this love were the ships and sailboats that plied the waters. He was fascinated by their structural and engineered forms. Once he wanted to show John and me the many slides he had taken of a trip to Malta. In fact the images were not of the island at all, but of the structural forms of the cruise ship that took them there. Don never created a seascape or landscape without including buildings, bridges, ships, or other engineered forms.

In all our times with him I learned so much about Don and gained an ever greater understanding and deep appreciation of his art. My own career has been in art history, for many years as a college professor, so he became a study and inspiration for me. I regard him as a very important artist, and one whose well-deserved recognition is still in progress.

In our long relationship with Don, John and I were not only friends but collectors surrounding ourselves in our home with his wonderful art.

Roger T. Dunn, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus, Department of Art & Art History at Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. His articles and essays on art have been published in various exhibition catalogues, books, and magazines.

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SHIPMATES David Zeni

I

had reached my limit with plastic seating at a cruise ship terminal when I was approached by an inquisitive man. I was standing against a wall to stay out of the way of meandering passengers. The man’s eyes appeared to be focused on a point above my head. I turned around to see what was on the wall. This was Florida, after all, perhaps a gecko was about to pounce.

He pointed at my head. Not the gecko, the man. There was an awkward moment of silence.

“I’m pointing at your cap,” Donald Stoltenberg said while still pointing. I was wearing a baseball cap with an image of an ocean liner on it. “I take it you’re a ship guy?”

We quickly established that we shared an interest in ships, lived on Cape Cod, and were in long-term relationships with men. The occasion was embarkation on a ship en route to Europe. The destination wasn’t important. It was the at-sea experience we were after — the Atlantic crossing. In one of our earliest shipboard conversations the nautical expression “tumblehome” came up. We were both pleased to learn the other knew what it meant. A wonderful friendship was born. That was almost thirty years ago.

After we returned to the Cape, Don and I traveled to various ship societies and events, often car-pooling with other nautical aficionados. I learned that Don’s interest in ships began at an early age. One influence was the Manitowoc, Wisconsin, shipyard, near his grandfather’s farm, where Don could observe not only objects that float but also the cranes and machinery servicing them. Another influence was the Second World War when Don became interested in building models of warships as well as painting them in watercolor. A maritime visual and structural interest was developing. As a boy, Don’s participation in a Saturday youth program at the Art Institute of Chicago showed him ways to record his love for ships.

Don also shared that his mother died as a result of Don’s birth, with the emphasis on “as a result of.” He told me this tragedy followed him his entire life. Don felt sorry for his dad. “The poor man lost his wife, stuck with me, he didn’t know what to do,” he told me. Hugo Stoltenberg was a good provider and remarried, and Don had a mother.

As Don continued to demonstrate an ability to analyze the visual environment and an interest to express this, his father wanted to redirect his focus. Hugo was an accountant and certainly did not see art as a lucrative career. Don recalled an early indication of his father’s awareness that he wasn’t suited for a traditional career. One Christmas, Don’s Dad presented him with an accordion. Don couldn’t believe it! “What was he thinking?”

Fate intervened. After a somewhat unfulfilling experience at junior college, Don’s uncle encouraged him to attend the Chicago Institute of Design. After graduation, Don sailed on the French Line steamship Liberté to practice his talent throughout various cities in Europe. The rest is history.

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Don left the Midwest, relocating to Boston, first settling at 70 Phillips Street on Beacon Hill, where he met his life partner, Ken Swallow, at a neighborhood cocktail party. In 1961, Don and Ken moved to 55 Commercial Wharf on Boston Harbor.

Don’s rise in the Boston arts community was meteoric. After winning top prize of $1,000 at the Boston Arts Festival, he wrote a prideful letter to his father. Mention was made of being interviewed on television next to Boston’s famous swan boats. This was clearly Don getting the last word on his career choice.

QE2 at Speed, 1992, oil on canvas, 51 x 39 inches.

On loan from Collection of David Zeni and Scott Bican.

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Christian Radich, 2002, watercolor on paper, 28 x 351/2 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

The Stoltenberg works I enjoy most are of the great ocean liners from the 1930s through the late 1960s, ending with Cunard’s QE2. My favorite treatment is when the ship is seen from an elevation off the port or starboard bow. This approach may have had its roots in early works. Geoffrey Bush, writing in the Boston Herald in 1956, noted of Stoltenberg’s abstracts, “… he constructs them around a horizon two-thirds of the way up the picture …”

“Tumblehome,” the word Don and I exchanged during our first at-sea experience, is the narrowing from keel upward as seen from a cross-section of the ship. It’s not readily observable unless the ship is out of the water. It is one of many aspects of a ship Don analyzed in his pursuit of accuracy. If you were to visit his studio when an ocean liner work was in progress, you would find many historical photos, books about the vessel, trial sketches, and sometimes a kit-model of the vessel built by Don to get everything correct before commencing the work. Once the painting was begun, it was not an overnight affair. Don concentrated on specific views and parts of the ship, building the image on canvas over time. It could take weeks or be revisited after months. I have a large Stoltenberg of the QE2 hanging in my living room. Guess what? You can see the “tumblehome.”

