Visiting My Local Museums after Months of COVID

The Bennington Museum looks robust, the Clark looks forlorn.

T his past weekend, I visited my two local museums. The Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vt., about ten miles from my home, is the state’s best museum of Vermont art and history. It’s the perfect New England experience. Grandma Moses, Robert Frost, and Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were all locals. Their heritage is a big part of the museum’s art and storytelling. Frost and his family are horizontal in the old cemetery hugging the museum building. It dates from Vermont’s earliest days and is next to one of New England’s prettiest old churches.

The Clark Art Institute is unique and far fancier. It’s in Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts, about 20 miles from me. With 35 Renoirs, ten paintings by Winslow Homer, and 14 Sargents, among many other great things, it’s a temple of art surrounded by woods, pasture, and mountains. I was curious to see how both looked and felt after this annus horribilis.

But, first, my end-of-year fundraising pitch. I’ve written a dozen stories about museums shutting their doors to the public because of COVID. If a museum’s closed, don’t give it money as an end-of-year gift. If it’s closed because of a government order, its financial needs should be vastly reduced. If it’s closed merely to “stay safe,” it doesn’t deserve your money. The senior staff doesn’t want to go to work, or doesn’t care about the public, or both. There hasn’t been a single documented case of Chinese coronavirus transmission in a museum gallery.

So my suggestion is to send your money to museums that are open, welcoming, and functioning, such as the Bennington Museum — the Clark is loaded and doesn’t need money. Or give it to your local church, animal shelter, home-heating-oil emergency fund, or any small, freestanding group that’s actually doing good things.

Grandma Moses, one of the Bennington Museum’s stars, was born a few weeks before Lincoln’s election in 1860 and died a few weeks before John Glenn orbited the earth in 1962. Her scenes of rural life in lush summers and sparking, white winters know no time, though. The museum has a gallery dedicated to its native daughter, with plenty of her infinitely charming paintings and an impressive interview with the artist, who plays homespun and clearly has a genius for marketing.

We’ve had nothing but rain in these weeks leading to Christmas and, of course, human contact outside the home is verboten by the political and public-health zilches who run our lives these days. They’re forcing on us a world alien to human nature. Grandma Moses gives us a world of farm labor, family, and playing children. She became famous around the time Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was produced. Hers is the world of Our Town, so seeing her work is always a salve. Far from sentimental sap, it’s a world that feels real. Now we’re living in the realm of science fiction.

The Bennington Museum opened in early July, as soon as it legally could. The museum lives from month to month, with a chunk of its income from admissions, events, and its very nice, Vermont-centric shop, so the lockdown delivered a hit as it reduced the local economy to depression-scale torpor. Still, the museum’s fully up and running. Bennington is surrounded by farms, wood, and mountains but is a very tiny city itself with an industrial history. I always enjoy the gallery focused on Bennington Pottery, a good, distinctive Vermont brand still firing its kilns after more than a hundred years.

There are clever special exhibitions. One — “(Re) Soundings” — examines the museum’s collection of old musical instruments, treating them not as relics but as the sound makers they were made to be. They’re mostly 19th-century instruments that are not merely displayed. The curators, all musicians, tuned and played many of them. The recordings are part of the show. Some of the sounds are strange. Provincial music was not only heavy on wind instruments but on rattles and whistles.

There’s a fife from the Civil War, a drum from the French and Indian War, and a piano that might be the first in Vermont. It’s a bit of a PC grudge show, and the otherwise fascinating booklet accompanying it needed an edit to cut spurious observations and rants that are tangential to the objects.

“What are the sounds of native resistance to settler-colonialism?” the curators ask, decrying the absence of Abnaki instruments in the show. Did the early natives even use music as a political tool? That seems like a separate show. It’s not about anything in this show.

Attributing to the Abnaki powers of musical resistance is a flight of fancy meant to elicit guilt. It’s a cheap trick, but the curators wanted to ensure they wedge their message of brutality and racism in among the cellos, tuning forks, bells, and banjos in the show. And, of course, saying it once is never enough.

