Looking for Art in Upstate New York? There’s No Place Like Canajoharie

A tiny Mohawk Valley town, a factory owner’s vision, and 21 Winslow Homers make for a feel-good story.

A few weeks ago, I began a series of stories on art museums and artists in New York but outside the city and its suburbs. There’s good art to be found all over the state, even in tiny, little-known places like Canajoharie, on the old Erie Canal, an hour west of Albany. The Arkell Museum of Art, also known as the Canajoharie Library and Arkell Museum, has a 350-object gem-of-a-collection of American paintings almost entirely assembled for the locals by the owner of Beech-Nut, famous mostly for baby food and chewing gum but a pioneer in vacuum-packed food of all kinds.

The art was acquired from the 1920s to the ’40s by Bartlett Arkell (1862–1946), Beech-Nut’s president, to fill, along with the library, a cultural center he built across the road from his factory. Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Sloan, Maurice Prendergast, Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, and other heavy hitters are there in splendor. It’s a tiny place and indeed both an art gallery and the local public library. It’s a temple to one small town’s can-do spirit and civic pride, to noblesse oblige, to idiosyncrasy, to learning, and especially to Homer, represented by seven oil paintings and 14 watercolors.

I’d call the collection miraculous. Arkell didn’t know much about art, and he probably had a price point, but he had a collecting philosophy, and his vision — bringing good art to educate and delight people in his little town — was extraordinary.

Watching the Breakers: A High Sea, from 1896, is among Homer’s big, late, rough-and-tumble, crashing-wave seascapes painted in Prouts Neck, Maine. The spray is putting on a show. It’s so cold, drops of saltwater seem to turn to ice in midair. “There’s no place like home,” Arkell seems to suggest to anyone in Canajoharie who is pining for a beach vacation, but I think he looked for balance and for contradiction. The spray’s a performer, but it’s also a curtain, separating us from the infinite, inscrutable horizon. Homer’s Moonlight is a quiet, romantic beach scene from 1874 and an antidote to Watching the Breakers. On the Beach, from 1869, even has bathing beauties. Sponge Fishing, a Bahamas watercolor from 1885, more than sparkles. Its simple masses and essential lines aren’t minimalist but close to it.

Arkell bought lots of work by Homer and also by George Inness but mostly stuck to one example for each artist on his list of who and what would make for a comprehensive collection of American art. Some are scenes of everyday rural life and farm life, which makes sense. Most everything is of a domestic scale meant to be contemplated closely rather than ogled in a crowd. When he initially started to buy art for the public’s edification, he preferred copies of Old Masters. Still on view is a life-size copy of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, a salute not only to the Old Masters but to old New York’s Dutch settlers.

He bought art from Macbeth Gallery in New York, one of a tiny group of dealers specializing in modern American art. The Eight, a 1908 Macbeth exhibition of avant-garde Americans, made the dealership a mover and a shaker. Arkell, looking for an encyclopedic collection, bought at least one work by each artist in the show as well as the work of each artist in the group known as The Ten, mostly American Impressionists working in the late 1890s.

Often he kept the art he bought in his home, eventually rotating it to the gallery. Arkell paid for the stone Dutch Colonial building, which opened in installments in the late 1920s. Canajoharie, like many towns in upstate New York, had a small — and lively — business, civic, and factory center and, beyond that, rural and agricultural sprawl. At around 3,700 people today, the town is a bit smaller than in Arkell’s lifetime.

The collection isn’t well known. Eakins’s Portrait of Mrs. M. S. Stokes, from around 1904, is and isn’t a looker. Her age, gray hair, white blouse, white bow, with a pince-nez hanging from a pin, put her in another epoch, but most people in Arkell’s time — and in mine — knew women who looked like her, like a grandmother or great-aunt or a keeper of standards or a voice of experience. Her blouse is pleated and delicate and girly. Does she look stern? If we’re feeling guilty about something, she does. She appears inquisitive and engaged. And she’s alive. She has presence. “Good work — not a good likeness,” Stokes’s son wrote on the back of the portrait. He eventually consigned it to Macbeth, who sold it to Arkell. There’s a good, midsize Bierstadt Western-mountain picture, an early nocturne cityscape by Charles Burchfield, and a very pretty Prendergast view of Revere Beach in Massachusetts.

