Exhibition Charts Rembrandt's Printmaking Mastery

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 - 1669), is known in popular memory for his emotionally charged portraits as well as for paintings of historical, mythological, and religious subjects, which exemplify the heights of Baroque drama and narrative. He was also a consummate draftsman and skilled printmaker. At the Worcester Art Museum through February 19, an impressive survey of the artist’s etchings shows off Rembrant’s talents and offers audiences an opportunity to learn about the thrilling qualities of printmaking as an artform.

Rembrandt: Etchings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen features some seventy works on paper by the exhibition’s titular artist as well as ancillary artworks by those who studied directly under him or found themselves in his circle. The Museum states that the exhibition is one of the largest focused on the artist’s etchings to visit the United States. A remarkable show in many respects, the exhibition is exciting for those interested in the history of the print as well as in the history of Dutch art. It also illustrates the way in which Rembrandt leveraged the power of the print to rise to the apex of popular culture in his own day.

A detail of Rembrandt’s Christ Blessing the Children and Healing the Sick, from about 1648.

One of the throughlines found in many of the pieces on view in the exhibition is Rembrandt’s keen sense of draftsmanship. His drawing skills naturally come across in his printmaking and even the subtlest of images bears this out. In some of the prints, tiny landscapes with minute figures read as larger vistas and in others the personalities of sitters are captured by Rembrandt’s distinctive portraiture. Close-looking unveils the artist’s facile hand and refined use of line and cross-hatching to create illusionistic and complex images.

Rembrandt’s Landscape with Square Tower, from 1650. A shaped plate gives this print its undulating edge.

Recurring favorites are found in multiple richly inked and dark prints. One can imagine the ways in which the candle-lit murk of the Dutch seventeenth century impacted Rembrandt’s way of making images and nocturnes or sparsely lit interiors are some of the exhibition’s most enthralling examples of what printmaking can do in the hands of a great practitioner.

A 1642 etching of Saint Jerome in a Dark Chamber shows off Rembrandt’s mastery of light and dark.

Another of the assets of this exhibition is its underlying focus on technique. With so many examples of work on display, the show also includes paper samples, explanations of tools and printmaking methods, as well as plates. A central space in the show is dedicated to the steps of making prints, which will give even a consummate print-lover things to consider. For those who are newer to etchings or to printmaking in general, this aspect of the show will provide a new appreciation for the uniqueness of prints. In their own day and now, these artworks are sometimes wrongly considered secondary to painting or sculpture.

A central component of the exhibition highlights the tools and techniques behind the prints on view.

While he is rightly renowned for his skills as a painter, the sensitivity of Rembrant as a person does not lose any of its impact in the etchings presented in this show. Frail and thoroughly human bodies, full of fleshy corporealness, come up again and again in Rembrandt’s work and they are present here. Faces that bear the deep lines of laughter and tears are also present and bring viewers nose-to-nose with their long-dead counterparts. To look at these prints is to be confronted with human experience in all of its rich complexity.

An image of a Head of a Bald Man Right, dated 1630, exemplifies Rembrandt’s sensitivity to the human experience.

For those who love Rembrant, Etchings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will reassure them of Rembrandt’s distinctive voice and impressive expertise as an image-maker. For those who are new to the Baroque, to printmaking, or to Rembrandt, the show has the potential to be revelatory. Either way, it is a joy to be immersed in the world of Rembrandt’s masterful etchings.

Rembrandt: Etchings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is on view at the Worcester Art Museum through February 19, 2024. The Museum is located at 55 Salisbury Street in Worcester and is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 10am - 4pm. Learn more at www.worcesterart.org. See additional views of the show below.

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Exploring American Art in New Britain

Numerous prominent arts organizations in the United States trace their roots to the turn of the century, a moment of turbulent excitement on the nation’s cultural scene. Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art is one such institution. Founded in 1903, it is considered to be the first museum dedicated exclusively to the acquisition of American art. In its galleries, a wide ranging collection tells a broad story of art made in and about the United States.

While the museum has holdings that span from the Colonial period to Contemporary, some of the most compelling areas of its collection are those that chart the realities of art being made around the time of its founding. American artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were newly emboldened to create artworks that were in their own voice and reflective of their own concerns. In a period prior to widely accessible art education in the United States, many of these artists traveled to, and studied in, Europe and the evidence of that is displayed in New Britain’s galleries.

A contemporary painting by Titus Kaphar (far right) reflects on an earlier piece by artist Ralph Earl.

One standout sample of an American in Paris comes from Childe Hassam’s ambitious 1887 painting Le Jour du Grand Prix. In his scintillating treatment of the scene, Hassam reduces the iconic Arch de Triomphe to the edge of the canvas while dedicating the bulk of the image to the street, the trees, the people, and the atmosphere. The recipient of the 1888 Paris Salon’s Gold Medal, Le Jour du Grand Prix was also shown at the influential World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. A highlight of New Britain’s collection, it is emblematic of where the interests of American artists laid in the late nineteenth century. It exemplifies the thrill of urban life, the drama and spectacle of a metropolis, and, of course, the cultural inspiration drawn from European travel.

Childe Hassam’s 1887 Le Jour du Grand Prix is a highlight of the museum’s late nineteenth century holdings.

Beyond Hassam, other paintings from the likes of John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and Gifford Beal continue the trend of Americans’ passion for urban scenes and city life in the first decades of the twentieth century. As Americans poured into cities in pursuit of economic opportunities, artists turned their collective gaze toward the benefits and ills of life in places like New York. Nearby examples by Maurice Prendergrast and Rockwell Kent are more bucolic but no less engaging, and exemplify the ways in which avante-garde approaches to art-making inspired American artists. An immersive installation of murals originally created by Thomas Hart Benton for The Whitney Museum exhibits the aspirations of the Regionalist School in American art and bridges the concerns of Americans both urban and rural.

