A pleasant fall drive to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University

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.

American Art at the National Academy Museum

Abraham Leon Kroll's 1920 painting "The Conversation" reminded us of portraits George Bellows was painting about the same time and restaurant scenes Edward Hopper would be painting in another 10-20 years

In a post last year, we were righteously indignant about the failure of the National Academy Museum to exhibit its large fine permanent collection of American art. But in 2009 the National Academy has been mending its ways. Twice already this year the National Academy has filled its modest galleries with nothing but art from its own collection. We happened to catch both shows.

This facade of the National Academy Museum looks just like another narrow Fifth Avenue townhouse (it’s half a block up from the Guggenheim).  You have to go through the gift shop to get to the ticketseller (clearly a volunteer), who doesn’t have much to do because the National Academy Museum unfortunately doesn’t get much traffic.

Last winter the National Academy was offering an exhibition of landscape paintings called “American Waters.” This exhibition was not, frankly, very focused, since 200 years of art were represented and the subject of “waters” 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 this post), titled By Addington (just above), a gentle scene of farm life along a Pennsylvania river.

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.

Currently the National Academy has another exhibit of pieces from its collection whose common feature is the portrayal 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.

The overall quality of these pieces is astonishingly high, given the relative obscurity of the National Academy Museum. Even after seeing only a modest sampling of its permanent collection, we feel sure that its holdings are superior to the American art collections in all but perhaps a half dozen museums in the United States.

Thomas Eakins, by Thomas Eakins

One of the unique features of a visit to the National Academy is that museum volunteers are likely to come up to you and strike up a conversation about a work you’re looking at. It’s happened to us several times now; during our recent visit we had a very pleasant exchange with a highly knowledgeable elderly lady about a self-portrait by Andrew Wyeth and the Wyeth family generally. And, indeed, two of the best works on display were the Wyeth self-portrait and a very rare self-portrait by Thomas Eakins.

Claude Monet, by John Singer Sargent

It is our sense that the National Academy Museum is especially rich in portraits because, when artists have been nominated (over the last 150 years) to membership in the National Academy, they are expected to contribute an example of their work to the museum, and not infrequently they give paintings of themselves. Omitted from this exhibit is a portrait by John Singer Sargent of the French impressionist Claude Monet; we know it’s somewhere in the National Academy’s vaults.

The twentieth-century is well-represented in this exhibit. We were pleased to see a 1930s-era painting by one of our favorite American artists, the regionalist 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 an earlier post.

American art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta

Till our recent baseball trip to the south, neither business nor pleasure had taken us to Atlanta. So between visits to Turner 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.

In gathering up treasures of European art, Atlanta seems to have come late to the party. Museums in the northeast are mostly built around large collections donated by such rich folk as Andrew Mellon, Robert 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.

But while those northern cities were depopulating (and their art institutions were having trouble keeping afloat), the people of Atlanta built a fine, bright, new art museum for the art it did have (and presumably hoped to get). We liked it.

In collecting old masters, the High Museum, to its credit, went for quality rather than big names — although there is a Bellini “Madonna and 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.

At any rate, the High Museum’s collection of American art is very good, even without pieces by Homer or Eakins. We were struck by a John Singleton Copley portrait and by three 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!

Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery has a spectacular rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge and its surroundings by the American impressionist Jonas Lie. But the High Museum has one too, a different view of the bridge titled Path of Gold. We don’t often see Jonas Lie; this was a rare and unexpected pleasure.

We are not always respectful of contemporary art. We’ve even been known to roll our eyes as we pass by galleries where plain black squares pose as paintings on the walls, and piles of cut-up tires masquerade as sculptures in the middle of the floor. But we must confess that we really enjoyed the contemporary art galleries at the High Museum, which are on the top floor and whose lighting benefits greatly from skylight 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.

Condescending Yankee that we are, we initially assumed that the people of Atlanta called their museum the “High” to let the world know that it held nothing but the finest art, as distinguished, say, from sidewalk art. We were wrong; the museum was named after a Mrs. Joseph M. High who donated the museum’s original home on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street in 1926.