The Arkell’s curator arranges well. She invites us to think of pairs. Near Mrs. Stokes is George Luks’s The Player, from 1926 — Mrs. Stokes an antebellum creation, the young musician at one with the Jazz Age. Homer’s Punishment for Intoxication shows a young Union soldier standing on a box, holding a short log, a keg, likely empty, on the ground. Looking at it, I thought of William Merritt Chase’s Connoisseur, a young, refined woman looking at art, or Edmund Tarbell’s Girl Crocheting, from 1904. Tarbell emulates Vermeer. As the girl crochets, a gauzy copy of Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X hangs on the wall. Then there’s Thomas Hart Benton’s potbellied New England Postmaster, the subject as fat and florid as Tarbell’s girl is dainty.

Arkell started life as a local, born in Canajoharie. His father owned a factory that made paper bags. Arkell owned a rug business before establishing what would become Beech-Nut. At a time when transportation was slow and refrigerated conveyances didn’t exist, Beech-Nut’s new way to vacuum-pack food was revolutionary.

He grew to be very rich, lived mostly in New York City, traveled to Europe once a year, and, especially during the Depression, kept lots of boats, charitable and otherwise, afloat. He funded free tickets for young people to attend the New York Philharmonic and supported young pioneers in aviation, among them Noel Davis, Charles Lindbergh’s rival in the Atlantic sprint, killed in a crash a couple of weeks before Lindbergh made it to France. Arkell was low-key but well known as a cultivated, philanthropic grandee. Hundreds of small manufacturing hubs produced men like these who didn’t forget whence the money came.

Arkell saw early in the gallery’s life that visitors — his workers, farmers, men, and women — responded not to his Old Master copies but to art by living, or recently living, Americans. It was the art of their time, culture, and heritage. This revelation pushed him to focus on the best modern American artists as well as local artists.

The front of the Arkell has a formal garden the centerpiece of which is a fountain topped by Harriet Frishmuth’s bronze Humoresque, a tall, curvy sea nymph holding a gurgling fish and standing on a larger fish with one foot. The big toe of her other foot is teasing the tip of the fish’s mouth. Frishmuth (1880–­1980) created many fountain figures, all pert nudes who look like Clara Bow, and all very good. The Slovenian dancer Desha Delteil modeled for her for Humoresque and later became well known for her role in Glorifying the American Girl, a 1929 musical that’s a filmed version of Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Follies” numbers.

Frishmuth is American but trained with Rodin. Her art stands on tiptoes at that point where Beaux-Arts elegance meets and greets Hollywood kitsch, a point that marks her as American as motherhood, apple pie, and the Bubble Dance, Desha’s turn in the Ziegfeld movie.

The garden’s got good bones, as does another garden and fountain in back that salutes American veterans. The fountains in both need to be fixed and the gardens maintained, with the one in front by the Frishmuth sculpture kept in its Roaring Twenties splendor. This is high-maintenance, but this garden is part of the museum’s original plan and complements the Frishmuth sculpture, an accessioned work of art. I know this is expensive. The Addison Gallery, where I was the director, had a fountain in its rotunda at the center of which was a marble nude by Paul Manship. Intended to dribble politely, it dribbled not at all, and for years. It needed to be restored, and we did it, and it was more expensive than a new faucet. It was part and parcel of a historic building, as is the Arkell’s Frishmuth fountain.

This leads me to the National Endowment for the Arts. Looking at the list of winners of its latest round of grants, announced two weeks ago, I saw nothing that would move the dial. Most of its grants are arts ephemera. There were a few good nuggets like money for the excellent Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, the city of my birth, and a subsidy for the Dallas opera company’s new production of the Ring Cycle. Wagner builds character.

