Summer Shows to See

Van Gogh and Nature will be at The Clark through Sept. 13

Just like that, July 4th is over and it feels like summer will be soon be a distant memory, too. A bunch of museum exhibitions ought to be part of those memories, if you can organize it, with Van Gogh and Nature at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute topping the list.

Roz Chast's style is unique

Other shows not to be missed include:
Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., through Oct. 26. The sardonic and self-deprecating New Yorker cartoonist is about as far from the Saturday Evening Post as you can get - which is why I can't wait to see this show in Rockwell's house.

Near Stockbridge is Boston Sculptors Gallery at Chesterwood 2015, featuring 24 Boston-area sculptors' responses to the work, estate, and gardens of Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French, through Oct. 12.

A pop-up book by Andy Warhol at WCMA

The Late Drawings of Andy Warhol at The Hyde Collection through Sept. 27 and Warhol by the Book at the Williams College Museum of Art through Aug. 16. Warhol lovers can get their fill this summer. WCMA, always an under-the-radar favorite of mine, also offers a spate of other cool shows, including a spotlight on their stellar collection of works by Maurice and Charles Prendergast, a dive into history titled Imagining the Trojan War, and a featured exhibition of James McNeil Whistler.

Notice: A Flock of Signs by Kim Beck at Art Omi

The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, which features about 80 long-term sculptural installations along a winding nature path, adds new works every year; I am long overdue for a revisit, and recommend it for all ages who have yet to go.

A Burchfield watercolor
that inspired his wallpaper design

Also on my to-do list are a show about Charles Burchfield's wallpaper designs at the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie; Lit at the Albany County Airport Gallery; and the 2015 edition of Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region, set to open this week at the University at Albany Art Museum.

If you feel a bit overwhelmed with all these options, you are not alone - I haven't gotten to any of these shows either. But today, we are heading out to Cooperstown for yet one more must-see: Maxfield Parrish: The Art of Light and Illusion at the Fenimore Art Museum, on view through Sept. 7. Watch this space for a review of that exhibition to come soon. And be sure to enjoy your summer, however you spend it, because it surely will not last!

Maxfield Parrish - What better art for a summer's day?

Reflections on Water in American Painting at the Arkell Museum

Anton Otto Fischer Summer Seas oil on canvas 1945

The drive along the Thruway to Canajoharie is a great set-up for seeing Reflections on Water in American Painting at the Arkell Museum. Along the way, the toll road follows the Mohawk River for miles, affording frequent and pleasant views of just the sort of landscape that inspired many of the artists in this excellent show.

Drawn from the collection of Arthur J. Phelan (best known for works depicting the American West), Reflections on Water is perfectly suited to the Arkell – its first stop on a national tour – because it includes a number of artists who are either in the Arkell’s permanent collection or might as well be. Comprised of 50 paintings dating from 1828 to 1945, the show provides lessons in both history and geography, as it mirrors the American expansion from east to west. In addition to the expected Atlantic Ocean and Hudson River scenes, there are also images from the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and Columbia rivers, even an Alaskan glacier.

Phelan, a former banker who later got involved in ocean shipping, began collecting marine paintings in the 1960s and displays a keen eye for outstanding work by lesser-known artists. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous pictures here that would appeal to any typical man or boy who enjoys action and activity – but there are many more that indicate a more specifically artistic sensibility that transcends the hunting, sailing, and fighting genres.

The crown jewel of the collection (shown above at right), a miniature tour de force made by William Merritt Chase while looking up the Arno River from his villa in Florence, Italy, is atypical in its foreign subject, but announces the seriousness and breadth of the collection. And it has plenty of company in a gallery filled with many fine American Impressionist canvases, such as a stunning winter scene by Elmer Livingston MacRae and Willard Metcalf’s petite Twachtman-like marsh view.

