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Wyeth show at MFA: What we liked

I'll pass on the question of whether the Jamie Wyeth retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts (through Dec. 28) merits the prime real estate. The museum obviously thinks so, and Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, who I usually agree with, very clearly does not. But the exhibition is definitely worth seeing, even if you're not one of the masses who are familiar with Wyeth's lineage - his grandfather was the great illustrator N.C. Wyeth, his father was painter Andrew Wyeth. There are some quite wonderful paintings here, and even some of the not-so-wonderful stuff isn't boring.

(Above, Jamie Wyeth at the MFA on June 23, with his Portrait of John F. Kennedy. Partial gift of Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth and partial purchase. © Jamie Wyeth. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

The Wyeths' ubiquitous presence in 20th century American art has a slightly comic resonance in my family. For many years we harbored a vague and apparently false belief that we were somehow distantly related on my mother's side to Christina Olson of Andrew Wyeth's famous painting Christina's World. When I was a boy my parents dragged me along on a visit to Cushing, Maine, to see the house in that bleak painting - what fun for a kid!

And my mother still grumbles when she catches sight of her copy of the large-format paperback catalog to an Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the MFA circa 1970; a visiting teenager with a pen scribbled a couple of phone numbers on the cover circa 1980, and the vandalism rankles her to this day.

Jamie is 68 now and due for a retrospective. This being Boston, they had to hang his posthumous Portrait of John F. Kennedy, which has just become part of the MFA's permanent collection. Wyeth was just 20 when he received the commission, and it's a fine portrait I suppose, but it seems rather much like all the other paintings I've seen of JFK, dignified and thoughtful yet sort of flat, as if any artistic spark was extinguished by the pall of tragedy.

It's a less interesting work, anyway, than Portrait of Shorty or Portrait of Helen Taussig, both painted, astonishingly, when Wyeth was just 17. These two pictures are vivid and alive and intense in character. Portrait of Shorty (below) applies his father's realism and washed-put palette, but has a rich weirdness all his own; it's one of the very best pieces here. There's also a portrait of Andrew Wyeth in which he wears a strange, monklike tonsure. It's a picture full of resonances that are hard to unpack.

Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. © Jamie Wyeth., Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

There was a lot of stuff here that I found meh at best. Other than Lou Reed, has there ever been an artist whose work was improved by hanging around with Andy Warhol? Wyeth's portrait of Warhol and his other 1970s pictures  are the exhibition's weak links, i.e. the rather pointless one of Ahhhhnold flexing. And who thought it was a good idea to include Wyeth's two tableaux vivant - dioramas, basically - of scenes from life chez Warhol? Bizarre.

After that, though, everything improves, as most of the work comes from Wyeth's beloved Maine coast or rural Pennsylvania environs. There's a constant push/pull between his desire for an idealized, "pretty"take on the rural past, exemplified in loving portraits of his wife, Phyllis, in period garb, often driving horses (Connemara Four) and a bleaker take that shows the shadow of his father's work (Head Tide-Maine). I'll take the latter, as the prettier pictures are sometimes nothing more.

But of course the best works are the most individual, which may touch on his father's rather grim view or his grandfather's storytelling, but always skewed just a little off what you'd predict. Sometimes this shades toward cute, as in the many affectionate animal pictures here or Pumpkinhead - Self-Portrait, which, sue me, I love. But Wyeth is at his best when he's ambiguous going toward dark. That means works like Orca Bates (below), a nude portrait of a adolescent Mainer with a whale's jawbone hanging over him; the jawbone reappears in a picture of Jamie's wife called simply Whale. The jaw is an artifact his grandfather might have made use of in illustrating some pirate tale, and the palette seems to be his father's, but the pictures are definitely his. The wristwatch!

