
Robert Rauschenberg's "Migration" is part of an excellent collection of contemporary art at the Johnson Museum
College art museums present special challenges for the art museum junkie because they’re generally hard to get to. True, at the Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven, you can just pull into a parking garage and walk a block to the museum. But others are buried in the middle of impenetrable university complexes where there’s no parking at any price (think Harvard and Princeton). And many of the others are a long way from metropolitan areas that you might be visiting anyway (think Williams College, in the mountains of western Massachusetts, and Bowdoin College, way up in Maine). You have to make a special trip.

Seen between Geneva and Ithaca
The art museum at Cornell University discourages visitors in every possible way. The campus is a goodly drive from almost anywhere (two hours from Rochester), and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art is in the middle of a maze of a campus with practically nowhere to park — especially right now, with street reconstruction and
museum expansion going on. Like so many other college art museums, it simply doesn’t take the general art-loving public into account. It doesn’t even charge admission! We made the drive a couple of weeks ago on one of the finest fall days we can remember, pausing on the way there and back to take pictures of fall foliage, century-old churches, and fantastic, falling-down barns and and rusting farm equipment.
What other art museum in New York is housed in such an aesthetically interesting building as the Johnson Museum — other than the Guggenheim (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) and the Met itself? This is a 1973 building designed by I. M. Pei and ideally situated on top of a hill overlooking all of Ithaca and Cayuga Lake. We liked it right away.
We weren’t blown away by any particular part of the Johnson Museum collection, but there was still a lot to enjoy. The European art goes back 500 years, but 500 years is a lot to cover in just three galleries or so. We spent time pondering over an elaborate vanitas still life from 1650 by the Dutch artist David Bailly (just above), in which every item symbolizes some passing worldly preoccupation of men, and we admired several eighteenth-century
portraits by George Romney and other Englishmen of his day. The Johnson museum has only a few minor pieces by the French impressionists, including a Monet that’s on loan and not part of the permanent collection; the jewel of its nineteenth-century gallery is a large though not especially lively landscape by the major French Barbizon
painter Charles-Francois Daubigny, titled “Fields in the Month of June” (just above) — surely one of the artist’s finest accomplishments. Twentieth-century European art was better represented with major pieces; we were delighted to find a six-foot-tall sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, who is a favorite of ours, entitled “Walking Man II.”
The American collection was somewhat meatier, with a satisfying gallery of paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Asher Durand, and others of the Hudson River School, and another gallery with mostly American impressionist pieces. But the Johnson Museum’s twentieth-century American art — mostly abstract, with fine pieces by Hans Hoffman, Robert Rauschenberg, and Philip Guston — is really worth going out of your way to see.

Cayuga Lake from the sculpture garden
And so is the Museum’s unique contemporary sculpture garden, for which the architect reserved a pleasant, uncrowded, open-air balcony off an upper floor. It has a spectacular view of the Cornell University campus and Cayuga Lake. The highest floor of the museum is devoted to Asian art (we don’t know enough about it to comment, but it’s an inmpressive collection); this floor is surrounded by large windows with views in all four directions.
When we visited, the Johnson Museum was hosting a fascinating traveling exhibition of the works of Duncan Grant and other artists of the Bloomsbury school that surrounding Virginia Woolf. If this is the caliber of exhibitions that the Johnson Museum attracts, we’ll have to pay closer attention.
We stopped to see the overlook at Taughannock Falls, just a few miles north of Ithaca, and made a mental note to come back someday to hike the path down to the gorge. In Trumansburg, we dropped more money than we should have at Green Horse Books, an excellent used bookstore
that we spotted as we were driving through. We took some more pictures of decrepit old farm structures, and helped the wife of our bosom to pick out a pumpkin for the Halloween and Thanksgiving seasons.

takes in a lot. But we were still delighted to see so much first-rate American art (about 50 paintings out of a collection of over 5,000 works of art) come out of storage. The one that pleased us most was a painting by Daniel Garber, one of our favorite American impressionists (see
We saw a number of Hudson River school paintings, including what is surely one of John Frederick Kensett’s finest, The Bish-Bash, which portrays a dramatic waterfall in western Massachusetts. We’ve added the Bish-Bash Falls to our list of places we want to see when we visit New England.
of the human face and figure; it runs till November 2009. Once again, the theme of the show seems to be fairly loose, but no matter, because they’ve uncarted plenty of gems: some very recent pieces as well as 200-year-old paintings like Junius Brutus Stearns’s old-fashioned utopian scene,The Millennium, based on the passage from Isaiah: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.” Isaiah 11:6 (NIV). We are always drawn to 19th-century American genre paintings; here we saw for the first time Thomas Waterman Wood’s cheerful portrait of a Parisian urchin, The Rag Picker.

