A Manoogian Collection exhibition at the Vero Beach Museum of Art is always a treat to see – and revisit often during its run. The American Spirit: Selections from the Manoogian Collection is the latest in a succession of Vero exhibitions from the nationally renowned collection of Richard and Jane Manoogian, who have long had a home on the ocean in John’s Island.
The current Holmes Gallery show brings back a few favorites from the collection previously seen at the museum, as well as a host of delights never seen by Vero’s public.
The Manoogians began collecting American paintings in the 1970s; the first public exhibition of their holdings was displayed at the National Gallery of Art back in 1989.
Vero’s current wide-ranging show includes 19th and 20th century American paintings, with works from the Hudson River School, impressionist landscapes, figure paintings, trompe l’oeil pictures and, for good measure, two watercolor paintings from Andrew Wyeth’s “Helga Series.”
The first Manoogian show at the Vero Beach museum dates to 1997; Selections from American Grandeur: Masterpieces from the Masco and Manoogian Collections appeared in the Holmes Gallery.
Richard Manoogian is chairman emeritus of Masco Corporation, a Detroit-based conglomerate of home improvement and construction companies founded by his father. Alex Manoogian, who died 10 years ago at the age of 95, made his fortune after creating the single-handle faucet. The family home now houses the mayor of Detroit.
The Manoogians followed up their first loan to the Vero museum with four more exhibitions. Along with the current show, there was a 2004 exhibit of paintings from the Hudson River School; selections of American impressionism in 2006; and a show of 14 paintings in 2011.
Director Lucinda Gedeon and Curator Jay Williams chose the works for the exhibit from photo images provided by the collection’s curator.
“They gave us everything we asked for,” a pleased Williams remarks.
Williams says the works on display will give viewers an idea of the scope of the Manoogian Collection. Works fall into three groups: Hudson River School, 19th century realism and trompe l’oeil.
And then there are the Wyeths, hung in isolation near the entrance to the show.
“Stylistically they don’t belong to any of the three groups, so we put them up there on their own wall,” says Williams.
The exhibition’s title wall primes the visitor with the first “Oh, wow” picture in the show, a panoramic “Niagara Falls at Sunset” painted by George Loring Brown in 1861. The picture is a bird’s-eye view of Niagara’s churning rush into the horseshoe-shaped abyss.
That’s not the only painting of the subject in the show. Hang a right into the Hudson River School part of the gallery and you will gasp anew at “View of Niagara Falls” by Ferdinand Richardt. The 1865 composition presents a scene at the bottom of the falls where sightseers posed along a rocky stretch in the foreground are covered in a cloud of spray.
Those figures not only give you a sense of scale, says Williams. They also remind you that there were no safety guidelines or guardrails around to protect the intrepid tourist of yore.
“It was like, ‘OK buddy, don’t fall over the falls!’” he quips.
Better-known names in this section of the exhibition include Albert Bierstadt, Asher B. Durand and Thomas Moran, but don’t expect the expected grand American vistas from them here.
In the mid-19th century Thomas Moran’s paintings helped to familiarize the folks back east with the majesty of the Grand Canyon, but the view on display owes more to the artist’s imagination than nature’s handiwork.
Moran’s 1864 “The New World” is “unlike any other thing I’ve seen by him,” says Williams.
The jam-packed vision of a pre-Columbian America even includes a cluster of colorful Native Americans waving from their mountainous seaside perch at the distant sails of an approaching ship. A snake in the tropical garden downwind of the group bodes ill of the encounter.
Likewise, the Bierstadt shows us a scene of Nassau, where Bierstadt and his wife retreated in 1876 to alleviate the symptoms of her tuberculosis, while the Durand “Dance of the Haymakers” of 1851 looks suspiciously like an old-world scene.
The gee-whiz aspect of the show continues with Franz Bieberstein’s “World’s Columbian Exposition” of 1893, a 36-by-54-inch canvas that documents the glimmering vastness of Chicago’s White City. Nearby is Frederic Rondel’s “Statue of Liberty Celebration,” a harbor scene of the October 1886 event that saw Navy vessels, double-decker steamboats and small pleasure craft jostling for the best view of the newly installed colossus. The cacophony of the scene can be imagined by the rising spurts of steam from screaming whistles and smoke from booming cannon salutes that envelope Miss Liberty in a luminous haze.
If you haven’t begun oohing and ahhing yet, there is still hope for you in the trompe l’oeil section at the rear of the gallery. It begins with three William Harnett gems and ends with the same number of works – only larger – by living American painter David Brega.
“The trompe l’oeil style never seems to go out of style,” says Williams. Paintings like Brega’s “The Magazine Antiques” (1986) will have you so absorbed in reading its meticulous details that you might not hear the shouts of the gallery guards until your nose is almost against the canvas (or hardboard, in Brega’s case).
For those who adore American Impressionism, there is a gleaming portrait of three little girls by Frank Benson; a classic Edward Potthast of children playing in a tidal pool; two sun-dappled Childe Hassams; a magnificent Frederick Carl Frieseke, “Two Ladies in a Boat (Grey Day on the River)”; and Martha Walter’s “Nursemaid and Baby at Gloucester, Massachusetts.”
That last is a daring study in blue of an anonymous woman, her torso turned from us, with a blond baby in her lap.
It’s easy to see why Williams placed Andrew Wyeth’s “Helga” watercolors at the end of the show. “In the Orchard” and “Walking in her Cape Coat” present the Teutonic beauty in a chilly winter scene and a dark-valued, almost abstract fall landscape.
They are a tonic to the surfeit of creamy treats that precede them. Think of them as a water biscuit to clear your palette for a second helping.
