Road Trip

A three-day art excursion took us to Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio; Greensburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The impetus was the “Manet/Morisot” show at CMA that had been so well received in San Francisco earlier this year. It was exceptional, although too small-scaled to have merited the trip by itself. Fortunately, in the next gallery was a sensational survey of works by Martin Puryear–and, of course, the permanent collection at Cleveland is a pleasure in itself.

The M/M exhibit was unusual in making a case: here, that Morisot was not simply a protege of Manet, but that her experimental art influenced and loosened his later work. The show was brilliant in its hang: every group of paintings went together to make a point, and there was a never-before united quartet of the seasons by the two artists. There weren’t however, many Manets, and the best were paintings we were familiar with from the Met and the NGA. Similarly, I felt we had seen more interesting Morisots at the Paris 1874 show in Washington last year. This display was a tease that made one long for a full-blown survey of Morisot. And the argument about Manet’s loosening manner made me wonder how to explain Bar at the Folies-Bergere from the end of his career.

As for Puryear, I had long admired him–especially after Robert Hughes called him the most important artist in America–but I had never fully warmed to his biomorphic curves, epitomized by the large sculpture outside the Getty entrance. What impressed me most in this survey was the range of forms and materials that made up his art. His pieces were so unlike each other yet exhibiting the same craftsmanship and the same quest for an artistic solution. Maybe some were more beautiful than others, but all were intriguing.

The Butler Institute in Youngstown had long been on my radar as the home of Winslow Homer’s iconic “Snap the Whip” painting and only vaguely as the oldest museum of American Art in the country. Unfortunately it is showing its age and is witness to the Rust-Belt decline. Paintings are dingy, the building is dated, the display is unimaginative. We didn’t anticipate the 4 pm closing so had less than an hour to visit; that turned out to be enough. Most of the names I know were represented, although few, other than Sargent and Paxton, with noteworthy examples. The Homer, also, was tucked into a corner, rather than given the highlights it warranted.

The Westmoreland Museum in Greensburg was a stunning contrast, undoubtedly due to a different level of financial support, led by Richard Mellon Scaife. He donated important artwork and the museum also benefits from a long-term loan arrangement with the National Academy of Design. Thomas Eakins’s Self-Portrait and Kensett’s The Bish-Bash were two iconic works that attracted my camera. The first galleries of the small museum are devoted to the steel industry, with paintings, sculpture, photographs and works on paper also reproduced in an instructive immersive gallery that gave you a feel for the western Pennsylvania locale. And the building is clean, bright and modern–all in contrast to the Butler.

Our final stop was the Carnegie Museum of Art, of which I’d heard (partly due to Jason Busch’s time there) but knew little. It was hosting the every-three-or-four-years Carnegie International, which I almost missed because the museum had so much to show. When I did go through it at the end I found it charming. It was everything the Whitney Biennial wasn’t: hopeful, sprightly, fun to look at, and of course international. The permanent collection only went back to Impressionism–two lovely Pissarros and other good examples purchased by major donor Sarah Scaife in the 1960s (a half-century after other American collectors)–but had interesting examples of subsequent movements and well-chosen contemporary pieces by Julie Mehretu and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, among others.

I think all our museum stops included a work by John Kane, the self-taught artist from western Pennsylvania, and when we left the Carnegie and drove to the airport I glanced across the Monongahela (or was it the Allegheny) and saw his landscape, with small houses dotting the hillside.