The Fountain of Creativity

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Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Today I visited one of the most important museums on the entire trip.

I ended up spending the entire day there.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was founded very late by art museum standards, a mere 75 years ago.

The devastation of the Civil War meant there was not enough wealth available before then in Virginia for art patronage.

When I last visited, the museum was building a major expansion.

The expansion is now open, and it held a very significant show.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso is widely considered the most important artist of the 20^th century.

He is certainly the most well known.

He painted some of the century’s most important works, including Les Demoiselles de Avignon, Girl Before a Mirror, and Guernica.

He created tens of thousands of paintings, etchings, and sculptures over his lifetime.

He was also an enormous pack rat; filling room after room of the villas he owned with his own work, those of artists he admired, books, and supplies.

At his death, his estate owned thousands of pieces of art.

His estate also owed a rather large tax bill.

The French government allowed Picasso’s heirs to pay the taxes by donating artwork from the estate, and these pieces became the Musee National Picasso, the largest single-artist museum in the world.

The museum is being renovated, so many of the paintings are going on tour.

The VMFA is its only stop in the US.

(Late addition) The tour was later extended to other US museums.





The exhibit is a blockbuster, and the museum knows it.

Tickets need to be bought in advance.

With a ticket, there is then a long line to actually get into the gallery.

To make the time pass, there is a film on Picasso playing in monitors near the line.

The film is pretty good.





The gallery is divided into multiple rooms, based roughly on the different phases of Picasso’s career.

He was constantly investigating new forms, and changed styles regularly.

None of the works have any labels beyond title and date.

To get the most from the show, it’s important to read up on Picasso’s career beforehand (thankfully, I had brought an Art History book on this trip).

The show has over one hundred works.

Some of them are studies and sketches for masterpieces held elsewhere (including several for the aforementioned Les Demoiselles de Avignon and Guernica) while others are completed paintings in their own right.

Some of his sculpture is also included.

The show as a whole tries to show the progression of Picasso’s career as a whole instead of just a parade of well known hits.

Seeing it requires time and study to appreciate it all, and I took several hours doing so.

American Art Galleries

After that, I explored the rest of the new wing.

The VFMA is an encyclopedic museum, but it emphasizes three strengths: American art, art from after 1945, and sporting art.

I’m very interested in the first two, and spent many hours seeing it all (after already spending several hours on Picasso).





Both areas are arranged chronologically.

Art from a particular era is grouped into a room.

A label in the room explains the era and the role that the art played during that time.

This context helps with understanding the art better.

Most of the rooms contain decorative arts (bureaus, chairs, couches, etc.) along with the paintings.

For me, the most meaningful room was dedicated to the Civil War.

Except for war correspondents, most artists did not depict war events during that time.

Art was a form of escapism.

Nonetheless, there were exceptions, and this room has several of them.

One painting shows Union soldiers (including the artist) playing cards during down time in the final Richmond campaign.

Another shows a Southern widow and her slaves burying a dead Confederate officer, almost certainly her husband.

Poignant work, even a century and a half later.





The last part of the American art is the years between the World Wars.

This was a discordant time in American art history.

Artists had been exposed to the European advent guard, and had not yet created equal innovations of their own.

There is a huge variety of styles, from abstraction to gritty realism, to celebration of consumer culture.

The exhibit is deliberately quirky in this era.

The museum was founded during this time, and during its early days it held regular art shows.

Most of the early collection was formed by buying work from these shows.

The work is shown in this room to display the evolution of institutional taste.

The label on one painting by Stuart Davis notes that it was hugely controversial when it was first acquired, but now gets lent out more than any other painting in the museum.

Art after 1945 Galleries

After American Art came Art after 1945.

This art is grouped by movement, and the groups are ranged roughly chronologically.

Each room has a label that tries to explain the different movements.

They attempt to explain esoteric art concepts in understandable language, so they run pretty long.

The labels are worth the time it takes.

The section as a whole runs up to the current day, and three rooms are dedicated to contemporary art.

For an encyclopedic museum, this is a lot.

I enjoyed the contemporary art the most, since I had seen less of this work elsewhere.





On the way out, I got one last beautiful work.

The museum atrium contains a large plastic sculpture that looks like a 3-D graph gone insane.

It’s covered in peaks and valleys, and the different parts are colored all sorts of different ways.

The piece is a “random sculpture” by Sol LeWitt (see A Whole Lot About Nothing).

He designed the color pattern, and then wrote up a series of instructions for using chance and randomness to turn that pattern into a sculpture.

The final form was made by a computer.

Since it’s in the atrium, it can be seen from both the floor and the walkways above.

It looks particularly beautiful at night, reflected in the glass wall.

Apparently the museum has a significant problem keeping people from touching it.





By the time I left, I had spent roughly seven hours seeing things.

This is the third-longest I’ve ever spent in an art museum.

The expansion is a winner, and the VMFA now ranks at the top of the regional museums list.

Like the best of midsized museums, it knows its strengths and emphasizes them.

Today was a very long day, but a very rewarding one.

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Photos

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The new museum wing is on the left, a reflecting pool is in the center, the original building is on the right

VMFA Entrance
Entrance to the new wing at night. Spotlights reflecting off the surrounding pool create the light effects.