Rubens and the old masters at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota

The interior sculpture garden at the Ringling Museum of Art

This art museum junkie paused in his recent tour of major league baseball stadiums in the South (see this post) to visit what was a brand-new museum for him: the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.  This was, in fact, was the first time we had ever been to Florida at all. 

We were delighted to learn that the man after whom the museum is named owned the Ringling Bros. Circus.   Sarasota was the circus’s winter home, which is why John Ringling built his home there.  He called his mansion “Ca d’Zan,” which of course reminded us of Citizen Kane and “Xanadu”. It was included with our admission, but we didn’t have time to see it.

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.

The side of the art museum building is visible across the bridge.

A lot of retirees in Sarasota seem to have volunteered at the Ringling Museum.  At any rate, we ran into them everywhere — smiling, cordial, and helpful, usually without waiting to be asked. After seeing the circus memorabilia, we found our way through the gardens and across the pond to the art museum building, which, we learned, was designed to resemble the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. It’s been open since 1931.

At the left in this gallery are portraits of Austrian Emperor Francis I and his wife, the Empress Maria-Theresa, painted around 1750 by the Swedish artist Martin van Meytens II

This building holds John Ringling’s personal art collection, as bequeathed to the museum, with a few additions over the years. We couldn’t help wondering whether Ringling personally sought out and selected works of art for his collection, or whether he relied on art advisors. In any case, he assembled a remarkably large collection.

We couldn’t help drawing a contrast with the Frick Collection, in New York City, which contains the art collection of the late Pittsburgh industrialist, and with which we are on intimate terms. Like Mr. Ringling, Mr. Frick concentrated almost entirely on the old masters. Our understanding is that Mr. Frick was very much a hands-on collector with definite tastes and affinities, who acquired new paintings very deliberately and did not keep works that did not give him lasting pleasure and satisfaction.  A regular visitor to the Frick Collection feels that he has come to know Mr. Frick through his tastes in art.

But one doesn’t get the same sense at the Ringling Museum. The collection is much larger, of course. But it also seems more indiscriminate, 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.

Still, the Ringling has a great deal of marvelous art that is well worth going out of one’s way to see. Among the most striking are a number of major works by Peter Paul Rubens.  The Ringling Museum not only has several very fine paintings of normal size by Rubens, like “The Departure of Lot and His Family 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.

Mr. Frick did not collect Rubens at all — he and Mr. Ringling didn’t collect many of the same artists.  Both collectors acquired notable portraits of King Philip IV of Spain by Velasquez, but while Mr. Frick never obtained a Poussin, Mr. Ringling acquired two. 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.”

The Ringling Museum has a few European and American paintings from the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. Mr. Ringling clearly had no interest in abstract art or in art of his own 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.

After coming home, we found an article on the internet in the St. Petersburg Times suggesting that the Ringling Museum is experiencing funding difficulties because of the State of Florida (and FSU’s) financial problems.  The museum seems to be well managed, well attended, and well supported by the locals; it’s absurd that anyone should think of closing it.

The great American art form: six baseball games in six days

Tim Lincecum, last year's Cy Young award winner

On our recent trip to the south, we focused on America’s two great original art forms: jazz and baseball.  Our trip was planned around baseball, but it’s so far between St. Petersburg, Miami, and Atlanta that we (father and son) still had still plenty of time for Count Basie, Oliver Nelson, Lee Morgan, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis as we drove along.

First stop was St. Petersburg.  We got there too late for tailgating and had to leave our burgers in our cooler and our grill in the trunk.

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.

The Rays went to the World Series last year, so all its fans wear Carl Crawford, B. J. Upton, Carlos Pena, or (most popular) Evan Longoria jerseys. Unfortunately, Longoria (no relation to the actress) was held out of our game because of an injury. Gil Meche of the Kansas City Royals and Jamie Shields of the Rays both pitched deep into the game, and this exceptionally well-played contest was decided by a two-run home by Upton in the bottom of the eighth. Rays 3, Royals 2.

