Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Review Monday, Jun 4 2007 

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The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is amazing! Isabella Stewart Gardner created the museum “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever,” as her will reads. She collected more than 2,500 objects for her museum, which opened in 1903. The museum has remained virtually unchanged since Gardner’s death in 1924. All of the images here are from the ISGM website. If you click on the picture, it will link to the museum page that contains information about the image.

PJ and I visited the museum while we were in Boston last month. Above is a picture of the courtyard, which contains a magnificent garden designed so that different plants bloom and flower throughout the year. In many ways, this museum is like the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London but on an even grander scale. Gardner planned every aspect of the museum, from the flowers to the architecture to the paintings, sculptures, and furniture.

RembrandtGardner’s collection began with three important paintings: a Self-Portrait by Rembrandt (pictured here), Titian’s Europa, and a portrait of Philip IV by my favorite painter, Diego Velazquez. The Gardner’s purchased these three works in 1896. They soon realized that their collecting ambitions would require that they build a new space in which to exhibit their acquisitions.

In 1898, however, Jack Gardner died suddenly of a stroke, leaving Isabella to design and fulfill their plans. She purchased the land and designed and oversaw the building of what would become her home and the museum, Fenway Court.

I really like the Rembrandt, which hangs in the Dutch Room. This room has had some unfortunate history. In 1990, thieves dressed as Boston policemen stole 13 works of art from the museum, the most important of which come from this room. Among the stolen artworks were two additional Rembrandt paintings and a Vermeer (another painter I love).

Lady in YellowMy favorite genre of painting is the portrait. The ISGM has many excellent portraits. My favorite is A Lady in Yellow by Thomas Dewing (1851-1938), which appropriately enough hangs in the Yellow Room on the first floor of the museum. This is the painting to the right. The intricate detail of the woman’s dress, which you can see when you examine the painting up close, is wonderful.

There are several other paintings that I really liked, including The Omnibus by Anders Zorn, Mme. Gautreau Drinking a Toast by John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo also by Sargent, Hercules by Piero della Francesca, and Christ Carrying the Cross by the workshop of Giovanni Bellini. I wish I had time to write about each painting and explain what I like about it. One thing that clearly stands out in this list is my fondness for brown colors, a common trait found in Velazquez’s work as well.

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Daytripping to Columbus Sunday, Mar 11 2007 

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Yesterday, PJ, Matthew, Liz, Ayesha, and I drove over to Columbus to visit the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State University Campus.

Glenn LigonOur main reason for going was to see the Glenn Ligon exhibit, entitled “Glenn Ligon–Some Changes.”Glenn Ligon is a queer artist who “creates resonant, multilayered works that filter other people’s texts, images, jokes, and voices,” as the exhibit’s brochure relates. Or, as book of the exhibit explains, “Glenn Ligon is at the forefront of a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s on the strength of conceptually based paintings and phototext work whose subjects investigate the social, linguistic, and political constructions of race, gender, and sexuality” (7). This is a picture of Ligon.

The exhibit is small but fascinating. One of the works that stood out to me was End of Year Reports, a series of “thoughtful and brutally honest critiques of Ligon at age 12 and 13,” to quote the brochure. Here’s a picture that shows how the work looks hanging in the museum. It’s a collection of report cards in which his teachers comment about such issues as his refusal “to talk about his own recognition of his own sexual urges.” This refusal is interpreted as a kind of immaturity, and the teacher concludes that he will become more comfortable with his body and sexual desires within the next year, at which point he’ll interact with the other students — especially the girls — on a more social level. (We, of course, know that he in fact turns out gay instead, making the reports even more interesting.) What kind of teachers are these that they comment on his sexuality so directly? At first, PJ thought that these must be Ligon’s imagined recreations of his teachers’ thoughts, but the brochure indicates that they are his genuine report cards. They’re really crazy to read. It really makes me wonder what I’d say about my students’ sexual development (and so glad that I don’t ever have to)!

One work, Annotations, is online. If you launch it, you get an online version of a family-style photo album. If you click on the individual images, you get Ligon’s annotations, some of which are definitely adult-oriented. I find his insertion of his own desires into the family album to be a fascinating project. It’s a great idea; maybe more of us gay people should do projects like this one. His Runaways series is also great: he uses the historically accurate format of escaped slave notices to describe himself, using his friends’ descriptions of him. (As I said above, a lot of his work is about reprocessing other people’s words about him.)

The Wexner is also housing an exhibit of works by Sadie Benning, called Suspended Animation, right now. Benning is another queer artist. I first heard of her a couple of years ago when a colleague recommended that we watch her videos. As a teenager, Benning made a series of videos using a Fisher Price camera. These short movies detail, in part, her coming to terms with her sexuality. I highly recommend them, especially her short film about Rubyfruit Jungle.

