Bentonville, Arkansas is the fly-over country of the fly-over country, the middle of nowhere, a city on the road to no place. Omaha is on the road to Denver. Kansas City lies midway between Minneapolis and Dallas. But Bentonville, in the extreme northwestern corner of Arkansas, is not a way station place leading to any place at all. It's not even on the direct route to Little Rock, another backwater within a backwater. For this reason, the presence of a world-class art museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville is disorienting, even, a bit surreal. Of course, the museum showcases art collected by an heir to the Walmart fortune and so the museum's existence in the town also harboring Walmart's world headquarters is not merely serendipity. Nonetheless, Bentonville is surrounded on all sides by so much rural outback -- it's three hours to Kansas City, the closest major metropolitan area -- that the museum's very existence seems insulting to those who correlate art with urban sophistication, that is, critics on the East and West coasts. And, indeed, when the Walmart heiress set her sights on Philadelphia's shamefully neglected Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, and came within a hairsbreadth of acquiring that iconic artwork, possibly the greatest painting ever made by an American, the sense of insult and injury on the East Coast was almost palpable.
Bentonville is a sprawling suburb that doesn't seem to have much of an urban core -- if there is a downtown, which I presume to exist, I never located it. The town is designed for easy access in and out, for Walmart trucks and so Bentonville is built on a painfully flat plain, sunny open fields backing long, brand-new strip malls. The city seems planted on a prairie-like plateau in the western Ozark mountains and so where the ground dips precipitously toward creeks or rises in wooded ridges, there are enclaves of expensive houses. The town looks remarkably clean, prosperous, Caucasian and the imprint of Sam Walton's fortune (and benevolence) is evident everywhere -- about every block supports a Walmart Life and Fitness club or a Walmart-financed field house or soccer pitch or stadium.
Crystal Bridges occupies a deep hollow on the western edge of town, a wooded declivity that has steep sides and something of the character of a narrow, steep-walled valley formed when the ceiling of a limestone cave collapses. In this country, hollows of this sort fill with murky green water; this kind of depression is a little like a cenote in the Yucatan. The museum is built below the grade of the terrain overlooking the tight, swampy valley. An arcade at the end of the parking lot accesses elevators in silver towers that drop the viewer into the hollow to a spacious lobby that opens into the galleries. The galleries themselves consist of domed lobes, vaguely lung-shaped, that bridge the murky green lagoon. Two or three of these lobes span the water where a fountain fitfully bubbles. Several of these lobe-like structures are built into the side of the hill. The whole complex has something of the character of an underground installation miraculously excavated and laid bare to the hot Arkansas sun. There is nothing crystalline about the lobe-like galleries. Rather, they are hard shell-like carapaces, round and domed like a turtle's shell, but textured a bit like the torso of an armadillo -- indeed, it's as if the designer was imitating an armadillo's scaly armor. Viewed from above, or from terraces and decks extending out into the swampy water in the depression, the galleries look impassive, reptilian, horny shells extending like piers across the water. At the south end of the complex, a big window opens to an impressive-looking wooded gorge, descending in ragged limestone slabs down to the water in the hollow -- the gorge looks like it should be running with water, a series of cascades but it was bone-dry when I visited the museum.
