The Clark

By John Boudreau, Communications Intern

In 1869, Reverend William H.H. Murray published a book entitled Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, which detailed the health benefits of vacationing in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. His book was a sensation, and scores of tourists rushed north from New York City to take advantage of the area’s clean air and pristine landscapes. Their vacations emphasized outdoor activity—hiking, fishing, and hunting—a far cry from the leisurely beach holidays popular at the time.

One such tourist was Winslow Homer. In 1870, he produced one of his first works set in the Adirondacks, aptly entitled An Adirondack Lake. It would, in some ways, set the mold for his later paintings: the Adirondack landscape is a tangible presence in the painting, but so too is the figure of a wilderness guide. These guides were often local men who took tourists around to prime hunting and fishing locations and otherwise ensured that their paying customers enjoyed their time in the woods. The guide soon became a popular archetype—“‘rough fellows, good shots, brawny and big of limb, the descendants of [James Fenimore Cooper’s] Leatherstocking’” as the Boston Evening Transcript put it in 1892.[1] These are the figures we see most visibly in paintings like Two Guides, but the guide also plays a minor role in other Homer paintings—notice the figure in the boat in An October Day.

Chief among Homer’s many Adirondack watercolors, An October Day captures the region as few other artists could. “The shores and mountains are splendidly dressed in the red and yellow robes of autumn, and there are vivid blue tones in the water of the lake. The coloring is intense, but it is neither unreal nor unpictorial,” the New-York Tribune raved in 1890.[2]

This realistic element in Homer’s paintings was arguably one of his greatest strengths. He made the Adirondacks come to life—no longer stationary landscapes nor an abstract stretch of forest, but a living environment that tourists, woodsmen, and animals inhabited. For those who couldn’t experience it for themselves, Homer’s Adirondack paintings served as a breath of fresh air.

A great way to learn more about Homer’s relationship with the Adirondacks is to attend the Clark’s next free lecture. Scholar David Tatham, who has published extensively on Homer and the Adirondacks, will lecture on Sunday, July 21 at 3 pm. His talk, “The Call of the Once-Wild: Winslow Homer and the Adirondacks 1870–1910,” will explore the holdings in the Clark’s collection as well as other Adirondack-themed paintings by Homer.

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By Camran Mani
Curator, Backstories

For a long time, the process of creating Backstories was all about projection. I did my best to predict what the installation would look like by using a dollhouse-sized model of the gallery and, later, by working with life-sized models in the actual gallery. But when the works of art themselves took their places in the installation, it became clear that they wouldn’t just make the points I wanted them to make; they have a life of their own (thank goodness), and they say things to each other I couldn’t have predicted. Discovering these surprises has been, for me, one of the most exciting parts of being involved with this show. Let me point out a couple examples.

Early on, I knew I wanted to put Winslow Homer’s The Dinner Horn alongside St. Michael Fighting the Dragon, a woodcut from Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse series. Both works have versos printed with text, making it clear that they come from literary contexts (a magazine in one case, a book in the other). I thought, “The dates of these works are more than three centuries apart; it will be striking to reveal that the treatment of the verso has been consistent over such a long period of time.” But, faced with the actual works, I was equally struck by an inconsistency.

The Dürer features a typeface that is visually akin to the image on the front. This suggests the artist coordinated his efforts with those of the typographer. The typeface on the Homer, however, has a severe, mechanical quality that is alien to the (hand-drawn) image. This announces that it was produced under more modern conditions: the artist and the typographer seem to have worked independently on their contributions to the magazine, almost like people on an assembly line. I take away from this “announcement” a heightened sense that Homer’s modernity, relative to his predecessors, is not simply a matter of imagery or style; it is also rooted in the way he relates recto to verso.

The Rodin Man with a Broken Nose also caught me by surprise. I knew, of course, that the head is incomplete. The back part is broken off so viewers can see the sculpture’s hollow interior. I also knew that the sculpture is supposed to be an early example of Rodin’s interest in the aesthetics of fragments, such as Greek and Roman sculptures ravaged by time. But I don’t think I appreciated the strangeness of the sculpture until I was able to consider the back from head on, both at a distance and up close, as one can in this installation. The break doesn’t evoke the “natural” fragmentation of Greek and Roman sculptures. It’s too clean. Also, the break calls our attention to an attribute that appears all along the break: a headband or fillet, such as those that appear in ancient sculptures of victorious athletes.

A number of questions follow from these observations (at least if we assume the break was deliberate). Why would Rodin welcome an allusion to antique sculptures of athletes but not an allusion to antique fragmentation? Why would he evoke ancient sculpture at all when his motif—a day laborer with a broken nose—seems designed to flout the canon of good taste that ancient sculpture embodied? Furthermore, should we understand the smoothness of the break to imply that the back of the sculpture belongs against a wall, or did Rodin want viewers to see that the sculpture was hollow? What would have been at stake in acknowledging this hollowness?

I don’t know if anyone else will be surprised or perplexed by these sorts of things, but I would like other visitors to be surprised and perplexed, too. My hope is that the questions Backstories raises will contain the seeds of future projects shedding even more light on the “hidden” sides of art.

