Arrive Magazine - March/April, 2011

Yet, when I read that the Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, had just been unveiled, after more than a decade and a $504 million expansion of the 1909 Beaux-Arts building, I thought it might be a good time to take a second look. Boston has been undergoing an art boom of late, with the 2006 opening of the new Institute of Contemporary Art building on the waterfront and a Renzo Piano-designed addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum scheduled to debut in 2012.

Joining me was my wife, Lisa, an art historian firmly rooted in the local art world (opposites attract, no?), who has worked at both the MFA and the Danforth Museum of Art, in nearby Framingham. The problem for most people, says Lisa, is that they venture to an art museum from out of town and feel forced to view the entire collection in an exhausting blur. To rekindle my love for art, she would focus on just one work in the entire museum.

“After writing in the morning, novelist Somerset Maugham would stroll over to the Louvre almost on a daily basis to see just one or two paintings,” she adds.

When I learned that the Art of Amer-
icas Wing displays a mind-numbing
collection of more than 5,000 works of
art spread across 53 galleries, I consid-
ered my wife’s idea to be brilliant. We
walked into the soaring, glass-enclosed
courtyard, up two flights of stairs, into
the Sargent Gallery, and were soon
peering at the four young girls in John
Singer Sargent’s famous painting The
Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

Lisa guided me to Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with an Angel, from the 1470s, to point out not the cherubic faces for which the artist was known but the little patch of rolling hillside visible outside the window. It is one of the first paintings to depict any form of landscape.

I’m uninspired, but we make our final stop at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Built on the shores of Boston Harbor in the burgeoning Fan Pier section of the city, the glass-enclosed fourth-floor galleries extend over the Atlantic, offering views of sailboats gliding by and the city skyline on the opposite shores. I follow Lisa to a pair of wooden block towers titled 11 Upside Down, created by Manhattan artists Ivan Navarro and Courtney Smith.

“Look down,” she says, and I stare through the glass top at a series of light bulbs and mirrors that form an infinite chain of reflections, as if one were free-falling down the tower.

“Fantastic,” I shout to Lisa, thinking that this is exactly the work of art I was looking for—one that speaks to a contemporary audience and its never-ending, frenetic pace.

The problem for most people, says Lisa, is that they venture to an art museum from out of town and feel forced to view the entire collection in an exhausting blur.