Hi, everyone! Thanks for being patient as Quiet Grandeur went on a little pause while I went on vacation. I’m finally back in California after 17 days on the east coast, and this week’s post is going to be a little “greatest hits” of the things I’ve seen. I saw a total of 9 museums, so I’ll be going in the order I visited them! In the interest of time, I’ve decided to discuss some museums in more in-depth posts at a later date; those museums will be marked with an asterisk (*).
Also, I started journalling on this trip to keep better track of what I was doing each day, and to record first impressions more organically, so I’ll be including notes for each museum that have been directly lifted from my journal. I’ll be adding a slideshow of a few of my favourite pieces from each museum in their respective sections.
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New Jersey State Museum (Trenton, NJ)
The NJ State Museum is part art museum, part cultural museum, and part natural history museum. There was something about the lighting in the art galleries in particular that was off and made viewing the art a little strange, as if it was a little too dark to really see the works properly but still light enough to see them. The collections focused on modern (i.e., 19th- and 20th-century) American artists; because most of my experience is with 17th-century Europe, a lot of the artists were new or only vaguely familiar to me, which was actually pretty cool because it helps fulfil one of my goals for this year off. One thing I really wanted to do between now and graduate school applications is to see more art outside of my “comfort zone,” so to speak, and this really hit that spot.
We went early enough that there were barely any people there until we were ready to leave. This was coolest when walking through the natural history part: having the whole room to yourself while looking at the taxidermy all around, as well as dinosaur reconstructions and other animal species, was as interesting as it was eerie and unsettling. I kid you not, part of me was waiting for one of the animals to come to life, Night at the Museum style. One of the other parts I enjoyed was the gallery dedicated to the history of New Jersey, complete with items, maps, and other historical facts throughout the placards. Finally, the last and most powerful exhibit on display for me was that of work produced by artists during World War I, from both sides of the war.
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Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, NJ)*
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Morris Museum (Morristown, NJ)
Like the NJ State Museum, the Morris Museum had a mix of art, culture, and natural history. I only stayed on the first level, but I believe the upstairs had dinosaur fossils and the like. Two experiences stood out for me, the first being this room towards the back of the museum which had a timeline of American history on its walls. I entered on the 20th century side, and on one wall, there was a TV playing a recording of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen the visual of that — I may have in classes before? — but the emotional impact of it was almost tangible in that empty room. Watching the speech interspersed with footage of police/white brutality and violence really stuck with me because decades later, the same racial injustices haven’t been corrected and are still being perpetuated by the same system Dr King was denouncing. People are still waiting for this part to come true:
And when this happens [applause] (Let it ring, Let it ring), and when we allow freedom ring (Let it ring), when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city (Yes Lord), we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children (Yeah), black men (Yeah) and white men (Yeah), Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics (Yes), will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! (Yes) Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” [enthusiastic applause] (source)
At the same time, 54 years isn’t that long compared to the historical systemic violence in this country, especially against black people. Later, I wrote, “I feel some modicum of peace, but a peace that feels like resignation in the face of returning to something that has been left unfinished.” I was moved to tears both by the passion in his voice and the passion of that crowd, but also because there is still so much left to do, and — lately — it feels like society hasn’t even come that far at all.
My other standout moment at the Morris Museum was the exhibit on the artist Ysabel LeMay, who works with “hypercollages,” which the wall text explained as “constellations of individual photographs [that blur] the distinction between reality and fantasy.” They’re these fantastical creations of flower arrangements, and robins and hummingbirds on made-up trees; easily, the best words I can use to describe the pieces are soft, and dreamy, and ethereal. The transition from the speech on the Lincoln Memorial to this was a little jarring, but entering this room was like stepping into another world.
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Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, NJ)
I really enjoyed the Montclair Art Museum. William Couper’s Crown for the Victor (1896) is easily one of the mos beautiful sculptures I’ve seen in person, and was so cleverly juxtaposed with modern art by Philemona Williamson in the rotunda you see it photographed in. It’s one of those sculptures that’s meant to be seen in the round, or in a place where you can walk around it, so a frontal photograph doesn’t really do it justice, but I think even from a photograph, you can see details like the wreath being made and the way the light hits the marble to form the shadows of her dress.
One of the things I wrote extensively about in my journal were the landscape paintings by George Inness, particularly a winter scene called Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve) from 1886. It was interesting because I’d gotten my journal out to talk about it, but then I got distracted (as I wrote in my journal) by a tour going on to my right and then a lecture going on to my left — it was a pretty busy day for the MAM! Here’s what I wrote about Winter Moonlight:
I’ve noticed that I don’t really know what types of landscapes I’m attracted to, since there are times that lush greens or wide yellows will capture my attention. Winter Moonlight has neither of those: it’s all blues, and greys, some browns, and white in the form of the moon and of the snow on the ground. The lone off-centre figure in the foreground casts a shadow lengthened by the moon above it, stretching out the silence & the loneliness — there is an eeriness looming in the figure’s walk into the darkened forest, but also calm & a sense of purpose.
