Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Richmond, Virginia, United States
Richmond, Virginia, United StatesA single rainy day can be a great thing when you plan to
spend several days in a city with significant indoor activity options like
museums . A streak of two or three, though, puts a real damper on travel, literally
as well as figuratively. So I welcomed having one rainy day in Richmond for the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The VMFA is what I’d call a Goldilocks Museum – not too big
or too small, with a good collection and variety of art from all eras and some
different parts of the world, in attractive exhibition space with good
lighting. Most of the VMFA building is actually very modern, something
surprising for a city as conservative and tradition-bound as Richmond. I
envisioned a very symmetrical colonnaded neoclassical building for Richmond’s
collection, perhaps with some new modern wings more or less hidden. My only
complaint is that some of the top floor galleries, including 19th
century European art (impressionism and stuff) were closed because the roof of
that wing is being replaced.
Like the North Carolina Museum of Art, the VMFA is a
state-owned art collection, with some of the newer works displayed chosen from
new art exhibited at biennial contests it’s sponsored since it was established
in the 1930s . A state-owned art collection is a nice but somewhat unusual
concept nowadays, but back in the 1930s guv’mint-hatin’ was not as in vogue as
it has become in recent decades.
I found the collection of American paintings and sculpture
from colonial times through the twentieth century to be especially impressive
(fitting for Virginia). Some unique collection at VMFA include a very large
display of British Silverware and the Mellon Collection of British Sporting
Art. Paul Mellon bequeathed most of his large collection of British art to Yale
University (his alma mater), now housed there in its own museum, but also gave
a significant portion of his horsey and hunting dog paintings and sculptures to
Virginia.
VMFA’s large collection of South Asian art from India,
Nepal, and Tibet (regions I visited early in the year) led me to think about
the difference between seeing art and artifacts in situ rather than alongside
art from other cultures through history from around the world. I find the
experience very different when it is possible to place a civilization’s art in
context relative to others than when one is temporarily fully immersed in that
culture.
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