Pontormo’s Ghostly Paintings Come to Bowdoin College in Maine

However, a new look at the permanent collection is a shallow PC rant about Western ‘imperialism.’

I was on Mount Desert Island for a week on vacation but, going up and back, I visited favorite museums. Last week, I wrote about the Farnsworth in Rockland. It’s observing its 75th anniversary. Today I’ll write about the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, a winning gem in normal times. But little that happens today on college campuses is normal.

It’s always nice to visit the Bowdoin museum. There, I was a man on a mission. I went to see Metamorphosis and Malice, an exhibition gathering the three known monochromatic paintings by Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1557). They depict Apollo and Cupid and Daphne and Apollo, both from 1513. Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel is from 1515. I’ve seen them before, but these small, gray, spectral things are, to me, snapshots of a deep, mystical past. They’re magical. Bowdoin owns one of the three. The museum borrowed the other two and shows them along with works on paper from the same era.

I hadn’t been there for a few years. Bowdoin’s president, Clayton Rose, shut the college for a year in an egalitarian move to subject Bowdoin undergraduates to the same inferior online education that working-class kids in Portland, Bangor, Bath, and other union-run schools got. Only kidding. He closed the college because he’s a crackpot and, by the way, a wily crackpot. Robust Bowdoin students, among the least vulnerable to Covid, still had to pay full tuition. Say “sayonara” to that class, advancement office. Parents and students are pissed, with ample reason.

The museum building is a jewel box designed by Charles McKim, a pal and kindred spirit of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, so it’s no surprise that it’s Renaissance Revival. James Bowdoin, the college’s founder, gave his art collection to the new school, but it didn’t have its own, museum-quality home until the lovely McKim building opened in 1894. When Bowdoin decided to expand and modernize the museum, it went underground. Lovely temporary exhibition galleries are accessed via a glass box, a very miniature version of the Louvre’s glass pyramid, and either an elevator or stairs down, down, down to an undistinguished lobby. The addition opened in 2006.

The three Pontormo paintings aren’t big, about 24 by 19 inches for the two Apollo pictures and 18 by 14 for Adam and Eve. Pontormo painted them when he was still a teenager or barely in his twenties. He apprenticed with Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto — not a bad set of teachers — and by 1515 or so he was working on church frescoes as part of the circle of artists supported by the Medici court. He’s a Mannerist painter known for swirling compositions, stretched figures, shallow space, and brilliant color. His Deposition from the Cross, a big altarpiece in Florence, and Portrait of a Halberdier at the Getty, both from the late 1520s, are prime Pontormo.

We don’t know what he was thinking when he painted the three gray pictures. Expelled from Eden, with its bounty and lush color, Adam and Eve aren’t livin’ la vida loca but, as God commanded, “cursed is the ground for thy sake . . . in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Little Cain and Abel are there. Sorrow awaits them all.

Gray conveys their drab new world, but what about Apollo and Cupid or Daphne and Apollo, also done in grisaille? The exhibition proposes that both decorated a carriage in a procession marking the Medici family’s return to power in 1512 and 1513. The laurel was a Medici symbol, after all. Apollo fell in love with Daphne after Cupid shot him with his arrow. Cupid, mischief-maker he, shoots Daphne with an arrow that makes her impervious to love. Adam and Eve might have been painted for a procession or for home devotion.

Chased by a smitten Apollo, Daphne changes into a laurel tree rather than submit. The two works are painted on linen, more likely to flutter fetchingly as the carriage moved. Gray on black makes for easy reading. White highlights would have flickered by torchlight.

All three are nocturnes. Action happens in the shadows. There’s no specific location. Gray works. It’s pithy but oblique. It’s the color of ghosts, too. It suggests marble sculptures of dead saints and dead royals, figures who are both present and absent. Gray is the default color of Florentine architecture.

Why do I love these? Gray, to me, is the color of nostalgia. It evokes the past, which is why, in part, I like old movies, until, say, 1960, shot in black and white. What I see is atmosphere and tone as well as light as an actor. Gray, which is what the palette of a black-and-white film really is, promotes a visual representation of memory. Black-and-white movies create mystery. Gray is soothing. One of the most beautiful works of art, in my opinion, is the Five Sisters stained-glass window at York Minster in England. It’s from around 1250 and made from 100,000 pieces of gray glass, with some red, blue, yellow, and green glass. It’s reserved and soulful.

