Provincetown Art Association and Museum

Problems, problems. You never know what kind of problem an architect will face.

In the case of the new Provincetown Art Museum, which opened on Commercial Street in May, the problem was how to put a big thing in a small place.

The outer Cape has, for good stretches of the last century, been yeasty with artistic enterprise. Hans Hofmann taught and awakened a generation of abstract painters here, and Eugene O'Neill staged experimental theater.

A gaunt, droopy-eyed old man and a beautiful young woman with long flowing hair sit at the center of "An Anniversary," one of the big, complicated, symbolically fraught works that made Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978) a famous American painter in the decades before World War II. She directs at the viewer a wide-eyed, sidelong gaze; he points upward with the index finger of one tired hand. On the floor at their feet is an array of ceramic ware and pieces of fruit painted with the realism of a Dutch old master. Behind them stands in profile a young man with a violin who gestures as though conducting an unseen orchestra. A crowd of seated figures fills in the murky space beyond -- customers in a purgatorial sad cafe of the soul.