In quoting from the New York Times’ 1619 Project, the curators — and they’re musicians, not historians — peddle the lie that “American revolutionaries were also fighting to protect their financial interests, particularly the profit generated by the labor of enslaved people.” That’s a howler, as even the Times was forced to admit after historians challenged them on the hokum. We read lots about America’s “violent origins,” slavery in Vermont, “women of privilege” who play the piano in the parlor, to the point where I stopped thinking of dulcimers and autoharps and started contemplating molasses poured thick, very thick. The show includes an Estey folding organ made in the 1940s in Brattleboro. It’s described as “sonic colonialism” because it was made for traveling, and troops in Vietnam used it to entertain themselves.

Pithy but gratuitous. Sometimes a folding organ is just a folding organ.

Vermont’s Vermont, and a show called “Vermont Utopia” has many idiosyncratic moments. It’s work about what Vermont should look like in the future, envisioned by living artists. “Small is best” sums it up, and I can’t disagree with that.

Southwestern Vermont is part of an art-rich stamp-size area that includes Mass MoCA, the Clark, Williams, and the New York artist havens in northern Columbia County and in Washington County. The show reflects the positive art energy here. The Bennington Museum postponed a needed and promising show on Frost and Vermont. Frost lived near the museum in the 1920s. He’s one of America’s best poets, and his work draws from Vermont’s landscape and eccentric lifestyle. The show is powered by original research.

The Bennington Museum runs on a tiny budget and is an eternal start-up. It’s independent and entrepreneurial. Pandemic or no, it’s doing original, good work.

When I looked at the Clark’s website, I was astonished to read yet another revolting panegyric to Black Lives Matter. Forget about the opioid crisis at its front door, rural poverty, or, going further afield, the thousands of black people killed by other black people in urban gang violence. The Clark wants “to honor the legacy” of fentanyl addict, drug pusher, and violent ex-con George Floyd. It deplores the “systemic racism” behind the higher death rates from coronavirus for people of color. “We have not done enough,” it confesses, on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, though almost the entire staff and all the curators are women. “We cannot look away from the truth of the nation’s simmering bigotry.”

Where to begin? Black Lives Matter is more than a slogan. It’s an organization as well as a brand. It’s also an anti-Semitic hate group and a racial outrage racket. BLM and the mostly peaceful protesters it goads are mostly responsible for a summer of looting and violence affecting poor neighborhoods. People with eyes, ears, and inquiring minds are starting to wonder whether it’s a money-laundering operation. No one knows, including its affiliates, how it spends its copious corporate, individual, and foundation gifts.

The Clark’s statement seems naïve as well as opportunistic. People there can think whatever they like — it’s a free country — but, please, don’t hijack the institution to push the slander that the country’s in thrall of the KKK. “Systemic racism” is a cliché. I haven’t heard a definition of it that can’t be torpedoed by facts.

No one at the Clark is an authority on law enforcement, criminal justice, or public health. The director’s not even an American. He’s French. Floyd’s death is the subject of a murder trial. . . . Remember things like trials? Until then, I wish the Clark would cut the pious, weepy, bull€@#t and keep the focus on art, which is the Clark’s only expertise.

No one was in the museum, but lots of people were walking on the Clark’s network of good trails leading up to the pretty hill behind the museum. From the top, there are beautiful views of the mountains. Ground/work is the Clark’s first show of outdoor, site-specific sculpture on its pastoral 140-acre grounds. I liked it. It’s not great, and it seems the race or gender of the artist was as key as the art. Still, it’s a positive move for the Clark. Outdoor sculpture suits the place, as it does Glenstone, the new museum in the Washington suburbs.

The show, which runs for a year, features the work of six artists. Eva LeWitt’s colorful resin towers are very contemporary totem poles. I first thought of the pencil skyscrapers that will eventually be ubiquitous in Manhattan. Her sculptures reference them, but in setting them against the Berkshire hills, she shows how puny the work of humankind is and how true it is that nature always has the last word. Kelly Akashi’s A Device to See the World Twice is a viewing lens aimed at the thick woods. Jennie C. Jones built a big aeolian harp attached to one of the walls of the Clark building. It’s called These Mournful Shores. Jones said it suggests the Middle Passage. You’d have to be a mind reader, and one with immense imagination, to get this, but the sound of the harp is nice.

The best sculpture is Nairy Baghramian’s Knee and Elbow, a marble and steel take on two body joints. She’s an Iranian artist I didn’t know. Knees and elbows help us move, but her versions are pitted to suggest wear and tear, and, set on top of one of the Clark’s hills in a meadow, they suggest repose as well as the tension (our joints teach us) between durability and vulnerability.

