New Faces at the Clark via a Splendid Gift

A stash of Old Masters debuts, an addition is in the works, and will lessons from past flubs be learned?

S eeing is believing. An Exquisite Eye, the new summer exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., premieres the majestic gift of more than 300 Old Master paintings and sculptures from the estate of connoisseur and tech pioneer Aso O. Tavitian. The Clark announced the gift two years ago, but now it’s on view, along with its bevy of Renoirs, Turners and Constables, and Sargents and Homers — all nourishing mind, heart, and soul.

The gift transforms the Clark by vastly enhancing its thin corps of Old Masters. Sterling Clark, the Singer Sewing Machine heir and founder, started his collection around 1913 with Old Masters but moved to Impressionism after he married his French-actress wife, Francine. Old Masters were added here and there, but that part of the collection has been too peripheral. No more. And as portraits go, unless you were a pretty young thing, chances are your face and figure wouldn’t have caught Sterling’s eye. Now, portraiture is an anchor at the Clark. It’s also building what promises to be an attractive new home for the Tavitian gifts. Good. Its last expansion — two new buildings — was a nightmare. No one loves the buildings, though the landscaping is gorgeous.

An Exquisite Eye is arranged mostly by school and era, with startling moments and every object an apex of refinement. We don’t know who painted a portrait of a young man holding a lira da braccio, a stringed instrument bigger than a violin and that was used to accompany lyric poetry in the early 1500s. The painting is in the first gallery, an intimate space with a freestanding wall in the middle that shows a gem of a Madonna and Child from the 1440s. Steps away is the picture of the head and torso of the angelic, young musician, the instrument, and especially his puffy blue embroidered sleeve filling the scene, so it’s up close and personal. What a sleeve. If the poem and the music didn’t deliver a gentle ascent to the moon and stars, this thing would.

There’s also Gil de Siloé’s alabaster sculpture of Saint Cecilia from around 1500. He’s not a household name. Flemish by birth, he worked in Castile when Spanish patrons looked abroad for the latest art vogue. Saint Cecilia, hefty and chromatic, also shows us how central sculpture is to the Tavitian gift. And alabaster isn’t to be found at Dollar General. The initial patron, Tavitian, and the Clark are in pursuit of what’s exquisite.

In the delectation department, in a corner, partly hidden by the freestanding wall, is a pair of big Andrea della Robbia terra-cotta portraits, glazed and the colors of a rainbow. They’re striking portraits of young men in antique Roman costumes. Now I knew why the wall was there. Hanging on the back of the wall, unseen from the entrance to the show, hitting us like a speeding tank, is Giulio Romano’s grand imaginary portrait of Alexander the Great in armor. If I were Theban, I’d be shaking in my sandals, he’s so fierce. Who needs to go to Mantua to see Giulio’s gods, goddesses, emperors, and saints? Against navy-blue walls, everything pops. Frisson is in the air, leaving us with a tingle and wanting more.

The Giulio, Jusepe de Ribera’s Philosopher with a Globe, and a few other pictures aside, everything is small — home-scale — and no wonder. Tavitian was a connoisseur, but his collecting started in decorating his stately New York City home on East 79th Street, steps from the Met, and his house in the Berkshires. I’d seen the art in situ in the New York house, so opulent and comfy that I forgot about the sensational murder there in 1915, when the first owner was strangled by the butler. Hence, “The Butler Did It” in banner headlines and forever after in crime vernacular.

The next gallery is mostly paintings on copper, small in part because copper was pricy. Copper’s color and sheen radiate through the oil paint, so the pictures glow. Small, too, because the artists — the Flemings Joachim Wtewael and Bruegel the Elder among them — liked to pack complicated stories into small spaces to impress viewers with their talent for intricacy and to promote close looking, since, often, the story’s key is tucked in the background. That’s part of Mannerist style. Then, a mostly Dutch gallery starts with a row of portraits by Rubens, van Dyke, and Sweerts, lovely but reserved, and a tiny still life for a dash of color. Across from it is Wallerant Vaillant’s self-portrait with a flamboyant turban. Deep burgundy walls add drama. A bit of jolt is sacrificed by putting pictures too far apart from one another. Breathing room is one thing, but in the Dutch room they seem to float.

Who was Aso — full name Assadour — Tavitian? Born in 1940 in Sofia in Bulgaria, the child of survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide, he came to America in 1961 as a Cold War refugee to study nuclear engineering at Columbia. He was a scholarship student and supported himself as a taxi driver at night. He loved being an American. He’d lived under communism, after all. He made a bundle here pioneering computer sorting systems. He had soft-power charisma through peerless taste and quiet, manly comportment.

Aso started buying art around 2004. He looked for exquisite things ever so offbeat, such as a tiny Carlo Dolci Angel in a high-octane frame or a precious, round picture by Watteau, The Proud Man, from 1715. Aso quit the Clark board very soon after he joined. He was new to the museum and felt pushed with ham hands to give a multi-million-dollar cash gift toward the Clark’s messy capital campaign, a case of asking for too much, too fast. He died in 2020.

I assumed that was that until I learned in 2023 that his art would go to the Clark along with $40 million for a building to house it and a curator to care for it. It makes perfect sense. The Clark is small, so Aso’s art would be displayed and indeed worshipped. With a $750 million endowment, the museum’s not going anywhere. It’s in the Berkshires, too, a place he loved. The Clark is a scholarly place, but for even higher octane, it’s next to Williams College.