An immersive installation of Thomas Hart Benton’s Arts of Life in America mural cycle, originally designed for 10 West 8th Street in New York, the first home of The Whitney Museum.

In upstairs galleries, an exhibition on view through October 29, 2023 focuses on highlights from the Museum’s collection of Post-War and Contemporary Art. This show is broad and offers everything from explorations of Contemporary Realism to samplings from Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. The variety is a celebration of the mixed interests of American artists in the decades after the Second World War and breaks down often monolithic art historical storylines.

An installation view of a current exhibition focused on Post-War and Contemporary Art.

Many of the museum’s sleek and well-appointed galleries date to an early 2000’s expansion project spearheaded by Boston’s Ann Beha Architects. The adjoining Landers House, which was the original venue for the museum was restored in 2021 and currently hosts an exhibition of 1970’s portraits honoring Black women who were active community leaders in the New Britain region. The entire complex hugs Walnut Hill Park. An early work of Frederick Law Olmstead, the space was designed by the nation’s preeminent landscape architect of the nineteenth century, who is best known for shaping Central Park but left a lasting impact on many public spaces.

The elegant library of the museum’s Landers House.

In addition to its permanent collection, which includes strong holdings in expected areas like the Hudson River School and American Illustration, the museum also mounts rotating exhibitions. Through September 3, 2023 it is hosting a significant show of work by photographer Walter Wick, creator of the I Spy books series, which will appeal to families. Other exhibitions on view probe topics as far afield as Shaker design and Post-War and Contemporary art. 

A view from one of the museum’s current rotating exhibitions, focused on Walter Wick.

For those interested in experiencing a primer of the story of art in the United States, the New Britain Museum of American Art offers compelling opportunities to consider the legacy of visual art in the context of the American experience.

The New Britain Museum of American Art is located at 56 Lexington Street in New Britain Connecticut. It is open Wednesday - Sunday from 10am - 5pm each day and Thursdays from 10am - 8pm. Admission is $15 for adults. For more details and to plan your visit, go to www.nbmaa.org.

The New Britain Museum of American Art’s campus at 56 Lexington Street in New Britain Connecticut.

Review: Impressionism Explored at Worcester Art Museum

Impressionism remains one of the most revered movements in Western art history. The soft focus paintings of Monet continue to hold sway with contemporary audiences sheerly through their unbridled beauty. The divergent influences and aftereffects of the Impressionist movement are less well-known by audiences but are no less worthy of exploration. In a current exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum, some of the complex realities of this art historical moment are explored, resulting in new insights that go beyond a popular aesthetic.

The entrance to the exhibition is a wall-spanning tribute to the Worcester Art Museum’s prized Monet Waterlilies.

Fronters of Impressionism, curated by Claire C. Whitner and Erin Corrales-Diaz, aims to unpack the nuances of artmaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On view through June 25, the show probes the world as it was when Impressionism arrived and shares works produced by concurrently occurring artistic movements. The narrative the exhibition unfolds will give many museum visitors their first broad readings of a period that is often characterized in the popular imagination as being dominated by the likes of Renoir or Cassatt.

The exhibition of course has fine examples of European paintings like Claude Monet’s 1908 Waterlilies, which was purchased by WAM within just a couple years of its creation. This is the kind of image that springs to mind when the term Impressionism is raised. But alongside Monet, the exhibition also contextualizes movements like the Barbizon School or later Pointellist creations and does an excellent job of illustrating how artists outside of Europe digested and influenced the avant-garde ideas of the Impressionist vanguard.

Corot’s A Fisherman on the Banks of the Pond, created between 1865-70, is a prototypical Barbzon artwork, and the type that would inspire generations of American landscape painters.

Works by Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833-1917) are featured in the exhibition, highlighting an artist who was intimately involved in the zeitgeist of the turn of the century and who had friendships with peers like Pissarro. In a small painting from 1864, Oller y Cestero captures his friend Paul Cézanne painting out of doors, documenting one of the more important strategies of boundary-breaking artists in the nineteenth century. Where the powerful French Academy of Fine Arts demanded that polished artworks be produced in the studio, young artists rejected this and painted “finished” works en plein air, giving life to a tradition that continues today.

Both a product and document of the Impressionism moment, Francisco Oller y Cestero’s painting of his friend Cézanne depicts the technique behind the avant-garde plein air painters.

Artists of the United States also make up a sizable component of the show. A fine example by landscapist Edward Mitchell Bannister is shown alongside portraits by John Singer Sargent and Cecilia Beaux. One of the best paintings in the show is by fellow American Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862-1938). Titled The Venetian Blind and produced in 1898, the painting was another early acquisition by WAM and has been owned by the museum since 1904. A award-winning work in its day, Tarbell’s figure is bathed in diffused golden light and interior elements like the titular shades bear his distinctive and painterly hand. It is at once a romantic and modern image, hinting at European precedents while tackling a contemporary subject in a novel way.

One of the exhibitions most interesting pieces, Edmund Tarbell’s The Venetian Blind, produced in 1898, presages the type of figurative artwork that has only recently returned to vogue in the twenty-first century.

Through the show, viewers will be able to follow the influences of Impressionism through to their various conclusions. The reality is that the ways in which these intrepid artists shaped the works made by ensuing generations are hard to define. But Frontiers of Impressionism provides a great sampler, and in doing so promises to encourage visitors to find new connections between individual artists, discrete schools, and varying periods.

