Warren McHugh Is A Bit Of Carved History

Local residents who were here back in the day will tell you: The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were a decidedly different time in Sag Harbor.

In the days before luxury yachts, high-end retailers and impossible-to-find parking, the rents were cheap, bars were rowdy, houses were unrenovated, and free-ranging dogs were their own masters.

And up on Madison Street, along a stretch of sidewalk that today houses The Church art center and several high-end home design stores, there was The Art Stall, a bedraggled little storefront where, from 1961 until his death in 1986, artist Warren McHugh carved wooden figures from boards of plain white pine, painted them and gave them a life all their own.

As a matter of history, The Art Stall was not only the first gallery in Sag Harbor, it was also home to the village’s first bookstore — McHugh sold used paperbacks from his shop for half the cover price, in order to buy his art materials.

And he made his woodworks accessible, selling the figures for a modest $15 or $20 each, so most anyone could afford them.

McHugh’s carvings were actually inspired by “dummy boards,” a 16th century Dutch and English art form in which life-size cutouts of figures were created with a specific purpose: to stand sentinel over homes and businesses, making it appear as if someone was minding the store when, in fact, they weren’t there at all, thereby deterring would-be thieves.

McHugh’s wooden figures were somewhat smaller than true dummy boards, and while many of them were nameless or inspired by real-life local residents, others sprang to life from the pages of costume books, National Geographic magazine and famous novels. The artist’s diverse subjects included soldiers of the Continental Army, turbaned sultans, Inca and South African tribesmen, as well as literary figures like writer Oscar Wilde, and even Queequeg, the Maori harpooner in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” who, upon arriving in Sag Harbor, expresses dismay at how supposedly Christian men behave on dry land.

Yep, that was Sag Harbor, and it’s somewhat propitious — if not altogether preordained — that McHugh, who was born in New York City in 1921 and spent his entire life as a professional sailor, would end up in a little village by the sea made famous for its prodigious 19th century whaling industry. For more than two decades, McHugh toiled in his Madison Street studio carving figures that evoked, among other entities, the sailors and whalers who once populated village streets.

But, of course, by the time McHugh and his novelist wife, Arona, bought their small, rough-hewn cottage on Glover Street in 1958, followed in 1961 by The Art Stall building, which had previously been home to a piano tuner, Sag Harbor was just a shadow of its former self.

During a recent visit to the village, the couple’s sons, Michael and Jonathan McHugh, who are both now in their 60s, recalled summers in Sag Harbor and the years during which The Art Stall was operational.

“Our building was from the whaling era and taken from Long Wharf on a flatbed truck. By the time we closed it in ’86, it was so dilapidated, there were 80 years of roots growing through the pipes,” explained Michael, a musician living in New York City, adding that after his father’s death from cancer at age 64, the building was sold to Jack Tagliasacchi, owner of Il Capuccino restaurant next door, who expanded his eatery into the former art space. “The town made them keep the facade — that’s all that’s left. Now you’re eating dinner in the space where the gallery used to be.”

Though The Art Stall is long gone, the dining room of Il Capuccino is still adorned with more than a dozen of the artist’s carved figures, including his “Chefs” series made specifically for the restaurant.

Now, thanks to a little luck and a lot of providence, a treasure trove of McHugh’s artwork has found its way back to the village where it was created, more than 35 years after The Art Stall was shuttered for good.

The summer, Keyes Art on Main Street is hosting “Warren McHugh Woodcarvings — A Sag Harbor Treasure,” an exhibition featuring not only McHugh’s carvings but also several of his paintings on canvas.

It turns out that it was kismet when Jonathan McHugh, who, along with his brother, owns the work their father left behind, walked into Julie Keyes’s gallery and asked if she might consider a show of his work to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. Keyes excused herself from the conversation for a moment, ducked down into the gallery’s basement — and returned holding one of McHugh’s carvings.

“The hair on my arms stood up. She had not only met him but had a carving,” Jonathan, a filmmaker who lives in California, recalled. “I said, this is the spot. Let’s figure it out.”

Keyes had her own memories to share about Warren McHugh and said that she first encountered him and his artwork after moving to Sag Harbor in 1980 in order to go to art school at Southampton College.

“At that time I had a friend who was good friends with Jerome Robbins, and we went to his house for lunch, and he had these woodcarvings, and I was so fancy and I knew about art, and I thought, ‘What the hell, where’d you buy these things?” Keyes recalled. “Then they haunted me. I lived in an apartment behind the building next to Warren’s shop. So I’d go by this guy every day, and he was still working there, and I loved them.”

