Hiram Powers Proserpine, c. 1840

  • Hiram Powers’ “Proserpine,” c. 1840

The Washington Post got a tour and has posted this slideshow of Crystal Bridges, including views of previously undisclosed works by Hiram Powers (“Proserpine,” marble bust, 1840), John Singer Sargent (“Under the Willows,” 1887) and Robert Rauschenberg (“Untitled,” an oil, graphite and silkscreen composition, 1963).

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Update 1:

Here’s a story from Maine Antiques Digest about a Florida man who was arrested last year for selling fakes, including one of “Under the Willows.” Sargent painted several “Under the Willow” paintings, so the painting in the article may not be the one owned by Crystal Bridges, but the article says the real Sargent was in the Museum of Art in Houston, where other of CBMAA’s paintings have hung.

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Update 2:

The Washington Post’s story on Crystal Bridges is here. From the story:

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While millionaires and billionaires before her have created museums, Walton’s Crystal Bridges — with its mix of contemporary and classic art, and its origins in the frugal, self-made ethos of the Wal-Mart empire — feels decidedly different from the museums of the Gilded Age, or the boomtown art collections of mid-century Texas. There is no anxiety about the status of American art, no looking to Europe for validation. There’s no embarrassment about the immense fortune that made the museum possible, no old-fashioned cultural money-laundering in the manner of Carnegie or Mellon. Nor is there any worry about whether the art is too conservative or too edgy. It is a mature, serious, relatively progressive museum launched at a time when increasing numbers of people consider themselves socially tolerant and fiscally conservative. It is a museum for people who are as comfortable with art as social experiment and provocation, as they are with untrammeled, winner-takes-all capitalism.

I’m not quite sure how large the audience described in the latter sentence would be, and I would hope the museum, Walton-funded though it is, is also for people who think untrammeled, winner-takes-all capitalism is destroying the middle class, and a valid subject for art as well.

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