Courtesy Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © Jamie Wyeth. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Which brings us to the gulls. I am boggled by people who really dislike Wyeth's paintings of seagulls, a frequent  subject of his later work. He is quoted here as saying, "the eye of a gull, that's limitless, that's more the ocean than any big seascape," and that's exactly what comes across to me. The ferocity on display in his Seven Deadly Sins series, in Sea Star or even the oversized, off-species Raven presents slashing, staring, flailing nature that's red in tooth and claw and feels more like his own vision than anything else in the exhibit.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a painter friend here in Newburyport was taking the ferry back to shore after a visit to Maine's Monhegan Island when a black power boat rather abruptly crossed their bow. "That's Jamie," he was told. Wyeth's weakness, it seems, is that he's all over the place.

LEFT: Envy - The Seven Deadly Sins
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
2005
Watercolor and gouache on toned, hand wove rag paper mounted on archival board
*Private Collection
*© Jamie Wyeth
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

ABOVE:

Artist Jamie Wyeth with his painting Portrait of John F. Kennedy in the Lois and Michael Torf Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on June 23, 2014. With art object: Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jamie Wyeth (American, 1946)
1967
Oil on canvas
*Partial gift of Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth and partial purchase. © Jamie Wyeth. *Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Portrait of Shorty
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
1963
Oil on canvas
*Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. © Jamie Wyeth.
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Orca Bates
Jamie Wyeth (American, born in 1946)
1990
Oil on panel
*Courtesy Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © Jamie Wyeth.
*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

 

Mark your calendars for a trip to the North Shore

As you may know, HubArts World Headquarters is in Newburyport and we pay special attention to the museums of the North Shore. The big news among them this year, hands down, will be the reopening of the renovated and modernized Cape Ann Museum, now set for Aug. 19. As our friend Keith Powers puts it, the Cape Ann is "Home to the greatest collection of Fitz Henry Lane paintings and drawings in the world, and the most sophisticated repository of the history of Cape Ann," so it's a big deal. The other big story around here is the ongoing development of the Peabody Essex Museum into a standalone art museum, vastly broadening its onetime mission to present the maritime history of the North Shore and the global trade and cultural exchanges that arose from it. On Sept. 6, the PEM will open a run as the only East Coast venue for Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in collaboration with the Calder Foundation. The exhibit of the iconic - a word not misused here - 20th century sculptor's mobiles, stabiles and maquettes - runs through Jan. 4.

Image: Blue Feather, c. 1948. Alexander Calder. Sheet metal, wire, and paint. 42 x 55 x 18 inches. Calder Foundation, New York. © 2014 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, NY.

'The Goldfinch' won't leave me alone

It's true. I've been procrastinating about this post for weeks, but Donna Tartt's decade-in-the-making, nearly 800-page third novel has that kind of power. Even if "The Goldfinch" isn't a masterpiece, as my friend Rob Weir says it might be, it's a real novel by the fullest definition, immersive and affecting and thought-provoking. There are themes and characters you'll find yourself thinking about - and, apparently, blogging about - weeks later. (Spoilers ahead.)

With the Marathon coming up, I should note that book's inciting incident is a vividly rendered terrorist bombing. In Manhattan, Theo Decker, 13, and his mother duck into the Met to get out of the rain. They go their separate ways in the galleries, Theo covertly pursuing another peek at a pretty red-haired girl. Then a massive explosion leaves him dazed but alive in a Bosch-ian hellscape that his brain can barely process; this is a bravura set piece by Tartt. Frightened and confused, Theo eludes first responders and leaves the museum with an old man's last words ringing in his ears, carrying an artistic treasure under his coat.

The painting is a very real one that Tartt has appropriated: "The Goldfinch" by Carel Fabritius, a protege of Rembrandt who died in a huge gunpowder explosion in Delft in 1654. Most of his works were destroyed too; "The Goldfinch" is one of the few that remains. Tartt obviously chose the painting in part for the power of this backstory, but the image itself is incredibly evocative, with the beautiful bird chained to its perch in the light, stoic.

