Monhegan Landform

“Hawaii to Monhegan—birthplace + home,” penned Reuben Tam in his journal for 1948. Just like Robert Henri and George Bellows before him, Tam felt the pull of Maine’s Monhegan Island, visiting and living there for decades. The artist believed landscape was not only a subject for representational painting, but also a medium to convey ideas and concerns related to memory, identity, and subjectivity and submitted this work in lieu of a diploma portrait. Departing from convention, the Academy’s governing council accepted it, perhaps because Monhegan Landform consciously harkened back to George Bellows’s Three Rollers, a diploma work also in the Academy's collection.