The scene from a causeway in the Naples, Florida area

Friday morning in Sarasota, we visited the Ringling Museum, then headed south and across the Everglades for the first of three games in Fort Lauderdale, where the Florida Marlins play. We parked in the tailgating section, got out our folding chairs and charcoal grill, then had to jump inside the car to escape a sudden torrential downpour. The game started an hour late. Unable to grill, we had to buy ballpark hotdogs; the choices at the concession stands were pathetically limited.

The name of the stadium was a puzzler. This was where the football team played and the signs outside said “Dolphins Stadium.” But inside, they were calling it “Land Shark Stadium.” Finally, at the final game of the series, a guy next to us explained that 70s one-hit-wonder Jimmy Buffett had just paid several million dollars for the right to rename the stadium. Turns out that “Land Shark” is the name of a new beer that Buffett is sponsoring.

Billy the Marlin really seemed to like his time up close with the scantily clad Mermaids. Cheerleaders at a baseball game are, of course, entirely unnecessary.

For our first game in Land Shark Stadium, we found ourselves sitting in the best seats in the house: front row, 50-year line. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a football game. Literally no baseball players were in our line of vision as we faced forward in our seats (along the right-field line), and we had to turn our heads a good 80 degrees to see the infield. We got better seats for the second and third games of the series.

The Marlins couldn't even get the picture ratio right on the big screen, so the skinny Mermaids all looked fat

This was unquestionably the worst baseball stadium we’d ever been in. Rain or no rain, we didn’t blame the local fans for staying home, which most of them did. Many of those who did come were wearing jerseys of Marlins stars who were traded away years ago — Gary Sheffield, Juan Pierre, Dontrelle Willis. On the positive side, we got a kick out of the Marlins’ team song, which the p.a. played before every game. It was a hip-hop thing delivered by a rapper with a Latin accent, with a catchy “Let’s go Feeeesh!” refrain.

We finally got to grill our hotdogs and burgers in the Marlins parking lot before the Saturday game, just before the rain started. This time the first pitch was an hour and a half late. We stayed sweating in our car till the Marlins radio broadcasters told us the tarp was coming off the infield. It started raining steadily again in the fifth and never stopped, but they kept playing. Curiously, in a climate where it rains hard every day without fail around gametime, Marlins management has a “no-umbrellas” policy for patrons. The rain drove us from our seats and we listened to the last two innings on the radio.

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?

We cut short our grilling so we’d get back to Dolphins Stadium — er, Landshark Stadium — by the 5:00 p.m. gametime and made it with 10 minutes to spare. 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.

All of these pictures of people in Lincecum jerseys were taken from our own seats.

As we are Pirates fans, the climax of our trip was to be a pair of games (Monday and Tuesday) between the Pirates and the Braves in Atlanta, where we were joined by the daughter-in-law. Little did we know when we planned the trip that Pirates center fielder Nate McLouth would be traded to these very Braves for three prospects just five days before we got to town. Like all Pirates fans, we loathe the Braves, making the sight of McLouth in a Braves uniform an especially bitter pill.

Unlike Tropicana Field and Landshark Stadium, Turner Field looks and feels like a real baseball stadium

McLouth himself apparently conquered his disappointment at being traded quickly enough; he hit a home run against Zach Duke in the opening game of the series on Monday, which went 15 innings before the Braves pushed a run across. In fact, the Braves won both games. We were consoled in part by the performance of Pirate rookie Andrew McCutchen in the Monday night game (he was called up to take McLouth’s place in center field), McCutchen impressed the Atlanta fans mightily with a single, a double, and two effortless triples, not to mention his outfield range and throwing arm.

Pirate rookie Andrew McCutchen, about to hit a triple at Turner Field

And we were gratified at the generous numbers of other Pirates fans at Turner Field, mostly wearing Clemente and Stargell shirts. Several of them greeted us as we grilled chicken and asparagus in the stadium parking lot before Tuesday night’s game.