Theo soldiers on after the bombing, stoic too, or just shut down, especially after the crushing revelation that his mother is not going to meet him at home, as he hoped. She has died at the museum. After too many hours on his own, the authorities find him, and he is taken in by a friend's screwed-up Park Avenue family. Eventually he ends up in the custody of his long-absent, alcoholic father, a grifter and gambler with a girlfriend from hell and a house in a spooky Las Vegas subdivision that has become a foreclosure ghost town. There Theo meets Boris, another latchkey kid, son of a Russian mobster (well, maybe; Boris already knows better than to put all his cards on the table). Boris introduces Theo to the sometimes pleasurable oblivion of booze and drugs, and to new ways of looking at the world, including as a criminal land of opportunity.

Through it all, Theo keeps the painting, stashing it away wherever he lands, rationalizing his continued possession of it while rarely looking at it. Is it a talisman of his survival on that awful day? A sort of compensation for his suffering, a karmic One Fund settlement? Or is it his link to the lost beauty of a world in which his mother was alive? Or a very valuable ball and chain that could land him in desperate trouble were it discovered?

All of those things and more, as it turns out. Tartt utterly convinces us of psychological rightness of Theo keeping "The Goldfinch," without ever pinning down his motivation too neatly. And the constant presence of the fragile painting – usually just offstage, and often in jeopardy – is also a great narrative trick for keeping us hooked. 

Besides the book's length, everyone seems to comment on Tartt's Dickensian plotting - as many readers have noted, Boris is a sort of Artful Dodger - and the author has a whopping, long-fuse surprise or two up her sleeve. Some of her moves take hundreds of pages to pay off. There's a skip forward in time in the middle of the book, when Theo moves back to New York as a young adult, bringing both the painting and a drug habit with him. He joins the furniture business started by the old man who died on the museum floor, run by his partner, the kindly Hobie. The red-haired girl and the Park Avenue family and even Boris return to Theo's life. But there is a reckoning to come, several of them in fact.

Caveats? Shining a light into every other corner of Theo's life, Tartt seems oddly elusive about sex. It's almost tangential in her otherwise probing vision. (In this, "The Goldfinch" compares unfavorably to another very long novel about a troubled adolescent, Mona Simpson's "Anywhere But Here.") Perhaps it is too late a time on the planet to hope for Dickensian closure in life, but I felt Theo's contacts with Pippa, the red-haired girl, deserved more of an ending, since she's the light he badly wants to see at the end of his life's lonely tunnel. I'm not expecting a happy ending, mind you, but their storyline simply lacks dramatic arc. She's not interested in him that way, and she won't take his expensive present. The end. Well. There is another woman in Theo's life, and when the by-then-racing plot takes him away from their big society wedding near the end of the book, he's numb to it for reasons including all those pills he's taking. But there seems to be very little fallout from his absence otherwise, which is odd.

I almost had the feeling that Tartt didn't want to share Theo with a wife or girlfriend, preferring to spend long hours alone with him in the furniture workshop (that's where I would have started cutting pages, btw) as he gobbles Vicodin and obsesses. But an author's intense bond with her character is hardly something to complain about, and perhaps these are quibbles. This is an intimate portrait of a troubled life shaped by fate and loss. It ranks with Simpson's book and also with John Le Carre's lonely "A Perfect Spy." When Theo was desperate and alone at night in a rented room in Europe, I worried Tartt's book would end the same way as Le Carre's...

What arguably sets "The Goldfinch" on an even higher shelf is Theo's transcendent soliloquoy in the last dozen or so pages, pondering art and time and mortality in highly personal terms, finding meaning in all that has transpired. To echo what Clea Simon wrote in her excellent essay about both book and painting, this is a novel that I sat up late at night rushing to get to the end, only to find I wished I had taken more time. Finishing it felt like a loss.

