Short Hops in New England

Business and family in Manchester, VT and Essex, CT allowed me to check out some of the smaller, local attractions that would normally fall under the art radar. Some were surprises, some disappointments, but all were worth the detour.
The biggest show, and biggest letdown, was “Pissaro’s People” at the Clark in Williamstown. While I love some of Pissaro’s Pontoise landscapes and Parisian cityscapes, he has always tandemed with Sisley in my mind on a lower rung of the Impressionist ladder: someone who should be represented in every collection, but whose work is often unremarkable and unrecognizable. He is not known – unlike Degas or Renoir – for his paintings of people, which may be why the Clark felt this show was justifiable. Conversely, he may be unknown for his paintings of people because they simply aren’t very good. The main claim that curator Rick Bretell seemed to make for them was their evidence of Pissaro’s communist philosophy. That is, he glorified the working man, or more often woman, picking apples, tilling the field. From the point of view of art, however, there was not a single picture that stood out, that I would want to own, other than a self-portrait that had little in common with the rest of the show. The paintings were all pleasant, plain, undistinguished and uninteresting.
The deficiencies of Pissaro’s people struck me at the Clark when I came upon Two Guides, by Winslow Homer, in a gallery across the hall. Without showing the men’s faces, as is Homer’s wont, this painting conveyed more personality and more sense of place than any of Pissaro’s subjects.
Most of the Clark’s Impressionism collection is currently on a world tour, and I suspect that some lesser works have been rescued from storage to fill the walls. For whatever reason, the rest of my visit was more a checking-off of familiar names than a discovery of anything exciting. I did have a new appreciation of the Alfred Stevens room after acquiring a painting of his for the MIA; and I was fascinated, as usual, by the Piero della Francesca, which may or may not be autograph. The question is always, if it isn’t a Piero, whose is it?
Down the road and two days earlier, we had stopped for an hour at MassMOCA. We couldn’t do it justice in the time available, but we left with smiles on our faces. The highlight was “Sub Mirage Lignum,” a five-part installation by Jamaican New Yorker Nari Ward. Two of the installations were particularly effective in the large spaces provided: Nu Colossus, a basket-shaped fish trap of immense size, with shaved wooden planks on the outside and broken furniture inside, and a complete fishing boat sitting in three vertical sheets of plexiglass; and Mango Tourists, eight snowmen made of yellow foam strips interlaced with mango seeds and dotted with leftover capacitors from the Sprague Electric Company that used to reside here. There was story and symbolism behind all the elements of Ward’s works, but they stood on their own as objects of visual beauty and physical wonder.
The entire “turbine room” plus was given over to Katherine Grosse’s One Floor Up, blobs and mounds of bright paint that climbed walls and covered floors. Walking through it, one felt as if one were a Lilliput inside an abstract-expressionist painting. By contrast, Sol Lewitts’s wall drawings in the adjoining gallery were tight and regulated. When I have seen these in situ, as at the Wadsworth Atheneum later in the week, I have been left cold; but seeing them together, displayed as related artworks, was a revelation of pleasure. Often, an artist’s work seems diminished when you see a lot of it in one place – as was true with Pissaro’s People; but the opposite occurred for me with these Lewitts.
The principal show was called Workers and it was more overtly Communist than Pissaro’s. As these things often go, it was wildly uneven. My favorite was a series of five large photographs of workers standing on a beach. In each succeeding shot, they sank lower and lower, not because the waves washed over them – in fact, the waves didn’t move – but because the holes they stood in grew deeper, until they disappeared completely. Local artist Mary Lum also created a wall collage from bits of paper bags that was rigorously formal overall but fascinatingly haphazard in detail.
In Connecticut I ventured up to New London to see the American paintings held by the Lyman Allyn Museum. There was nothing out of the very ordinary, but I was pleased to find two oval portraits from 1802 by William Jennys (Major and Mrs. Hatch) that could have been cousins to the Portrait of Moses Kimball, Jr. at the MIA that we have adopted. There was also a nice Gilbert Stuart portrait of Mrs. William Rawle that was purchased in 2006, evidence that the MIA could have been building its American paintings collection had the will been present.
My last stop was the Wadsworth Atheneum, which seems to be in the middle of a major renovation. Things had moved since my previous visit, not long ago, and many spaces were closed. Of main interest was the red fabric-lined Gangras Court, where all the paintings from Renaissance to Rococo, the traveling exhibit that visited both Santa Barbara and Minneapolis, were on display. While it was fun to see old friends, it was a little disappointing that the selection at home was no larger or more varied than it had been on the road. Still, Orazio Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes thrills me every day I see it.
A less successful rehang was in the Morgan Great Hall, a former home to classic work, now filled with the contemporary collection. The pieces, all large and hanging at varying heights up to the ceiling, just didn’t work together.