A Day at the Clark

IT’S EASY TO OVERLOOK the outings that take you not very far. What counts as close? Living as we do in the rural wilds of New York’s farming country, between Utica and Albany, a 90-minute drive is nothing. And that’s where Williamstown, Massachusetts awaits, so we decided to make a recent day of it at the Clark.

Or, to put it correctly, the Clark Art Institute. Or, to put it historically, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, because it was that fabulously wealthy couple who collected enough significant art to decide, as they advance in years, that a museum was needed to house it. Sterling Clark was an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, alongside his brothers Stephen and Ambrose, but they were a fractious bunch and plans to put up that museum in Cooperstown were scuppered by fraternal fighting, and Sterling chose Williamstown instead.

A great Francophile, Sterling spent many years in Paris, where he met and married Francine Clary, a performer with Comédie Française. She, apparently, had the better eye for great art, and approved of paintings her husband otherwise might not have acquired.

Sterling wanted a building with plenty of natural light and the classical architecture of the Frick Collection, and went through two designers until he settled on Daniel Perry. The cornerstone was laid in 1953, and the museum opened two years later. Sterling died the following year; Francine survived him by four years.

Along with ongoing renovations to that structure, the Manton Research Center, which houses the library, was added in 1973. The Lunder Center, added in 2008, offers more galleries and a  seasonal café; the Clark Center (2014) has more gallery space as well as dining and retail areas. The artworks in the permanent collection come from a range of classic Dutch, Flemish, and Italian painters, alongside the Impressionists and other fin-de-siècle artists. Works by Renoir, Rodin, George Inness, and John Singer Sargent abound.

Our June 19 visit to the Clark began with a Permanent Collection Gallery Tour, as docent Kathleen led 20 of us through a series of representative rooms. We began before a painting by Renoir, which Kathleen at first didn’t identify by title. Our task was simply to take in the colors and textures, and offer our own interpretations of this burnished expanse. Some called it land, some sea; it turned out to be titled “Sunset,” and pictured a seascape with the tiniest wisp of a sailboat in the distance. Dating from about 1880, this was a clarion call of the Impressionist movement, completely defying the precepts of the stodgy old Academy that dominated the art scene in Paris. It’s difficult to reckon that works of art which seem so attractive to us should have inspired such scandal, but that never stops any generation from disparaging the work of contemporaneous artists.

Until comparatively recently, it’s been difficult for female artists to be seen and heard, but that has changed and continues to change. We’re now in an era of aggressively acknowledging the women who struggled against obscurity, so our second artist was Mary Cassatt, although I don’t think she needs any extra introduction. Although American-born, she lived for most her life in France, studying with Degas and combining a representational approach with impressionist technique. We looked at her 1873 canvas “Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter,” panal being a length of honeycomb the handsome bullfighter is dipping into the glass of water a young female admirer presents.

A pair of contrasting Renoir paintings followed: “Onions” (1881), a rich but simple still life that added some garlic to the menu, and the magnificently bosomed “Blonde Bather,” also from 1881, prompting Kathleen to explain that nude subjects almost never looked directly out from the canvas, maintaining instead a demure illusion of privacy.

Of course there were works by Monet to explore, contrasting “Tulip Fields at Sassenheim,” a marvelously designed landscape across which cut a few almost-horizontal strips of tulips is varying shades of red, and “Rouen Cathedral, the Façade in Sunlight,” a subject Monet painted many times and which takes on completely different aspects the farther back from it you step. Having seen these works only in books, it’s breathtaking to see the originals right before you.

The Impressionist collection at the Clark is vast – we could see it stretching to a vanishing point in the rooms beyond us – but we finished with a sculpture by Degas, “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” a piece that was modeled around 1881 and cast in bronze nearly forty years later, finished with a gauze tutu and silk ribbon. It inspired much critical wrath because he gave us a realistic look at an “opera rat,” as the young hangers-on at the Paris Opera were known. Ballet was an art form enjoyed by the upper classes, who didn’t wish to be reminded of the lowly origins of many of those dancers.

Although Williamstown offers plenty of lunch-fare opportunities, we visited the Clark’s Café 7, where a brief menu of sandwiches and salads gave me a Reuben panini and Susan a tasty chicken quesadilla. And you can dine on an outdoor terrace with a view of the reflecting pool. That’s where I betook myself with a post-prandial coffee as Susan went to her next event, a Sensory Tour of the grounds and museum.

Two of the docents led this 90-minute event, explaining that it was the second time they’d offered this program and were shaping it to present at an upcoming docent convention. The challenge was to use one’s senses to experience the “now” of the Clark – outside and in. Participants were instructed to walk quietly to a large red maple tree by one of the reflecting pools, and engage all of the senses to experience the immediacy of the natural world, culminating in that tree, examining its mass, looking up through the leaves. Susan, a known tree-hugger, ran her fingers over the bark of the tree.

The group next walked across a small bridge to a wooded area. Among other sensory provocations, “We touched a hemlock,” said Susan, “to get that fragrance on our fingers.” Other methods of awareness also were encouraged. “Putting your foot on the ground, being aware of the ‘now’ of that feeling. Then we paused in another wooded area, where were given clipboards and pencils and asked to draw a tree we liked. I drew the roots of the tree in the ground, and the herb-Robert growing around it.”

From my perch on the reflecting-pool terrace, I saw Susan’s group then go inside. They looked very subdued. But once inside, Susan explained, each was given a stool on which to sit and study a trio of landscape-intensive paintings. While looking at George Inness’s, “Green Landscape,” the experience outdoors informed this observation wonderfully, Susan said. “We could see how much variety of green was int hat painting, and how those shades became contrasting textures, often in very subtle ways.” Similar scrutiny was given to Monet’s 1890 “Spring in Giverny” and Alfred Sisley’s “Banks of the Seine at By.”

It was time for our final event of the day, which necessitated a short drive to a nearby building, the Manton Research Center, which has an excellent auditorium. On tap was a program titled “Zarabanda Variations,” performed the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC*, an ensemble of classical-instrument players and singers who seek to draw out different sounds than those we expect.

Or so I am led to believe. The nine who performed at the Clark (there are more on the group’s website roster) include a string quartet, flutes, guitar, bass, and percussion, and a singer who also doubled on percussion. The brief program notes suggested that the zarabanda (or sarabande) has roots in pre-Columbian America, with Arab and African traditions also flowing in. But the performance itself gave no indication of what was being played or how it tied in with the theme of the show. There was a lack of timing and intonation among the strings, suggesting a lack either of rehearsal or skill, and the pieces themselves, although credited to different composers, most of them ensemble members, shared a meandering quality that seemed like improvisations that had run out of steam.

The works were connected, or at least interrupted, by poetry written by Edgar Garcia and declaimed by various performers. They are described as “dream diaries written while reading the journals of Christopher Columbus,” but they burrowed into Garcia’s head without provoking any sense of outrage. Taken all together, it was a surprisingly unfinished, even amateurish program, which was a great surprise given the quality of all other aspects of the Clark that we enjoyed that day.