Speak now, and later

As noted below, I'll be joining Bill Steelman of Essex Heritage at the mic for First Friday at the Custom House Maritime Museum in Newburyport on April 5. That's a member event (although you can join that night and still get in on the buffet and drinks). But everyone is invited when I'll be on a panel at the Newburyport Literary Festival on April 27. Ghlee Woodworth and I will talking about Newburyport walking trails, local history, the byway and so forth at 11 a.m. at the Newburyport Art Association. And best of all, it's free! And I'll be the speaker at the Lynn Museum's annual membership meeting in May. In each case I'll be selling and singing the Byway Guide for interested parties.

Big-screen Strangelove at the MFA, Kubrick style

As a juvenile film fanatic, I was given copies of "Truffaut/Hitchcock" and "Stanley Kubrick Directs" one Christmas or birthday in the early '70s, back in the days when you could see all their films at the Brattle or the Orson Welles or at your nearest college film series. DVDs and cable have pretty much put an end to those outlets, but "Psycho" and "Dr. Strangelove" remain perhaps disturbingly close to the top of my list of all-time favorites. And now the Museum of Fine Arts is offering a chance to take in Kubrick's complete filmography in order on the big screen in February.

Offerings include: "Fear and Desire," the little-seen 1953 war allegory in a print restored by the Library of Congress (Feb. 1, 2, 3 and 7); Kubrock's first masterpiece, the World War I drama of cowardice and heroism "Paths of Glory" in a print restored by UCLA (Feb. 7 and 9); and of course his 1964 peak, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," a bit of Cold War insanity that's a shortgun wedding of "Fail Safe" and "Duck Soup," that's also one of Peter Sellers' greatest films (Feb. 14 and 16). And of course those great Kubrick couples - Hal & Dave, and Tom & Nicole - are also on the schedule.

Tickets are $11 (less for members, students, seniors, etc.) at www.mfa.org/film, 800-440-6975 or the MFA ticket desks. Click the web site to find out which theater each show is in and other info.

Photo: Kubrick and Sellers on the "Strangelove" set, © Sony/Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. / The Stanley Kubrick Archive

Anatomical art show wants you - today

Between the time she sent her press release and when I actually read it, Naomi Slipp's Kickstarter reached its goal, so some of the suspense has gone out of this. But you still have one day to kick in more to support the exhibition she's organizing, Teaching the Body: Artistic Anatomy in the American Academy, from Copley, Eakins and Rimmer to Contemporary Artists, set for Jan. 31-March 31 at the Boston University Art Gallery. Slipp, a BU grad student, says she's trying to create "a unique project that will draw together the Boston arts and medical communities and provoke a rich conversation about what it means to picture the human body." Given how large and important those two communities are here, and how interesting the results can be on the rare occasions when they interact - Remember the giant photos of cancer cells at MIT? - this seems like a worthwhile project. premiums available to backers include a copy of "Teaching the Body" (the illustrated exhibition catalog) and a private exhibition tour with Slipp.

The exhibit is especially challenging behind the scenes as she is arranging to borrow (and prepare and ship) works from all over, While she has secured significant funding, one source dropped out late in the process, leaving her with a $2,500 shortfall. Hence the Kickstarter. And her laptop got ripped off this week, which means a little extra would probably be appreciated.

From her Kickstarter sales pitch: "Over eighty works in the exhibition [many never exhibited before], including drawings, prints, sculptures, paintings, and texts, illustrate the relationship between American art and medicine, a collaboration founded because of their shared interest in the human body and the study of anatomy. Included in the exhibition are: illustrated anatomical lecture tickets; photographic stereoviews; anatomical sketches, studies, and models; pathological anatomy illustrations; and American anatomy books written for women and children. Fine art created by American artists Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), Kiki Smith (1954- ), Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), William Rimmer (1816-1879), Hyman Bloom (1913-2009), Frank Duveneck (1848-1919), and many others, along with visual works from the 'everyday' including magazines and prints, will illustrate the ways that artists studied artistic anatomy. Perhaps, most important, this exhibition examines both what that study meant for these artists and for the way we, today, think about our own bodies and how they work."