Some grants seem rubber-stamped “Waste of Money,” such as $75,000 for “a temporary public arts project that reflects black, indigenous, and people of color narratives” in Dubuque, Iowa. I assume “oppression” will be the central narrative chosen to bore us. Or $60,000 for arts programming that addresses the impact of climate change on wild blueberry pollinators in Maine. Or $90,000 “to support a series of traffic calming interventions in Tucson.” Washington, D.C., that little postage stamp of a snake pit, fat and prosperous, parasitical and vampiric, got more money than Texas or Florida or Ohio or Pennsylvania, but Washington is where the NEA staff lives and works. It’s buddy money.

The totality is themeless, earnest, and dull.

For a few years I’ve urged the NEA to do something truly useful and support hard-to-fund, focused, unusual infrastructure projects. The two fountains in Canajoharie would be star examples of this. For a small town, raising the dough to unclog the sludge in two old bubblers would be a slog too far. Canajoharie isn’t destitute, but, like many once thriving mill towns in New England and upstate New York, it has a litany of needs and a tiny donor base.

Old theaters need new seats. Old museums need HVAC. Old symphony halls need handicapped access. The distinguished — and broke — Pittsfield Museum didn’t have air-conditioning until about 15 years ago. It sold art to pay for it. All the while the NEA shovels millions to very modest, putting it diplomatically, programs forgotten the day after they happen. Keeping legacy culture organizations going in towns facing hard times often means fixing buildings. Maine’s blueberry pollinators don’t care whether or not they’re depicted on an embroidered tapestry.

The Arkell Museum and the library — the town’s library — share a single board of trustees. Together, they’re a single 501(c)(3). The combined budget for the two is $726,000. Talk about value added. The Met’s gala-goers spent that much for boob implants! Income comes from a small endowment, an ongoing grant from Arkell’s foundation, a tiny subvention from the town, an annual appeal, a museum admission, a gift shop, and, yes, it’s a library, so it earns money from lost-book fines. It’s a bare-bones budget.

The Arkell’s far from stagnant, and neither is Canajoharie. Nor, for that matter, is Beech-Nut. The company has changed hands many times, moved from Canajoharie to nearbyFlorida, N.Y., about ten years ago, and still makes baby food. The old factory building across from the museum and library — an empty hulk after Beech-Nut left town — was demolished a few months ago. It’s now an empty, sad lot the size of a football field. What beckons? Cannabis, of course. A 160,000-foot growing facility for the renowned gateway drug is in the works. We live in a crazy world, and canal barges aren’t making a comeback. Canajoharie is lucky. I-90 heading to Buffalo runs through town, with a ramp near the museum.

The gallery does nice temporary exhibitions. Mary Michael Shelley’s low-relief, carved, painted wood wall sculptures are on view now. Born in 1950, Shelley lives in rural upstate New York and depicts scenes from everyday life and imagined scenes from history in a style evocative of Grandma Moses. They’re charming. It’s a salve to see happy calves cavorting in fields rather than Trots with acned faces and souls screaming about Gaza. Also in the permanent galleries are photographs and ephemera tracing the history of Beech-Nut through the Arkell era.

Last year, the Arkell got a splendid gift of hundreds of Homer wood-engraving illustrations from Harper’s. Homer’s paintings, watercolors, and illustrations aren’t separate enterprises. They’re of a piece, with his strides in one genre augmenting whatever he was doing in the other two.

The Arkell is in an art hot spot. Cooperstown, home of the Fenimore Museum, isn’t far, and neither is the Munson-Williams-Proctor in Utica. Like the Arkell, both started from collections assembled by potentates with hometown roots who wanted to see local culture and local people enriched.

The Arkell is unusual in that it’s a little, very high-end art museum in a small, rural town. Though there are likely others, I can think of only one — the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in northeastern Vermont. Both St. Johnsbury and Canajoharie had generous, visionary, art-savvy donors, both towns are still small, and both are thriving in spirit but not economically. There are many hundreds of heritage-rich places in America like them. We’ll find rare archives, house museums, and old theaters there as well as places like the Bennington Museum near my home. It’s bigger than the Arkell but there’s no Park Avenue anywhere nearby and no money. Philanthropists of all stripes need to direct their money there rather than the Met, MoMA, the Getty, and universities that sit on billions. Forget about calming the troubled traffic in Tucson. Art donors need to aim at art-world problems, and at problems we can actually solve.