Summer is high season for visiting the Cape. To be at the very tip of the hook, in Provincetown, in the depths of the off-season, when the wind comes whipping across the full breadth of the Atlantic, is no picnic (it’s the cold of the “freezing-asses-off variety,” as New Yorker writer Mark Singer once put it). The 3,000 or so year-round Provincetown residents are hardy souls.
But, as many have discovered, one person’s off is another person’s on. The tourist industry skirts the question by calling spring and fall the “shoulder seasons.” Maybe not everything is open at those off-peak times, but there are enough restaurants, coffee shops, and stores to keep you fed, caffeinated, and diverted, without having to crowd-surf on Commercial Street. (And the terrific Provincetown Art Association and Museum is open year-round.)
Instead, you can rub elbows with tulips, wisteria, and apple blossoms in spring, roses, clematis, hydrangeas, and dahlias in fall, the ensemble cast of the evolving show put on by the many gardens along that long and winding little road through the middle of town.
And enjoy an unimpeded view of its remarkable vernacular architecture, a pastiche of styles and functional and decorative elements that rub along pretty nicely together: ells and eaves, front porches and back decks, bay windows and plate-glass storefronts, granite steps and exterior wooden staircases, classical columns and Victorian gingerbread, weathered shingles and white clapboard.
All year-round, you have the beaches, the dunes, the sky, and the light to keep you company. If you’re a resident, it seems, you have a dog, too.
Charm gets laid on with the proverbial trowel in Provincetown, but it’s a trowel, often a garden trowel, wielded so masterfully. Would the charm wear off after while? Maybe. But a row of gleaming white rocking chairs, a front lawn populated by a boxwood spheres big and small, or a front garden brimming with hundreds of white tulips (and one red) is pretty hard to beat.
A lot of love is lavished on these mostly modest-scale outdoor spaces—a venerable old tree staked from the four points of the compass to keep it upright, for instance—and, I suspect, a lot of money. If you’re in Provincetown in the shoulder seasons, you’re likely to encounter work crews busily planting and pruning as well as painting, insulating, taking apart, shoring up, and restoring properties up and down the lanes.
Still, a beguiling rumpledness seems to creep in. Hedges gone scraggly, a vine threading itself around the feet of a bench. Oak trees are molded by the prevailing winds. Flowers poke their head out through picket fences, Japanese maple leaves make a pattern on clam-shell driveways. Nature asserts itself in this village hunkered down on a sandy finger dipping into the sea. The sand scours; the air gives everything a coat of brine. Wind and rain rust sheet metal and hinges and strip surfaces better than any man-made solvent.
The life cycle of the material world is on full display here. Some properties are in the prime of life, plucked and polished to the last blade of grass; others sag and could stand a coat of paint. The disheveled sidling up to the prim and proper is another one of the contrasts that make Provincetown so visually interesting.
I get the impression that the locals cherish the rough edges. Witness the front of the long-standing Old Colony Tap, according to its Facebook page, “the best little bar in Provincetown, MA, where you [might] see a salty old sailor get a haircut and where Norman Mailer used to drink Old Granddad.” That storm door. Upstairs Florence Mauclere makes beautiful leather goods, in the former workshop of the late Victor Powell, legendary sandal maker and artist.
Commercial Street has plenty of commerce—retailers selling groceries, housewares, books, alcohol, and lottery tickets, tattoo shops, inns, art galleries, bars, cafes, and restaurants, including the famed Lobster Pot, souvenir shops, cannabis dispensaries—and immaculately maintained private residences, as well as the a nonprofit movie theater, the aforementioned PAAM, and the grand public library, located in a former white steepled church.
You might notice here and there a small blue-and-white plaque on the facade of an old house, designating it as a “floater.” According to an article in Cape Cod & The Islands magazine, 28 buildings were ferried across the bay from Long Point, the town’s outermost edge, in the 19th century. Among them was a bakery, and the article says, “the baking process went on, with the smoke curling from the chimneys on the cross-harbor journey.”
Yet another kind of contrast arises between the huddled human community in the town center and the expansiveness of the nearby beaches and dunes. As much as I like how the buildings have grown up around each another, I wonder what it’s like to live shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors, and if the hedges, picket fences, lattice screens, and shutters aren’t just for show. Maybe they’re also means of keeping one’s distance and obtaining a tad of privacy.
The nearby beaches and the trails that ramble through the dunes hold out the pleasures of deeper solitude. In spring and fall, you have them mostly all to yourself. It’s an exhilarating blast of freedom, to walk down to the water’s edge, to have the infinite heavens above you, the vast ocean before you, a wide sandy stretch between you and civilization. I can’t resist taking pictures of the scene, knowing that they all come out looking the same.
More on the history of the Old Colony Tap can be found on the Building Provincetown blog.
To read the article about the floating houses, go here.
This time about a year ago, I was in Paris. Before I went, I wondered if the Paris I loved and remembered from earlier visits, especially my first, would be the same. How could it be? But a few decades isn’t a big deal to a city 2,000 years old. After all, its motto is fluctuat nec mergitur: “it floats, it does not sink.”
There were differences: cell phones everywhere, but fewer smokers, less car exhaust, and the street sweepers’ broom bristles are now plastic, not thatch, although water still flows down the gutters in the early morning. But the narrow streets, elaborate facades, wrought-iron balconies, sidewalk cafes with velvet-upholstered chairs inside and cane chairs outside, storefronts painted olive, forest green, smoky blue, maroon—still there. Mais, oui.
Admittedly, my brief stays there have been within the city’s inner circle, the part most ancient, most preserved, not where the high-rises loom, and my impressions, as of any place during a short visit, subjective, personal, superficial. What we take away from a place is what we’ve absorbed within the limits of our perception, memory, and expectations. (Never mind those limits imposed by the time, energy, and money we have to spend.)
When we’re someplace new, we can’t help seeking the familiar in the foreign, even as we wonder at the unfamiliar. Returning to a place, we look for our past in the present. The experience of travel is a jumble of sensory stimuli, intellectual engagement, emotional reactions. We busily try to organize it all as it comes at us into a sense of where we are, and who we are in relation to where we are. Afterward, the sorting and shaping continue as we recount and reflect on our experience.
Back in Paris this time, I just felt overwhelmingly glad to be once again in the presence of so much beauty. I couldn’t resist retracing some steps, but mostly I just went around breathing it all in.
My memories of my first visit are vivid. I had an immediate, surprising sense of being someplace northern. Something about the light, and the short days, I think. Given my fuzzy notions of latitudes, I didn’t realize Paris is farther north than Duluth. Fortunately, I didn’t encounter Minnesotan winter in Paris, but it was December, and the weather was dour, the air damp and chill. I don’t recall a sunny day.
None of that bothered me one bit; I was snug in a warm, lined trench coat from Bonwit Teller. It came from that department store’s Boston branch, which occupied a magnificent Back Bay Beaux Arts building, originally the home of the New England Museum of Natural History (now a Restoration Hardware store). The coat was an early Christmas present from my parents, whose generosity extended to not making a peep about my being away from home for the holidays. And I was just a few months out of college, on my first trip abroad, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
I was thrilled to be there and primed for novel experiences. I didn’t have to wait long. As I made my bleary way on the Métro to my hotel that first morning, I felt eyes on me: The chihuahua of the elderly woman seated next to me was steadily regarding me, its tiny head poking out of her handbag.