These, like many other works in the show, were made in Connecticut, where Phelan spent his summers growing up, and they form the core of the collection, both from the personal standpoint and artistically. Phelan, who holds two degrees in American history from Yale University, said “I have built a number of collections that started with a chance acquisition of an artwork that reminded me of something from my past.” He also said, in a 1978 Washington Post interview, that he “got interested in art through an interest in the historical process, because paintings offer a clear record of the changes that people have made in the environment.”

The second quote may explain two other key groups of pictures in the show: those that go deeper into the historical aspect of life in the United States (such as James Bard’s meticulous, fanciful 1873 rendering of a Hudson River steamboat, shown at the bottom of this post) and those that represent industrialization (such as Reginald Marsh's 1936 Lift Bridge, Jersey Marshes, shown below at right). Others present popular pastimes, including duck hunting and beach vacationing (such as Aiden Lassell Ripley's 1935 Beach Scene, shown above at left), but most of the work in the show is landscape – and the majority of that falls into the timeframe of the heyday of American Impressionists, revealing a softer side to the historian-collector whose first purchase depicts a burning ship and its fleeing crew.

I don’t know if it’s a trend, but it appears that exhibitions drawn from personal collections are becoming more common (see my review of an exhibition at the Hyde Collection earlier this year). This may not be a bad thing, as institutional perspectives can get stuck in conventional thinking, which an independent voice can possibly shake up. But it also means there’s a risk that the (moneyed) source of the collection is more vain than rigorous, and that we will be subjected to a lot of second-rate work in the process of polishing their ego with our attention.

Fortunately, Phelan does not seem to be that sort of collector; despite its slightly punny title, Reflections on Water is a first-rate show that explores a strong personal sensibility while exposing a number of unfairly overlooked figures from our rich artistic history. If you haven’t yet seen the wonderfully renewed and expanded Arkell Museum, use this opportunity as an excuse to go – I promise it will be an unqualified pleasure.

Reflections on Water in American Painting, organized by Exhibits Development Group and accompanied by a nicely produced color brochure with several reproductions and a fine, historically oriented essay by John Seelye, runs through Oct. 3. A related event set for Oct. 2 will feature NPR’s Selected Shorts readers performing seaside stories live as a fundraiser for the museum. For details, call (518) 673-2314 or go to http://www.arkellmuseum.org/.

Walter Wick at The Arkell Museum

Walter Wick New Fallen Snow 1999 from Can you See What I See? Night Before Christmas

Fact: A bald eagle flew directly over my car as my wife, Karen, and I were on our way to the Arkell Museum on Saturday. Fantasy: Something the remarkably talented Walter Wick weaves throughout his stunning photographs, which are on view at the Arkell through Feb. 15.

This was my first trip to the Arkell in some time, and I was as eager to see the new museum as I was to delve into the pranks and puzzles of Wick's work. The former Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery was built in 1927 by Bartlett Arkell, founder of the Beech-Nut Packing Company, whose important art collection and boundless community spirit formed its core. It reopened as the Arkell more than a year ago after a major reconstruction project, the completion of which was delayed by devastating floods that caused extensive damage there and throughout the neighboring counties.

Situated 50 miles from Albany (for details - including hours, which will change on Jan. 2 - click here), the new facility honors Arkell's memory by deftly incorporating the original stone structure and decorative gardens into a postmodern, almost industrial design, while retaining the small-town public library that Arkell made available to his workers across the street and the rest of Canajoharie's citizenry. A viewer-friendly display recounts the family history, bridging the conceptual chasm between the wood-paneled gallery that showcases the museum's permanent collection and the slick galleries that house changing contemporary art exhibits.

The collection, which includes a big cache of Winslow Homers and several important American Impressionists, such as William Merritt Chase and George Inness, is rightly famous and always worth a visit in itself. Among my favorites here are a luminous snow scene from 1926 by Albany's own Walter Launt Palmer and a gorgeous 1889 portrait of a Victorian young lady by Thomas Dewing titled The Letter.

