Itinerary - MFA Boston Hudson River Valley Press Clippings
THIS IS WHERE EDITH WHARTON WROTE THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
Regina Cole | AUGUST 6, 2019
Edith Wharton built The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1902 as a country retreat for herself and her husband, Teddy Wharton. The 17,000 square foot house – half of which was given over to servants and their work – was modeled after European manses in which guests entered via an anteroom, where they waited to find out whether they would be received by the lady of the house. No gaudy entries or vulgar grand staircases for Wharton, who wrote The Decoration of Houses before she published best selling novels that include The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth.
Wharton was an unlikely writer: her upbringing was in the ele vated circles of old New York society, where women’s intellectu al ambitions were discouraged. Her maiden name was Jones, as in “Keeping up with the Jonses;” the phrase was literally coined about her family.
But Edith defied expectations and not only wrote best sellers, but became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize as well as the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate of letters from Yale University.
When she built The Mount, Wharton used the architectural and landscape design theories she had previously published in The Decoration of Houses. She thought that good architectural ex pression included order, scale, and harmony. The house exterior is a striking white stucco, with clusters of gables and white chim neys rising from a roof capped with a balustrade and a cupo la. The design of the gardens were as important to Wharton as that of the house; they include a sunken Italian Garden, a gravel
promenade, annual and perennial beds and a Rock Garden that includes molded grass steps cut into a sloping hill, a landscape feature rarely seen in America.
This is where Wharton wrote two of her best-loved books, Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth. But she and Teddy were not des tined to live happily ever after. Teddy, who was mentally ill and maritally unfaithful, sold The Mount without his wife’s permission. Edith Wharton divorced him in 1913. In 1911, she moved to France, where she lived for the rest of her life.
After many years in which the house served as a school, a theater company headquarters and a designer show house, The Mount has been restored to its appearance during Wharton’s time there. The house and grounds are home to a summer lecture series, weekly bird walks, concerts, theater performances and outdoor sculpture exhibits. Best of all, Edith Wharton’s library has returned to the house. Included are 22 first editions of her own work. It took the non-profit foundation that now owns the house a long time to raise the $2.6 million needed to buy the 2,600 books from George Ramsden, a British rare book dealer who assembled and painstakingly cataloged them. Most important, he resisted pres
sures to break up the collection and sell it piecemeal. He decries as “cultural vandalism” the dispersal of formerly intact libraries of such celebrated authors as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and Henry James.
With her gardens and her library restored, Edith Wharton would be happy here today.
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www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/arts/design/art-exhibitions-in-upstate-new-york.html
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THE SCHOOL: A NEW YORK ART DEALER’S DREAM GALLERY — IN KINDERHOOK Robert Ayers | APRIL 8, 2015
Kinderhook, N.Y. —Those of us who live in Berkshire Edge territory are fortunate to have some of the best art museums in the coun try right on our doorstep. But you may be surprised to learn that one of the most remarkable places for looking at contemporary art hereabouts is actually a 30,000 square foot private gallery.
Jack Shainman is one of the most highly regarded art dealers on the international circuit. He opened his first gallery with his part ner, the late Claude Simard, in Washington, D.C., in 1984. Nowa days, he is a mainstay of the most prestigious art fairs and runs two galleries in New York City. Last year, he expanded his opera tion to The School in Kinderhook, N.Y. If you have not visited it yet, you should. A genuine pleasure awaits you.
Shainman’s roots are very much in our part of the world. He grew up in Williamstown (Mass.) where his father was longtime mu sic critic for The Berkshire Eagle. Fifteen years ago, he bought a small farm in Columbia County, N.Y. “I just love the area so much,” he says, “so this was a life’s dream come true.”
He explains that he’d always wanted “a bunker for storage and a
space to exhibit large works. Then I was driving through Kinder hook — it must have been in May or June of 2013 – and I saw that the school was for sale. I screeched to a halt, but thought we’d never be able to afford it.” He bought the building for $550,000, but as he reflects now, “It’s not the price of the building; it’s the fixing up that costs the money. We never imagined that we were going to go so far with the renovation as we did, but luckily we were naïve in a lot of ways.” A geothermal heating and cooling system was installed, all of the exterior walls had to be insulated, but, using almost entirely local contractors, the place was ready to open within a year.
What Shainman and his team have done to the building is ex traordinary. Compare it, for example, with another school that has been turned into a contemporary art space (like MoMA PS1 in Queens) or a recently constructed public art museum (like the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan) and its qual ities are immediately obvious. The largest space in the building is an expansion and amalgamation of the old gymnasium and cafeteria. Floors were lowered, walls were demolished, and what results is,without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful gallery
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spaces anywhere in the country. It sits at the center of a network of smaller rooms, corridors and staircases that manage both to honor the building’s history and to provide a context into which the meaning of serious art can expand.
The School, like all of Shainman’s projects, has a specific focus: “to exhibit, represent and champion artists from around the world, in particular artists from Africa, East Asia, and North America.” Their work tends to be politically engaged, provocative, and certainly not the sort of stuff you forget about as soon as you leave the gallery. The current installations are wonderfully typical. In the largest space are three pieces by Williams College alum Meleko Mokgosi, including two colossal multi-panel paintings that use the devices of European history painting to reflect uneasily upon the post-colonial realities of life in Botswana (Mokgosi’s home), South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Alongside these is a sober
ing piece focusing on the cultural and racial biases that still dog many of our perceptions of art making.
This is an unforgettable group of works, but they are rendered all the more resonant by the fact that they sit at the heart of a larger mixed show entitled Status Quo. This reveals Shainman’s special gifts as a curator, for every work of art benefits from its relationship with the pieces that surround it. The entire building echoes to Hank Willis Thomas’s high-volume interactive video piece Black Righteous Space; a small room to one side is filled almost to the ceiling by Nick Cave’s King of the Hill;
in what is still called the principal’s office sits the 6-foot-high sculpture that gives the show its name, Yoan Capote’s Status Quo (Reality and Idealism); and in the niches of one corridor a six
teenth century Mary Magdalene and a Goan Saint Sebastian from the eighteenth or nineteenth century rub shoulders with a couple of modern West African Cat Masks.
