Tom McGee's Blog

We spent Fathers’ Day vis­it­ing the Mont­clair Art Museum in beau­ti­ful Mont­clair, NJ. Yet another cool place nearby I’ve never vis­ited before, it’s a sweet lit­tle col­lec­tion of really good Amer­i­can paint­ings and sculp­tures.

And it’s a very man­age­able trip — we cov­ered it in detail in about two hours.

The Big Show right now is the Wyeths, work by the three gen­er­a­tions of that fam­ily, N.C., Andrew and Jamie. N.C. tended to be more of an illus­tra­tor — which he was great at — with occa­sional for­ays into stand­alone works.

Andrew we’re all famil­iar with, though LF and I were blown away by the qual­ity of his water­col­ors. Repro­duc­tions don’t do them any jus­tice so I’m not even going to look for any. It’s all about the sub­tleties, and reduc­ing them down to screen size is just a waste. Jamie has gone off in another direc­tion, though he still keeps ele­ments of his father’s style right up front.

They’re all real­ists, but after a cer­tain point — like Whistler — their abstrac­tion­ists. The objects you see are almost inci­den­tal to the form and com­po­si­tion. That tri­an­gle could be a sail­boat sail or the eaves of a house, but it’s all about the tri­an­gle in space.

Not that this makes me famous or any­thing, but I know per­son­ally the direct descen­dants of two of the artists in the per­ma­nent col­lec­tion.

Another fun thing was learn­ing how many of the Hud­son Val­ley school painters had roots in this area. Maple­wood, Mont­clair, and even Newark back when it was a farm­ing com­mu­nity. Here’s Maple­wood home­boy Asher Durand, whom of course we already knew about.

Well worth the trip.

Down in the audi­to­rium was a piano recital by a group of 10–15 year-olds. We caught three of them, a girl no more than 10 knock­ing out a set of Rach­mani­noff vari­a­tions — really good — a cou­ple of young teenagers doing a four-hands ver­sion of one of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances — pretty good but how could they not be smil­ing at the end of such a fun piece? — and another girl doing the Brahms A Major Inter­mezzo, one of my favorite piano works.