Of Connecticut’s outstanding art museums, one — the Yale British gallery — is closed for renovations. The other four are in tip-top shape, but the Atheneum, the Florence Griswold Museum, and the New Britain Museum of American Art are currently cluttered with Christmas display and the crowds that draws.
To my eye, decoration is detrimental in such a setting. Already the walls offer beauty by definition unmatched, which nothing should obstruct. Rather than carp, this time of year I visit the Yale University Art Gallery at the corner of Chapel and York, all free all the time and charmingly unadorned for the holidays.
It is of course a first-rate collection, with the balance across time and place especially desirable in a teaching museum. There’s far more than can be seen in one visit or discussed in a single article. If you haven’t been for a while, you might head to the American wing, entirely redone a few years ago. It’s in the same direction as before, across the lobby of the fine Louis Kahn addition (which we leave for another day) and down the side of the old college gallery, filled now with sculpture and light, a most inviting transition to the paintings (pictured above).
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Ascend the circular stone stairway beyond the sculptures (or the elevator beside it) to arrive at a sweet spot on the second floor. To your left is a big Courbet, striking even at that distance, of a mounted hunter following his wounded prey in the snow, the horse sniffing the blood trail while the rider leans back, resting a hand on his mount. I don’t know a scene that so captures the weariness of dogged effort; even the shadows cast by the winter sun seem exhausted.
The Impressionists come next if you continue that way, guaranteed to please. Gem of the collection by current taste might be the large and arresting Night Café by Van Gogh, its curdling yellow, lurid green, and blood red colliding in a nightmare billiard hall with its doomed habitués. The owner in his white suit beside the table looks like Mark Twain in Hell.
The extraordinarily thick application of paint, seemingly squeezed right from the tube to form the lamplight and the flowers, suggests a manic, enraptured creator. Van Gogh proudly called it ‘one of the ugliest paintings I have ever done.’ The artist supposedly gave it to the pictured barkeep to cover his tab; today it would command hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the end of the Impressionist section hang three small views horse racing views by the Edgar Degas, an artist cool as Van Gogh was impassioned. In color, composition, finish, and perspective, they exhibit the different ways one artist can see the same scene. Degas painted three things obsessively: horse racing, nude women, and ballerinas. On the same wall to the right of the entryway is a lovely dance studio scene, not large but deep, loosely-painted yet precisely defined: you could calculate the distance across that floor to the foot.
But we were headed for the American section, further that way and up a few steps. In the first large room, an enormous and eerie Eakins of a prizefighting scene dominates the wall to the left, so entirely still it seems surreal. In fact, the painter has provided an accurate snapshot: one boxer kneels, about to arise; the other awaits him; and the tuxedoed referee counts time, with the aspect one might assume before a casket. For a moment, no one moves; it looks like they never will.
The opposite of Eakins is Sargent, one might say, inaccurately but perhaps not incorrectly. One is heavy-wrought reality, the other floating light, Sargent’s shimmering surface a contrast to Eakins’ insight. In the little alcove to the right of the boxers is a small Sargent still life with daffodils, as dazzling and loose as Eakins is dark and heavy, a miracle of handling and as near to Matisse as any American comes.
I like to ask myself, on visiting a gallery, which picture I would take home, were I invited. My choice is in that large room, near the center of the wall right of the alcove, a muted, medium-sized landscape that might not attract but will reward your attention. George Inness believed in a spiritual world behind what we see, revealed at transcendent moments. His Moonrise establishes both the vivid atmosphere and the lay of the land with the subtlest means.
For the history fan, the next large room in that wing holds eight familiar Trumbull recreations of Revolutionary events (including the deaths of Warren at Bunker Hill and Montgomery in Quebec, my two favorite American battles) and a tall standing Washington. More moving for me is the Ralph Earl portrait of Roger Sherman, further to the right. The great Founder in his stiff Windsor chair seems as forthright and awkward as the painter’s own primitive but convincing technique.
One floor up four strong Hoppers illustrate how his vision influences the way we see our country. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” said D.H. Lawrence. Hopper painted landscapes for that soul, empty streets and fields, rooms and houses home to lonely figures. The pairing of Rooms by the Sea with Sunlight in a Cafeteria illustrates how he creates light — the one true presence in his paintings — by its sharp delineation.
The unpeopled Rooms represents the more absolute form of Hopper emptiness; Sunlight in a Cafeteria illuminates the drama of being alone together. End of that road I suppose (and a good end to our stroll) is his Rooms for Tourists: no one in sight but a light on inside waiting, in what looks like a funeral home, which might be the point.