Perhaps it would be flippant to suggest that there is something here for everyone, but Shainman has been delighted by the re sponse that The School has received. He had originally imagined that the place would only open during the summer months, “but when I saw the number of people who wanted to come,” he says, “we had to rethink it and decided to be open on Saturdays 11-5 every week. I’m just floored at how many people show up even on the coldest winter day.” He seems particularly pleased by The School’s relationship with the local community. “We get a lot of day people from New York City,” he says, “but the community in Kinderhook has really embraced it. People come over and over again. That’s something I hadn’t imagined and it’s really gratify ing.”
It is clear how much Jack Shainman enjoys The School. “Ever since we finished the construction and the kinks were sorted out, it’s really been fun. It’s really exciting.” Obviously, the building al lows him to do things that his city galleries do not: “One of the challenges of shows in the city is that they are only up for 4 or 5 weeks. It goes by so quickly. Here we are going to be doing three shows a year, and that’s advantageous because a lot of collectors and museum people can make it. Plus we have so many large ob jects that usually have to remain in storage, and it’s really nice for works to have more of a life.”
He knows that the life they can enjoy is deeply connected to Kin derhook and to the region around it. He is particularly excited by a large-scale sculpture that he is planning for the front lawn of the building this summer, though as contracts are yet to be signed, he cannot say much more about it. What he does say is this: “I’ve always loved Kinderhook. It’s so beautiful, and there’s so much history. Now The School is one of the most beautiful buildings in the town, and we’re part of the community. It’s an investment in our futures.” And he shrugs as he adds with a smile, “ It sort of worked out, I guess.”
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VISIT
HUDSON RIVER VALLEY
OCTOBER 16–18, 2019
MELEKO MOKGOSI
(born 1981) is an artist and assistant professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. His work includes large-scale paintings that explore themes of colonialism, democracy, nationalism, and life in Southern Africa.
early life and education
Mokgosi was born in 1981 in Francistown, Botswana, and raised in the city of Maun. He began drawing in primary school. While in high school, he became interested in the potential of making political commentary with art. In 2003, he moved to the United States, par ticipated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and studied art at Williams College and UCLA, earning B.A. and Master of Fine Arts degrees.Mokgosi studied for four years with American conceptual artist Mary Kelly, who guided him in developing a project-based practice, which he described as “focused not on producing objects but articulating a set of questions”.
career
From 2008–2011 Mokgosi created his first series of paintings, Pax Afrikaner, which explored xenophobia and national identity in south ern Africa.
In 2012, Mokgosi was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. There he worked on completing his Pax Kaffraria painting series, which he explained was “to explore how people in southern Africa think about nationhood.” Mokgosi made a series of more than 50 paintings on the subject of colonialism in Africa. A book on the Pax Kaffraria project was published by the Hammer Museum in 2014. In 2014, Mokgosi began the project Democratic Intuition, which he described as being about “how do normal people understand, recip rocate, have access to, and not have access to the ideas of democracy and the democratic”. He presented the first two chapters of this work at his first solo New York exhibition in 2016.
honors and awards
2012 – Inaugural Mohn Award, Hammer Museum | 2017 – Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts PAGE 6
MAGAZZINO ITALIAN ART OPENS IN THE HUDSON VALLEY Geoffrey Montes | JUNE 28, 2017 A 20,000-square-foot art warehouse in Cold Spring showcases avant-garde Italian works
Daytrippers to New York’s scenic Hudson Valley can now add a warehouse brimming with Italian art to their itineraries, thanks to Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, the art-collecting local couple behind the beguiling new venture. Known as Magazzino, the ap
pointment-only art space debuts in Cold Spring on June 28 with a selection from the Olnick Spanu Collection‘s trove of works from the Arte Povera movement, which emerged in 1960s Italy and uti lized nontraditional, everyday mediums like tin, burlap, wax, and even shoes, books, and blankets.
To reimagine the site’s existing factory building, the couple tapped Spanish architect Miguel Quismondo, who expanded the footprint to 20,000 square feet. The result is airy, clean-lined spaces that work in perfect harmony with the artworks. “It’s hard to find a museum where the architecture doesn’t compete with the art,” notes Quismondo, who harnessed natural lighting with strategically placed windows and frosted skylights. (Revealing their dedication to the project, Quismondo and Olnick spent time touring museums in Europe in search of the perfectly-lit exhibi
tion space.)
Inaugurating the venue is an exhibition celebrating late Italian
gallerist Margherita Stein, an early champion of Arte Povera and the artists who embraced it. Here, Nancy Olnick shares more de tails about the exciting new space.
WHAT IS THE DRIVING FORCE
BEHIND THE COLLECTION?
Our passion for post war and contemporary Italian art. In addi tion, we feel a great responsibility to provide a platform for lesser known Italian artists in the United States.
HOW DID THE COLLECTION COME ABOUT? Beginning in 1992, Giorgio and I would visit Italy several times a year for extensive periods of time. As art lovers, we were curious to learn more about Post War Italian art and were fortunate to meet Sauro Bocchi, a knowledgeable art gallerist with a keen and discerning eye. He suggested we visit Castello di Rivoli in Turin before we embarked on what would become a long and fantastic adventure. We followed Sauro’s advice and visited this wonderful museum, which at the time was exhibiting an extensive collection of work from the Arte Povera period, which had begun in 1967. We were overwhelmed and returned to Rome full of enthusiasm
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and a fervent desire to educate ourselves further. We began to
study the work in depth, became more fascinated by the con
ceptual nature of the work and decided to acquire the work of
these artists.
WHAT IS THE COMMON THREAD THAT RUNS
BETWEEN THE ARTISTS?