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By Michael Cassin
Director, Center for Education in the Visual Arts

An image labeled The Dinner Horn appears on Page 377 of Harper’s Weekly, dated June 11th, 1870, printed from a drawing by Winslow Homer. The picture is a kind of rural idyll of nineteenth-century, post-Civil War America: a young woman blows her horn to let the people working in the distant fields know it’s time to eat. Ivy grows around the farmhouse door, and a contented-looking cat scratches itself against the door jamb; you can almost hear it purring with delight. A large cooking-pot hangs over the fire in the kitchen grate, steam rising from its contents, and the table is laid with neat place settings. The people who live here may not be rich; their food may be simple and they may have to work hard for what they receive, but the war is over. Their lives have returned to normal after its upheavals, and the farm laborers can look forward in safety to a hearty meal at the end of a working day. If we turn the page, however, we will encounter a story of a very different kind.

Most of this page is printed with text from the beginning of chapter forty-six of a novel called Man and Wife, by the English writer Wilkie Collins. Collins worked with Charles Dickens during the 1850s and ’60s, contributing chapters of what were called at the time “sensation” novels, for serial publication in Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round. This episodic format lent itself to scenes of high melodrama, with a cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter to keep readers on the edges of their seats, eagerly awaiting the next exciting installment. The son of a professional painter, Collins was highly adept at telling a good yarn in graphic prose. Novels like The Woman in White and The Moonstone are among the earliest examples of the classic mystery, with fantastic descriptions (a ghostly female appearing out of the darkness on a quiet Hampstead street; an unbalanced maidservant who drowns herself in a stretch of quicksand ominously called “the shivering sands”—you get the general idea), and with astute investigators who predate Sherlock Holmes by about 20 years.

But—like Dickens—Collins also wrote about current social issues, often choosing legal anomalies with which to prick the conscience of his Victorian readers. My favorite of Collins’s novels, No Name, revolves around the plight of two genteelly brought-up young women who discover, after their parents’ tragic and unexpected deaths, that they had not in fact been married at the time of their daughters’ births. This leaves the girls not only alone in the world, but without legal status, unable to inherit their parents’ possessions and, through no fault of their own, literally with no name.

Man and Wife, though not perhaps as gripping as some of Collins’s earlier tales, challenges the inconsistency, the inequity, and the iniquity of the marriage laws in different parts of Victorian Britain. Chapter forty-six brings many of the novel’s protagonists together in a chilly formal room in London to present arguments and evidence to determine the legality of a betrothal and a marriage. The text drops us into the middle of a convoluted plot. Unfortunately—and tantalizingly—we know neither the story so far nor what happens next. The text ends not just in mid-chapter, it ends in mid-question: “From the moment when you entered the inn to the moment when you left it, were you also…”??? How’s THAT for a cliff-hanger? Presumably, the rest of the question and its answer would appear on subsequent pages, but we don’t have any other pages. Oh, the suspense…

Well, I could tell you what happens next, but where’s the fun in that?  Maybe seeing this ‘midstory’ in the Backstories exhibition will encourage some of you to look up Man and Wife and Collins’s other novels in your local library or bookstore. Many of them are as intriguing as the backstories revealed in the show.

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Hi everyone! Just about two weeks ago, my exhibition, “Giselle’s Remix,” opened at the Clark! Since that was my first time seeing my exhibit in real life, it was very exciting! When I walked upstairs to see it, I was amazed at how well the Clark had put it together. Everything was right where I wanted it to be, and the room looked fantastic! The blue wall color was so nice, and the paintings looked really good together. The whole day was wonderful, and the Clark uCurate team let me do so many things I never dreamed about doing, like talking to the press and speaking on a panel. I loved getting interviewed for newspapers, and my talk in the auditorium was so much fun! Seeing the billboards advertising the exhibit on our drive up was just as exciting!

Getting feedback from everyone at the opening was really helpful, and it put me in an even better mood than I was in before. Watching people look at my exhibit made me feel amazing, and when people came up to me, I was so happy. It made me realize that everyone interprets the paintings and the pieces I selected in their own ways. One woman, for example, came up to me and said, “I love all of the French art that you put in your exhibit, because I love French art, too.” I guess I do like French art, but I certainly never thought about my exhibit that way!

I can’t wait to bring my friends to Williamstown to see the exhibit over winter break. I hope that they’ll like it and maybe even “curate” a room of their own during the visit.

Giselle

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The Clark is preparing to open Giselle’s Remix, the first exhibition we will install based on a submission to our uCurate interactive program (check it out at clarkart.edu/remix). The first exhibition was created by 11-year-old Giselle Ciulla, who shared the post below as she anticipates the transformation of her exhibition from virtual to actual. As part of her work as a Clark curator, Giselle has worked closely with our marketing team as they’ve developed a campaign to promote the show. Recent ads in the Boston Globe and New York Times launched the marketing effort, which will soon be supplemented with billboards throughout the Berkshires region. Not surprisingly, Giselle has some thoughts on the media efforts.

Hi everyone! This week has been a tough one, because I live right outside of New York City, which got very hard hit by Hurricane Sandy. My town lost power and some houses, but not most, flooded. The wind was crazy, and the morning after the storm hit, there were so many trees and power lines down! It has been a long week, because all school was cancelled, my power was out, and the lack of gas means it’s hard for us to drive places.

But before this huge storm hit my town, I was home with my grandparents who were watching us for the week. They had brought the ad from the Boston Globe that had my picture in it, and showed it to my friends who were over. They started screaming with me and they all called their parents who asked to talk to me. I was so happy and embarrassed by them, because they went walking down the street singing, “My best friend’s a celebrity! She’s in the newspaper and is going to be on a billboard!”

I was so excited at that point, and whenever the ad catches my eye now, my heart starts pounding and I get so anxious. I can’t wait until the exhibit opens!

Giselle

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