Art From Collections

 

[I’ve compiled another small collection of old art reports from my archive.  The first two reports below predate Rick On Theater and the third was never posted on the blog. 

[Though I may have added information to the original reports, such as life dates for significant people named in the account, I haven’t edited my comments from my initial write-up.

[A note pertinent to all these archival reports, both on theater and on art: the dates in the headings are the dates on which the reports were originally written; the dates on which I attended the events—the play or art exhibit—are in the text (if I kept a record of them at the time) and I’ve added the dates the events were scheduled at the theater or museum/gallery, also within the text.]

AN ARTIST’S ARTIST: JACOB KAINEN’S COLLECTION
National Gallery of Art, West Building
Washington, D.C.
9 & 12 Jan. 2003 

My mother and I went to the National Gallery of Art’s West Building to see An Artist’s Artist: Jacob Kainen’s Collection (22 September 2002-9 February 2003).  Kainen (1909-2001) was himself an artist, a painter, draftsman, and printmaker (I have a color etching and aquatint of his, Masquerade [1976], formerly part of my parents’ collection), but he was a curator (with the Division of Graphic Arts of the Smithsonian Institution’s United States National Museum—now the National Museum of American History) and an art scholar with several significant books to his name (The Etchings of Canaletto, 1967; John Baptist Jackson: 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut, 1962). 

This exhibit, consisting of 77 prints and 2 drawings, is of the art he owned, not the art he made—and he had exquisite taste.  (Mother and I judge an exhibit by the number of pieces we’d like to come back for on a midnight shopping trip.  Kainen, whom my folks knew somewhat in their art-gallery days [see “Gres Gallery,” posted on ROT on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018]—which is how they acquired the piece I now have—had a number we’d have liked to own!) 

Most of this collection, culled from more than 400 pieces which Kainen willed to the NGA, are etchings and prints—a special interest of his; he taught printmaking at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts (1945-1956)—and go back as far as Rembrandt (he owned only one) and the early Renaissance and up to the modern era. 

The collection includes many modern artists such as Alexander Calder (a favorite of mine, both for his sculpture and his prints, one of which I have in my living room, and, especially, his mobiles) and Joan Miró.  Kainen’s taste was obviously eclectic, but if similarity in taste is any criterion, he really knew his stuff! 

Artists have always collected the work of other artists and their collections often reveal a span of personal connections and aesthetic curiosity that are frequently far different from their own styles.  

Kainen’s private art collection included etchings by Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606-69), Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641), and Giovanni Canaletto (Italian. 1697-1768), to woodcuts by Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938), and Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867-1945).

There’s quite a contrast between Kainen’s own bold color abstractions and his favorite etchings such as the elegant images of 17th-century French painter Laurent de la Hyre (1606-56) or the detailed rustic landscapes of 19th-century British artist Samuel Palmer (1805-81).

Kainen’s strong political and aesthetic allegiances are apparent in his Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-79) lithographs, his American works from the 1930s, and his outstanding German Expressionist prints (the subject of an NGA exhibit in 1985-86, German Expressionist Prints from the Collection of Ruth and Jacob Kainen, and its published catalogue).  

Kainen’s experience in New York—where his family moved when he was 9 and where he studied art at the Art Students League and the Pratt Institute—in the thirties put him in touch with the New York School, from Louis Lozowick (Russian-born American painter and printmaker, 1892-1973) to John Graham (American painter, 1886-1961), to David Smith (American sculptor, 1906-65).

The interest in printmaking led to his admiration for the technical brilliance of Félix-Hilaire Buhot’s (French, 1847-98) views of city and shore.  One of his last collecting enthusiasms, and another of his most valued additions to the NGA collection, are great examples of American landscapes from the 19th-century etching revival: from the finesse of James Smillie (Scottish-born American, b. 1944) and the tonality of J. C. Nicoll (American, 1847-1918) to the grandeur of Thomas Moran (American, 1837-1926).

(There’s a museum in D.C., not far from my mom’s apartment, featuring another private collection of a wealthy Washingtonian named David Lloyd Kreeger (1909-90).  He’s the Kreeger of the Arena’s Kreeger Theater, the company’s proscenium house. 

(He had a very large art collection and some years ago, several years before he died, he built a big house on Foxhall Road—D.C.’s Sutton Place, in a way—that was intended to become a museum after his death.  The Kreeger Museum opened in 1994.

(My folks knew Kreeger, too, and we were invited to his new house soon after he built it—I was visiting at the time—and saw his collection before it was augmented and mediated by museum curators and others.  He had works by many famous artists, mainly from the mid-1800s through the Pablo Picassos, Piet Mondrians, and Amadeo Modiglianis, as well as later artists. 

