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Williams Museum Goes Over Niagara Falls
William Morris Hunt and Alec Soth on Honeymoon
by Edgar Allen Beem
oil on canvas
Williams College Museum of Art; Gift of the Estate of J. Malcolm Forbes
Chromogenic print
© Alec Soth. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Chromogenic print
© Alec Soth. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
The Williams College Museum of Art has mounted a series of late fall exhibitions that celebrate and provide context for its 1878 William Morris Hunt masterpiece "Niagara Falls," a symphonic oil of one of America's iconic landscapes. Hunt (1824-1879) was a Vermont native who became a celebrated Boston portrait and landscape painter.
A Strong Impression: William Morris Hunt's Niagara (through January 31, 2010) brings Hunt's monumental painting together with oil, pastel, and charcoal studies as well as rare books, maps, photographs, Niagara Falls souvenirs, and an oil sketch of the falls by Frederic Edwin Church, whose 1857 painting of Niagara inspired his own.
Both Hunt and Church (1826-1900) painted Niagara Falls from its most startling aspect, the top of the broad, smooth horseshoe precipice from which the falls seem to be disappearing into a hole in the earth. The most impressive vantage on most waterfalls is from below, but Niagara Falls is a top down phenomenon, the Niagara River seemingly swallowed rather than spilled.
In William Morris Hunt and the French Tradition (through January 31), WCMA places Hunt's landscapes in the context of the influence of the naturalistic Barbizon School, painters such as Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles François Daubigny. The art historical significance of the two Hunt shows is scholarly and insightful, but Williams also explores more modern and contemporary takes on Niagara Falls.
Alec Soth: NIAGARA (through January 10) presents Soth?s 2006 photographic project that examined Niagara Falls as an American cliché and romantic honeymoon destination. Alec Soth, a Minnesota artist, burst onto the contemporary photography scene in 2004, the year he was featured in the Whitney Biennial, he published Sleeping by the Mississippi, and he was invited to join the prestigious Magnum Photos agency. Soth is the photo-poet of the ordinary, a Midwesterner who casts a bemused, ironic eye on everyday life.
Soth's Niagara Falls is a rather sad settlement of seedy motels filled with honeymooning couples in various stages of nudity and neurasthenia, bored and a bit bewildered in what Soth calls "the aftermath of passion." He captures the tawdry and the gauche in gorgeous large-format color photographs.
And as a coda to Niagara grand and Niagara clichéd, Williams tops off its falls festival with Media Field: Niagara (through January 31), a pop culture look at vintage films that portray such iconic Americans as The Three Stooges and Marilyn Monroe in pilgrimages to the landmark waterfalls.
[Williams College Museum of Art, 15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Williamstown, MA. 413-597-2429.]
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