Rendezvous with Perfection at the Addison Gallery

This long-ago director returns to find the museum still serene, inquisitive, and classy.

I’ m not for walks down Memory Lane or, as my grandmother called it, Delusion and Denial Dell. Her finger, pointing in space, signaled each syllable like the falling blade of a guillotine. That’s where that little jaunt will take us. Not for her were nostalgia, sentiment, and memories wrapped in gauze.

After a hectic road trip that covered New York and Boston, I decided to head home the long way and stop at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover in northwestern Massachusetts. Yes, I was the director of this jewel box of a museum for ten years, and I’ve been gone for ten years. I don’t have any bad memories of my time there. I didn’t go there to massage good memories, either.

Everyone who visits the Addison knows it for its inside-and-out perfection. It’s one of the great small museum buildings in the country, Georgian Revival elegance — on the very pretty campus of Phillips Academy. The experience in the galleries is both serene and bracing. It nurtures the soul and stimulates the brain.

Memories or no memories, wouldn’t we all need dollops of calm, cool beauty, especially after 18 hours in Boston and 18 hours in New York?

More specifically, I visited to see the Addison’s new retrospective of the work of Alison Elizabeth Taylor (b. 1972). She works in the medium of marquetry, which is the art of using pieces of wood veneer — not paint, pencil, ink, thread, charcoal, metal, stone, or mosaics — to create figures and landscapes that are very different. I’ve had my eye on Taylor for a while, in part because I like art made from unconventional materials. Wood veneer is certainly unconventional, but it’s a rarefied Old Master medium. It’s best known for luxury furniture during the age of Louis IV and XV and, earlier, cabinets in the royal palace studioli, or little studios, in Renaissance Urbino and Gubbio in Italy.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor: The Sum of It, running until late July, is a superb look at an American original. The Addison is at its best in introducing us to living artists we might not know and to facets of famous artists that the critics and art historians have overlooked.

Taylor grew up in Las Vegas. Her subjects are casino dwellers, foreclosed and decaying homes, desert landscapes, and everyday people in Brooklyn, where she lives now. So what was once a highbrow medium meets lowbrow life.

How American is that? And in America, wood is the ubiquitous material. Trees are always near and dear, whether cultivated or wild. We love its grain. Used for furniture, floors, walls, ceilings, and cabinets, wood’s a warm, soothing, cozy material.

Taylor started playing with wood — not with the real thing but with wood-grained contact paper she found in a Dollar General while she was in art school. The tacky, fake grain, she discovered, worked well in creating texture, backgrounds, light, and shadow. What was at first experimental turned life-changing when Taylor saw the studiolo from the ducal palace in Gubbio. The complete studio is now on display at the Met, which owns it. Made in the late 1470s for the local despot, its beech, rosewood, oak, and fruitwood pieces, arranged like a puzzle, seemed lush, clever, and new.

Taylor’s early work merges material and subject. Swimming Pool and Roadside, from 2006, are set in a brown, dry American West she knew well, coming from Las Vegas. The place isn’t far removed in time from the millennia when it was a desert. People look very trashy indeed. In Swimming Pool, women wear bikinis, which they oughtn’t to, given gravity’s toll on their flesh. One has drained her martini glass. Another berates a teenage boy, skateboard in hand. In Roadside, deer graze in the desert foreground. Two doofuses in an SUV stop and aim their guns. Taylor uses a shiny veneer, suggesting that the line between the new and glistening and the mere tawdry is a thin one.

Her Foreclosed series treats the death of subdivisions following the mortgage and real-estate bubble starting around 2006 and bursting in the 2008–09 financial crisis. Wood’s very much part of the subject. It’s the stuff of decay. Wood is kicked, punched, and mutilated. We rarely see them, but thieves gut interiors. Squatters come and go. For The Gleaners, from 2011, Taylor presents us with two copper-wire thieves. Jean-François Millet’s women in Gleaners were the poorest in a French farm village, allowed to follow the harvesters and pick up leftover corn kernels and grains of wheat. These wire guys work with a prosaic but different purpose. They’re stripping the ruins of the housing bust.

Taylor’s veneers suggest peeling paint and cheap plywood. Armstrong Congoleum, from 2011, is a floor piece. Congoleum was a cheap vinyl floor covering popular from the ’70s into the ’90s. Taylor peels it back to show earlier floor coverings to uncover previous owners and tastes.

After Taylor saw the Gubbio studiolo, she made her own version, Room. It’s a room-within-a-gallery that the Addison borrowed from Crystal Bridges. It’s from 2008 and a Western, rural riff on what was made in Gubbio and Urbino for dukes. It’s very fun. Using thousands of pieces of wood veneer, she created what could have been a set in a Western. There’s a marquetry gun cabinet, with guns behind lock and key, windows showing dry, spartan exteriors, a safe, a tool cabinet, lots of knickknacks, a microwave oven, and a squat refrigerator.

Taylor began adding painted surfaces to her marquetry works around 2012. The Optimist’s Ennui, from 2013, combines the two media to create a surreal scene. Veneers in variations of brown suggest a wall, but a gouged wall that gives us a small view of a dreamy outdoors and eerie, red sunset. Even the grain of the wall’s veneer is supervised. Soon, red, orange, and yellow, all in a neon shade, with dead trees in the foreground convey sunsets with a touch of the diablo. Only Castles Burning, from 2017, and Slot Canyon 1, from 2018, are apocalyptic.

