New, platinum gilt Native American sculptures look good, and the new jewelry gallery looks fab.
After a week of snow, rain, ice, sleet, wind, and cold in ye olde Vermont, I decided to escape. I’ve got lots of frequent-flyer miles so thought “long weekend in Mexico City,” which I’ve never visited. Lots of art, it’s warm, and there’s no snow. Schedules and deadlines upheaved my planning, alas. I did indeed escape but to Boston, a place with marginally less snow, rain, ice, sleet, wind, and cold but, still, less. I hadn’t been to the Museum of Fine Arts in a year or so. I always love my visits there, and after days of temperatures near zero, Boston’s 20 degrees feels tropical. And I found sparkle and sheen where I least expected it.
I hadn’t seen Alan Michelson’s two new bronze, platinum-gilded sculptures, The Knowledge Keepers, installed in November on each of two empty plinths that stand in front of the MFA, flanking the granite steps to the main entrance. They’re attractive, intelligent complements, and some will say retorts, to Appeal to the Great Spirit, Cyrus Dallin’s 1912 sculpture of a Native American man, on horseback and nearly nude, his head and arms raised to the sky in prayer. Appeal to the Great Spirit stands plunk in the center of the plaza at the MFA’s front steps.
The Dallin sculpture rankles a psychological type — oppression junkies who preen for a hobby — and also hustlers for whom victim culture is a business model. Both are plentiful in Boston, Cambridge, and the Champagne-socialist suburbs. Appeal to the Great Spirit, we’ve been told since the George Floyd riots, is racist. It’s a composite of attributes from different tribes, most outside New England. Bad. It’s not authentic. Dallin, a Boston-based gringo whose iconic sculpture of the Angel Moroni tops the spire of the Salt Lake Temple, also wandered outside his lane in depicting an Indigenous subject. Doubly bad. He’s an appropriator, and a Mormon at that, though a lapsed one. Dallin’s Native American — everyone would have called him an Indian, but that’s racist, too — is quiet and yielding, with the look of the Noble Savage. Make room in that Basket of Deplorables for a horse, rider, and feathered headdress.
Dallin specialized in equestrian bronzes, and Appeal to the Great Spirit is one of a series of his award-winning sculptures of Native Americans on horseback. Scratch a complainer and you’ll discover that what irks the most is the prayerfulness of Appeal to the Great Spirit, though, to me, the sculpture is nondenominational and even Unitarian.
Matthew Teitelbaum, the MFA’s soon-to-retire director, would have been happy to banish Appeal to the Great Spirit to the smelter, or at least to an undisclosed, deep, dark vault. He’s Canadian, and Canadians obsess — to an extent that Americans just don’t — over unfairness to Indigenous people. As a lame duck in the jittery environment that’s the MFA, he opted to leave Appeal to the Great Spirit where it’s been since 1912. The general public likes it. A committee was convened. We’ll see a series of commissions from living artists “engaging the site in all its complexities.” Goody. The Knowledge Keepers is the first. I hope it’s the last.
Michelson is very good. Based in New York, he specializes in “the retrieval of repressed histories,” which do indeed exist, as do fake histories like the 1619 Project. He’s a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, an Ontario-based tribe allied with the British during the American Revolution, for those who dwell on the past. In a twist, he selected portrait sculptures of two living people, both Native Americans with Massachusetts roots.
Who are they? Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. builds traditional homes — no, not ranches or Cape Cods but wigwams, perfect for those of us who want to atone for the past by housing family, friends, and fellow travelers in an open-floor-plan abode. He also builds dugout canoes, which is how we’ll travel if “net zero” nuts ever run the world, unless we’re rich and well-connected, in which case we’ll zip from Davos to the U.N. to Hollywood to Burning Man in a private jet. Gaines is a tanner, too. He belongs to the Nipmuc tribe, which once lived in central Massachusetts — they were belligerents in King Philip’s War. Julia Marden is a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, based in, of all places, Martha’s Vineyard, that renowned roost of the oppressed and downtrodden, though she now lives in Vermont. She twines. Last year she made a turkey-feather mantle, the first, I read, by a tribe member in 400 years.
The art-market niches for turkey-feather mantles, wigwams, and dugout canoes must be tiny, but they’re both talented artists and keepers of heritage. And they’re not portrayed as downtrodden victims.
Michelson’s sculptures depict both subjects, the MFA tells us, “posed in dynamic gestures of public address” rather than “as exotic, anonymous figures frozen in time and represented in poses of subjugation, violence, or reverie” — a pose like Appeal to the Great Spirit’s. What’s wrong with reverie? Does everyone have to be giving a speech or filing a lawsuit or distributing free needles to drug addicts?
