Home is the sailor, home from the sea

In the summer of 1997, I was invited by Norman and Judith Topper to visit their home at Fearrington Village. Originally from New York, the Toppers had embraced the Triangle and especially the Museum. Both were dedicated, enthusiastic docents at the NCMA. They invited me over that August morning to talk about their art collection and specifically if there was anything of interest to the Museum.

Their collection was modest, mostly European and Japanese prints and Chinese export porcelain. While not for us, they would be welcome in the collections of several local museums, and I gave the Toppers names and phone numbers of the curators. However, there was one item that I very much coveted. Leaning on a shelf was a bronze portrait medallion of the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. That was a keeper! The Toppers happily offered to leave the portrait to the Museum in their wills. The next day Norman called to say that he and Judith had changed their minds: they wanted to donate the portrait right away. In such moments curators are allowed to be giddy.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) is arguably the finest American sculptor of the 19th century, famed for his heroic monuments to Civil War heroes. His most celebrated works are the gilded equestrian statue of General Sherman at the bottom of New York’s Central Park and the incomparable memorial to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the heroic African American soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry on Boston Common. Saint-Gaudens was also the unsurpassed master of the demanding art of relief portraiture. Working within a shallow plane, he managed to convey an illusion of space and a complexity of design as well as a vivid and personable likeness. The Stevenson portrait is regarded as one of the sculptor’s great triumphs.

Saint-Gaudens requested and received permission to create the portrait during Stevenson’s visit to the United States in 1887. As the artist recalled in his autobiography:

I began the medallion at [Stevenson’s] rooms in the Hotel Albert … not far from where I lived on Washington Place. All I had time to do from him then was the head, which I modeled in five sittings of two or three hours each. These were given me in the morning, while he, as was his custom, lay in bed propped up with pillows, and either read or was read to by Mrs. Stevenson.

The artist modeled the poet’s thin, elegant hands several months later. In the finished relief, he filled the background with Stevenson’s verse.

The Stevenson portrait achieved immediate and enduring success, and the sculptor had editions cast in several sizes.

The portrait arrived from the Toppers without a frame. We looked at examples of frame designs favored by the sculptor and initially tried a hexagonal design in dark walnut. That proved unsatisfactory. This past year Chief Conservator Bill Brown and I revisited the frame problem. This time we were inspired by an arts and crafts design frequently used by Saint-Gaudens for other casts of the Stevenson portrait. Instead of a dark wood molding, this design featured splined oak boards, decorated only by a carved bead border circling the inset relief and by three carved rosettes at the bottom, echoing motifs in the relief. We brought in local furniture craftsman Evan Lightner, who had earlier fabricated the imposing architectural surround for our mural study by John Singer Sargent. We showed Evan photographs of our chosen design. He then researched frame making of the period and came back to us with drawings. He also proposed using a tricky 19th-century technique to impart a rich golden tone to the wood by fuming the boards with ammonia—a process that required trial and error. Though lengthy, Evan’s description of the frame-making process makes interesting reading:

Once the design was agreed upon, I sourced lumber in the dimensions necessary to fulfill the specs of the frame—plus another plank for backup. As with most American arts and crafts furniture from that period, quartersawn white oak was utilized for its stability and uniform grain. Initial milling of my planks yielded grain directions and cosmetic characteristics. I selected the lengths with the straightest grain and lack of inclusions for the frame body. These were cut from the plank, remilled, surface scraped, and left to acclimate.

At the Museum a template of the bronze medallion was traced, noting its attachment points, depth, and deviations. Back at the shop, the frame sides were planed to thickness, ripped to width, and cut to length. These lengths were then mitered at 45 degrees. I then used the template to rout into the frame the exact ever-so-slightly oblong shape of the artwork.

At this point I temporarily assembled the frame. With a razor tool, I then scribed the two lines around the inside perimeter that would comprise the channel for the carved pea molding. Taking the frame apart into its four sections allowed me to carve the double row of inset 1/8-inch peas into the channel as well as the rosettes at the frame bottom. When completed, I glued the four corners of the frame together. A segmented ledge was installed in the frame interior to enable attachment of the relief.

