After a Near-Death Experience, the Berkshire Museum Looks Ready to Bloom

What can and should a museum do if it’s both broken and broke? 

I n the past few days, I’ve been less than a gimlet-eyed art critic, having had the first installment of cataract and glaucoma surgery in mid January. For two weeks, I had laser vision in one, new-and-improved eye and minimal distance vision in the other, old-and-beclouded eye. With a touch of double vision, I’ve laid low. Once my right eye was fixed, I felt I’d been seeing the world as if it were an over-varnished Old Master painting, as if everything had a ultra-thin layer of mud spread over it. The world looked like a Reynolds portrait that needed a good cleaning.

Things could be worse, I know, but when it started to look like a late Inness, which is another term for “inscrutable,” I knew my eyes needed to be fixed.

In a profile of courage, or recklessness, I drove to Pittsfield in Berkshire County in Massachusetts to visit the Berkshire Museum. It’s the Wunderkammer — cabinet of curiosities — best known, alas, for a $50 million trustee raid on its art collection in 2018 to fund a building overhaul and new mission.

It’s a 60-mile drive to Pittsfield but a straight line, more or less, and no traffic. I live to tell the tale. I hadn’t been to the Berkshire Museum since the Sotheby sales and was curious to see how the place looks. I’m not dwelling on the past except to repeat the obvious point that the sale of the best things in its paintings and sculpture collection was a jumbo scandal.

I think of one word — “brutal” — in describing the loss of marquee work by Church, Bierstadt, Bouguereau, and locals Alexander Calder and Norman Rockwell, as well as the stealth of the sale. Though Rockwell’s best work happened when he was in ye olde Arlington in Vermont, where I live, he moved to West Stockbridge, near Pittsfield, in 1953 and gave two of his best pictures to the Berkshire Museum.

Out the door these treasures went, all to fund deferred maintenance and the transition of the place to a science-and-ecology museum, with art and a mummy on the side. I still think the loss of so much art is a shame, but the fiasco had many fathers over decades. It’s time to look ahead.

I had a nice, long visit. Part of the place was closed to install a traveling exhibition called Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th to 18th Centuries, organized by the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania. It opens this weekend. It examines the paper, pigments, and techniques used to decorate illustrated books, almost all religious. Good for the Berkshire Museum to do an exhibition on art and materials. It will be an education for everyone who wants to know how art is made. It certainly satisfies the museum’s mission to integrate science and art. There’s plenty of chemistry in how paint is made. And paper, which does, loosely speaking, grow on trees, has to be manufactured.

But more on paper later.

With no temporary exhibition, the permanent-collection galleries and the museum’s plans for the future take center stage. The place is financially stable now, probably for the first time since the 1960s. This is very good news.

The people who actually go to the museum — the locals in Pittsfield and the surrounding towns — have never seen the place as an art museum, which is why opposition in Pittsfield to the sale was muted. Most of the opposition that there was came from people in the affluent towns south of Pittsfield. Pittsfielders themselves go to the museum to see the very good aquarium, the compelling collection of rocks and minerals, and the smorgasbord of antique guns and coins, antiquities, taxidermic animals, Native American regalia, over-the-top garments, funky Victorian sculpture, seashells, dinosaur bones, and, of course, Pahat, the name of its beloved Egyptian mummy.

The museum owns a copy of the Declaration of Independence printed in 1776. It also owns decent Asian religious art. There’s armor, a plaster cast of the Nike of Samothrace, Calder toys, and snakes, turtles, and seahorses.

Zenas Crane, the local industrialist who, in 1903, built the museum and bought the core collection, envisioned a museum of treasures — art and artifacts — giving what was then an isolated but bustling city a sense of the life and heritage all over the world and through the centuries. Crane’s company, started by his family 250 years ago, makes the paper used for American money. Money makes the world go round, and Crane wanted the locals to know more about other, more refined, kinds of creativity.

As much as I hated seeing the museum sell art to pay for building improvements and a new mission, the big enchilada among the pictures sold, Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop, went to the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts bought the museum’s beautiful South American landscape by Frederic Church.

Granted, the museum had, over 50 years, such high turnover in directors and so many false starts in strategy that it lost credibility. This is the doings of the board of trustees, but, their incompetence aside, we still had the problem of a precious, unique, and family-friendly collection of 40,000 objects and a nice, old but dilapidated building.

In 2017 and 2018, the trustees insisted that the only alternative was closing the museum — for good — and dispersing the collection. This would present a logistical and financial nightmare worthy of John Martin, the English apocalypse painter. There are 40,000 objects. The live snakes would find an agreeable home in Washington, but what about the clump of lava from Mount Vesuvius? Or the scraps from the Wright Brothers’ first plane?