I would say it’s the artists’ desire to explore the essence of how
our daily lives are affected by the physical principles and natural
phenomena that have existed throughout history. The concepts of
memory, myth and archetypes, natural events, such as the growth
of a plant, chemical reaction of a mineral, gravity and weight, as
well as the role of the artist and the viewer and essentially equat
ing life with art and its relationship to the meaning of life.
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE COLD SPRING OF
ALL PLACES?
As members of the Cold Spring/Garrison community for over 25
years, there was no question in our minds that we wanted to give
back to our community by establishing an art and educational
center for their benefit. The area draws many artists, writers, and
creative people who seek refuge in the picturesque surroundings
and natural environment. We have watched over the years as the
Hudson Valley has grown into a hub of cultural and historic sites
that invite visitors worldwide.
HOW IS MAGAZZINO DIFFERENT FROM A PRIVATE
MUSEUM OR FOUNDATION?
By maintaining Magazzino as a private initiative we can operate
more independently rather than be forced to comply with the
rigid laws required of non-profit organizations or foundations in
New York State.
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AT BOSCOBEL HOUSE, CONVERSATIONS
BETWEEN ANTIQUE AND MODERN
FURNISHINGS Douglas P. Clement | JULY 15, 2016
One of the best exhibitions in the Hudson Valley this summer ex plores a trend that art museums have embraced with mixed suc cess in recent years: trying to achieve an aesthetic interplay by exhibiting contemporary art alongside the work of old masters.
“Hudson Hewn: New York Furniture Now,” on view through Aug. 14 at Boscobel House and Gardens in Garrison, is a quietly power ful show that juxtaposes contemporary studio furniture produced in the region with the incomparable antique furnishings that dis tinguish Boscobel, the house museum across the Hudson River from West Point.
Boscobel offers many rich narrative veins, including the proper ty’s status as home to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival,
which continues through Sept. 5 with productions of “Macbeth,” “As You Like It” and other plays.
Among the many house museums in the Hudson Valley, Bosco bel — restored in the Federal style of the late 18th and early 19th centuries — is the only one built by a British Loyalist, States Morris Dyckman. But it no longer stands where it was built, on a 250- acre riverfront property in Montrose, 15 miles south of the current location, from 1804 to 1808.
In the mid-1900s the property became the site of what is now the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ Hudson Valley Health Care System. Boscobel was dismantled, stored, moved, restored and rebuilt in Garrison, thanks to its major benefactor, Lila Acheson
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Wallace, co-founder of The Reader’s Digest. It opened to the pub lic in 1961 with a focus on the decorative arts, a mission that was modified in the 1970s to emphasize neoclassical furniture.
“We have the very best New York furniture made between 1800 and 1820,” Jennifer Carlquist, the Boscobel curator, said of its Federal collection, which includes pieces by Duncan Phyfe and two other premier furniture makers of the early 19th century, Mi
chael Allison and Charles-Honoré Lannuier.
“The ‘Hudson Hewn’ exhibit is also a chance to see what’s hap pening in New York 200 years later. Contemporary furniture flaunts its through-tenons the way Phyfe-style furniture flaunts its carved decoration,” said Ms. Carlquist, who has fashioned an unusual display for a space usually used to present exhibitions of work by Hudson River School artists.
The genius of “Hudson Hewn” is in Ms. Carlquist’s decision not only to pair antique with contemporary furniture in Boscobel’s lower-level exhibition gallery, but also to create a past-and-pres ent conversation in each of the period interiors by adding a con temporary piece to the setting.
In this way. the exhibition highlights the continuity of an advanced design vocabulary and gestural sophistication in New York furni ture-making, positioning what Ms. Carlquist calls today’s renais sance of Hudson Valley craftsmanship as a parallel to the golden era of the early 1800s.
A signature visual duet, given pride of place on the cover of the exhibition catalog, takes place between Boscobel’s regal Grecian Easy Chair attributed to Duncan Phyfe and the Wickson Chair made by Michael Robbins of Philmont in 2015.
One is ornate, the other spare, but both exude the same sense of cosmopolitan power within the context of economical design. Hallmarks of Phyfe’s bergère-type easy chair — one of only two known to exist — include saber-shaped front legs, featuring wa
terleaf carving, that extend to animal paw feet thought to have been carved from solid wood.
“Michael Robbins’s Wickson Chair manages to express the same dynamism and power with the bare minimum of solid form,” Ms. Carlquist writes in the catalog. “The barrel-back consists of Amer ican-tanned bridle leather pegged into posts that extend down to the floor.”
A flamboyant exchange takes place between Boscobel’s circa-1810 dumbwaiter storage cabinet and the cross-shaped, wall-mounted china cabinet made in 2016 by Jeff Johnson of Poughkeepsie. Its front rotates like an airplane propeller, providing awkward access to what’s stored within.
“It’s the story of the update of what impractical luxurious storage looks like,” Ms. Carlquist said. “The spectacle is part of the charm.”
Though compelling, the display in the exhibition hall is just a deli cious appetizer to a main course consisting of the pairings in each of Boscobel’s period rooms. So virtuosic is the curator’s touch, it can take a few minutes to spot the contemporary piece salted within the display — but once each pairing is isolated, the care fully arranged marriage of aesthetic correspondences is goose bumps-worthy.
“The elegant rooms for which Boscobel is so famous present a legacy of art and craft that continues to the present,” Steven Mill er, Boscobel’s executive director, said in a release announcing the exhibition. “We are honored to place that heritage in a new con text in this unprecedented exhibition.”
The legacy of Boscobel is as prismatic as the expansive prop erty’s charms, which include a rose garden, an herb garden, an orangery, a woodland trail and the Belvedere Overlook, with stun ning views of Constitution Marsh and the Hudson River beyond. There is a nascent sculpture garden, where four busts of Hudson River School artists by the sculptor Grey Wyatt will expand to 10 pieces by the fall of 2017.
States Dyckman, who served in the British Army and subsequent ly worked to collect money he was owed in England, died while Boscobel was barely a work in progress. His wife, Elizabeth Corne Dyckman, soldiered on and, when the house was completed, dec orated it with elegant furnishings, some shipped from England and many bought in New York City.