I think the two sculptures are attractive and a success, aesthetically and intellectually. They look good from all perspectives. Michelson conceptualized and designed the sculptures and then worked with UAP, a foundry that started in Brisbane, Australia, and now with locations all over the world. Using detailed 3-D scans created through photogrammetry, Michelson and UAP craftsmen worked on the casting, welding, and finishing of Gaines, Marden, and their tribe-specific clothing. Together, Appeal and the two sculptures make a trio.
The platinum gilding is bright indeed. It works well in an any seasonal palette except winter’s intense light, which tends to dissolve the sculptures in sparkle. The two are very representational, but limber and alive rather than stiff. Scanning and hand-finishing animates forms. Michelson chose platinum in response to Native reverence for lustrous materials such as copper, crystal, and shells. Platinum doesn’t corrode and is high-tech lustrous. The look is modern and quaint. If this is the price to pay to keep Appeal to the Great Spirit from the door-knocker factory, I consider my own prayers answered.
I’d ditch the plan for a series and keep the new sculptures in place rather than risk an aesthetic horror. In 1912, Appeal to the Great Spirit was thought to be temporary, but there he sits, still beseeching for better weather. This will save the MFA big bucks, too. My sense is that the woke phantasm, even in Massachusetts, is fast a-fading. Except for extreme clingers and preeners, and they’re noisy, there’s no demand for further reckoning with a sculpture that’s more than a century old. People want to look forward.
Inside the MFA, I saw two new exhibitions. Beyond Brilliance: Jewelry Highlights from the Collection displays 150 exquisite pieces of jewelry. The show spans more than 4,000 years, not surprising since the MFA’s collection is world-famous, but Boston has been itself a center for jewelry design and manufacture for 200 years. The museum has a curator dedicated to its jewelry collection, a sure sign of seriousness.
The introductory section of the small but luxe gallery is for wow value, starting with an Egyptian broad-collar necklace made from glazed soapstone, turquoise, and lapis lazuli beads, gilded beetles, and tiny gold balls. At 4,500 years old, it has stood the test of time. Fast-forward to 1937 and a 71-ruby and 665-amethyst starfish brooch made for Claudette Colbert. She played Cleopatra in the 1934 biopic, but this starfish is pure Art Deco and, at 4 by 4 inches, a hunk of echinoderm. Near it is a swag-style natural pearl-and-diamond necklace from 1880 that belonged to Baroness Clarice de Rothschild. The pearls are perfectly matched in color and shape, which means that a task force of divers got the bends looking for them.
Jewelry, like most classes of art, tracks trends in style and technology. Sometimes the new style and new tech are rediscoveries, or revelations. Two weeks ago, I wrote about a pair of gold earrings made in Attica, Greece, around 750 b.c. and distinguished by hundreds of round, tiny gold granules. For 2,000 years, the technology for making these perfect little beads was lost. In the 1850s, the Italian jeweler Castellani discovered how to make these forms by embellishing gold sheets with spherical forms. One of his experimental beaded brooches is on display in the MFA exhibition.
An inkstand isn’t exactly jewelry, but an inkstand retailed in Paris by Boucheron in 1876 is the supreme flower of “Japonisme.” Calder, Bertoia, and Man Ray were famous in other media but made jewelry in snazzy modern styles. Some styles are wackier than others. Sam and Carol Kramer made what they called “fantastic jewelry for people who are slightly mad,” in their case Surrealist jewelry such as a serpentine silver brooch from 1949 that looks like entwined lovers but also like handcuffs.
Goldfinger, a heavy gold bracelet made by Bruno Martinazzi in 1969, is shaped like a bulky thug’s hand grabbing the wearer’s wrist. That startled me. A Black, Starr & Frost American-flag brooch, with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, inspired me. It’s from 1917, the year the U.S. entered the First World War, and an early, very high-end example of patriotic bling. Marjorie Merriweather Post’s big emerald brooch dazzled me. It’s a big, sparkling green chunk, to be sure, but examination of its various transformations traces it to the 16th century. It’s not shamrock-shaped, but it’s green enough to make quite a St. Patrick’s Day statement.
A case in the center of the show is dedicated to jewelry designed by Elsa Peretti, who drew from animal anatomy, spare geometric shapes, and whips. If you’re going to do S&M, best to don your sterling-silver-and-snakeskin whip belt from 1975. Beyond Brilliance is more or less installed long-term. This central case will be swapped out to salute different makers, movements, and materials.
It’s a big show of little things but I was entirely smitten by it. There’s something for everyone except, I suppose, a Puritan killjoy, and the interpretation is rich but not intrusive. Yes, it’s lifestyles of the rich and famous, but the art is the star.