Several rounds of finish sanding prepared the frame for coloring and sealing. I constructed a plastic tent to envelop the frame, leaving about 3 inches of airspace around it. Before sealing the tent, I poured one cup of 28% aqueous ammonia into a pie dish located in the center of the frame. After two hours of exposure to the ammonia fumes, the frame had darkened substantially. Following a light surface sanding, I applied three coats of a polymerized linseed oil based on a 19th-century coachmakers recipe. Once cured, a coat of paste wax was applied and buffed to a satin sheen.

In the meantime Bill Brown had cleaned the surface of the portrait relief and applied a thin protective wax to the surface. The original patination of the bronze had likely suffered over the years from overpolishing—think a polished doorknob. Bill used a colored French wax, Pâte Dugay, to impart a slightly darker overall tone and to highlight the subtle textural differences hidden within the shallow picture plane. When the frame arrived, Bill carefully set the relief into the recess, attaching it with bronze screws. The result is an elegant presentation: a frame that does not call attention to itself but only enhances the quiet beauty of the portrait.

The framed portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was reinstalled to the American Galleries on January 28, paired with Thomas Eakins’s portrait of Dr. Albert Getchell.

John W. Coffey

Israel and the Law is part of an ambitious cycle of murals created by Sargent to decorate a palatial hall in the library. Titled “The Triumph of Religion,” the murals chart the evolution of Western religious thought from polytheist beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the “enlightened” monotheism of modern times. A central theme of the cycle is the dialogue between Judaism and Christianity carried out in corresponding paintings that occupy the spandrels of the vaults, three on each lateral side of the hall. In Israel and the Law, a cowled Jehovah, his face unseen, crouches on a mountaintop teaching the Divine Law to the boy Israel. The pair is protected by a ring of warrior angels.

Judging by the number of drawings made for Israel and the Law, Sargent worried over this painting more than any of his other murals.  In addition to the drawings, now at Harvard, he made two full studies in oil. The Museum’s painting is most likely the first of the two. Close examination reveals clear evidence of the artist fine-tuning the composition. For example, in the group of angels at right, one can see under the buildup of paint where Sargent adjusted the placement of the winged figures. The other study, in the collection of London Royal Academy of Arts, has few editorial changes. It was probably made for exhibition, whereas the Museum’s painting is a true study, all the more interesting for showing the artist at work.

Israel and the Law is unique in our American collection for being essentially a work of civic art, not intended for a private home or even a museum. It was composed for a grand public space and meant to be viewed from below. This posed a challenge for us. The painting arrived at the Museum in a handsome gilt frame that made the picture “behave” as though it were any easel picture circa 1900. That was clearly the wrong message. As a corrective, we looked back to the practice of American mural painters of Sargent’s generation. We found that it was common for artists to paint small versions of a proposed mural for approval by a client or architect. Some of these paintings were framed in elaborately constructed and painted frames that would give the client a suggestion of the architectural context for the final mural. One such frame was designed by the artist Elihu Vedder for his study for Rome, or the Art Idea. Using that frame as inspiration, we asked Raleigh furniture maker Evan Lightner to build a frame for Israel and the Law. The design incorporated some of the beaux-arts architectural features found in Sargent Hall at the Boston Public Library. We then asked decorative painter Rosa Patton to paint the frame using marbled colors matched to those in Sargent Hall. The resulting frame endows Sargent’s mural study with appropriate majesty and distinguishes it from the rest of the American paintings.

On February 24 Israel and the Law was unveiled in a special single-painting exhibition in West Building in the space immediately preceding the Judaic Art Gallery.

And all of this followed from one phone call.

NOTE: “Israel and the Law: The Key to a Missing Keynote,” is the subject of a public lecture by Yale University Professor Sally M. Promey to be presented as 12^th annual Abram and Frances Pascher Kanof Lecture, Sunday, March 25, at 2 pm in the Museum Auditorium.  The lecture is free to the public. More info

Who would have imagined that treasures of English Judaica would end up in North Carolina? In mid-January we placed on display in the Judaic Art Gallery a major new acquisition: Torah ornaments from the Orthodox Synagogue of Plymouth, England. Consisting of silver and gilt finials (rimmonim) and matching pointer (yad), these superb pieces are among the earliest complete sets of English Torah silver.  How did they come to North Carolina?  Therein lies a tale. But first, some background.