Portraits command us. “Look at me” or “Talk to me” or “Why are you looking at me?” or “Guess what’s on my mind?” or “What’s on yours?” — all among their demands. We become mind readers. Even the sane among us have imaginary conversations. Portraits are for the curious, the sartorial-minded, often the lonely, and for people with one foot in the past. Or hand. The one American object in the exhibition is Hiram Powers’s Loulie’s Hand, a marble sculpture from 1851. Powers made casts of his daughter’s hands and arms when she was a toddler in the late 1830s. He did a marble version of her hand in the center of a marble flower petal. It’s a different kind of portrait, but that makes it both charming and bracing.

I wasn’t sure I liked the placement of Houdon’s Little Lise, from 1775. It’s a bust of a young woman, set on a plinth in an apse-shaped niche facing Aso’s biographical panel, a place of pride. It pivots us from one half of the show to another. The walls here are turquoise, good for French Rococo and Neoclassical art. The moment’s also an awkward incursion of a shape usually meant for church altars and, here, in a show otherwise filled with right-angle spaces. The Houdon seems too puny to pull it off, but Lise’s head turns toward the next gallery, lots of it post-1793. She moves us along.

An Exquisite Eye ends with a bang: Louis Léopold Boilly’s 33 portraits, each a bit bigger than 13 by 11 inches framed, displayed in a single row. Boilly did thousands of these in the 1820s, each done in one or two sittings — a couple of hours, tops. It paid the rent. Not every Jacques, Henri, and Antoinette could sit. Most of his subjects were doctors, lawyers, middle managers, an aristocrat here and there, and their ladies. A few are children. Overall, it’s a lineup, literally, of bourgeois Paris.

They’re brilliant, sparkling things, minute in rendering. They’re a survey of the fashion in hair and dress. At first, I didn’t like the straight-line display style. I like things in small groups. It’s gentler on the eye and on the art and promotes close looking and sparks among objects. That’s a French style, I learned at the Clark. What we get in this part of the show is a German style, what I call the Wehrmacht look: disciplined, regimented, and oriented toward a totality rather than individual works of art. It’s fine, though, and people were spending the time to look.

No subject is dressed for grandeur. No one is dead-eyed, either. We think of them as living and breathing and about to yammer in French. Boilly’s subjects had lived through a lot, as had Boilly, born in 1761. They’d seen kings and emperors and despots and lunatics come and go, often with heads axed along the way. Life goes on, Aso, the collector, seemed to think. He did once drive a cab for a living and never forgot it. Opposite the Boilly wall is an encased wall filled with 30 caricature portrait sculptures, bold and sensitive, done by Jean-Pierre Dantan and nearly all from the 1830s. A lot of them are of musicians famous today — Liszt, Johann Strauss, and Paganini —  but some are forgotten giants like Auguste Vestris, called the King of Dance. Dantan isn’t political like Daumier. He’s into fun, and I left smiling.

An Exquisite Eye is among the best Clark shows I’ve seen over the past ten or 15 years. It’s unqualified success, which, sad to say, is rare. Last year’s summer show, A Room of Her Own, was earnest, yes, and beautifully produced, as are all Clark shows, but it was another example of the Clark’s nearly all-woman program staff pushing mediocre art by women artists. Its resurrection of French neoclassicist Guillaume Lethière two or three years ago was nice, but I learned why he was forgotten. He’s not bad, but he’s formulaic. Lethière was a mixed-race artist, too. More faddish thinkers than I probably fault the Clark as a very white place so, voilà, Lethière is reborn.

A Berenice Abbott show focused on subjects composing “the queer spine of literary modernism.” Faddish and dull, and, to me, “queer” means a few screws loose in a tiresome, yappy way. Then there was the Munch landscape show. Yes, he’s a big name, but the show was filled with landscapes that he did mainly for exercise. He rarely sold his landscapes. The best things were — and I don’t know why they were there –  a group of male nudes. Most of the works in Rodin in the United States were drawings never before seen in the United States, and the show was boring. How can you make Rodin boring? Ida O’Keeffe, Georgia’s sister, got a big summer exhibition to tout her very so-so paintings. If her name were Ida O’Goldberg . . .

These aren’t minor defects. They touch on narrative, editing, and quality control. Big names and faddish themes aren’t everything. Of course, there are shows I’ve loved, too. Possibly the trauma of constructing the two Tadeo Ando buildings, a wave of layoffs, a mountain of debt, the Covid mass hysteria, and social justice hallucinations had left the Clark reeling. Has a page been turned? We’ll see.

The Clark’s new Tavitian wing will be twelve galleries on a single floor in a space between the Clark’s Neoclassical 1955 original white-marble building and its 1973 granite building, called Brutalist though it’s not concrete. The fossil-rich granite wasn’t a salute to the Clark’s aged audience — ha ha — but to its rural, mountain location. The 1973 building isn’t strictly an addition; it’s a freestanding building connected by an ugly, covered pedestrian bridge to the 1955 building. The addition will go there, and the bridge will go to salvage.

The 1955 building is Imperial Danby marble, a deluxe stone from Vermont about 40 miles north of Williamstown. It’s the gray, veined marble used for the Lincoln Memorial. The granite, Dakota Mahogany, is from the South Dakota and Minnesota border. How to link the two in harmony? The architect, Annabelle Selldorf, picked Calacatta Malva marble from northern Italy, a deep white stone, elegant with bold, deep-blue markings. It’s beautiful. Selldorf designed the Frick addition in Manhattan and did a wonderful job. The rest of the team that the Clark’s new director, Esther Bell, assembled is experienced and calm, cool, and collected. I left the press preview thinking “onward and upward” for one of America’s most loved museums.