Tina was my travel companion. Having spent her junior year of college in Paris, she knew what to see, where to eat, and how to get there. Our tastes and perceptions have always been remarkably aligned. The same things strike us funny, things that might not set off a reaction in others (the word cruet, for instance) often to the point of tears, still.
We loaded up each day on croissants and jam courtesy of our hotel, then sated ourselves on museums: the Louvre, the Cluny, the Jeu de Paume, the Marmottan … We walked for miles each day, and took the Métro, but never thought of taking a taxi, even when we changed hotels mid-trip. (Lugging our suitcases along, we fantasized about the “luggage walk” as an Olympic event.) Around four in the afternoon, we’d plop down into one of those cane café chairs for hot chocolate and, of all things, a soft-boiled egg. In fact, it was the perfect tide-me-over-to-dinnertime snack. I can still see the waiter expertly and simultaneously pouring a stream of chocolate from one pitcher and hot milk from another into a china cup.
Two hungry young women who’d been on the go all day, we enjoyed our evening meals. At one classic brasserie (that is, black-vested waiters, white tablecloths, white-tiled floor, dark woodwork, mirrors on the wall), we started with a vegetable soup—never surpassed since—creamy, savory, no less delicious for being mysterious. What were we tasting? Leeks? Parsnips? Turnips? In other words, it was a quintessential example of traditional French cuisine, in which humble foodstuffs are transformed into sublimely satisfying dishes. (The inclusion of cream, butter, chicken stock, etc., doesn’t hurt.)
There was pizza on New Year’s Eve, which we ate in a sweet little restaurant within hearing distance of fellow Americans who marveled, loudly, at the sight of Parisians eating their pies with a knife and fork. Tina and I were smugly amused that we didn’t say things like that. Why pizza? We didn’t know that so many restaurants would be booked for private parties that evening. But it was good.
There was the dinner at a posh restaurant on the Champs Élysées, the kind catering to expense accounts, courtesy of a Parisian advertising colleague of Tina’s aunt, Jane Trahey, one of the original Mad Women of New York. The meal began with a showy pyramid of shaved ice with every fruit de mer from teeny periwinkles to beefy oysters scaling its slopes and proceeded to the presentation of an intact sea bass, wheeled up on a cart, poised for sacrifice on a chrome platform. The waiter lit the pyre of dried fennel beneath it; flames shot up with a whoomph. That was just the last of a series of shocks to the two proper couples enduring a chilly business dinner at the next table.
Aux Assassins, 1950s, Maurice Bonnel photo.
We had another kind of memorable meal at the Café aux Assassins. Although it felt as if it dated from the days of the Paris Commune, the rue Jacob restaurant had opened in 1948. When it closed 55 years later, the daily newspaper Le Parisien mourned the demise of “la célèbre institution de Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” as “ce dernier bastion de la chanson paillarde” (“the last bastion of the bawdy song”). At a diminutive desk by the door presided a stout and stolid middle-aged matron, very non-paillarde, wearing oversized glasses with blue lenses and a stiff platinum-blonde bouffant hairdo. The place was crowded, but we sensed that crowded or no, if she didn’t like the looks of you, there would never be a table pour vous.
We were rescued by a party of jovial working men who waved us over and made room for us. They were a good-natured, welcoming bunch of older guys enjoying their food. Wine bottles circulated freely around the table. It dawned on me that, just like Americans, French people might mispronounce and slur their words, particularly when they got tipsy. I don’t remember what I ate, and most of the talk, possibly bawdy or not, blew right over my head. It didn’t really matter. It was a moment of fraternité.
Last but not least, Paris was where I first tasted clementines. We bought them from the market stalls along the rue Mouffetard, the oldest street in Paris, at the end of the day. In the famous l’heure bleue, they glowed, beside bunches of brilliant orange calendulas.
From this account, it might seem that I ate my way through Paris, to the exclusion of absorbing much else, but I also drank in the art, architecture, history, landscape, and general élan of the city. What I saw and felt settled deep in me and has informed me ever since. For a long time in my dreams, I was back there.
When I arrived in Paris last fall, I was just as ready to gobble it up. Thanks to that technological wonder the smart phone, it’s way too easy to take pictures. I shamelessly indulged my desire to photograph everything: beautiful storefronts, old courtyard doors, the skinny metal chairs in the parks, the sturdy elderly women in their skirts and nice shoes (one I saw in heels, pushing a walker, with a little dog on a leash), children, flowers, trees, cafés, the light, the Velib rental bikes. (The human-powered are yellow-green, the e-version, an elegant green-blue; their French riders also smartly dressed.) My excellent travel companion this time was exceedingly patient about the frequent stops and starts.
Paris and me, we click. I admire the precision and style Parisians bring to what they do, their aesthetics, sense of color, nuance, presentation. Even a two-euro coffee was served to me in a nice china cup and saucer, with a small glass of water, a little napkin, an elegant paper packet of sugar.
I didn’t encounter the rude, snooty Parisians that tourists complain about. I liked that when I walked into a shop, the first order of business, before any transaction, was to exchange bon jours. I was grateful to the Métro teller who helped me with a crumpled ticket; the waiter who was so pleased when I liked a wine he’d served me; the courteous clerk who so kindly assisted me in selecting just the right present for a friend; another who gift-wrapped a modest purchase. There was the restaurant owner who remembered us days later; the friendly woman in the épicerie where I assembled a delicious dinner to eat at our hotel when we were too pooped to go out. And all the people who graciously let me fumble my way through a bit of French.
I didn’t chase after my past on this trip. I went back to the Musée Rodin; when we went there, Tina and I never got past the gardens. The grounds were free, and I think we didn’t want to pay (some very modest) entry fee to the museum. Besides, the brooding, romantic atmosphere of the gardens appealed to our brooding, romantic selves. The bare trees brutally cropped, nary a person in sight—you half-expected to see Kaspar Hauser, from the gothic Werner Herzog film of that name, scurrying down the path.
This time the grounds were full of sunlight and flowers and fellow tourists. The museum, an 18th-century rococo mansion that had been Rodin’s home for the last decade or so of his life, had had a major facelift a few years earlier, and every surface—the black-and-white marble tiles in the grand foyer, French windows, glass cases, crystal chandelier, parquet floors, bronze sculptures—was gleaming.
I strolled up and down the rue Mouffetard again. If it seemed more upscale than I remembered, it was no less tantalizing. The shops were luscious, selling fresh figs, apples, cyclamens and heather, wine, chocolates, cheese, pastries, paté, pizza al taglio. The ice beneath fish filets vaporized; bees daintily sipped glazed fruit tarts as humans nearby sipped apertifs.
