Arts Holes in the Walls
A few months back, the Frye Art Museum rehung its founding collection of old paintings with elaborate frames in salon style, meaning they take up every inch of wall space in the two central galleries, which have subsequently become dens of visual hedonism. It’s a beaut:
This week, exhibition designers took to removing 7 of those paintings and leaving gaps in their stead. These 7 are the chosen ones. Through museum lore, they’ve come to be understood as visitors’ favorites. Now that they’re gone, visitors will be encouraged to write about why they like them, about what they remember about them, and the most interesting of those writings will be compiled and exhibited next to the favorites when they return in their own separate gallery. In this way, both the museum and visitors will get a look at the sedimentary process by which generations of viewers develop favorite artworks in a permanent collection. Maybe the reasons these are favorites aren’t artistic at all; we’ll see. This is a test.
The disappeared paintings — they’ve even been removed from bookstore postcard racks — are:
1. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Shepherdess, 1881, oil on canvas, 46” x 28 ½”
2. Hermann Corrodi, Venice, about 1900, oil on canvas, 49 ¼” x 91 ¼”
3. Alexander Max Koester, Moulting Ducks, about 1900, 28 3/8” x 51 3/8”
4. Adolf Schreyer, Horses Fleeing from Flames, 19th Century, oil on canvas, 47 ¾” x 79 ¼”
5. Franz von Stuck, Sin, after 1906, oil and mixed media on canvas, 34 7/8” x 21 5/8”
6. Fritz von Uhde, The Picture Book, 1889, oil on canvas, 24” x 19 ½”
7. Dάniel Somogyi, Knigssee, 1878, oil on canvas, 46 5/8” x 59 3/16”
They cover the whole range of subject matter, from lusty ladies to innocent little girls to idyllic landscapes to fluffy animals to fire. Visitors have until July to comment on them.
One more Frye note: On a rotating basis, curator Robin Held invites contemporary artists to write their reactions to the historical art on view, and up now are the musings of Claire Cowie, whose own work is up in the adjoining show Swallow Harder and looks like this:
My favorite of her notes addresses two Marsden Hartleys hung vertically, the top painting of two artichokes and the bottom of a grotesquely austere plainswoman (this one is as ugly, in her way, as some of de Kooning’s Women). The artichokes, Cowie writes, must be the embittered woman’s missing breast armor. Only one step from Hartley to Xena.
In the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museaum she willed that the collection be left exactly how it is and when one of the paintings was stolen, they just left a frame there. Presumably there won't be a seperate room if it's ever returned, but this reminded me of that and I hadn't thought of it in years.