Ethel Waters in Oil and Sea Critters in Silver, Starring at the Huntsville Museum of Art

It’s a relatively young museum but central to Huntsville culture.

T his week we’ll jump from Maine to Alabama, bookends to the Appalachian Mountains. While planning for a wedding trip to Nashville, I looked at a map, saw Alabama, and decided to visit the art museums in Huntsville and Birmingham. I’d never been to Alabama, so this was a treat.

One of my goals in writing my weekly column is, ultimately, to cover art stories in all 50 states. I believe that no art critic has ever done this. We live in a big, creative country with good art and museums everywhere. I also believe, with this story on the nice Huntsville Museum of Art, I’ve done reports from 20 states. Will I get to Hawaii? That’s the ultimate two-bus-fare trips from ye olde Arlington in Vermont. We can dream, can’t we? By the time I get there, I’ll need a surfboard equipped with a walker.

Huntsville is a high-tech center for missile development with an ingratiating art museum, lovely antebellum neighborhoods, and a tidy look I’d expect from a place heavy on engineers. Nothing keeps mischief-makers in line better than a handy supply of missiles. I’m first in line when Huntsville rolls out a pocket-launched model. Evildoers, beware that fateful moment.

The museum’s located in Big Spring Park, which is not only in the heart of Huntsville but where the place was settled in 1805 because of munificent supplies of fresh water. Later, a canal connected Huntsville from Big Spring to the Tennessee River and vastly facilitated its cotton sales.

Sharing the park with the museum is the Von Braun Center, the city’s performing-arts venue. The German Wernher von Braun, the original rocket scientist, was a Nazi, the brains behind the V-2 rocket, and a visionary in space travel. He was also the biggest techno catch that Americans made as the war drew to a close.

After a spot of de-Nazification, von Braun was sent to El Paso and then to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Redstone initially produced chemical weapons, legal to produce and use if deployed against us first, and it moved to missile technology starting in the ’50s. Von Braun and his team set the stage for orbiting satellites, ICBM defense, the Saturn rockets, and the space shuttle. The Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville.

I suspect that art was the stuff of ladies’ clubs and not a priority, even as the missile business put the economy on liftoff and brought new people to town. The newbies, the guys with pocket protectors, weren’t reading Art in America. The Huntsville Museum of Art dates only to 1970. Its building, which I like a lot, opened in 1998, with an addition in the back in 2010.

The permanent collection is mostly American. As in many museums in the South, decorative arts, especially craft, are important. There’s a permanent collection gallery for glass from the Studio Glass Movement. I enjoyed it. Harvey Littleton, Marvin Lipofsky, and Dale Chihuly are post-war pioneers in art-school education on glass-making. Good work by them and their circle celebrates technical prowess and high style.

The permanent collection isn’t online. This is an essential step that a rich Huntsville space scientist should easily understand and embrace. Digitization means blastoff time for use of the collection by teachers and students.

I love the gallery of Buccellati silver. A dozen big, persuasive silver sculptures of animals by the once-Italian, now Paris-based maker wasn’t something I expected to see, but that’s the best thing about civic museums outside the marquee cities. Huntsville, let’s face it, missed the moment when Old Masters and Impressionists were cheap and plentiful.

So did hundreds of other cities, mostly in the South and mountain states. Art museums there are newer, as are the big money, the itch to collect, and the right contacts. This means we don’t often see a Tintoretto so stupendous that a Methodist like me is moved for a moment to believe Saint-This-or-That will, one of these days, add a couple of zeros to my checking-account balance. Or a Monet so gauzy, so rich in pastel color, I imagine Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, teens in love and splendid in the grass.

“Right place, right time” usually dictates what kind of museum you get. What it does mean is that very good but idiosyncratic art such as the Buccellati sculpture, collected by a determined local, gets star billing. It’s very Palm Beach, so it’s striking to see it in Huntsville, but the flamingo, giraffe, and marine-critter centerpiece are the best of their kind. Craftsmanship is superb. The one change I’d make would be to move a couple of the cases out from the wall and closer to the center of the gallery. They’re meant to be seen in the round.

The museum also owns a group of John James Audubon’s large-scale prints from The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Audubon did more than birds. Toward the end of his life, he tackled four-legged critters who didn’t lay eggs. They’ve got the look of the wild.

This brings me to one of my pet issues, which I haven’t indulged in a while. When Dr. Fauci-the-Fraud and his ilk of third-rate public-health lifers worked overtime to keep culture closed, this seemed less timely, but I’m an ardent believer in collection sharing. While Dr. Malpractice hogged TV time, his disciples — some cynical, some berserk, some merely stupid — padlocked museums and theaters in their entirety. Collection sharing seemed irrelevant, so I haven’t written about it since the days before the Covid mass hysteria.

Big legacy museums such as the Met, the MFA in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with thousands of great objects locked unseen in their vaults, need to make long-term loans to places such as Huntsville. Not three-month loan shows extorting fees that enrich bloated plutocrats, but long-term, free loans so imbued with a share-the-wealth spirit that even the likes of Huey Long would pine for Pointillism. Places like the Huntsville Museum, which wasn’t around even for the bounty of the Kress Collection of Old Masters, would benefit, as would its community of half a million people.

