American Art in Winona

Winona collectors Mary Burrichter and Bob Kierlin have done in Winona exactly what I’ve been trying to get the MIA to do in Minneapolis for 15 years: build a representative collection of 19th-century American landscape painting. Moreover, they’ve done it in less than 10 years and built a beautifully sited museum on the Mississippi River to house it. Unfortunately, it’s three hours away from the Twin Cities in Winona, near the Iowa border. On the other hand, it offers an excuse to drive through a lovely part of the country, whether you go through Minnesota farmland or along the river.

The best wall, worthy of any museum, displays three relatively large canvases: Thomas Cole’s unusually cheerful topographic view of Boston Harbor from Milton Hill; Frederic Church’s 1853 ‘Autumn,’ allegedly his largest work featuring fall foliage, a bright red maple nestled next to a white barn, both lit by a break in the clouds; and Albert Bierstadt’s ‘Sunrise,’ a luminously orange work with the sun reflecting off a central pond, a composition familiar from European artists.

There are mini-surveys of second-tier, but high-quality, artists Francis Silva, William Bradford and A.T. Bricher. My favorite Silva was ‘On the Hudson at Tappan Zee’ (1880), although Katherine at Godel tells me the two smaller New York Harbor scenes are the best. None of the three large Bradfords struck me as particularly good, but they show his style changing after his Arctic voyages began. ‘Ship Off a Northern Headland’ (c. 1862) is more 3-D, more active and more primitive than his later works. The work closest to ours in style and subject is ‘Artic Sunset with Rainbow,’ which mistakenly shows the rainbow descending in front of an iceberg, an optical impossibility. Bricher’s ‘Mississippi River at Dubuque’ (1870) is wonderfully atmospheric and brings back memories of its appearance at the MIA show of 2009. His ‘Near Cape Elizabeth, Portland, Maine’ (1887) was one of the collection’s highlights, duly recognized by its appearance on museum notecards. Its palette and overall placid feel struck me as very similar to our own treasure by Bricher. Coincidentally, the museum also displays his ‘Boats in the Afternoon, Newburyport’ (1884), a painting featuring two unattractive women that appeared at the Shannon’s auction where we made our purchase, a painting we didn’t like and would never have bought. So, not everything is great, and that would also include Bricher’s ‘Spring at Newport’ (1879), a portrait of his wife-to-be that recalls Ridgway Knight.

One sidewall shows representative works by ‘must-have’ names: Cropsey, Heade, Richards, Whittredge and Thomas Moran. The Heade is unusual in being a seascape, but is otherwise totally typical of his low, horizontal views. The Cropsey scene of autumnal foliage, ‘Watching the Stream’ (1868) is also typical, calm but full of interest, and does not descend to the saccharine, as many of his late works do.
I would think Fitz Henry Lane would be a hard artist to find, but the Marine Museum has two sweet (I hate to use the word, but it fits) works, similar in size (8″ x 12″?) but varied enough to provide an interesting contrast. ‘Coming Ashore Near Brace’s Rock’ is the more familiar subject, but ‘View of Indian Bar Cove’ is just as exquisite. Pairing them with a comparable painting by Mary Mellen completes the picture.

I’m no expert, but I would think ‘Mt. Orford’ (1864) must be a ‘major’ Robert Duncanson. I can’t think of any I have seen that are as fully realized and present an individual style so clearly. Two Haseltine views of rocky coasts are both “right,” as a dealer would say. They appear to be the same scene, although one is twice as large and they are identified as showing Newport and Cape Ann, respectively. John Kensett is also represented by a picture of Newport rocks. No one paints rocks better than Kensett and these rocks (‘At Newport [1870]) are very good, but nothing special.

Although he is not a landscape artist as are the others, Winslow Homer makes an appearance with ‘Winding Line’ (1874), a study of a young man, face hidden as Homer prefers, leaning on a dinghy. More brilliant, by far, is a Homer watercolor, ‘Three Schooners at Anchor’ (c. 1880), which is fresh and fairly sails off the paper. The collectors’ criterion for inclusion in their museum is that the work must show a body of water sufficient for boating, thus justifying the museum’s name, Minnesota Marine Art Museum. It is instructive, and not terribly suprising, that almost every significant American artist of the 19th century’s second half produced paintings that qualify.

(I will perhaps add that the fixation on this subject has perhaps goaded the collectors to purchase works that don’t quite rise to museum level – see my comments on Bricher, above – and the special exhibition, paintings of lighthouses and lightboats, contains many more pedestrian works, as well as the unfortunate genre of contemporary artists who paint 19th and early 20th-century scenes, often in the adopted style of those eras. There are one or two large paintings by John Stobart that earn him a designation as the Thomas Kinkade of the Sea.)

Preliminary to the display of American seascape landscapes, the MMAM presents French Impressionism, also with a water theme although more attenuated. I can only commend the Burrichter/Kierlin duo for acquiring works that can introduce the southeastern Minnesota market to some of the great names of art history: Monet, van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, Pissarro, Vlaminck, Signac, Picasso, Matisse. There isn’t, however, as consistent a thread to this part of the collection – it is more a grab-bag of ‘look what we could find.’ Not surprisingly, what they could find were generally second-rate works, interesting more for the artist’s name than the composition. The two exceptions are a lovely, evocative work by Berthe Morisot, a sketchy but substantial quay-side view, ‘The Pont-Aven River at Roz-Bras,’ which was her only painting in the 1868 Paris Salon; and a masterful late Corot, ‘Brume Matinee au Marais’ (1871), which has everything you want in a feathery, grey Corot, starting with two large trees in the middle.

One last comment: the MMAM has installed state-of-the-art lighting in its new (2009) permanent exhibition gallery, but it could stand a lot of tweaking. All the wall labels are well lit, but too many of the paintings – the Morisot, for example – are left in the dark. By contrast, the temporary exhibition space currently housing a show of naval battle prints is flooded with light, the reverse of what you would expect, if only for the prints’ sake.

As a compulsive listmaker, I felt it essential that I compile my Top Ten Paintings from the afternoon. With reference to the write-ups above, they are, listed by artist in alphabetical order:
Bricher, Bricher, Church, Cole, Corot, Cropsey, Duncanson, Hassam (‘The Harbor’ [1902]), Homer, Morisot. And on the drive home, I was thrilled to find, feeding at Weaver Bottoms, flocks of pintail, gadwall, shoveler, wood duck, green-winged teal, pied-billed grebe, tundra swans, about a trillion coot, and a majestic bald eagle circling overhead.