• Cole's "The Course of Empire: Destruction"

A New-York Historical Society exhibit on tour brings 45 Hudson River School paintings to Crystal Bridges Museum of Art starting Saturday, May 5. The paintings compliment CBMAA's own strong 19th century collection, the highlight of which is Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits." The Durand was purchased by museum founder Alice Walton from the New York Public Library.

"The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision" includes works by all five paintings in Thomas Cole's allegorical series "The Course of Empire," as well as works by Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, Jasper Cropsey, Durand, Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett.

The exhibit runs through Sept. 4. Reserved, timed tickets are required. They are $5 for non-members and free to members. Click here to reserve.

• O'Keeffe's "Radiator Building - Night, New York"

Just read a Los Angeles Times report that the Tennessee Supreme Court has rejected an attempt to keep Fisk University from sharing its Stieglitz Collection of Modern American and European Art with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Barring any further legal action, that means the Bentonville museum will have a 50 percent share in the collection, which includes Georgia O'Keeffe's famed "Radiator Building — Night, New York 1927" and works by American modernists Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Stanton McDonald-Wright, John Marin, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz and others, as well as Cezanne, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and other Europeans.

The state of Tennessee tried to stop the deal, under which CBMAA pays the Nashville school $30 million. Fisk will go back to lower courts to work out administrative details.

O'Keeffe donated the collection to Fisk in 1949. Some who follow museum business have objected to the deal, as a violation of O'Keeffe's intention in offering the school the collection. The school, however, has had financial difficulty and saw Alice Walton's offer as a way to improve its facility and its curation of the collection.

• Brian Chilson
• Alice Walton

Time Magazine has named Alice Walton one of the 100 most influential people in America, thanks to her creation of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She stands in line with Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (essay by Jeb Bush); Tim Tebow (essay by Jeremy Lin); Catherine, Duchess of Windsor, and her sister Pippa Middleton (essay by Catherine Mayer); "Today" show host Matt Lauer (essay by Howard Stern), and the singer Adele (essay by Pink) among many others.

The museum's press office released a couple of quotes. From Walton: “I am sincerely honored to be selected for this recognition. Most humbling, however, is the overwhelming response from our guests who have been inspired by the Crystal Bridges experience.” And from Don Bacigalupi: “The impact of Crystal Bridges has just begun to be felt in Arkansas and in our nation. It is wonderful and appropriate that Alice Walton receive this mention in recognition of her vision and ability to transform our views of American art, culture and history.”

Time's Richard Lacayo writes:

With Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, she has placed a daring bet that a small town can become a big art-world destination. We're betting she's right.

• Houghtelling's "Alice in Wonderland"

OK, at Sotheby's American paintings auction last week, someone paid about 5 times the estimate for an egg tempera and gouache storybook scene. Why think Alice Walton? A, someone paid about 5 times the estimate ... and B, the name of the piece: "Alice in Wonderland," by Ayres Houghtelling. Sotheby's information on the piece is that it was painted in 1947 as the first in a series of children's literary classics for Collier's Magazine.

Sotheby's expected the 22-by-28 inch painting to sell for between $10,000 and $15,000. The hammer price with buyer's premium was $53,125.

More likely, the piece was bought by an "Alice in Wonderland" fanatic or a Carroll collector. But it's amusing to imagine that Alice might have decided to buy a painting telling the whole story of Alice in Wonderland (presented clockwise in the work) for children who visit her museum.

The New York Times has a super story on how Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Director Don Bacigalupi, his partner Dan Feder and their son Guston have become part of the Bentonville community and about the very modern house that suits their decision to live openly in what outsiders might guess is a closed-minded town.

The story reports that when she offered the job to Bacigalupi, Alice Walton was concerned for the family's happiness in her home town:

Still, even Alice Walton, the Walmart scion who grew up in Bentonville, wasn’t sure the couple would be happy raising their child there. After offering Bacigalupi the job of director of her Crystal Bridges Museum, in 2009, Walton insisted he get to know people in the Ozarks town before deciding. She even went ahead and found potential friends for the two men, via a gay employees group at Walmart. “After knowing that Don was the right fit for us,” Walton wrote in an e-mail, “I wanted to be certain the community was the right fit for him and his family. That was my No. 1 priority.”

Great photographs accompany the story, which you can read here. Here's our own picture of Bacigalupi and Guston at the November opening of the museum.

• Prendergast, "People on the Beach: Revere Beach"
• Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Dwight Primiano.

To give some of its watercolors a rest from gallery lighting, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has replaced them with new works, all but one from the late 19th century and none previously announced as being part of the collection.

Installed are a 13 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. watercolor of people on a beach by post-impressionist Maurice Prendergast (above), painted circa 1896-1897; a 16 3/8 x 23 3/4 in. bronze by Augustus Saint Gaudens of Gertrude Vanderbilt at the age of 7 (below), 1882; a 30 x 25 in. painting by James Earl, "Lady Mary Beauclerk, Daughter of Lord Aubrey and Lady Jane Beauclerk (1793-1794)"; a figurative watercolor by Arthur Bowen Davies (1895) and watercolor landscapes by George Inness, John La Farge and George Henry Smillie, all created between 1880 and 1900.