McHugh may have had a passion for art, but his life was defined by the sea. A Merchant Marine, he began creating small woodcarvings at sea during World War II. His only formal training in art was provided by the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal. After the war, McHugh worked in the Civilian Navy aboard ships in New York Harbor. He even met his wife, Arona, aboard a ship heading back to Europe after the war. She was in the Women’s Army Corps, he was a sailor, and they met aboard the Amerika, a former German passenger ship that had been pressed into service for the Marshall Plan, and they served together in Bremerhaven in post-war Germany.

According to the couple’s sons, theirs was an unusual pairing — though both were big readers, Warren and Arona had very different levels of education. She had a graduate degree from Columbia University, while he was a self-taught artist who had barely graduated from high school.

“She was so deep — almost too brilliant. She could recite 18th century German poetry. He was the exact opposite. She was Jewish, he was not, so she became the scorn of her patriarchal Boston Jewish family,” said Jonathan.

“It’s so interesting that they found each other. He was influenced by a lot of different things. He used found objects in his art — he found bags of spice can tops on the docks where he worked, or he would find nails, children’s toys, horseshoe crabs. He loved historical figures and nautical craft. He loved whaling because of Sag Harbor. He read a lot of historical fiction and watched a lot of movies.”

And, in summer, he ran The Art Stall, often with the help of his older son, Michael, who recalled how he and his father operated the Sag Harbor business as a true tag team effort.

“We’d do shifts,” Michael explained. “We were supposed to be open from 10 in the morning to 10 at night, but what happened in the ’80s is, we’d realized there was a huge crowd of people from Il Capuccino next door. My father or I would do the late shift — people would pour in. They were drunk, and they’d see the art and want to buy it.

“We were making money at 11 at night, so we’d stay open and do night business,” Michael added. “Then I’d close the door at some point, and my musician friends would come in and jam. We’d also write poetry. On weekends, we’d throw open the doors till 1 a.m. — people were playing and buying art. We were making more in the middle of the night than during the day.”

Though McHugh’s work could technically be classified as folk art and was sold for a modest price to those who stopped by The Art Stall, he did find some success as an artist during his lifetime, showing at galleries in New York City and the East End, including Guild Hall. McHugh was also a featured artist in the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition “Nautical Folk Artists of Today.”

Though the McHughs’ year round home was on Staten Island, where Warren also made his woodcarvings, he and Arona were no doubt drawn to Sag Harbor because of the literary and artistic vibe, which makes sense given their respective interests and talents. Arona McHugh was a bestselling author who published four novels for Doubleday, including “The Seacoast of Bohemia.” Her first novel, “A Banner With a Strange Device” (1964), was written at the family’s home in Sag Harbor.

They were both part of the creative community of writers and artists who bolstered Sag Harbor’s visibility as an artists’ colony beginning in the late 1960s. Among their friends were contemporaries like D.A. Pennebaker, Betty Friedan and E.L. Doctorow.

In a recent interview, their friends Mimi and Clive Irving, who still live in Sag Harbor, recalled Warren McHugh as a hardy, do-it-yourself kind of character.

“He was like a sea dog. He was robust and a fit person,” said Irving. “I watched him put a new roof on his house. Arona paid no attention to the house, but Warren was practical and fixed everything.

“Warren also went bathing in the sea — literally, he’d take a bar of soap,” Irving laughed.

When asked about the woodcarvings that McHugh prolifically produced at The Art Stall, Irving said, “What Warren was doing was folk art. They are amazing works of art. His originality and ability to convey a sense of this town was unique. There’s a directness.

“He was also very fussy about the art store itself, the way it was kept. It was a place everyone loved going to — a very social place,” he added. “It’s quite a lovely memory of that old Sag Harbor. That bit of Madison Street when it was very quiet, with the art store and Il Capuccino.”

For Julie Keyes, who lived next door to The Art Stall all those years ago, this recent reintroduction to McHugh’s work has provided her with new perspective, clarity and an appreciation that only time and wisdom can bring.

“Back then, I had this preconceived notion about who I was in the art world and what the art world was all about — and it was about all those sophisticated painters,” said Keyes. “It was vapid. I had a vapid, insecure relationship with it, and from there, you can’t look at things correctly and you can’t make a decision when you’re on that level.

“I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I didn’t even know what authentic meant. How do you figure out what’s an authentic painting when you don’t have authenticity?” she added.

“But what’s fascinating to me is that after getting out of art school and getting my master’s degree and going into a deeper dive into the art world, which is what my life has been about, I’ve come full circle to a place where I have much more appreciation about the depth of how great these works are. In 1980, I was a child. I didn’t have any information about how all art should be about getting out what’s inside of you. The more direct of a line from heart to canvas or wood, the more interesting the work is.

“It’s clear how much he cared about the characters he was working with,” she said. “What he was doing was communicating. It’s the nature of art.”

Keyes Art is at 45 Main Street in Sag Harbor. To learn more about Warren McHugh and the work at the gallery, visit juliekeyesart.com.