The Clark has a brand, and one element of its brand is the terminus of its collection, which is, more or less, 1900. It’s a boutique collection of Impressionists, Homer, Old Masters, and antique English silver set in a sumptuous but domestic-scale marble temple. Most contemporary art undermines the brand. Besides, Mass MoCA and the Williams College Museum of Art focus on living artists. The Clark’s doing lots of contemporary art shows, and I ask, “What’s the point?” But its outdoor sculpture show looks good. I hope it does more.

The Clark landscaped its grounds when it did its massive renovation and addition a few years ago, and the results are the best part of this $150 million project, which left the Clark nearly $80 million in debt. I wrote about its finances two years ago. This won me no friends. I worked at the Clark as a curator for years and went to Williams. I had a great experience at both, but now I’m an art critic. Like any good journalist, I go where the story is. These days, I look at most things as potential subject matter and everything with a gimlet eye.

The landscaping united the Clark’s property in back, which was woods and cow pasture, with the formal grounds of the museum, eliminating a ragtag, definitely back-of-house look that emphasized the old conservation lab and its smokestack, the parking lot, and the ha-ha keeping the cows out. The new trails are inviting and widely used. A big, new reflecting pond and patio are sublime when the weather is nice, but, here, that’s only for a short slice of the year.

Walking from the parking lot to the museum, the sidewalk cleaving to a long, austere granite wall, I thought about how much I loathe the $150 million in new buildings added to the Clark.

They are ten years old now and still look like a suburban office park — antiseptic, low-slung, and controlling. Tadeo Ando designed the minimalist addition to the Clark’s Greek-temple-style, 1955 building. The addition has some exhibition space, but it’s mostly given over to an admissions area, an expansive shop, a restaurant, a donor wall, and a massive loading dock, all peripheral to the art lover’s experience. Ando designed a pricey $30 million art-conservation lab at the top of the Clark’s hill. There’s good exhibition space there, which the Clark opens during the summer only.

The Conforti Pavilion, a big exhibition space by the museum entrance, was closed. I looked through the glass doors. This airy space is prime real estate. I saw a great French wrought-iron show there last year. It’s used now as a staging area for what looks like a mass mailing. Boxes sit on top of folding tables. Are they fake ballots for the Georgia runoffs? Who knows. I know there’s no art there, and I know it’s the first thing the visitor sees when entering the museum.

Downstairs, the big temporary-exhibition area, also new, is also empty. It’s not good space, for starters. It’s below ground, which is a downer anywhere. Subterranean art space can work in a city, where we expect to be underground, but it’s not ideal. In the country, it’s a mood mauler.

Space for traveling shows should ideally exist as close to the permanent collection as possible, and this space is as far from the permanent collection as possible. It’s a philosophical point. At the heart of a museum is the permanent collection. Temporary shows don’t have to feature objects from the collection, though that’s desirable, but they need to complement the collection. They have to draw something from the collection we haven’t seen, to give the collection a new spin. At the Clark, this is a challenge. The collection and the Clark’s prime space for temporary loan shows are barely in the same town.

Alas, these aren’t the most relevant observations since these galleries are empty and dark. So, in that new building, which cost tens of millions of dollars, all the dedicated art space was empty. The admissions desk and shop were open. The restaurant was closed. There’s a big, transitional hallway that doubles as a donor wall. There were only two works of art, both on random walls and both textile wall sculptures by the Mexican artist Pia Camel. They’re lovely. They look like Frank Stella’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, and we’re told that they “highlight questions of the body, gender, and identity,” though these questions, much less their answers, are inscrutable to me after looking at the objects.

In the Clark’s Brutalist 1973 building, there was a temporary exhibition of French drawings the Clark recently got as a gift. They’re modest drawings, mostly by second- and third-tier artists such as the Flandrins, Pils, Raffaeli, and Cabanal. There were a couple of Degas squiggles but nothing of the quality that the Clark already owns.

If I were a trustee, I wouldn’t exactly be mortified or embarrassed, but I’d definitely give them the hairy eyeball. Where’s the initiative? What are the curators doing? The Clark reopened in July after an unprecedented lockdown. Though COVID is rare in rural Berkshire County, Massachusetts as a whole was hit hard. People were depressed, and still are. They need uplift. What they get is a car running on empty.