Towards the end of the exhibition, some of the more radical offspring of the changing art world are shown. A vivid and lush Paul Signac painting from 1896 shows off a technicolor Pointellist technique. Capturing the Golfe Juan in the South of France, the image of a pink horizon over the seaside is scintillating and celebratory. Nearby, Georges Braque’s Olive Trees from 1907 tackles another landscape subject with similar zeal. While Signac’s coastal scene is a coalescence of painted dots, Braque’s tree is a disintegration of limbs executed in utterly unnatural tones. Looking at it, the thrilling modernisms of the twentieth century that owe so much to their nineteenth century predecessors can be seen and felt in the distance.

Georges Bracque’s 1907 Olive Trees heralds the excitement of forthcoming modernisms that would define art in the twentieth century.

Frontiers of Impressionism is on view now through June 25, 2023 at the Worcester Art Museum. After the exhibition concludes in Worcester it will travel to the Tampa Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Art, and other venues. Learn more about the exhibition and plan your visit while it is on view in New England at www.worcesterart.org.

Seurat’s Circus and the Spectacle of Pointillism

Nineteenth century France was a time and place full of excitement around new modes of art making. Of the avant garde schools that took shape in this moment, the Impressionists are the best known and most widely revered. Defined by Monet’s sensuous treatment of subjects ranging from cathedrals to haystacks, the appeal of the Impressionists is hard to escape. Other contemporary movements, such as the Pointillists, sought to broker new ways of seeing as well, and with dazzling effects. Georges Seurat’s Circus Sideshow is a signature product of the thrilling nineteenth century and shows off the spectacle inherent in the Pointillist mode.

The Pointillists, led in large part by Seurat, aimed to dissolve the picture plane into innumerable inflections of paint. The eyes of viewers would reassemble these dots, completing the intended image in the heads of onlookers. Based on a novel and sophisticated understanding of optics, the works produced by the Pointillists have a scintillating quality that is unlike the works produced by their earlier counterparts. While Monet’s paintings might make one marvel at light or atmosphere, Seurat’s hinge on something more complex. They make the viewer consider how a picture is constructed, diffused, received, and absorbed.

Seurat’s Circus Sideshow, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, leverages the stylistic flourishes of Pointillism to underscore the showmanship of its subject. Musicians are seen playing under gaslight and over the heads of a crowd eagerly hoping to gain admittance to a circus proper. The hum of the gathered group seems implicit in the daubs of paint spread across the surface of Seurat’s canvas. It is a painting about the buzz of a public event, and that exciting atmosphere is perfectly attuned to Seurat’s technique. Each dot of paint can be read as a warbling note of sound, or as the glint of twilight, or as a dash of the vibration of the rowdy mob.

Georges Seurat, Circus Sideshow (Parade du Cirque), 1887-1887, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The image was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1888. In displaying this vivid nocturne, Seurat was playing a bit of a game with his audience. Like a circus, French salons of all types were about showmanship. Paintings were designed to stop the crowd, to draw them in, to rile them up. Seurat’s image is no different. Its stylistic treatment, novel when it was painted, is still surprising and exciting today. Looking at the painting, one gains a sense of atmospheric dramatism that surpasses many comparable works of the Impressionists. Seurat’s Pointillists sought to build upon the groundbreaking works of the likes of Monet, whose famed Impression Sunrise was completed sixteen years prior to Seurat’s engaging Sideshow.

The event at the heart of Seurat’s grand painting was a proceeding designed to entice passersby to become customers. Through showmanship, this tertiary scene was supposed to turn viewers into ticket-buyers and bring them under the big tent. It was about allure. In this way, the sideshow and Pointillism overlap. They are both full of eye-catching spectacle.

Pointillism was designed to catch, and hold, and entrance the eye. The effect remains and even today Pointillist works bring the viewer back again and again.

Seurat’s interest in circus imagery was deep and the motif appears a number of times throughout his oeuvre. The Met’s Circus Sideshow is one of his largest and most stunning artworks and one that easily defines the movement. It, like the evening it depicts, is a grandiose and exciting extravaganza.

By looking at Circus Sideshow, viewers become both onlookers of art and participants in a public spectacle. They might be dazzled by Seurat’s composition, or by his palette, or by the Pointillist technique. They also become the crowd, like the one the artist captured, waiting in line for a chance to get a closer look at the show.

A detail from Seurat’s Circus Sideshow

In New Bedford, a Rare and Wonderful Exhibition of Albert Pinkham Ryder

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847 - 1917), may not be a household name but his contributions to American art are significant. An exhibition on view through October in the artist’s birthplace of New Bedford, Massachusetts, explores his art in its own right as well as within the context of modernist movements that came in his wake. Mounted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the show is a rare and wonderful opportunity to see many of Ryder’s paintings in one place. A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art is a must-see exhibition which will reshape perceptions of American art history.

One of the most exciting elements of the show is that it gathers together many of the artist’s paintings in one exhibition. This is the first significant display of Ryder’s work since a 1990 retrospective at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Some of the paintings on view are indeed on loan from the same institution and give viewers the opportunity to explore works that they might otherwise have to travel to Washington, D.C. to experience. Other artworks come from major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Phillips Collection, making this a mini-blockbuster exhibition.

A quote from Ryder illustrates his independent sensibilities alongside his paintings.

Seeing Ryder’s work in his hometown rather than in New York or the nation’s capital is part of the thrill of this show. Not far from the Whaling Museum’s galleries, the sights and sounds of this historic maritime city are reminders of some of Ryder’s inspirations. Bells are heard from nearby trawlers and seagulls fly low overhead. New Bedford’s bustling port is one of the busiest and most lucrative in the country. In Ryder’s day it was a similarly busy place and the realities of seafaring play into the aesthetic and philosophy of his art.

