BWW Reviews: Vermont: Corn, Craft, Cheese and the Shelburne Museum
By: Barry Kostrinsky Sep. 05, 2013
Vermont Corn, Craft, Cheese and the Shelburne Museum
By Barry Kostrinsky
Vermont, there, I said it and now the thought of art has left your mind. I drove 243 miles to get away from New York and MOMA to see the mountains, the lakes and yes all that maple syrup.
Oddly enough, the first signs you see that don't advertise corn, heirloom tomatoes and artisanal goat cheese are for artist studios and craft spots. It is as if the art followed me up the Taconic parkway, routes 295,22,30,and the ever-famous Leicester-Whiting road to RT7. In western Vermont, when they say go north young man, they mean drive up RT7. I was ready for this craft fest of art that is not quite Art and yet holds fast to Arts root in functional objects adorned with skill in glass, clay and folk anything.
I would find art at most every corner. Sometimes all I had to do was cross an uprooted stormed down tree and play add a rock to make my own ephemera installation softly laid in the land, a Smithson unspun, dry.
Kostrinsky's Kockamania conglomoration
Early in the trip I went to a glass blowers hide away 50 miles from everything post 20st C. As I entered Michael Egan's studio memories of a trip past to Venice post Peggy came to mind. The work felt like Murano glass and indeed Michael had studied with a Murano master. He explained how the next generation of Venetian glass blowers were not following in their fathers footsteps.
Mr. Egan with his assistant Christopher Kerr-Ayer blowing glass. In a teamed choreography they dance through hot flames and molten sand. It seems easy but definitely burns beginners.
Who wants to follow poppas path besides George W? I had read about this lack of progeny blowing along papa and how Murano glass was dying. Mr. Egan explained the United States was benefitting as these master craftsmen were coming to the US to train the next generation of glass blowers. But in many ways the glass chandeliers of Murano don't cut it in today's contemporary homes. Yes, A Chihuly may don the pond and some broken shards may make a contemporary statement but the old guard is dead. More often these days at an art fair you'll see common empty glasses lined up and stacked to make an aesthetic statement.
To my surprise the small piece of this elongated state I was plodding through has one great stop for Art. The Shelburne Museum is sort of the MOMA in the woods for the Vermonters and the flatlanders- the term Vermont born and bred are proud to dis New Yorkers with. New Yorkers don't really care, no one reads the Addison Independent 20 miles south of Brandon. The 45 acres of the Shelburne has 38 charming and grand exhibition buildings dotted across the landscape and brought back memories of Colonial Williamsburg but with an art focus. So how did the Shelburne come to be in the land of milk and honey and maple syrup?
The Shelburne Museum's new building, the Pizzagalli Center is a testament to the strength of the organization. The 7 Mill for the bill was easily raised as was the 7 Mill for the rest of the yearly nut. The Geo cooled subterranean gallery is very cool.
As with most great art spots it is those terrible folks, those 1 percenters, from which the Shelburne was born. Always in fashion to hate and despise, even though we all yearn to be like Mikey (Bloomberg), the rich folk, who give out of a sense of civic duty, out of a desire to improve man's aesthetic life, heck who cares, maybe it's even for the tax deduction, that lay the foundation for most Museums.
I think you either love quilts or they just put you to sleep. This portrait is spellbinding. The mix of realism with a naïve or outsider hand makes for her mesmerizing gaze.
The Shelburne is an interesting mix and the push and pull between crafts and fine art is ever present. The museum was the dream child of Mrs. Electra Havermeyer Webb. Yes, she had a sugar daddy. No, not that kind, she had the real thing. Her father was at the top of a sugar empire that we know today as Domino Sugar. This sugar daddy's daughter seemed to garner her collecting taste as a reaction to her parents collecting style. What did her parents collect? At the end of the 19th Century, the Havermeyers were collecting that art that was not in favor and consider, well at best, little impressions of images and objects.
Monet's for not so much money
Yes, they were buying Monet, Manet, Degas, Corot, Courbet and several others; sometimes at $500 a pop. Mary Cassatt advised the Havermeyers and parallels Glackens roll as advisor to Dr. Barnes. Indeed they were enamored by the Impressionist and pre-impressionist and not by the excepted artists of the day that would in 40 years lose aesthetic weight faster than an anorexic in the Mojavi.
The Havermeyer name should make a synapse or two start popping and light up your art brain like a Christmas tree. The sugar barons are largely responsible for the MET's great collection of impressionism and are etched in many Museum walls as founding and significant contributors. There is one room in the Shelburne that struck me as being worth the whole trip. Mrs. Webb, who married into a not so bad off family herself, the Vanderbilts, recreated the look of mom and dads NYC apartment in one of the buildings. This is a very warm and sincere pledge of allegiance and love to her parents and almost left me teary-eyed but the 'Butler' drained my ducts for months to come the previous night.. One room is adorned with Monet's. They were not just Monets, they were very good Monet's and recalled MOMA's Monet room but in a smaller, warmer and cozier environment. The addition of furniture, wall fabric and chairs sets the art in it's proper context. Matisse's famous quote calling for art to be "a soothing calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue," lives in all it's glory in this idyllic room.
