Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum

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Pioneer Valley Delights I;

Mount Holyoke Museum of Art

When “art” and “western Massachusetts” get mentioned in the same breath, most East Coast cognoscenti head for the Berkshires to take in the Stirling and Francine Art Institute, MassMOCA, or (gasp!) the Norman Rockwell Museum. Okay, I’ve developed a grudging admiration for Rockwell over the years, but he was mainly an illustrator and I’m just enough of a snob to say his work doesn’t qualify as fine art. But my biggest beef is that travelers to the Berkshires miss some serious art treasures if they fail to stop in the Pioneer Valley, home to the Five Colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst). In that spirit, this is the first of four blog posts highlighting college art collections–first stop, the Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum (MHCAM).  

Milton Avery: Lone Goat

The MHCAM is located in South Hadley, just across the Connecticut River from Holyoke and just a dozen miles from Springfield as the crow flies, though it’s light years removed from the squalor of urban postindustrialism. Though the town has 17,000 residents, it feels like a village–especially when you venture further from the river and venture upon the Gothic campus of Mt. Holyoke, the nation’s oldest remaining women’s college. You’ll find the MHCAM beside the college greenhouses and fronting a narrow stream connecting Upper and Lower Pond. It’s a ‘teaching’ museum, which means it’s small, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Longtime curator Wendy Watson has always made the best of the museum’s 16,000 plus items and its new director, John Stomberg, is dedicated to bringing vest pocket but innovative special exhibits to at least one of the museum’s nine galleries. Through June 8, 2014 there is a show of six of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s monumental works, which he fashions from flattened bottle caps connected by cooper wire. This is a big deal indeed–El Anatsui’s works can be found in art museums in Boston, Brooklyn, New York and Washington.

Avery: Purple Ram

Because the MHCAM is a teaching museum, its on-display permanent collection is generally a sampler from the vault; that is to say that you get a splash of American art, a splatter of Asian, a dab of African, a daub of European, and a smattering of antiquities. Because the collection is small and changeable, there’s plenty of time to savor what you like and then return in the future for something new. My personal favorites are idiosyncratic. I’ve always enjoyed Milton Avery. His Discussion is at Mt. Holyoke, which most would consider a more important work, but I’m quite fond of two small pictures: Lone Goat and Purple Ram. Why? Because they remind me of how little a great artist needs to produce striking work–just a few squiggles and two or three colors.  

Joseph Cornell, Marsh Sunset

Lawren Harris, Mountain Sketch

The MHCAM also some dramatic pictures from the Hudson River School, including Albert Bierstadt’s Hetch Hetchy Canyon, but my heart raced faster for a small Joseph Cornell often called Marsh at Sunset, though Cornell didn’t name it. I also liked Mountain Sketch by Lawren Harris. His name might not be familiar to you, but Canadians know him–Harris was part of the influential Group of Seven credited with forging a distinctive Canadian style of art. If ever a painting can be described as icy and warm at the same time, Mountain Sketch fits the bill.

Japanese netsuke

A small favorite is a piece of Japanese netsuke–that’s small as in size, not in importance. I was magnetically drawn to a piece that’s made of ivory and is about two inches high. It’s a robed badger holding a bowl of saké. It comes from the 19^th century and that’s about all we know about it. And what else do we need to know? Think of it as a metaphor for the MHCAM–lots of small pleasures that, like saké, can stagger you.     

Here’s the Website: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/artmuseum

While you’re on campus, make your way to the foyer of the library, where you’ll see a large white with gold flecks Dale Chihuly glass installation. Then cross the foyer and climb either of the side stairs and peek into the library’s fourth floor Reading Room. If you’ve had a cup of tea from the Rao’s in the foyer, you can squint your eyes and imagine yourself in Cambridge–the one in Britain, not the one across the Charles from Boston.  

Detail of Dale Chihuly glass scuplture