There are many reasons for men of good will to despise the Atlanta Braves. Surely one of the most compelling is the mindless chant that their fans sing while they do the infamous tomahawk chop. We noted dismally that the Braves still don’t know the melody of their own six-note chant. In the most familiar version, the third note in the chant (the fifth of the minor scale) is repeated, and the last interval of the chant is a fourth. But although the p.a. system at Turner Field played this version, it also played a subtly different version (we were told that it was a recording by the Florida State University Seminoles marching band) in which no notes are repeated and the last interval is a minor third. Our contempt was boundless.

After we left Atlanta, the Pirates took the final two games of the series. As of today, even without McLouth, the Pirates are only four games out of first place.

June 15, 2009

American art in New Britain, Connecticut

The old museum building is on the right, the new one on the left.

(April 11, 2009) Till a couple weeks ago, we hadn’t been back to the New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, Connecticut) since before its new building was built three years ago. We were a little nervous; part of the charm of visiting this museum had been muddling about in the old Victorian mansion (on a quiet city street) that housed its collection. The truth was, though, that the place was cramped and inadequate.

The fine old houses on the other side of the street from the museum. We were able to park our car on the street right in front of the museum steps.

We now give our belated review of the new facility: it’s excellent. They’ve put up a 43,000 square-foot building with two floors of nicely designed exhibition space (including a Dale Chihuly glass sculpture hanging over the staircase). The pleasant neighborhood is the same. The old building, next door, is connected by a walkway; it’s just not used for exhibiting art anymore.

Of all the museums that exhibit only American art, the one in New Britain is still our favorite. Its collection certainly isn’t the largest or finest (that would be the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.), and much can be said for other museums of its ilk (the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia; the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City; the Butler Institute of American Art, in Youngstown, Ohio; and the Terra Foundation for American Art (not currently located anywhere at all). Still, this collection, especially in its new digs, touches us at all the right points, and it includes a number of our very favorite American paintings.

For anyone who might go out of his way to see the works of Thomas Hart Benton, the New Britain Museum of American Art must be visited. Here in Rochester, the Memorial Art Gallery has one of Benton’s very best, Boom Town, from 1928 (above) — but if Boom Town is the only Benton painting you know, you absolutely must see the Bentons in New Britain, 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 in this earlier post.) We said earlier that Colin Campbell Cooper’s Main Street Bridge, Rochester (also at the Memorial Art Gallery) is the best Cooper we’d ever seen. But the New Britain museum also has a wonderful Cooper, entitled On the Rhine, which is also a painting of a bridge. We were fascinated to see how differently Cooper approached painting the European bridge in the New Britain painting.

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.

We devoted an entire post several months ago to George Grosz’s 1943 painting, The Wanderer, another of the Memorial Art Gallery’s prizes, which portrays a weary man 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.

This is the same tragedy described in a novel that we liked when we were young. Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread tells the story of a nine-year-old Cleveland boy who was caught up in the chaos of that very explosion and fire. We re-read the book (still in print) with great pleasure just a couple of years ago.

The MAG's "Chinese Restaurant", by John Sloan

The Memorial Art Gallery’s pieces by the Ashcan painters and the later American impressionists, including Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, and especially John Sloan (the MAG’s two Sloan paintings are among his very best) are good, but so are the ones at the New Britain museum, which are all part of a very satisfying exhibition of “The Eight” at the New Britain museum for the next several weeks. The show includes works from the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Terra Foundation for American Art. We wish we had a chance to go back and spend more time with “The Eight.”

One thing we do think the New Britain museum could use is a better copy writer. Go back four paragraphs to the museum’s discussion of its John Koch painting; did you gulp at the phrase “a looming tribute”? In what way, exactly, might a tribute “loom”? Then consider this sentence from the gateway page of its website:

The NBMAA is thought to be one of the nation’s most dynamic art museums by exhibiting the permanent collection and special exhibitions on widely diverse subjects in ways that combine the highest aesthetic standards with engaging and intellectually accessible presentations.