• Saint Gaudens' "Gertrude Vanderbilt at the Age of Seven"
• Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Dwight Primiano.

• Destruction, from the Course of Empire

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will show 45 masterworks by Hudson River School artists when "The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision" opens May 5 in the temporary galleries where Wonder World is now.

The New-York Historical Society loan was reported here in January, in an interview with director Don Bacigalupi. There will be a $5 admission fee for persons over 18 to "Nature and the American Vision," though admission to the museum is free.

From the news release:

The New-York Historical Society organized the exhibition with works selected from their rich collections of 19th-century American landscape painting. The exhibition was designed to travel while the society’s galleries were closed during renovations, offering an unprecedented opportunity to share works that have rarely traveled. The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision" includes Thomas Cole’s legendary five-part series The Course of Empire and other masterworks by Cole, John F. Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper F. Cropsey, Asher B. Durand and many others. This exhibition at Crystal Bridges will be the last time these works are on display outside of the New-York Historical Society.

The museum will hold special programs on the exhibit with CBMAA curator Kevin Murphy and N.Y. Historical Society

Linda Ferber, New-York Historical Society senior art historian and curator of the exhibition, and Kevin Murphy, curator of American art at Crystal Bridges, will participate in special programs including a private preview and a lecture for Crystal Bridges members.

Wonder World goes down April 2.

I should have posted this ARTNews article about Crystal Bridges sooner, but better late than never. Author Patricia Failing has done the best job so far, I think, writing about the art in the collection, but then she is a professor of arts history at the University of Washington at Seattle and not a glib reporter who writes from a more limited arts background, like yours truly. Failing has made one teeny error, however — she identified the Arkansas Times as a supporter of the Walton Family. As all Times readers know, that's hardly the case. No matter. I must admit to being thrilled to see something I've written, teeny sentence though it is, quoted in ARTNews!

Failing's views:

Hartley’s 1940 Madawaska—Arcadian Light—Heavy, a portrait of a young boxer with glowing nipples, is especially arresting and well displayed. Crystal Bridges founding curator Chris Crosman’s description of the painting is not coy about its homoerotic allure: the painting, he writes, “reveals Hartley’s full-blown embrace of homosexual desires that up to this point had remained hidden in stylized imagery, encoded in mystical symbols, or subsumed in representations of nature’s heaving rhythms.” ... The early-20th-century room wraps up with a 1936—37 Arshile Gorky still life, which could have been hung in the modern-and-contemporary gallery with an early ho-hum Pollock and a 1946 psuedo-Surrealist painting by David Smith. ... The most ambitious is “Wonder World,” a survey of approaches to “realism” by contemporary artists. Assembled by curatorial director David Houston, formerly chief curator at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the show is both witty and routine—Dan Flavin versus photorealist Richard Estes. This exhibition subverts conventional wisdom about the museum’s collection with several artworks, including a John Baldessari sound sculpture, Nam June Paik’s multimedia portrait of John Cage, an inlaid wood installation by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Roxy Paine’s steel-and-plastic Bad Lawn, Al Souza’s fantastic jigsaw-puzzle collage, and holograms by James Turrell, who was also commissioned to create one of his “skyspaces” for the museum.

• Oldenburg's "Alphabet/Good Humor"

It's been pointed out to me that it makes perfect sense that Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has installed Claes Oldenburg's "Alphabet/Good Humor" sculpture of a melting popsicle of letters in its restaurant. Now, you can see the drip off one side.

When it comes to art, A. Walton is something of a Good Humor Woman. She enjoys playful art. Me too, even if the flesh tone/brain form on the Oldenburg makes it hard to love at first.

Writer Paul Brady goes to colleague Doug Smith to find out a bit more about Bentonville's past. Read the story here. Spokesperson Laura Jacobs is quoted: "We're learning that this is many peoples' first experience with a museum."

Bentonville gets yet another plug as a travel destination, this time from the Los Angeles Times, which includes Crystal Bridges Museum in its "12 places to visit in 2012." To wit:

Bentonville, Ark.: That's right, Bentonville, served by Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. It's where Wal-Mart is headquartered, and it's where Alice Walton, of the chain's founding Walton family, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build Crystal Bridges, a new museum of American art, colonial to contemporary, on a 120-acre site. The collection, which opened Nov. 11, leans toward representational works with broad appeal. Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" is here, as is Andy Warhol's "Dolly Parton." New Yorkers may scoff at this distant town as a cultural destination, but we out west should be above that. crystalbridges.org; free admission to the permanent collection.

(That's my emphasis in the paragraph above.)

Travel and Leisure magazine was the first out of the gate to urge folks to travel to Arkansas. Many others have followed.

A sharp-eyed fan of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art asked on the museum's Facebook page when Robert Indiana's 1999 "Love" sculpture would be installed. The museum said it would announce something shortly on new sculpture installations, but sharp-eyed fan had apparently looked at the trails map on the website and seen that "Love" is planned for a trail tucked in the woods south of the museum and east of the trail to the rear entrance of the museum. (See map).