I went back to Notre Dame. Years ago, Tina and I had joined the throngs shuffling around the interior on Christmas Eve. Of course, now entry is interdit. Plenty of us shuffled around the exterior this time, awed by the monumentality of the ongoing restoration task. The ravages of the devastating 2019 fire were virtually invisible behind acres of scaffolding. It was oddly fascinating and heartening to see this beloved landmark undergoing painstaking, mind-blowing repair. And trust the French to tell that story with finesse.
I went to plenty of places new to me: the Musée d’Orsay, the Marché aux fleurs, Sainte Chapelle, the Jardin des Plantes grounds and the Natural History Museum there. When I got home, I realized that a photograph I’d taken during my second visit to Paris was of the flower market, but from nearby subway stairs. I’d missed it somehow back then. And I wondered why I had never gone to Sainte Chapelle; it’s such a major attraction, and in the centre ville, hard to miss. This trip, I knew better. Thanks to Professor Brigitte Buettner’s “Age of Cathedrals,” a Smith College course I’d taken as a community member in 2020, I was prepared to be awed, and I was. Ditto the Musée d’Orsay (the Rosa Bonheur exhibition alone!), et al.
I ate well this time around, too. Maybe it’s the peasant in me, but one of the meals I most enjoyed was my first of the trip, a simple, made-to-order jambon beurre: a fresh baguette, crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, sliced lengthwise, luxuriant with butter, filled with ribbons of ham. It cured my jet lag; that, and a morning spent in the sunny Jardin des Plantes. A bowl of onion soup a few days later was a close second. I was on the go again in Paris.
On one of the last, beautiful balmy days of our visit, fully embracing my tourist status, I glided down the Seine on a bateau mouche. It was dreamlike, slipping past majestic Lutetian limestone buildings with all their furbelows, gilded by late-afternoon sun, and serene, despite my being one of many sitting thigh to thigh on rows of benches. By that time of day, the sightseers around me, like me, seemed to have had their fill of rushing around and were content just to sit and absorb the scene.
When I got home, I vainly attempted more than once to write a post about my sentimental journey, but I was still absorbing it all, and I’m not done yet. (I did write about some Paris gardens and places I visited for GoNOMAD. You can go here to read it.)
As well, I was stymied by the sense that everything I could say had already been said, and said better. But looking at my photographs, I’m there all over again, and the impulse to share what I saw prevails. (I notice that, after thinking I had nothing to say, I’ve managed to come up with quite a lot.) Is there more to see? Given the chance, would I go back? In a heartbeat.
The Portland Museum of Art (PMA) at Congress Square in Portland, Maine, faces one of the more irrational intersections in that coastal Maine city, a road engineer’s nightmare and a puzzlement, no doubt, to people who didn’t grow up following the twisty New England roads that began as cowpaths.
The paths inside the PMA are easier to navigate and far less pedestrian, if you will, leading to one terrific gallery after another. The collection will keep you on your toes, made up of what you’d expect—Winslow Homer’s thrilling paintings of crashing seas, for instance—and more surprising things, e.g., Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled, Early Egyptian, which might have taken a detour from the Museum of Modern Art. The 1973 “combine,” Rauschenberg’s coinage for a work that combines sculpture and painting, is a droll trompe l’oeil piece. Masquerading as a leftover chunk of a pyramid, the upright block is not stone or concrete but cardboard coated with sand (seems appropriate, given the PMA’s a few streets over from the waterfront). Another sleight of hand is the orange paint on one side that creates a glow on the wall behind it.
As the museum’s website notes, “It looks like it should be plugged in, but it’s not. Rauschenberg is deliberately playing with the traditional museum setting of stark white gallery walls.” Among the big guys of American post-war modern-art mold-breakers, Rauschenberg has always been the one to win me over most consistently, with art that is playful, dramatic, witty, and serious. The artist Lynda Benglis said, “He knew how to make trash precious. He knew how to just turn it over and make you think about it.”
Speaking of wit, playfulness, drama, and seriousness, Migration (2015), by Christopher Patch, suspended from the Emily Eaton Moore and Family Gallery ceiling over a stairway, possesses all those elements.
Like Early Egyptian, Patch’s avian procession is made from humble materials, the stuff of elementary school art rooms: papier mache, collaged paper, paint. The ducks, hawks, songbirds, owl, oystercatcher and, of course, puffin, on the wing catch your eye from various angles: above the starkly beautiful Philip Guston, across the room from Bernard Langlais’s Untitled. Like their real-life counterparts, once you start seeing them, they’re all over.
Philip Guston (1913–1980), Sunrise, 1979
Dominating the fourth floor gallery, Langlais’s motley crew of sassy seabirds perches among fishes and next to a nine-foot-tall carving of Andre the seal, a celebrity pinniped who summered for many years in Rockport, Maine. (Untitled, originally created as a fountain for a Maine seaside resort, is one of several pieces by Langlais in the room, including Animal Farm, below. I wrote about this artist in an earlier post.)
You can just enjoy Migration’s lively, loosely rendered specimens, or you might be prompted to contemplate the sheer, dazzling, heroic, perilous nature of the fliers’ journeys between summer and winter homes. You might find yourself thinking about the other perils they face, or about climate change, or displaced people seeking refuge …
The PMA’s overall atmosphere is as invigorating as Down East salt air. Its flagship, the Charles Shipman Payson building, designed by the prestigious Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and erected in 1983, has wood and granite floors, evoking two dominant features of the Pine Tree State’s landscape, high-ceilinged rooms and intimate spaces, and windows large and small that offer views of surrounding city streets, as well as skylights that bring in that distinctive, shifting Maine light, variously brilliant and fog-tempered.
The layout encourages roving, rather like those olden cowpaths. Turning a corner, you might come face to face with a Hopper, a Warhol, a Degas, or an Andrew Wyeth. Or a full-size Sargent portrait of a society woman, Ellen Sears Amory Anderson Curtis, or a show that turns the assumptions behind such portraits on their heads, by contemporary Black artist Elizabeth Colomba. (Colomba’s show is about to close, but her Study of a Face, part of the permanent collection, is on view.)
Stuart Davis’s New York — Paris No. 2 (1931) caught my eye, as did Courbet’s Stormy Weather at Étretat, with its insightful wall label by high school student Isabella Tarkinson that speaks of a “fresher ocean scent.” I have to admit I was more fascinated by the sea creatures than the goddess in Diana of the Sea, by Marguerite Thompson Zorach (1887–1968). Maybe because I hadn’t had the obligatory lobster roll yet.
I was stopped in my tracks many times, sometimes by paintings by artists new to me, to name two, Vincent Smith and George Copeland Ault.
Smith (1929–2003) was a Brooklyn-born artist, the child of immigrants from Barbados. The PMA gave him a solo show in 1974 to “introduce this leading Black artist to Maine,” as the museum’s wall label recounts. In fact, he had introduced himself to the state in 1955 when he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture with Ben Shahn and Marguerite Zorach. Smith loved New York’s nightlife; he used to hang out evenings at the Five Spot Cafe to hear Black musicians play. He was another artist who put sand in his paint, as in The Sights and Sounds of Night (1972), below. My photograph doesn’t do justice to its gritty texture and jazzy vibrancy.
