Something, I'm afraid is amiss at Winona's Minnesota Marine Art Museum. When last I visited the handsome museum overlooking a channel of the mighty Mississippi, usually clogged with immense iron barges, there were three large, wall-to-wall galleries featuring valuable paintings -- a turquoise Manet depicting iron-clad battleships (if I recall correctly), several paintings by Monet, and a smaller version of Emmanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware". The collection was quite large and very impressive and the docents, decent regular fellows, well-met, were happy to tell you in whispered tones how much money was spilt to acquire these objects. On my visit to the Museum on the 8th of July, 2023, the famous paintings and famous names were all gone. The tour guide, who was a also a decent retired guy, was ludicrously inept -- he hadn't even mastered the information contained in the labels on the wall and repeatedly misidentified canvases. (The collection was purchased by the founders of the Fastenal Company, a firm that manufactures screws and bolts, and the docents tend to be interested in technical details as to plexi-glass varnishes, finishing veneers, and the hardware involved in the ornate frames.) The tour guide, advised with a tiny edge of hostility, that the owners of the famous paintings took them all, sold some of the most famous (the Washington picture for instance) for a pretty penny and plan to invest in a 28 million dollar gallery and performance space somewhere downtown. This betrayal, if such it can be called, has left the MMAM with a large building that would be mostly empty if traveling shows could not be enticed to exhibit in the space. (The Fastenal folks also bequeathed the museum huge, bulky bank-vault doors between the exhibition spaces -- after all this was building in which their treasures were stored.) Admission is now reduced and museum was mostly empty on the morning that I visited, before attending a couple plays performed at the Great River Shakespeare Festival.
Four traveling exhibitions are now on display at the MMAM. One of them shows whimsical masks depicting marine animals, various fish, sharks, otters and the like. Some eerie-looking large photographs show slender figures wearing the masks in subways or nondescript parking lots or on the dock of the bay. (The photographs are like collage-figures from a surrealist book by Max Ernst.) A second exhibition is comprised of elaborate ceramics depicting the different, profusely colored corals that one might see at a reef in a shallow tropical sea. The brilliantly floral corals are, often, shown surrounded by bleached white coral skeletons, the result of ocean acidification, and, so, the art has an ideological burden. The coral facsimiles are beautiful and intricately made and some of the works are comprised of more than 400 delicately contrive ceramics. But, after I got the point as to conservation and climate change, I have to admit that the whole show seemed a bit pointless to me. A third gallery displays drawings and woodcuts made for children's books. These things are beautiful but, also, inconsequential. A wood cut artist named Nick Wroblewski produces very fine facsimiles of similarly designed Japanese landscapes, similar to the sequence graphics made by Hokusai such as "100 Views of Mount Fujiyama". Wroblewski's excellent, but derivative, images even feature the little red "hatchmark" monogams that you see on the bottoms of Japanese prints -- in the cartouche, he has incised his initials, also a bit like Duerer. The fourth traveling show on display is about forty canvases from the New-York Historical society -- most notably, there are paintings by Asher Durand and Thomas Cole (however the star pieces in the New-York Historical Society gallery -- for instance, Thomas Cole's grandiose paintings of "The Progress of Empire" have not traveled for this exhibition.) The paintings from New York are mostly mid-sized canvases depicting conventionally "pretty" landscapes -- there are vistas over deep valleys with craggy peaks on the horizon, a scattering of ghostly white and skeletal trees in the foreground, sometimes, a stump as an emblem of the fate of the forests under manifest destiny, and, occasionally, a couple of cows in aerial meadows at the edge of the frame. A luminous larger painting of autumnal woods by Alfred Bierstadt is a highlight of the show. There are a number of studies of boulders and pine trees by Asher Durand that look a bit like Courbet; the paintings by Thomas Cole are lesser works, not at all flamboyant, but rather restrained in palette and composition -- there's a melange of alpine meadows and Catskills mountains under a lone icy summit, obviously a fantasy, and some pictures made by Cole in the Alps. At the center of the show is a wall-sized canvas by John Hope showing Watkins Glen in New York with a ribbon of water falling out of a central glowing void where the declivity opens to the sky; a rainbow decorates one of the sedimentary-ledges in the little gorge -- it's a wonderful picture, still owned by the MMAM, and accounted, according to the docent, as a favorite with visitors; the docent praises the artist, whom he calls Hart, and says people should look in their attics because sometimes Hart pictures are found in unlikely places and they are worth money -- "tens of thousands but not millions," the guide says as if to explain why the Fastenal entrepreneurs haven't de-accessioned this work. (This is all fine except that the painting of Rainbow Falls is by John Hope, not someone called Hart.)
Some museums are interesting due to their eccentricity. The best example of this that I know is the Adams Museum in Deadwood, South Dakota -- a noble-looking Carnegie Library building crammed with weird artifacts found, mostly, it seems at Estate Sales and in people's barns: there's rope used in notorious hangings, looted pre-columbian figurines, skeletal parts with arrows and bullet holes in them, dioramas made by obsessives full of tiny naked females, sculpted, I think, from masticated bread, a two-headed calf and a ghost dancer's shirt worn at Wounded Knee. The MMAM seems in danger of becoming a place of this sort, a kind of communal attic -- in the first gallery, there are a smattering of mediocre marine paintings possibly made to document ships for insurance purposes, a horn of a narwhale, a radiant picture of icebergs as dusk, and, a letter written by Lord Nelson on yellow parchment in left hand script, the poor admiral's right arm had been shot off, as well as an eye and part of a shoulder and he had a ball lodged in his belly as well -- my constitution is weakened, says Lord Nelson in the letter, and unless "I get asses' milk I am done for --" or words to that effect. Nearby, there is a scale model of the Victory, Nelson's flagship, made by some anonymous artist and the great man's washbasin and mirror taken from Victory.. It's not clear what this stuff is doing here, but it's pretty interesting. The art in the sole surviving gallery of the museum collections is all unimpressive.
One of docents tells me that the MMAM wasn't making enough money to sustain itself. This man, who looks like the Ancient Mariner, has gone outside for a cigarette break and he morosely turns his eyes over some huge rusting barges in the Mississippi channel next to the museum. (Here, one of the guides says, the Mississippi flows west to east.) The Ancient Mariner remarks that the Kierlin's (as he calls the Fastenal owners) sold all of the good stuff and that the museum, despite its wonders, never made more than one-third of the revenues of the International Eagle Center up the river at Wabasha. I don't have the heart to ask how profits compared with the smaller store front International Owl Center at Houston, Minnesota, a county away.
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