Metamorphosis and Malice displays the three Pontormos with prints and drawings from the Bowdoin collection. They’re mostly about composition and technique with a nod, Bowdoin being a college, to sexual violence. Yes, Apollo’s horny as hell, but I see the subject as supernatural transformation as well as the manipulative, cruel streak in bad-boy Cupid. The story is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Daphne’s a professional virgin, but she runs from Apollo not by her own, unsullied choice. Cupid deprived her of choice. Apollo is a braggart, but Daphne is his first love, and he loves her even after she turns arboreal.

In the few years between the Apollo pictures and Adam and Eve, Pontormo ups his game. His figures in the later work are both more monumental and more smoothly mobile. Adam is a convincing nude while Apollo is a skinny dandy. Eve is built like a football player. Pontormo needed the work, so, if the Medicis wanted grisaille banners, that’s what they’d get. That said, he was a young savant who loved to experiment.

Apollo and Cupid belongs to the art museum at Bucknell University. Both Bucknell and Bowdoin got their pictures as a gift from the Kress Foundation in 1961. Then, the foundation was distributing Samuel Kress’s Old Masters to museums throughout the country with thin collections. Adam and Eve is in a private collection and was rediscovered only in 2020.

It’s a great treat to see these pictures again, and to see them so beautifully presented.

I also saw People Watching: Photography Since 1965, which occupied all the subterranean galleries. I love people-watching and, sad to say, it’s a disappearing practice given people’s fixation on iPhones and the crazy idea that looking at people is a microaggression. I think everyone’s unique and idiosyncratic, with quirks and shapes worth more than a glance. While almost everyone I watch looks weird to me, people-watching makes me happy. It affirms the richness and complexity of life. Mitch Epstein’s 1998 photograph of an exhausted woman in the back of a car is a very New York image.

The exhibition defines “people-watching” as “a recreational activity, act of surveillance, form of harassment, a marker of admiration, a sign of empathy, and a documentary form of expression.” The art’s good, but I left thinking it was a joyless show. It seems meant to support a survey course in photography since it’s so broad. I see people-watching as an impromptu, random act, so sections on street photography and on-assignment, journalistic photography make sense. These are scenes of the moment.

Garry Winograd’s photographs of life in New York City in the ’60s look improvised and rapid-fire. I like Peter Hujar’s work, but Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), from 1976 — a great photograph — is as calculated as it could be. Hujar shot pictures of men at the Christopher Street piers, a cruising space, and Crossed Legs is an obvious though stylized crotch shot. The label tells us that “art provides a tool for the expression of diversity,” which is just about the most banal thing I’ve read in a while.

In the On Assignment section, there’s Larry Burrows’s Reaching Out photograph from 1966 depicting two wounded American soldiers reuniting at a triage spot in Vietnam. It feels like a Baroque altarpiece. Danny Lyon’s photographs of prison life in Texas — no fun — are next to it. “Given the inequities and prejudices existing in the world,” the label cautions, “being on assignment compels photographers to think critically about their role in larger societal dialogues.” Don’t gaze at your navel for too long, though. You’ll miss that one-in-a-million shot.

On Assignment would have been more useful and visceral had it focused on straight, current-events newspaper photography, and not from the ’60s and ’70s, which, for students, might as well be the time of the Crusades. For People Watching, the museum drew from its permanent collection. It must have more topical, recent things than what’s in this section. If it didn’t, it could have borrowed. If it didn’t, and didn’t want to spend the money, it could’ve decided to not do the show.

Along the way, in sections on photography at home, studio photography, self-portraits, and even a section on photography with no people, the exhibition loses the plot. It becomes a treasures show, and one littered with woe. A Sally Mann photograph of her young daughters in bed treats, were told, “loneliness, injury, and anger.” The kid in the center looks like Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, Peter Hujar’s photograph of a drag queen in extremis. Donna Ferrato’s photographs are about wife-beating. Laurel Nakadate’s August 23, 2010, is one of 365 self-portraits depicting her in tears, every day of the year.

As much as I like Dawoud Bey’s work, his Sugarcane II, a view of a field where slaves might have worked, seems out of place. Like Edward Burtynsky’s photograph of a sprawling fish farm in China, it’s a landscape. “We are drawn by desire — a chance at good living,” Burtynsky tells us, “yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success.” I wrote about Burtynsky’s very good exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art a few months ago. It’s easy to cherry-pick quotes to make a point, and the show seems to want us to be sad and guilty. Of all the evils in which I’m complicit, a sprawling fish farm in China ain’t one of them.

