For Cole to Pollock, Go to Utica for the Best

Upstate New York treasures at the Munson

S low news week, eh? Best to take us out of ourselves and go to Utica. Utica’s no Paris, but with a superb art museum like the Munson-Williams-Proctor, it’s no tumbleweed town, either. Smack in the center of this small city in the Mohawk Valley is one of the Northeast’s marquee collections, a good art school, a landmark Modernist building, and a premiere performance space, making what’s now called simply the Munson a much loved and revered culture mecca.

I spent Sunday afternoon there as part of my look at the arts in New York State outside the Big Apple behemoth and its suburbs. I’ll hit Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo in the next few days and, God willing, Niagara Falls, which, in addition to copious cascades, has a small history museum showing more than barrels.

Established in 1919, the Munson is unbelievably strong in American Modernism and Hudson River School painting, but it also has a good, mostly Victorian decorative-arts collection that came via the founding local, multigenerational potentate family called Munson, Williams, and Proctor. Utica is one of a string of upstate towns from Albany to Buffalo settled in the years after the American Revolution and endowed with august, aspirational, classical names.

Utica was a Carthaginian and early Christian hub, but in my art journey this week I’ve seen Syracuse, Rome, Ilion, Cicero, Scipio, Manlius, Pompey, and, next to Albany, Troy. I know Camillus from Livy. He was a general, and a ruthless one, from the early days of the Roman Republic. Locals know the Camillus Mall jingle. Our modern Utica might be distressed and depressed, but at least it’s still standing. Mostly peaceful Arabs flattened it around a.d. 500.

I’d been to the Munson a few times. It doesn’t do grandiose exhibitions. It serves the locals, uses its collection, and it’s the region’s performing arts space and an art school, all ruled by a single board of trustees and one director. The museum isn’t a big place. Philip Johnson designed it. Yes, he was a Nazi and a New York socialite, but he had a way with squares, and the Munson is a perfect, logical, limestone square. The parking lot is in back, making the entrance awkward and inauspicious.

I’m not ruled by habits — I sit in a different pew every Sunday at church to discombobulate the front-row types — but I always first visit the Munson’s grand Number 2, 1949, by Jackson Pollock, a 16-footer and the supreme flower of Abstract Expressionism. Pollock is his era’s Basquiat and a one-trick pony, but this pony is his Secretariat. It’s the Milky Way of painting. Who knows what hooch he guzzled the day he painted it, but it must’ve been the ultimate secret sauce. Pollock scholars celebrate his accidentalism, but I think he’s a calculated, line-obsessed painter.

Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock’s dealer, offered Number 2 to Andover’s Addison Gallery in 1949 while the paint was still wet, for $2,500, with a small Pollock — Phosphorescence — tossed in as a gift. I was the director 50 years later. My predecessor, Bart Hayes, declined the offer. He was raising money to buy a pair of portraits by the colonial-era painter Robert Feke. I can always spot a Feke portrait of a woman, since all of his women have bazooka bosoms. Rembrandt, he ain’t.

Number 2 eventually landed in Utica. Months later, Hayes begged Peggy Guggenheim for Phosphorescence as a gift. She was angling to place Pollocks in prestigious public collections, so Phosphorescence is in ye olde Andover today. And Hayes never did raise the pennies for his Fekes. New England WASPs have, in my New England WASP opinion, very few virtues. They’re stingy to a fault, especially if they’re from anywhere near Boston.

Johnson probably designed the Munson in the late ’50s around the 16-foot Pollock. The perfect square suits its perfect madness. Number 2 is displayed in the museum’s main gallery next to a painting by David Siqueiros, whom Pollock admired, and, nearby, a painting by Philip Guston from 1947. Guston, like Pollock, was a Surrealist painter before he wasn’t. The three paintings make for a good compare-and-contrast moment.

In one dazzling corner, across the gallery from the Pollock, hang Rothko’s Number 18, from 1951, and his Abstraction, No. 11, from 1947. Number 18 is prime, mature Rothko at his best, with two puffy rectangles, the top one red-orange, the bottom cumulus-white, with two narrow bands, or zips, separating them, the top one white with streaks of purple, the bottom a creamy orange. Abstraction is only four years earlier. It’s physically — and aesthetically — a corner away, different but close, and it’s not just a case of lookalike orange. Rothko’s forms in Abstraction aren’t random but articulate and coherent.