This exhibit is mostly of her recent paintings but also includes Benning’s 29-minute animated film, titled Play Pause. I didn’t watch it all, but the part I saw was fascinating. I wish I had stayed to see it all. It’s kind of simplistically drawn (or so it seems at first) and combines music, dual screens, and a non-narrative form to follow a group of characters around in bars, at home, at the airport, etc. We see various aspects of these characters’ lives, including their sex lives. As I’ve subsequently read online, this movie is a response to 911 and the loneliness she feels is intrinsic to her sexuality. Like I said, I really wish I had stayed and watched the whole thing. I did buy the book that accompanied the exhibit, so at least I’ll get to learn more about it.

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The Field Museum Wednesday, Mar 7 2007 

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While I was in Chicago two weeks ago, I had hoped to make it over to the Art Institute, which is only about two blocks from the hotel I stayed at while I was at the conference. The first morning I was there, I walked over to the Institute, but I got there about a half hour before it opened. So, I thought that I would walk around a bit and then come back.

I walked down Michigan Avenue and ended up at the Field Museum. I didn’t know what it was, but it had the word “museum” in the title, so I figured I go in for a little while and then walk back to the Art Institute. Three hours later, I left the museum and went in search of lunch. A friend of mine was supposed to arrive a little while after that, so I went back to the hotel and waited for him. I never made it to the Art Institute, but I loved the Field Museum.

The Field Museum, it turns out, is a natural history museum. PJ and I don’t often go to natural history museums — if we’re only in a particular city for a few days, we tend to try to fit in as much art as possible instead. The Field Museum is well worth a visit.

Sue at the Field MuseumThe museum’s main draw is Sue, the world’s largest, most complete, and most famous Tyrannosaurus Rex. She’s practically right inside the door. Her skull is too heavy for the exhibit, so it’s displayed separately; the skull attached to the skeleton is a replica. There’s also a special Sue gift shop where you can buy Sue souvenirs.

A large portion of the museum is dedicated to taxidermied birds, mammals, and reptiles. The birds section, in particular, was both fascinating and totally macabre. On the one hand, I can see how useful it is to have the specimens in the museum. While I was there, for example, a woman was painstakingly drawing one of the birds. On the other hand, it feels like a weird kind of funeral home for dead birds — rows upon rows of carcasses. Some of the birds are now extinct; the bodies of these birds especially evoked the dual sense of benefit and grotesqueness.

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New York Museums Monday, Dec 4 2006 

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PJ and I went to three museums while we were in NYC last week: the Guggenheim, the Met, and MOMA. Each of these is, of course, world famous. As I’ve written before, I love going to museums and even have favorites. MOMA may now be on that list.

The Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim is, of course, famous for its distinctive architecture and spiralling exhibit space. The main exhibit while we were there was a collection called “Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso.” My previous experience with Spanish painting is visiting the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. While visiting the former, I fell in love with the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velazquez, so I was excited to see that the Guggenheim was showing Spanish art, including a few works by him.

One of my favorite paintings in the Spanish exhibit is Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step, which was painted sometime around 1655-60:

Four Figures on a Step

According to the description that accompanied the painting, the woman lifting her veil is, in doing so, indicating that she’s a prostitute. The older woman with glasses is probably a procuress. The placard audio guide also suggests that the little boy’s torn pants and exposed buttocks is meant to suggest his erotic allure for male patrons as well. The description did not mention the male figure on the left, but he too is presumably “for hire.”

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Philadelphia Museums, Among Others Tuesday, Nov 14 2006 

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One last Philadelphia post. While PJ and I were in Philly last week, I had the opportunity to visit a couple of non-eighteenth-century-related museums. I’ve been wanting to write a little about museums in general, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to post my thoughts on museums in general and the Philadelphia Art Museum, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and one or two other museums in particular.

I love museums. Art museums, science museums, historical museums. It doesn’t matter. But not all museums are created equally. Some really work, and some don’t. Maybe it’s obvious, but it seems to me that a museum should educate its patrons about its subject(s). I not only want to see great art and artifacts; I also want to be able to learn more about the ones that strike my fancy. For me, a museum is successful when I leave wanting to read more about something I say in it, an artist, a particular painting, or a historical event. When PJ and I visited Spain last summer, for example, I came away from the Museo del Prado wanting to know more about the work of Diego Velazquez, so I bought a book about his work from the museum’s store, which I read on the plane back. Since then, I’ve also watched a documentary on his painting “The Rokeby Venus,” which I’ve since seen at the National Gallery in London.

My two favorite museums thus far are the the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the National Portrait Gallery in London. I’ve always had a tendency to love Asian art. As a budding gay teen, for example, I dreamed of someday decorating my bedroom in a Japanese motif. I now love House of Flying Daggers, which is Chinese, of course. And I’ve started collecting images of Ganesh (mostly postcards and photos of sculptures in museums). So, when PJ and I were in SF last May, I went to the Asian Art Museum while he was at a conference. I had never been to a museum dedicated exclusively to Asian art. It was wonderful. It has excellent holdings from each nationality/ethnic group. And I felt genuinely educated about the works and their historical contexts. I bought two books there: The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco: Selected Works and A Curious Affair: The Fascination between East and West, a book about a special exhibit on five centuries of interaction between Asian countries and the west.

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