How to See an Art Museum: Boston Museum of Fine Arts Part Two

 

 

Holgar, Man with an Axe

 

 Edwin Holgar as Printmaker (through December 16, 2024)

Dutch and Flemish Masterworks (ongoing)

Power of the People: Art and Democracy (ongoing)

 

My first rule for enjoying an art museum is always to see the things that you came to see first. That’s why we hit the Dali and O’Keeffe shows when we walked through the doors on our October 27 visit. See your # 1 desire when you’re fresh.

 

This leads to my second rule of museum-going. Many people feel like they have to see “everything” because they paid to get in. Bad move! In a big museum like the MFA you simply can’t, but you can make your brain explode by trying. It’s the equivalent of trying to force yourself to read after you’ve nodded off on the same page three times. Plan ahead so you know what else you might wish to see–if you have time. Take breaks: browse the gift shop(s), grab a cup of coffee, or have a quick meal.* Resume your journey, but allow yourself to shift gears if you stumble upon something that fascinates you.

 

Mary McMaster

Museums like the MFA nearly always have smaller special exhibits worth seeing, plus they like to show off  new acquisitions somewhere prominent before they are shuttled into a gallery. The one at MFA is often in the corridor near the information desk. That’s where I saw When the Storm Ends I Will Finish My Work, a poignant work from Mary McMaster, a Canadian/Cree artist. Call it a silent agitator. McMaster grasps a feather quill and is slumped over a tall stack of papers from which vegetation pokes through. Are they moldering broken treaties and the reason for her world-weary expression?

 

Holgar, Labrador Kitchen

My favorite special small special exhibit comes from another Canadian, print maker Edwin Holgate (1892-1977). He only made 60 prints and half of them are on display at the MFA. Most are from the late 1920s into the 1930s. He had great affinity for the northern climes of Quebec and Labrador, though he spent most of his career as a painter and teacher (at Montreal MFA). The prints you see inspired an invitation to join the Group of 7, a revered group in Canada. He never formally did so but, like Emily Carr, was so simpatico that he sometimes gets lumped with them. (If you’re trying to remember when you heard about the 7, Steve Martin is a great collector of linchpin Lawren Harris.) Thirty small prints, but I loved them.

Horseshoe Lake PQ

The Lumberjack 

 

The Village

 

Here's what to do when you’re starting to fade: Pop into a few permanent galleries and make mental notes to revisit them next time. I did this with two galleries, beginning with the revamped Dutch and Flemish Masterworks galleries. The MFA scored big-time in securing a gift nearly every Western museum longed to have: the Rose-Marie and Ejik van Otterloo Collection. It's mostly from the 17th century Dutch Golden Age. If you’re wondering, there is no Vermeer but I’m sure you can make do with luminaries such as Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Rubens, and Van Dyck. You’ll also find one whose name will ring a bell if you read The Goldfinch, Donna Taart’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel: Carel Fabritus. It’s not that painting, but it’s nice to see another. Fabritus (1622-54) was killed when a gunpowder magazine exploded in Delft and just a dozen of his paintings survived.  [Apologies for some of the oils. They simply have too much bounce light.]

Van Dyck

 

Rubens, Portrait of Sultan Ahmed III

 

 

Bruegel the Elder, Village with Canal
                                            

Rembrandt

Fabritus , Mercury & Aglauros

 

I must go back and spend more time in the newly opened Power of the People: Art and Democracy. Many people are so cavalier about democracy that they take it for granted that it will survive anything. In truth, it’s an old idea in theory but a recent and contested one in practice. The MFA scoured its own collections to highlight its promise (from 5^th c. BCE Rome on), its practice, and its need for preservation. Fittingly one of the last images if of storming the Capitol on January 6, 2020. Right now the exhibit is heavy on world war materials and photos and posters from the 1960s/70s. I suspect it will evolve and broaden.

 

John Trumbull, Death of Gen Warren

 

 

Can We?

Look Familiar?

Democracy was important to him

WWI

Good Idea

1/6/20 Is this how democracy dies?