Only the lawyers would be enriched, as the Berkshire Museum’s were with the deaccession. “Closing the museum” would, as a practical matter, have meant shuttering it and maintaining it in a deep freeze with a bare-bones staff. As the barest of bare necessities, only the registrar is essential, since she’s the keeper of records, locations, insurance policies, and the locks to the doors. The museum would have reopened once the board regrouped.

There’s no money in Pittsfield. People living in chichi towns south of the city give to such highbrow causes as Edith Wharton’s house and Tanglewood. They’re worthy, not flush, but the Berkshire Museum was on the balls of its feet. In driving through Pittsfield, I saw what seemed to be a lot of business signs for psychics, hearing-aid vendors, and suppliers of pepper spray.

Now, the museum’s fundraising trouble can’t be wholly blamed on poverty in Pittsfield. Bad trusteeship and a revolving door in the director’s office doomed prospects for raising serious dough. The endowment was probably raided more than once and over many decades.

Since the sale, the museum has done lots of work on the building, whose roof had trouble. It plans to move the aquarium from the basement to the first floor, making it twice as big. The aquarium, by the by, is fascinating. Pittsfield is far from coral reefs and, for that matter, salt water of any kind.

There’ll be more room for the dinosaur collection and a darkened gallery for luminous rocks and minerals. I’ve always loved this part of the collection. Agates, malachite, schist, marble, granite, lapis, and dozens of other varieties of rock and mineral are presented in rows in old-fashioned cases, but to both young and old and even impaired eyes, they evoke jewelry, sculpture, and architecture, some local, some exotic.

It’s a museum of art, artifacts, and quirks. One small gallery presents a Victorian sculpture of the ancient Irish king Brian Boru, a petrified tree stump, a stuffed cougar, a dinosaur’s footprint, and the innards of an old clock once installed on top of a tower in an old building in town that’s no more. Why plop them all together? Because you’re in the boonies, and city-slicker rules don’t apply. The changes in the building will keep the charm.

And charming, even enchanting, the Berkshire Museum is. It’s a temple not only to creativity but to curiosity. As ignorant, blinkered, and depressed as most of Generation Z is, and as pumped with lies in union-run public schools as younger kids are, the museum is a refreshing view of how rich both nature and the human mind are and how blessed we are by the bounties of both. Putting aside how the museum navigated the corner it has turned, it was lovely to be there. Its leaders should look at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., as a model — a very aspirational one, I know.

I also hated the deaccession because I thought the Berkshire Museum, true to form, would squander the money on junk and gimmicks. In 2017 and 2018, the trustees promised immersive technology and screens galore. Now, everyone agrees that screens are bad. A technology kick is expensive and, as machines and graphics evolve, more expensive still.

I learned that, with the museum’s current board, director, and chief curator, screens are out, and old-fashioned looking at real objects is in. Everyone wants to make it a serious place for educating young people. Schoolchildren come in the thousands. It’ll never do cutting-edge shows or lush catalogues. That’s for the Williams College Museum of Art and the Clark Art Institute, 20 miles north.

I had high expectations for the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, which I thought would be about innovation in business and industry, a good field for young people in economically and socially distressed Pittsfield to plumb. Berkshire County draws trust-fund babies, coupon clippers, and plutocrats for its cool mountain breezes and culture, but Pittsfield could be Youngstown’s stepchild.

A bustling mill town starting in the 19th century, it was the hub of General Electric’s plastics division until the company, with Jack Welch chasing the quick but illusory buck, pulled GE from Pittsfield. Thousands were tossed from their jobs. PCBs pollute the Housatonic River, which runs through the city. Pittsfield has drug woes, and the schools aren’t the best. Young people need lessons in entrepreneurship. I thought they’d find them in a big space endowed by the two businessmen — the Feigenbaums — who coined the practice called total quality control and the notion that quality in a factory is everyone’s concern. Accountability for most people today is a dirty world.

The topics covered in the Hall of Innovation’s partitioned spaces aren’t bad in themselves but, really, is Ted Shawn’s first all-male dance ensemble the best example of innovation? While Shawn’s group did indeed twist and turn at Jacob’s Pillow, a renowned dance space near Pittsfield, unless there are plenty of Billy Elliots in town, it’s not especially on-target. There’s a niche on civil-rights activism and the Shakers. Sure, the Shakers, who had a village nearby, made innovative baskets and furniture, but another innovation was no sex, so they’re extinct.

