My Day in Jersey

N ew Jersey and You: Perfect Together was the Garden State’s marketing retort in the 1980s to “Virginia Is for Lovers” and “I Love New York,” but it was a tougher sell. Most people experience New Jersey from the highway, where we see blighted, dreary cities, massive oil tanks, and spots where Jimmy Hoffa might have been buried. Over the years, I’ve never written about a New Jersey museum. There’s plenty of good ones, but the grandest, the art museum at Princeton, has been closed for a few years as the university builds a new home for it, and in driving through New Jersey, I’ve often been rushing to get someplace. And we Vermonters get more than our fill of New Jerseyans who come to the Green Mountain State for skiing, summering, leaf peeping, speeding — oh, they’ll kill you — and behaving like churls. We don’t mind people from New York and Connecticut. Living in Ye Olde Arlington, which is very rural, we don’t see many New Jerseyans, and when we do, they marvel at our reserve, our precise directions, and covered bridges. All of us, alas, have a horror story about people from Jersey.

In late May, I made my slogan-for-a-day “New Jersey and Me: Together at Last.” Today, I’ll write about the lovely, little Montclair Art Museum in spruce, swanky Montclair.

I hadn’t been to the Montclair Art Museum since I worked on an exhibition on George Inness’s views of the Berkshires more than 20 years ago. Inness (1825–1894) lived in Montclair, and the museum is rich in his work. This is Inness’s 200th birthday, so why not see the celebratory gallery that the museum assembled to show the best things it owns? Aside from the Innesses at the museum, I remember the awesome views of New York City from this beautiful town and the monument to the many dead from the September 11 attack.

The museum isn’t only about Inness, though. It’s unique as the only museum in the country limited to both American and Native American art, with great things in both fields. When it opened in 1914 in a purpose-built Georgian Revival building, it was the first art museum in New Jersey open to the public. The early money for the museum came from the steam-drill heiress Florence Rand, while the core American collection came from the Irish immigrant William T. Evans, who split his art between the Smithsonian and Montclair. Rand enlisted the formidable Grace Nicholson, the Pasadena-based dealer in Native American art and a family friend, to give part of her collection to Montclair.

The Inness room is very, very beautiful and is well worth a visit to Montclair. Inness spans much of the era of the Hudson River School of American landscape and seascape artists. Like all the best artists from this period, he evolves, though in a most unusual way, ending his years painting landscapes that expressed his Swedenborgian religious beliefs. The gallery, displaying most of the museum’s 20 or so Inness paintings, is arranged starting with landscapes in full daylight and ending with moonlight scenes. Pictures from the 1850s are topographical and full of crisp detail. Inness doesn’t do spectacle like Frederic Church. He has an Italian period but, unlike Thomas Cole, doesn’t do ruins. He’s a Barbizon painter in the style of the French painters Camille Corot or Théodore Rousseau, but he’s American and a religious painter.

Inness’s scenes are everyday landscapes, but that’s where God is. Swedenborgian belief doesn’t have much truck with Heaven or Hell or even sin. Its faith is in lifelong regeneration through love, goodness, and beauty rather than through rules. The Clark Art Institute, where I was a curator at the time, has two splendid Inness paintings from 1893. Out of curiosity, I went to a Swedenborgian service in Cambridge once — it was squishy but very nice, Episcopal lite, and I didn’t choke from a surfeit of incense.

Inness’s work from the 1880s until his death, much of it painted in Montclair, is gauzy. It’s not Impressionist at all, since Inness isn’t much interested in the science of color and light. It’s dappled and dewy and very dreamy. All that love, goodness, and beauty induce a daze. His sunset pictures from the early 1890s are gorgeous. He’s a painter of memory, not anything he remembers but what we viewers want to remember. He invites that. The gallery is hung Salon-style and is long-term. Montclair’s curatorial style leans in the direction of very long labels, but, at least in the Inness room, interpretation is in a three-ring binder that visitors can carry. That’s all for the best, since Inness is an artist of immersion.

The museum has a lively exhibition program. I didn’t know Nanette Carter (b. 1954), an abstract collagist who uses Mylar as a surface. Her attractive, bewitching retrospective — Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance — ended on July 6, but a monumental banner by her, Shifting Perspectives, remains on view till August 10. Carter grew up in Montclair, where her father was mayor, and as a teenager she saw an inspiring Mondrian exhibition. She went to Oberlin College determined to be an artist and, afterward, to Pratt Institute.

In the mid-1980s, Carter discovered the wonders of frosted Mylar, a polyester film developed in the ’50s. Tough and shiny, it’s often used for packaging and lids and for birthday-party helium balloons. Experimenting first with pencil drawings on Mylar, she found that the graphite lines looked like “poured black butter” — as descriptions go, a sensual adventure.