Ryder’s work is not easily classified but many of his treatments of land and sea bear markings most readily associated with the Tonalist school which heavily influenced American art in the late nineteenth century. Inspired by European counterparts, such artists often sought to create poetic and romantic imagery defined by particularly moody palettes. Where Ryder’s work often differs from his contemporaries is in brushwork, composition, and the sheer expressive energy of his scenes. Ryder’s paintings give viewers a sense of the raw power of the sea, the glittering beauty of atmosphere, and the possibilities of historical or mythological narratives. 

A painting by Wolf Kahn (1927 - 2020) forms an interesting contrast to an earlier piece by Ryder.

The exhibition does not feature Ryder alone, though. The show pairs a wonderful range of the title artist’s paintings with works by later makers who similarly broke boundaries and reconsidered the potential of expression. Works by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Marsden Hartley, Wolf Kahn, and Richard Pousette-Dart form a fascinating pendant to the excellent selection of paintings on view by Ryder.

While Ryder was born in New Bedford, he spent a good portion of his adult life in New York before returning to his hometown at the time of his death. He was an unusual and often lone individual who cuts something of a melancholic figure. While his painterly contributions may not be fully appreciated by a broad audience, this exhibition is an important step in bringing viewers a more complete picture of American art. Ryder’s paintings are beautiful and mournful and provoke emotional reactions as well as appreciation for his remarkable handling of paint. He is, in short, one of the great American artists of any generation and this exhibition is a fantastic chance to learn more about him and his incredible impact.

A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art is on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum through October 31, 2021. For full details and information on planning your visit, go to www.whalingmuseum.org.

Balance, Tension, and The Art of Robert Rohm

It is easy to misread sculpture as a static medium, or as one dedicated to inward-looking stillness. Great art, though, can upend such preconceived notions of its genre. One of the best regarded Baroque sculptures, Bernini’s David, for instance, is known for its remarkable torsion. Building up in the subject’s taut body, the drama inherent in tension and expected release is the key to this great work. In Down to Earth, a career-spanning survey of work by twentieth century sculptor Robert Rohm (1934-2013) another artist’s relationship with notions of tension, balance, and even motion is explored in depth. On view through April 25, 2021, at The WaterFire Arts Center in Providence, it includes selections from a diverse oeuvre created over four decades. A remarkable exhibition, it shows off the artist’s use of quotidien elements to create transcendent sculptural forms.

Down to Earth at The WaterFire Arts Center opens with a kinetic wood sculpture.

Rohm, a longtime professor at The University of Rhode Island, was an maker steeped in craft, an educator with a giving character, and an artist unparalleled in his capacity to examine structure through unassuming materials. Whereas predecessors like Bernini sculpted in marble, Rohm preferred rope, lead, encaustic, wood, and rebar. These components are used and reused, resulting in cohesive ties binding the far flung aesthetics of differing bodies of work.

The earliest objects in the exhibition were produced in the heady days of 1960’s conceptualism. The show opens with a rough hewn kinetic work in wood and moves into Rohm’s notable rope sculptures. The enormous rope work, Untitled May 16th, 1969, engages an entire wall but is constructed of simple Manila rope. Exhibited at The Whitney Museum alongside the likes of Carl Andre and Eva Hesse, the piece consists of a sixteen foot tall by twenty-two foot wide grid of two foot squares. Nailed to the wall, the work is based on the interplay between construction and disruption. When Rohm released several of the identical knots from their nails on the wall, the overwhelming grid began to give way and to dive into the viewer’s space. In Down to Earth, viewers see a reconstruction of this work executed to the exacting standards of the artist. This activation of the artist’s original intent is an essential element of conceptual art.

In later works, Rohm explored familiar figurative forms made up of materials like rebar and encaustic. This series is spookily fleshy and corporeal. In one piece, Untitled (Large Cascade), from 1996, a massive hand balances on a lone finger as its iridescent blue surface disintegrates into the sketchy contours of digits shaped in metal mesh. Hands and fingers are a reappearing motif in this group, as are shapely torsos and mantle-like forms empty of bodies. Limbs flexed and tense, or still and resolute shoulders, or a cupped palm, are all fashioned out of elements which could be procured from the hardware store. Rohm was able to play with material, with form, with the tensions between subject and object, in ways that reward the viewer who takes the time to look closely.

A view of Untitled (Large Cascade) in Down to Earth at The WaterFire Arts Center.

A grouping of tables, described in exhibition text as “Platonic work benches”, shows off Rohm’s taste for material as well as his wry sense of humor. Leaden wheels and sleigh runners serve as feet on two such tables, while another is ankle deep in metal buckets. Overhead, shop lights dangle to illuminate mysterious objects. The  whole series is a sampler of sketches in the type of craftsmanship Rohm enjoyed. These benches are strangely personified, totemic, and even altarlike. In one table, the viewer is invited to look through a glass surface into a void below which is shaped in the outline of a basilica or cathedral. Architectural forms undergird crafted objects. The hard lines of this series counterbalance the soft and amorphous edges of other sculptures on view.

Almost a quarter of the space is dedicated to a series of columns, all using rebar in one form or another. In this group, objects within cages seem to defy gravity, with the hand-formed metal canopies being the only thing to stop encaustic balloons from floating away into the cavernous space above them. These works are all about verticality, but also are almost leaden in their weighty footings. They are also largely transparent, with voids between rebar acting as windows onto still other sculptures beyond. Both solid and punctured, they are firmly clung to the ground but aspire to be aloft. The sense of the totemic object found in Rohm’s tables might be noticed here as well, as might a sense of the ceremonial.

