This morning, I visited the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA). I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.
I heard about it through word of mouth. The secondhand information included a report that it had started as an exhibition out of someone's home and was later expanded. Having seen something like that in New Hampshire where I enjoyed some Maxfield Parrish paintings, my expectations for the building were low.
Also, NBMAA's site shows no pictures of its building. That reinforced my low expectations.
So, imagine my surprise when I found a large, spanking new building perched right next to an invitingly large park named Walnut Hill Park. Plenty of parking spaces were available. Everything was immaculate. Even the scent inside the building was "new," reminding me of the scent of a new car when you drive it for the first time.
Entering the building, I found the main desk manned by two very nice women. Happily, they informed me that I had arrived in time to enjoy the museum's collection free of charge. Apparently, from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM on Saturdays, there is no charge.
NBMAA has its share of modern art. Fortunately, not enough was there to overshadow my enjoyment of genuine art.
By modern art, I mean obvious crap like one display that included nothing more than a wooden border holding white flourescent lights. The name associated with that display is Dan Flavin. However, I must give him credit—he made me laugh. If he meant his work as a joke, it worked.
By genuine art, I mean work by artists like Claude Raguet Hirst, Charles Courtney Curran, Thomas Moran, and Robert Salmon, among others. All of these artists are new to me. Learning about them added to my enjoyment of this museum only a couple of towns away from my home.
Topping the day for me was finding in NBMAA's collection MaxField Parrish's The Old Glen Mill. Important note: This web picture does not do justice to this work. It fails to show the exquisite detail in each leaf at the center of the painting.
All that and I didn't have to pay to enter the building. Thank you NBMAA!
Saturday, January 13, 2007
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2 comments:
I know how much you love (not) Modernism so here is a definition from the Tate in London.
Modernism:
In the field of art the broad movement in Western art, architecture and design which self-consciously rejected the past as a model for the art of the present. Hence the term modernist or modern art. Modernism gathered pace from about 1850. Modernism proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. It is thus characterised by constant innovation. But modern art has often been driven too by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the Realism of Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as Postmodernism.
Thank you for sharing the Tate's definition. Constant innovation is, of course, a good thing, in context. So, too, is progress. A question I bear in mind, then, when I see or hear these concepts used is this—to what end?
If the end is man, specifically man at his physical, intellectual, and spiritual best, then I'm all for it. If the end is anti-man, then I oppose any innovation that helps the progress of such an idea.
That is my point of reference—man as he can and ought to be. I judge art by what I see in its ability to measure up to, down from or defiance of that standard. A simple wooden frame with some neon lights is, at best, a utilitarian device for literally shedding some light on art. When it is displayed as art in and of itself, it defies that standard.
The same pattern applies to an entire art movement—i.e., where is it moving to? Toward a vision with "an overwhelming sense of intellectual freedom, of depth, i.e., concern with fundamental problems, of demanding standards, of inexhaustible originality, of unlimited possibilities and, above all, of profound respect for man" or away from it? (The quote is from the introduction to The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand.)
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