This Gaudy Gilded Stage

During our recent trip to Boston, I spent part of Saturday visiting the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University:

This museum was founded in 1866 and is one of the oldest anthropology museums in the world. I really enjoyed visiting it and thought that I would share some highlights here.

First let me say that I’m starting to really enjoy natural science and anthropology museums. I visited the Field Museum in Chicago a few years ago and really enjoyed it. The Peabody is attached to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, so I visited it too. I’ll try to blog about that soon too.

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One of the highlights of PJ’s and my trip to Boston last week was our visit to the Museum of Fine Arts. Because of our upcoming trip to Italy, we especially wanted to see the museum’s special exhibit on Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, to get a head start on thinking about how to look at all the Italian art we’re going to be seeing in museums there.  The three painters in this exhibit were rivals in Venice during the sixteenth century, and this exhibit compares their work, allowing the viewers to decide which is more to his or her taste. It’s a great exhibition.

As I often do, I bought the exhibit catalog, which is a great discussion of the exhibit. One set of paintings the book compares is a group of portraits by these three masters.

Here’s Titian’s Doge Francesco Venier:

One of the things to notice about Titian’s work is his mastery of drapery and clothing. He also fills the canvas with images in the background.

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While I was at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Richmond this past weekend, my friend James and I visited the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, which is a great little museum that focuses primarily on the historic Jackson Ward district of Richmond. Here’s what the museum looks like from the outside:

The museum has three floors of exhibits. The first floor comprises the museum’s primary collection, which in part tells the story of the Jackson Ward district. This was my favorite part of the museum. You start by watching a brief, 10-minute video about the Jackson ward. While the collection is relatively small, I like that the museum uses it to tell a specific story, the rise of the Jackson Ward as an important cultural center for African Americans and their businesses during the early twentieth century. Interestingly, these businesses were actually hurt by desegregation, since the community dispersed and the businesses has to complete with a wider range of competitors.

The basement houses an exhibit of designs from J. W. Robinson Horne fashion collections. It’s an interesting story, which you can read on the museum’s website; so interesting that I would have enjoyed more information about Horne and what became of him later.

The second floor contained a number of exhibits. My favorite was one on the African American Migration Experience. One thing that fascinated me about this exhibit was its exclusion of Ohio in all of its statistics and images. It made me wonder if Ohio just kept really bad records or the state just didn’t serve as a destination for as many African Americans as we sometimes like to think.

Overall, I thought that this small museum was really interesting and well worth a visit. It was walking distance from our hotel downtown. I’m glad we saw it.

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While PJ and I were in NYC last week, we visited the Tenement Museum, a museum dedicated to telling “the stories of immigrants who lived in 97 Orchard Street, a tenement built in 1863 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.” We both loved this museum, and I highly recommend it to anyone visiting NYC.

The museum offers guided tours of apartments in this tenement building. Each apartment recreates immigrant life in the nineteenth or twentieth century by focusing on a specific family. The tours also emphasize issues of health and the history of immigration in the U.S.

We went on the fourth-floor tour, entitled “The Moores: An Irish Family in America.” Our tour guide was great. She made the tour fun while also emphasizing the serious issues that this tour wanted to convey to visitors.

The Moores moved to the Orchard Street tenement in 1869, just six years after the building was built. One of the things our tour guide emphasized was just how progressive the building was for its time, especially in promoting sanity sewer and water conditions. Unlike many other tenements at this time, 97 Orchard Street was hooked up to the city’s sewer system, which prevented its outhouses from overflowing and contaminating the water supply, which was right next to the outhouses in the back yard.

As our guide noted, this tenement was a step up for the Moores, who had previously lived in a more crowded, less sanitary neighborhood. One of the interesting things about the tour is the information we got about the neighborhood and how immigration patterns in the nineteenth century are quite similar to the neighborhood’s current pattern, the key difference being the nation of origin for the immigrants. In the nineteenth century this neighborhood was largely German; today it’s right on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown.

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Last week while we were in Michigan, PJ and I also visited the Henry Ford Museum. I’ll admit that I wasn’t exactly thrilled when PJ picked it for a stop on our way back home. I wasn’t really excited by the thought of looking at a bunch of cars. It turns out that the museum has a lot more to offer than just cars — but even they are worth a visit. I ended up really enjoying the museum.

One of the first exhibits you see in the museum is this one:

This is the car in which President Kennedy was sitting when he was assassinated in 1963. It’s kind of startling to see it — especially after PJ and I had been to Dallas and the Sixth Floor Museum last year. What’s even more startling is to learn that the government kept using the car as a presidential limousine for several years after the assassination.

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Late last week, PJ and I drove up to Rochester, Michigan. I gave a paper at the International Conference on Romanticism, which seemed to go well. I certainly accomplished what I had hoped to accomplish with the paper. And I’m looking forward to completing work on the article-length version of the paper and submitting it for publication soon. Since PJ lived up there during the year before he joined me in Ohio, he was also interested in seeing his former home and colleagues.

While we were there, we also visited the Detroit Institute of Arts, which is a great museum in downtown Detroit near the Wayne State University campus. The first thing we saw at the museum was the Monet to Dali special exhibit. It took PJ only a few minutes to recognize that the works in this collection seemed familiar and why: they are from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has loaned out the exhibit while it completes its remodelling.

Despite our having already seen this collection, we nevertheless enjoyed seeing them again. I especially like Édouard Vuillard‘s painting “Cafe Wepler:”

I can especially relate to this painting now that I’ve been to Paris. This work reminds me of the lazy hustle and bustle (if that’s not too paradoxical a concept) of a Parisian cafe in the late afternoon. I also love the color contrasts in this painting, the golden yellows of the walls and ceiling with the reds, whites, and blacks, of the interior and floor. It probably goes without saying, though I’ll say it anyway, but the painting looks even more alive and vibrant in person.

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Yesterday, PJ and I drove over to Cincinnati to hang out with our friend James, who was attending the North American Conference on British Studies. While there, we visited the Taft Museum of Art, pictured here.

The Taft Museum was founded by Anna Sinton Taft, who, according to the museum’s website, “lived in the mansion with her husband Charles Phelps Taft from 1873 until their respective deaths in 1931 and 1929.”

PJ and I have developed quite a fondness for house museums. In the past couple of years we have visited the Frick Collection, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Sir John Soane’s Museum. There’s something both fascinating and garish about the wealth that enabled these people to amass such collections. We feel both grateful to them and kind of grossed out by them. (At least I feel that way — I don’t want to speak for PJ.)

I’ll write about a few of my favorite works in the Taft Museum after the break ….

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During our recent trip to San Francisco, I visited the Asian Art Museum, a museum that I visited previously two years ago. At the time, I thought that this museum was one of the best museums I’ve visited. Since then, I’ve had the chance to visit a lot of other world-class museums, including The Louvre, The Frick, The Whitney, the Musee d’Orsay, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Guggenheim, The Met, and the NY Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tate Britain (unfortunately, I never got around to blogging about my visits to these last two). I don’t think the Asian Art Museum is quite in the same league as these others, but it’s still a great museum and well worth a visit.

The museum is housed in a great building. I took a picture of it on my way in:

It’s across the street from City Hall with a green space in between. The building is well designed to display the artworks within it. Overall, I thought the rooms were well proportioned and that the works of art were arranged to maximum educational and aesthetic effect.

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