Berklee's working out a groove

You don't have to put on the funkalicious shades like Berklee College of Music President (and drummer) Roger Brown did to greet honorary degree recipient  George Clinton the other day. It's easy to see with the naked eye that Berklee's impact has grown under Brown's tenure, which began in 2004.

The museums have been getting most of the ink lately when it comes to cultural impact around here, as the ICA makes itself felt in its new digs, the Museum of Fine Arts unveils its massive makeover, and the Gardner shows off its sleek addition. But despite its own changing profile and big expansion plans, Berklee hasn't gotten quite the same attention.

When I moved back to Mass. almost 15 years ago, the venerable music campus still had to remind us journos at times that it was a college now, not a school, even though that change had taken place back around 1970, when a relative of mine was taking classes there in big-band arranging. Jazz was still what people thought of when they thought of Berklee - the names most commonly mentioned were Pat Metheny and faculty member Gary Burton - as well as the Berklee Performance Center. Those in the neighborhood also knew it as the source of all those kids with instrument cases clogging the sidewalks around Tower Records.

The kids are still there, though Tower isn't. Berklee's student body seems to grow ever more talented and diverse, like this bluegrass fiddler from Prague. Now, though, folks like Clinton regularly pass through the campus, sometimes performing for the public, but almost always hanging and jamming with students. Students, alums and the occasional passing bigger name drop into the school's Cafe 939 to perform. Student and faculty ensembles pop up all over the city with (usually free) performances, especially in warmer weather and outdoors. And in September the Beantown Jazz Festival draws a hearteningly huge and diverse crowd to Columbus Ave as well as venues around the city. (Wish they'd called it something other than Beantown, but ....)

Berklee has long done well at the Grammys, but often with producer or songwriter credits that don't get much attention. Student-turned-faculty-member-turned-jazz-phenom Esperanza Spalding lives out of town now but did much to raise Berklee's image with that surprising 2011 Grammy win for best new artist. Spalding also appears on alum and percussion professor Terri Lyne Carrington's "The Mosaic Project," which followed her into the Grammy spotlight this year by winning best vocal jazz album.

Trey Parker of "South Park" and "Book of Mormon" fame and the brilliant singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi are also alums who were among Berklee's eight Grammy winners this year, as is songwriter Jeff Bhasker, who won best rap song for “All of the Lights” by Kanye West, Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Fergie.

There are plenty of other signs that Berklee is hitting it right, but I'll name just one more: the Rethink Music conference, which Berklee runs with Reed Midem and Harvard's Berkman Center for Society and the Internet. Last year's event drew a full house of music business insiders to yak for two solid days about whatever the hell it is that's happened to the industry and where it goes next. There were endless podium and hallway debates about copyright and digital distribution and bands charting their own course in the increasingly chaotic field.

This year's event, featuring keynotes from the president of Pitchfork Media and the chief content officer for Spotify, is set for April 22-24 again at the Hynes Convention Center. I encourage Brown - no relation, by the way - to break out the shades, and maybe some nice stack heels too.

Photo of Clinton and Brown courtesy Berklee.

Work and play at MASSMoCA. And a boat.

Made one of my regular visits to MASSMoCA in North Adams last weekend and found that the current exhibits - at least the ones I could hit in a couple of hours - are as usual a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. At the sublime end of the spectrum of course is Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, which has its own building and its own web site and is expected to stick around through 2033. I've been through it perhaps half a dozen times since it opened in 2008, and the work still feels like genius.

The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility, on display through April 14, does something different for a MoCA show, tackling its subject head-on, almost polemically at times. The idea is to show how far labor has fallen from the days of Rosie the Riveter in our era of economic despair, outsourcing, migrancy and exploitation. A series of photos shows workers increasingly buried on a beach, in sight of distant factories, until there's nothing left of them. A nearby installation combines a workers' break room and a gallows, like a New Yorker cartoon that needs no caption.