Rohm’s production was singular, but while early works correlate to those of co-exhibitors like Andre and Hesse, some later objects reflect the sensitivity for materials more common in a different contemporary like Martin Puryear. Rohm and Puryear overlapped for a period and the warmly tactile quality found in Rohm’s work can also be seen in Puryear’s. Finding such stylistic connections between divergent artists is one of the delights of this exhibition.

Rohm was in command of an array of sculptural techniques, but also made enviable drawings. Throughout the exhibition, there is a smattering of works on paper by the artist which are nearly as obsessively textured as the surfaces of his encaustic-covered forms. Recurring objects like pianos, lightbulbs, or the jagged map of Rhode Island appear in these two dimensional pieces. They are lively and colorful. In two-dimensions, they express the same knack for specificity and exactitude that one sees in the artist’s three-dimensional work.

To close out the exhibition, a separate gallery features stage sets the artist created as well as intricate and beautiful maquettes. Rohm used these as the basis for many of his projects, some of which are on view in the exhibition. These tiny alter egos are so fantastically detailed that they could be mistaken for their full size counterparts. Here, macabre subject matter works itself out. Little gibbeted and dismembered figures that recall Goya are examples of such imagery. In another maquette, a window looks onto a winch, where a coiled rope appears on the verge of snapping. Another small sculpture features an electric chair. The tension in these small works is as intense as that in the full scale objects nearby.

The last gallery of the exhibition is lined with maquettes and features stage sets created by Rohm.

As one exits the show, there is a drawing on view Rohm made in the days before he passed away. In this diminutive work, a forest of brown trees parts to reveal a sliver of sky, which transitions through tones of blue. Depending on how it is read, it could either be a scene of dawn breaking or evening falling. This type of tension or ambiguity is poetic, and beautiful, and is present throughout much of the work on view. 

This is a rich and varied exhibition, and one which serves as a necessary primer for Rohm’s significant production over a lifetime. From the 1960’s into the 2000’s, it charts his skillful craftsmanship of core materials and his sensibility for design, balance, and tension in many wonderful forms. 

Down to Earth: Robert Rohm Sculpture, 1963-2013 will run March 24 – April 25, 2021. The exhibit is free for all, donations encouraged. The WaterFire Arts Center hours are: Wednesday – Sunday, 10:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m, Thursday 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. In following Rhode Island’s COVID-19 protocols, all visitors are required to self-screen before entering the WaterFire Arts Center and practice safety rules: keeping a 6’ distance from others and wear a mask at all times. For more information, visit www.waterfire.org.

Below, explore a slideshow of my photographs of my favorite details from the exhibition.

Destination: The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

It had been about a year since my last museum visit, until this past weekend when I made a visit to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Founded in 1842, and open to the public since 1844, the Wadsworth is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the country. It has strong holdings in American art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as in European paintings. It was the first museum in the United States to buy a painting by Caravaggio. His St. Francis in Ecstasy remains a major draw. The Wadsworth is not just a particularly good smaller museum, but also a worthy destination for a reintroduction to the world of museums in the time of Covid-19. 

At an hour and a half, the drive from Providence to Hartford is a picturesque one. The route linking the capital cities of Connecticut and Rhode Island runs through kind of small and charming towns for which New England is renowned. At certain points the roadside becomes thickly dotted with fine Federal houses bedecked in Doric-columned porches. Occasionally, a ramshackle red barn is silhouetted against the backdrop of a rolling hill as the road curves through the shallow valleys of Eastern Connecticut. The snow of the last few weeks is still clinging to the roofs of houses, and barns, and general stores, whose eves are lined with perfect icicles. In a parallel universe, the whole scene doubtlessly lives on the lid of a cookie tin in some grandmother’s cupboard. When I arrive at Hartford, the city emerges almost as a surprise, startling me out of the idyll at the end of this country road.

The Wadsworth is situated in the shadow of the Travelers Insurance Tower in the heart of the city’s downtown. Comprised of five interconnected structures in varying styles, the museum is a labyrinthine collection of galleries, each with its own distinct personality. In 2015, the facility reopened after a multi-year renovation effort, which added thousands of square feet of exhibition space and saw the reinstallation of swaths of the museum’s collection. The result remains, some five years on, an impressive feat of reimagination. The Wadsworth, which has a collection in the range of 50,000 objects, is a museum of diverse and beautiful spaces, which are rarely at odds with each other. 

As of this writing, the museum is offering free admission to all guests, and is organizing visits with timed ticketed slots. Upon my arrival over the weekend, temperatures were taken and visitors were instructed to follow the paths laid out by directional arrows on the floors of the galleries. At certain points, specific paintings were paired with vinyl dots adhered to the floor to indicate where visitors should stand to look at a work whilst also maintaining social distance. Most of the museum-goers I encountered were considerate and well behaved, with Wadsworth staff providing courteous assistance and direction. As a first experience of museum life in this unusual time, the museum’s policies felt well thought out and geared toward visitor safety. It was reassuring of the potential for cultural life to return to something we all might recognize in the coming months.

The Wadsworth’s 1842 entrance is defined by its imposing Gothic tracery and rooftop crenellation. In the background, The Travelers Insurance Tower looms. Photo by the author.