A section on the Crane Paper Company in next-door Dalton could have been fantastic. Debased as the dollar might be, money is something everyone uses. From its earliest days, Berkshire County was a version of Silicon Valley. An early incarnation of the Crane Paper Company sold Paul Revere the paper that he used to print some of the new country’s money. Westinghouse, the Atlantic cable, dynamite, and electric motors had their roots in Berkshire County inventions and factories.

A video on the Crane Company is mostly about counterfeiting, which is of profound interest to traffickers whose life’s blood is the $100 bill but, really, not what we want young people to know when it comes to innovation or money. They need to know how to earn it, not fake it.

I have a lot of respect for the Feigenbaums, but these galleries don’t do them, innovation, or young people justice. I’m glad to hear that the space will change to highlight a rotating selection from the permanent collection, making it a real cabinet of curiosity.

Speaking of accountability, I compared the list of trustees from 2018, the year of the scandal, and those on the board today. To cleanse the palate, and in the interests of moral hygiene, I suggest all trustees still on the board from that period leave. Insiders tell me that Jeffrey Brown, a lifetime honorary trustee, championed art-for-cash schemes for many years, finally getting his way. He should leave the masthead, too.

I’d rethink two spaces on the second floor. A space dedicated to the art collection focuses on American marble sculpture from the 19th century, which was still in high vogue in Zenas Crane’s time, so the museum has a lot of it, and it’s very good.

In the gallery next to it, a prominent panel tells us in a headline that “museums are not neutral.” They need, the wall text advises, to get involved in pressing political issues of the day. Close to it is an idiotic wall panel on a controversy over the name of Washington, D.C.’s football team, the Washington Redskins. Cue a chorus of professional wailers. I know nothing about football but do know that Native American — once called Indian — mascots are as verboten now as suggesting that Rubens’s women ate too many banana splits.

Why is this there? Nothing is neutral. We’re all products of our culture and times. Museums should be circumspect and wise. They’re the keepers of heritage and perspective in a messy world focused on fads. Why is the museum proposing in another wall label in the same room that there’s not enough federal-government interference in how museums display and collect Native American art and artifacts? This, the names of sports teams, and the design of town seals are hot-button issues for crackpots. But, in a community with poverty, addiction, unemployment, high taxes, and crime, why be loud and proud about, of all things, the names of football teams? Does the museum want Washington bureaucrats telling it what to put on its walls or what to say in its interpretation?

These spaces, recently refurbished, look good as spaces. At some point the museum needs to display some of the paintings, prints, and drawings it didn’t sell. It still has 450 paintings, and many are good, with good stories.

The Crane Room is a very elegant, spacious Art Deco hall for receptions, but it’s virtually empty. I’d move the Victorian sculpture and plaster casts there, making it an art space that could still be used for parties.

Kimberley Bush Tomio is the director, arriving in 2022 from the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where she was the administrator in the curatorial department. She was director of the Tyler Art Museum in Texas and, before that, worked at the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas. I don’t know her. Initially, she was a registrar, which prepares a museum professional to keep good files, but she seems to have a good community focus. She might be the steady hand and voice of experience the board needs. I think the board would do well to add an outside museum director to its ranks if it doesn’t have one already.

Jesse Kowalski is the new chief curator. He’s experienced, having worked at the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Andy Warhol Museum. The museum’s next show after the illuminated-manuscript show is a primer on the Holocaust using art, some made in concentration camps, and artifacts. Local schools don’t teach much about the Holocaust, and they teach even less about the savagery and wickedness of communism. He sees the museum not as a place primarily for entertainment, but as a center for learning. The Berkshire Museum has had good curators in the past but often went for years without a curator. This was one more banana peel on the road to the abyss.

And while the museum now has an endowment north of $50 million, and it’s mostly restricted so it can’t be blown on toots, it needs to jump into the world of reputation rehab, a prelude to serious fundraising. Nothing, of course, succeeds like success. For every competent, nice-looking exhibition or building fix, more people will get the warm fuzzies when they think “Berkshire Museum.” This will take a generation. I’d suggest an overhaul of the primitive website and digitizing the collection for online use. Few have any conception of its riches.

My father deployed old saws with abandon, one of which was “what’s past is prologue,” and it fits the Berkshire Museum to a tee. The museum will soon be on a roll, but the public, local leaders, and art lovers need to watch it closely to make sure it doesn’t sell its soul to the devil. It’s one of the city’s great assets. I’m looking forward to my next visit. Both my eyes are now repaired, so I have bionic vision. Better to have it to enjoy the beauty of the Green Mountains and the Berkshires, and to see, over all, more than ten feet in front of me.