The Orthodox Synagogue in Plymouth lays claim to being “the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in the English-speaking world still in regular use.” Founded by German and Dutch immigrants, the synagogue was built in 1762 by carpenters and other artisans from the nearby shipyards of the Royal Navy. Though never large, the Plymouth Jewish community attained a degree of prosperity that is reflected in the sophistication of the synagogue furnishings and ceremonial art.

About 1783—the year the American colonies won their independence—an unknown member of the Plymouth community went to London and commissioned a pair of finials and pointer from John Robins, a silversmith with a fashionable clientele. Robins responded with pieces that in their refined proportions and playful elegance typify the best of Georgian silversmithing. A respected authority on English silver has judged the finials to be “one of the two most effectively original pairs of rimmonim of pure English character made in London in the 18th century.” Whether intended or not, the bulbous shapes of the finials suggest the origin of the term rimmonim—pomegranates. Gilded bells dangle from three tiers of fancifully designed brackets, adding a celestial tinkle to the procession of the Torah scroll during religious services. Topping each finial is a very English hooped crown, symbolizing the sovereignty of the divine word.

For 226 years the Robins-made finials and pointer played a central role in the ritual life of the Plymouth synagogue. However, in recent decades the once-thriving community has declined, so that today it reportedly numbers about 50 people. “We are a dying community,” admitted one of the leaders of the synagogue to a reporter for the London Times in 2009. She was explaining why the congregation took the drastic decision to sell 23 silver items, including the Robins-made finials and pointer. She further confessed that “we don’t use the items, and we are very short of funds. I’m not sad to see them go …There is no point keeping silver in the bank that we are not using.”

The decision to sell the Torah ornaments sparked a brief furor. Besides the Times, the story was reported by the BBC, London’s Jewish Chronicle, and as far afield as the Jerusalem Post and New York’s Jewish Daily Forward. Inevitably, voices were raised decrying the loss to Jewish—and English—heritage. Even so, despite the ruckus, no one stepped forward to assist the Plymouth Synagogue, and the objects were consigned to auction at Bonham’s in London in November 2009. Nicholas Shaw of Bonham’s praised the Plymouth silver as “the earliest and rarest set of English ritual Torah furnishings to have come up for auction.” Interest was high among collectors of Judaica. Some people expected London’s Jewish Museum to bid on the finials and pointer in an effort to “rescue” them for England.  In the end no rescue materialized, and the pieces were bought by a respected London dealer in antique silver and jewelry. After some minor conservation—primarily replacement of a few lost bells—the finials and pointer were offered to the North Carolina Museum of Art for our Judaic Art Gallery.

This presented an opportunity that would not come twice. In strengthening the Judaic art collection, a top priority has been to extend the geographical range of the collection in order to represent the variety of interpretations of ceremonial art across the Jewish Diaspora. Our collection had no English Judaica. And we had few pieces of any kind from the 18th century. Then, too, our goal has always been to acquire only Judaic art of superb artistry. After all, we are an art museum. The Plymouth ornaments were not only historically important; they were also visually dazzling. We had to have them.

The price, however, even after considerable bargaining, was high, and the resources then available in the Judaic Art Fund were substantial but not enough. The dealer in London granted us time to raise the remaining funds. An appeal went out to the Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery, and happily several North Carolinians stepped forward with generous contributions that completed the purchase.

Plymouth’s loss is certainly North Carolina’s gain, but we do not intend to ignore, much less forget, where these beautiful objects came from. So many pieces in our Judaic art collection—and in the Museum’s other collections—have lost their histories as they have passed from one hand to another, sometimes with war intervening. With these Torah ornaments, we have the full and very human story: objects created to honor God and enhance communal pride, cherished by 10 generations of Plymouth’s Jews, and finally, sadly sacrificed as the Plymouth community dwindles. The story is well worth sharing.