Walking through the Helen and Harry Gray Court, the museum’s original building and grand main entrance, one is immediately entranced by Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing Number 793 C, a massive mural that encompasses the space and draws the eye up a storey. From there, arrows guide visitors into contemporary galleries, which were in between exhibitions on my visit, and through to The Avery Memorial. Constructed in 1934 and billed as the first museum wing built in the International Style in the nation, this space exhibits an array of objects and is dedicated to dealer, collector, and museum donor Samuel P. Avery. Around a central court surmounted by a gracious skylight, its three floors of galleries feature three-quarter-height walls, which are punctuated by Juliet balconies that look down onto a central fountain. It is a light-filled and buoyant and unusual assemblage of exhibition spaces, featuring a strong collection of work. One standout is a particularly stunning Georgia O’Keeffe painting dating to 1929. The subject is the brilliant night sky of New Mexico seen through the sinuous limbs of a ponderosa pine.

Georgia O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree, 1929, Oil on canvas, 31 x 40 inches, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1981.23

For the Valentine’s Day Weekend, the museum hired a harpist who played contemporary classics while I milled through a gallery filled with treasures from the Hudson River School. Getting lost in the incandescent horizon of a Thomas Cole while strains of Elton John’s Your Song filter through the gallery is the type of surreal experience that can only be had in real life in a museum, and I was grateful for it. Later, while I examined the museum’s ruminative Caravaggio of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, echoes of applause could be heard for the musical performance concluding galleries away. 

At the heart of the intimate but rambling museum, the Morgan Great Hall holds an impressive salon style installation of European paintings. This is the prototypical art museum one imagines as emerging out of central casting, and gives viewers a sense of the substantiality of the permanent collection. Smaller galleries that circumscribe this space and others hold more specific treasures including a jewel-like portrait of an angel by Fra Angelico. Upstairs, paintings by the likes of Delacroix, Ingres, Rousseau, Monet and van Gogh illuminate later moments in art making. Another particular bright spot is William Holman Hunt’s dazzling interpretation of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shallott”.

William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, c. 1888–1905, Oil on canvas, 74 x 57 inches, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1961.470

A number of laudable temporary exhibitions are currently on view at the museum. One show highlights the rhythmic paintings of the Iranian-born artist Ali Banisadr, which draw their compositions in part from the phenomenon of synesthesia. Another exhibition focuses on the ancient inspirations that shaped the Art Deco sculptures of Paul Manship, whose work will be recognized by anyone who has visited the artist’s famous Prometheus at Rockefeller Center in New York. Nearby, the museum’s Amistad Center for Art and Culture shares engaging works that in the museum’s description “document the experience, expressions, and history of people of African American heritage”.

A day trip to the Wadsworth is always a delight and it is always worth the beautiful drive. Particularly now, as many of us are just beginning to cautiously dip our toes back into the types of experiences we once foolishly took for granted, a visit to a museum of such digestible scope and scale is a renewing experience. One of my favorite, if overused, quotes is John Keats’s assertion that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. The Wadsworth’s collection is indeed a joy – and one which is more compelling now than ever.

To learn more about the Wadsworth, visit their website at www.thewadsworth.org. 

Note: Current guidelines in the State of Connecticut permit visitors from only Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey to visit without quarantining. Be sure to apprise yourself of the most up to date health guidelines before planning your visit and be sure to act responsibly when making such a trip.

Looking at A Medieval Devotional Ivory

One of my favorite works of art at the RISD Museum is an object which might otherwise go unnoticed. It isn’t very large or impactful on first glance but, at about the size of a small book, it is tucked away in a corner under glass. An ivory diptych dating to around 1300, this piece depicts in exquisite detail scenes from the shared lives of Jesus Christ and his mother Mary. An exceedingly well crafted artwork, it is also one of arresting beauty. It is difficult to understand the views and opinions of those who lived hundreds of years before us, but occasionally art can make it possible. In the case of ivories like this one, we can step back in time and begin to enter the medieval mind and to experience the religious devotion that has largely come to define this period in European history.

Unknown Artist, French, Île de France, Diptych with scenes of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgement, Ivory with traces of polychromy, ca. 1275–1325, each panel is 9.5” x 5.25”

Small ivory devotional objects in the form of miniature would-be altarpieces were extremely popular in the medieval Christian world and were produced en masse in workshops, the finest of which were located in France. These pieces, typically in diptych or triptych form, could be set up on a table within a domestic setting and then folded shut for travel. The life of the aristocratic class who could afford such an indulgence was a mobile one. Sculptural images such as this were the three dimensional equivalent of books of hours and psalters. A plethora of religious tools engaged lay Christians in a kind of prayer that matched their clerical counterparts.

Ivories would have been richly painted with polychromy, and now a few examples survive of similar works which retain their coloring. Because these objects were so purposefully tactile and because much of medieval devotion centered on the touching, caressing, and even kissing of iconic images, most extant ivories are largely denuded of color. RISD’s retains some traces, which the careful observer can find in the fine crevices of the ivory’s detailed carving.

In a contemporary world so impacted by the new norms of social distancing and in which church services for Easter weekend have largely been cancelled or moved online, the type of individual prayer common in the Middle Ages takes on a new resonance. Objects like this facilitated and were integral to the interior lives of the faithful in a time when public displays of religion were counterbalanced by rich private prayer lives in a complicated puzzle of devotion.

In RISD’s ivory, the viewer witnesses the intertwined stories of Mary and Christ, starting in the lower left register with an episode called The Annunciation in which the Angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear God’s child. Mary holds a prayer book, signifying her unique faithfulness. Between her and the angelic messenger stands a vase holding a lily, a symbol of her purity as a spotless and holy virgin. In the same lower register, we can follow the continuous narrative. The figure of Mary appears again, this time laying on a cot next to the swaddled Christ child at The Nativity. She looks down adoringly at the child while above her within a cloud shepherds are told of the good news by an angel faraway. The visual constructions used in ivories followed rubrics which created images that were easily readable and readily duplicated. The result is something like a cross between a comic strip and a storyboard.

