Wadsworth Atheneum

And for my last trick....

I took a ride up to the Wadsworth Atheneum in in Hartford this afternoon. I had held off on this one after researching much of their policies and determining that this would probably not be an ideal trip to bring the children on as, according to their website, they seem to really frown upon strollers. So, with that being said, I chose to fly solo.

But Sean,  you might be asking, didn't you mention that you also made a trip to the Aldrich Museum? Oh, indeed I did, however I hit an unfortunate snag with attempting to write about my trip to Ridgefield. While we were there, I had taken a few gallery guides with me for further reference, as the guides labeled each individual piece in an exhibit. Unfortunately, I have lost all of the guides I brought home, so I have a bunch of photos with no titles or artist information. Regardless, I would like to still post the photos from the trip before the end of the class, because I feel as someone who does not really get contemporary or modern art, it was definitely different.

Side Entrance...if you approach from Archer Street direction.

Enough about that, we are here to talk about the Wadsworth! Prior to registering for this class, I had no idea that Hartford housed a museum of this size near the Capitol Area. I wound up parking closer to the side entrance, so I never saw the building from the front entrance's exterior until I began to look more into the website for information on the history of the museum. The architectural composition of the site mirrors Yale Art Gallery in that there are multiple styles at work. Daniel Wadsworth founded the museum in 1842. The Atheneum houses not only a large collection of fine arts paintings, but a large collection of sculptures, decorative plates, vases, and even houses a gorgeous replica room from a Victorian mansion once located in Hartford.

The building itself, according to the website is actually five buildings, each with separate styles: "The first was the Gothic Revival Wadsworth building of 1844, designed by the eminent architects Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis....The Tudor Revival Colt Memorial of 1910 and the Renaissance...The Avery Memorial opened in 1934 and was the first American museum building with a modern International Style interior... the Goodwin building, designed in a late modernist style." (https://thewadsworth.org/about/history/) When the last building opened in 1969, the entire museum was a fine arts institution.

After marveling at the courtyard in the side entrance, which was lightly decorated for Christmas, I began to explore the first floor, which housed primarily contemporary art. I normally make it a habit to go at museum opening in order to avoid any potential voluminous crowds, due to weekend visiting. I found the Wadsworth to be incredibly quiet, even for 10am. It might have been because I came in the side entrance and not the front, but it was quite awhile before I encountered anyone else in the museum aside from the guards.

The courtyard displayed some interesting exampled of modern art. There was no real "theme" to the exhibit; it appeared to be more of a sampling of some more well-known artists. Again, I'm not one for contemporary and modern art. I am admittedly biased towards it, and most of the time when I visited museums during the course, I gravitated more towards the more "historic" pieces. I don't deal well with the subjective nature of the art some times. This time I decided to step out of the box a bit and spend more time looking at the contemporary art on the first floor. One of the first paintings I saw was a Piet Mondrian, Composition in Blue and White. Mondrian (1872-1944) is very well known for his unique style of abstract art, using primary colors and thick lines. A description of his work on ArtStory.com tells us, "The simplification of the pictorial elements was essential for Mondrian's creation of a new abstract art, distinct from Cubism..." (https://www.theartstory.org/artist-mondrian-piet-artworks.htm) For reference, cubism basically takes a subject, breaks the image apart and reconstructs it in an abstract form.


What stood out to me with this piece was the inclusion of just the sole colored block. Normally, the Mondrian art that I have seen in books consists of a few colors and varying sized blocks. It's sort of an unbalanced piece to me and as somebody with symmetry OCD, it throws off my sense of wanting a balanced resolution. Even in the example piece that Art Story offers, Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue, it may not be symmetrical either, but the inclusion of more color takes my focus away from that fact.









There was this one piece I stopped and looked at for a bit, mostly because, as I stated in a previous writing,  how I enjoyed urban exploration photography. I looked at it and absentmindedly photographed the placard with the artist information, not really looking at it as I did because I decided to seek out the source of the clearly audible seagull sounds I was hearing (it turned out to be a video loop installation that I didn't stop to view). I came home, grabbed a beer, and sat at the table to show my wife the photos I had taken. When I scrolled through to this one and looked at the placard, I almost choked because I can't believe I hadn't noticed it while viewing it, given the level of fame of the artist.

Andy Warhol's Triple Silver Disaster is a screen print on canvas. It's the same image three times of an empty electric chair chamber. Warhol was well-known for his silkscreen prints (the infamous Campbell Soup images are of this variety) and his pop art counterculture. It was an interesting choice for art. The information next to the images says that Warhol had released the piece around the time that New York State carried out it's final execution. Warhol made it a point to keep the Silence sign visible, I guess as a commentary on possibly either the silencing of the system or what the execution produced. I felt the off-center nature of the images was puzzling, perhaps the remainder of the canvas being blank was an expression of the silencing of the prisoner that followed?

Stack. Kenneth Noland.

Elsewhere on the first floor is a Post-World War II abstract section. Much of this to me was reminiscent of when you watch a television show and they tend to mock people analyzing like, a gigantic white canvas with a teeny red dot. I mean, there was this one work that was literally a black canvas, just a huge canvas painted black. All joking aside, I truly did enjoy looking in this wing of the museum, even at the black canvas (which I looked at for awhile and determined there were red and brown hues underlying.)