Reginald Marsh, that was new to us, entitled Barrel of Fun. It shows people in a large tube in an amusement park in which people fall all over each other as the “barrel” slowly turns. We haven’t seen such a thing lately; the likelihood of a fellow’s being kicked in the teeth by accident, or a lady’s being groped
on purpose, would seem to be fairly high, and no doubt the liability insurance carriers have balked. We were also struck by a self-portrait of a painter at his craft of figure painting, Alphaeus Philemon Cole’s, The Blank Canvas, which reminded us of a painting on a similar theme by John Koch right here in Rochester at the Memorial Art Gallery. We noted the Koch painting in
Field to see the Pirates play the Braves, we spent a pleasant, leisurely afternoon at the High Museum of Art. What we found was a marvelous facility, a worthy though unspectacular collection of American art, and surprisingly appealing galleries of contemporary art.
Lehman, the Havemeyers, John J. Johnson, the Clark brothers, but Atlanta apparently had no such major donors. So the galleries of European art at the High Museum are fairly modest, even compared to what can be seen in northern cities like Hartford, Detroit, and Toledo that are now a lot smaller than Atlanta.
Child.”. We liked a pair of paintings by Il Baciccio from 1700 illustrating the Genesis accounts of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and Noah’s sacrifice after the flood. From the nineteenth century, we doted on a pair of smaller Corots and thought a Pissarro landscape, Road to Marly, was the pick of a small group of French impressionist paintings.
remarkable early 19th-century portraits of native Americans by Henry Inman. And we found a few American artists that we consider particular friends. In our spare bedroom is a print of John George Brown’s best-known painting, The Berry Boy; the High Museum has a pair of delightful genre paintings that are surely also among his finest, Neighbors
and The Deacon’s Visit. Another of our oldest friends in art (dating from our boyhood days as a stamp collector) is Samuel F. B. Morse (also known as the inventor of the telegraph) —
and here was a portrait by Morse of his wife and children!
pleasure.
windows. Many of the works are artfully hung so as to be seen from adjacent galleries. (The painting with the white and light blue stripes is by the Canadian artist Agnes Martin and is cleverly entitled Unitled #3. We kept wandering back and forth through these galleries and were sorry to leave them.
The Ringling Museum of Art is only one of several fine structures on a large campus, all of which is (we were told by the loquacious ticket-seller) now owned by the State of Florida and managed by Florida State University. Several buildings are devoted to circus history and circus artifacts, including Ringling’s private railway car,
which is currently being restored in full view of visitors. (The railway car (above) is in the building pictured to the right; a friendly restorer working on the trim in the observation room seemed happy to talk to us about it when we stuck in our heads.) This is surely the only place in the world where one can view masterpieces of art in proximity to circus memorabilia.

as if Mr. Ringling had simply commissioned someone to collect as many of the old masters as possible. For us, Mr. Ringling’s personality didn’t emerge from his collection.
from Sodom” (above), but also, in a large special gallery, a set of half a dozen enormous canvases on Biblical themes collectively entitled “The Triumph of the Eucharist.” These deserved much more time than we had to spend.
The collection includes quite a few paintings by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and Italian artists that we did not know, not all of which seemed especially interesting. But we enjoyed first-rate works by Cranach the Elder, El Greco, Murillo, Veronese, Henry Raeburn, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and we especially liked a painting by Anton Raphael Mengs entitled “The Dream of Joseph.”
country. But the Ringling Museum does have a major early work by one of our favorite American artists, the regionalist Reginald Marsh, entitled “Wonderland Circus, Sideshow Coney Island 1930.” No doubt Mr. Ringling the circus man was attracted by the painting’s theme.
Oddly, the Tampa Bay Rays don’t actually play in Tampa; Tropicana Field is in St. Petersburg. From the outside it looks like a municipal convention center; inside, the place is an indoor shopping mall with a baseball field in the middle; behind the stands are more restrooms, food vendors, and souvenir shops than at any stadium we’ve ever visited. But the place was comfortable, well laid-out, and, of course, nicely air-conditioned. It didn’t seem nearly as bad as its reputation. If baseball has to be played indoors — and we’re not persuaded it ever should be, even in Florida — this really isn’t that bad. Anyway, it’s far superior to, say, Toronto’s Skydome.
The local team isn’t the “Devil Rays” anymore, just the “Rays,” but as a sideshow the management still keeps a large tank of rays on the second level of the stadium. We didn’t want to miss the first pitch, so we put off our visit to the tank till after the game — but the aquarium closed as soon as the game was over, so we missed them after all.


On Sunday morning the weather looked fine, so we headed for the Keys and got as far as Key Largo, where, amidst perfect weather, the son grilled more dogs and burgers on the beach while we dipped ourselves in the Atlantic. The signs on Route 1 said “Crocodile Crossing Next 6 Miles,” but we didn’t see any. We were puzzled: aren’t alligators, not crocodiles, indigenous to Florida?
At almost exactly 5:00 p.m., the heavens opened and the rain came down again. This time, the opening pitch was two hours late.
But Giants ace Tim Lincecum (the anchor of our fantasy baseball team) was pitching!
That day we saw more Lincecum jerseys in the Florida crowd than anything else. Lincecum wasn’t his sharpest; he walked four in seven innings, and the manager left him in one batter too long, as he gave up a two-run homer in the top of the eighth, but he got the win. And we left Land Shark Stadium fans of Giants first baseman Pablo Sandoval. He’s a bear.




