Art New England: Focus On - Connecticut Art Trail

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he real prize in taking advantage of the Connecticut Art Trail is the chance to experience a marvelous array of venues, with the freedom to select and encounter their objects at your own pace. Each art collection along the Trail has a particular, often idiosyncratic artistic enthusiasm at its core, awaiting your fresh discovery. It is your Art Trail.

With the museums embroidered into Connecticut’s varied landscape, the Trail creates a perfect add-on to vacation plans, flexible Art Pass in hand. Since it couples the experience of art with getaways to locations as diverse as the shoreline beaches and the rolling Litchfield hills, college towns and hamlets that truly are bucolic, the Art Pass vastly enriches a vacation or a day trip. A virtual golden ticket, it enables you to see art "in situ,” in every manner of showcase, formal and informal— from paintings applied directly to door panels of quirky bohemian enclaves to more modern installations gracing sleek contemporary spaces.

Each institution along the Trail bears the indelible stamp of its own history and perspective. Viewed in combination, institutional contrasts are chatty and engaging. Most grew from lovingly amassed personal collections (“homes for art”) that since have become public and are enlarged with new curatorial research and outreach. Getting to know these cultural personali-

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ties up-close and in-person is not only educational, it's half the fun.

One enlightening element about exposure to these various institutions is the profoundly human character of curatorial scholarship— ringing with stories of friendship and connection, influence and affiliation. Originally a tenmember institutional partnership launched in 1995 as the Connecticut Impressionist Art Trail, the present Art Trail comprises a broadened consortium. The expansion sought and successfully gained increased visitation.

One delightful take-away is just how often art was, in the context of its own time, considered edgy and challenging. So many of Connecticut’s original collectors were visionary and venturesome. Consider Theodate Pope Riddle (1867-1946), who instituted the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington. This wealthy and privileged, strong-willed progressive, who refused to accept the confining expectations the Gilded Age consigned to those of her gender, became a practicing architect and an influential art collector. Her friendship with Mary Cassatt gave her an inside track on the acquisition of gorgeous French Impressionist works which now grace her former home, which she stipulated in her will was to be preserved as a public museum, with the proviso that its contents be kept intact and

unchanged. The Hill-Stead Museum therefore constitutes a time-capsule of turn-of-the-century forward-thinking, and challenging good taste: among the gleaming dark furniture and posh Oriental rugs, a visitor can find Degas pastels side-by-side with the romantic lithographic imaginings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, landscapes by Claude Monet, and a great Edouard Manet seascape alone worth the trip.

There is also the example of Florence Griswold (1850-1937), the enterprising daughter of a successful ship captain in Old Lyme, Connecticut, who, as family fortunes reversed, scraped together a living as a teacher, mentor and friend to artists, renting out rooms in the family mansion to a lively, somewhat bohemian crew. These globe-trotting, nature-imbibing free thinkers, who included Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf and Frank DuMond, spent their summers en plein air on the park-like grounds of the Griswold House, which became a de-facto center of the Lyme Art Colony, the core of the group known as the "Connecticut Impressionists."

Preserved intact (inscribed with an extraordinary array of paintings done directly on the wood paneling and doors by Florence's board-

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inghouse artists), Florence’s home is the anchor of the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme.

The beautiful Kreible Gallery, added to the grounds in 2002, creates an up-to-date exhibition space for changing exhibitions, yet the most remarkable aspect of this museum is that it is maintained within the same natural context that inspired the paintings on display—a wonderful and informative juxtaposition.

In the capital city of Hartford, an Art Pass holder has access to one of the most comprehensive museums in the state, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, with the distinction of being the oldest public art museum in the United States. The collection of nearly 50,000 works of art encompasses decorative as well as fine arts. It also houses a rich collection of American colonial furniture, the Samuel Colt firearms collection, the Serge Lifar collection of Ballet Russes drawings and costumes and the Amistad collection of African American art. A museum that prides itself on a history of collecting "contemporary art" from the get-go (Wadsworth bought works by Thomas Cole still wet, right off the artist's studio easel), it is also the home of MATRIX, a showcase of challenging contemporary art set within the context of a traditional museum. MATRIX was the first of its kind, a model for such programs nationally.

The New Britain Museum of American Art, founded in 1903, collects only American artists, including the must-see Arts of Life in America mural by Thomas Hart Benton. Additionally it has a distinctive collection of graphic arts, and has energetically embraced contemporary forms.

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Bridgeport Opposite left: The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT. Opposite right: Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, featuring work by Mary Cassatt.

Above: Map of the Connecticut Art Trail, highlighting Art Trail locations across the state. Below: Mattatuck Museum’s 19th Century Gallery, Waterbury, CT.

In each corner of the state—from the urban centers to picturesque hills to the shoreline and the magnetic tug of a seafaring past—the museum trail accents local flavor while providing global perspective. Even the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield manages to couch its artists' probing and unconventional approaches sensitively into the beautiful

context of a dappled New England village.

The Art Trail also invites trail blazing of urban sanctuaries for the modern, represented

by New Haven's newly renovated and expanded Yale University Art Gallery, and, across the street, the Yale Center for British Art, that houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom—both designed by acclaimed American modernist architect Louis I. Kahn. Here, the architecture itself creates the ambience, serene and light-filled, as lucid and soul-filling as the mood of perfect twilight. These museums are works of art themselves, products of a master's hand, providing a complimentary poetic ambience for experiencing their cultural treasures and considering the dialogues of modern/contemporary forms, all awaiting your close encounter.

—Patricia Rosoff

Note: An Art Trail Pass, priced at $25, is available at each of the participating museums, or via arttrail.org, where a printable brochure is also accessible.

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