Even if you, like many of us, didn’t win a gold medal snowboarding the half-pipe at the Olympics, late winter disappointments and ennui can be successfully leveled by viewing the current exhibit at Williamstown’s Clark Art Institute.
Through April 22, an encyclopedic array of drawings on paper — the collection of the late New York art dealer and patron Eugene Thaw — is on display. The big names are all here, ranging from Rembrandt, Brueghel and Rubens to Gauguin and Pollock. There are stunning surprises as well from those not known for art, such as images from the novelist Victor Hugo (“Les Miserables”) and the German writer Johann van Goethe.
“Each work is a highly finished drawing,” Jay Clarke said during a press preview. “Mr. Thaw wasn’t necessarily interested, like some collectors, of getting roughly sketched drawings which may have had a question of attribution.”
Clarke is the institute’s curator of prints and drawings and led a press preview through six galleries spanning generations of artists obsessed with the qualities of light.
In opening remarks Olivier Meslay, the institute’s director, described Thaw as “a legend” in the museum community.
“No important collection in the world was able to do anything without going to see Eugene Thaw,” he said. “He was an expert taste-maker and the discoverer of many, many treasures.”
Clarke recalled that the art dealer “was not at all ‘showy’” and in some ways was a bit private. “He was always a gentleman,” she said.
When Thaw visited the institute’s prints and drawings collection, she said “It was like a light switch went on. He was so excited. He just completely came to life looking at these drawings.”
When shown the works of one particular favorite, he knew exactly where each drawing came from and who the first, second and third owners had been.
The Bronx native graduated from Columbia University with a degree in art history, and in 1950, he opened a small gallery above the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel. Recalling those post-war years he’d noted that he haunted book and antique shops, often procuring remarkable finds at bargain prices.
“Great art collecting need not be based on a great fortune,” he once said. “Education, experience and eye are more important.”
A few years before his marriage to his assistant, Clare Eddy in 1954, he began amassing a personal collection of drawings. This avocation would continue for another 50 years.
His pursuits were eclectic. He also became keen on Eurasian bronzes, medieval ornaments and 18th-century French pottery.
Thaw believed that art should be shared with the public rather than sequestered in the dusty studies of the wealthy.
In the New York of the 1950s, there was only one curator of valuable drawings who worked at the Pierpont Morgan Library.
When he offered the library the gift of a valuable image, he was “calmly rejected.” He was told that the institution didn’t accept artwork from dealers.
In time, as Thaw’s reputation for integrity became well known, the Morgan Library and Museum relented. Later, in 1975, they hosted a pioneering exhibit of his collection. The cornerstone of the museum’s collection of 20th-century art centers upon his contributions. Thaw also became the first art dealer to become a trustee of the Morgan.
A longtime friend of Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, Thaw created the definitive four-volume catalogue raisonné of her husband’s work in the 1970s.
Working from a Park Avenue gallery for the last 40 years of his life, Thaw gifted several institutions with his finds. Among them were New York’s Fenimore and Metropolitan museums as well as the Clark. He and his wife also established a namesake charitable trust to support nonprofit artistic and environmental organizations.
During the press preview, Clarke explained that, among other unusual aspects to the collection, Thaw ensured that virtually all frames for the images are from the period in which they were created. Failing that, other frames were made to look antique. Whether the artist was obscure or famous, the works are in pristine condition.
The curator first stopped by an ink on paper drawing from 1545 by the Italian Domenico Campagnola. The scene is from the artist’s depictions of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelations. An earthquake has tossed formidable buildings into a heap like chess pieces and the image looks as fresh as when it was first created.
Clarke explained that even the early artists chose expensive paper free of acids that would prematurely age a rendering. By the 17th-century, paper was more readily available and, in the art trade, drawn images were far more transportable than oil on canvas. Within another century, the business of buying and selling such works rocketed.
To preserve the well-being of these treasures, the overhead gallery lighting is screened to no more than five “foot candles” of illumination. Museum paintings are displayed in the range of from 25- to 50-foot candles. In comparison, a 100-watt light bulb produces 137-foot candles.
“Some works (from Thaw’s collection) are not shown due to their fragility,” Clarke said. “Others you can show for a period of time and then they have to rest for five years. So this is their big moment in the light.”
Where else in the region will you find sketchbooks by Edgar Degas and Jackson Pollock as well as illustrated letters written by Vincent van Gogh?
Thaw was a significant collector of Degas’ work and there are more than a half dozen drawings here. The Frenchman was highly experimental with various mediums. Looking closely at “Mademoiselle Becat at the Café,” you’ll find that he’s painted figures over a colored lithograph. Nearby is a graphite study by his colleague Mary Cassatt displaying her immediate family.
A few paces from the Degas sketchbook are pastel studies from 1880 that the artist made of the ballet student Marie van Goethem. These images resolved certain design problems he faced prior to creating the famed sculpture known as “Little Dancer, Age Fourteen.” Incidentally, the beeswax rendering, when exhibited, set off a firestorm of controversy in as far as the girl wasn’t depicted as either beautiful or heroic. Critics lambasted her as looking common and from the streets. Indeed, van Goethem was an “opera rat” who had joined the Paris ballet as a way out of poverty. The sculpture itself was then exiled to Degas’ closet for some 40 years. Long after, a wealthy financier purchased the work and it was recast in bronze. A copy can be found at the Clark.
Alongside Pollock’s sketchbook, displaying images suggesting a fever dream, is an untitled 1944 work, a tsunami of wild human and animal forms.
Clarke explained that the drawing was created at a time in the troubled artist’s life when he was involved with Jungian analysis.
He would bring these drawings and sketches to a therapist and the two would attempt to analyze the possible symbolism within.
Nearby, a 130-year-old correspondence, sent by van Gogh to a protégé, Emile Bernard, also depicts the design of two paintings.
Fans of the Dutchman will recognize the small ink renderings of “The Sower” and “The Bridge at Arles.” The artist had also noted what colors he would use in their final renderings.
Images range from the comedic to the sublime. A work by the Italian Giovanni Tiepolo titled “The Quack Dentist” conjures up extraction pains endured in the late 1700s, apparently a very public, crowd-pleasing event. Other artists from that period artistically mock the social foibles of that time. A cartoonish drawing by Paul Klee, “Big Ones and Little Ones” is an amalgam of curious, wiry stick figures living in a two-dimensional world.
Among the more dramatic images is Theodore Gericault’s study of a black man, the central figure for his enormous, 16-by-23-foot canvas, “The Raft of the Medusa.”
The artist was an abolitionist and was incensed by an 1816 incident wherein a French naval frigate had run aground. Officers and crew took to lifeboats, leaving 147 passengers on a raft.
Fifteen survived. Gericault’s painting is said to represent the apogee of the Romantic Movement.
This comprehensive exhibit was first shown at the Morgan; the Clark is its only other venue. The show, and Thaw’s career, is studiously defined within the pages of a companion catalogue, “Drawn to Greatness” (The Morgan Library and Museum; 296 pgs.; $40).
Meslay said that originally the exhibit was to be a celebration of Thaw’s career and collection. The New Yorker, however, passed away in early January at the age of 90. The institute director said that, instead, the show serves as a memorial.
“This was really what he saw as his life’s work,” Clarke concluded.
“Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection” continues at the Clark Art Institute through April 22.
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The admission cost is $20, though ages 18 and under and students with ID are admitted for free. Free every first Sunday of the month through May.
Don Stewart is a freelance writer who lives in Plainfield. He has written for The Recorder since 1994.