I’m off to California and Mexico for three weeks, but thought that I would stick in a reminder to folks who are staying in Boston to drop by the Museum of Fine Arts.
Ansel Adams is the big show right now. The photographs are drawn from a private collection and include lots of stuff we haven’t seen before. It is not just “one damn mountain after another”.
MITers will love the two shows that can be loosely categorized as “stuff belonging to William I. Koch.” Koch was the scion of a Midwestern oil family, studied chemical engineering at MIT, won the America’s Cup sailboat race the first time he entered, and built up a big energy business for himself. Koch has a house on the Cape and a tax-avoiding residence in Florida, both normally filled with fantastic art treasures from 500 B.C. through contemporary. It is not a huge collection, because everything has to fit in the two houses, but the Picassos and Modiglianis are familiar. There is a comprehensive Western collection of Remington sculpture and Russell paintings.
Koch loves boats and therefore the museum has a couple of America’s Cup entrants mounted on poles in the front. Koch also owns models of nearly every yacht that has ever raced in an America’s Cup. The models are displayed on the first floor.
I really enjoyed the Koch collection, probably because the man shucked the traditional collector’s role of following one or two periods in one or two media, and just bought stuff he likes. It restored a bit of my faith in humanity to think that one can collect art without being all that much of a snob about it.
Ansel Adams is the big show right now. The photographs are drawn from a private collection and include lots of stuff we haven’t seen before.