Students leaving this exhibition have got to feel depressed, if they’re not depressed already. Yes, they’re seeing great things by Ann Hamilton, Laurie Simmons, and others, and, no, I’m no Pollyanna. But People Watching ought to have at least some buoyancy, some joy.

I didn’t see Strangeness Is Inevitable, the exhibition of the work of the Surrealist poet and artist Mina Loy (1882–1966). It’s the first retrospective of an artist who was part of a clique with Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams. I’d never heard of her, principally because she was a poet, but her wall constructions look good. I walked through, wondering why the museum did this show and the Pontormo show at the same time. They’re both meaty, and in a small museum in a small Maine town, it’s best to sequence big events.

I visited the museum’s big permanent-collection gallery — the European and American art there has just been reinterpreted. “Beginning in the late fifteenth century,” I read, “competing European nations and, after 1783, the United States of America, fought over and harvested the continent’s vast resources.” The gallery “explores how art reflects the deeply ingrained belief systems of Euro-Americans that justified colonization, empire-building, and structural inequality.” It “incorporates new perspectives to tell more inclusive stories.”

The gallery, which, I think, was curated in part by students as part of a class, doesn’t explore anything. It’s a recitation of cant and an embarrassment for its superficiality. These aren’t new perspectives, either. It’s boring, old Blame America First crap.

Through assiduous cherry-picking in Bowdoin’s big collection, the curators found examples of Africa’s “otherness,” silver bowls filled with sugar harvested by slaves, and a painting of the Three Magi, one of whom is an African king. We’re then informed that Africans played no role, except as helpless victims, in the slave trade, the mother of all canards. Oh, and in a description of Denys Calvaert’s Annunciation, from 1595, Europeans are faulted for believing that Christianity “represented what was true and moral.” Never before or since has anyone, anywhere felt his religion was the best!

The two centerpieces in the gallery are Gilbert Stuart’s grand portraits of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison from around 1806, both part of James Bowdoin’s original gift.

Jefferson, we’re told, famously asserted the primacy of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but, in the new nation, women, slaves, Native Americans, and indentured servants were denied citizenship and, as we all know, Jefferson owned slaves. “The irony of the disregard of individuals of non-European descent reflected in the founding documents is glaring,” sniffeth whoever wrote the label. Jefferson does, though, get credit for the Declaration of Independence. Madison’s “ideas of liberty did not extend to the hundreds of men, women, and children who labored” on his plantation. And, by the by, he wrote the Bill of Rights.

Much has been written and done on Jefferson’s and Madison’s views on slavery, but the curators picked the drive-by-shooting tact. “Nuance” seems to be a dirty word. Both men abhorred slavery and did everything they could, they believed, to ensure its gradual disappearance. When Stuart painted his portraits, slavery existed everywhere in the world where there were people. Women everywhere had little agency in the civic sphere, and neither did servants and slaves. Jefferson and Madison saw the country, a new enterprise, as a long-term thing. Social, political, and economic change was, in their view, inevitable. They created an egalitarian system radical in theory, less so in practice, but infinitely freer and more empowering than anywhere, ever.

That’s on the plus side. Their personal weakness was a human one best described in the old Episcopal folk prayer “Lord, make me good but not yet,” which doubles as a toast before downing a dirty martini. Both owned legacy farms that were marginal and depended on slave labor. Slaves constituted much of their capital. Without slaves, they wouldn’t have been poor but, rather, would’ve been just like you and me. Neither could bear that thought, much less the reality.

The millionaire Osgood Fielding III said it best when he learned that his new love in Some Like It Hot was a man, not a woman. “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

Bowdoin is supposed to be a rigorous place. Before mounting the high horse, students, faculty, and curators need to ask themselves a simple question. “What would I have done?”

Hanging in this gallery is a small portrait of Sarah Bowdoin, the wife of the college’s founder. It’s from around 1805 and is by Louis-Léopold Boilly, the exquisitely good French portraitist. She looks sour. “This gallery sucks,” she thinks. “Crack open some books, boys and girls, don’t tread on me, and use your heads.”

To all my friends among Bowdoin’s faculty and alumni: I adore the museum. Not everything’s a hit, though. I left happy to have seen the Pontormos.