Sweeping through a century of landscapes

The show hopscotches through a century of Provincetown painting. All four artists portray the people or the landscape of the Outer Cape, and that thread of consistency neatly ties it all together.

Moffett leans into Modernism even as he clings to narrative in paintings such as “Higgins Wharf’’ (1947). Shacks and boats make a formal jumble at the end of a pier; there’s a jazzy rhythm to the sloping roofs, jagged entryways, and jutting masts. Four fishermen are on the dock, each caught up in his own task; it’s a scene of contemplation, not socializing. Even a dog looks out to sea.

There are several gems by Dickinson on view, delineating his trajectory toward abstraction. A 1921 watercolor “Boatyard, Provincetown’’ has the clean lines of a boat awash in fluid hues, as if the colors might dissolve the contours. By 1948, his painting “Through Two Cottage Windows’’ is all painterly atmosphere hanging on the sharp edges of the window frames. We look from the outside through a darkened interior out to a low hill beyond. It’s a dream of a place layered with shadow and reflection.

Vevers painted surreal montages, such as “Transition’’ (1964), a series of whispery scenes on one canvas: a ribbon of a path leading up a dark hill; a window framing a nude woman; the early, flaming buds on a spring shrub. Vevers reclaims figure and narrative in a filmic way, utilizing crosscuts, leaving much of the storytelling to the viewer’s inference.

Baker paints still lifes against a backdrop of landscape, as in an untitled work from 1993, which depicts a pile of tools and wood blocks. The image, like a Hofmann painting, is about structure and the illusion of space. The pile lies on a surface that rises to meet us. The landscape beyond, glimpsed along the edges, is correspondingly deep.