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FALL 2019

Walking Reynolda

Grounds and Gardens tours

This Spring, in honor of Historic Preservation Month, three docents, Ann Rudkin, Louise Bazemore and I, lead about fifty visitors on a Historic Reynolda Grounds and Gardens Walking Tour, a new guided walking tour through Reynolda’s trails, grounds and gardens. Also leading groups were Curator of Education for the Gardens, Amanda Lanier, and our Deputy Director, Phil Archer. The program was developed by Amber Albert, Manager of Community & Academic Learning. The weather cooperated beautifully. Although the temperature was near ninety degrees, the stroll through the wooded area was shaded and everyone was kept well hydrated. Scripts were prepared although most of us added our personal knowledge and ad-libs. The tour included about eight stops along the wetlands, lawn and trails with inquisitive visitors who, in my case, shared memories of their personal experiences throughout Reynolda. (One woman told of her soon-to-be fiancé who drove near the lake to clip some daffodils to hand to her with a diamond engagement ring and a marriage proposal.) Greatly aiding our tours were iPads with beautifully organized archival photographs depicting the grounds’ features and the Reynolds family, staff and friends enjoying themselves from Katharine’s time.

Reynolda Greenhouse discussions included information about the manufacturer, Lord & Burnham, the fact that it was shipped as a kit to be assembled on-site, and that this particular line of greenhouses was continually manufactured since 1849! The stone foundations, the London plane trees and some of the nearby buildings were also described. After discussing Katharine Reynolds’ acquisition of the 1,067 acres, the origins and purpose of the lake (including the Hiawatha pageant), we began the tour. Several stops were made along the way including: the Boathouse (opened for visitors to enter), the pumphouse (including details about the operation of the water system), the outdoor “pool” (now completely filled in), the campsite and outdoor kitchen area, the meadows (golf course location and airplane landing area), and the 1917 Sears-designed forecourt garden in front of the house. We also discussed Wake Forest University’s role and facts about their relocation from Wake Forest to Winston-Salem, NC. Much was shared during this one-hour tour! Based on the positive reactions and on-site feedback from tour participants, most were anxious to learn more. Reynolda Grounds Tours are well-worth taking and leading; join us next time they are offered!

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Art on the move VINCENT CIMMINO

The first time I saw a Reynolda House painting in a different venue was quite by accident. In March 2015 I was staying near the University of Florida on a family visit and stopped by the Harn Museum of Art on campus, where an exhibition, Monet and American Impressionism was being presented. It displayed fifty paintings and twenty prints completed between 1880 and 1920 by American Impressionists who adapted the French Impressionists’ innovative techniques. There, prominently on view, was Mary Cassatt’s Madame Gaillard and Her Daughter MarieTherese (1897). I was so surprised that I kept returning to it, trying to hear comments from other visitors. According to the museum’s exhibition description, “The exhibition explore(d) relevant issues of the day such as America’s fascination with French art and culture, the impact of tourism on artistic taste and consumer culture, changing roles of women in American society, and attitudes towards industrialization, exercise and public health.” I did not know at that time that I would be seeing other Reynolda works in other venues twice more. I was determined not to be surprised again and to seek out where and when our works were being shown, and if convenient, view them.

In 2016 I was prepared. I knew Stuart Davis’ For Internal Use Only, 1944-45) was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as part of the exhibition, Stuart Davis: In Full Swing. I was visiting family and friends close by, and wanted to visit the Whitney, in its new downtown Manhattan location. About 100 Stuart Davis works were on display, from his consumerproduct-oriented works of the 1920s to an incomplete work left on his easel at his death in 1964. It was an exhibition intended to combine his abstraction and popular culture. This time I actively engaged docents and visitors and asked what they thought of the work without revealing my connection to it. The comments ranged from pure delight to, as one docent said, “…amateurish and not his best….” Oh well, that‘s what I get for prying.

Opposite: Stuart Davis, For Internal Use Only, 1945, oil on canvas. Gift of Barbara B. Millhouse. Art © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

While visiting London, England in July of this year as part of a college alumni summer getaway, I had a chance to see our Lee Krasner work Birth (1956) at the Barbican Centre. According to the Barbican’s own description: “…The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London and the largest of its kind in Europe. The Centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhibitions….”

Below: Mary Cassatt, Madame Gaillard and Her Daughter MarieThérèse, 1897, pastel on paper.