Images: John Robins, Torah Finials and Pointer, 1783–84, silver: hollow-formed, repoussé, cast, chased, partly gilded, velvet crown caps; finials: H. 14 1/2 in., pointer: L. 11 in., Purchased with funds from Wendy and Mike Brenner, Alice and Daniel Satisky, Phyllis Shavitz and Family in Memory of Stanley Shavitz, and other Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery

Related: Join the Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery on Saturday, March 11, for Purim Madness!

I returned to Cebolla in early June while driving with my family to my son’s college graduation in Washington State. (Yes, we took the long route). I left my family in the car while I photographed the somewhat forlorn church which replaced the adobe structure painted by O’Keeffe. (Note to memory: in my earlier blog post I mistakenly described this later church as made of brick. It is in fact faux adobe.) The church was locked so I was limited to peering through the windows. I was pleased to see that several windows had potted plants on the sill, though none resembled the lavish foliage of the “thing in the window.”

In the fall of 1944 in the fifth year of the Second World War Valentiner wrote an essay in the Art Quarterly on the reclusive visionary artist Morris Graves.

Our whole existence has been weighed down by the horrors of war to such a degree that we have forgotten how necessary to the balance of our life is the aspect of untouched nature, of nature unaware of and unconcerned with human struggle.  There is only one thing that can save man from himself—his contact with nature. When we look up from our work at a bright moment nothing grips our heart more than a glimpse of the splendor of her colors and her forms, than the awareness of the power of her growth.  It does not need to be a glance into the crater of a Mount Vesuvius….  It is sufficient to become conscious that in the beauty of a flower, in the song of a bird, there is something more wonderful than all the mechanization of the world of which we are so proud.  But we people of the cities where wars are conceived, believe this truth only if it is explained to us by the artist-prophets who with their deeper insight into nature speak so convincingly that we cannot help but listen.

W.R. Valentiner, “Morris Graves,” The Art Quarterly 7 (Autumn 1944), 251.

Manship was the most successful American sculptor of the first half of the 20th century. He specialized in subjects inspired by classical mythology, which he treated in a sleek, graceful style, very linear, highly patterned, that echoed Art Deco design. He is best known as the sculptor of the gilded Prometheus at Rockefeller Center in New York.

However, Manship’s most accomplished sculptures are a pair depicting the Roman goddess Diana and the hapless mortal Actaeon. In classical mythology Diana (or Artemis in Greek) was bathing with her nymphs in a forest pool when Actaeon chanced upon them while hunting in the woods with his dogs. The fiercely chaste goddess was so incensed that she cast a spell on Actaeon, transforming him into a stag. The hunter thus became the hunted. Not recognizing their master, Actaeon’s own dogs attacked him, teeth bared.

It is this gruesome tale that Manship depicts in the pair of sculptures now on view in the American Galleries. He tells the story as if it were a ballet. Diana leaps into the air, at the same time twisting around to let fly a deadly arrow at the poor hunter. Actaeon, already sprouting horns, bounds away from the goddess as his confused hounds bring him down. I’m convinced that this athletic figure in dramatic extension was at least partly inspired by the great Russian dancer Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes.

Manship links the figures by the implied arc of Diana’s arrow. Note how Actaeon clutches his side—a direct hit! (You will note in the gallery how the pedestals are angled so that Diana aims straight at the man’s side.) Visitors might appreciate the startling differences between Manship’s figures and those of Auguste Rodin. Where Rodin is all about emotional turbulence, Manship is about grace and an almost blissful disregard of drama. Even the doomed Actaeon succumbs with magnificent aplomb.

Diana and Actaeon are promised gifts to the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Art history not only provided an occasional foil for Rockwell’s comic riffs, it also gave him a deep well of images. Forced by relentless deadlines to be prolific, Rockwell often borrowed ideas from other artists. (No shame in that. All artists filch, crib, plagiarize. If they’re good at it they leave few fingerprints.)