One of the more stand out-ish pieces that I stopped to check out was by an artist named Kenneth Noland. Noland was known as a color field painter. Color Field was an expressionist movement where you will find in many of the works, quite literally, large fields of color across the canvas. Noland's contribution to the gallery, Stack, painted in 1963, doesn't seem to fit that model of large amount of color usage. It was more of a geometric piece to me. I found it interesting that the canvas was rotated, because if you square it off at 90 degree angles, I feel it changes the panting entirely. With this piece, it wasn't so much the painting itself that drew me in for a closer look; I had a much more silly reason. My eye was drawn to the top of the painting and I wondered who on earth would damage a painting so haphazardly?

The information on the right of the painting tells us that Noland himself actually intentionally blotched the blue paint on the canvas in an effort to keep the work from being too rigid in composition. Once I had noticed it, admittedly, it was all I had noticed about the painting because it was this one spot of imperfection.

Down the middle of the first floor is an impressive gallery that rivals the upper floor of Yale British. The entire museum had been decorated for the holidays, so it added to the already regal and stately charm of the interior. The first photo was taken prior to entrance into the gallery and the second photo was taken in the gallery itself.

In my usual search for your standard religious Renaissance pieces, I found an interesting representation of Christ. Ecce Homo, by Luis de Morales is an example of his religious pieces he had become famous for. Morales (1509-1586) El Divino, due to his passion in painting these great religious works. Encyclopedia Britannia describes his work, "Morales always worked on panels, often depicting subjects related to the Passion of Christ, such as Ecce Homo and Pietà (1560–70), and the Virgin and Child. Perhaps the best known of these panels are 20 on the Life of Christ, painted for the Church of Arroyo del Puerco (1563–68). All of his paintings are marked by detailed execution and anguished asceticism." (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Luis-de-Morales)

Ecce Homo (Behold, Man) is an utterance by Pontius Pilate, who, according to story, had Christ beaten, flogged, and then presented to the angry Jewish mob. I think what struck me as interesting with this painting was we so often see paintings of Christ during or after crucifixion, so there is always this sense of anguish on his face, or he's already dead or resurrected. Here, we have Christ, having been shamed, beaten, mocked, looking directly at the viewer, why? I think we take into consideration de Morales' passion for his faith, and in his day this painting may have been a means to call the believer to a deeper acknowledgement of their faith or to stir up basic faith in the viewer.

When I made my way up to the second floor of the museum, I found another fascinating example of religious art. We're all familiar with daVinci's Last Supper painting. Big, long table, Jesus in the middle, sleepy, full disciples to his left and right. There's a small painting on display that changes the way to look at the scene. This Last Supper is painted by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo sometime in the 1750s. Tiepolo (1727-1804) was an Italian painter, who was more well-known for his genre paintings. Genre paintings are pretty much paintings of normal, everyday scenes. I saw a lot of examples of American genre paintings at the museum in New Britain. So we have this rendition of The Last Supper, and Tiepolo does something incredible (to me, at least) with the scene:



He takes the table and instead of the view being almost panoramic, it becomes more of an issue of a constrained perspective (well...he also gave Jesus a shave, but that's more of a matter of artistic liberty to me).

I love what Tiepolo did with the familiar scene; it is almost as if daVinci's painting were a sculpture or a model, and Tiepolo, instead of photographing it from the front like everyone does, swung around the side of the table and captured the scene in his own way.





As much as I loved this rendition of the last supper, my favorite painting was found in a different part of the art on the second floor.

On the Yacht, "Namouna", Venice is a painting by Julius LeBlanc Stewart. What I was able to find out about Stewart while I was at the museum was that he was the son of a wealthy sugar millionaire who moved to Paris. His affluence pretty much allowed him to spend his free time painting. This painting on display is from a series involving his time sailing with a group of other rich people.

What gets me with this painting is how easy it is to immerse yourself in the scene. The angled perspective meant to mimic the rocking of the boat, coupled with the close-quarters proximity to the subjects makes you feel like you're part of the conversation; almost as if any moment the woman on the left is going to turn to you and ask if you remember some long-past event you both shared. 

The remaining portion of the second floor I wandered through had some phenomenal examples of landscape painting. This one last painting that I took a photo of before I made my way to the surrealist special exhibit (which was not able to be photographed), I thought the frame itself contributed to the viewing experience.

Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica by Frederic Erwin Church was painted in 1867, after the artist and his wife, having lost both children to diphtheria, retreated to Jamaica for several months.



Now this to me is a landscape! Church's representation of this paradise is gorgeous, to say the least, and not even the threat of an impending storm from the west could spoil my day if this were my window on the world. Speaking of windows, when I mentioned above that the frame contributed to the experience, I had meant it in this manner. Looking at the painting, the framed image made me think of vacationing up high on some tropical mountain overlooking this valley, the frame the window on which you look out towards nature. I'm more of a forest-dwelling individual when it comes to nature retreats, but something like this would definitely change my mind!

I enjoyed my time wandering the Wadsworth today. Aside from traditional art, there's quite a bit to see in terms of vases, sculptures, and even antique silverware on display. It was a shame that the Surrealism exhibit was not able to be photographed. I found another example of a work depicting the temptation of Saint Anthony. that I would have loved to shared, given all the other ones I have seen over the course of the semester. There was a few choice Max Ernst pieces and Dali's Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach was available for viewing (which is impressive up close).

Cited

Britannica, T. E. (2018, May 05). Luis de Morales. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Luis-de-Morales

History. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://thewadsworth.org/about/history/

Piet Mondrian Most Important Art | TheArtStory. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.theartstory.org/artist-mondrian-piet-artworks.htm