I’d suggest incentives, too. Don’t want to share? How about dinged accreditation for the biggest hoarders as well as reduced eligibility for the federal art indemnity; immunity from seizure; NEA, NEH, and IMLS grants; and federal tax deductions for gifts of art? The Met, as an example, is the biggest beneficiary of the federal law exempting charity from taxes. Every gift of cash and art, tax-exempt, makes everyone’s taxes a little higher in Huntsville, Nashville, Atlanta, and Birmingham, just to note four cities in the South I visited this summer. It’s been thus since the start of the income tax. Send some oil-on-canvas lovin’ their way. The Met owns 1,500 works by Picasso. It can part with a few.

In a supreme case of serendipity, the Huntsville Museum owns Luigi Lucioni’s portrait of Ethel Waters, which I saw in July when I reviewed the Lucioni retrospective at the Shelburne Museum. It’s a splendid painting from 1939. “Stormy Weather” was her song long before it became Lena Horne’s.

Waters, already a famous blues singer and Broadway star, hadn’t done “Cabin in the Sky” yet, but she was still big. Lucioni posed her before a green stage curtain. She’s got presence and character, with a touch of modesty, even defensiveness, in her folded arms. Lucioni, then an established portraitist, still-life painter, and social whirl in New York, met Waters through Carl van Vechten, the culture critic and photographer.

They became fast friends. Lucioni painted her portrait, on a whim rather than as a commission, though Waters eventually bought it from him. After a few years she gave it to Grady Wilson, the evangelist who worked with Billy Graham on his nationwide preaching crusades. Waters appeared with Graham off and on. The painting disappeared into the netherworld called “private collection.”

Christopher Madkour, the director of the Huntsville Museum, is from Manchester in southwestern Vermont. He knew Lucioni, who spent his summers in Manchester from the ’40s until his death in 1988. Madkour directed the Southern Vermont Arts Center, where Lucioni, regarded as local, is always a topic of interest. Madkour was also Gloria Vanderbilt’s personal curator. Vanderbilt, Lucioni, and Waters weren’t part of the same social circle but orbited Lincoln Kirstein, New York’s premier avant-garde networker and tastemaker from the ’30s into the early ’60s.

The best directors are obsessive acquirers. Once in Huntsville, with a little detective work, Madkour tracked Wilson to Charlotte in North Carolina, but he was dead. There was an elderly widow. After messages left on an answering machine and letters went unreturned, Madkour assumed he’d come up empty. Her daughter finally called. Yes, they had the painting still but had just consigned it to Sotheby’s. Madkour begged for time to raise the money to buy it. The family and Sotheby’s agreed. All’s well that ends well. The locals stepped up, and the painting is in Huntsville.

There are two exhibitions of paintings from the museum’s permanent collection on view. All the artists are women. I don’t like identity-themed exhibitions unless there’s some other hook, but that’s neither here nor there. The Ethel Waters portrait is so good that it’ll blow most of what I saw in these two galleries to smithereens, hit by an aesthetic V-2 rocket. The Lucioni portrait, a great acquisition, raises the bar. That’s a good thing.

There’s lots happening at the museum. When I was there, a nice Dorothea Lange exhibition was on view. Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, from 1940, was there as well as her biggest hits from the Depression. I thought it was smart for the museum to interpret the entire Lange. There’s good work from the ’50s as well as a selection of photographs by artists in her circle such as Michael Disfarmer. A Beautiful Mess: Weavers and Knotters of the Vanguard, which is on view until early October, is a loan show of twisted, tied, and braided art made from not only yarn but rope, wire, and clay. I’m a huge fan of what used to be called fiber art and, before that, textile art. I enjoyed it. Textile artists used to be entirely women, and this exhibition is all women, but don’t men make this art, too?

Every year, the Huntsville Photographic Society organizes an exhibition of the best work by its members. It’s getting close to its 70th anniversary of promoting the art and science of photography. I think every museum should program space for local-artist shows. Curators usually hate the idea. Insecure and snooty as they often are, most can’t fathom the concept that local art can be any good, much less select and interpret the best. Every community will have lots and lots of mediocrity. It’ll also have a star here and there. New York and Los Angeles are no better or worse.

I though Huntsville’s 2022 members’ showcase was good. John Shriver’s Still Life with Fish from 2021 is a tribute to Old Master still lifes, especially Dutch and Spanish paintings, with a twist. Using a medium suited to convey what the eye sees, pure and simple, Shriver coaxed mystery from the everyday.

Mystery and Benevolence is scheduled for the spring. I think it’s going to be a big hit for the museum. It gathers the best Masonic and Odd Fellows art from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Call it weird and wonderful, strange and sassy, the art celebrates camaraderie, charity, and rites of passage. I saw a version of the show at the Folk Art Museum. It’s very fun and a sensitive look at the centrality of fraternal lodges in building the country.

The museum is a heartening example of a community center that stays focused on art. It runs an art academy for children and does lots of work with the local schools. The museum’s owned by the City of Huntsville. The mayor appoints the board. It raises money to support itself, though. It’s a public–private partnership that works — not uncommon in the South. Local governments there are keen on economic development. They know that culture, as well as good schools, are part of the mix drawing new businesses.

At 50, the Huntsville Museum is young. As the region continues to grow and prosper, its collector base will develop. That means the museum will grow. With civic pride behind it, a good director and cadre of supporters, an attractive building, and lovely galleries, the sky’s the limit.