By contrast, Ault’s August Night at Russell’s Corners (1948) is a compelling portrait of the dead of night in an upstate New York town. There really is “nothing happening here.” It’s hard to avoid seeing its utter solitude as an evocation of his inner life. Ault grappled with poverty, depression, alcoholism, and terrible losses (all three of his brothers committed suicide, one in a suicide pact with his wife). He died by suicide or accidental drowning the same year he painted this picture. Hard perhaps to set aside the lurid biography, but only fair, right, and more interesting to take the painting on its own terms, as a remarkable reduction of a scene to pure fundamentals: a farm, a dark winter sky, a light, a moment.
One of the newer works on display at the museum is Jeffrey Gibson’s People Like Us (2018), a 2019 acquisition. Its visual splendor derives from a panoply of materials: glass and plastic beads, tin, copper, and gold-finished jingles, artificial sinew, quartz crystal, silver-coated copper wire, druzy crystal, nylon thread, nylon fringe, acrylic felt, acrylic paint, repurposed wool blanket, recycled jersey stuffing, and rawhide, but People Like Us is more than the sum of its parts. (I’m not even sure what some of those parts, namely, druzy crystal and jingles, are.) They contribute color, pattern, texture, but much else makes it irresistible: the intricate fabrication, for instance. Its dimensions, making it a kind of “Everychild.” And its radiant creativity.
Of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, Gibson refashioned his sculpture’s title from that of a 1965 Sister Corita Kent print he owns, People Like Us Yes. (I have fond memories of speeding past Sister Corita Kent’s rainbow painted on a huge gas tank near the Southeast Expressway, a few miles from downtown Boston.) Earlier this year, Gibson was chosen to represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale; he’s the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the U.S. pavilion.
Compelling as it was, the art at the PMA didn’t always get my full attention. Sometimes I was looking at people looking, like me, at art. Museum-goers figuring out how portrait subjects were, or weren’t, “people like us.” Bridging the gap, feeling the distance. IK MACH DASS SCHON JE$S (‘I’ll take care of it Je$s), seen below, is, according to Christies’ website, “one of Sigmar Polke’s largest and most important paintings of the 1970s … a fond critique of America, its foreign politics, cowboy movies and glamourizing of violence.” Now JE$S has become a subject of (one hopes fond) critique. And its observers get folded into the experience of the painting.
Sometimes fellow museum-goers are a pain—how to count the ways?—dutifully and so slowly reading every last word of every wall label, tuned in to droning, muttering audio tours, chatting heedlessly with friends in front of something you’d like to cast your eye over, taking photographs (guilty as charged). But being among fellow humans in a museum is also a treat. Like going to the movies, looking at art can be enjoyed collectively as well as personally. It’s affirming, reminding us of what makes us human, what we have in common: among other things, a shared desire to be inspired and to learn about ourselves and the world beyond. And yes, it’s great excuse for people-watching.
This slide show provides a tour of the flagship Payson building. The museum is planning an ambitious expansion that will more than double its square footage. I love that the plan is to use wood, specifically “mass timber,” as a major building component, but I’m dismayed that the plan might include razing the historic 1830 building next to it. Here’s the Portland Landmarks’ dissenting view of that possibility.
For more on Vincent Smith, read this Village Voicearticle. A bio of the fascinating artist Sister Corita Kent is available here in a New England History Society article. And Andre the seal? Here’s his story.
Looking at prints and people in a Berkshires museum
On a chilly New England winter day, the preferred “museum-casual” dress of visitors to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, tends to L.L. Bean, flannel shirts, Uggs, and comfortable shoes, with the occasional knitted hat (and masks, of course).
Not fashion-forward types for the most part, in other words, but they take on a touch of the dramatic coloration of the surroundings. The spectacular, impeccably presented art. The luscious wall colors. Natural light streaming through expanses of glass in Tadao Ando’s addition and, in the original marble temple, soft, diffused light through a frosted glass ceiling and French windows.
I’m there to see the art—two print shows, in particular—and, as always, I am awed and entertained by what I see. But I’m also interested in who is there, the interplay between the art and its viewers, the viewers and the setting. The intent, thoughtful, curious forms of contemplation, the leaning in and leaning back.
The Little Laundress, Pierre Bonnard, 1896
Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors, curated by Anne Leonard, the museum’s Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, is an extensive survey of a period when major artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, Bonnard, Cassatt, and Vuillard plumbed the possibilities of color printing, despite the fact that, as the exhibition text explains, “color in print was an outlier phenomenon… frowned upon as a matter of taste.”
With that premise, the show is off and running, and it covers a lot of ground, starting with scenes of pre- and post-revolutionary racy divertissements, then leaping forward several decades to the Belle Époque. If your current travel plans don’t stretch to Paris patisseries (maybe just to Stop & Shop?), this show gives you a chance to inhale the joie de vivre of one of that city’s most vibrant eras.
Some Aspects of Life in Paris, 6: Boulevard, Pierre Bonnard, c. 1898
Child with Lamp, Pierre Bonnard, 1896
Cobblestone streets and concert halls, ice-skating rinks and wall-papered interiors, wasp-waisted redheads and sinister toffs in top hats, as well as tender domestic encounters with children, even a busy market day in Gisors, Normandy: Artists took their inspiration from a variety of subjects and applied a range of approaches to them.
As a whole, these works exude a freshness that apparently was air too raw for some critics of the time: The Paris Salon, the official arbiter of art in France, didn’t accept color prints until 1899, years into this period of experimentation.
Detail, Dance Mania, Philibert Louis Debucourt, 1809
Like many other exhibitions I’ve seen at the Clark, Hue & Cry jogged my brain while bowling me over with beauty. It progresses past gorgeous woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs, displaying variations in technique, composition, and use of color that build an understanding and appreciation of the medium. It quietly calls attention to the complexity of the printmaking process. (Seeing as I never can keep straight intaglio, etching, mezzotints, engraving, I’ve since bookmarked the Clark’s online glossary of terms.)
It gets you pondering the push and pull between technology and creativity and what makes up the “mise en place” of an art moment: in this case, can-can dancers, cough-drop advertisers, and ukiyo-e woodcuts, among other things, got the color print movement rolling.
And, of course, there’s the matter of taste. Hard to believe that anyone viewing such dazzlers was not enthralled, but Nietzsche had a point when he wrote, “all of life is a dispute over taste.” Arguments about what makes good art have probably been raging since the pigment was still wet in the Lascaux caves.
I was equally enraptured by the works in Competing Currents: 20th-Century Japanese Prints, which I managed to see just days before it closed. Also organized by the Clark, it was curated by Oliver Ruhl, a 2021 graduate of Williams College’s master’s program in art history. More information about it can still be had online. Here are just a few examples of the exquisite works that were on display.