The exhibition, Lee Krasner: Living Colour was shown in their art gallery, in fourteen huge rooms on two floors and included nearly 100 works of hers, some large enough to take up a whole wall. It was on view there through August and afterward would be going to Frankfurt, Germany; Bern, Switzerland; and finally Spain, to be shown at the Guggenheim

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Poetry and peter campus

Museum Bilbao. It is the first time since 1965 that Krasner’s works have been displayed in Europe. An eighteen-minute video projected on a large screen greets the visitor, and presents a 1983 interview with her when she was 75 years old. (She died the following year.) The exhibition was organized in categories: Little Images, Becoming Lee, Life Drawings, War Service Windows, Stable Gallery, Prophecy (this is where Birth was displayed), Night Journeys, Primary Series, Palingenesis and Eleven Ways. These categories follow, more or less, periodsß of her life.

Docents don’t often feel led to recite a poem while standing in front of works of art on the Reynolda House walls. But during a recent docent training session for affinities: peter campus and american art, the exhibition in the Northwest Bedroom Gallery, Becky Brown, a retired AP English teacher, did just that.

More than fifty organizations, museums and private collectors participated in lending works to the exhibition. Upon my asking staff and visitors, practically all the comments were favorable toward our work, its presentation and the whole exhibition. I left an exhibition pamphlet from the Barbican in our education department. If you have a chance, either by accident or design, I would encourage seeking out our works in other venues. You’ll surely get a flavor of how special they are particularly in relationship to accompanying works grouped by curators for specific exhibition purposes. Lee Krasner, Birth, 1956, oil on canvas. Gift of Barbara B. Millhouse. © 2014 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The art: a videograph by artist peter campus (he uses all lower-case letters), dusk at shinnecock bay (2010). As in other works, he uses digital manipulations in videos of the water and the waves of quiet coastal scenes in the U.S. Northeast and on France’s Atlantic shores. The exhibition’s interpretive guide also says: “the videographs are characterized by an inherent contrariness: an unwavering, protracted focus is subverted by digital abstraction, the manifest is rendered ineffable, allowing the viewer to join the artist in the complexities of attentive looking.”

The poem: Reading, by A.R. Ammons, who graduated from Wake Forest College and conducted poetry workshops at Reynolda House while on the faculty of Cornell University. It’s nice after dinner to walk down to the beach and find the biggest thing on earth relatively calm.

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New faces: Wendy Katz GENIE CARR

Phil Archer, who was leading the training session, thought it so appropriate to campus’ work that he sent the artist an email telling him about it. Campus replied: my response would take hours: all kinds of thoughts are making their brief appearance in my consciousness. one fragment is that i do feel peaceful when making the work; i try to empty myself of conscious thoughts and let the land engage me. another, that i am more contentious than most people i know, often gratuitously so: it comes from proudly being from a people that argued the meaning of every bit of the torah, and even the proper thickness of pastrami in a sandwich. it was wonderful to sit in that room, with the [Arthur Dove] and the [Marsden Hartley]. i would hope that peacefulness would lead to a deeper contemplation. oy veh, peter

As we docents know, our training is based on correlation—putting together one of the museum’s works of art with literature and music of its decade. It has been that way since Nicholas B. Bragg was the first director of Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

affinities: peter campus and american art is presented in support of the exhibition peter campus: video ergo sum, organized by the Jeu de Paume, Paris and presented this fall at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the Hanes Gallery of Wake Forest University.

Wendy Katz, who is based at Reynolda and at Wake Forest this academic year as the Reynolda Fellow, does something like that. She is a professor of art history at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but her interests reach far into the culture of the time of the art and artists she is studying. (Read the accompanying bio from Nebraska to see the variety in her professional work, here.)

Wendy and her pup, Isadora (Izzy), named after Isadora Duncan.

A big interest of Dr. Katz’s is the 19th century’s Colonial Revival, “which I think is not something people get excited about,” she said with a smile. She spoke in her office, the sleeping porch off the Master Bedroom Gallery, in late September. The idea of the Revival, she said, was, “Let’s revive George DOCENT DATELINE

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Washington, let’s revive the Founding Fathers of this country, to unify the country. Sections are battling each other, so let’s look back to our common origins.” Those ideas developed as early as the 1850s, she said. The common origins were understood to be the Protestant English men who founded the Republic. The founders were certainly not seen as people who came from other regions and religions. “Reynolda House is built, as you know, in the second Colonial Revival, in the early 20th century. Jewish, Catholic, Italian immigrants were coming in,” and people who had been in the United States since the 1700s—or whose forbearers had settled the country later—were getting nervous. Just as Katharine Smith Reynolds was different from other wealthy matrons of the early 20th century, her dream house was different from the usual Colonial Revival building style. Columns, yes, but not tall, white columns in a big, clapboard house. It’s a bungalow, with a recessed porch and squat columns, as Barbara Millhouse has often told us in the introductory video. Dr. Katz said, “I think the bungalow was intervention. That kind of saved it. The bungalow made it democratic.” Dr. Katz’s work during her time here is rather democratic itself. Allison Perkins wrote in her introduction of Dr. Katz that the Reynolda Fellowship, funded with a grant to Reynolda