Most compelling is Adrian Paci's tragicomic "Centro di permanenza temporanea," a large-screen video that shows solemn-faced  minority workers lining up to climb one of those wheeled airport staircases - but instead of boarding a plane, they are left standing stoically on the staircase in the middle of the airport, while the shiny jets of commerce taxi and take off all around them. (Image courtesy MASSMoCA.) The video is specifically intended to comment on the plight of undocumented workers, but the sense of abandonment seems to apply to pretty much everyone these days. This five-minute film was a kick in the head.

Upstairs in Building 4 is the exhibit Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum, running through February. This is one of those shows where the scale of the works is designed to take advantage of the huge spaces at MASSMoCA, so that they make an impact even if the curatorial explanations don't always convince. The centerpiece of Ward's show is "Nu Colossus," which features a fishing boat cut in sections and a giant, conical basket-woven fish trap of a kind used in Ward's native Jamaica. One's immediate impression is that the hunter has become the hunted. But of course such obvious interpretation is never correct here at MoCA, and the accompanying text informs us, "This duality of seduction and entrapment is key to Ward's idea of mirage, which as an image both distorts reality and points to a sense of need."

I sometimes feel as though I am insulting the artist when I talk about what's most affecting in these giant installations, as it's often different than the stated intent of the work. Does my sense of wonder at their immediate visceral impact trump the Moebius-strip curator-speak of the cerebral explanations? Disbelieving some of the airy conceptual constructions does not make one a Philistine, does it?

By itself, bringing a boat into the gallery no longer floats mine. But a look into the gaping maw of the fish trap - filled with broken furniture (more on that in a sec) and lit in sinister chiarscuro by the gaps in the basket weave - was a stunner. All I could see was an upsettingly intense still-life of a tornado's unholy inner chaos, looking up into the funnel as it sucked away me, Dorothy and Toto. My crappy cellphone pic can't do it justice, but perhaps it doesn't matter, as this interpretation is apparently an unintended consequence of the artist's craft and vision, and nowhere mentioned in the text. Thanks to eavesdropping, though, I know I'm not the only one who saw it immediately.

The furniture, as well as the foam rubber, resistors and capacitors making up Ward's giant "Mango Tourists" in an adjacent gallery, were sourced around the museum, which occupies the former Sprague Electric factory complex. A large installation in the Workers exhibit re-creates and comments on an "artwork" of disposable cups stuck in a chain link fence at the Sprague plant during a 1970 strike. To use a couple of verbs much favored by curators nowadays, it would be interesting to "unpack" the ways that these works "interrogate" the site's history. There are places in the museum where the workers' passages (in both senses of the word) remain vividly present.

Finally I wandered into the football-field sized Building 5 gallery, the site of MASSMoCA's most mind-blowing triumphs and its most hilarious misfires. The sheer size of the joint brings out artistic ambitions that raise the stakes so high even the misfires are must-sees. That, alas, was not the case with Katharina Grosse's one floor up more highly, an exhibit which ended, fortunately or unfortunately, on New Year's Day.

The main portion of the exhibit consists of truckloads of dirt heaped on the gallery floor, spray-painted in various colors and stuck with large, styrofoam rods that look like the icy wastes of Superman's home planet. It called to mind the el cheapo alien landscapes on the original "Star Trek." The exhibit text says that Grosse's work "opens up a new path for painting while rearranging conventions, hierarchy and our very habits of seeing." Also: "the anarchic work embraces a state of ambiguity that allows for alternative ways of processing what is seen." To which I can only say, uh huh.

MASSMoCA: You can get there from here

NORTH ADAMS -  MASSMoCA, the Clark Art Institute and other cultural attractions in the North Adams-Williamstown area are once again accessible to eastern Mass. residents without a long Mass Pike re-route or a detour through dueling banjos country in the Berkshires.

On Dec. 15 the state reopened the stretch of Route 2 that runs through Charlemont, Savoy, Florida and North Adams after $23 million in rapid-fire repairs. The road, a key-east west link in that corner of the state, was washed out in Tropical Storm Irene in late August.