Solitude, Kyoto, Saitō Kiyoshi, 1948Shadow of a Mountain, Kasamatsu Shirō, 1959, and Late Autumn in Ichikawa, Kawase Hasui,1930A Stand of Trees, Shima Tamami, 1959, and Shisendo Temple Garden, Kasamatsu Shirō, 1960Snow at Kiyomizu Hall, Ueno, Kawase Hasui, 1929
I finished up my visit with a look in on Constable’s cloud studies and Turner’s View off Margate, Evening, a turn around the glowing silver collection, and a stop at Degas’s wonderfully off-kilter horse, cast in bronze after the artist’s death in 1917, spotting along the way hand-knit sweaters and visitors gazing at the outer landscapes—beautiful in every season.
Hue and Cry is on view at the Clark through March 6, 2022. Imaginary City, featuring the large, abstract paintings of contemporary artist Tomm El-Saieh, opened just after my visit, and runs through 2022. It appears in public spaces around the museum and is free and open to the public. The brilliant colors that distinguish his work might be just what we need.
Note: Several images of artworks in this post were downloaded from the Clark’s online library of works in its collection—a wonderful resource.
In the current at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine
I don’t always know what to make of contemporary art, or what it’s asking of me. The critics and historians aren’t along for the ride, murmuring in my ear, telling me it’s good, how good, and why. Of course, contemporary art is a roomy category, so whether it’s gorgeous, mind-blowing, off-putting, or opaque depends on the artist, the style, the medium, the context…
And being on your own with a work of art, even, or especially, a challenging one, can be freeing. Sometimes the best thing to do is just relax and let the art come to you in its own good time.
The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA), in Rockland, Maine, helps that to happen. Celebrating its 70th anniversary next year, the center presents exhibitions and events year round in an understated, elegant set of glass and corrugated-metal boxes set around an exterior courtyard. Designed by the highly regarded architect Toshiko Mori, the five-year-old building has a youthful energy. Gleaming in the clear, strong light of a Down East summer day, it put me at ease before I walked through the door.
CMCA is on Winter Street, off Main Street, and around the corner from the wonderful Farnsworth Museum. As is true of many of New England’s smaller cities, three-story brick buildings predominate downtown, and against such a backdrop, the architecture of the center stands out. But its kin, the commercial warehouses, are just a stone’s throw away, down by the waterfront.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Rockland was one of the busiest ports on the East Coast, shipping out lime and granite, fish and lumber, and building the ships that carried those raw goods all over. The port no longer sees that level of trade, but the city still come across as vibrant and gritty, as Merriam Webster defines it: “plucky” and “having strong qualities of tough uncompromising realism.” So it seems fitting that Rockland should take on often tough and uncompromising contemporary art.
Artists started CMCA in 1952. Several were from away; they came to the midcoast region looking for a cheap place to live and work. Cheap but beautiful.
They were not the first, nor the last to be attracted to the sublime quality of Maine. The illustrious roster of artists with a Maine connection includes Winslow Homer, George Bellows, John Marin, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Wyeth, Berenice Abbott, Robert Indiana, Lois Dodd, Kosti Ruohomaa, and Alex Katz. Sculptor Louise Nevelson, originally from Russia, moved with her family to Rockland as a small child, captained the girls’ basketball team in high school, and took off for New York City as soon as she could. Winslow Homer and Berenice Abbott, to name two, were off-islanders who chose to spend their final decades in Maine.
The Shape of Things, in the largest of the three CMCA galleries, is an exhibition of 23 works by Maine native David Row (through September 12). Row’s CV is lengthy and impressive and the show beautifully presented, but initially at least, the art took a back seat to the room itself. I couldn’t get over the look of the satiny cement floor and the glowing, rain-puddle reflections of the sharp-edged geometric paintings. The room’s bigness and the light filtering down from the clerestory windows in the sawtooth roof made the space feel like a church between services, somewhere contemplation feels natural.
Although everything about Row’s oil paintings, their colors, textured surfaces, size, meticulous finish, their sophistication, was spot-on, I was truly drawn in by his “lighttraps.” Like outsized jewels, the cast-glass sculptures just seem to have it all, all the qualities of the paintings, but something else, something ineffable, something deeply satisfying.
Kitty corner from, and at an aesthetic slant to, the The Shape of Things, was Will o’ the Wisp, a collaborative installation organized by artists Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck. According to the exhibition brochure, the title refers to “the mischievous sprite that leads weary travelers deeper and deeper into a treacherous swamp with its lantern-like, shimmering countenance.” At first glance, I felt less like a weary traveler than a college student stepping into a dorm room, circa 1969—not a bad thing.
The overall effect was the sum of a slew of artworks: Feasley’s circular shag rug, a sort of a psychedelic color wheel; Swenbeck’s Specter Moon, a light show of lunar landscapes; audio, terraria, dangling Indian brass bells, a glass orb, a seeweedy polyester resin sculpture, craft-y objects. The metallic mesh wall covering gave the room its own shimmering countenance.
A lot going on, but then the sensory overload sorted itself out into its component parts. Swenbeck’s Four Crinoids, brass sea flowers, seemed almost to sway in the air, or in an ocean current, in one corner. Kelsey Halliday Johnson captured the surreal spirit of fungi in her Biomediation (mushrooms at the end of the world) nine prints in an oval, each in an oval slice of Maine wood.
Across the room, Shannon Bowser’s watercolors of lichen took a different light-handed, loose tack to convey the otherworldly nature of forest life. I thought about how easy, and unfortunate, it is to pass by a toadstool or minuscule pixie cups sprouting on moss or a tree stump without a glance. (Did you know that, according to the Virginia Native Plant Society, “lichens are not plants, but an association, often called ‘mutualism’ of two, and sometimes three different organisms”? Cohabitation, also very sixties.)
For those tending to the neurotic, the show might provoke an unease related to that “treacherous swamp” atmosphere it’s going for: To think all this is going on around us, without our knowing. That nature does its own thing can be both a comfort and a stimulus of existential anxiety. The artists have tapped into the confounding, and unsettling because ultimately unknowable complexity of the natural world.
Remarkable how an assemblage of work in several media by eight artists could coalesce into an installation so richly satisfying on both sensory and emotional levels. And so smart of the CMCA to exhibit The Shape of Things and Will o’ theWisp together. The concept of generating a “dialogue” between art works comes up so often it risks becoming a cliché, but in this case, it was happenin’.
Maine fungi.
The CMCA’s website has a terrific gallery of photographs of the center’s founding members and a full schedule of upcoming exhibitions and events.
“When the Artists Descended on the Midcoast” is a fun, candid account of the period when the center got its start, as recalled by Stell Shevis, 100 years old at the time of this article’s publication.
And here’s another post I wrote about midcoast Maine, the Farnsworth, and Rockland.
Once the summer retreat of New England blue bloods, an estate in the Berkshires retains its elevated status
Can you say that a 44-room Shingle Style cottage “perches”on a hillside? Maybe “presides over” is the more accurate description of Naumkeag’s presence just up the road from the center of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
It presides, yet recedes into the surrounding landscape. What makes this Trustees of Reservations property one of the Bay State’s “irreplaceable natural and cultural treasures,” as that nonprofit puts it, is its gardens and grounds—and its views of the Berkshire mountains beyond.