(The problem was that he’d selected some of the worst examples of art these great artists made!  He knew artists; he didn’t really know art—or he had execrable taste, which is probably the same thing.  Kainen didn’t suffer from that deficiency.

(In an odd coincidence, another of Kreeger’s philanthropic endeavors was a gift to Rutgers University to renovate the Douglass College campus’s Little Theater.  As readers of Rick On Theater may know, I was a grad student at what is now the Mason Gross School of the Arts, then housed at Douglass, and I worked often at the Little; Kreeger was an undergraduate at Rutgers—probably at Rutgers College—in the ’20s.)

*  *  *  *

[The brief report below, on the Sackler exhibit Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, covers art that’s not precisely a private collection in the sense that the Meyerhoff, Kainen, and Dale collections are.  First of all, 10 of the 60 paintings on display were on loan from several other museum holdings and, second, the remaining 50 works are from the palace collection of the Maharaja of Marwar-Jodhpur, held by the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, a cultural institution and museum that publishes research on its collection and undertakes conservation programs. 

[In any event, virtually none of the art had ever been seen by the public since they were created before this exhibit was assembled and after its début at the Sackler Gallery, it toured several additional museums (Seattle Art Museum and the National Museum of India in New Delhi), including the British Museum in London.]

GARDEN AND COSMOS: THE ROYAL PAINTINGS OF JODHPUR
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.
9 January 2009 

On Saturday, 27 December 2008, my mother and I took the bus down to the Mall to check out the newly renovated National Museum of American History (“America’s Attic”) which reopened on 21 November after two-years of work. 

Unfortunately, the same idea struck all the tourists in town for the holidays, particularly since it was a gorgeous, sunny day in Washington: lines snaked out the entrance on Constitution Avenue and curved in both directions around the corners of the building. 

Having expended the energy to make the trip downtown (and because it was just too nice a day to simply give up and go back home), we decided to walk across the Mall and see what was “playing” at the Sackler Gallery, the underground Asian art museum next to the African art museum along Independence Avenue. 

The special exhibit was Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, a collection of 60 newly discovered paintings from the royal court of Marwar-Jodhpur (in the modern Indian state of Rajasthan).  More than 50 of the works presented in Garden and Cosmos were lent to the museum by His Highness Gaj Singh II (b. 1948), the Maharaja of Marwar-Jodhpur; the remaining 10 pieces, from the 1600s, were loaned by various other museum collections.

The focus of the show was on garden and cosmos leitmotifs, with an introductory gallery about the kingdom of Marwar-Jodhpur and the origins of its court painting traditions in the 17th century. 

The 60 paintings, almost none of which had never been exhibited before, are from the palace at Nagaur, once part of the princely state of Marwar-Jodhpur.  The collection reveals the garden aesthetics of 18th century Rajputana painters.  The court painting traditions in the kingdom of Marwar-Jodhpur originated in the 17th century.

The art was produced exclusively for the private enjoyment of the Marwar-Jodhpur maharajas; very few of the works on view in Garden and Cosmos have ever been published or seen by scholars since their creation centuries ago.

Though most of the works were exquisitely beautiful—many with the minute details of miniatures—the subjects did get repetitious and, though the collection spanned several centuries (13th to 19th), the painting style was essentially prescribed by the court atelier and masters and didn’t vary much. 

So we left the Sackler while it was still afternoon and walked down to the Hirschhorn’s Sculpture Garden.  (This is differentiated from the other garden across the Mall, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden at Constitution Avenue.)  We wandered around the meandering display, among David Smiths, Alexander Calders, Henry Moores, and Auguste Rodins.  And a Yoko Ono. 

The Ono piece is The Wish Tree for Washington, DC.  It’s a (real) Japanese dogwood tree on which people are invited to hang on a branch, a wish written on a piece of paper.

In the end, it took almost two hours to cover the outdoor exhibit, even though we’d both been there many times (though not for a while: it does change some from time to time—the Wish Tree was only installed in 2007, during the National Cherry Blossom Festival in April; see my report posted on 9 April 2012)—but on a nice day, even a winter’s day, it’s an extremely pleasurable way to while away some time. 

(We like to play a guessing game to see if we can identify the artists before we look at the labels.  I won’t reveal my score.)

*  *  *  *

FROM IMPRESSIONISM TO MODERNISM: 
THE CHESTER DALE COLLECTION
National Gallery of Art, West Building
Washington, D.C.
4 August 2010 

I went to Washington for a family event and I only stayed a few days, but my mother and I took the afternoon of Monday, 19 July 2010, to drive to the Mall to see From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection (31 January 2010-2 January 2012) at the National Gallery of Art’s West Building. 

