Worcester Art Museum: Cultural Diamond in the Rough
When entering the Museum, by the main entrance, I found myself initially skeptical. For so cheap an admission (only eight dollars), I expected much less than I ended up getting. The range of exhibitions currently available at the Museum is truly astounding. From Jodie Manasevit’s contemporary exhibition to the “Hope & Healing” collection of plague-era Italian paintings to Jim Hodges’ eternally inspiring masterwork “Don’t be afraid,” there is something to be found for all range of artistic tastes.
The first work I encountered in the museum was not a painting, but a mural- the largest in North America. Entitled simply “The Hunt,” it depicts an ancient Roman hunting expedition to Africa, probably a once-in-a-lifetime event for the hunters. The mural has been dated to not long after the turn of the first millennium. More impressive than its age, or the fact that it has been preserved so beautifully in its original form, is the fact that such capable craftsmanship existed at all so distantly in the past. This work, located on the ground floor, the lowest point in the museum, was tastefully placed to reflect the fact that this sort of work is the origin of all of our art today.
Directly above The Hunt, draped along 67 feet of wall space, is Jim Hodge’s masterpiece, the mural “Don’t be afraid.” Scrawled across the sky-blue face of the medium are the words “Don’t be afraid,” as written in the native languages and styles of 100 different United Nations member states, including Japanese, Arabic, and Cyrillic. The message of the piece is one of inspired unity- the representation of a congruent whole represented through the diversity of smaller parts contributing to a greater, more powerful whole. The collective effort required to create the piece is also symbolic of the power of communal unity- the content of the mural come from 100, anonymous United Nations represented, and the actual construction of the mural took the work of about another hundred high school students, guided by Hodge. Hodge’s use of the “Don’t be afraid” phrase is also of significance on the artist’s personal level. Hodge has had the phrase hanging in his studio since long before this piece was commissioned by WAM, and he used the phrase on bumper stickers sold at last year’s Whitney Biennial. All in all, “Don’t be afraid” was an early, uplifting surprise for me, whose tasteful placing above the center of the museum seemed meant to represent the background emotions of unity and harmony that underlie our art and the purpose of our art.
The “Hope & Healing” exhibition, which will be available at the Museum through September 25th of this year, was a truly emotional experience. The paintings are arranged by the exhibitioners such that the viewer follows the plague over its chronological course, from its tragedy to its triumphant conclusion. Paintings by all range of the ancient schools of Italian painting represent the full span of emotion felt by the suffering masses of Europe. There is despair, exemplified in Marcantonio Raimondi’s The Plague (after Raphael’s original) and the imagery archetypes of the infant trying to suckle its dead mother, and the fallen classical ruins all around, symbolizing both the apparent end of civilization and the loss of the integrity of societal institutions in the face of insurmountable tragedy. Flemish painter Michael Sweerts’ 1650s painting Plague in an Ancient City depicts a foreground of suffering plague victims against a background of the frantic healthy to show the fact that, at the height of the plague, those who hadn’t yet been affected were doing little more than waiting for the plague to reach them, inevitably. This theme is repeated in Giovanni Martinelli’s Memento Mori (“Remember, You Shall Die“), which shows a common dining scene of upper-class gentlemen and women suddenly interrupted by the intrusion of a skeleton holding an hourglass. This was meant to show that, unlike many of the pestilences that cling to the ghettos, the Black Death struck rich and poor alike, without discrimination, and without warning. Finally, the exhibition climaxes with the portrayal of Giovanni Andrea Sirani’s Michael the Archangel Overcoming Satan, surrounded by other works of religious art, relating the divine intervention many felt was responsible for the final abolition of the plague. Saints Rosalie, Roch, Sebastian, and others are represented as the divinely-inspired traveling healers who risked their lives to try to bring hope and healing to plague victims across Europe. But Sirani’s work reflects the larger theme of the plague’s demise, that the pestilence was an artifice of Satan’s, and its defeat was an inspired act of God, through his servants.
Jodie Manasevit’s exhibition was what next I encountered in the Museum. Now I have never been a devoted follower of much contemporary art, yet the title of Manasevit’s exhibition, “Just Painting,” struck a chord with me. The use of seemingly random mosaics of painted color and unusual sculptures consisting of various arrangements of oil-painted paving stones gave me an important glimpse into the meaning behind this type of modern art: perhaps there is no effable meaning, only the impulse to “just paint,” and what that means to the artist is a total mystery to us until we, too, find it in ourselves to go and just paint, and see what “just painting” means to us.
The Printmaking exhibition, which ends at the conclusion of July 2005, explores the origins of water-and-oil printmaking. It features artwork from the 19th-century European masters such as Fransisco Goya and Eugene Delacroix up through the lithographs of modern masters like Jasper Johns and Robert Raushenberg. The quiet, mostly colorless elegance of these works did not go unappreciated. Being able to portray such moving, lasting scenes like The Bulls of Bordeaux by Fransisco Goya or the quieter The Cat in Summer and The Cat in Winter, by Theophile Alexandra, through the use of only light and dark lines is an important, expressionistic tool from the history of our human arts that is quickly disappearing, but that cannot be allowed to be forgotten.
Other exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum, such as the American Art display that contains original metalwork by Paul Revere and continues up through the radio age, served as a reminder of where art has gone since its beginnings in the Hunt. The French paintings section, which bears all range of pieces, from Romanticism through Modernism and beyond, bridges the developmental gaps between the emotional plague years of Raimondi to the more-abstract-that-Abstraction, contemporary works of Jodie Manasevit with original works by Gorky, Gaughin, excerpts from Surrealism and Cubism, and pertinent works of everything in between. All in all, I was much more satisfied than I’d anticipated and in fact drawn to return multiple times by the Worcester Art Museum, and I would recommend it as a must-do experience for any serious art aficionado living in the New England area. It might not be the Louvre, but the Museum has such high-quality exhibited works and meaningful displays to make it well worth the trip and the price.
The Worcester Museum of Art is open 11-5 on Wednesday through Sunday, 11-8 Thursday through Saturday, and is open from 10-5 on Saturdays, with free admission from 10-noon on Saturdays.