Naumkeag was originally the summer home of the blue-blooded Choates. Like acorn-laden oak trees in a mast year, the family trees of both Joseph and Caroline Sterling Choate, who built it, are thick with New England’s first white settlers, Revolutionary War veterans, and U.S. senators.
Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Joseph made his name and a vast fortune as an attorney. He argued cases before the Supreme Court and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of Saint James in the early 1900s. Caroline, a member of New York’s social elite the Four Hundred, was an advocate of women’s higher education who helped to found Barnard College. She was studying art and considered herself wedded to that calling when she met Joseph, then a young lawyer “winning his spurs at the bar,” according to her New York Times obituary.
Materially, their marriage in 1861 got off to a modest start, but with certain amenities, listed in a letter Joseph wrote his mother: “a bed, two tables, four chairs and a sofa, a cream pitcher, an asparagus fork, six salt cellars and a rug, and there might be a much meaner stock to begin upon than that, you know.”
By 1884, the Choates could afford to hire Stanford White, of McKim, Mead & White, then on its way to becoming the premier architectural firm of the Gilded Age, to design a summer home for them. Over time, Joseph and Caroline, and later their daughter Mabel, acquired antiques, art, and oriental rugs (as well as a 1930s-era Frigidaire for the kitchen) to keep that lonely asparagus fork company.
Prominent Boston landscape architect Nathan Franklin Barrett laid out the grounds on the steep slope of Prospect Hill, previously a favorite picnicking site of the family. His plans spared a favorite oak tree and introduced the copper and European beeches that are now majestic specimens.
Mabel Choate became Naumkeag’s guardian after her mother’s death in 1929. Like many socialites of her time, her life was a mix of purpose and privilege.
In the “privilege” category: A few months after her mother’s death, and the Stock Market Crash, she bought a 15-room duplex on Park Avenue. In the “purpose” category, she was a philanthropist and an active advocate for such causes as maternal health, neurological research and treatment, and historic preservation. She seems to have lived her life with energy and flair (that hat!), traveling in Europe and Asia, collecting fine art, furniture, and decorative art objects, entertaining—the Baron and Baroness Rosenkrantz, in Hot Springs, Virginia, the Condé Nasts in Stockbridge.
Mabel Choate, left, in the early nineteen-teens, with the original Gibson Girl. (Library of Congress photograph, from a glass negative)
And she had a passion for gardens. According to the Trustees’ archives website, she was a member of the Garden Club of America, the American Peony Society, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and the Lenox Garden Club.
In 1926, at the Lenox Garden Club, she met the master landscape architect Fletcher Steele, then in the early years of his career. That meeting was the start of a nearly 30-year collaboration in the reimagining, remaking, and expanding of the estate’s gardens. Steele had his own room at Naumkeag, with a bell connected to the kitchen, and Mabel gave a birthday party for him every year.
“In my mind, Naumkeag is now a work of art,” Choate wrote Steele in 1950, when she was 80. “Thanks to you. I am more interested in it and excited about it all the time.”
Eight years later, Mabel Choate died and, thanks to her bequest, Naumkeag became a Trustees property.
Steele combined a modern approach to design with the belief that gardens should have a “patina,” according to a Spring 2016 Preservation Magazine article. (He said of Naumkeag some 20 years into it, “Nothing gets right until Time gets in its work.”) In the decades after 1958, the gardens’ patina-making outran Choate’s endowment for their maintenance. A million-dollar matching gift to the Trustees in 2012 made an extensive restoration possible. During the process, workers unearthed a lost rock garden and determined that the famous blue steps were originally navy, not the bright blue they had been repainted over the years.
About designing the Blue Steps, Steele said, “I figure that comfort in going up a steep hill depends on variety of leg action, the lack of which makes a long flight of steps intolerable … So I put up four ‘divisions,’ each one having a couple of steps and turns, two ramps of different steepness and a graduated flight of half a dozen steps to a platform.”
When you see the steps, their gracefulness, more than their engineering, is what stands out. Google “Naumkeag,” and their image is everywhere, but by exercising some leg actions of your own when you’re there, you can discover several other dramatic settings: the re-created linden allée, the Chinese Temple Garden entered through the Moon Gate, and the Afternoon Garden, with a parterre bordered by Venetian gondola poles.
I went to Naumkeag most recently for its Tulip and Daffodil Festival, a succession and a profusion of spring flowers, more than 130,000 bulbs in all, that goes from mid-March to mid-May. During the festival, if you can tear yourself away from all that floral glory, you can also tour the ground floor of the house.
In the heat of the summer, the somewhat shadowy interiors (lots of dark woodwork, antique tapestries on the walls) must have offered a cool refuge. It’s a showplace, but not terribly showy. Like Steele’s garden designs, the house has a patina, too: from the soft golden glow of a miniature Chinese screen on a mantel, the glimmer of the dining room’s tin-leaf ceiling.
I enjoyed my look-round, but the spring light was calling, and I wanted to see everything outside before I ran out of steam. So, I moved on to the Chinese Temple Garden to admire the aged marble paving, the young ginkgos, a comical trio of watering cans, and the copious peonies (plus a shocking-pink art installation in the temple that seemed made to be Instagrammed).
My last stop was the fountain where artificial bubbles floated on the water and real ones into the air, a delightful, mysterious reminder that the beauty of gardens, even those that endure, is ephemeral and evanescent.
The tulips are alljust a memory, but Naumkeag’s gardens are open for the summer season, Thursdays through Sundays. At the nearer end of the linden allee, there’s a terrace with tables and chairs and a food kiosk offering drinks and snacks. Find the Naumkeag website here.
The restoration of the gardens is a fascinating story in itself. You can learn more about it in the Preservation Magazinearticle mentioned above and this photo essay from the National Trust for Historic Preservation website.
Robin Karson’s Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect: An Account of the Gardenmaker’s Life, 1885-1971, University of Massachusetts Press, is an excellent account of his life and career.
And to read more about Joseph Choate, who led a full and interesting life, take a look at this American Heritage article.
Its being March 17, I have an excuse to post some photographs of Dublin and environs. What lingers in my mind from my visit in 2017 is the conviviality, the civility and, of course, the greenness.
Choose your tipple and celebrate the day. Sláinte mhaith!
A little tribute to a brilliant, prolific writer who loved and wrote eloquently about Venice. And some photographs of same.
Although by and large the obits about Jan Morris, who died November 20 at age 94, described her as a travel writer, she didn’t consider herself one; in fact, in a 2015 interview, she told TheGuardian:
“I hate being called a travel writer. I have written only one book about travel, concerning a journey across the Oman desert. I have written many books about place, which are nothing to do with movement, but many more about people and about history. In fact, though, they are one and all about the effects of everything upon me–my books amount to one enormously self-centred autobiographical exposure! So I prefer to be described as simply–a writer …”
That’s how I enjoyed her: as a writer, of tremendous style, perception, curiosity, and joie de vivre. When I was learning about writing and about the world, reading her accounts of places, in particular, Venice, gave me great pleasure and taught me about how to look, how to live, how to think, how to write (all interconnected).
