Ten pictures you shouldn’t miss at the Clark Institute

Renoir was Sterling Clark's favorite artist. This 1897 self-portrait is at the Clark.

 

We were just back to one of our favorites, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, which is inconveniently located in the mountain wilderness of western Massachusetts, several hours from anywhere. Of course, getting there over winding roads along mountain streams with breathtaking views of the Berkshires is part of the attraction. 

But the art collection is worth the trip. In fact, we would dare to rank the Clark (as it now calls itself) among the dozen best art museums in the United States. If you care for the work of John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Renoir, especially, it’s absolutely indispensable. And its special exhibitions — more compact than those you might see at the Met or the MFA in Boston and often better as a result — are always memorable. That’s the case with this summer’s striking side-by-side Picasso/Degas exhibit.  

Here is a modest list of ten pictures at the Clark that we wouldn’t want friends who visited the Clark to miss:  

1. Sunset, Saco Bay (Winslow Homer). Much of the art in the Clark was originally collected by Sterling Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune.  He had his prejudices; he didn’t like modern art at all, so you won’t see anything at the Clark by Matisse, Kandinsky, or Picasso (except in this summer’s exhibit) — not even Cezanne. And he apparently didn’t think much of American art, either — except, fortunately, for Homer and Sargent.  

We first fell for this dazzling 1897 painting — our very favorite Homer, and he’s our favorite American artist — when it visited Rochester in 1988 as part of a marvelous traveling exhibition of Homer’s marine paintings. The scene is Saco Bay, on the southern coast of Maine, not far from Prout’s Neck, where Homer lived and worked towards the end of his life. The women, with their traps, remind you of the paintings of fisher folk that Homer did a couple of decades earlier in England.  

We missed seeing Sunset, Saco Bay on our July visit. It’s evidently out on loan somewhere.  

2. The Onions (Pierre-Auguste Renoir). Mr. Clark clearly loved the French impressionists best, and Renoir most of all.  When you think of Renoir you think of women in various states of dress and undress, but his still lifes are wonderful. The Onions is our favorite of the dozens of Renoirs, including several still lifes, at the Clark.  

3. Fumée d’Ambre Gris – Smoke of Ambergris (John Singer Sargent)  The ancient Egyptians burned ambergris (a kind of whale secretion) as incense, and evidently some Algerians still did when Sargent visited northern Africa in 1879.  In this 1880 painting, was this a priestess, or simply an upper-class woman seeking the intoxicating (and supposedly arousing) effects of the fumes?  There’s just no other Sargent painting like this large, dramatic study in whites. The Clark’s smaller Sargent pictures of Venice scenes are favorites of ours too. 

4. Undertow (Winslow Homer). Did one of these unfortunate women perish trying to save the other? The lifeguards seem philosophical, as if reminding themselves that they did their best to warn swimmers about the dangerous undertow. The simple composition of this 1886 Homer masterpiece reminds us of Poussin’s paintings of classical scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 

5. The Snake Charmer (Jean-Léon Gérôme).  Besides Renoir and Homer, Mr. Clark’s special interests included the European academic painters of the late 19th century, who could get away with frankly sensual pictures.  Could Gerome have actually witnessed titillating private performances like this in the Middle East, with a nude, snake-entwined youth performing to the music of an exotic flute for half-drugged men with, shall we say, specialized tastes? 

6. The River Oise near Pontoise (Camille Pissarro). Sometimes we like Pissarro’s early paintings best, with their willfully flat areas of color (usually muted like the greens and blues in this one); sometimes we lean to his more heavily textured late pictures. This 1873 painting records a moment of change: the near riverbank still probably looks as it had for hundreds of years, while the factories and smokestacks have already transformed the far bank forever. 

7. Farm in the Landes (Pierre Étienne Théodore Rousseau). One of the pleasures of returning to any familiar museum is seeing what’s new. At the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, which we also visited on our recent New England jaunt, our hearts were gladdened to see a lovely, recently-donated, garden-and-river painting by Willard Metcalf.  

In Williamstown, what was new was this large, vivid rural scene by Theodore Rousseau.  A little internet research discloses that the Clark apparently bought it at auction in 2009 for something in excess of $1 million. We think it’ll be the centerpiece of what was already a remarkably fine group of works by the Barbizon painters, including Corot, Troyon, and Millet. 

8. Girl with Sleeping Dog (Renoir). We feel sorry for the art-loving French.  What must they think when they come to America, make the rounds of art museums from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Washington and out to Chicago, and realize that we’ve got a lot more of the French Impressionists than they do?    

But the French won’t really feel the enormity of what’s they’ve lost without coming to Williamstown, Mass.  We judge there are more Renoirs in the Clark than anywhere else in America except the Barnes Foundation and the Met — in fact, probably more than in any European museum besides the Musée d’Orsay.  Girl with Sleeping Cat is perhaps the best-known Renoir at the Clark.  

9. Apples and Grapes in a Basket (Alfred Sisley). Monet, Renoir, and Degas may be more popular, but our tastes in French impressionism tilt toward Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, both of whom are generously represented at the Clark. This Sisley is special, a still life instead of his usual landscapes.  

10. Hunting for Eggs (Homer 1874). Yes, this is the third Homer on this short list, but it’s a watercolor, and it’s part of possibly the best collection of Homer watercolors anywhere (those at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Met are worthy rivals). The group includes gentle genre pictures like this one as well as Adirondack lake and stream scenes (you’ve got to see the jumping trout).  

We didn’t see any of the Homer watercolors this summer; for conservation reasons they aren’t exhibited very often. We watch the Clark’s website for them; they’re sure to be back on display one of these years. They’re worth driving a long ways to see.

