Mass. shows fine works en masse

Author: Joyce Man

The works of master painters Degas, Monet, Rodin and Pissaro are housed in the most illustrious museums and highbrow collections in the world. Some of them rest among other famous canvases in the exclusive collections of the Musee d'Orsay, others repose in the grand halls of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, while still others are honored in London's National Gallery. In this day, when a van Gogh painting goes for $100 million to a billionaire hedge-fund investor and the biggest impression the impressionists make is through their gavel prices at Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses, the average art enthusiast can feel pretty detached from the revered masterpieces.

But happily, the likes of Monet and Renoir can still be found mingling with the commoners. In fact, many world-class works, far from being inaccessible, are housed a mere four hours' drive from Middlebury in Williamstown, Mass.

While our sports fans may associate this town with Middlebury's supposed rival, for art lovers, the Williams College area holds much worth seeing. Peel away the layers of the same yellow-and-red foliage that surrounds our campus, and find Monets, Remingtons, pale oil paintings dreamt up by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, expressive wax forms sculpted by Edgar Degas - and that's not all.

Just 20 minutes away from the masters is a collection of equally renowned yet completely different contemporary art. Venice Biennale participant Patricia Piccinini's silicone part-human, part-animal sculptures labeled "wonderful and sinister" by Art Forum magazine stand in one arena. Next to these biomorphic forms tower the dramatic, large-scale installations by one of today's foremost Chinese artists, Cai Guo-Qiang.

The two museums in question are the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCa). With the combined energy of famous impressionists, nineteenth-century American masters and modern-day installation artists, these two rich collections make up an impressive duo of fine art and culture right here in rural New England.

The Clark Institute, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, lays claim to an impressive permanent collection of art that has been carefully accumulated over several decades by Sterling and Francine Clark. The collection boasts European art from the 15th to 19th century, including such celebrated works as Claude Lorrain's "Landscape with the Voyage of Jacob" and Francois Boucher's "Vulcan Presenting Arms to Venus for Aeneas," which was commissioned by King Louis XV's Minister of Arts. Joseph Mallord William Turner, the 19th century painter whose depiction of the Battle of Trafalgar is currently being celebrated in London's National Gallery as "Painting of the Month," is represented at the Clark by his resplendent 1840 work, "Rockets and Blue Lights to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water."

"The Clark has a positively world-class collection of paintings," said Instructor of History of Art and Architecture Eliza Garrison in an e-mail commentary. This was a sentiment that has been echoed by many of the museum's patrons. On Sunday afternoon, one visitor was overheard exclaiming in Russian, "This is amazing, it's like the Hermitage!"

While any comparison with Saint Petersburg's gargantuan Hermitage museum collection would require incredible exaggeration, the idea that The Clark's collection is worthy of praise is well-founded. Indeed, its collection of impressionist art, which includes 30-odd works by Renoir, is truly impressive. The vibrancy in color and light, so typical of Renoir's work, are displayed in his 1881 oil paintings "A Girl with a Fan" and "The Blonde Bather." Equally exciting is Edgar Degas' "Little Dancer," whose quiet yet expressive pose at the center of the room calls to mind the artist's famous ballerina paintings. Further bolstering the collection are works by Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro and Paul Gaugin.

But, as Garrison pointed out, showing masterpieces is only half of what The Clark does. The Institute also has an enduring commitment to its traditional role as a center for public education and continues to offer a lengthy series of lectures and interactive programs for children. "The Clark has a great many scholarly resources that are invaluable [and] absolutely top-notch [in bringing] the most highly-respected scholars from every field," said Garrison, "[but] even with their illustrious master's program, the Clark is truly committed to making the museum a place where everyone can come away with something, no matter whether they have had History of Art Course 110, 101 or 111."

On a completely different note, and as a delightful contrast to The Clark's masters of the past, Mass MoCa displays cutting-edge contemporary works. The museum's beginnings lay with the then-director of the Williams College Museum of Art Thomas Krens, but it was not seriously conceived as an institution until his colleague Joseph Thompson completed the center's industrial home, procuring its status as an interactive center for contemporary art in 1999.

Today, their 13-acre, 27-building campus of creativity opens its doors year-round to the striking and innovative works of today's most influential contemporary artists. At the moment on display in Building Four is "Life After Death," curated by Laura Heon and Mark Coetzee, which reveals the moving yet disturbingly silent compositions by seven talented students of the Leipzig Art Academy in former East Germany.

Cai Guo-Qiang's "Inopportune," an installation of leaping tigers and flying cars, frozen in motion, completely transfixes the viewer. Meanwhile, Long Bin-Chen's "Buddha Project" destroys conventions of sculpture by showing figures carved out of rows of old books. Separately, from Oct. 28 to Nov. 6 Mass MoCa will house part of the seventh annual Williamstown Film Festival.

Last Sunday, perhaps sensing that Greyhound's termination of service has left many of the college's students high and dry, not least in their ability to reach larger cultural centers, the College's Department of History of Art and Architecture organized what they nicknamed the "Artbus." "Artbus" transported a group of students, professors and art enthusiasts from Middlebury to Mass MoCa and The Clark. For one rare day, they got to come face to face with the Renoirs and Monets that would otherwise have remained unknown.

Sadly, with the exception of such opportunities, the harsh winters and virtual lack of public transportation means that this group of art museums which should, as Garrison said, "be on any art-lover's list of places to see, no matter where they live," remains inaccessible to most of the local population.

To add to the pity, Middlebury is also in the midst of other great art and cultural treasures: the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vt., the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Ma., and the Williams College Museum of Art. Renoir's works may have traversed the Atlantic and Cai Guo-Qiang's the Pacific, but the Middlebury student still has a hard time crossing the state line to see them.