After the reign of Dyckman family members at Boscobel ended in the 1880s, the property had a series of owners over the next 40 years, a website history explains. Westchester County bought the Montrose property in 1924 for use as a park; the Veterans Administration arrived in 1945; and by 1955 Boscobel was set to be demolished.
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A preservation movement was begun, and Boscobel was disman
tled and stored until the site in Garrison was secured in 1956 and
the restoration project started. Following the initial focus on dec
orative arts, Berry B Tracy, then curator of the American Wing of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, came on board to reinterpret
the house around the top-tier, historically accurate furniture be
ing acquired.
Greatly aiding in the reinterpretation of Boscobel was the discov
ery in 1975 of an 1806 inventory of the Dyckmans’ possessions.
An 1824 inventory of the house, documenting its contents shortly
after the death of Elizabeth Corne Dyckman, was found in 1989,
leading to further refinement of the period room presentations.
Visitors can first get a sense of Boscobel’s history in an exhibition
in the Carriage House Reception Center before embarking on a
docent-led tour of the house.
The artists and furniture designers featured in “Hudson Hewn”
also include Atlas Industries (Newburgh); Dzierlenga Furniture
(Salt Point); Fern Handcrafted Furniture (Hudson); Josh Finn
(High Falls); Rob Hare (Ulster Park); Asher Israelow (Brooklyn and
Hudson); Nokolai Jacobs (Rosendale); Christopher Kurtz (Kings
ton); Mike Legget (Woodstock); Moran Woodworked Furniture
(Gallatin); David R. Morton/Big Tree Woodworks (Kingston);
Samuel Moyer Furniture (Staatsburg); Munder-Skiles (Garrison);
Pacama Handmade (Woodstock); and Michael Puryear (Shokan).
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VISIT THE STARN
BROTHERS‘ SPRAWLING BEACON, NEW YORK, STUDIO Vicky Lowry | FEBRUARY 13, 2017
The studio of artists Doug and Mike Starn is a testament to the brothers’ shared vision
Growing up in New Jersey, Doug and Mike Starn would sit next to each other at their family’s kitchen table and do what kids do around the world: make art. In their case, the identical twins worked in complete harmony. “I’m painting on his painting, and he’s painting on my painting, and we’re perfectly happy,” recalls Mike. “It’s just the way we are.”
The Starns have been collaborating in unison ever since, mov ing from childhood doodles to photography-based work that ex plores the intersection of art, science, and religion. In the 1980s, unable to afford enlarging an image to 30 or 40 inches, they just
stuck small sheets of photographic paper together with Scotch tape, like a mosaic, before exposing them to chemicals in the darkroom. Since then they have pushed themselves far beyond photography, melding sculpture, performance, and more into their practice. Their 2010 rooftop installation, Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop, a jungle-gym-like structure consisting of 6,800 bamboo poles, remains one of the Metropoli
tan Museum of Art’s most popular exhibitions ever, with 630,000 visitors and at least six marriage proposals reported over six months.
For the past eight years, the brothers have worked side by side—
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fueling each other’s ideas, finishing each other’s sentences—in
a former factory in Beacon, New York. The 40,000-square-foot
building once served as a foundry for casting metal sculptures as
high as 50 feet not only for patriotic monuments on Washington’s
National Mall but also for fantastical creatures by such artists as
Louise Bourgeois and Jeff Koons. The Starns’ original Big Bambú
lives here, festooned with a bamboo sailboat (test-launched two
summers ago on the upstate New York lake where they each have
a weekend house). The room-size sculpture, inset with a woven
staircase leading to the second-story gallery and a third-story of
fice, continues to shift across the ground floor thanks to local
rock climbers who extract and reattach poles using colored rope
while 128 webcams capture the meticulous evolution. “Our vision
is that nothing in the world is monolithic, nothing is one thing—
everything is interconnected,” Mike explains.
It’s an especially productive time for the brothers. The annual Ar
mory Show in New York City, running March 2–5, is featuring a
double booth of new pieces—including large-scale portraits and a
ten-foot-tall glass sculpture—for Stockholm’s Wetterling Gallery.
An exhibition of beloved album covers (complete with vinyl re
cords) that they have reworked with paint opens at the Baldwin
Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, on March 17, followed by a show of
woven-bamboo furniture debuting April 27 at design dealer Cris
tina Grajales’s space in Manhattan.
One of their most complex projects to date, a 90-foot-long
stained-glass wall commissioned by the Art in Embassies pro
gram during the Obama administration, will be erected outside
the U.S. embassy in Moscow this May. The freestanding façade,
which consists of a composition of satellite images relating to
space exploration and the cosmos, harks back to the brothers’
1990s tenure as NASA artists in residence. The digital photos
have been transferred onto layers of glass (some of it handblown)
by Franz Mayer of Munich, a fifth-generation workshop in Ger
many. “We’ve made translucent work with photographic film and
glass throughout our career,” Doug says, “but this piece has an
additional meaning of transparency—science is positive—looking
for truth in a transparent universe.”
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WHO MOWS THE LAWN AT STORM KING, NEW YORK’S LARGEST
SCULPTURE PARK? Peter Libbey
It takes a crew of eight to maintain the 500 acres at Storm King Art Center, where art lives in the landscape.
Storm King Art Center isn’t a museum, exactly. Instead of hanging on white walls or resting on pedestals under track lighting, the art here is nestled amid 500 acres of verdant hills, exposed to the ev er-shifting and unrelenting climate of New York’s Hudson Valley.
The surrounding landscape frames the pieces in ways that squares of gilded wood never could. At the property in Cornwall, N.Y. the color of Mark di Suvero’s “Mother Peace” can be appreci ated alongside the matching hue of local Red-winged Blackbirds and the plastic dynamism of sculptures like Jerome Kirk’s “Orbit” (1972) is only heightened by the darting of rabbits nearby.