The genesis of the collection is wrapped up in the Arkell family's interest in commercial art, both through direct involvement in publishing and through the marketing of Beech-Nut's products (example at right is by Cushman Parker). This makes for a surprisingly smooth transition to the studio photography of Wick, who went from Connecticut to New York City to establish himself as a commercial shooter, then returned to his home state to develop the work that would make him famous.

The chances are that you have kids and are well aware of the I Spy and Can You See What I See? books that Wick has been making since the 1990s - in which case you know that this exhibition is a must-see. If, on the other hand, you are like me - childless and scarcely aware of those books - you have even more reason to check this stuff out and be enthralled by the irresistible mix of visual fact and wild imagination that fuels Wick's work.

The exhibition, titled Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic, was organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art and includes many enlarged photographs and a number of the models from which they were made, filling three rooms in all. Between the quantity of work shown and the mind-boggling amount of detail in many of the pictures, it could take hours to try to describe even a good fraction of it. Instead, I'll point out some highlights and encourage all children and former children to get out to "Flavor Town" and see the rest for themselves.

There are three distinct components to the exhibition: The major part of it consists of the images and models from Wick's popular children's books; then there is a nice selection of earlier work that focuses more on optical illusions and is targeted to adults; finally, a group of six scientific photographs represents another of Wick's interests (example above left is a microphotograph of a snowflake). Additionally, four black-and-white landscapes show the very beginnings of Wicks photographic work. This last group makes for an interesting "what-if," as they are pretty darn good versions of the style that Ansel Adams and Minor White spread far and wide during Wick's formative years in the early '70s.

For fans already familiar with Wick, the highlight might be a sequence of pictures from 2008's Can You See What I See? On A Scary Scary Night, which is augmented by an elaborate model of the story's sleepy, creepy village. As with the rest of the show, the prints are very large (up to 5 feet across), which allows the viewer to scrutinize them for all the elusive details that give them their raison d'etre. One could easily get so involved as to pass hours in this pursuit, something not so common in the era of minute-per-masterpiece museum visits.

Comparing photo to model is a puzzle all its own, as afforded in the Scary Night room and in examples from 2003's retro-futuristic Dream Machine and the Puss 'n Boots fable. But that's nothing close to trying to wrap your mind around some of the elaborate visual puzzles that characterize Wick's magazine work from the '80s (one example, O Frabjous Mirrors, shown below, has three levels of difficulty in its search-and-find questions). Here you can see that Wick was inspired by creators as diverse as M.C. Escher, Rube Goldberg, Irving Penn, and Lewis Carroll (himself a dedicated photographer and mathemetician in addition to being the author of Alice in Wonderland).

I found the puzzle pictures and the quietly dramatic scientific still-lifes most inspiring. Wick's almost superhuman patience in creating the set-ups (even with plenty of help) and his deep understanding and application of sophisticated visual principles combine to make images that are both extraordinary and easy to access. It's no surprise that he should be popular, but that commercial appeal also raises an obvious question: Is this art?

Going back to the Arkell's history for a moment, one notes images that were made specifically to sell stuff on a grocery shelf (the happy girl eating peanut butter, above) are now shown in this museum framed in gold leaf - and they're very nicely painted, too. So Wick, straddling that imaginary line between illustration and self-expression so deftly, is therefore the perfect fit for the Arkell. His show is enjoyable, but it also challenges us to consider the differences that may make some art "commercial" while other art is "fine."

Even if you conclude that commercial art is low, Walter Wick must be credited with making it in its very highest form. Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic is an impressive testament to his outstanding level of dedication to that pursuit.

Merry Christmas!

Window Shopping - photograph by Walter Wick, 1999, from I SPY Christmas

To my dear readers, I wish you the happiest of holidays. May you give and receive many gifts of art. And, if you're looking for something good to do, try the Walter Wick exhibition Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic at the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie. I will be reviewing it here in the next few days. In the meantime, be well and stay warm.

-db