and Wake Forest from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was “created to advance crossdisciplinary learning throughout campus and in the community. Wendy’s research and teaching will enrich the interpretation of historic Reynolda, including its relationship to the Reynolds family’s multi-faceted legacy, its impact on Winston-Salem, and its contemporary connectivity to students at Wake Forest.” Wendy Katz indeed has new interpretations of many of Reynolda’s collections. She pointed out that Jared Sparks, our self-satisfied gentleman in the Library, tried to correct George Washington’s letters, because he found Washington too vulgar. In October, Dr. Katz presented an Object of the Month: Katharine’s magazines. Katharine subscribed to approximately twenty magazines, from Progressive Farmer to Vogue to house and style magazines. “I’ll discuss how the ideas about Colonial Revival are represented in the magazines,” Dr. Katz said. In the spring semester she will teach an American Art course with Professor David Lubin at Wake Forest University. She also has started a faculty “book club” of members from various fields, including the director of the Museum of Anthropology, the curator of The WFU Art Collections, Reynolda curator Allison Slaby, a faculty member from the School of Divinity, and a

curator from MESDA. “My hope is that after I’m gone, the people from the group will have connections,” she said. A history major in college, Dr. Katz said that there’s a difference in what historians do and what she does as an art historian. Historians study classes of people: the Big Picture. An art historian thinks about the relationship of, say, a bureau to a class of people. The people “have connections with an object,” and that helps us learn more about those people and those times.

In the current exhibition, Leyendecker and the Golden Age of American Illustration, J.C. Leyendecker is advertising Arrow collars. He is also “pointing out that masculinity is something you put on and take off.” In his paintings, the clothes have “crisp, sharp lines.” Seen in Leyendecker’s action-packed brushstrokes, “the man’s body is pushing out his clothes. He creates the idea of 20th-century masculinity as physical, natural, not put on. In the 18th and 19th centuries, men hid their bodies behind layers of clothing—and even wigs.” Dr. Katz has a book coming out in 2020 about politics and criticism in the art world of New York City newspapers from 1830 to 1860. “New York had 300 newspapers in the city at that time,” she said. Writers of all sorts—including Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman—wrote art reviews, among other things, for the newspapers.

Newport, RI. Photo courtesy American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY.

Walt Whitman, by the way, is a favorite in Dr. Katz’s household. Her husband, Kenneth Price, is a professor of American Literature at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive. He came to Winston-Salem with Dr. Katz and is teaching courses online; they are living in our lively downtown. One more connection with Reynolda House… Katharine and some of her ladies-club friends would walk three miles from the Fifth Street house to see Reynolda being constructed and to enjoy the grounds. Dr. Katz has made the walk. It took her an hour. “I’m a slow walker,” she said with a smile.

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November TUE

THUR

Interpreter training for new holiday tour: Through the Years, Christmas at Reynolda. 10 a.m. – 12 noon 2 – 4 p.m. Sign-up here

WED

Celebrate Reynolda fundraising events for the Museum and Gardens.

MON

through S AT

S AT

Holiday Stroll at Reynolda 2–8 p.m. Museum, Gardens, and Village shops open until 8 p.m.

December Object of the Month: The Old Hunting Grounds by Worthington Whittredge with Phil Archer 1 p.m.

TUE

and THUR

Holiday Decorating of the Historic House. 10 a.m. – until complete. Want to help? Sign-up here.

THUR

TUE

Wreath Decorating at the Gardens Two times on each date 12:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. $50; $35 for students, faculty/ staff, and Friends of Reynolda Gardens. Registration required here.

WED

Extended Holiday Shopping Hours in the Museum Store until 7:30 p.m. Continues December 6 and 7 until 8 p.m., and December 10 until 7 p.m.

FRI

Caroling Fridays begin! 3 p.m. Join our guests and staff in the Reception Hall for a festive round of singing along with the Aeolian Organ. Continues December 13 and 20.

Carolina Brass Holiday Pops Concert 7 p.m. $20; $15 Members and students.

SUN

A Christmas Memory. 4 p.m. $25; $20 Members and students

Object of the Month: Home in the Woods by Thomas Cole, with Allison Slaby and Katie Womack 1 p.m.

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