There are practical and aesthetic reasons for Taylor’s turn to paint. It became harder and harder for the artist to locate veneers she liked, since her veneer suppliers in Las Vegas closed or moved. Another practical reason is the hierarchies of the art market, where painting’s still on top and wood has the stigma of craft. Aesthetically, does the medium of wood, which makes the grain part of the design, have its limits?

Sam’s Town, from 2016, suggests “no.” I think it’s very successful. A woman of a certain age sits before a slot machine in Las Vegas. She’s not a tourist. Sam’s Town is a small casino that serves the locals. She’s riveted. Marquetry, first of all, gives her monumentality and character. She’s at home in the casino. The console of the slot machine is homey like an old piece of furniture. Casinos are organized to favor the house. Is she one of life’s losers? The backdrop — with a punctured wall looking out to a new house, fancy draperies, and blue skies — tells us that dreams may come true. Even if they don’t, the mere possibility keeps us going.

Grand, too, is Anthony Cuts under the Wburg Bridge, Sunset, from 2021. Anthony is a stylist who, locked out from his salon during Covid, created a makeshift salon on the street. There’s no doubt that these bits of wood give him the look as well as the power of sculpture.

I’m very curious to see where Taylor goes next. She won the National Portrait Gallery’s top prize in its Outwin Boochever Portrait Triennial for Anthony Cuts Under the Williamsburg Bridge, Morning last year, as I hoped it would. Prizes are one thing, though. Big exhibitions at distinguished museums such as the Addison along with beautiful catalogues are another. They’re the best catapults.

The Addison’s permanent collection is around 25,000 objects. It’s encyclopedic, covering all media and running from colonial times to now. The Addison has almost no permanently installed space. Three times a year, the entire museum is reconciled and rehung. This allows objects in storage space to sing. When I was there, I enjoyed a new exhibition, almost all from the permanent collection, about women abstract artists. I knew many of the works on view by famous artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Florine Stettheimer, Sally Mann, and Jennifer Bartlett.

Women and Abstraction, 1741 to Now, running at the Addison till the end of July, is a surprise since who knew abstraction was so old? Phoebe Billings’s bed rug, made in 1741, is an abstract design of sassy garlands, zigzags, and flowers. At eight square feet, it’s big and bold. Textiles are linear, so the bed rug resonates with Sheila Hicks’s textile Fenêtre series, from 2009, made from cotton, bamboo, linen, and silk but also with Ellen Banks’s tribute to Scott Joplin from 1982 and a grid-rich photograph of the NBC transmitting tower from 1933 by Margaret Bourke-White.

Addison exhibitions tend to have short labels, if there are labels at all beyond the name of the artist, title, and date. The place is about close looking without undue curatorial intervention and minimal art history. Curators do indeed arrange the art, since it doesn’t jump onto the walls. They look for surprising juxtapositions among objects, often involving medium, design, or subject. Liz Whitney Quisgard’s Scrambles, from around 2010, is exuberance itself. It lives happily with Native American artist Clara Darden’s 1910 basket and, in the same small gallery, Billings’s bed rug.

The Addison is part of Phillips Academy, an elite school if there ever was one, but the museum’s not big into woke. I think it’s fair to note that women artists were historically marginalized and underrepresented, and the Addison stops there. Unlike many museums, it grinds no axes. In my day, and to today, the Addison did lots of exhibitions on race, sex, class, and identity, but they were always first and foremost about the art.

The museum’s 19th- and early-20th-century collections are as good as the Met’s, the MFA’s, and the National Gallery’s. This season, the Addison gave one big gallery to what I call the old favorites, or the American Old Masters. The curators chose well. Showing its majestic 1804 painting by Washington Allston, the subject of my dissertation, dissolved all quibbles about leaving a sublime Whistler, not one but two definitive Homers, and an exotic La Farge, among other heavy hitters, in storage. I chair what I believe is now a count-on-one-hand Allston Fan Club, so I was happy to see him get a place at the table.

And this gallery looked fantastic. Its centerpiece is Abbott Thayer’s Monadnock Angel, from around 1920. It glows, set as it is against a deep brown wall color. Thayer, who, by the by, invented camouflage for military use, painted lots of angels. Hung above the Addison’s sumptuous, oak-lacquered floor and flanked by Art Deco sofas and easy chairs, Thayer’s painting looks like an altarpiece.

I’ve written about the Addison three or four times over the years. I don’t visit often, in part because it seems so far. The last time I was there was the fall of 2020. The gallery opened as soon as it legally could, as did Phillips Academy, and I happened to be driving home to Vermont after seeing a dreadful exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.

The place looked beautiful but, as I’ve said before, everything looks great in its perfectly proportioned galleries. When I was the director, we did a total renovation of the original museum, now over 90 years old, and a discreet addition. I was happy to see last week that both look sharp and fresh. Some museums do additions and renovations that don’t age well at all. Their directors and trustees don’t understand that the first rule is “do no harm.”

The Addison is about 25 miles from Boston and close to the Andover exits on I-495 and I-93. Parking’s easy and free. And the museum’s free. Some people are intimidated by the very thought of entering the grounds of a private school, but the museum is front and center, has always been open to the public, and gets most of its visitors from the locals. It’s a lovely, intimate experience.