Take it from someone with family in North Adams and an interest in MASSMoCA, the Clark, the Williams College art museum and various other attractions: doing without Route 2 would have made a winter trip here less than appealing. The state-recommended detour added considerably to the travel time. In November we took a shorter route recommended by MASSMoCA, which traversed some beautiful valleys and slopes in the backwoods north of Route 2, but also brought us to a near head-on with a convoy of giant dump trucks carrying fill for the Route 2 project, on a narrow two-lane blacktop with no shoulders. There were Trucks use lower gears signs and hair-raising descents.

I spent a night out on Interstate 93 during the Fast 14 bridge-replacement project for a story, and was flabbergasted by what they could do in the course of a week. I'm even more impressed by the Route 2 project, which we drove this week. We'd heard a bridge was out and some other areas might have seen a little washout, but in fact it looks like several hundreds yards of roadway have been replaced (in different stretches), in one of the most hilly and remote high-traffic stretches in the state, through steep hills, with precipitous dropoffs to the Cold River on the other side. Banks and long cement retaining walls are or will be rebuilt, entire stretches of river seem to have new channels, landslides have been cleared away, etc. We got our $23 million worth, although it looks like the project will continue through the winter.

It's safe to go back to MoCA, in other words, and now through Sunday is your last chance to see Katharina Grosse's "One Floor Up More Highly" (right) in the museum's ginormous Gallery 5. Strangely, it bears a certain resemblance to the piles of fill at the Route 2 constuction sites. A museum official said today that they didn't think the road closure had affected visitor traffic much, but that they've noticed more people coming through since Route 2 reopened on Dec. 15, so maybe it hurt a little bit after all.

One other note. If any of you are fond of stopping in the Mohawk Trail State Forest during the warm weather months to use the unofficial nude beach just downstream from the state campground, I have bad news. The trees that shielded the site from the road are gone.

Winslow Homer studio opens September 2012

Boston art lovers might want to pencil in a trip to Maine on their calendars for next fall. Winslow Homer's studio at Prouts Neck will open to the public on Sept. 24, 2012 and should be a major new destination for cultural tourism and scholarship. The Boston-born painter, who is buried in Cambridge's Mt. Auburn Cemetery, lived and painted at the studio from 1883 until his death in 1910. It's already a National Historic Landmark.

The studio was purchased by the Portland Museum of Art in 2006 from Charles Homer Willauer, the great grand-nephew of Homer. The museum has raised $8.5 million toward a $10.5m goal to support the acquisition, preservation, and future of the Studio. It has been restoring the building to the period when Homer lived there.

“The opening of the Winslow Homer Studio will be a pivotal moment in American art history. For the first time, visitors will be able to experience the Studio as it was during Homer’s time and discover the actual location where he created his best-known paintings,” Museum Director Mark H. C. Bessire said in announcing the opening.

OK, "pivotal" might be a little much, but there's no question this is big news for art lovers.

Homer's work includes many iconic images of the New England coast (Gloucester figures prominently after Maine). To celebrate the opening, the museum will present Weatherbeaten: The Late Paintings of Winslow Homer, on view September 22 through December 30, 2012. Comprising more than 30 major oils and watercolors painted at the Studio, Weatherbeaten will feature works from museums including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston  and The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.

The Portland museum rightly boasts of its Homer collection. Homer first exhibited at the Museum in 1893, showing the painting "Signal of Distress." In 1976, philanthropist Charles Shipman Payson gave 17 Homer paintings  to the Museum and $8 million to build an addition to house the collection. The museum’s also holds his first oil painting, "Sharpshooter," and a nearly comprehensive collection of 400 illustrations.

Tickets for studio tours won't go on sale until next summer, but if you want to start making plans now, click to www.portlandmuseum.org.

Image credit: Winslow Homer
United States, 1836 - 1910
Weatherbeaten, 1894
oil on canvas
28 1/2 x 48 3/8 inches
Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson. Photo by Melville D. McLean.