An Art Destination in Birmingham

From its best-in-the-country collection of Wedgwood pottery to its American art, the Birmingham Museum rewards a visit.

L ast month I spent two days on an art trip in Alabama, my first time there. I wish I’d explored more but was due in Nashville for a wedding, so I got to only Huntsville and Birmingham. I’ve written about the Huntsville Museum of Art, a grounding place to look at art in a city known for space exploration and missile development. The museum isn’t big and, having opened in 1970, isn’t old, either.

I spent an afternoon at the Birmingham Museum of Art, another not-very-old museum. It opened in 1951 in five galleries in the new City Hall. As with most places outside the Northeast and Chicago, wealth, taste, and worldliness, a scarce combination anywhere, came late to the South, so museums started late. It’s impressive and definitely a place to visit.

Birmingham itself is a creature of the 1870s and a place purpose-built as a steel town, a rail hub, and, before long, the South’s Pittsburgh or, more precisely, the American Birmingham, named for Britain’s industrial giant. The city had an arts club to keep wives busy, but it wasn’t until after the Second World War that movers and shakers got serious about culture. I wrote about this phenomenon when I profiled the High Museum in Atlanta.

New places with new money might have missed the Rembrandts and Titians that, say, Boston and New York got, but the Birmingham Museum does well in other ways. Insularity breeds eccentricity, and eccentricity obsession. I knew about the museum’s collection of Wedgwood pottery. It’s the best in the country and, aside from the Wedgwood company, now part of a Finnish conglomerate, the best in the world. Josiah Wedgwood industrialized pottery, and while we can quibble about what’s the world’s oldest profession, potters are in the mix.

Dwight and Lucille Beeson, from Birmingham and with money from his family insurance business, collected the very best Wedgwood and gave it to the museum. Stoke-on-Trent is 40 miles from England’s Birmingham and in the Midlands’ industrial heart. That might have appealed to the Beesons, but it’s also true that gracious, elegant dining and hospitality are essential to southern living. Vermonters are genuinely nice, but no one’s rich, and we focus on staying warm. It’s still a frontier culture.

Wedgwood is about more than dining. The company made sculpture, too. Britannia Triumphant from around 1800 is Wedgwood at its more precocious, at least technically. It depicts Britannia, drawing from Roman models of Minerva, stomping on a figure representing France, in itself a reason to love the thing. It’s made from clay and fired, so it would have been easy for the delicate details to go wrong.

The Beesons, who also gave millions to Christian schools in Alabama, focused on early Wedgwood, almost all from Josiah Wedgwood’s era. Their collection came to the museum in the ’70s. In 2008, the museum got the Buten collection of Wedgwood, an encyclopedic group of 8,000 objects spanning the company’s history. The Buten Wedgwood Museum in Merion, Pa., on the Main Line near Philadelphia, was one of the weirdest museums I’ve visited, with Wedgwood to the rafters in an old pile not far from the original Barnes Collection. When it ran out of money, the trustees, with no connection to Alabama, gave the art to Birmingham since, with the Beeson things already there, their objects would have a happy home.

I didn’t spend my day looking at Wedgwood, but I could have merrily done it. Birmingham has the best as well as great silver and furniture.

I always visit the American galleries since that’s my field, officially, and I usually get plenty of surprises. One was The Barricade by George Bellows, done in 1918 and one of his World War I atrocity scenes. The museum bought it in 1990 when Bellows’s post–Ashcan School work, which means after, say, 1915, was out of style. I think Bellows, who loved the texture of paint, is a first-rate painter, but around 1915 his work loses its flash and sparkle. He’s governed less by viscous paint and more by a grid. His paintings go static.

That’s the old art-history take. Late Bellows — he died in 1924 of a burst appendix — can be freaky-funky. The Barricade depicts Belgian resistance to German invasion, but what Belgian, either Flemish or Walloon, strips first? Where do you hide the stilettos, the pots filled with boiling oil, a can of pepper spray, those last lines of defense? The picture’s out of this world and fantastic.

It’s a hothouse, no, a bathhouse nude. It’s an anchor work in the gallery and makes the visitor want to stay. It’s very Tallulah Bankhead, who was from Jasper, Ala., a short drive from Birmingham. The actress’s father was the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the late 1930s. The museum owns the Sargent portrait of Helen Vincent, who looks like Tallulah. After my visit, I spoke mezzo-basso for two days.