Telephone calls from Don, even after we each had our own mobile devices, always opened with, “David? It’s Don.” With those three words I instantly knew if he was up or down. Regardless of mood, if he had something in mind, it was hard to dissuade him. One day, Don called to set up a time for us to hit the bike trail. I advised that I wasn’t up for cycling. I next heard, “You may not be, but I need to.” So, we biked.

Don felt a little guilty about it, so he bought me lunch. That was Don saying thank you because he didn’t part with a nickel easily.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

Although living a few miles away in Harwich, I thought of Don as a next-door neighbor. We spoke of changes around the Cape, notably the growth in numbers and scale of private homes. Over a half-century earlier, Don had purchased the Chase house at 947 Satucket Road in Brewster. He recalled the buying process in late 1957. One of the difficulties, as an artist, was establishing one’s income to qualify for a mortgage.

Fortunately, Don could document half his income from work as a free-lance package designer for Container Corporation of America. He had worked there three years, averaging twenty-four hours per week. The remaining income came from sales of his work at Margaret Brown Gallery in Boston, and from pocket money earned teaching two painting classes per week at the school at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln. Don offered $6,000 for the Chase house. The Chase heirs, a brother and sister, were reluctant to sell and held out for $6,750. Perhaps they had heard of Don’s recent windfall at the Boston Arts Festival? The bank was also a reluctant party to this transaction. When they appraised the property, they found an outhouse and an insufficient supply of potable water. The bank made the deal contingent on installation of indoor plumbing and a new well.

The other issue was Don’s relationship with Ken Swallow. Who was Ken? The bank looked askhance at having the title to the property in the names of two unrelated male co-habitants. To explain the relationship, Ken was put forward as a “studio assistant.”

The irony here is Ken’s occupation. He was a bank teller in Boston, which the Cape lender should have found eminently acceptable. To simplify matters, Don applied for the loan in his name alone. After three months, he secured a loan for $5,000. He separately contracted out installation of a new well, pump, plumbing, water heater, toilet, bathtub, lavatory, and kitchen sink with a drain board for $1,484.50.

Ken died on September 24, 2015. Don and Ken shared sixty years together. Three months later, Don told his doctor that he wasn’t interested in sketching or painting anything. I drove him to the hospital for tests. It was an evening appointment, which felt odd as nighttime was reserved for visiting patients, not becoming one. Don was unusually calm, not anxious or uncomfortable. We soon learned that Don had bone metastasis. He was able to remain at 947 Satucket Road, the home he established fifty-seven years earlier, until his passing on Saturday afternoon, March 26, 2016. I was there holding his right hand. A visiting nurse had his left. At 3 p.m., I told Don I had to step out to drive my partner to work. Upon return, I resumed holding my friend’s hand. I pressed his palm and called his name to announce my return. Don opened his eyes, they brightened, focused on me, and with that he took his last breath. Don had communicated a final farewell, visually, with the same eyes that had translated the world around him onto mountains of canvas. Thank you, my friend and shipmate.

David Zeni, a retired civil servant and former Navy officer, resides in Harwich, Massachusetts. He is author of Forgotten Empress, a book about Canadian Pacific Railway’s steamship Empress of Ireland. He is writing another nautical manuscript about the U.S. Navy submarine S-4, prospectively entitled Sail Four.

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Untitled Abstraction (Yellows and Oranges), late 1950s, oil on canvas, 16 x 21 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

14

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Untitled (Abstraction in Blues and Violets), 1959, oil on canvas, 41 x 51 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

15

Untitled (Abstraction in Rose Colors, Mauves, and White), 1950–1960, oil on canvas, 41½ x 31 inches.

Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

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DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Third Avenue El, 1955, oil on canvas, 25 x 36½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

17

Rolling Bridge (Fort Point Channel Bridge), 1977, acrylic and oil on canvas, 25 x 31 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

18

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Steel (Railroad Bridge), n.d., collagraph on paper, 26 x 32 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

19

Old Colony Railroad Bridge, 1994, collagraph on paper, 21 x 31 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

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DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Longfellow Bridge, 1980, collagraph on paper, 18½ x 29¾ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

21

Southampton, Europa & Empress of Britain, 2001, watercolor on paper, 15 x 22½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

22

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Ship on High Seas, 2001, oil on canvas, 33 x 43 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

23

Battleship in Drydock, 1988, oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 41½ x 31 inches.

Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg.

24

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Red Ferry Boat, 1981, oil on canvas, 27 x 30 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

25

Nobska Light, 1989, watercolor on paper, 13 x 21 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg.

26

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Sesuit Harbor, Summer, 2011, watercolor on paper, 15 x 201/2 inches. Gift of Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

27

Spinnakers, Version II, n.d., collagraph on paper, 18 x 237/8 inches.

Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

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DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Gaft Sail Study, 1989, watercolor on paper, 11¾ x 14¾ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Yvonne Backus.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

29

Untitled (St. Pancras Station, London), 1972, oil on canvas, 32 x 46 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

30

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Old Sullivan Square Station, 2004, watercolor on paper, 33 x 41 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

31

Oakbluff Shadows, 1987, watercolor on paper, 11 x 22½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

32

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Byzantine Tondo, 1989, collagraph on paper, 25 x 25 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

33

St. Mark’s, Venice, 1987, collagraph on paper, 25 x 31 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

34

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Munich Rooftops, 2003, oil on canvas, 271/2 x 211/2 inches.

Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

35

Washington Street, Boston, 2007, n.d., oil on canvas, 251/4 x 371/4 inches. Gift of Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

36

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Boston Public Library Lamps, 2005, watercolor on paper, 293/4 x 223/4 inches.

Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

37

House in Harwich, 1991, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

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DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Untitled (House on Cape Cod), 1988–1995, oil on canvas, 21 x 27 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

39

Waterfront, 1986, collagraph on paper, 17 x 29½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow.

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DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

Provincetown, 1987, collagraph on paper (color proof 1), 151/4 x 37 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg.

CAPE COD MUSEUM OF ART

41

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST Battleship in Drydock, 1988, oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 41½ x 31 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 24 Boston Public Library Lamps, 2005, watercolor on paper, 293/4 x 223/4 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 37 Byzantine Tondo, 1989, collagraph on paper, 25 x 25 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 33 Christian Radich, 2002, watercolor on paper, 28 x 351/2 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13 Cleveland Arcade, 1970, watercolor on paper, 23½ x 17½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow ������������������������������������������ 5 Colosseum, 1960s, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 2 Evening Train, 1974, collagraph on paper, (10/50), 21 x 143/4 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow ������������������������������������ 7 Gaft Sail Study, 1989, watercolor on paper, 11¾ x 14¾ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Yvonne Backus ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 29 House in Harwich, 1991, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow ������������������������������� 38 & Inside Cover Longfellow Bridge, 1980, collagraph on paper, 18½ x 29¾ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow �������������������������������������� 21 Montmartre, 1988, collagraph on paper, 231/2 x 20 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 10 Munich Rooftops, 2003, oil on canvas, 271/2 x 211/2 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 35 Nobska Light, 1989, watercolor on paper, 13 x 21 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 26 Oakbluff Shadows, 1987, watercolor on paper, 11 x 22½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow ������������������������������������������ 32 Old Colony Railroad Bridge, 1994, collagraph on paper, 21 x 31 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow ������������������������������ 20 Old Sullivan Square Station, 2004, watercolor on paper, 33 x 41 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 31 Provincetown, 1987, collagraph on paper (color proof 1), 151/4 x 37 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg �������������������������������������������� 41 QE2 at Speed, 1992, oil on canvas, 51 x 39 inches. On loan from Collection of David Zeni and Scott Bican �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 12 Red Ferry Boat, 1981, oil on canvas, 27 x 30 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 25 Rolling Bridge (Fort Point Channel Bridge), 1977, acrylic and oil on canvas, 25 x 31 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg ��������������������� 4 & 18 Sesuit Harbor, Summer, 2011, watercolor on paper, 15 x 201/2 inches. Gift of Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 8 & 27 Ship on High Seas, 2001, oil on canvas, 33 x 43 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������23 & Back Cover Southampton, Europa & Empress of Britain, 2001, watercolor on paper, 15 x 22½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow. �����������22 Spinnakers, Version II, n.d., collagraph on paper, 18 x 237/8 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow. �������������������������������������� 28 Spire Under Scaffolding, n.d., oil on canvas, 39 x 23 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf. ���������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 St. Mark’s, Venice, 1987, collagraph on paper, 25 x 31 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 6 & 34 Steel (Railroad Bridge), n.d., collagraph on paper, 26 x 32 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 19 Third Avenue El, 1955, oil on canvas, 25 x 36½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 17 Untitled (Abstraction in Blues and Violets), 1959, oil on canvas, 41 x 51 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg ������������������������������������ 15 Untitled (Abstraction in Rose Colors, Mauves, and White), 1950–1960, oil on canvas, 41½ x 31 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg. �����16 Untitled Abstraction (Yellows and Oranges), late 1950s, oil on canvas, 16 x 21 inches. Gift of Dr. Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf ������������������������������������������������������������������ 14 Untitled (House on Cape Cod), 1988–1995, oil on canvas, 21 x 27 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg. ������������������������������������������������������ 39 Untitled (St. Pancras Station, London), 1972, oil on canvas, 32 x 46 inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Bequest from the Estate of Donald Stoltenberg. ����������������������������30 & Cover Washington Street, Boston, 2007, n.d., oil on canvas, 251/4 x 371/4 inches. Gift of Roger T. Dunn and Howard John Stapf. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 36 Waterfront, 1986, collagraph on paper, 17 x 29½ inches. Cape Cod Museum of Art. Gift of Donald Stoltenberg in memory of Kenneth Swallow ����������������������������������������������������� 40 42

DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD

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DONALD STOLTENBERG | BUILDING HIS WORLD