Art Vandals Stage Another Sick Show in D.C.

The mood’s better in the countryside, at the Clark, with the drawings of a little-known German architect whose buildings float and gleam.

T oday I’m writing mostly about the very nice visit I had last weekend to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts. First of all, though, I want to write about the terrible attack last week on a unique, fragile Degas sculpture at the National Gallery in Washington by two climate kooks. Swollen with self-righteous fury and clearly crazy, they smeared paint on the plexiglass case in which The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen is displayed. They jostled the case and posed for photographs.

I’ve written about attention-getting assaults on art in Europe by full-mooners who glue their hands to the frames of paintings by Van Gogh, Turner, Rubens, and others, and to the base of the Laocoön, the Hellenistic sculpture. Some slather art with food that looks like blood. They think more should be done to arrest purported changes in, of all things, the climate. They think the End Is Nigh, which it might very well be, but if so, it’s not because of the weather. It’s because our rulers are asses.

Let’s put aside the fact — the climate crazies howl at facts — that our planet is 4 billion years old and the climate’s always changing, and in ways we don’t understand. Satellite climate records, the most accurate, start in 1970. Reliable land and sea temperatures date to around 1900. Lots of corporations are getting rich from an apocalypse scam.

I wrote that publicity attacks on art would come to the U.S. before too long. They have, and museums need to be better prepared.

The Little Dancer is famous. Degas’s many bronze versions are in museums here and in Europe. I know it well since the Clark Art Institute — where I was a curator years ago, before leaving to become a museum director — owns one. The object vandalized at the National Gallery is Degas’s original wax sculpture from 1880, from which all the bronzes were cast. It’s unique and, made of wax, delicate. Paul Mellon gave it to the National Gallery about 20 years ago. The Clark tried to borrow it in the ’90s for a scholarly exhibition on The Little Dancer. Mellon wouldn’t lend it because of its fragility.

Where were the guards? This wasn’t a split-second event. They had time to be creative. They didn’t simply smear paint. They created a bad Miro imitation, red and black, you know, the blood-for-oil trick. And then they posed for a photo op. Guards shouldn’t put their lives at risk under any circumstances, but how did this happen? One day something’s going to get damaged beyond repair.

I hope the D.C. prosecutor and criminal court treat this with an eye toward discouraging others. A month in the slammer, with no air-conditioning, in Washington, in August, might send a message.

On a brighter note, or a wet, gray one, last week, Ye Olde Arlington, where I live in southwestern Vermont, was awash in rain, excitement, and trout. Our Battenkill River is the premiere place for trout fishing in the Northeast, and this is peak season. Trout gather because of the bugs, and fishing tourism is at its zenith.

Last weekend was our annual Battenkill Fly Fishing Festival. I decided to pass on the jamboree and look at art. I drove down to Williamstown, not far from my house, for a visit to the Clark. The Little Dancer story didn’t figure, and I didn’t even see it. I hadn’t been to the Clark for months. We live in troubled times, and the Clark is always a salve.

I haven’t written about the Clark since I looked with chagrin, however much I expected it, at its selections over the last 20 years for its visiting-scholars program, the Clark Fellows program. Now 25 years old, it invites scholars from around the world to visit the Clark — some for a few weeks, some for a full year — to use its superb library for research on specific projects. It’s a fantastic program — in theory and sometimes in practice.

The Clark’s an idiosyncratic place, with its 35 Renoirs, many Sargents, Rococo English silver, Old Masters, and a dreamy, bucolic setting. David Brooke, the director in the ’70s and ’80s, described it to me as “a pretty prison.” Yes, the Clark’s on the edge of the Williams campus, but northwestern Massachusetts, rural and in the mountains, is an isolated, insular place. The Clark Fellows program is designed to rattle and ruffle with new faces and ideas.

