Bernard Langlais

American (1921-1977)

Born in Old Town, Maine, Bernard Langlais studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where he studied under the tutelage of German Expressionist Max Beckmann. Langlais was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the works of Edvard Munch in Norway.

Langlais’s experiments with wood began in 1956 when he bought a place in Maine and rebuilt an interior wall by piecing together scraps of wood. Langlais started to create abstract wall reliefs that he showed to great acclaim in New York in the late 50s and early 60s. By the time he moved to Maine full-time in 1966, he was making room-sized wall reliefs and would begin to construct wooden sculptures on the land around his Cushing farm, including his best known commission, the 70-foot tall Indian for the town of Skowhegan.

Langlais’s work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Corcoran Gallery, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Langlais was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honorary degree from the University of Maine and a Ford Foundation Purchase Award. In 2014, the Colby College Museum of Art presented the retrospective, Bernard Langlais. Langlais’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Farnsworth Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.