The galleries of the permanent collection are free and they are large and well-lit, big concourses with more narrow side passages. There are many views toward the water and several barge-like decks, appendages to the galleries, that seem to float on the lake -- perhaps, these are venues for musical concerts. The art displayed is principally on canvas, paintings that date from the colonial period (for instance, ten or so big portraits showing the members of an extended mercantile Jewish family made around 1750) to today. There is no American Indian art, an omission that seemed puzzling to me. The collection contains several iconic images: there are two pictures of George Washington, one of them depicting a lean, skinny smirking libertine, and the other showing the Father of our Country toothless, with pursed lips, more the nation's grandmother than otherwise. There is a resplendent Copley showing an elegantly dressed woman, her clothes rendered photorealistically, gazing contemplatively at a tiny lemur-eyed flying squirrel tethered to her wrist by a golden chain. Like most museums of this kind, the majority of the paintings are landscapes, generally influenced by Claude Lorrain as adapted to American tastes by Thomas Cole, showing great wooded valleys that are mostly devoid of human beings. These kinds of paintings are ubiquitous, pretty, and generally forgettable. Some paintings seem to have been collected because of their historical interest -- there is an image of a chimpanzee holding a brochure about Darwin and a risible picture of a man fighting a black bear; the bear seems to salute the man and the man holds a bloody knife in his hand as if it were a tea-cup -- in the background. the fallen man's comrade aims his rifle but because the perspective is botched, he seems to be pointing the gun in the wrong direction entirely. Somehow, Crystal Bridges acquired Asher Durand's archetypal Kindred Spirits, a wonderful picture showing William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole perched on a jutting stone in colloquy above a wild wooded ravine -- it is a central image in the Hudson Valley School of paintings. A famous painting of men reading news of the war in Mexico while a sad-eyed slave sips whiskey, apparently, from a tin cup adorns one of the walls -- this picture has been on the cover of a dozen textbooks. A painting by Benjamin West showing Cupid and Psyche demonstrates staggering incompetence -- the anatomy of the embracing figure is all wrong and their limp, slug-like bodies seem flabby and ill-proportioned: it's like El Greco's mannerism, except as a result of poor draftsmanship and not expressionist emotion. A huge painting by Audubon of two harried-looking wild turkeys is fantastically eloquent and poignant -- the turkeys have as much (or more) character than most of the portraits in the gallery. The big clumsy-looking birds look like refugees, trudging toward an uncertain future: there is something curiously Indian about them -- they are like Cherokees on the Trail of Tears that ran through this part of the South, melancholy, if brightly plumaged, exiles. (Audubon's handling of the iridescence in their feathers is nothing short of miraculous). Held hostage by the Walmart fortune is a huge painting by Eakins, a kind of consolation prize for losing The Gross Clinic -- it's a world-class canvas, a dark, brooding variant on Eakins' theme of the scientist as hero, in this case, a bearded, somewhat diabolical researcher peering out at us skeptically from his gloomy laboratory, beams of brilliant inexplicable light illumining his brass tools and calipers. One painting by Elihu Vedder is certainly memorably bizarre -- it shows a naked, goat-footed Marysas playing a double-flute (not a lyre as would be customary); the satyr is serenading a group of eight or nine big jackrabbits and the animals are painted with extraordinary verve; each rabbit seems sentient and individualized, a group portrait such as Rembrandt might attempt, but showing rabbits and not men. I have no idea what the picture is supposed to mean, but, once seen, it is indelible. The modern works in the collection are generally mediocre -- there is a Rothko, a pretty Guston painted during the artist's abstract expressionist phase, a few big pictures by Georgia O'Keefe that I thought bombastic, and many very fine canvases by Marsden Hartley. (Hartley is the Picasso of American painting -- he produced fascinating and beautiful canvases in a variety of styles, seems to have been unerring in his color sense, and was remarkably versatile.) There are some Warhols, a lackluster Pollock and DeKooning, and an uncanny sculpture by Duane Hansen of a tired old man sitting on a bench that is so realistic as to be frightening -- you can sense the flabby weight of the old man's forearm resting on his trousered leg.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is in the museum district in Kansas City, a sloping hillside overlooking a riverbed diverted into concrete channels that have always been dry during my visits to the area. The building is a tawny handsome beaux arts temple, carved, it seems, from a soft stone the color of cheddar cheese -- the structure sits on the crown of a hill and looks a bit like the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Annexed to the old museum is the so-called Bloch Wing, a subterranean gallery that is essentially invisible from outside the museum -- this part of the museum imposes on the viewer the curious sense of being inside a structure that has no outside. The old museum has the traditional design of two floors of galleries enclosing a courtyard -- or, in this case, a double courtyard; the galleries are Italianate with beautiful floors and muted dark walls. The Bloch wing is feather-shaped, a plume that seems, somehow, to simultaneously descend the slope of the hill, while also arching up to "lenses" -- that is, skylights opening upward on the lawn under which the museum is constructed. (The Bloch wing is immensely famous among architects and said to represent the ne plus ultra in unassuming but efficient museum design. And, there is no doubt that the design is highly ingenious and the space easy to navigate -- but the modern wing is a little too coldly utilitarian for my taste.)
