American Masterpieces in Youngstown, Ohio

The Butler Institute, both national treasure and national secret

I n my swing a few weeks ago through western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio, I targeted high-profile museums but suspected that the secret sauce would be the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown. I was right. When it opened in 1919 in its McKim, Mead & White building, it was the only art museum in America focused solely on American art. A dozen or so followed, among them the Whitney, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, and the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

I’ve written about all of these but never the Butler, whose collection was more myth to me than reality. I’d never been there. Yes, I knew Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip was there as well as great Hudson River School landscapes and seascapes, a first-rate Sargent group portrait, and Norman Rockwell’s Lincoln the Railsplitter, famous in part because Ross Perot once owned it. The Butler’s heavy on pre–World War II American realist painting, I knew, but who, what, when, where, why and what else, I didn’t know.

So, at the end of my swing, to Youngstown I went. The Butler’s many treasures reflect a high-bourgeois vision of good taste and beauty leavened here and there by avant-garde but safe work. This guiding philosophy isn’t different from lots of American civic museums but, for a small museum, the Butler acquired exceptionally well. In the last 40 or so years, the place moved into post-war art. The collection has breadth and depth, with 22,000 objects in most media. The museum isn’t on the circuit for traveling exhibitions and scholarly catalogues, and the collection isn’t online, so few know what’s in it.

Homer’s Snap the Whip, from 1872, is indeed there. It’s one of two versions of this iconic boys-will-be-boys picture, the other owned by the Met. Homer, then famous less as a painter than as an illustrator, translated the scene into a wood engraving published in the September 20, 1873, issue of Harper’s Weekly. What Thomas Nast did for Santa Claus and toy stores, Homer did for Snap the Whip and boyhood. He created an indelible, defining image.

The “Butler” in the Butler Institute is James G. Butler Jr. (1840–1927), based in Youngstown, and, like Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate of the first order. By the Teens, the very rich Butler sensed that American world hegemony was nigh, both for the country’s wealth of resources but also for its wealth of opportunity. Wealth and power, though, ought to have high culture at their side. A student of American history, he wanted Americans to celebrate their heritage. So he established an institute, not only for the display of great art but for its study and the edification of the public. Snap the Whip was one of his earliest museum purchases.

Butler was a boyhood friend of William McKinley, with whom he played Snap the Whip. The old, rural game puts a boy at the middle of a whip, with boys on both sides, forming a chain. Each holds the hand of the boys next to him. As the boy in the middle runs back and forth, faster and faster, then suddenly stops — snapping the whip — the boys at the end of each tail lose their grip and fall off. It’s a high-velocity tug of war, with boys moving up the chain or landing in the dirt, or snapping the whip.

It’s a game of coordination and strength. Homer depicted boys playing games off and on through the 1870s. After the horrors of the Civil War, the doings of children became favorite — and low-stress — subjects in art. A baby boom followed the war, so children were front of mind. These aren’t idle games, though. Games, even for children, had rules and strategies. Physical and mental aptitude mattered.

These games, then, whether mostly physical or, like fishing, more about equipment, patience, and stealth, prepare boys for manhood. In the Butler picture, the two boys on the left stumble toward two girls with a hoop toy and, beyond them, a husband and wife waving. There’s a point when boys leave the world of games for the real world of marriage and responsibility.

By the time Butler died in 1927, a house aesthetic seems to have been set. He left the museum most of his $1.5 million estate. Before long, his grandson, James G. Butler III, was in charge as director, ruling from 1934 to 1981. Over the years, the museum excelled in buying high-quality paintings of beautiful women. Nothing wrong with that. Ideal womanhood was a cult interest among Americans of both genders until the 1960s, though the Butler’s ideal women are various.

They’ve got Life Is Sweet, by Daniel Ridgway Knight, from around 1910, and Frederick Frieseke’s Good Morning, from 1912, one a very late Barbizon beauty and the other a very late Impressionist one. And Cecilia Beaux’s The Dreamer has that come-hither look.

