A Crash Course in Medieval Armor at Nashville’s Frist Museum

The museum, with no collection of its own, wins by focusing on variety in a stellar Art Deco setting.

P lanning my visit to Nashville, Huntsville, Birmingham, and points in between began with a wedding invitation. Spencer Klavan, one of the two grooms, has an inspiring, erudite podcast, Young Heretics. It’s about the Western literary canon from Herodotus and Plato to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Caesar’s own account of hopping the Rubicon in his “civil war,” to T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis. I think I’ve listened to all 115 episodes so far.

He lives in Nashville with his now-husband, who works for the Daily Wire, the media company based there. I enjoy going to weddings. His was lovely.

One of my goals in these weekly scribbles is covering art in all 50 states. We live in a big, great country with plenty of great art and scholarship happening, cue the gasps and convulsions, between the Acela Corridor and Los Angeles. The places in between are less likely to live in an echo chamber.

I made sure I went to the Frist Museum. It’s Nashville’s unusual, enjoyable civic art museum. It’s the brainchild of Thomas F. Frist Jr., co-founder of hospital conglomerate HCA Healthcare. Last year marked its 20th anniversary, so it’s a new place.

Nashville is a big, important city with history, wealth, universities, and a cultured ruling class, but it didn’t have a civic museum until the Frist opened in 2001. It’s a Kunsthalle, both German and English for a museum that doesn’t collect but, rather, displays and, sometimes, develops temporary loan exhibitions. As its core business, it offers diversity in media, historical periods, and styles.

They’re rare in America. Our museum system exists through private philanthropy. Civic egotism pulls movers and shakers toward collecting. Locals rightly take pride in a good museum. “Our museum owns” — add “Titian,” “Whistler,” “Pollock,” or any one of a hundred big names — is a statement of pride and a sign of good taste on the part of the civic whole.

Why not in Nashville? Memphis and Knoxville, after all, have good museums with collections, with the Brooks Museum in Memphis having especially nice things.

Nashville might not have an encyclopedic big-city museum like those in, say, St. Louis, Fort Worth, or San Francisco. What it does have is Cheekwood, a nice museum strong in decorative arts and with a botanical garden; the Tennessee State Museum, which owns art but is mostly a history museum; and the Parthenon, with its small American-paintings collection.

Fisk University, a historically black school in Nashville, owns part of Alfred Stieglitz’s collection of Modernist art through a 1949 gift by Georgia O’Keeffe. Fisk notoriously tried to liquidate the art about 20 years ago to save itself from dissolution. Howls were justifiably loud. That’s old news now that the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art bought a 50 percent share of the Fisk trove of work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin. Fisk and Crystal Bridges share the art.

Together, these places create a critical mass of hometown art for people in this part of Tennessee to call their own. Each of these museums, though, had modest space for big loan shows. The Frist meets this need.

Though I was a curator and director at museums with distinguished collections, I think this is more liberating than odd. The Frist has a broad, community-enrichment mission “to inspire people through art to look at the world in new ways.” That’s what they do, and they do it well.

The Frist building is gorgeous and an unusual case of landmark reuse. It was built in 1933–34 as Nashville’s main post office and done in peak, gleaming Art Deco style. Art Deco can be flashy — think Fred and Ginger movies — but it’s urbane and austere, too. Along with gleaming surfaces, it can come stripped of ornament. The Frist’s home is more streamlined than impoverished.

The look suggests power and speed, good since it was a post office, delivered with elegance, also good since the building is on Nashville’s high-end drag, Broadway, and was a point of pride for a city walloped by the Depression. Nashville hadn’t become Music City yet. In the ’30s, it was known as the Athens of the South for its universities but also the Wall Street of the South for its banks and brokerage houses.

By the late ’80s, the post office had outgrown the space. The new Frist turned the sorting rooms into spacious, high-ceiling galleries and the long public spaces into an impressive atrium, courtyard, and shop space. There’s still a post-office branch tucked in the innards. In the ’80s and ’90s, the city helped pay for the repurposing, and it now owns the building, leasing it to the Frist for $1 a year. The Frist Foundation both stewarded the project and established the endowment, now $57 million, to run the place. It’s 125,000 square feet.

It’s handsome. The long courtyard is a silky, sleek space. Every inch was renovated and restored, with passages of black and metallic surfaces. After 20 years, it looks good. I like seeing partnerships that become long-standing collaborations in which everyone does well. The Frist is a marquee draw downtown, so the city’s invested in its success. As a culture center, the Frist is a part of Nashville’s boom not only in building but in new people moving there. New businesses want to come to cultured places.

There were two big exhibitions on view. Knights in Armor is a 100-object look at armor in the context of knighthood. It’s from the Stibbert Museum in Florence. Light, Space, Surface is an exhibition of light art from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Stibbert Museum is on the hill of Montughi, which is next to Fiesole in the heights above Florence. I’ve visited once. It’s a villa museum displaying the collection of Frederick Stibbert (1838–1906), an eccentric English millionaire expat who bought enough arms and armor to outfit Guelphs and Ghibellines, with enough left for the Pazzis and Medicis.