In most respects, the art in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is superior to the works on display in Bentonville. Crystal Bridges has a small idiosyncratic painting by John Singer Sargent; Nelson-Atkins possesses one of the artist's big society portraits of a woman so transcendentally beautiful that it is impossible to look away from her. In the same vein, Nelson Atkins has a horrific but gorgeous and sinisterly glamorous DeKooning "Woman"; the DeKooning in Bentonville is an interesting abstraction but not on par with the picture in Kansas City. The O'Keefe's in Kansas City are substantially better -- there is painting by O'Keefe of a big skyscraper in New York, atypical of the artist, but very vivid and cruel, an image of Moloch. The Rothko canvases in Kansas City are more luminous and there are many fine paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, a native of the city (his studio is a dozen blocks away), including the artist's greatest image, his Proserpina, imagined as a farm girl resplendent in her nakedness in an idyllic Midwestern landscape, all summer and light, sunbathing beside a creek while a hideous old farmer leers at her. Both museum's have genre works by Peto and Raphael Peale, images of things tacked up on walls, but the Kansas City pictures are better, more interesting and varied. And Kansas City has a strangely flamboyant Poussin, Dionysius drawn in procession through a floral landscape, a grim and hyper-realistic Caravaggio (the Saint has filthy feet), and a lovely, gem-like image of the three graces by Cranach. Whereas Crystal Bridges is crowded with second- and third-rate landscapes (it's painting by the underappreciated George Innes is dull and conventionally Victorian; by contrast, Nelson Atkins' has a murky, late Innes with the remarkable enameled haze surface embodying the artist's Swedenborg-influenced theosophy), the Kansas City museum is replete with second- and third-rate Baroque religious images -- these pictures are showy but, ultimately, stultifying as well: cotton candy angels and swooning Madonnas. But there are many highlights in the Nelson - Atkins permanent collection, including a fierce Indian chief, red as ocher, by George Catlin and an interesting portrait by George Bellows of a retarded newsboy that has the curious effect of looking hideous and daunting from a distance, but becoming engaging (even endearing) when viewed from a few feet away. The KC museum also has the most physically luscious and beautiful of all Rauschenberg's works, a glorious blue collage based on images appropriated from Velasquez (I think). If you are going south on 35, I recommend that you spend your time in Nelson-Atkins museum and not make the detour to Bentonville.
That said, I note that Crystal Bridges, apparently, has the prestige and wherewithal to attract excellent traveling exhibitions. When I was at Crystal Bridges in late March 2015, the museum featured four large gallery rooms of masterpieces from the Knox-Albright gallery in Buffalo, New York. I was not familiar with this collection, a group of paintings that also seem to have been acquired by a wealthy industrialist or his heirs. The traveling show is astounding -- almost every painting in the exhibition was extraordinary and many were very famous, for instance Arshile Gorky's very large The Liver is the Cock's Comb, a picture that I've never appreciated in reproduction, but which has a powerful presence when viewed in its actual colors and dimensions. (The show also featured a transcendent rose-period Picasso and a beautiful, enigmatic Max Beckmann interior crowded with strange personages). It is certainly possible that my muted reaction to many of the pictures in the Crystal Bridges permanent collection galleries was based upon unfair comparison with the astounding European post-impressionist paintings touring as part of the Knox-Albright show. (On a Monday afternoon, March 30, both upper and lower parking lots at Crystal Bridges were full and the galleries were reasonably crowded -- the place is roomy and, certainly, not unpleasantly full of people, but there were a good number of museum-goers on hand. In the Knox-Albright show, the people looked like retired truck drivers and elementary school teachers -- everyone was white and in their late sixties. I eavesdropped on the people and noticed that no one made anything approaching an intelligent remark about the paintings on display. But I hasten to add, that unlike an exhibit in New York, or Chicago, I didn't hear anyone say anything annoying or pretentious either.)
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