Norman Rockwell, Girl at Mirror, 1954, © 1954 SEPS: Curtis Publishing

One of the most intriguing instances of artistic “appropriation” by Rockwell relates to a painting that appeared on the cover of the March 6, 1954, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Girl at Mirror depicts a young girl, maybe 10 or 12 years old, playing alone in the attic. Dressed in a lacy slip (or nightgown?), perhaps a cast-off of her mother’s, she sits on a  stool and considers her reflection in a mirror. Now note the props. Resting in the girl’s lap is a magazine, open to a glamour photo of the reigning Hollywood sex kitten, Jane Russell. A doll is tossed aside. At the girl’s feet are a brush, comb, and coral lipstick, uncapped. And we see that the girl has glossed her lips and pinned up her braids in an effort to look like … Jane Russell. Can it be? Can it be that Norman Rockwell—our Norman Rockwell!—has discovered sex?

The Rockwell exhibition catalogue is annoyingly brief in its discussion of this painting. The author only speculates that the artist may have been inspired by Picasso’s famous Girl at Mirror at the Museum of Modern Art or by Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun’s portrait of her young daughter, Julie LeBrun with a Mirror (1787). With all due respect, you’ve got to be kidding! There is a much more obvious, though less polite, source for this painting.

Gerald Brockhurst, Adolescence

Anyone familiar with the graphic arts of the early 20^th century? Anyone who enjoys browsing through boxes of matted etchings, drypoints and lithographs (I’m raising my hand) would recognize the uncanny resemblance of Rockwell’s painting to a once-notorious etching by the English artist Gerald Brockhurst (1890−1978). Now little known outside of print collecting circles, Brockhurst enjoyed a considerable reputation in the 1920s and ’30s as a superb printmaker, specializing in portraits of young women. His women—often girls—inhabit an antique world, half Florentine, half Dutch. Of all Brockhurst’s etchings, the acknowledged masterpiece is Adolescence, dated 1932.

As in the Rockwell painting, the girl sits with her back to us so that our eyes rove past her to her reflection. The big difference is that Brockhurst’s girl—actually his soon-to-be wife—is explicitly naked. She contemplates the unwanted maturity of her body with fierce, frightened eyes. It is a moment of terrifying awareness. Her private turmoil is made shockingly public, and it is this voyeuristic aspect of the image that is most disturbing. We clearly shouldn’t be there, peeping over her shoulder. We should close our eyes, close the door. But we can’t.

Rockwell would have known Brockhurst’s print. It was widely exhibited and reproduced in the American art press. He would have appreciated the print’s clever contrivance: after all, perceptual games were among Rockwell’s favorite ploys. He certainly understood the potency of the image, the silent drama, all the more intense for being surreptitiously observed. Of course, it would have been unthinkable to be so frank on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. (In Eisenhower’s America movie couples still slept in twin beds and Elvis’s pelvis was too risqué for Ed Sullivan.) And in any case, Rockwell wasn’t interested in shock. He was content to slyly insinuate. His little miss is still a child, still blessed, still dressed. Neither girl nor young woman, she’s a “tween,” staring at her “adulterated” image with a blend of longing and self-conscious anxiety—not yet the fearful awakening of Brockhurst’s adolescent. That will come soon enough.

Through tireless volunteerism, generous and wise philanthropy, and the warmth of his personality, this respected physician, scholar, and educator made a singular contribution to Raleigh’s cultural landscape and to interfaith understanding throughout the state through the establishment of the Judaic Art Gallery at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

All very true, but too short by a thousand words. Ten thousand words. After all, the man lived 95 years. He witnessed and participated in the whole of the twentieth century. He deserves a biographer. However, until one arrives I offer the following remarks written several years ago and only slightly edited:

This morning I was making a final check of the Judaic Art Gallery. I halted in front of the Chinese Torah Case, its surface embellished with delicately wrought flowers—an allusion to the beauty of life and perhaps also to the first Garden when all was yet right with the world. And I thought of Abe Kanof and how he would have delighted in seeing this case here in Raleigh, half a world from its origin.