The Rothko mega-show in Paris, about which I had mixed feelings, had at least a dozen paintings from the late ’40s, most of them lame and halt, as Rothko struggled to click. The pair at the Munson, deftly placed, is a two-step turned balletic. The museum bought the big Rothko in 1953. Abstraction came to it in 1957 as part of Edward Wales Root’s bequest. Root (1884–1956) was Elihu Root’s son and lived near Utica. Sort-of-rich, he was passionate about American Modernism and bought what was then cutting-edge contemporary art with the Munson, his local museum, in mind.

Between his lifetime gifts and his bequest, he made the place great. Before Root, what was then the Munson-Williams-Proctor was packed with the founding family’s curiosities.

The Munson isn’t an encyclopedic museum. Its splendors are American Modernism and Hudson River School art. In what has to be one of the great coups of regional museum collecting, the Munson bought Thomas Cole’s four eight-footer Voyage of Life series, from 1840. The National Gallery in D.C. owns the other version. Childhood, youth, manhood, and old age are covered with succinct beauty. Seeing them is worth the trip to Utica.

American Landscapes, a treasures show from the New-York Historical Society, is on view at the Munson until September 22. The Historical Society’s Hudson River School collection is without peer, but versions of this show have been traveling for years. Still, beauty’s beauty and never it. The Munson is far from the Hudson River, but Cole, Durand, Church, Kensett, and Sanford Gifford, to drop some names, aren’t limited by something as mundane as a river. They’re vision artists. The Old World might have cathedrals galore, but America, vast and fresh, offered limitless possibilities, and the offer’s not ad hoc but from God, to we Americans, and for a purpose. The vision’s ideological, moral, religious, and ethical.

The exhibition is organized by themes like Durand’s studies from nature, highly finished sketches painted outdoors, landscapes from the four seasons, and the Adirondacks and White Mountains. The art’s arranged to promote contemplation, perfectly complemented by burnt-orange, forest-green, and slate-blue wall colors.

Every picture’s a gem. Visitors can skip the wall text. The great merit in American Landscapes is that it gives us license to revel. We might be at a place where three or four generations of art historians, and I’m among them, have plumbed maximum scholarship from the art. What’s left is beauty and magic, both outlasting the scribbles of a thousand academics.

This might be the Munson’s house style. We’re not bludgeoned with blather in the permanent-collection galleries, either. Very few things have didactic labels. When they do, as for Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair, from 1967, the text is succinct and helpful rather than inane. Warhol’s art of plane crashes, electrocutions, and mangled bodies puzzle people, but there’s method to his madness. Mass media in the ’60s and ’70s were chockablock with disaster stories, as if horror-movie aesthetics had crept into everyday life. “When you see a gruesome scene over and over,” Warhol is quoted in the label, “it doesn’t have any effect.” His death-penalty scene is a mauve-gray, a TV-screen palette. Visitors take it from there. I’ll add my own words of wisdom. The palette is also pastel-pretty, like a cloudy, misty day, Whistler-style, which makes Big Electric Chair even more bizarre.

I visited Utica during the opening weekend of the city’s annual summer art festival. I had a pierogi lunch at the Ukrainian Catholic Church next to the Munson, and the museum is hosting a bonsai-tree display. I can’t say the town’s a high-energy place — it’s pathetic — but a Munson-sponsored exhibition of work by local artists shows how vibrant American art is. The art is in the museum’s big, lovely atrium, displayed on racks delineated by media.

The museum’s grounds are a construction site now, but it’s all for the greater good. It’s a massive landscaping project turning a treeless, concrete-heavy site into a park with native gray birches, lots of trillium, dogwoods, flowering shrubs, and native ferns.

The more, the better. Urban renewal, the ’60s version of domestic terrorism, trashed the center of Utica, so the more green and flowers the renovation adds, the better. The square, severe Munson building needs a luscious landscape to soften it.

I have very few quibbles. Utica’s Utica. The Munson pushes women artists, some good, some not so good, leaving in storage many great things by the boys. Its last annual report was published in 2021. The director told me that a new report is to be out soon, but we’re approaching 2025. I hate name changes. A museum is named by the founders, and it’s best to stick with what they wanted. Years ago, the Wadsworth Atheneum’s trustees decided that “atheneum” was beyond the public’s comprehension, so, idiotically but characteristically, they changed it to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, which makes no sense. That said, the “Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute” doesn’t roll off the tongue. Munson was the old man and not deeply interested in art, but he made the original museum and big bucks, so the Williamses and Proctors are off the masthead.

So, having enjoyed my time in Utica, I’m shuffling off to Buffalo.