N.E.exposure Regional treasures at the Newport Art Museum BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Visual riches buried away around the region have been gathered together in "Envisioning New England: Treasures from Community Art Museums," at the Newport Art Museum.

From Provincetown to Bennington, from Fitchburg to New Britain, 46 collection highlights have been assembled. Co-curator is Nancy Whipple Grinnell of the NAM, which is directed by Christine Callahan, currently president of the sponsoring Consortium of New England Community Art Museums.

Limited to the years 1850 to 1950, the exhibition has been drawn from 14 member museums, which represent every New England state except New Hampshire.

Accompanying each painting is an informative paragraph or two of explanatory text. The seminal influence of the 1913 Armory Show in New York is pointed out for a painting from that year by George Bellows, "Autumn Flame." In it, modernist technique and feeling comes through in the short, bright slashes of paint depicting a forest scene on Maine’s Monhegan Island. In stylistic contrast, placed next to that is Edward Hopper’s "Blackhead, Monhegan" (ca. 1918), in which a rocky Maine shore view shows a tranquil rather than surging sea. While Hopper may be associated with the spirit of the lonely city more than any other American artist, his calm and solitary sensibility gets an outdoor tryout here. (Not mentioned in this exhibition, Hopper’s first sale was at the Armory Show and was decidedly not modernist: a sailboat glowing yellow on a sunset sea.)

Every small regional museum tries to collect one or more centerpiece works by artists that even casual patrons will recognize. The trick is to gather worthy examples. Grandma Moses, for example, has daubed many a painting with glaringly untutored technique in her celebrated primitive style. Not so in "Bennington" (1953), contributed by the Bennington Museum, in which a bird’s-eye view of the town reveals perfectly well-proportioned horses drawing carts and carriages about the town.

Another household name interestingly represented is Thomas Hart Benton, whose "Keith Farm, Chilmark" (1955) shows voluptuously contoured hills as muscular as the workmen and draft animals in his more familiar paintings and murals. A typical work by N.C. Wyeth is included. "Mrs. Cushman’s House" (1944) shows the draftsmanlike precision that made him such an effective illustrator.

Landscapes are opportune subject matter for New England painters and necessarily dominate the exhibition. Rockwell Kent’s "Monadnock Afternoon" (1909) is a simple evocation of a still winter scene, with two bands of sere treescapes alternating with long swaths of snow-covered meadow and white sky revealing a corner patch of blue. Showing how such stillness can nevertheless be visually dynamic, Lucy L’Engle’s "Truro in Winter" (1933) does an expressionistic turn, exaggerating steep, parched hills interrupted by a twisting road that is edged with clawlike trees and two skewed telephone poles.

An illustrator’s eye for detail is amusingly revealed in Beatrice Cuming’s "Saturday Night New London" (1938). A specific time and place is captured, but with more control of detail and mood than a photograph could: in the crowded street scene, a sailor pulls imploringly on the hand of one young woman while he talks to another, as a marquee announcing the Gary Cooper film The Lives of the Bengal Lancers places this precisely in time.

There are some superb images here that are not familiar to us because the subject matter has been more familiarly treated — and represented in art history books — by masters. We may think of Winslow Homer’s man-sized flounder spilling out of a rowboat when we see Walter Lofthouse Dean’s "On the Deep Sea" (1901), but the piece is an impressive compositional and emotional work, as the brush strokes of the sea and backdrop fog center our attention on the fisherman hauling in his massive catch with a hand line.

The exhibition is underrepresented by paintings from the mid-19th century starting point of its declared time span. That is just as well, if visual more than historical interest is a priority. Nevertheless, Fitz Hugh Lane’s "New York Yacht Club Regatta" (1856) is an exciting snapshot of racing boats caught between roiling sea and storm-cloud sky. Yet the inclusion of the portrait "The Carpenter" (ca. 1922), by Gertrude Horsford Fiske, is a character study more interesting to us today than is the static "Portrait of Dr. Samuel Elton and His Riding Chair" (ca. 1850), with the good doctor relaxed cross-legged in his horse cart.