First-time visitors to the North Carolina Museum of Art are invariably surprised to find a gallery devoted to Jewish ceremonial art. How it came about is directly attributable to the vision and bullish tenacity of Abe Kanof.

Like the Chinese Torah Case, Abram Kanof’s life began far from Raleigh in a backwater town of the Tsar’s empire. He was born in 1903 in the same month as the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. Rampaging cossacks forced his family to flee to America, where they settled in New York and began to climb rung-by-rung the immigrant’s ladder.

Fast forward 60 years.

In the late 1960s, Dr. Kanof retired from a successful medical and teaching career in New York and moved to Raleigh. Thirty more years lay ahead of him. Retirement freed Abe to pursue his bliss, including the scholarly study of Jewish art and symbolism. He wrote books. He traveled. He involved himself in the affairs of the Triangle’s small Jewish community. And he joined the North Carolina Museum of Art. In 1974 he convinced Director Moussa Domit to let him organize an exhibition of “Ceremonial Art in the Judaic Tradition.” The unexpected success of that show inspired Abe with the grander dream of a permanent collection of Judaica at the Museum. Domit and the Museum didn’t say no, but it was made clear that Abe would have to raise the funds and assemble the collection himself. Abe welcomed the challenge. (“It was my crusade,” he told me, laughing when I winced at the joke.) For years he traveled the state, lecturing to civic and religious groups, all the while wheedling, coaxing, and cajoling potential donors. Abe and his wife also donated many objects from their own collection. By 1983 when the Museum opened on Blue Ridge Road, one of the most remarkable galleries featured not Old Master paintings but glittering Torah crowns, Hanukkah lamps, and Sabbath candlesticks.

From the beginning the Judaic Art Gallery expressed Abe Kanof’s ecumenical vision. He knew that his audience was predominantly not Jewish. What he hoped to create was a place accessible to all where the spiritual and cultural life of the Jewish people could be both celebrated and shared through memorable works of art. Believing that the vitality of Judaism was best reflected in ceremonial art of contemporary design, he also insisted that equal attention be given to objects in modernist styles.

Until his death in 1999, Abe Kanof was the Judaic Art Gallery. He never tired of giving tours to visitors and was always in demand. He once confessed to me that Baptists were his favorite group: they knew their Bible! A natural teacher with a driven need to share his life, he enjoyed performing before a group, whether five or 50. I see him in his well-worn jacket of green corduroy, his hand resting lightly on the shoulder of a young boy as the two of them count the number of lights on a Hanukkah lamp. I see him at the center of a visiting church group holding forth on the heroism of the Maccabees or the symbolism of the foods served at Passover Seder. His gestures were slow and professorial, the pauses between thoughts like deep breaths. When he was past 90 he and I led a small museum tour to Israel. We were visiting the archaeological site at Kfar Nahum (Capernaum) on the Sea of Galilee. Abe had been sleeping on the bus but sprang to life as we arrived. Walking behind, I watched as he entered the precinct of the ruined synagogue, the square of sun-white sand enclosed within broken walls and columns. He’d been there before but was still moved to silence. After a few moments he walked over to a toppled stone from the sanctuary doors. His finger slowly traced the eroded image of the Menorah. Then, turning toward us, he commenced to teach.

From the NCMA video archives, here’s a 1992 video of Dr. Kanof guiding us through the Judaic collection:

From the NCMA video archives, here’s a 1992 video of Dr. Kanof guiding us through the Judaic collection:

A Tour of the Judaic Gallery with Dr. Abram Kanof from The North Carolina Museum of Art on Vimeo.

Thomas Moran, "Fiercely the red sun descending / burned his way along the heavens," 1875, oil on canvas, 33 3/8 x 50 1/8 inches, Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest), 1952 (52.9.34)

Growing up in Raleigh in the early ’60s, I would sometimes bicycle downtown and stop at the old North Carolina Museum of Art. (The Museum was air conditioned). One of the paintings that always attracted me was a landscape with a sunset. But it was not just a sunset. It was volcanic. Krakatoan. Looking back, I don’t think I saw a sunset at all. It was a blinding flash, igniting the sky. (Remember, this was the era of Cuban missiles and “duck and cover.” Neighbors down the street had built a basement fallout shelter that the father of the family promised to defend with a shotgun. But I digress . . . the painting fascinated me. It still fascinates me, though less as a premonition of “Dr. Strangelove” than as an image of absolute evil.