What a dreadful, ungrammatical, jargon-full sentence! Ouch.

An exhibit with only 5 pictures at the Frick Collection

What museum would have the audacity to promote a special “exhibition” consisting of just five pictures? In fact, the current exhibition at the Frick Collection seems sprawling compared to the one-picture exhibit the Frick put on a year ago (the “Antea” by the Italian master Parmigianino, lent by a museum in Italy). And this five-painting exhibit from the Norton Simon Museum of Art (Pasadena) is practically perfect.

Constable's "The White Horse"

The Frick already has way more than its fair share of the world’s greatest pictures. Where would one even start to list them? Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert”? Constable’s “The White Horse”? Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More (copies of which can be found in the offices of most Roman Catholic lawyers)? Despite its riches, there are still a few of the Old Masters who are not represented at the Frick. The Norton Simon Museum has now lent the Frick superb examples by five such artists: Guercino, Rubens, Murillo, Zurbarán, and Bassano.

We loved these pictures. But do you know what got our attention? This passage from the Frick’s promotional materials: “This exhibition marks the beginning of a series of reciprocal loan exchanges between the two institutions.”

What gives? Wasn’t it a condition of Mr. Frick’s trust, nearly 100 years ago, that his paintings would never, ever leave the museum? Wasn’t the Frick the only museum that wouldn’t share its three Vermeers a few years ago when the Met organized an exhibition of every known Vermeer painting in the world? We remember the small placard at the Met’s exhibit advising exhibit patrons, more in sorrow than in anger, that if they wanted to see the remaining three Vermeers, they’d have to walk down 5th Avenue to the Frick, because it didn’t lend its works to other museums.

The Ingres portrait will be traveling to Pasadena in October 2009

There apparently has been a breach in the citadel. We checked the Norton Simon Museum’s website, and sure enough, in October 2009 the Frick will indeed be lending that museum one of its best-known pictures, Jean-August-Dominique Ingres’s celebrated 1845 portrait of Comtesse d’Haussonville. What loophole has been discovered in Mr. Frick’s trust agreement?  Will the Rembrandts or the Duccio be lent out next?

The five superb pictures in the current show may be seen in the octagonal gallery where Gainsboroughs and Van Dykes usually hang. 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.

As Renoir is to the sterner Cezanne, Murillo is to the more austere Velasquez.  The Norton Simon Museum has an especially fine Murillo depicting the scene recorded in Luke 1:57: “Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy.” The elderly Elizabeth is in bed in the dim upper right after giving birth to John; we couldn’t help wondering if Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, the future mother of the Saviour, is the young woman holding the white garments in the lower right.

As an art collector, Mr. Frick was clearly partial to landscapes and portraits; there are only two biblical pictures (Gerard David’s “The Deposition” and Claude Lorraine’s “The Sermon on the Mount”) in his grand gallery. Still, it seems surprising that Mr. Frick never bought a major Rubens; the Norton Simon Museum’s “The Holy Women at the Sepulchre” seems like just the sort of thing Mr. Frick would have liked. It would have been a worthy complement to “The Deposition.”

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.

Suffice it to say that the dog, apparently the pride and joy of an Italian nobleman named Aldrovandi, dominates Guercino’s canvas. On seeing the Aldrovandi Dog, we immediately glanced 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.

How nicely Poussin's "A Dance to the Music of Time" (the Wallace Collection, in London), would have graced the Frick Collection!

Poussin’s elephant picture is fairly new to the Frick; we first saw it there last year. The Frick says that it is on long-term loan to the Frick till sometime next year, and we’ve been speculating as to what will happen then. Is the owner thinking of donating it to the Frick?  Mr. Frick’s failure to acquire a Poussin was arguably his most glaring omission when he assembled his collection. Is the Frick thinking of buying “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” even though it’s hardly typical of Poussin’s style?