Mike Seaman and his seven-person facilities crew are the stew ards of this complex, evolving environment. They keep the care fully sculpted lawns mowed, the trees trimmed and the sculptures clean and intact. When a hole needs to be dug, they perform the excavation. When something needs to be fabricated, they’re the ones to do it.
Seaman, who has worked at Storm King for almost 30 years, is modest about the role he and his crew play at Storm King. He would rather, it seems, talk about chemical reactions than about himself. You have to use distilled water to refurbish certain sculp
tures, he explained, because otherwise contaminants can leave
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blemishes behind. Sculptures that tend to be touched by visitors (touching, in general, is not allowed) need special attention, be cause the oil on human hands can damage their patina. Wax, used to protect some pieces, should be applied sparingly, because it can catch pollen and dust.
Seaman sees himself, primarily, as a facilitator and mediator be tween artists and curators and the demands of nature. When in stalling a new piece, his aim is to “help actualize” the center’s art works by placing them in the environment in the “least invasive”
way possible. Disturbing the site’s plants and wildlife is always avoided when it can be.
“For us, you can’t just impose something on the landscape,” said Nora Lawrence, a senior curator at Storm King. That’s not only because it goes against the center’s artistic and environmental commitments. There are also practical constraints to consider, and Seaman’s team knows the property’s weather and topogra
phy intimately. Sometimes, Lawrence explained, artists have to be told things like, “‘that’s going to flood’ or ‘we can’t possibly create something that deep in the ground’ or ‘if we dig there we’re going to hit a boulder.’”
At a place where the art is meant to interact with its surroundings, even basic maintenance work has a big impact. When a member of the crew mows Maya Lin’s “Storm King Wavefield,” they’re not just keeping the grounds neat. They’re also participating, along with the site’s natural forces, in the re-creation of the artwork. And cleaning Alyson Shotz’s “Mirror Fence” so it can reflect the faces of visitors and the surrounding foliage isn’t only good housekeeping. It’s necessary for the piece to function in the way it was intended.
Seaman and his team are also integral to ensuring that Storm King is environmentally friendly and hospitable to the local wildlife. In 2012, they planted six acres of local grasses and wildflowers to at tract more endemic birds and insects. Six more acres followed the next year, seeded with grass and forb suited to the microclimates within the site, and there have been several more such planting projects since. Seaman is currently preparing to replant the area near “Mother Peace” with more flora native to the Hudson Valley.
After working there for decades, “watching Storm King evolve over time,” Seaman said, is what he’s most enjoyed about his ca reer. During his tenure, he has seen saplings flourish, new species of animals visit and major artworks added. Day-trippers might not catch the subtle changes that unfold over years, but despite Storm King’s vastness, Seaman still encourages visitors to slow down to “look at small details.”
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THE FASCINATING
HISTORY BEHIND THIS MOORISH-STYLE HOME IN UPSTATE NEW YORK
Cator Sparks | MAY 3, 2019
Here’s why you should know Olana
When roaming around historic Hudson Valley in upstate New York, there is no shortage of things to do—from antique shopping on Warren Street to gorging on pumpkin tortelli at the beloved Fish & Game restaurant. But one must-stop for any design-driven tourist is Frederic Church’s delightfully eccentric, Moorish-Ori
ental-style fantasy home turned museum (and surrounding 250 acres of grounds), Olana.
Church was part of the Hudson River School movement, a mid 19th-century art movement of American landscape painters. Think of him as the J.M.W. Turner of America; he was known for his dazzling landscapes of saturated sunsets (basically the OG Clarendon filter), romantic waterfalls, and majestic mountains. His home, perched atop the rolling hills just outside of downtown
Hudson and overlooking the Catskills, is as impressive a master piece as his artwork.
In 1867, before embarking on an 18-month global voyage through Europe and the Middle East that would put Rick Steves to shame, Church purchased 18 acres of farmland with spectacular views of the Hudson River. The original house plan by Richard Morris Hunt was for a French-inspired home, fashionable (and predict
able) for that era’s elite. Upon returning to the States, however, Church abandoned those designs for something much more ex otic, a home that today remains one of America’s best examples of Orientalist architecture.
Church hired family friend Calvert Vaux (who was working on the
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buildings of Central Park at the time) to design the Persian palace of his dreans. A rare blend of Victorian architecture juxtaposed with Middle Eastern decorative motifs sets Olana apart from so many of the grand country houses that dot the American land
scape.
Since designing a completely Middle Eastern-style home would be hard in a cold climate, Vaux attempted to distill that same feel by creating a complex of stone rooms built around a central courtyard with a roof. One big trend of the era was stenciling—
and Church ran wild with it. While interior stenciling was extreme ly popular, exterior stenciling was rare. Being an artist, it is no surprise that Church designed the stencils himself, inspired by tile work, metal work and stone carving of Islamic mosques.
On the inside, the home continues its blend of styles. Lucky for us, the interior stencils have never been retouched, just cleaned, so you can imagine how the metallic paint would have glimmered by candlelight when the family was entertaining guests, such as Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain).
Speaking of the interiors, most of the furniture and paintings today remain just as the Church family left them. Of course, most of the paintings are by Frederic, although there are works by other impressive artists of his day, including Martin Johnson Heade, John Thomas Peele, and sculpture by Erastus Dow Palm
er. The furniture is an eclectic mix of Middle Eastern and Asian and American. So richly layered are the interiors, you really need three or four visits to completely absorb everything going on in this house. Like most Victorian homes, it’s a complete sensory overload from the doorknobs to the mantels. Be sure to scope out the amber glass windows that Church overlaid with cut pa
per patterns to resemble ‘Mashrabiya’ latticework, characteristic of Arabic homes.
While we’re fascinated with the home’s design, the grounds and gardens (also designed by Church) are well worth a stroll, too. The parklands are so extensive the website even has maps you can print out to prepare for your visit, and the barns and cottage are well worth a peek.