The artist Thomas Moran had a thing for “The Song of Hiawatha,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem recounting the heroic exploits of an Ojibway chief. The poem and its vivid imagery inspired Moran to paint several pictures. Our painting depicts an ominous moment in the story when the hero is about to set out to avenge the death of his ancestor at the hands of the murderous magician Megissogwon. To direct his journey, Hiawatha’s grandmother Nokomis stands on the shore of Lake Superior and points westward, where:

Fiercely the red sun descending
Burned his way along the heavens,
Set the sky on fire behind him,
As war-parties, when retreating,
Burn the prairies on their war-trail

For this painting the artist was challenged to imagine a land of pure evil. Faced with such a challenge, Moran habitually asked himself “what would Turner do?” The great British landscape painter Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) was Moran’s idol. His influence was so pronounced that Moran was known widely as the “American Turner.” For his Hiawatha painting, Moran had in mind a specific Turner painting: the horrific Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Painted in 1840, Slave Ship was Turner’s response to a widely publicized incident in the transatlantic slave trade. He heightened the malevolence of the story by marshaling all the forces of nature—a roiling, inky sea, a livid sun, and an angry, incendiary sky—creating a setting fit for the Apocalypse.

Moran, who undoubtedly saw the Slave Ship in New York, understood what Turner was doing. He saw that Turner’s fire-and-brimstone vision was precisely what was needed for Longfellow’s epic. And so in an act of homage, if not plagiarism, Thomas Moran appropriated the vicious world of the slave trade for his realm of the “mightiest of Magicians.”

When I recently walked a group of Governor’s School students around the American art galleries, we stopped at Moran’s painting. Several of the kids—not much older than I was when I first saw the picture—were clearly agitated, one asking me what it was all about. Rather than talk about Hiawatha, which none of them had read, I had a flash. Pointing like Nokomis at the picture, I declared, “that, that is Mordor!” (Peter Jackson also plagiarized Turner.)

Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman, Red and Yellow Background, 1952

Alfred Sisley, The Bridge at Moret on an April Morning, 1888

Maurice de Vlaminck, The Bridge at Poissy (Le Pont de Poissy), 1905

Emil Nolde, Fishing Boat (Red Sky), 1916

The Museum will be the recipient of a major donation of paintings from the collection of Julian and Josie Robertson of New York City. The paintings are four works by late 19th- and 20th-century European masters. In 2001 and again in 2008 we presented an exhibition of works from the Robertson’s collection. The star of both exhibitions was a striking portrait of a nude, pensive woman by Pablo Picasso (Seated Woman, Red and Yellow Background, 1952). That portrait of the artist’s soon-to-be ex-mistress Françoise Gilot will be coming to Raleigh, first as a loan for the Grand Opening of the new gallery building, and later as a gift.

Two other paintings in this promised donation feature similar river towns and an arching bridge, but they could not be more different. One by the Anglo-French Impressionist Alfred Sisley (The Bridge at Moret on an April Morning, 1888) is all sunny tranquility. In contrast, The Bridge at Poissy (1905) by Maurice de Vlaminck is stridently colored and agitated as though the artist had drunk five too many espressos. The fourth painting is a Wagnerian seascape by the German expressionist Emil Nolde (Fishing Boat [Red Sky]), painted in 1916 in the midst of World War I.

The Sisley joins our two Monets (The Seine at Giverny, Morning Mists and  The Cliff, Etretat, Sunset) and one Pissarro in giving us a strong core collection of French Impressionists. The Nolde contributes a bold new subject to our group of German expressionist paintings. The Vlaminck leaps beyond Impressionism into the wilder territory of the Fauves where things are as strongly felt as they are seen. And the Picasso gives us our first Picasso. Enough said.

Together, these four paintings constitute one of the most significant gifts of art in our history. So, sound the trumpets!