And revisiting Venice to write this post, I was impressed all over again by how much research Morris had done into the city’s history, by her powers of observation, how skillfully she drew connections between past and present, how generous, receptive, how willing she was to meet the Venetians on their own terms. Hardly “self-centred” (or self-centered).
During an extraordinary career as a journalist and the author of “fortyish” books (the Times of London described her as “a bit hazy on the exact number”), Morris covered a variety of subjects over a range of genres. She was also notable as a “transgender pioneer,” in the words of the Los Angeles Times; about half her life she was James Morris.
Her career got a jump-start in 1953 when she sent a coded scoop to TheTimes of London reporting Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s successful ascent of Mount Everest, dispatched via messengers from an expedition camp at 20,000 feet. She went on from there to, you might say, even greater heights, capturing the Zeitgeist covering Adolph Eichmann’s trial, interviewing Che Guevara.
Her trilogy Pax Brittanica is an acclaimed history of the British Empire. There were essay collections, novels, and memoirs, including Conundrum, published in 1974, about her 10-year transition from man to woman.
And the “non-travel writing” writing, including that book about La Serenissima.
In a 2015 Vanity Fair essay, Morris wrote about how she got into the Floating City for the first time in a back-door kind of way, at the end of World War II. At that time, she was still James, “an officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers (founded 1715), […] my menial job would be helping to run the motorboats of Venice, almost one and all requisitioned by the army.”
Here’s her description of the first time she went to the legendary Harry’s Bar during that original visit:
“I paused on the doorstep there, but as I did so I caught the eyes of the Venetians behind the bar, one at the cash desk, two others busy with trays and glasses. They all looked up, too, but their expressions were different. Their look seemed at once speculative, interested, amused, kind, and collusive. I loved that look, and it was, I came to think, a true look of Venice. It put me both at ease and on my guard, and it has kept me going back to Harry’s Bar, with more or less the same sensations, from that day to this.”
And to give you just a taste, here’s an excerpt from Venice, written in 1960:
“It is very old, and very grand, and bent-backed. Its towers survey the lagoon in crotchety splendour, some leaning one way, some another. Its skyline is elaborate with campaniles, domes, pinnacles, cranes, riggings, television aerials, crenellations, eccentric chimneys, and a big red grain elevator.
“There are glimpses of flags and fretted rooftops, marble pillars, cavernous canals. An incessant bustle of boats passes before the quays of the place, a great white liner slips toward its port; a multitude of tottering palaces, brooding and monstrous, presses toward its waterfront like so many invalid aristocrats jostling for fresh air. It is a gnarled but gorgeous city […] the whole scene seems to shimmer–with pinkness, with age, with self-satisfaction, with sadness, with delight.”
In that Guardian article, Sam Jordison ended the interview with a great question, “Is there a question you haven’t had before that you’d like to be asked?” Morris’s reply was equally good:
“Yes, I would like to have been asked if there was any moral purpose emerging from my 40-odd books, and I would answer yes, my gradually growing conviction that simple kindness should be the governing factor of human conduct.”
I took these photographs of Venice in 2008. Morris’s book helped set me up to fall in love with the city on my first visit years before, and I was not disappointed my next two, either.
I was entranced each time by all its magical elements: the architecture, the art, the votive shrines, the vaporetti, the traghetti, the piazzas, the vivid, tingling presence of the sea and the evidence everywhere you look of the city’s long, glorious, and inglorious history. By its elegance, its dog-eared corners, the thrill of hearing music at La Fenice, the shopkeepers’ curious but charming custom of propping open their doors to let in the sea air, even when it was wet and cold as a dog’s nose…
As a tourist, you hope that by being courteous, open, and appreciative, the locals will cut you some slack, but on each of my stays in Venice, I met people who went beyond, who extended courtesy to me, who were interested in finding common ground, even if it was just for a few minutes. Simple kindness.
For further reading, follow these links toThe Guardianarticle, the Vanity Fair article, and The New York Times‘ Jan Morris obituary.
Returning to the re-opened Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts
The last time I wrote about The Clark, I talked about the particular cocktail-party appeal of mingling again with art familiar from earlier visits.
I didn’t know then–who did?–that two years later museums would shut their doors for months. Stepping into The Clark’s soaring entry hall this time, I was even more grateful to see old friends.
I said hello to “Sleigh Ride,” “The Bridal Path, White Mountains,” and all the other Winslow Homer dazzlers in the first of the American Art rooms. I greeted George Inness’s bucolic “New Jersey Landscape.” I caught the eye of Sargent’s Madame Escudier.
Then, in the dreamy violet gallery with its laylight ceiling, I surprised myself.
In college I loved the paintings of Renoir, Monet, and co. Then, other artists, other periods nudged them out. The pastel surfaces, the misty landscapes, the rosy nudes: “chocolate box” is the adjective their detractors have used. Without ever rejecting the Impressionists, I admit I treated them rather nonchalantly. This visit, I went for the bonbons.
“Paint generously and unhesitatingly,” advised Impressionist Camille Pissarro. It’s also important as a museumgoer to look generously. To stop, step in, step back, give a painting its due, especially if you have tended to breeze by it before. But I wasn’t thinking this all through at the time. I just followed my feet to Renoir’s “At the Concert.”
Mother and daughter or sisters? One corseted, in black, hair up; the other, in white, in short gloves, hair still unconstrained, streaming down the length of her back, the curve of her cheek still showing a trace of childhood plumpness. Both bandbox perfect and bringing to mind those adjectives—fresh, dewy—long applied to girls.
But what about that big, mottled, wine-dark section? At first glance, it looks hastily done, as if Renoir were eager to get on to the more interesting parts or ready to put his brush down. Yet that smudgy, swirly suggestion of a maroon velvet curtain lends motion, texture, contrast, some mystery.
A quarter of the canvas, it keeps things from getting too fussy, and it sets off the faces, drawing attention to the most precisely rendered area of the painting: the older one’s eyes. Is she listening, watching, waiting, dreaming? In the midst of a sensuous material world, she seems to have gone somewhere else.
“People are crazy about Renoir,” Sterling Clark, the museum’s cofounder, wrote in his diary. Well, the artist could make an onion look sensuous, as another jewel in the Clark’s collection demonstrates. Part of my pleasure of looking at these works was feeling the pleasure Renoir took in looking and painting.
And pleasure was what I was after, my first time in a museum in seven months.
I spent time with other portraits. Its ornate gilded frame aside, the Degas self-portrait seemed very modern; he could be a Brooklyn hipster.
Rembrandt’s “Man Reading” struck me as a portrait of Every Reader. The label bolstered that impression, noting that the painting may be a tronie, done as a study of a subject, not a representation of a specific individual. (I wonder, did every reader wear a big, black hat in 17th-century Holland?)
Rembrandt’s common-law wife, Hendrickje, and Titus, the only child of his to reach adulthood, both died of bubonic plague. It may have killed Saskia, his first wife, too, that or tuberculosis. Plague broke out in Amsterdam again and again during Rembrandt’s lifetime. Whether or not it was Rembrandt’s intention, “Man Reading” captures the comfort of retreating to intimate, interior experiences during terrible times.