The Havermeyer's got their money's worth with this Manet and Shelburne conservators must deal with both cracked oil paint and the broken skulls of Electra's dolls.
So, Why rebel against mom and dad when they were rebelling and ahead of the game already? Ask Freud. What did Electra decide would be her passion? Of all things she chose folk and American art. Her parents thought she was nuts. She found joy and art in simple objects, in cigar men statues, trade signs, quilts, hats boxes, weathervanes, metal minutia and more. Andy would have liked her style.
Hat boxes are fascinating oval objects to me. They combine low art wallpaper like patterns into simple stackable forms turned high art installations.
"Color, Pattern, Whimsy, Scale: The Best of the Shelburne Museum" is a good inaugural show for the new Pizzagalli building. Memories of barns not red but Doctored in Philadelphia come to mind. I liked the mix of objects and in the best of ways the Barnes Museum came to mind with its frenetic clash of art objects from different times of both high and low art. The education component of the Estate like Museum is growing; Given todays cuts in art education Museums like the Shelburne play a more critical and integrated roll in arts education to both the youth and the still youthful amongst us.
The Shelburne looks to line up special exhibits around Mrs. Webb's collecting taste- this may be their undoing in the long run. While I was there a show of three of the Wyeth men was on exhibit. Towards the end of her life, Mrs. Webb was collecting the Wyeth clan en mass. Andrew is the better known of the bunch that includes his father NC and his son Jaime.
Winter 1946 by Andrew Wyeth.
I liked Andrew work very much as a kid and did see just what I liked about him again; those big open spaces painted with precision and yet an abstract fashion are memorizing and crisp. However, they reek of that awful adjective conjoined with art: illustration art. I put Andrew in the same boat as Norman Rockwell and don't sail with either of them to any far off places.
What is the problem for the Shelburne down the road. Apparently nothing! They had no problem raising 14 mill for their capital campaign. Recently they expanded to a full season and have a plethora of educational programs both Vermont slanted and New York styled.
Carousel Horses, a beached boat showing off the $1.25 menu of days gone by and more makes this a fun family affair.
The problem lies in the vision for the future. I sense a desire to be modern and yet being shackled to an older modern idea that has grown somewhat stale. Can you mix modern art with craft and mixed objects? Does the Shelburne need too? Colonial Williamsburg is certainly a success and a great experience but it is not on anyone's art trek trail even though it houses one of the best collections of American Folk Art.
The small and not so small buildings dotting the Shelburne's landscape are complete with a blacksmith shop, a quilt loaded building, a small house preserving what it was like to live in a 1 bedroom cottage pre Freon, and a barn filled with modes of transportation pre Leno's collecting taste- a sort of horse and buggy museum. The gardens in themselves are a pleasure and often reflect the art on exhibit by recreating the gardens in paintings. There is so much to choose from at the Shelburne it makes sense to do two half days and take different pieces of it in each day. The docents were a pleasure,both informative, polite and very knowledgeable. Many have 30 years experience and are well trained. They seem as sharp as a Posie I once encountered at the Jewish Museum, she's my docents delight.
Blue Ledge Farms gateway to a Geo-cooled goat cheese cavern.
And what of all that goat cheese? You wouldn't want to miss the Blue Ledge Farm in Salisbury. Under this unassuming shed is a pitched gravel and dirt slide leading to an oasis of white light, cheese rounds and three woman flipping cheese geo-cooled moving in another time as a printing shop does. Geo-cooling can be done by great architects at the Shelburne and smart farmers alike. Their cheese turned up at all the right farmers market: Brandon's and Middlebury's farm fest gathering mecas of the usually manured. The little rounds can be found at Chef Robert's Cafe Provence in Brandon as well. Oh Vermont, I'll miss your simplicity. We strive so hard to achieve her in city mockeries yet you give her away free in your mountains, lakes, skies and vista's of green and blue.
Dock and sun glitter on Lake Dunmore. Always keep 'em guessing in a photograph; an edge of this, an off angle there.
Would I recommend a day trip or even a weekend get-away for the five or six hour sojourn? Definitely not, unless you can take Monday or Friday off too. If you're a jet setter I'd say fly into Burlington,. It's on the way back from Nova Scotia where you can see the total eclipse. Yes, you'll overshoot the Shelburne by 15 miles and miss the free feast at Dakin Farms but some of us don't have time to sit and smell the roses and that ever-important manure. On the other hand even though the locals will still consider you a flatlander, and they will always be hicks in the sticks to me, I would recommend buying a getaway home out in the Vermont woods to see what it is that makes the country so beautiful every day. In NYC you can own a penthouse and see all the ants below. In Vermont you can own a trailer home and see God in everything.
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