A Christmas Tale of My Local Museums

Christmas is a time for reminiscing, which has been my theme for the last couple of weeks, and for staying home in ye olde Arlington in rural Vermont. We’re cursed with loudmouth, throwback hippie socialists in high places, but Arlington’s a pretty, quiet town bracketed by mountains and made famous by Norman Rockwell, who lived and did his best work here from the 1930s into the ’50s. He used locals as models for the Four Freedoms, and he was much liked for organizing square dances. Grandma Moses lived a few miles away, as did Robert Frost, who wrote his best poetry here.

Staying put doesn’t mean going without art. A 30-minute drive from my house — there’s no traffic and few stoplights — takes me to the Bennington Museum, the Clark Art Institute, the college museum at Williams, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, called MASS MoCA. I skipped MASS MoCA this weekend. It’s the biggest art museum in the world, so it takes half a day to cover, and, in the Christmas spirit, I wanted to see old things. As a curator, Williams alumnus and trustee, and local yokel, I’ve followed each museum for decades. I’ve been visiting the Bennington Museum since I was a child.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Andrew McCarthy

Christmas is a time for reminiscing, which has been my theme for the last couple of weeks, and for staying home in ye olde Arlington in rural Vermont. We’re cursed with loudmouth, throwback hippie socialists in high places, but Arlington’s a pretty, quiet town bracketed by mountains and made famous by Norman Rockwell, who lived and did his best work here from the 1930s into the ’50s. He used locals as models for the Four Freedoms, and he was much liked for organizing square dances. Grandma Moses lived a few miles away, as did Robert Frost, who wrote his best poetry here.

Staying put doesn’t mean going without art. A 30-minute drive from my house — there’s no traffic and few stoplights — takes me to the Bennington Museum, the Clark Art Institute, the college museum at Williams, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, called MASS MoCA. I skipped MASS MoCA this weekend. It’s the biggest art museum in the world, so it takes half a day to cover, and, in the Christmas spirit, I wanted to see old things. As a curator, Williams alumnus and trustee, and local yokel, I’ve followed each museum for decades. I’ve been visiting the Bennington Museum since I was a child.