Rob Weir

 

* The MFA has a quick-stop coffee shop outside its bookstore and a cafeteria in the basement. There’s upscale dining in its internal courtyard. It takes Mastercard, Visa, and organ donations.

 

 

 

 

Dali, O'Keeffe, and Moore: Odd Couples at MFA Boston

 

 Dali: Disruption and Devotion (though December 1, 2024)

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore (through January 20, 2025)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) has had some blockbuster shows lately, including a new one on Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore. You’ve only got the rest of November to catch one on Salvador Dali. These two shots might inspire you to get to the MFA before the Dali show closes. There is great synergy between these three icons of the art world.

 

Technically, the soon-to-close Dali exhibit isn’t the main draw at present; that would be the O’Keeffe and Moore show. But maybe you can already spot where I’m heading. I shall be brief with the Dali exhibit as what you see at the MFA are 30 works borrowed from the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which I visited in March and reviewed on this blog.

 

Dali worked hard at self-promotion and succeeded in making himself famous and notorious. He is probably the most celebrated surrealist painter of all time, though he neither invented the genre nor was necessarily its finest exemplar. But is there anyone who doesn’t know of his melting watches or his fool-the-eyes perspectives? The very word “surrealism” alerts you of the movement’s intent; it’s not “real” in a literal sense and probably not very realistic in a figurative sense either. Dali and others extrapolated from dreams to explore the subconscious. How does one paint that? If you ever had a literal dream like some of Dali’s works, you’d consider seeking psychiatric help! One could argue, though, that his imagination is no more disturbing than the concrete horrors of human history. 

 

 

 

The MFA’s show stresses Dali’s “disruption”– of art, hidden desire, decorum– and his shift to “devotion.” After decades of surrealism he gravitated to religious mysticism. He was always an egoist, but he tempered it with an increasingly rigid adherence to Catholicism.

 

Oddly, that’s my segue to O’Keeffe and Moore. A non-Catholic confession: I was baffled when I first heard the MFA was putting these two into the same show. After all, we often think of O’Keeffe’s New York modernism, her New Mexico desert canvasses, her erotic/vaginal flowers, and her clotheshorse personal style. It seems a weird coupling with the England-born and bred Moore. He was a competent painter, but he was best known for his monumental bronze sculptures–the kind that are often so massive that they adorn museum courtyards instead of commanding gallery space. Other than the fact that they were contemporaries–born in 1887 and 1888 respectively and died in the same year (1986)– how do they match up?

O'Keeffe

Moore

 

Courtesy of MFA curators with a better eye than yours truly, pretty darn well! Modernism proved the same thing that Dali grasped: There’s a lot more to art than duplicating what what’s at the end of our noses. In ways both different and overlapping O’Keeffe and Moore imagined things in their essence, not merely their outward forms. Shapes are art and the best art depicts them in some sort of balance.

 

Moore

Moore

O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe

Moore was famous for the “holes” in some of his sculptures. A hole in context is called “negative space” and functions to draw the viewer into a work, be it two-dimensional (painting, engravings, photos…) or a three-dimensional sculpture. Many of them wouldn’t work without the negative space–even if it’s a thin cleft in a rock or a peek at the horizon. 

 

 

Color is art, but the trick is in how you use it. Skies are seldom actually turquoise or acidic green, but that’s where another kind of balance comes into play. If you’ve ever seen a Van Gogh up close you know another trick: Texture is art.

 

O'Keeffe

Moore

 

 Still another way O’Keeffe and Moore line up is that both had workshops filled with found objects–bones, stones, twigs, sherds, shells, discarded materials–in which they saw something else waiting to come out or be assembled. (Try this at home, kids—tell your parents your room isn’t “junked up;” it’s art waiting to happen.)

 

O'Keeffe use of skull

Moore workshop

 

 

And some art is just “cool” in ways that are hard to define! Kudos to the MFA for this thoughtful show. There’s still more at the MFA right now, but I’ll save it for another posting.