Why do they squirrel all that art away?

Fernand Leger: The Smokers

How often has it happened that Emsworth has made his way to the doors of a notable art museum, far from his Rochester home, only to find that its famed collection is not being exhibited?

We speak not of cases in which a museum is closed for renovations (will the Cleveland Museum of Art ever reopen?), but of museums that stubbornly choose to display anything and everything in their galleries other than their own paintings and sculptures.

(For example, Fernand Leger’s The Smokers, owned by the Guggenheim and one of the cubist painter’s masterpieces, was decidedly not on display during a recent visit by Emsworth.)

Nothing is more frustrating to art museum junkies like Emsworth. Let us catalog the chief culprits:

Max Beckmann: Paris Society

1. The Guggenheim Museum (Fifth Avenue, Manhattan). The most egregious by a landslide. The Guggenheim owns one of the finest collections of modern art anywhere — dazzling works by Picasso, Mondrian, Modigliani, Franz Marc, and Ernest Kirchner. And what Kandinskys!

Yet for years, disappointment has awaited the modern art lover who hoped to see more than a few of these works when in New York City. (Max Beckmann’s Paris Society, owned by the Guggenheim, was not on display during a recent visit by Emsworth.)

Emsworth took another chance on the Guggenheim again just a couple of weeks ago. You know (the ticket-seller asked me) that it’s mostly just photographs right now, don’t you? I did know it, having seen a poster announcement when I finally entered the building. It wasn’t what I came for, but I’d waited so long in line that I went in anyway.

By my actual count, the Guggenheim was exhibiting only eleven works of art from its collection: two paintings by Franz Marc, two by Chagall, one each by Kirchner and Jawlensky, and five early Kandinskys. Not even the Guggenheim’s Thannhauser collection was on display.

We didn’t want to waste our money, so we visited the photography exhibit, a retrospective of Catherine Opie. She was a new artist for us, and we can report that she has a keen eye for urban landscape and also an interest in what the exhibit termed “queer culture.” We rolled our eyes at a pretentious description of a group of photos as “Opie’s most complex investigation of community to date” and wished there had been more Kandinskys to see.

Frederick Carl Frieseke:Hollyhocks

2. National Academy of Design (also on Fifth Avenue, just north of the Guggenheim). The crimes of the management here are remarkable.

No chance of seeing either Frederick Carl Frieseke’s Hollyhocks or Asher Durand’s The Evening of Life at the National Academy of Design, which squirrels them away in storage somewhere.

We walked into the Fifth Avenue mansion which the National Academy occupies, bought our ticket, and were then told that there was nothing to see but exhibits of George Tooker and Henry Blakelock in galleries on the fifth floor.

Asher Durand: The Evening of Life

But in a nearby atrium a large plaque gave the history of the institution and informed me that the National Academy has a collection of more than 3,000 works of American art from the 19th and 20th centuries, including works from the Hudson River School, the tonalists, the American impressionists, the Ashcan painters, and the modernists. Our heart quickened; surely the ticket man was mistaken.

I spent some time in the exhibits (which, in fairness, were excellent, especially the Tooker), and when I saw the ticket seller again, I asked him again about the 3,000 pieces of art. You might ask this lady about it, he said — she’s the director.

I turned and intercepted a woman walking by, who interrupted my question to say that the Academy now actually had over 5,000 works. They weren’t ordinarily displayed, she told me, in a tone that suggested she was weary of the question. Wasn’t it a shame, I asked, that such a fine collection should be kept in storage? Well, she said, next year sometime we’re going to make a point of having at least some of the collection on display.

Total number of works of art from the National Academy’s permanent collection on display? Two, that I counted — a Tooker and a Blakelock. They were part of the exhibits.

Hopper: Ground Swell

3. The Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., just north of the White House). The Corcoran has a fine, comprehensive collection of both American and European art. At least, we think so. For in perhaps half a dozen hopeful visits to the Corcoran over the last 25 years, we’ve seen only bits and pieces of it. (For example, Edward Hopper’s Ground Swell. We’ve never seen it at the Corcoran.)

As far as we can tell, there aren’t any galleries in the Corcoran regularly dedicated to its permanent collection. The management seems to think that it’s enough, every now and then, for it to cobble together an “exhibition” of works from the permanent collection. There are a couple such exhibits there now. But one never gets a sense of the entire collection.

The Corcoran is big on high-profile exhibits like the retrospective of Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, that we ran into last year, or of the glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, which amazed us a while back. But shows like that are unsatisfactory when you can’t wander through the rest of the museum and put them in context with other art.

Alfred Sisley:The Loing at Saint Mammes

4. The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). At times we’ve actually been a card-carrying member of the MFA, so we feel fully justified in complaining that a good part of its magnificent collection of European impressionists hasn’t been seen in Boston for years, like Alfred Sisley’s The Loing at Saint Mammes. At least, we never see them when we’re there. Our frustration is compounded by our strong suspicion that the MFA has, in fact, been selling its members and visitors short by renting out the Sisley and other masterpieces to a casino in Las Vegas.

Max Weber: Chinese Restaurant

5. The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City). The Whitney has 12,000 works. It could easily fill up a couple of floors of galleries with its permanent collection, as the Museum of Modern Art does. (Your chances of seeing Max Weber’s 1915 cubist masterpiece, Chinese Restaurant at the Whitney, which owns it? Slim.)

But no. I’ve virtually given up visiting the Whitney, even though it has many of my favorite paintings, because it’s been so long since I’ve seen more than two or three galleries worth of its permanent collection. And as with many art museums, it’s virtually impossible to get a sense, from visiting its website, how much of the permanent collection can actually be seen at any given time.

(October 30, 2008)