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to own many of the world’s best paintings?  More than that, have you ever thought about living in a house where the walls are decorated with that art?  It’s almost unfathomable, but the thought comes to me whenever I see an exhibit of art that once belonged to one private collector.  (Recently, Mother and I took in the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff collection at the East Building last January.  See “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10),” 18 January 2010.) 

The closest I ever came was visiting David Lloyd Kreeger (see above), once a CEO of Geico, at his new house-cum-museum-to-be.  I don’t think that was a very good model for the experience of living with magnificent art, however: Kreeger’s collection, as I noted earlier, was often characterized as the worst examples of the work of some of the world’s best artists. 

Furthermore, the house he built, where I saw his collection, was more museum than home; except for the “private apartments” (as they used to call them in old palaces), it didn’t feel like anyone really lived there. 

The next closest I ever came was visiting the office of a friend’s father here in Manhattan.  The dad worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, and we’d gone to the offices to go to lunch with him.  The offices were decorated with art, which I noticed only subliminally at first—then I stopped to take a drink from a wall-mounted fountain.  I looked up from my drink and I was confronted, a few inches from my face, with a wonderful Picasso. 

It wasn’t a print or a copy, like you might expect in some corporate offices.  It was the genuine article!  Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79), who was still alive at the time, and his brothers had generously adorned the office walls with the family’s art.  Nobody lived at the office, of course, but all day long, my friend’s father and his co-workers got to be inspired by some of the best art in the West.

The Dales have gone most everyone else a step further, though.  In the NGA exhibit (81 French and American paintings) are five portraits of the couple—all painted by now-renowned artists.  Depending on which way you go through the show, you encounter them as either the first or the last things you see.

To the left of the entrance into the rest of the exhibit is a formal portrait of Chester Dale by George Bellows from 1922, a painting of him sitting at his desk looking over an art catalogue in 1945 by Diego Rivera, and a 1958 depiction of Mr. Dale by Salvador Dali in a style reminiscent of the artist’s Last Supper; to the right of the doorway, a portrait of Maud Dale by George Bellows from 1919 (which apparently the Dales didn’t like in its first version so they tracked Bellows down on vacation and made him redo it), and a 1935 Fernand Léger painting of Mrs. Dale posed like a Greek goddess in a blue dress. 

What must it be like to have your portrait painted by Diego Rivera or Salvador Dali?  I’m sure I’ll never know!

Well, that’s the kind of thing that went through my head when I walked into the first gallery of Impressionism to Modernism.  It didn’t hurt that this collection covers the period and styles that are my favorite in painting: the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.  And the Dales had lived with this art—though probably not all in one home. 

The show includes only some of the hundreds of paintings they owned and donated to the NGA over the years.  If you apply my usual criterion for judging an art show—whether I’d come back for a midnight shopping spree—I’d have had a hard time deciding what to take home under my jacket!

Impressionism to Modernism isn’t the normal kind of one-collector show.  The Meyerhoff collection, for instance, was a display of a significant portion of a single gift that had just been acquired by the NGA.  The artworks will become part of the NGA’s permanent collection, some to be displayed at the Meyerhoffs’ mansion in Phoenix, Maryland (the estate is the first remote site the NGA has ever administered), some among the Washington holdings. 

In other instances, the collections of one person or family go on tour from museum to museum, sometimes returning to a private venue and sometimes becoming the property of an institution as a bequest or donation.  The Dale art, however, is already part of the gallery holdings—the works have been on display somewhere in the West Building for 48 years or more. 

This was the first time they’ve been shown together in all that time because they’ve been part of various Impressionism and Modernism galleries throughout the museum.  The NGA had been able to assemble the paintings for this exhibit now because many of those galleries are under renovation; otherwise, removing them would have denuded the walls of many of the late-19th- and early-20th-century rooms where they had been hanging.

(Chester Dale began donating art to the NGA in 1941, four years after it was founded.  When he died in 1962, the bulk of his remaining collection—he donated to other museums, including New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art—was left to the NGA.) 

Though there are several American artists in the collection (George Bellows, Mary Cassatt), the Dales concentrated on the French painters (there are only seven sculptures in the Dale contributions to the NGA, none of which are in the current exhibit) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Chester Dale (1883-1962) was a stock broker on Wall Street with a reputation for aggressiveness and sharp elbows; the Washington Post called him “pugnacious.”  (He had begun as a runner at the NYSE when he was 15 and worked his way up to true mogul status.) 