Last year, I looked at every scholar brought to the Clark since 1998 and his or her project. Two things stood out. First, the Clark almost never hosts a visiting scholar whose project concerns American art before 1945. I suggested there’s an active bias against the art of our country, at least as far as the Fellows program is concerned. There are many American art scholars doing cutting-edge projects on historic as opposed to contemporary American art. American art scholarship before 1945 is, surprisingly, hard to fund. Lots of funders don’t think it’s glam, and they also assume that someone else will pay for it.

Second, the Clark is funding silly fad projects. Last year, Tsedaye Makonnen was a visiting scholar. She’s “a Black American mother, perinatal community health care worker, and Doula” who aims “to create a spiritual network around the world that aims to recalibrate the energy toward something positive and life affirming.” At the Clark, she worked on a project “that explores how performance art can challenge whiteness, colonialism, and systemic forms of oppression on migration.”

I watched an interview with Makonnen and a video of a performance. It happens on the Mall in Washington, with a view of the Capitol. She drapes herself with a tent-of-a-textile decorated with knife-shaped pieces of reflective silver stencils. While another woman sings a song called “Tryin’ Not to Lose Hope,” Makonnen beats her drapery on the ground.

I’d yawn — or laugh — except this and too many other Clark Fellows projects leave me breathless at their vacuity. The Fellows program was organized to fight insularity, but it’s evolved into a new kind of insularity. Too many fellows focus on stale gender, race, and colonialism topics. The topics are boring and predictable, and often ultra-fringe.

Many of the projects in the recent past are good and what the Clark should be doing. A scholar researched her catalogue of the silver collection at the City Palace Museum in Udaipur in India. It’s a great collection. A project on today’s baroque turn in African-American art intrigues. I’d love to see the exhibition that comes from it. Susan Dackerman’s book on Albert Dürer and the Islamic East sounds great. These are projects that actually move the needle in art history.

What doesn’t move it is a project on the role of Dominican artists in visualizing the plight of Ozama River communities in the Dominican Republic that are supposedly endangered by climate change. It’s too esoteric. The art has become a tool for a political polemic.

Another fellow’s book on “environmental catastrophe through the lens of critical race studies,” though a woke twofer, sounds like one big, wretched hairball. Shawn Michelle Smith is producing this one. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Oppression is her calling card, and, smug and prosperous, she’s made a rich, tenured living from it. Her work doesn’t move the needle. Rather, the needle’s stuck.

The two loons who vandalized the Degas sculpture draw comfort and credibility when places like the Clark mainstream false values such as environmental catastrophe, not to mention the cult of victimhood.

I’ll write about the Clark’s summer exhibition, Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth, when it opens in June. It’s about Munch’s landscapes. I loved the Clark’s 2021 summer show on Nikolai Astrup, the Norwegian Symbolist. Scandinavian art is fascinating and different, and Munch landscapes seem perfect for the Clark, given their contrast with French and American landscapes.

The show “resonates profoundly with current anxieties about climate instability,” I read on the Clark’s website. This sounds like a very big stretch to me, to say the least, and potentially both an abuse of the art and an indulgence of cultists like the people who vandalized the Degas as well as the many neurotics and fantasists among us. But my mind’s open.

The Clark, as always, looks great. With the Bennington Museum, it’s my local haunt for the best art. I had no agenda. I visited the British art gallery, drawn by a new, Castleton Green or British Racing Green wall color against which Turner’s Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water startled me. The combination, so counterintuitive, is wickedly good.

Most of the other art in the gallery — small, perfect paintings by Turner and Constable — comes from the Manton gift. The heirs of Edwin Manton, one of the founders of the American International Underwriter Group (later AIG), gave his British art collection and a pile of dough to the Clark, though neither they nor Manton had any connection to the Clark or Williams.

They live in the suburbs of Boston, so they knew the Clark and understood it was both a museum and a research center. Since the Clark is small, they knew Manton’s art would be displayed and used. It’s one of the most brilliant cases of philanthropy I’ve seen. People should be giving art to places like the Clark where it’ll be enjoyed by the public and used by students. Giving art to places such as the Met massages a donor’s ego, but, almost always, the art disappears.

Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch is the superb exhibition on view. The people who run the Clark Fellows program should study it closely. Yes, it’s esoteric, but it is centered on art and has multiple layers. Different audiences, rather than just the flagellant class, will find meaning in it.

Goesch (1885–1940) was a German architect who never built anything. He was in and out of mental institutions — schizophrenia — before he died in the Nazi Holocaust. The show highlights his designs, mostly in watercolor. I’d never heard of him, so I learned something.

The exhibition is brilliant in setting the time, place, problem, and mood through a selection of prints. Erich Heckel’s Portrait of a Man, a bold, colored woodcut from 1918, Max Beckmann’s Café Music, an etching, also from 1918, and Max Pechstein’s woodcut But deliver us from evil, from 1921, project a time of anxiety and exhaustion after a terrible war. Goesch was a trained — and employed — architect who didn’t fight. But he was part of a traumatized culture and already having emotional problems. Germany wasn’t bombed or invaded, but a collapsed economy made building of any kind a rare thing. Many architects worked on paper. They survived through very modest projects here and there, to be sure, but indulged their creativity and ideals through fantasy architecture.

“What would we do” designs pointed to a new world. Goesch was part of a formal group called the Glass Chain. It was an affinity group of like-minded, bleeding-edge thinkers who swapped designs. Many liked glass as a material, hence the name.

After 1921, Goesch spent most of his life in institutions. His watercolor architectural designs are on the formulaic side, redundant and mostly symmetrical as if he’s seeking self-control. Still, they’re very beautiful. He paints ceremonial pagodas as well as arches, gates, and temples. His colors are radiant. One of Goesch’s mentors, the architect Bruno Taut, actually succeeded in glass construction, using colored glass bricks, panels, and lenses to create a prismatic feast. Goesch’s jewel-like colors show us that he and Taut were kindred spirits.

Goesch’s mental problems started when he was a young man. In his better periods, he was a searcher. He was a passionate Catholic convert and interested in Freud’s work and theosophy. Inspiring his imaginary architecture were ancient Roman arches, German Gothic churches, Rococo filigree, and Buddhist temples. Though his palette is peculiar, it works. His buildings often don’t seem grounded. Most look as if they’re floating and melting. I see him as a most unusual Expressionist. The exhibition compares him to Paul Klee, which seems right.

The work on view in the two-gallery show is almost entirely from the early ’20s, before he was more or less permanently institutionalized. He died in 1940, probably euthanized as part of the Nazi plan to eliminate the disabled.

It’s the quintessential Clark exhibition. The art’s gorgeous, the interpretation’s succinct, and the subject’s surely a new one to most people. The Clark did the exhibition with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, which owns about 250 Goesch watercolors. The very good catalogue is the first English-language book on Goesch, so it contributes something useful to scholarship. It’s also good to see the Clark do an architecture show.

Robert Wiesenberger, the Clark’s curator of contemporary projects, specializes in graphic design and taught at Yale’s art school. The Clark’s known for Impressionism but did more than a few contemporary art exhibitions in the ’70s and ’80s. Of course, that was before Mass MoCA, and the Williams College Museum does lots of contemporary art, too. The Greater Williamstown Metro Area probably has 50,000 people in 20 or so towns. Culture tourists visit during the summer, but, overall, I doubt there’s a market, much less a need, for three museums doing contemporary art.

Goesch isn’t a contemporary artist, but it’s Wiesenberger’s show, and it reflects his design interests. He’s a very good curator. He’s also one of two authors of the catalogue. His essay deals with Goesch’s life and aesthetic. Raphael Koenig writes about Goesch’s critical reception.

Unlike the trite and tiresome fellowships the Clark funds, Portals implicates a broad, positive social and aesthetic movement. After a horrible war, avant-garde German architects sought a freer, fairer, and less stratified country. The exhibition isn’t a dead-end drudge-and-grievance operation. In keeping with the Clark’s traditional teaching mission, it’s about big themes expressed by a singular artist.