 

Moore cross

O'Keeffe cross

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir   

Loiuse Penny's Latest Out Now

 

 

 

The Grey Wolf (2024)

By Louise Penny

Minotaur Books, 414 pages.

★★★

 

Is the Armand Gamache franchise running on fumes? The Grey Wolf, the much-anticipated 19^th book of Three Pines series, shows that author Louise Penny still has tricks up her sleeve. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of recycling – especially from books six (Bury Your Dead), eight (The Beautiful Mystery), and nine (How the Light Gets In).

 

The Grey Wolf begins on a placid Sunday morning when the phone rings, Armand notices the number and ignores it, but when the caller is persistent, he swears into the receiver and hangs up. The central mystery begins curiously. Someone bypasses the alarm and enters Gamache’s Montreal pied-á-terre. All that is taken is a stained jacket, which is promptly sent to his office at the Sûreté du Québec with a list of spices scribbled onto a torn piece of paper in a pocket. Soon, Gamache is sitting in a café facing a nervous young man who has reason to be so.   

 

Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Isabelle Lacoste soon find themselves embroiled in investigating multiple murders that take them from Montreal and Three Pines to Rome, France, Washington DC, and the Gaspé region of northern Québec. A monstrous plot is brewing that could kill hundreds of thousands. The problem is that none of the clues add up, the objective is vague, and Gamache is torn between warning the public–an act that would alert the terrorists–or keeping the lid on in the hope of both preventing a massacre and exposing the conspirators. If only he knew who the terrorists were and when they will strike! High government officials are probably involved, but how high and how to prove it? Who else is involved in the complex plot? The Montreal Mafia? Fanatics? Corporations? Worst of all, Gamache thinks that two of his bêtte-noires are involved: Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Dagenais and his assistant, Jeanne Caron. Dagenais harbors an old grudge. Young Gamache once arrested his daughter  for DUI and refused to drop the charges. (Dagenais pulled strings to do that and subsequently made certain Gamache’s son was jailed for drugs.) Caron is both ambitious and corrupt; she and Gamache despise each other.

 

If you’re not following this, it means you have some reading to do to catch up, a nice way of saying The Grey Wolf is not a stand-alone mystery. Gamache has plenty of suspects for the evil black wolf, but who is the grey wolf he can trust? Aside from his inner team, that’s a short list. The Sûreté is riddled with corruption, despite Gamache’s efforts to cleanse it, and it’s possible some old friends and allies may have turned coats. Solving the threat means ferreting information from two different abbeys, interviewing three different monks and a nun, and tiptoeing around rivalries between the Gilbertines, the Carthusians, and Dominicans, the latter of Inquisition infamy. At one point a warrant is drawn, but how does one serve it in a monastery closed to outsiders and monks who have taken a vow of silence? What in the blazes does a particularly vile liqueur have to do with anything? Where are a victim’s notebooks and laptop that might tell Gamache what is about to happen and where?

 

As you can tell from my no-spoilers summary, The Grey Wolf has a lot going on. I am tempted to say so much so that the novel is occasionally sloppy.* As the Gamache series has progressed, Penny has opted for thriller formats that replace detective work with pick-a-number intuition. Some readers probably prefer the tension of a rush-to-avoid-Armageddon approach. Yet, it’s hard to ignore that Ms. Penny has drawn from that well before. The ripple effect is that by infusing the novels with globe-trotting plots and visits to halls of power, Penny takes us further away from Three Pines. Characters such as Clara, Myrna, Olivier, Gabri, Ruth, and Reine-Marie are mere cameos in The Grey Wolf. It is Penny’s prerogative to plot her novels as she wishes, but I miss the charm of earlier books in which cleverness solved the mystery more than guns and heart-thumping action.

 

The bottom line is that I liked The Grey Wolf, but I didn’t love it. I should also note that The Grey Wolf ends with a remark that assures a sequel is in the works.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Disclosure: I read an uncorrected advance copy, hence it’s possible some of the wrinkles have been ironed.