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.

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 rich folk like Andrew Mellon, Robert Lehman, the Havemeyers, John J. Johnson, and 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.

Ten pictures you shouldn’t miss at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In Philadelphia on business last week, this art museum junkie was able to spend a pleasant afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he found the usual tourists posing for souvenir photos at the top of the famous steps in triumphal “Rocky” poses. Unfortunately for the photos, most of this fine building is temporarily covered with scaffolding (even more than in this 2007 shot).

Inside, the collection is as rewarding as ever, but can’t be seen all in a day. If you have a chance to visit, Emsworth offers a modest list of ten pictures at this museum that he wouldn’t want his friends to miss.

1. Interior (Edgar Degas). Never mind the famous paintings of ballet rehearsals and nudes getting into their baths — this melodramatic 1868 painting is the Degas that appeals to me most. There’s a story here, but what is it?

The room, with its old-fashioned wallpaper, looks like a set from a play. The painting has been subtitled The Rape, as if the impassive man has just taken from the unfortunate, half-dressed woman something she can never get back. Is this a pictoral re-telling of the story of Amnon (son of King David), who tricked and raped his half-sister Tamar? “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.” 2 Samuel 13:15 (KJV). But what to make of the oddly lit jewelry box on the table in the middle of the room?

2. Rhetoricians at a Window (Jan Steen). Even without a Rembrandt or a Vermeer, the collection of Dutch and Flemish old masters at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is outstanding. It includes at least half a dozen marvelous genre paintings by the Dutchman Jan Steen, of which Rhetoricians at a Window, painted in 1661, is my favorite by an eyelash. Most of these portray working-class citizens in everyday activities, although one illustrates the Exodus scene of Moses striking the rock in anger to get water for the Israelites.

3. A Temperance Meeting (Homer). But Dutch genre paintings have nothing on American genre paintings. The Dutch peasant with the cup in Steen’s painting isn’t drinking milk, but the American farmboy in Winslow Homer’s scene, painted in 1874, is.

4. Christ Bearing the Cross (Murillo). The Gospel of John tells us that, after his trial, Jesus was forced to carry his own cross to Calvary, where he was to be executed by crucifixion. In this large picture by the great Spanish master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jesus meets his mother Mary and kneels to rest, with his cross on his shoulder. Mary holds out her hands as if to ask Jesus whether he truly must give up his life, a conversation she surely had with her son long before his arrest at Passover. Jesus confirms his mission with an expressive look.

Murillo’s picture is not a literal portrayal of the scene on the road to Calvary, because Jesus was guarded and whipped along by His tormentors on his way to Calvary, and it seems unlikely that they left Him alone for a private moment with His mother. Its meaning is, I think, figurative. Jesus surely knew long before his arrest that He had been sent to yield up His life as a sacrifice for the sins of mankind, and in a real sense He was carrying the cross throughout the years of His ministry. None of the many works of art with Christian themes in the Philadelphia Museum of Art will speak more movingly to believers than this 1665 picture.

5. Pont Neuf, Afternoon Sunshine (Pissarro). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a spectacular collection of French impressionist paintings, but the sheer pleasure afforded by this heavily textured view of the most famous of the Paris bridges that cross the Seine is unmatched. Every part of this 1901 painting, from the colorful wagons and figures on the bridge to the fantastical greens and mauves of the river itself, is a sensual treat. To my great disappointment, it was not on the gallery walls during my mid-July 2008 visit.

6. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (Duchamp). This cubist painting made a stir when it was first exhibited nearly a century ago (in 1914), but it’s not at all salacious. In fact, it’s difficult to find the nude subject of this monochromatic painting at all, let alone identify any particular parts of her anatomy. Nude Descending a Staircase may be the best-known cubist painting in the world. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an excellent collection of other cubist works, especially by Picasso, Leger, and Juan Gris.

The museum has devoted an entire gallery to Marcel Duchamp. What a sad case study is his career! Some early paintings by Duchamp in the gallery, in what might be considered a post-impressionist style, show his exceptional talent. These include, for example, a fine portrait of his father. But Duchamp was caught up in the rapidly changing artistic and intellectual movements of the day. First, in a cubist phase, as represented by Nude Descending a Staircase, he abandoned representational art. Then, perhaps finding that celebrity and notoriety suited him more than artistic achievement, Duchamp abandoned his discipline altogether. He gave up painting, bought a bicycle wheel, mounted it on a pedestal, and announced that it was art.

Gratified with the attention, Duchamp repeated the trick over the years with a urinal, a comb, and other objects, a number of which are exhibited in this gallery. Remarkably, people took these stunts seriously; apparently some still do. The gallery chronicles Duchamp’s fall. The visitor will marvel at a century of public gullibility.

7. William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuykill River (Thomas Eakins). In the shadows, the famous sculptor chips away at his masterpiece. Neither Rush nor the elderly chaperone look at the nude model, who holds a box on her shoulder to help hold her pose. The model’s clothing, laid on a chair, is by far the brightest part of the painting.

8. The Large Bathers (Cezanne). It’s the picture that’s large (83 by 93 inches), not the bathers. Cezanne painted three versions of The Large Bathers, one in the London’s National Gallery, one at the Barnes Foundation, in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, and this 1906 work, which is the finest of the three.

Paul Cezanne’s masterpiece can be seen 50 yards away down the long gallery lined with impressionist masterpieces that leads to the circular fountain court gallery.

9. The Rialto (Sargent). If Emsworth ever visits Venice, it will be because of John Singer Sargent’s evocative paintings of scenes from that city.

Visitors to the Philadelphia museum who want to see all the Sargents are led a merry chase. The curators have hung The Rialto among the works of late 19th-century European, presumably for no other reason than that it is a European scene. Portrait of Lady Eden is in the same gallery, presumably because the subject was British. But other Sargent paintings, including several fine portraits and a strikingly modern late landscape, are found among the works of his fellow Americans.

10. Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg (Matisse). In 1914, while Picasso and Braque were painting the same Cubist painting over and over again, Henri Matisse was using art’s new-found freedom to paint this unique portrait. As an afficionado, Emsworth was frustrated no end to find on his recent visit to Philadelphia (July 2008) that hardly anything by Matisse was on the walls.

These are not necessarily the finest or the most famous paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I have not forgotten Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Rubens’s Prometheus Unbound, Renoir’s Large Bathers, Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, or Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and Lily Pool. But you’d see them anyway.