Up-to-Date in KC

Whenever I go to a comparably sized city, I inevitably end up comparing their art collection to the MIA’s, and this thought was never far from my mind as I toured Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art last Wednesday (10/10/12). My investigation was neither deep nor complete, as there were whole parts of the collection – notably Egyptian, Classical, Medieval and 19th-century – that I didn’t even get to. But here are the opinions I came away with.
We spent our first 90 minutes in the company of curator Colin Mackenzie, touring the Chinese collection, which has been a famous strength of the N-A for decades – indeed, most of the prime works were collected around the 1930s. Colin’s comments made it clear that he ceded superiority to the MIA in the areas of furniture and ceramics. Just as clear in his mind was the N-A’s advantage in paintings, although the best weren’t on display and, indeed, a number were headed to China for a major show of Song Dynasty paintings, an area in which a late collector like the MIA can’t compete. The other major advantage the N-A holds is in Buddhist sculpture. The first piece we saw was a stunning wall relief, c. 520, from a cave shrine at Longmen. The last was a monumental Yuan Dynasty mural that had been chopped in squares and reassembled and now covered the entire far wall of a large, hall-like gallery, with a famous Guanyin of the Southern Seas (12c.) gracefully seated in front of it. Any of these three would have been worth the time we spent with China, but there were other highlights: a unique Ming Dynasty canopy bed with alcove made of huanghuali wood; a Cizhou vase that perfectly married exquisite form with a swirling dragon decoration; and a related display of Tang earthenware women all caught our attention. Many objects had direct counterparts at the MIA: splendid Shang Dynasty bronzes (although the collection was missing a jue); a 6c. sarcophagus with episodes of filial piety; a Tang tomb retinue; and a folding huanhuali armchair. The MIA probably has the edge in jades and bronzes, and maybe textiles. Our collection of literati objects, thanks to Bruce Dayton seems stronger, although the N-A had an impressive display of cricket cages. Beyond that, who knows? – I certainly couldn’t judge. I will say that the two collections compete well, and knowing one is great preparation for seeing the other.
Where the MIA unquestionably excels is in presentation. Its two period rooms alone put the N-A galleries to shame, but the MIA’s more recently renovated galleries are clearly superior across the board. The N-A hall with the wall mural and Guanyin is pleasantly startling with its cinnabar hue, but its furniture gallery resembles a doctor’s office and other spaces lack cohesion. Presentation also prevents close comparison of the Japanese galleries. The N-A display cases are all designed for screens, so other objects, such as pottery and lacquer, have to be shoehorned in. I was taken by a Hokusai painting of immortals climbing Mt. Fuji and a Kano screen of Four Sages; but in all, I was reminded more of Santa Barbara’s Asian collection than the MIA’s.
On the same floor as the Asian art we found my pet area of interest, American paintings. As the MIA has no American painting collection worth discussing, this competition was a slam-dunk. I was struck first by a lovely Thomas Moran of the Grand Canyon (1912), in which, unusually, the foreground rocks and trees captured my attention as fully as the majestic canyon in the background. Frederic Church’s view of Jerusalem (1870) is one of his typical show-stoppers. William Merritt Chase is well represented by a still life of fish, a gentleman’s portrait and an airy Shinnecock beach scene. There’s George Inness early and crisp and George Inness late and brooding. Genre scenes by Edmonds, Mount and Bingham cover that American school just as you would wish, and amid a gallery of froth, a particularly restrained and balanced Richard Miller stood out. There was, not surprisingly, too much Thomas Hart Benton for my taste, but if you’re going to show Benton, his Persephone is a jackpot. The Hudson River School is modestly represented, and the biggest names – Eakins, Homer, Sargent, Whistler – are not at their best. But there are so many representative examples of everyone else – Copley, Stuart, Peale, LaFarge, Bricher, Hassam, Remington, Hartley, Davis, et al. – that one’s thirst for American art is well sated.
