Vincent Hartgen and the Maine Snow
Vincent Hartgen
By permission of The Hartgen Group
Painter and professor, Vincent Hartgen,* was a legend at the University of Maine, founding the university’s art department and art museum. I met him my senior year in his one-semester course of Janson’s History of Art. He was the first man I’d ever seen wear a tee shirt under a sports jacket—and his views made a profound impact on me.
My knowledge of art history wouldn’t fill a teacup, but what I learned from him made my viewing exciting when Mark and I saw Michaelangelo’s statue of David at the Accademia Gallery in Florence, Turner’s sea paintings at the Tate in London, and da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris.
But Hartgen affected me most by two words he taught that caused me to remember him with them as a unit: function and form. And form followed function.
He built a home in Orono where the garage door, several feet from the rural road, was what you saw driving by, assuring him in winter snows the least amount of shoveling. Walking a mile from my dormitory to my classrooms, at road intersections I climbed over snow banks plowed eight feet high.
Our family home in Longmeadow had simple curtains because the house had needed a new furnace—clearly a Vincent Hartgen-inspired decision that if the house wasn’t efficiently warm, good curtains were of little use.
My realization is, “Of all the words in our lives, some become lifelong reliable guidance in making decisions.