Robert Henri’s Little Dancer is from the late Teens, but she looks like a flapper. The girls in The Stryker Sisters, painted by Ralph Earl in 1787, are sweet but strange and compelling. They grew up on their parents’ farm on what is now 52nd Street and the West Side Highway. Did they intuit the future and find it infused with car exhaust? Walt Kuhn’s Green Pom-Pom, from 1944, came into the collection in 1986, after Butler died. It depicts a circus performer who looks like Madonna.

There are other pictures of more subtly edgy women. George Bellows’s portrait of Geraldine Lee from 1914 is a minimalist stunner of a fisherman’s daughter on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. Set with a plush curtain on either side, with a spotlit, plain but beguiling face, and smart foreshortening, she looks like a young queen from ancient times. Eakins’s Coral Necklace, from 1904, is one of his late portraits of brooding subjects. She’s relaxed and delicate, a long coral necklace giving her the look of a bohemian, yet her face seems prim and sad.

Then there are the mothers. Mary Cassatt’s Agatha and Her Child, from 1891, is a first-class pastel depicting a fat and tad grumpy baby warming to her mother’s embrace. The Butler bought it in 1947. It bought Mrs. Knowles and Her Children, by Sargent, in 1929. It’s splashy, glorious, and peak Sargent, painted in 1902, around the time he did his best Wertheimer portraits and pictures of the Duchess of Portland, Lord Ribblesdale, the daughters of the Duke of Manchester, the Duchess of Sutherland, and Theodore Roosevelt.

The acquisition was — and still is — a great coup since the Knowleses, though not aristocratic, were very rich and there were very few English Sargents in America. Both the boys in the Knowles picture were killed in World War I.

These portraits aren’t together but scattered throughout the museum and juxtaposed against cityscapes and genre scenes from the same period. They’re absorbed, not gulped, so I realized slowly but surely what a fine portrait collection the Butler has. Of great quality, too, are its landscapes and seascapes.

Bierstadt’s Oregon Trail, from 1869, and Cole’s Italian Landscape, from 1839, are beautiful, with a touch of Hollywood. Fitz Henry Lane’s Starlight in Fog, from 1860, is a scene of moored ships in silvery fog. It’s magic.

The Butler has a Western art gallery where the Bierstadt is displayed along with a selection from E. A. Burbank’s 1,200 portraits of Native Americans from 125 tribes, done between the late 1870s and around 1910. The Butler owns many of these portraits, commissioned by Butler himself. They’re both ethnographic and rich in detail and well done. Burbank is the only artist who painted Geronimo from life. Tribal leaders invited Burbank for his accuracy and his sensitivity.  He saw as well as understood.

The museum waded into the realm of contemporary art via contemporary issues, not the art itself. It bought William Gropper’s great Youngstown Strike in 1985. Painted in 1937, the picture depicts the moment when company guards shot striking workers and their families on the picket line. The strike at issue was in 1916, another measure of how tentative the zeitgeist of the place must have been. No well-born women in reverie here. The 1980s weren’t so much wartime for labor and management, but steelworkers knew their livelihood was on the chopping block. It’s a great picture and, like Picasso’s Guernica, based on Goya.

Post-war art must have been a tough field for the Butler for many reasons. There’s Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, and Conceptual art, and Warhol, and then the question of money. Starting in the ’80s, blue-chip contemporary art got — and stayed — expensive. Has it done well? The Butler has a Pollock and a Joan Mitchell painting. The place doesn’t have much money, so it’s focused on works on paper and has a good print collection. It also owns nearly 6,000 movie stills it acquired as a gift in the late ’50s from one of Youngstown’s fancy downtown movie theaters.