The Clark had already postponed its big summer show. Why not do something clever and fun with the unused space? The Clark owns dazzling, big lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, Chéret, and Bonnard. Put them up for people to enjoy. Rather than leave swaths of gallery space empty, use it for art that’s usually hidden. Surprise people and buoy them. Or do a pop-up exhibition of the Clark’s collection of work by Degas. It owns 250 of them, in all media. Or borrow 20 or so great American landscapes from some of New England’s college museums, all of which are closed to the public. The Clark borrowed a showy Thomas Cole landscape from the Denver Art Museum in exchange for paintings it lent to a Denver show. Do something big, splashy, and exciting with it. The outdoor sculpture show is nice, but there are only six things, and nothing is truly fabulous.

Whatever you do, don’t leave your showcase new building empty. That’s an abuse of philanthropy.

The Clark’s American silver and glass galleries are lovely and show the Clark at its very best. They’re in what was for many years the Clark’s temporary exhibition space, suitably a few steps from the permanent collection. It wasn’t ideal space, but no one complained about it. Now, at least, a scholar, casual art lover, or total neophyte can walk through the silver and glass galleries and find plenty to learn and to enjoy. The Clark’s brand is that it can do both.

The white temple, the Clark’s original building, almost never changes, and constancy is a good thing. The Clark renovated the building, opened in 1955, using Annabelle Selldorf as an architect. It was a radical but tasteful and sensitive redo. She and the curators resolved some of the building’s odd features, making proper, distinct galleries out of awkwardly and aimlessly wide and long corridors. The building is now entered from the back, from the Ando addition. The entrance to the 1955 building is elegant. Selldorf fashioned it from the old loading dock and the remnants of Sterling and Francine Clark’s old apartment — they lived in the museum for a time right after it was built.

Since the Ando building has almost no art to see, it’s a quarter-mile walk from the parking lot, down the long, walled sidewalk, through the visitor-services space, through the shop, along the donor wall, through an enclosed patio, and, finally, breathless, to a gallery filled with Homers.

The Clark’s Renoir room is the old museum’s star gallery. It’s the biggest space, in the center of the museum, capped by an elegant glass ceiling. How can a gallery filled with the most scrumptious, luscious Renoirs, Monets, and Pissarros seem cold? Yet it does. An entire long wall of Renoirs is installed in a rigid Modernist style, the pictures spaced evenly so they look like they’re on an assembly line when they should be grouped in threes or with some double hangs to relieve what looks like a vast, monotonous space. Painting the decorated cornices and the walls the same lavender color is a mistake. The space cries for sofas instead of austere benches. Restoring the palace-sized carpet that was there for 40 years would soften the gallery, which now has a hard, commercial, New York feel.

Other than these few quibbles, the place looks great. The Clark, in my opinion, is the finest small museum in the country. It’s both splendid and intimate, and almost everything is “the best of its kind,” as Sterling Clark said. The Clarks had strong opinions about art and shopped for art without rest, giving the collection a focused quality and its idiosyncratic look.

The museum’s exhibitions have been religiously hit or miss the last few years. Once, the Clark perfected a formula for the popular and pleasing yet academically rigorous exhibition. It lost its way, possibly because of fatigue and upset during an endless, byzantine construction project.

It did lots of weak treasures shows. A Van Gogh show was a leisurely survey without much punch and a missed chance to do something original. A big show on Picasso and Degas thrilled only because the loans were so good. Both artists produced thousands of works, so anyone could cherry-pick among them to make any point. I could argue that they were soldiers together during the Trojan War. The oeuvre of each is so vast and various. That the two had a pronounced synergy isn’t a proposition that impresses or matters. A show on women artists in Paris in the late 19th century wasn’t dreadful but a degree or two from it, both tiresome and mediocre. An exhibition on Monet and Ellsworth Kelly was one of the worst shows I’ve seen, ever.

Then there were bracing, incisive, lovely shows on Pissarro, late Renoir, and Alma-Tadema furniture. Next year, the Clark’s doing a retrospective of the work of the Norwegian painter Nicolai Astrup (1880–1928). I think it will be a big success. He’s an artist no one outside Norway knows, with an intense, startling vision. He is a high-energy artist and will be an aesthetic jolt for a place that now seems to have lost its stride.