The curators have bravely hung Poussin’s elephant near a Corot and a Hals portrait in the Frick’s grand gallery, no doubt hoping that visitors will take to it. After several visits, we still find the elephant jarring. We are unpersuaded that it’s truly a good match for the personality of the Frick Collection.

The best American Impressionist painters

Everyone knows the French impressionists: Claude Monet, August Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and (even though she was born in Pittsburgh) Mary Cassatt.

They’re famous — but what about the Americans? This art museum junkie thought he’d make a modest list of the ten American impressionists whose paintings he has enjoyed the most.

Hassam's "The Breakfast Room," at the Worcester Art Museum

1. Childe Hassam. We begin with the best-known American impressionist, Childe Hassam, who despite his exotic-sounding name was from an old Boston family. Hassam was a prolific worker, and Emsworth has seen more of his work than of any other American impressionist. Most American museums have at least one Hassam. In fact, he’s is the only American impressionist whose work we’ve ever seen in a major retrospective exhibition (it was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the summer of 2004).

Hassam's "Rainy Day, Fifth Avenue," at the University of Princeton Art Museum

In our humble view, the quality of Hassam’s paintings is decidedly mixed. We Rochesterians have a piece by Hassam at the Memorial Art Gallery, but it’s a large, wide, mural-size, classically-flavored landscape without a great deal of appeal.

Personally, we blame the facile Hassam as much as anyone for the quickly painted, low-quality, “impressionistic” paintings you see at “starving artist” markets. He made it look as if there was nothing to it — and sometimes there wasn’t much. But the best of his material has a lot of charm.

2. Theodore Robinson. Hassam may have the cringe-making nickname “the American Monet”, but Theodore Robinson 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 in this post last summer.

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.

5. Daniel Garber. As we noted in an earlier post about our visit to the Michener Art Museum (in southeastern Pennsylvania), which has several superb Garbers, his paintings tend to have a magical, mystical quality about them.

But there is nothing at all cartoonish about Garber’s paintings, though some of them remind us vaguely of the cinematography in Sleeping Beauty. This large, marvelous landscape, entitled Tohickon, belongs to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., which has just recently (as of fall 2009) put it on display in the Grand Salon of the Renwick Gallery.

6. Philip Leslie Hale. If this was the only painting he’d done, we’d still include the Boston impressionist Philip Leslie Hale 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.

Bits of trivia: Philip Leslie Hale was the son of the noted preacher Edward Everett Hale. And his wife Lilian Westcott Hale was also a well-known painter; we saw a couple of of her paintings at a traveling exhibition here in Rochester last spring. Her picture Home Lessons was noted in this Emsworth post..

7. William Glackens. The great American collector Albert Barnes, who amassed the finest collection of Renoirs and Cezannes in the world, 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.)

The Renoir-like painting shown above, Bathing at Bellport, is at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Clearly Glackens studied Renoir closely. No doubt that’s one of the reasons Barnes thought so well of Glackens; Barnes thought every aspiring artist should study Renoir. I enjoyed this blogger’s excellent illustrated note on Glackens’s paintings of Washington Square, in Manhattan.

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.

Cooper’s picture was painted in 1908. Till the 1960s, there were still buildings right on the bridge itself, on both sides. There aren’t any buildings on the bridge now; you can see the river as you drive or walk across. This is our favorite impressionist painting at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery.

10. Frederick Carl Frieseke.. Frieseke’s adventures in color took him as far past 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.

The Pennsylvanian Edward R. Redfield's "The Brook at Carversville," at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art

We had trouble limiting our list to ten painters; it was hard to leave off Edward W. Redfield, one of our very favorites (see this post), from the list. (Mary Cassatt worked in Europe for virtually her entire career, so we omitted her.) A longer list of famous American impressionists would include Cecilia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Guy Wiggins, Elmer Schofield, Lilian Westcott Hale, Frank Weston Benson, Robert Reid, and Dennis Miller Bunker.