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‘THOMAS COLE’S
REFRAIN: THE
PAINTINGS OF CATSKILL CREEK’ REVIEW:
ELEGIES FOR AN
IMPERILED LANDSCAPE An exhibition of the English-born painter’s lesser-known Hudson Valley scenes evinces his love for natural beauty and sorrow over its
devastation.
Barrymore Laurence | AUGUST 10, 2019
Although the English-born painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is
widely regarded as the progenitor of the Hudson River School of
American landscape painting, his best-known works often depict
imaginary scenes. For example, in his pentalogy “The Course of
Empire” (1833-36, at the New-York Historical Society) the same
invented landscape forms the constant background in each of the
cautionary tableaux narrating the rise and decline of an ancient
allegorical civilization. Moreover, though Cole traveled through
out the Hudson Valley, eventually settling in the town of Catskill,
N.Y., in 1836, he rarely painted the Hudson River itself. And he
rarely revisited a scene on canvas.
Nevertheless, from 1827 to 1845, Cole painted a succession of
works depicting Catskill Creek, a tributary of the Hudson. These
particular canvasses seem not to have been examined as an in
tegral series until H. Daniel Peck, emeritus English professor at
Vassar College, began to study them as such in 2007. His research
yielded the book “Thomas Cole’s Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill
Creek” (published this year) and inspired the current eponymous
exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. (The show
runs here through Nov. 3 then moves to the Hudson River Muse
um, Yonkers, Nov. 22, 2019-Feb. 23, 2020.)
With Mr. Peck as curator, the intimate show was assembled from
public and private collections and is presented chronologically in
the handsome 2016 reconstruction of Cole’s 1846 “New Studio”
on the homestead grounds. It consists of 12 Cole paintings—10 of
Catskill Creek and two thematically linked to them. Three paint
ings of the same general location supplement these, representing
the continuation of Cole’s legacy by his contemporary Asher B.
Durand (1796- 1886), Cole’s pupil and artistic heir Frederic Edwin
Church (1826-1900), and the American Pre- Raphaelite painter
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Charles Herbert Moore (1840-1930).
Cole’s artistic celebrity benefited from the wealth yielded by America’s burgeoning commerce and industry, which fostered the national desire to produce and promote native art and, thereby, assume a cultural place beside Europe. Yet Cole himself viewed America’s industrial development as a pernicious threat to its landscape. Essentially a proto-environmentalist, he deplored not just the visual ruin of the land, but the resulting destruction of what we now understand as its ecology.
In these Catskill Creek paintings, Cole documented a landscape that was increasingly imperiled. Each is charged with an elegiac sensibility that grows more pronounced in the works of the 1840s. By then, this particular setting had been drastically altered by the construction of the Canajoharie and Catskill Railroad in 1836. In the course of this, many trees were cut, ruining the forested texture of the landscape, and a bridge was built to carry the line across Catskill Creek, thereby scarring it. Though Cole’s paintings allude to the destruction wrought by the builders he called “cop
per-hearted barbarians,” the show’s paintings don’t actually de pict the offending railway itself.
Cole was also angered by other forms of commercial intrusion on his beloved Catskills. However, in his “Mill Dam on the Catskill Creek” (1841) he includes the titular water mill as a picturesque element. Unlike the textile mills and iron works of his Lancashire youth, which
belched smoke and hellish coal fire day and night, small wa termills like this one worked in harmony with the flowing river. Nestling it cozily in the middle of his composition, he carefully delineates its weathered roof and rough siding boards with par allel brush strokes of the same mingled browns, terracottas and violet shades with which he paints the rugged crags of the dis tant mountains, thereby further integrating the mill with its nat
ural surroundings. “Mill Dam” also features a group of lovingly rendered trees on the left bank of the stream, their gnarled trunks almost glinting in the afternoon sun, their leafy crowns seemingly atremble in a gentle breeze.
Cole loved Catskill Creek so deeply that while in Rome, on his sec ond and final European tour (1841-42), he was apparently moved by profound homesickness to paint it again—either from mem ory or from sketches he had packed —in “Settler’s Home in the Catskills.”
Perhaps the show’s greatest triumph is the pairing of Cole’s “Catskill Creek, N.Y.” (1845)— likely his final oil painting of the scene—with his preliminary “Study for ‘Catskill Creek’” (c. 1844-
45). Here Cole capitalizes on the bold simplicity of the moun tain range’s profile against the opalescent sky with its scudding clouds of gilded pink. He contrasts this crepuscular expanse against the deeper autumnal textures of the trees in the fore ground, the standing tree at left made all the more poignant as it rises defiantly amidst the broken limbs and stump of an arboreal victim of the railroad—which ironically had ceased running three years earlier.
The paintings gathered here represent deeply personal state ments whose visual quietude is unlike the more public voice of Cole’s large narrative works. In them, we bear witness to Cole’s joy in unblemished natural beauty and his profound sorrow over its creeping devastation.
—Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.
PAGE 19
OLD GUARD
AVANT-GARDE Gregory Cerio | MAY 12, 2017
The place is startling even when you know it’s coming. Part of the surprise stems from the location: the old and selfassured village of Lenox, Massachusetts—the Berkshire Mountains summer seat of Gilded Age worthies who built estates with names like Holm
wood and Tanglewood and Bellefontaine and Belvoir Terrace. But it’s more the cinematic reveal that follows an approach up a long, narrow lane and across a bridge over a little brook, the whole passage shaded by maples and pines. Then boom—the sudden appearance of a spanking white stucco assemblage of geometric volumes, a house that is a cousin to the buildings of the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. What the hell is that doing here?
The Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio dates from 1930 and is reputed to be the first modernist edifice in New England. If any one wants to split hairs about that designation, it was certainly the first building in that part of the country to embody the fresh, progressive, vigorous spirit of the European born creative move ment. Suzy Frelinghuysen and her husband, George L. K. Mor ris, were artists, part of a small group known as the Park Avenue Cubists. In the 1930s, at a time when regionalism and American scene painting were the order of the day, they were committed to abstraction, making work full of fractured imagery and floating forms. Morris and Frelinghuysen were radicals in their way, and as their home and lifestyle suggest, they were cordial ambassadors for the new type of art. They were avant-garde without being rude about it.