Unknown Artist, French, Île de France, Diptych with scenes of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgement, Ivory with traces of polychromy, ca. 1275–1325, left panel, 9.5” x 5.25”

Across the central vertical hinge of the diptych the narrative continues. In the entire bottom right register, The Adoration of The Magi is depicted. At the left, a groom handles three horses entering a city gate indicating the far journey of the travelers. The three kings occupy a central space within this frame, each taking on a unique stance and presenting their individual gifts to Christ who stands precarious but confident on his mother’s knee. On the rear of the panel three oak leaves likely indicate the kingly lineage of Christ within the House of David. All medieval images, from great public works down to small personal ivories, are filled with a thickly layered language full of multivalent signs and symbols. For a medieval viewer, details that may be lost on us would have been common parlance. The three gothic arches which hover over each seen are a more clear symbol, underscoring the trinitarian nature of Christian belief.

Unknown Artist, French, Île de France, Diptych with scenes of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgement, Ivory with traces of polychromy, ca. 1275–1325, right panel, 9.5” x 5.25”

In the upper registers of the panels, Christ’s crucifixion appears at the far left, followed by the crowning of his mother as Queen of Heaven. After the vertical hinge the story is consummated with The Last Judgement. Christ sits centrally, bookended by angelic hosts holding the instruments of his martyrdom - another common conceit in medieval art. Mary kneels at Christ’s righthand, signaling her preeminent status within a Christian canon which numbers saintly individuals in the thousands. Below these heavenly people, in a second register demarcating the earthly realm, minute figures awake in their tombs and raise from the dead in a moment of prophetic foreshadowing. Such is the everlasting life promised in Christian scripture.

RISD’s ivory is a small artwork so full of detail that it can be looked at again and again and enjoyed for hours. It invites contemplation even from an unbeliever. Contemplation of design, of form, of composition, and of narrative. Not to mention of the historical sociological implications such works have.

There tends to be a reading of the Middle Ages, fed by the common misnomer “the dark ages”, as a time of religious terror and general ignorance. In reality the picture is much more complicated. While there was enormous inequality and limited access to education, most Christian adherents during this period had a faith that was both profound and uncynical. The evidence that comes down to us paints a picture of sincere religious devotion borne out in public and private displays of faith that took place across a calendar packed with holy days both high and low. There was a frank belief in theological certainty and an acceptance of both heavenly salvation and hellish damnation. Christianity was also, though, a social practice set within a milieu shared with university foundations which gave us most of the eminent European institutions whose names are now taken as shorthand for learnedness.

The works of art which survive from this period are equally complex and ivories tell just one part of that story. From the guilds of Parisian sculptors that produced them, to the courtly figures who prayed over them, many members of a stratified society laid hands on these objects. And later, similar works were coveted by a spectrum of collectors who wanted to use them as emblems of their own sense of history; they were bought and sold by robber barons in the nineteenth century and looted by Nazis in the twentieth. Today, regulations around endangered species make the purchase of works that include ivory incredibly problematic if not entirely illegal.

The ivories that are available for public appreciation exist mostly under glass in the corners of quiet medieval galleries in museums. But they still hold a kind of magnetic sway. For a viewer in the twenty-first century, that appeal is much more commonly about craft and construction than about religion and devotion but it still exists. These are objects designed to pull one in close, to be educative and inspiring.

The same ivory that we observe now was handled seven centuries ago by a devotee. The same rivulets of tiny botanical borders that we can lingeringly appreciate in a museum were also known intimately by someone of another time entirely in the drafty bedchamber of a great house in Northern Europe. These are two worlds connected not necessarily by the same faith or by the same societal structure, but bound instead by an object. This object.

Therefore an ivory like this can tell us much not only about Paris in 1300, but about our time and place. It can show us that the interior life and indeed the solitary life are not always to be avoided but can instead be fulfillingly embraced. And such lives can also bring a recognition and appreciation of a kind of beauty - one which is both transcendent and even, occasionally, sublime.

Looking at Vincent van Gogh's The Night Café

Vincent van Gogh’s The Night Café, in the Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.

In 1888, just two years before he died of an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot wound, Vincent van Gogh was living in rented quarters in the south of France. His time in Arles resulted in some of the most prolific output of his decidedly productive career. This was not just a period of great quantity, but also of great quality. Among the paintings he finished in Arles was an interior scene of the café where he was staying; a painting that many consider to be one of his masterworks. Le Café de nuit or The Night Café, depicts the vividly colored interior of the Café de la Gare, van Gogh’s home  as he continued work on The Yellow House, where he hoped to found an artists’ colony with the likes of Paul Gauguin, who famously departed after a short sojourn as Vincent’s housemate. The Night Café is an unusual painting even within van Gogh’s oeuvre. It is defined by a sense of foreboding and unease. But it is also nonetheless one of his most affecting paintings, and one of my favorites.

In the painting, the viewer is placed in a position of confrontation with the barkeep in an all night café lit by the radiating glow of a series of hanging lamps. This figure, that of the owner, Joseph-Michel Ginoux, stands like an apparition behind the billiard table in the center of the room. He is surrounded not only by drunken derelicts peppered throughout the surrounding space, but also by the thickly painted walls of the encroaching room. This space and the characters within it induce a kind of claustrophobic response, and a sense of the psychic angst. This is entirely by design. Van Gogh said as much of the painting in a letter to his brother Theo.

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.  

The color relationships that van Gogh describes, between the greens and reds, et cetera, create the illusion of vibration and dissonance within the space. It is as if, we, the viewers have entered the bar already drunk and unwilling to accept the limitations of a last call. The quaint local tavern becomes a destination of last resort.