She sometimes layers woodcut, monotype, or painted strips of canvas on a Mylar sheet. The contrast of surfaces isn’t jarring. It piques curiosity. Forms seem to slide and then skate and dance across the Mylar surface. She’s also very good at simulating surfaces such as marble, slate, wood grain, metal, water, and clouds. Forms are often cantilevered, so balance becomes a subject. Cantilevered, a series from 2013 to 2021, uses the shape of the architectural element, extending horizontally and unsupported on one end, to suggest what she considers the disequilibrium of contemporary life.

Of course, disequilibrium has marked every era of human existence since Eve bit that forbidden fruit and got tossed from Eden, her dummkopf man in tow. She’s the original toxic feminist. Ours are more operatic, but, as eras go, we live in a fat and prosperous time. I like the tense balance in the art in Cantilevered, what Carter calls the point where “holding on” and “letting go” seem to be at a standoff. Destabilizing, her current series, deploys irregular shapes, weird diagonals, zigzags, and different paint techniques from shape to shape. Afro Sentinels #3, from 2024, quotes African power figures and the bounty of terra-cotta warrior figures in Xian, China. Carter is black, but, stretch and strain as the curator does, she draws from, among others, Jacob Lawrence and the wonderful Al Loving but also Mondrian and Stuart Davis, who, like Carter, is jazz-infused. She’s still an original who makes art that people want to contemplate and from which they get pleasure.

A Question of Balance does Carter no favors, and she doesn’t help herself by describing her recent work as a reaction to “the chaos of the Trump era and the global pandemic” and “contemporary angst and uncertainty over the fate of democracy.” These are disingenuous marketing stunts. And the show has plenty of gratuitous musings by a curator run amok. “Carter has a veritable laundry list of recent changes she finds disturbing,” the catalogue tells us, “an increasingly polarized Congress, threats to democracy, erosion of women’s rights, the rise about political extremism, and climate change, to name a few.” Blah, blah, blah. Carter lets the museum go to town. Hey, they’re giving her a nice show.

Carter’s beautiful, beguiling shapes, and the perfect scale of her art — not too big, not too small — deserve better. By pushing her work as political and affixed to the front pages of the New York Times, the museum makes it time-limited rather than timeless and enduring. That’s a shame, but Montclair is the ultimate limousine-liberal suburb. It’s got not one but two Whole Foods stores. The moron Kamala Harris got 86 percent of the vote there in 2024. The museum is probably giving the locals what they want to hear. Carter’s short essay in the catalogue addresses her art — shocking, I know — and her family. She says the titles of her series sound foreboding but that the images themselves are upbeat. “Their sense of movement, rhythm, and color speak to my belief in hope,” she writes. She should have written the whole book.

The museum’s budget is about $6.2 million. It makes a third of its money, a hefty proportion, from earned income such as tuition from art classes, the very nice shop, memberships, and events. Its endowment, at about $14 million, isn’t microscopic, but it’s small, given Montclair’s affluence. As vain as many rich people are, Montclair’s might get the warm and fuzzy-buzzies giving to New York City museums or even to the art museum in Newark, which is all about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. These peacocks should support the treasure in their own backyard. The museum gets about 75,000 visitors a year, which seems right for a ritzy suburb with 40,000 people. Locals, many snoots, probably go in greater numbers to New York museums.

The museum has embraced DEIA — diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility — big time. It invites the grievance pimps from the New Jersey Department of Civil Rights to harangue its staff and volunteer docents about bias. On the accessibility front, the museum’s collection isn’t online, so the public doesn’t know what’s there, which shows how phony a commitment to DEIA can be. Twenty years ago, when I went to the Addison Gallery as the director, I fast-tracked the digitization of its magnificent collection. The Montclair museum has a list of artists represented in its collection, from Copley to now. But what are the goods? Enquiring minds want to know. Keeping a collection a secret in 2025 is a case of incompetence.

The Montclair museum has very good taste in acquisitions. It has focused on photography over the last few years and has bought good things. A show of new photography acquisitions since 2000 was a treat. I love Karl Struss (1886–1981), whose velvety Lower Manhattan, from 1911, is a prize purchase. Struss is an unsung, though great, photographer, like Inness having a gauzy aesthetic, but I imagine he’s best known, if he’s known at all, as the Hollywood cinematographer for Charlie Chaplin movies, F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the original Ben Hur, and Mary Pickford’s first sound film, Coquette. I liked the museum’s new Native American photography, too. The curators are adept at finding talent before prices soar. Natia Lemay’s Four Generations is very good. She’s Canadian, from New Brunswick, so I don’t know why she’s in an American-only collection, and who in their right mind would want Canada as our 51st state?

I loved my visit. The new Princeton museum opens this fall, and there’s the art museum at Rutgers, as well as the Morris Museum in Morris Township and historic houses. Montclair, though, is a place to visit.