Provincetown History Snippet: Forum 49

May 24, 2019

History

In the late 1940s and 1950s Provincetown emerged as one of the nation’s première art locales for contemporary American art. The first major exhibition of Abstract Expressionists was held at 200 Commercial Street during Forum 49 in the summer of 1949.

Forum 49 was a summer-long series of sophisticated programs, beginning with the forum “What Is An Artist?” and ending with the controversial “French Art vs American Art Today.” Record crowds attended the exhibits of paintings and programs focused on the avant-garde in many areas, including architecture, psychoanalysis, poetry, jazz), which some have seen as a nascent event of modernism in Provincetown.

Click here to check out all of our Provincetown History Snippets!

More Recent Provincetown News

A Heavenly Return: “Angels in America, Part II: Perestoika” at the Provincetown Theater

May 11, 2025

There is, it turns out, a formula for stage magic: ten impressive actors, an indescribable set design, a brilliant time-tested script, and an inspired director. That’s what you’ll see at the Provincetown Theater’s production of Angels in America, Part...

Season Twelve at the Hawthorne Barn

April 16, 2025

Twelve seasons ago, Twenty Summers opened the doors of the Hawthorne Barn with a simple but profound idea: to honor the past while creating space for the voices shaping the future. Once the studio of painter Charles Hawthorne, founder of the Cape Cod School...

1st Annual Outsiders Festival

From May 8-11, 2025, The 1st Annual Outsiders Festival features four days of art, theatre, salons, happenings, film, fashion, photography, poetry and dance as a celebration of us as a vibrant community of world-class performers and artists in every sense of...