Shelter from the storm? Onto a Joseph Mallord William Turner masterpiece, “Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water.” Turner’s lengthy title is more literal than the painting: a commotion of sea and sky; blurry figures huddled in a corner, blotches of paint, bursts and pinpoints of light.
It’s like looking into the eye of a hurricane (a metaphor for our time). And the closer you look, the more the imagery disappears. Turner’s signature sinks and merges with the surf.
Find the signature.
Meanwhile, outside the museum, the calm, crystalline fall day was calling.
The setting of the Clark is so beautiful that, on a nice day, you’re tempted to linger by the vast reflecting pool, designed by landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand, before you step inside, and you should always give yourself time to explore the grounds (140 acres in all) and trails, which are free and open to the public.
The afternoon I visited, a shiny flatbed truck stood next to sculptor Eva LeWitt’s “Resin Towers A, B, and C,” at a spot halfway up Stone Hill, which looms behind the museum’s main buildings. The colorful, nearly 11-foot-tall totems and works by five other contemporary artists comprise Ground/work, the museum’s first outdoor exhibition. Jenny Holzer’s stone benches inscribed with statements that are witty, disturbing, and provocative all at once, as well as work by Thomas Schutte, William Crovello, and Giuseppe Penone, are also on longterm display en plein air.
You can climb Stone Hill straight up a steep path or take a trail that winds more gently through woods and brings you out by the Lunder Center. I was there on one of the last days of the solo exhibition Lin Mae Saeed: Arrival of the Animals (now closed). I confess, every time I see a show in this part of the museum, I fantasize about setting up house in the spacious galleries.
At any party, the time comes when you have to go home, and after a dash into the Manton Research Center to wave at the Constables, I went. I didn’t have the chance to thank my hosts, but I am grateful. Spending time with art has never been more nourishing.
The pandemic protocol for visiting The Clark is painless: You buy your ticket in advance for a specific entry hour. Masks and social distancing are required.
Once I was there, I realized that museums are pretty safe places to be: the ventilation systems are excellent; the spaces are big and airy, with a minimum of surface (even fewer you’re permitted to touch); and staff is on hand to monitor things. I relaxed and enjoyed the art.
On my way to The Clark, I stopped to see “Big Bling,” the Martin Puryear sculpture on the edge of the Mass MoCA campus in North Adams. Forty feet tall, made of wood and chain-link fence, it’s terrific from every angle.
Here goes: my version of a virtual tour of Hartford’s venerable art museum.
It won’t pay your bills, but art can be a source of solace in turbulent times. So I write about a museum no one can visit right now. Having weathered nearly two centuries—it’s the oldest public art museum in the country—the Wadsworth Atheneum will persevere, and so will we.
The Wadsworth Atheneum: The name conjures up 19th-century well-heeled New Englanders and their earnest enthusiasm for learning and collecting and for classical culture. The temple of Athena that Connecticut Yankee Daniel Wadsworth built in 1842, though, wasn’t a latter-day Parthenon but a golden granite Gothic Revival castle designed by two leading architects of the time, Andrew Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town.
Buildings in Tudor and Renaissance Revival styles came later. In 1934, the Avery Memorial opened, “the first American museum building with a modern International Style interior,” according to the museum’s history.
The result is a gorgeous hodge-podge of connected structures forming a square around a courtyard. The Atheneum is one of those museums (the Yale University Art Gallery being another) that serve as a sort of tutorial on architectural movements as well as art movements.
The museum’s extensive holdings, added to over the years by Pierpont Morgans and a Colt firearms heiress, among others, provide what amount to survey courses on the art movements.
You can circle Yayoi Kusama’s 2018 painted bronze “Pumpkin,” which looks like porcelain, and try convincing yourself that the bouquet flourishing in an ornate basket (circa 1751, a gift of J. Pierpont Morgan Jr.) really is made of porcelain.
If, before you came in the Main Street door, you didn’t admire Tony Smith’s “Amaryllis,” which keeps company with Calder’s “Stegosaurus” on the museum grounds, you can cosy up to “Spitball,” a stripped-down sculpture perched on a pedestal and looking out the window at its big sister.
Or tease out connections between objets (more than 200 of them) in the cabinets of curiosities, such as a giant lace coral, a geode, and a 1,000-year-old glass bottle.
In the mood for sensory overload? Just beyond the cabinets gallery, Sol LeWitt’s epic “Wall Drawing #1131, Whirls and Twirls” might do it for you.
The busy Victorian furnishings of the Goodwin parlor also give the eyes a workout. An equally exuberant LeWitt, “Wall Drawing Number 793 C” (above), dips and curves around Gray Court, the Main Street entrance lobby.
* * * * *
In her review of the Wadsworth’s 2015 major and masterful renovation, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith talked about how a museum can “nourish the art… and the people who love it.”
Nourish is just the right word. Delicious, rich, and luscious work, too, when it comes to conveying the sensory feel of the Atheneum. How it feels, for instance, to walk into one of the Atheneum’s high-ceilinged galleries, painted deep gray, cool light cascading from frosted skylights onto a wall of landscapes full of weather.
Or to be brought up short by the piercing blue eyes of a Van Gogh self-portrait, set off by its teal background.
The Van Gogh and the landscapes, the Degas street scene, Sisley’s “Pike,” and Bassano’s “Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine,” to name only a few of the museum’s show-stoppers, would stand out no matter their setting. Still, the Atheneum’s atmosphere enhances the experience, accentuates the strengths of the works, and encourages you to savor each one.
I may have over-savored: Drifting into a dead end on an upper floor of Avery Court, I had to retrace my steps. No hardship. I got a second look at George Bellows’s “Pulpit Rock” (none of his sweaty boxers slugging it out, just ocean swells bashing Maine’s brawny granite coast). And Robert Motherwell’s winsome “Line Figure in Beige and Mauve” (1946).
The rampant “Stegosaurus,” by Alexander Calder
Footnotes:
To learn more about the Wadsworth, you can visit its website.
This 1992 American Heritage article is full of fascinating information about the Wadsworth’s history, a history that includes several firsts, including the premier of Balanchine’s first ballet choreographed in America (the Wadsworth sponsored his immigration) and of an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, and the first Minimalist art show, curated by Sam Wagstaff early in his career.
One of the loftier atheneums established in the 1800s is the Boston Athenæum (note the very proper Bostonian spelling), from which I and a friend were evicted when we were college girls. And, I mean, girls, brash budding intellectuals who breezed into its vestibule under the mistaken assumption that it was open to hoi polloi hippies, not just to Boston Brahmin members whose families had subscribed for generations. Times have changed: Now, you can visit it without a starchy WASPy matron shooing you out the door.
The Wadsworth Atheneum: The name conjures up 19th-century well-heeled New Englanders and their earnest enthusiasm for learning and collecting and for classical culture. The temple of Athena that Connecticut Yankee Daniel Wadsworth built in 1842, though, wasn’t a latter-day Parthenon but a golden granite Gothic Revival castle designed by two leading architects of the time, Andrew Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town.
You can circle 
Or 
Faye Wolfe words photos 
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