Both were well-off and well-bred. George Lovett Kingsland Morris was born into New York’s Knickerbocker aristocracy. His father, Newbold Morris, was a direct descendant of Lewis Morris, a sign er of the Declaration of Independence; his mother, Helen, was a Schermerhorn. The family kept homes in Manhattan and Paris, and had a Georgian revival estate in Lenox called Brookhurst. Morris was educated at Groton and Yale. Estelle Condit Frelinghuysen, dubbed Suzy by her brothers, came from a New Jersey family with a less distinguished, but no less honorable history of public service. Her grandfather was secretary of state in the Chester A. Arthur administration. She grew up in Princeton and at the family mansion on the Jersey shore, receiving a classic young lady’s ed ucation that was heavy on musical instruction and voice training.
Frelinghuysen and Morris hit it off during an intermission at a Met ropolitan Opera performance in 1933, and they married in 1935. By then, Morris had embarked on a career as a painter, sculptor, critic—and a key advocate for abstract art in America.
Morris’s pivotal encounter with modern art came by chance. He was spending the summer of 1927 studying painting in Fontaine bleau, near Paris, when he happened to run into Albert Eugene Gallatin, an older cousin and family friend. A wealthy artist and collector, Gallatin had made yearly trips to Europe gathering works by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, and other artists of the School of Paris. He introduced an enthralled Morris into their circle. Later that fall in New York, Gallatin opened
PAGE 20
the Gallery of Living Art—the first contemporary art museum in the United States.
Upon graduating from Yale in 1928, Morris enrolled at New York’s Art Students League, where his teacher was the Ashcan school artist John Sloan. But his interest in abstraction lured Morris back to France in 1929, and there he became fast friends with many of the leading modernists, among them Léger, Piet Mondrian, Rob
ert Delaunay, Jean Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Morris bought their work and that of others, including Picasso, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Braque, and Joan Miró—buying art not simply to col lect it but to study it. Toward the end of the year, Morris began art classes with Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris.
The sojourn in Paris marked a turning point in his life and art. While Morris’s color palette and brush work resemble those of Léger, representative figuration disappeared from his canvas es, replaced by concise, studied compositions of flat geometric planes. Morris also began to promote abstraction in the art press. In 1937 he joined forces with Gallatin, Taeuber-Arp, and others to publish a French-English art journal called Plastique (which lasted for five issues). There, and in the pages of the Partisan Review— which Morris joined that same year as an art critic, while provid ing financial support for the magazine—he argued many times and passionately for the notion that contemporary nonfigurative painting and sculpture were a logical step in the evolution of art.
The Paris art world also changed Morris’s lifestyle. He was fasci nated by the airy, clean-lined house and studio that Le Corbusier designed for Ozenfant. In 1930, with the help of Boston architect George Sanderson, his Yale classmate, he built a studio on a rise a few hundred yards from the mansion on his parents’ Lenox estate: a white near-cube with a northfacing wall of windows and a saw tooth roof with skylights (Fig. 5). A decade later, Morris worked with local architect John Butler Swann to design a house as an addition to the studio. The result was a Bauhausian composition of narrow block forms, with a glass-walled semicircular stairwell as a grace note. To help finance construction, Morris consigned a Picasso cubist work, The Poet, for sale. The buyer was Peggy Guggenheim.
The building is now open to the public in the summer months, and to enter off the graveled forecourt is to be transported to a day of sure faith in the march of progress—down to the then state-of-the-art fluorescent lighting fixtures. Frelinghuysen and Morris are announced as artists in the foyer. Suzy took up painting seriously shortly after she married Morris, and her early work was heavily influenced by Braque and Gris. Her 1938 cubist still life of a bistro tabletop tableau, Printemps (Fig. 8), hangs on the wall on the left side of the entry hall. To the right is a curving marble staircase. It embraces Morris’s 1936 sculpture Configuration, and the stairway walls are covered in a bright, energetic fresco of his making. (The staircase originally had no bannister, but out of a concern for safety, Morris finally designed and installed one.)
From the entry, the layout directs guests to the living room on the right—you pass a vest-pocket cocktail bar tucked beneath the stairs—or left into the dining room, or straight ahead to a back garden with flower beds and a lawn that sweeps down to a pond. Frelinghuysen and Morris each put their mark on one of the pub
lic rooms. Suzy’s blue and black frescoes enliven the dining room (Fig. 4). George painted frescoes—inset with verre églomisé pan
els—in the living room, and installed an abstract marble bas relief above the fireplace (Fig. 7). The furnishings include pieces by sev eral of the greats of prewar American and Scandinavian modern design: Gilbert Rohde, Donald Deskey, William Lescaze, Paul T. Frankl, Alvar Aalto, and Bruno Mathsson. Perhaps the most mar velous thing about the house is the treatment of the artwork that Frelinghuysen and Morris collected. A Léger here, a Miró there, a Paul Klee down the hall— the paintings are hung casually, without hierarchy or look-at-me spotlights. These were, after all, the work of friends and acquaintances.
Morris had done well for those artists. By the late 1940s, he had triumphed in his long campaign to gain broad acceptance for ab stract art. But if he won the war, Morris lost the peace. He believed that art should strive for objectivity and universality, and that cubism and the variants developed by the artists of the School of Paris attained those goals. But a different view of abstract art rose to prominence in the United States, as critics such as Clem ent Greenberg championed Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist painters whose work manifested the will and ego of the individual. In an America ascendant after World War II, no one wanted to look to Europe for inspiration anymore.
PAGE 21
Meantime, even as she continued painting, Frelinghuysen re
turned to her first love: music. Under the name Suzy Morris, she
debuted in 1947 to acclaim in the New York City Opera produc
tion of Ariadne auf Naxos. A dramatic soprano, she enjoyed even
greater success the following year in Tosca. But her opera career
was derailed by a bout of bronchitis in 1951, and she retired from
singing. Her artwork continued to develop, embracing expres
sive, gestural brushwork. Morris continued to plumb geometric
abstraction. A highlight of his later career is a group of paintings
composed of small rectangular elements arranged in a swirling
pattern that presages the op art of the 1960s.
