NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE B efore I write about my visit to the Dallas Museum of Art, I want to say something about the foiled stunt that climate kooks planned this past Saturday at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. A group called Extinction Rebellion hoped to vandalize the empty frames from which paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt were cut in the notorious 1990 theft. Saturday was the 33rd anniversary of the unsolved, late-night heist.
The Gardner learned that Extinction Rebellion hoped to mount a “guerrilla art installation” in the Dutch Gallery, where the frames still hang to remind visitors of the biggest and most brazen robbery in American museum history. Rather than endanger art, visitors, and staff, the Gardner’s director closed the museum for the day. Pissed and stymied, Extinction Rebellion held a fake die-in in front of the Gardner. Why does no one ever actually die in these left-wing die-ins? It seems disingenuous as well as a missed chance to reduce the number of crazy people.
I hate the very idea of closing a museum to the public. Couldn’t the Boston police department or the Boston FBI office, having botched the investigation of the theft in the early ’90s, load the Gardner with cops? Both in atonement and to protect one of Boston’s cultural treasures, that’s the least they can do.
The director, alas, seems to have made the right call. The Gardner has hundreds of little things on view. It’s a warren, too. It’s a challenge to guard the whole place when nuts are there in droves. Groups like Extinction Rebellion have targeted art in dozens of European museums, with protesters smearing fake oil and blood on Turners and Van Goghs and gluing their body parts to frames. One day they’ll actually damage something or hurt someone, and the Gardner director doesn’t want her museum to endure that “one day.”
Now, back to Dallas. I hadn’t been to the DMA since I saw its extraordinary exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings of olive groves done in 1889 and 1890. I thought it was one of the best shows I saw in 2021. The museum’s a big, low-slung place that covers a Texas-size city block. As usual, there was a lot happening.
Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks is a satisfying survey of Flemish painting from the early 1400s into the 1600s organized by the Denver Art Museum and the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp, which owns the art. It’s by no means cutting-edge scholarship, but it’s thematically snappy and a good primer for visitors who know little about Flemish art.
Flanders is the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Its Renaissance, insofar as art is concerned, was different from Italy’s. The culture clung to a flat, lavishly detailed, embroidered look with jewel-like colors — a distinctive medieval style — until the days of Rubens and Van Dyke.
Hans Memling’s The Nativity, from 1480, shows us that Flemish art is an acquired taste. Zig-zag drapery, doll-like angels, and an anorexic, redheaded Mary are, indeed, odd. Everything’s off-center. There’s no relationship among the figures. The baby Jesus is about the size of a bean. The colors are lovely, though, robin-egg blue for Mary, scarlet for Joseph.
It’s an exhibition with lots of humor, and that’s nice. David Teniers’s Festival of Monkeys, from 1633, is irreverent, as is Keep Your Mouth Shut, by Quentin Matsys, from around 1510. There’s a decent, early painting of Saint Sebastian by Van Dyke. Nothing’s great, and there’s lots of studio work and work by followers of this or that great artist. We get the idea of Flemish art, and that’s okay.
I missed the DMA’s Matthew Wong retrospective by a few weeks. Very much a shooting star, Wong (1984–2019) painted abstract still lifes and landscapes in a style that evokes Klimt, Seurat, and Van Gogh, but intensely modern. Like Van Gogh, the young Canadian artist had a short career and died by suicide. The DMA was the first museum to buy his work, and one smart acquisition it was. Alas, my timing was off, but that meant I could spend more time looking at my favorite things in the permanent collection.
The DMA’s 125th anniversary is in 2028, but as a museum of national consequence, it’s less than 40. Housed for years in Fair Park in a rickety Art Deco building, the museum moved to the newly created Arts District in 1984. Its purpose-built, elegant, Modernist campus was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and financed by a combination of City of Dallas money and a capital campaign.
Before the move, snarks called the DMA the “Bluebonnet Museum” for its predominant collection of pretty Texas landscapes, though the museum had bought some nice things along the way, notably portraits by Eakins and Bellows and a basic smattering of Hudson River landscapes and colonial portraits.
A spanking-new building needed to be filled with better art, and by the ’80s, Dallas had serious collectors. Banking executive James Clark and his wife gave their superb collection of Mondrian paintings to the museum. Margaret McDermott, whose husband founded Texas Instruments and who was probably Dallas’s greatest philanthropist, gave her Impressionist pictures. Oil tycoon Algur Meadows, who established the Meadows Museum at SMU with money and his Spanish art, gave many pieces of his not-Spanish-art to the DMA. The place was on a roll that has never stopped.
A 1903 Monet given by Mrs. McDermott is certainly the perfect Monet. It’s a big, immersive water scene with reflections of clouds so convincing that people think it’s displayed upside down. Near it is another late Impressionist picture, a Pissarro cityscape from 1902. I shouldn’t call either of these Impressionist since they’re so abstract.
Frederic Church’s Icebergs, from 1861, is a Texas-size painting and one of Church’s grand pictures like Heart of the Andes. It’s a turbulent, sublime thing. It’s also the one painting Church managed to sell to a British collector. Icebergs hung in a country house that became a private school, disappearing from sight for over a hundred years. It was discovered in the late ’70s and purchased at a Sotheby’s auction by Lamar Hunt for $2.5 million, then the most ever paid at auction for an American painting. He later gave it to the DMA. Gerald Murphy’s Watch, from 1925, a six-feet-square depiction of two watches, has the grandeur of an Old Master portrait, but it’s coolly analytical.
A few years ago, the DMA made what I think is the best, most inspired, and most idiosyncratic purchase. It bought the Wiener Werkstätte’s — the Vienna Workshop’s — famous silver vitrine, made in 1908 for Karl Wittgenstein, the iron and steel magnate. Carl Czeschka designed it. It’s a cabinet for the display of precious knickknacks but, more than a cabinet, it’s fantastic and the Parnassus of Art Nouveau silver. It’s mostly silver — 200 pounds of it — with opals, lapis lazuli, baroque pearls, and bits of ivory. I borrowed it once, about 20 years ago, before the DMA bought it, for an exhibition at the Clark on Wittgenstein furniture and silver.
In 2005, the DMA announced a massive gift of art and cash, “a shower of philanthropy,” the New York Times said, from Robert and Marguerite Hoffmann, Howard and Cindy Rachofsky, Deedie and Rusty Rose, and Mrs. McDermott. It’s mostly very good post-1970 art, aside from Mrs. McDermott’s Impressionist things, and I was thrilled for Dallas. The couples had collected collectively, buying things they said they thought the museum could, eventually, use and would, eventually, get.
No one understood then that it was a thicket of promises and fractional gifts, which I considered bad taste. New Englander as I was and am, my thinking was and is “either you give it or you don’t,” and cut the hedges. Texas, though, isn’t Andover, Yale, Williams, or rural Vermont — my little world. No one has any money in rural Vermont, and it’s vulgar at Andover, Yale, and Williams to equivocate or parse, though I suspect that attitude has evolved.
No one in Texas wants to dump money — hard-earned from real work — into the Swamp. The thicket was not driven by taxes. Now, nearly 20 years later, the gifts are coming through. The DMA is proposing an architectural transformation of the place to accommodate the new art and to promote transparency. I’ll write about this on Saturday.