He apparently bought his art the same way—and there were not a few museums, galleries, and other collectors who regretted going up against him when he went after something he wanted.  (No one said so, but I suspect that a few of the artists had the same sentiments about the man who was a patron in the years before they were world-famous painters.) 

Chester Dale married Agnes Maud Murray (1876-1953), the divorced wife of Frederick Thompson, a fellow art student, in April 1911 (the same month she divorced Thompson).  Maud Dale was trained as an artist (and later would write about art) and Chester Dale liked to say that it was her taste and his acquisitiveness that gave birth to the Dale art collection.  I wouldn’t know about that, of course, but I can say that someone in that family had magnificent taste in art. 

Chester unquestionably had the wherewithal to make the purchases (and the market savvy to know how to get the best prices), but if Maud was the tastemaker of the pair, then I go along with Karen Wilkin’s final remark in the Wall Street Journal: “The most appropriate comment, after walking through the installation, is simply ‘Thank you, Chester (and Maud) Dale.’” 

Their taste was conservative, staying away from the starkest of the artists’ later experiments (for example, Picasso’s Cubism), but I can’t fault her ultimate choices.  From his Rose Period, for instance, Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905) is not only one of my favorite Picassos, but one of my favorite paintings of all (maybe after several of van Gogh’s). 

I suppose it doesn’t hurt that the saltimbanques are actors (well, performers—they’re really buskers).  The harlequin figure is supposed to be a self-portrait of the artist, which makes the wonderful little scene all the neater as far as I’m concerned.  The WSJ suggested that it’s “like something out of Beckett.”  (That’d be Samuel, the great Absurdist playwright.)

I’d probably have enjoyed this show anyway, considering the period and styles it covers as I said, but there were a couple of lagniappes that added an additional fillip of delight.  Ordinarily the Dale art is displayed by artist and year, but Kimberly A. Jones, associate curator in the NGA department of French paintings, has arranged this exhibition in general themes, starting with a gallery of the Dales’ favorites. 

Here is a delightful little van Gogh that doesn’t look like any I’d ever seen before—a single female figure in a simple white shift and a yellow straw hat with a broad brim, apparently just strolling in a green field.  Girl in White (1890), painted the year the artist died, is tranquil and charming as compared to van Gogh’s usual fury and energy.  If I had to select one piece to take home from this show, Girl in White would be it.  But it’d be a hard choice. 

Also in this gallery is Modigliani’s Gypsy Woman with Baby (1919), one of the finest paintings of his I’ve seen: a serene-looking young woman sitting in a chair in a blue room, holding a swaddled infant in her lap.  She wears a sort of Mona Lisa smile, her dark hair short or pulled back, with one stray strand hanging down on the left side of her face. 

The following rooms focus on portraits of women, nudes and portraits of men, landscapes and city scenes, still lifes, and, at the end (just before the Dale portraits), what the NGA calls examples of “monumental modernity” and the Washington Post characterized as “blockbuster masterworks.”

One of the neatest little thrills is in the men’s portrait gallery.  To the left of the room’s entrance from the previous gallery is Chaim Soutine’s Portrait of a Boy (1928), a nice little painting of teenager in a bright red vest, his arms akimbo as if he’s showing off his new outfit.  A few frames farther along the same wall is another Modigliani portrait—Chaim Soutine (1917)!  

The Dales bought both paintings in 1929 and I have to imagine they bought them intentionally as a sort of pair.  (I wonder where they hung them in their house?  Were they next to each other, or looking at each other across a hall?)

There are other terrific paintings in this exhibit: the recognizable 1889 Self-Portrait by Paul Gauguin looking something like a character in a Fellini movie, Picasso’s The Tragedy (1903) from his Blue Period, Modigliani’s Nude on a Blue Cushion (1917), Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, West Façade and Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight (both 1894), and Georges Braque’s 1928 Still Life: The Table. 

If I even just listed the great paintings in this show, it’d be all 83 canvases and go on for pages.  Just among the select artists are special treasures for me.  The two Monet paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, for instance, are the epitome of Impressionism for me.  They aren’t my favorites of the genre (that would be a long list, too), but when I was little and first saw them, the idea that they were so ephemeral that if you stood too close, you couldn’t make out the image—that was what Impressionism meant.  Even today when I think of the genre, that’s the image I get. 

The Modiglianis—the Dales eventually owned 21 of his works, one of the best selections of Modiglianis ever amassed, and donated 13 of those to the NGA—hold another significance for me.  Maud Dale was a committed supporter of Modigliani’s work and she published one of the first studies on the artist, and he’s always been a painter I’ve liked.  But what makes his work so special to me is that Modigliani was a favorite artist of my father.  Whenever I see paintings by him, I can’t help but think how much Dad would love them.