On June 26, 1975, the car in which Frelinghuysen and Morris were
driving near the village of Stockbridge was struck by a tractor
trailer. George died instantly. Suzy recovered and lived until 1988.
In her will, she stipulated that the Lenox house and its art collec
tion be used for educational purposes. And so they have.
PAGE 22
10 THINGS TO LOVE ABOUT HUDSONJamie Larson | OCTOBER 6, 2019
HUDSON HALL
The key elements behind Hudson, New York’s success as a dis tinct, character-rich destination are no secret, but they’re not reproducible, either. Hudson’s a cocktail of classy and lecherous history, gritty architectural and natural beauty, and a fiercely inde pendent, artistic community. Decades of hard work and creative momentum transformed a former industrial town on the verge of ruin into one of the most vibrant small-business driven communi ties in the Hudson Valley. The city survived because it was willing to change; it thrives because it continues to do so. Here are 10 things, old and new, that we love about Hudson.
1. HUDSON HALL The Historic Hudson Opera House is an apt representation of the little city as a whole. Once the elegant ar tistic and civic center of town, it wasted away and sat abandoned for many years until the ‘90s, when a group of ambitious citizens began the long, hard work of restoration. Looking back now from the fully restored building, rededicated Hudson Hall, the amount of work it took to get from there to here is astonishing. Though it lives in a historic shell, the heart of Hudson Hall’s performance calendar, community programming and curatorial spirit are fresh and progressive. Hudson Hall is the city’s center once more.
2. HIP BOUTIQUE HOTELS It’s hard to believe, but little more than five years ago there weren’t any proper hotels in Hudson. Now, there’s a handful of exceptional, quirky boutique hotels like Rivertown Lodge, The Maker and Wm. Farmer and Sons, which also have their own restaurants and bars. There’s also The Wick and The Barlow, and many of the older bed and breakfasts have stepped up their games to essentially provide a hotel experience. These modern hotels give a more traditional lodging experience than the ubiquitous Airbnbs while maintaining a strong sense of style that reminds you you’re still in Hudson.
3. TSL Making Hudson cool before Hudson was cool, Time and Space, Limited has been a cauldron of alternative artistic energy for more than 40 years. The performance and art space’s leg endary founders, Claudia Bruce and Linda Mussman, have built a community around their bold vision of progressive and chal lenging artistic expression. Whether you’re looking for a place to watch independent movies and live broadcasts of the MET Opera or you’re in the market to start a revolution, TSL’s your place.
4. LIL’ DEB’S OASIS With its playful but expertly executed tropical menu and decor, Lil’ Deb’s captures the imagination of everyone who enters. It’s not a restaurant full of art — the restau rant is the art, from what’s on the walls and what’s on the plate to what the chef-owners Carla Perez-Gallardo and Hannah Black happen to be wearing that day. The idea that every moment of your life can be an expression of artistic positivity is inspiring and, as a side effect, also creates a pretty swell place to grab lunch or dinner.
5. SIDESHOW AND 5 AND DIAMOND VINTAGE CLOTH ING STORES The world-class antique stores that were the backbone of Hudson’s economic resurgence are a great place to find vintage furnishings, but Hudson’s also got great places to find high-quality vintage clothing. Sideshow and 5 and Diamond aren’t selling old rags, these are classic styles stocked with inten tionality to support your modern wardrobe.
6. JOHN DOE RECORDS Part of Hudson’s charm is that it’s always been a little wild and rough around the edges. While one of the side effects of success is that Hudson has become a lit tle more polished (especially on tourist-facing Warren Street), the city still has enough grit and grime to make it feel real. Dan Seward, the proprietor of John Doe Records, for many years and in many locations, is one of the last ambassadors of Hudson’s
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dirtier days. The Bunny Brains frontman has stocked the store
with a little bit of everything and a lot of great records. It’s actu
ally a really welcoming place in its own kind of way.
7. SPOTTY DOG BOOKS & ALE PUTTING a bar in a book
store isn’t a new idea but it was when The Spotty Dog opened
up in a historic firehouse on Warren Street back in 2006. This fun
idea is now serious business and the success of the store/bar is
due to how well its owners have curated their book and beer se
lection, not to mention their big back section of art supplies and
children’s toys. They also feature an active and eclectic schedule
of performances and events.
8. BACK BAR At this popular high-end dive, tucked behind the
3FourtySeven international antique shop, star chef Zak Pelac
cio was firing on all cylinders when he created an overachieving
menu of amazing south-Asian cuisine in a casual atmosphere. The
drinks are just as well thought out and delicious.
9. GRAZIN’ DINER The edible extension of the Grazin’ Acres
Angus Farm in Ghent, this burger joint is all about the quality of
the ingredients sourced directly from the family farm. The classic
diner atmosphere heightened by excellent food and friendly staff
makes Grazin’ a relaxing breakfast and lunch joint just off the 7th
Street park.
10. BASILICA HUDSON The city of Hudson would be noth
ing without its namesake waterway. After the industrial revolution
turned the river into little more than the city dump, Hudson has
finally begun to reclaim its riverfront in earnest. One of the main
reasons to venture down to the riverfront is to take in an event at
Basilica Hudson. Formerly a glue factory, the massive brick struc
ture makes for a stunning venue whether it’s for a 24-hour drone
performance put on by a community of avant-garde musicians
or the Farm & Flea showcasing the craftsmanship and originality
of small-scale local vendors. Behind the Basilica are noted artists
Melissa Auf der Maur and Tony Stone. Their commitment to revi
talizing this once-forgotten district of the city is as strong at their
drive to put on unique performances. The Basilica is more proof
that you don’t have to leave behind what’s old to blaze ahead. In
Hudson, as always, it’s progress through preservation.
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