I have been avoiding Crystal Bridges for a long time. I heard about it a long time ago, probably around the time it was being built by the Walmart heiress who did it. For some reason, the fact that all that money came off the backs of people who labored for that empire in not very good conditions bothered me.
But a lot of my friends have gone down there and loved it. I guess that sort of thing doesn’t bother them enough to keep from availing themselves of the experience. After all, you only have to pay for the special exhibits. The rest of the collection is free.
I have to admit the museum itself is a work of art. Seldom have I seen a more beautiful building, and it really set off the site it was built upon. The surrounding grounds with all their sculpture were beautiful to view from within. I know there are several miles of trail but it was so raw a day we did not walk on them. Next time.
Crystal Bridges has a pretty decent collection too, although I was sort of surprised that it did not include a single Peter Max, who truly is a pretty well known American Artist and certainly is worthy of having his work represented. Nor were there any Russells on display. At least not at the moment.
They do have four different Georgia O’Keeffe works on display, which made me happy. There is a large Jimson Weed painting, just gorgeous. It was not lit very well, so it was difficult to appreciate the glory of her brush work. They also had a couple of smaller studies, one a still life with leaf and feather and the other one of the hills near Ghost Ranch. The surprise for me was a large bronze sculpture by her. I thought I knew about Ms. O’Keeffe, and either I did not know or had forgotten that she had done some bronzes. The one on display was very beautiful but I would have liked to have seen it put farther out in the middle of the floor rather than stuck in a corner where you could not walk around it and observe the flow of light along it.
One thing about Crystal Bridges that bugged both Jim and myself was the very poor lighting of the collection. I am not sure what the curator and the hangers were thinking, but there were several walls that had far too many works on them set way too close together. Each one had bright lights on them, and if you tried to get close enough to see brush work the glare was so severe you could not see anything, not even colors and shapes. If you stood back far enough to get away from the glare, the works’ proximity to each other made it hard to focus on them individually.
There were some very amazing large works that occupied full wall panels that were very fun to look at up close. Then when you went outside and looked at them from the lawn, they were a completely different story. Very complex.
I am afraid that there was a period of time during our visit I really wished I had never studied music, because for some reason the museum had a young man playing the cello near one of the galleries. It was interesting to see the audience lapping up his very Chopinesque murder of the Bach Cello Suite in C. It was pretty excruciating to listen to his out of tune, rubato rendition of a work that I studied assiduously for an entire semester while I was at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I sort of missed a whole section of the museum because I felt compelled to get out of that wing before I was driven to madness.
We LOVED the special exhibit that was in residence, “The Soul of a Nation”, a comprehensive focus on the art of Black Americans during the Civil Rights era. If that collection comes to a city near you, I highly recommend a visit. It was educational, illuminating, thought provoking, and filled with some really wonderful art by artists that I was largely unaware of.
It is no secret that I love beautiful things; it might even be an addiction. Although we went into the Museum Shop fully expecting to leave empty handed, that was not to be. There was a vase there that called out to come home with us. So we ransomed it and freed it from its captivity on the shelf. It truly is a wonderful work of art from Cohasset Gifts and Garden.
I accepted the reflection of the dining room lights in this photo because the illumination from above really brings out the sculptural aspect of the molten glass having been draped over the root it rests on.
This following shot was serendipitous in the extreme. I had opened the dining room curtains and noticed how the scene out side reflected in the glass of the vase.
Well, I hope that everyone has a fantastic week. It is supposed to warm up around here, and I am very much ready for it.
We are waiting with bated breath to learn whether or not the freezing and just below freezing temperatures will have been enough to kill the wisteria buds.
Check out the orange tulips, and ntoice how they have spread through the garden. The yellow ones in the right corner have completely filled in the area around the perovskia (Russian sage). Fortunately, they appear to be willing to peacefully coexist with it, unlike some other colonizers I could name. (e.g. Missouri primrose, spotted knapweed).
Yes, yes. I see the chickweed in the lower corner.
the havens 