(Check those visual analysis skills I haven’t used in a few months!) One other thing about my experience at the MAM was that so many of the paintings I saw that day moved me to tears — but I can’t even really tell you why! There are just times when I’ve seen art in person and been overwhelmed that I’m even standing in front of it, especially with regards to art I’ve only seen in books or on slides; and then other times, I will have never seen the painting before, and most times I’ve never even known the artist, and I will just get emotional. It’s a real, deep-from-the-gut feeling that, genuinely, I want to keep experiencing the more I look at art.
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Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA)*
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Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA)*
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, NY)*
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Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York City, NY)
Along with the Met and the Frick, the Guggenheim was a must-see on my trip to New York, for two reasons. The first is that I’ve never been to the Guggenheim! On my last trip to New York in the summer of 2015, I only got to visit MoMA (that trip was focused more on seeing Broadway shows: I saw six in a total of five days!), so all the New York City museums on this list were all first-time visits. The second reason is that the show currently exhibiting, Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World, features a lot of artists that I’d studied when I took a seminar on contemporary East Asian art; they were artists whose work I’d very rarely encountered in the institutions I’ve visited, and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see them here. This exhibit was a little controversial because of three artworks involving animals, sparking up protests from animal rights’ activists, and also (re-)opening the discussion on artistic freedom, what constitutes art, and when, if it does, art goes too far. Here’s the official statement the Guggenheim released when it decided to remove these videos from display.
The walk to the Guggenheim was a really anticipatory one. “The architecture alone was enough to give me pause,” was what I wrote into my journal later that day. “[The building] starts to peek out as you walk up 5th Ave/Museum Mile, & then emerges from the row of buildings in the recognisable spiral. Wow. I mean, I’m not an architectural historian, but just on pure aesthetic & visceral reactions alone, it was so good.” I purchased my ticket to the Guggenheim online to skip the lines, and then went to the top of the rotunda so I could see the exhibit from top to bottom, rather than bottom to top. (Since I came specifically for this exhibit, I skipped out on the permanent collections — will just have to go back and see them another time, I suppose!)
I saw names I had been expecting to see, like Xu Bing and Ai Weiwei (Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn was larger than I thought it would be, and I wasn’t expecting to see June 1994, although I guess I should have been!), but I was also pleasantly surprised to see Cai Guo-Qian, who had a piece with gunpowder and ink called Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 2 (1989); Song Dong, who was represented by the rubber stamp and photographs of 1996’s Stamping the Water; stills of Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters, which is one of the first pieces of modern/contemporary Chinese art that I ever learned about; and Wang Guangyi’s Mao Zedong: Red Grid No. 2 (1988), which sparked some enlightening discussions in my seminar about what both the colour red and a grid could mean.
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The Frick Collection (New York City, NY)
Last but certainly not least, I visited the Frick Collection, which is housed in Henry Clay Frick’s old mansion on 5th Avenue and 70th Street. In a word, it was stunning. One of the things I liked about it was that, in order to preserve the ambiance of the home, children under 10 aren’t allowed into the museum. I’m all for exposing children to art while they’re still young, but it helps prevent situations like the one I saw at the Princeton University Art Museum where a young little girl of about three was running around and trying to pat the frames of very old paintings. (I know I didn’t work there or anything, but it was enough to make me anxious; and it doesn’t even have to be a child! Sometimes I see adults get way, way too close — especially to busts on pedestals — and I have to keep myself from speaking up.)
Photographs aren’t allowed in the Frick, so the only photo I have is from the Garden Court, the one place where you can take pictures. It reminded me a lot of the interior courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Garden Court is said to be modelled after an ancient Roman interior, while the courtyard at the Gardner reflects Isabella’s preference for Italian architecture. There’s a beautiful fountain that acts as the centrepiece of the Frick’s Garden Court, and I spent a solid amount of time sitting before it and just journalling. The sound of water was really soothing, but it was also colder here than it was anywhere else. My observations:
[The courtyard] is lined with double Ionic columns 7 deep and 4 wide, & they make the courtyard sleek & elegant. It is as Roman as the Gardner’s courtyard is a mix of different Italian periods. [Note: The Gardner’s interior courtyard was intentionally meant to mimic the façade of an Italian palace, bringing the outside inside.] The arched glass dome lets in light & makes the room seem even bigger, & since it’s frosted, it mimics but also tempers the light from outside, easily like a pale Turner sky.
The Frick has an app you can download onto your phone or tablet, which lets you “like” art on display and gather them into a “collection” that you can look over. This is what I did instead of taking photographs or taking notes the entire time, and then I spent some time writing them down into the journal after I was done at the museum. I’ve also never really used the audio guide at museums — I’ve done so at the Huntington, but just the once — but the app has recordings about most of the items on display, many of which have placards but not a paragraph explaining them. I listened to some of them in English, and then the rest of my visit, I switched to French to practise my listening comprehension skills!
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Overall, the trip was amazing. I got to see family and many old friends along the way, and just basked in all of the art I saw. Can’t wait to see where the next trip takes me!
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Featured Image: Jacques Lipchitz, Acrobat on Horseback, 1914.
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Quiet Grandeur 
Amazing! Just amazing.
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Wow! Leaves me speechless…. such an amazing and priceless journey.
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