The house is a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. Stibbert collected European and Japanese armor but also Rococo furniture, Islamic tiles, and decent 15th- and 16th-century Florentine painting. I remember the cavalcade of full-length-armor figures greeting visitors, a big group of Samurai suits of armor, and Stibbert’s own watercolors, which show talent. Queen Victoria knew him — Stibbert’s grandfather grew rich as governor of Bengal — and visited him at his villa during her last Tuscan vacation. A high honor under any circumstances but more so since Stibbert’s English father and Florentine mother never married.

I liked the exhibition. I’m not sure about the quality of the objects. Stibbert commissioned high-end reproductions of distinguished armor, and some of these are on view. I’ve written about armor at art fairs and consider it refined metalwork whose casting, engraving, and chasing have high, middling, and low standards. The best makers produce art of the same caliber as Lamerie’s or Storr’s silver. Armor is high-end sculpture for a disputatious world.

When I visit an exhibition, I read every label. This is sometimes a drag, as in the Whitney’s Jasper Johns retrospective, for which I read 250 labels. Many interpreted redundant art that wasn’t good from the get-go. Or the Met’s Homer exhibition, which I reviewed last week — there, the art was the best. It was the eye-rollingly bad art history that vexed. Knights in Armor is a model in clarity. A serious, thorough, visitor-friendly mind produced them, a teacher’s mind.

The exhibition first proposes that knights exhale “an air of danger and mystique.” It evokes “the knight in shining armor,” a trope that runs from the eleventh-century epic poem the Song of Roland to Camelot to the video game Hollow Knight. And then there’s knightly virtue. Courtesy, courage, honor, and fidelity make the knight chivalrous. We learn that Charlemagne first developed an elite cavalry. From there, knighthood evolved into a branch of the aristocracy. Armor was often beautifully made — at its best it’s high art — and used not only in wartime but in jousts and tournaments. We don’t exactly want to go back in time. There was the bubonic plague, so today’s mask kooks would be happy, but no one else would. The Frist excels in evoking a mood and a spirit.

It’s a survey show of European armor. I learned about armor for men and for horses with easy-to-comprehend graphics and clear examples. In a spacious gallery, we see the big picture. Three mannequins of knight and horse fully armored look grand. We’re not thinking about the Tin Man. I look at the engraving, which I know best, but then there’s imagining the weight and heat. Starting in the 16th century, makers etched metal for subtler, more fluid lines.

With the introduction of guns, warfare changed. Armor didn’t stop a bullet. It became ceremonial, which made it more elaborate. The show explains what jousts and tournaments were. Jousts involved two contestants and were like prize fights. Tournaments involved more pairs, could last a couple of days, and were usually part of a celebration. Swords became ceremonial, fashion accessories, mostly. Fencing became a sport. The Casanovas of the day had to battle irate husbands if caught in flagrante, so rapiers sometimes were handy to have.

It’s an entirely satisfying, well-done show. There are labels for children, too.

Light, Space, Surface has good work by James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and a dozen other Los Angeles–based artists using light as a material or hyper-polished surfaces. I think the Frist means well in showing this work, and LACMA has the best, but Turrell needs a total environment and scale to be effective, which the Frist can’t provide. Turrell’s work is about drama and immersion. Modest-sized things in a gallery space shared with works by other artists seem wimpy.

I don’t like treasures shows — the “best of the XYZ Museum of Art.” I like a show with meat. A treasures show from a lofty place like the Louvre can be synthetic and weak unless it sends the very best things, and then we need a good, new, scholarly twist. The Stibbert show works because it’s about the history of armor and knighthood. The Frist, to its great credit, stays clear of highlight shows. I looked at its exhibition schedule over the past ten years. It’s done exhibitions on medieval Bologna, Mandala sand painting, Newcomb pottery, Italian post-war fashion, Art Deco cars, and Tina Barney. It’s a balanced exhibition program.

Nothing’s more deadly than what I call an agenda curator or agenda director. These creatures, myopic, selfish, and insecure, want to do only shows on subjects that orbit their narrow academic concentrations. The Frist seems to understand that variety is the spice of life.

Martin ArtQuest gallery, which opened with the museum in 2001, is a copious space with a hands-on component, and it’s not for children only. It’s a point of pride for the Frist, since it’s one of the first truly sophisticated immersive art spaces.

I liked the space teaching us through lifting weights how heavy armor is. Starting with a piece of armor, say, the cuirass or a gauntlet or the helmet, a flexible weight we can lift tells us how much it weighs. “Throwing down the gauntlet” might break your foot. Pajama Boy, that icon of aborted, lefty manhood, would collapse in a yipping puddle.

I loved the space. Far from an afterthought, it’s part of the museum’s curatorial vision.

Seth Feman is the new executive director. He succeeded Susan Edwards this year. She was the director since 2004. Feman, who grew up in Nashville, comes from the very nice Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va., where he was the curator of photography and the head of the curatorial department. Nothing succeeds like success. He has done well at the Chrysler and is now at a place with a mission that works.