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.

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. (The Barnes has a couple of paintings by the American impressionist Ernest Lawson as well.)

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.

American Impressionists at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery

(June 8, 2008) The Phillips Collection, an art museum in Washington, D.C., has once again sent a group of paintings out on tour, and for the next week or so they are here in Rochester at the Memorial Art Gallery.

The last time paintings from the Phillips Collection were here, several years ago, we got a group of abstract twentieth-century still lifes. This was the only occasion I can remember that a painting by Pablo Picasso has been shown in Rochester, but all in all, I don’t think Rochesterians were much impressed.

But now the Phillips has sent us a fine selection of its American impressionists, painted from about 1880 through 1925, and these seem to be better received by MAG visitors. At any rate, we like it, even though, in our pride, we like to think of ourselves as having advanced beyond the ever-popular impressionists in our appreciation of art.

Sisley's "Overcast Day at Saint Mammes"

The American impressionists have a reputation as second-rate imitators of the “real” impressionists, the French. But I think that is due more to our inferiority complex on matters cultural than to any marked differences in artistic quality. And, of course, the French themselves have never had much interest in art created outside France, Italy, or Spain. American museums are littered with Monets, Pissarros, and Sisleys (just above, a Sisley from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; below, a Monet that can be seen right here in Rochester), but the Musee d’Orsay has nothing by any American impressionist. (It does own Whistler’s Mother, but Whistler was neither an impressionist nor terribly American.)

The best paintings of the American impressionists match up pretty well with the French. It is true that impressionism originated in France and that the Americans learned from the French impressionist masters. But who thinks less of van Gogh or Cezanne because they studied with Pissarro? Most artists are influenced by somebody.

The best-known American impressionist is Childe Hassam, represented among these Phillips paintings by Washington Arch, Spring (1890), a scene in soft pastels set in lower Manhattan. The show also includes three paintings by another prominent American impressionist, John Twachtman, including Winter (1891), a snow scene painted almost entirely in light blues and grays.

"Home Lessons"

Hassam and Twachtman will remind you of Monet. On the other hand, the juicy summer colors and broader brushstrokes of William Glackens’s Bathers at Bellport show him as a disciple of Renoir, while Theodore Robinson’s Giverny reminds us both in subject matter and style of Pissarro’s mid-career paintings of country people and farm scenes. We were especially taken with two interior scenes: Lillian Westcott Hale’s Home Lessons, a picture of a young girl studying a globe (affinities with Renoir), and Helen Turner’s A Rainy Day, a picture of a woman with a bird in her bedroom (affinities with the French post-impressionists Pierre Bonnard and Edward Vuillard).

"Ice in the River"

However, the real focus of this show, and the main reason we returned several times, is that it includes enough paintings by Ernest Lawson (nine in all) to make up a decent exhibition by itself. The thick textures and glittering jewel tones that Lawson used to depict rugged urban and rural scenes, mostly from upper Manhattan and the lower Hudson river valley, put him in a class by himself, and the nine paintings visiting here from the Phillips, painted from 1900 through 1921, are top-drawer. (So far as I know, no other museum owns such a large group of Lawsons.) I was especially drawn to Spring Night, Harlem River, a blue-green scene of a large bridge and the riverbank below it, and Ice in the River, done in greens and browns.

This exhibition does not amount to an overview of American impressionism because Duncan Phillips failed to collect several of the most notable American impressionists, and also because he seems to have preferred landscapes over interior scenes, still lifes, or portraits. Not represented, for instance, are Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Philip Leslie Hale, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Guy Wiggins, Jonas Lie, Willard Metcalf, or Colin Campbell Cooper. Fortunately, the MAG has some of the best works of Lie (see picture just below), Metcalf, and Cooper in its permanent collection.

Jonas Lie's "Morning on a River"

The Memorial Art Galley has presented this traveling exhibition together with a room of American impressionist paintings owned by the MAG itself. I had never seen most of them, apparently because they were in need of restoration and not suitable for exhibition.

A few of these were undistinguished, we thought, but most were first-rate, including Edward Redfield’s River Hills (just below) and a small painting by Guy Wiggins, Fifth Avenue in Winter. I was especially irritated to know that Elmer Schofield’s Devon Countryside has languished in storage, unseen and unloved, for so long. (I would like very much to know whether this “Devon” is in England or New England.) This is a fine large summer scene of a sloping village lane, lined with stone walls and dappled with sunlight. Now that it has been cleaned, perhaps the curators will keep it on view after the exhibition is over.

I recommend a visit to the Phillips Collection itself, which is the proud home of Auguste Renoir’s grand and celebrated Luncheon of the Boating Party. We have visited this Washington, D.C. museum several times; it’s about 15 blocks northwest of the White House, too far to walk from the Mall, nowhere to park, best reached by subway. Duncan Phillips founded it in the late 1920s to showcase his own personal collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern art. Besides Cezannes, Picassos, and van Goghs, it has an outstanding collection of paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Mark Rothko, and Jacob Lawrence.