A few steps away is Albert Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley from 1865. It’s eight feet wide and a dusk scene. Early evening suits Bierstadt well. In full sunlight he’s too hokey. Uranus Crosby paid $20,000 for it when he bought it for his opera house in Chicago. Plucked from the wall moments before the 1871 fire destroyed the theater, the picture was bought by an old lady from Birmingham for $300. She gave it to the Birmingham library, which gave it to the museum. There’s Asher B. Durand’s big scene from 1845 of the arrest of Major André, whose smuggled secrets and bribes were tucked in his shoes, unlike Hunter Biden, who kept records of such things on his laptop.

All of these very good things have a dash of Grand Guignol that I love and often find in southern museums.

I enjoy seeing what museums are collecting from living artists since, unless the museum’s rich, the artists are local. Sometimes they’re famous but were once local and want their work represented at their hometown museum. School of Beauty, School of Culture by Kerry James Marshall is there. Marshall is from Birmingham. It’s a fun, operatic picture by an artist I like.

Southern museums couldn’t and wouldn’t acquire the work of black artists during the Jim Crow era. There’s a lot of catching up to do. The Birmingham Museum needs to focus on Alabama artists. Marshall’s great, but he’s contemporary. There’s lots of history to recover. This is something the National Endowment for the Arts and the big foundations can finance. They can help museums like Birmingham acquire and interpret this missing work.

I don’t know whether Birmingham was the most segregated place in the country, our apartheid central, but it was a place where social, economic, and political worlds were organized by race. In those times, Tuesday at the museum was “Negro Day” and the only day blacks could come. The 1963 church bombing and Bull Connor are notorious.

The museum is owned by the City of Birmingham and gets half of its $6.8 million budget from City Hall. It has a board, and that’s where fiduciary duties live, but it’s appointed by the city. Birmingham’s population is about 70 percent African American and, since 1960, has plunged by about 40 percent. The steel industry still exists, but Birmingham is now more a banking, high-tech, and health-care economy.

City funding and ownership are among the least ideal models for art museums, but the Birmingham Museum weathers it well. I think the politicians understand the value that unfettered culture brings. This is a function, in part, of the museum’s leadership. I met the director, Graham Boettcher, when he was a student at Yale, majoring in German, not art history. I was teaching there and finishing my dissertation. He didn’t go directly to an art-history specialty but did one or two German things before getting his M.A. in art history at the University of Washington, a school I like, and his Ph.D. in art history at Yale.

He and I were both inspired by Christopher Wood, the German Renaissance professor at Yale. I took Chris Wood’s Dürer seminar and his German art-history methodology class when he was a new professor, younger than I. He had both sparkle and substance. If you know your Dürer, you know enough, let’s say, to live a noble life. The Germans invented a type of art history based on classification, which is one way to look at art and superior to what passes as art history pushed by race pimps.

Boettcher came to the Birmingham Museum 16 years ago as a curatorial associate fresh from graduate school and stayed, moving from there to become American art curator, chief curator, and, in 2017, director. He knows the museum, obviously, but also navigates well. Off and on, I was recruited for museum directorships in the South but would never touch it. I’m a lifelong New Englander, which is to say I’m more Roundhead than Cavalier. Culturally, I’d put my foot wrong and not even realize it.

The museum’s free, as all museums should be. I saw a top-notch exhibition when I was there of work by Manjari Sharma, an Indian artist who stages and then photographs scenes from the world of Hindu gods. The exhibition and book draw from the museum’s collection and were done by its Asian art curator. I learned so much. Visually, it’s Bollywood comes to Birmingham.

One surprise, given the museum’s only 70 years old, is its breadth. From its start, the museum worked to become encyclopedic. I loved its collection of ceramics from Vietnam, again, the best in the country. The museum hired Sherman Lee, the great Asian art scholar and museum virtuoso, to advise it on buying the best things in a niche where prices were affordable.

The building’s from 1959, with lots of additions and a big renovation in 1993 by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Barnes was the go-to safe pair of hands for museum architecture in his day, but he gives a dated, thinned postmodern look I’ve never liked. I was at the museum only for part of an afternoon but never knew quite where I was, a function of looking at art but also of lots of additions making for architectural incoherence. The highway is directly in back of the museum, rising hundreds of feet above it. That was unsettling, though convenient. The museum’s in the heart of the city.

I enjoyed my visit. Birmingham has a fine museum with good leadership and dash.