The self consciously gritty content of van Gogh’s Café may seem somewhat passé to a modern audience. But consider its place in the history of art and the way this image presages the qualities found in later work by Munch or Kirchner or Hopper. The alienation that would become the hallmark of modernity is encapsulated in this painting of a sleepy night haunt in nineteenth century France. The quality that made this work visionary in its own time also establishes its accessibility and resonance for a contemporary audience. Thus, the subjective outlook of the viewers of 2019 informs the static art of the 1880’s, renewing and reinvigorating it with meanings even the artist could not have envisioned.

Van Gogh’s treatment of the scene, with its scintillating colors, thick daubs of paint, and the innate eeriness of a barely-peopled bar make it all too real in a sense. It is what I, personally, love about this picture. Van Gogh crafts an experience as much as he does a place. Ignore, momentarily, the aforementioned color theory meant to display the passions of humanity, and let the instant the painting shows us sink in. The Night Café displays the knife’s edge of drinking. The painter was a drinker and was intimately aware of the way in which festive friendliness of a bar can slip into something uneasy and even funereal.

That pool table lunges forward, as if the room is about to start spinning. The lights are shining a bit too brightly in the lead up to a hangover headache. The barkeep is a blur, but all too able to pour us out another glass. All of it is very solid, but also on the verge of dislocating. Although van Gogh loved beauty and wanted to paint like the Impressionists he so admired, he couldn’t help but show us the darker side of things – the side he knew all too well. This painting illustrates the goings on within the walls of a building that artists just a few years prior would have described with gauzy delicacy. What van Gogh has given us is something altogether unique and altogether his own, and his gift to art history. He has transformed the angst of the emerging industrialized working class into a space. He converted the dramas of humanity into the architectonics of a pub.

So why should such a painting be lauded as one of the most important by an artist such as van Gogh? Are color theory and narrative intrigues enough to catapult a work into the firmament of a particular zeitgeist? These attributes alone are perhaps not enough, but, combined with the artist’s tumultuous personal story and the role his production played in reshaping the broader imaginative possibilities for all artists, they can illustrate why such a work could be seen as a pendant for something larger. The Night Café represents many of van Gogh’s best qualities including his striving for technical complexity and excellence. It also represents some of the personal struggles that drove his art-making and defined his stylistic aims. It is both quintessential and unexpected. It is a great painting of a bad night out.

A detail from The Night Café, showing abandoned tables and a drinker with his face in his arms.

Encountering The Divine: Fra Angelico at the Gardner Museum

Fra Angelico (born Guido di Pietro, c.1395 - 1455) was described by Vasari in his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori as "an excellent painter and illuminator, and ... a perfect monk". Vasari also lauded the Angelic Friar's surprising piety in the face of his immense artistic talents. Angelico ably captured the Catholic imagination of the Early Renaissance with his unusually sensitive and humanistic depictions of normally distant saints. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's current exhibition on the artist provides an incredible opportunity to see a series of Angelico's gold-drenched reliquaries, which invite viewers to look deeply and intimately at revelatory and beatific scenes.

On view at the Gardner Museum in Boston February 22 - May 20, Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth is an excellent show featuring stunning pieces. It is described by the Museum thus: 

Heaven on Earth reunites the Gardner's magnificent Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin, acquired by Isabella in 1899 and the first Fra Angelico to reach the United States, with its three companions from the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Conceived as a set of jewel-like reliquaries for the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, they tell the story of the Virgin Mary's life. This exhibition invites you to explore Fra Angelico's ground-breaking narrative art, marvel at his peerless creativity, and immerse yourself in the material splendor of his craftsmanship.

The exhibition lives up to its promise, bringing together companion artworks that are rarely seen outside of their home at the Museo di San Marco in Florence. The reliquaries are presented in an ecclesiastically-inspired architectural setting constructed within the Museum's rotating exhibitions gallery. This context serves the practical purpose of highlighting the relatively small works within the Gardner's relatively large exhibition space. It also reminds viewers of the original intent of the pieces, which were housed at the Dominican Friars' Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and were meant for quite a personal kind of devotion.

Fra Angelico (c. 1395 - 1455), Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin, tempera with oil glazes and gold on panel, 1424-1434, 24 5/16"x15 1/16", Collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA

The works on view are full of lively interactions between God and his holy courtiers. These are underscored by Angelico's eye for the humanity of his subjects, which gives them a vitality remarkable for the time. Each reliquary is also imbued with a sense of humor. Looking closely one can find a waiting angel with hands on hips, or St. Peter looking over his shoulder at the viewer. There are a few moments in which saintly observers of heavenly sights turn to the on-looker and invite them closer into the scene, fulfilling their traditional intercessory role.

In 1899, when Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased Angelico's Assumption and Dormition of The Virgin (1424-1434) it was the first piece by the artist to come to the United States. Gardner and her contemporaries were no doubt drawn to Angelico's work due to his technical virtuosity and the timeless beauty of his paintings. In bringing this stunning object to Boston, Gardner added to her own esteem as a collector with a refined eye. She also set the stage for viewers to encounter Fra Angelico's vision of the divine.

This exhibition is a rare and wonderful opportunity not only to see the Gardner's Angelico reunited with its peer reliquaries from Florence, but also to see these works in relation to the Gardner Museum's extensive and eclectic holdings. By viewing Gardner's collection in her original "Fenway Court" and carefully looking at the works in Heaven on Earth, visitors will not only gain an understanding of the connoisseurship that compelled Isabella to buy her Fra Angelico. They will come away with a sense of the deep faith and spirituality that drove the artist to create it in the first place.