especially in its new digs, touches us at all the right points, and it includes a number of our very favorite American paintings.
especially Benton’s large, lively, mildly racy mural, The Arts of Life in America. The various parts of the mural occupy all four walls of a gallery on the museum’s second floor. (This is the ten-foot section of the mural entitled “Arts of the West.”)
Another reason we’re high on the New Britain Museum of American Art is its superb gallery of American impressionists. There are first-rate pieces by Frederick Carl Frieseke, Childe Hassam, Richard E. Miller, J. Alden Weir, and Willard Metcalf, among others. (We put images of a couple of these
One of the most “hmm”-provoking paintings at the Memorial Art Gallery is John Koch’s 1963 painting Interlude. The painter (presumably Koch himself) takes a break and sits back to think about his canvas; an older woman in an orange morning robe (presumably the artist’s wife) placidly serves coffee to a nude model. In the New Britain museum, we were delighted to see a John Koch painting that depicts his wife in earlier years. From the museum’s exhibition label for Koch’s The Florist, we learned that in 1943 Koch was newly married and had just
been drafted into the armed forces when he painted this picture. “He thought he might never return to his bride and his career as a painter. Consequently, he worked feverishly to complete The Florist, which he hoped would establish his fame and also serve as a looming tribute to his wife, whom he portrayed surrounded by beautiful flowers.” Fortunately, The Florist was neither Koch’s last picture nor his last portrayal of his wife.
fleeing a burned-out city. So far as we know, the New Britain museum does not have any works by Grosz, but a 1946 painting by Carl Frederick Gaertner (a new artist for us) reminded us immediately of The Wanderer. The scene of devastation in Gaertner’s The Search Begins looks a lot like the product of aerial fire-bombing, and in this picture Gaertner used a palette similar to Grosz’s in The Wanderer. But The Search Begins is not a war scene at all, except possibly figuratively; it shows an area of northeastern Cleveland where in 1944 an explosion of gas tanks devastated a large neighborhood, with a large death toll.


We were especially looking forward to seeing the painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, the Spanish master who became one of our favorite artists after we visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery (just south of London) several years ago. Murillo seems to be only modestly represented in American museums.
The most arresting of the five pictures from the Norton Simon Museum, however, is a 1625 portrait of a dog by Guercino, another painter in whom we became interested as a result of our visit to the Dulwich Picture Gallery (which owns Guercino’s affecting “Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery”) . Now Guercino
the painter of classical and biblical scenes we knew. But Guercino the animal portraitist we did not expect.
over to the adjacent grand gallery, where another seventeenth-century picture dominated by an animal was directly in our line of sight. In Nicolas Poussin’s “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” the predominant figure is not Hannibal, but his elephant.


actually painted with Monet in Giverny, France. This pleasing New England scene, painted in 1894 and entitled Low Tide, was just acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Emsworth noted several Robinson pictures in the collection of the Terra Museum
3. Edmund C. Tarbell. Don’t tell us that the best of Tarbell’s paintings don’t afford as much pleasure as a fine Monet or Degas. His dazzling Mother and Child in a Boat makes our point. We think it’s the best of the American impressionist paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the city where Tarbell lived and worked.
4. Willard Metcalf. We have so gotten to enjoy the landscapes of Willard Metcalf that we had difficulty choosing a representative picture. One of the superb winter snow pictures that made his reputation? Or one of his colorful autumn pictures, like The Golden Carnival at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery? This 1909 picture, Icebound, belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.
his paintings tend to have a magical, mystical quality about them.
on our list. We nominate The Crimson Rambler, a 1908 painting that is in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as one of the very finest of all American impressionist paintings. This image doesn’t do it justice.
unfortunately didn’t think much of his own country’s artists. His friend William Glackens was practically the only American impressionist Barnes cared for, and if you make your way out to the ritzy Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania to visit the Barnes Foundation, you’ll find Glackens sharing the walls with Renoir, Seurat, and Picasso. (We’ve read that Barnes bought several Ernest Lawsons, but he must have sold them, because we don’t remember seeing any at the Barnes.)
8. Ernest Lawson. Like Vincent van Gogh, Lawson slathered paint onto his canvases pretty freely, and to marvelous effect. We’ve noticed that a lot of his paintings show a broad landscape through a screen of trees in the foreground, like this painting, Spring Tapestry, which is in Connecticut at the New Britain Museum of American Art.
9. Colin Campbell Cooper. Cooper’s best-known pictures are urban landscapes set in Philly or New York City. In the 1920s he moved to California and painted there. But the finest Cooper we’ve ever seen, Main Street Bridge, Rochester, is right here in Rochester. We walk across the Genesee River all the time over this very bridge.
other American impressionists like Edmund Tarbell and Willard Metcalf as French post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard’s wildly successful experiments (we love Bonnard) took him past Monet and Sisley. This picture, The Bird Cage, can be seen at the New Britain Museum of American Art; the gift shop there will sell you a refrigerator magnet with the image.