There are museums, mostly big but some, like the Addison, small, that have stayed current in contemporary art, so they have lots of heavy hitters. The Butler hasn’t and doesn’t, and that’s fine. The work of living artists in the more conservative — or risk-averse — museums is often fun, quirky, and very good, in its own way. I’d never heard of Joseph Raffael, whose Paper Mill, from 1974, is a smashing view of river rapids. In the gallery, it’s juxtaposed against Marc Sijan’s Seated Security Guard #2, a sculpture the Butler bought in 2010. His name tag reads “Art.”

Across the gallery is the biggest surprise. It’s Alfred Leslie’s Americans: Youngstown, Ohio, from 1979. Leslie, who died earlier this year, is among the most inventive and independent artists no one knows except connoisseurs of Abstract Expressionism and the ’60s New York art scene. He was the best and certainly the wildest among the second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but in the mid ’60s decided he’d exhausted abstraction and jumped to an intense realist style.

Leslie painted Americans: Youngstown, Ohio after a fellowship at Youngstown State University. It memorializes Black Monday, the day in 1977 when 5,000 local steelworkers lost their jobs in a massive restructuring. He used local models, in a very ’70s style, seeming to ask, What’s next? — partly in anger, partly in defiance, partly in disbelief. It’s riveting.

And the Butler owns William Harnett’s After the Hunt, the zenith of American trompe l’oeil painting. It’s the third of four versions, bought by the museum in 1954 when Abstract Expressionism was at a peak and American 19th-century painting classed with antiques like great-grandma’s rocking chair. After the Hunt, from 1884 is, at 55 by 40 inches, a behemoth tribute to the culture of game-hunting but also to observation and deceit as well as geometry. It’s a very Victorian picture, evoking as it does the rituals and fashions of hunting, stuffed heads on the wall, and multi-course, multi-critter meals. It’s a tribute to Dutch still lifes, too. It’s so weird, it’s modern. In 1959, the Butler got as a gift Charles Meurer’s A Doughboy’s Equipment. Painted in 1921, it mimics Harnett’s design, colors, and hyperrealistic style using a canteen, gas mask, helmets, Army rifles, bullets, and a pack of cigarettes. Modern warfare becomes a different kind of hunting.

The Butler runs on a shoestring. There’s not a lot of money in Youngstown anymore. The donor community has shrunk along with the industrial base and the population, which capsized starting in the ’70s, while nonprofits such as schools, churches, hospitals, and the museum still needed big money. The Butler’s endowment is $35 million. Its annual budget is about $2 million. It has done periodic expansions and renovations along with money-raising drives. No doubt it’s locally beloved.

In 2006, the museum pulled $1.6 million together to buy Rockwell’s Railsplitter. In the past ten years or so, it’s added some very nice things to the collection, among them a George Tooker painting and Nam June Paik’s Virtually Wise sculpture, from 1994. Paik is Korean American and a unique proposition. His work treats the subject of telecommunications from the phone to the computer to satellites.

The Butler feels old-fashioned, but that’s fine. Its 1919 building is lovely and, in its day, à la mode. Praise the Lord, visitors enter to a small lobby and then there’s great art, instantly on view. The place hasn’t wrecked the experience with a shop the size of Macy’s, an introductory video, and a mile-long donor wall. That’s one benefit of being poor. I felt comfortable and happy there. The current director, Louis Zona, has been in charge since 1981, so he might be the longest-serving director among all American art museums. After a distinguished career over five decades, he’ll retire eventually, so change will be on the way, but, please, no overdoses.

The Butler’s always been free. Parking is easy. On improvements, the galleries could use better lighting. There were two exhibitions on view. Both were good. Black on White is a survey show of the Butler’s print collection, which, of course, made me want to know more about it. I enjoyed its annual exhibition of the work of local artists. I don’t think the museum needs to do fancy, expensive exhibitions. The movie stills need to be thoroughly catalogued. The website needs an overhaul, and that includes not only digitizing the collection but an enhancement of its look.

And, by the by, some deluxe-grade Samaritan has got to give the Butler $50 million. A bequest would be acceptable. The place is a national treasure.