Modern art has its own wing, the new Bloch building designed by Peter Holl. It neatly steps down the hillside, a progression that relieves the wonderfully airy galleries inside of any boring repetition. On the other hand, the outside is almost willfully unattractive, in both its lines and its material, perhaps making the point that what is important is, after all, inside. Here again, as much as the MIA is trying to move forward in this direction and has the benefit of wonderful loans from Gordon Locksley and Myron Kunin, the N-A is miles ahead with major works that could no longer be found or afforded: DeKooning’s Woman IV, Diebenkorn’s Interior with a Book, Rauschenberg’s Tracer. Then there’s Reinhardt, Rothko and Kline. In the Realist mode, Andrew Wyeth, Richard Estes, Fairfield Porter, George Segal and several Wayne Thiebauds. Neil Welliver is a favorite, but I had never seen anything like his Late Squall, a painting of Mt. Monadnock in a snowstorm, painted entirely in pointillist dots. A new favorite, whom we had met the day before at the Nerman Museum in Overland Park, was local painter Keith Jacobshagen, and his Crow Call was displayed next to Welliver.
The N-A’s African collection came, somewhat bizarrely, at the end of the modern wing. It is either much smaller than the MIA’s, or they’ve decided to display it more selectively. If it’s the latter, I don’t agree with all their selections, especially the space given to a Bamileke beaded throne of hideous tackiness. Their Benin oba head is less majestic than the MIA’s and their Djenne horseman is terra cotta, instead of wood. There is no stand-out piece like the MIA’s Ife Shrine Head, although they do have a good ci wara, which the MIA lacks. The collection is far less comprehensive, and I suspect that Africa just hasn’t been a collecting priority – and undoubtedly wasn’t even on the radar screen during the great collecting decades of the N-A’s history
This leads to European paintings, the heart of any museum in the eyes of the public. Starting with an hour to go before the museum’s unusual 4 p.m. close, I was able to navigate one-quarter of the museum’s “plaza level,” somewhere between a third to a half of the European galleries. Basically, I covered the 17th and 18th centuries. I missed the Renaissance – Memling, Bellini, Lorenzo di Credi, Mabuse, Titian, Bronzino, Veronese, El Greco, to cite some names – and the 19th century – Turner, Lawrence, Monet, Degas, Pissarro, van Gogh, Gauguin – but from the images in the catalogue I would judge that the N-A wins, hands-down, for that earlier period but not the later. The 17th century, of course, is one of the MIA’s strengths, both for its overview of Dutch art and the scene in Rome. Poussin’s Germanicus in Minneapolis is as important a 17th-century painting as there is in the Midwest, but I don’t doubt that some would take the N-A’s Caravaggio of St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness if given a choice. The Caravaggio is paired with a wonderful Bernardo Strozzi, St. Cecilia, and surrounded with works by the Spaniards Ribera and Zurburan, both unrepresented in the MIA (and there’s a Murillo in the next room). The N-A pictures seem to be in remarkably pristine condition, which makes them even more powerful, and almost nowhere is there glazing to detract from their power. There are many draws between the collections: Pater, Largilliere, Hobbema, Salomon van Ruysdael, Canaletto, Vigee-Lebrun, Gainsborough, to name a few. I happen to prefer the N-A’s Chardin, a wonderful and typical Still Life with Cat and Fish, to the MIA’s, and only the N-A has a work by an idiosyncratic favorite of mine, Jean-Etienne Liotard. Kansas City doesn’t have Lucretia, the MIA’s other unparalleled masterwork, but their Portrait of a Young Man from the same year is even more beguiling here than it was at the MIA’s recent Rembrandt show. The edge here, however, is provided by a wonderful Frans Hals Portrait of a Man (c. 1650). To flank a doorway with a Hals and a Rembrandt brings us to the summit of Dutch art, at least.
Any overall evaluation of the two institutions would continue on for many more pages. I would guess that the MIA is stronger in decorative arts and sculpture – silver, for one example, would not even be close – as well as all those fields that used to be called Crafts. Photographs and works on paper are largely off-view and would have to be left to specialists. Egyptian art is wildly popular with the public, and the MIA’s weakness in that area hurts it in any comparison. One gets the overall impression that the MIA has a larger acquisition budget and is accordingly stronger in new fields of (affordable) collecting, like decorative arts, crafts, African, Oceanic and Native American art; while Kansas City seemingly had more wealth, or wealthier collectors, in the 1930s to 1950s, when more attention was given to European painting, Egyptian and Classical art and, of course, large works from China. In their own ways, however, both are powerhouses, amazing artistic outposts in the prairie.