Phillips de Pury & Co., New York, sold one of Indiana's "Love" editions for $1.3 million last May. (Polychrome aluminum.
96 x 96 x 48 in., stamped 1966-1999.) Christie's sold another, for $4.1 million (144 x 144 x 72 in.). But the latter was stamped 1990; CBM's trails map dates its "Love" as 1999. So it looks like Alice Walton got a deal. Eight by eight by four feet is a fine scale for a path in the Ozark woods.

trail_map.pdf

• Eleven, where wine is served.

I forgot to include in yesterday's post about my interview with Don Bacigalupi of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art a question he was asked — one he said he'd never gotten before a talk he'd given. And it was, how's the food at the museum? What's on the menu?

Bacigalupi said he was "thrilled" with the question. "That's something we've paid attention to." He bragged on Eleven's "high South, lower Midwest" cuisine and the efforts to buy locally.

Typical question from the French, non? I asked him if the questioner wanted to know about the wine. He didn't, but Bacigalupi addressed that important question. "I did mention that we do serve very good wine," though the museum is in a dry county. Do the French have the concept of "dry county"?

• Cole's "The Good Shepherd," at the Louvre until May.

Don Bacigalupi, the director of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, is just back from the Musee du Louvre in Paris, where he introduced the museum’s collection to a French audience attending a seminar on the birth of American landscape painting.

The seminar opened “New Frontier: Thomas Cole and the Birth of Landscape Painting in America,” a small exhibit of six paintings, four by Thomas Cole, one by Asher Durand and another by Frenchman Pierre-Antoine Patel the Younger.

I talked to Bacigalupi this morning about the show, a collaboration with the Terra Foundation in Chicago and the High Museum in Atlanta as well as the Louvre and CBM, and its reception in Paris. Bacigalupi said the French, who didn’t regard American art as having an identity until 1945 and the birth of abstract expressionism, are now wondering if they were about 100 years too late to recognize the quality of American art.

The Louvre, with its astonishing compilation of works art from around the world, has snubbed L’etats Unis, with only four paintings by American painters in its holdings. One of them is Cole’s “The Cross in the Wilderness.” That work was joined by Cole’s “The Good Shepherd” from Crystal Bridges, his “Landscape with Figures: A Scene from ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ ” from the Terra Foundation, and his “The Tempest” from the High. The High also contributed Durand's "View Near Rutland Vermont." “The Summer,” painted in 1699 by Patel the Younger, was from the collection of the Louvre. The six will be on exhibit at Crystal Bridges May 12-Aug. 13.

“Several of the French speakers said that before the show opened, ‘We would have said American art is second tier.' " They won’t say that anymore,” Bacigalupi said.

The audience was curious about why so many museums — like CBM and the Metropolitan, with its new American wing — are focusing on American art. Bacigalupi said heightened interest in American art could be a 10-year delayed response to 911.

The seminar attendees also asked about the future of collecting American art. “To their detriment,” Bacigalupi said, those who want to collect now are “coming very late to the party.” It's a party CBM wants to keep going, of course.

The Terra Foundation no longer operates exhibit space but travels its collection, and Bacigalupi said CBM expects to collaborate with the foundation to show some of its work that complements Crystal Bridges’ collection.

Bacigalupi also talked about the American response to Crystal Bridges, which he called “amazing beyond anyone’s expectations.” There have been more than 130,000 visits to the museum — 3,000 just yesterday, on a Monday — and he’s seeing that visitors' experience is “one of deep engagement.” People want more details — on the labels, on the audio tours, from the docents. “It’s shocking in a way,” he said. “That’s not the experience of most museums.”

The director said the museum will continue to install sculpture on the grounds — like Deborah Butterfield's sculpture "Redstick" — and tweak what’s hanging on the walls. The exhibit “Wonder World,” a show of contemporary art which runs through April in the temporary gallery space, will be replaced in May with Hudson River school masterworks from the New York Historical Society.

• Butterfield's "Redstick," new sculpture installation.

• January in Paris: Curator Kevin Murphy with "The Good Shepherd"

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has posted this picture of the lucky Kevin Murphy, curator of early American art, at the Musee du Louvre as CBMAA's Thomas Cole, "The Good Shepherd," is unpacked. Crystal Bridges, the Terra Foundation of Chicago and the High Museum in Atlanta are collaborating with the Louvre on an exhibit of works by Cole, Asher B. Durand and Pierre-Antoine Patel the Younger to illustrate the birth of American landscape painting and its French inspiration.

The exhibit opens Saturday, Jan. 14, with a day-long symposium on the history of American art collections in the United States and Europe.

I've got a call in to the museum asking what has taken the place of "The Good Shepherd" on the wall of the museum. Maybe someone who has been there recently can fill me in?

UPDATE! Cole's "View of Mount Etna" was moved to the spot previously occupied by "The Good Shepherd" (next to Durand's "Kindred Spirits.") Taking the place of "View of Mount Etna" is a previously unexhibited Cole, "Landscape with Indian," according to CBM communications director Laura Jacobs. Thank you, Laura.