The Parrish Art Museum, image: Hufton + Crow
In 1897 when Samuel Longstreth Parrish established a small art museum in the Village of Southampton to house his collection of Italian Renaissance paintings and classical sculpture reproductions, he could never have imagined it would turn into the eye-catching structure that now sits alongside Montauk Highway in Watermill. While Parrish’s original building was cozy, Italianate, and brick, this new building, designed by renowned Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, is massive, Modern, and concrete. But the art world has changed since Parrish opened his little cultural outpost in the Hamptons, and without proper temperature control, enough wall space, or room for large cocktail parties, his building was thoroughly outdated.
The long narrow building cuts a striking figure from the road. The outer walls of the building, stretching just over 600 feet, are made of concrete poured in a wood form. Bits of wood are left caked into the concrete, giving the walls a rough and casual finish, and they are topped by a simple double peaked roof of corrugated metal. Two subtle, visitor-friendly touches include a concrete lip that juts out from the outer wall and runs its entire length to serve as a bench, and a roof with an exaggerated overhang to provide protection from the sun and summer showers. It is said the design was meant to be an abstracted version of the East End studios of various artists, but a few critics have said, not inaccurately, it looks more like an industrial chicken coop. The overall design is modest, and might not stick out in a row of other modern museums or contemporary galleries, but set among a waving field of Hamptons’ grasses and an orchard style tree planting, its restraint becomes noticeable.
The Parrish Art Museum, image: Hufton + Crow
The simplicity of the exterior carries over to the interior. The floor is concrete, the walls white, and the ceiling made up of exposed wood beams. A long central hallway runs the length of the building with gallery spaces breaking off to either side, giving the building a logical and easily navigable flow. There is ample wall space for display, natural light enters from skylights whenever possible, and large windows link the building to the beauty of the surrounding natural landscape. It is a building, in short, that shows art well, which is all one really hopes for in a new museum.
The main show on view while I was passing through was “Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating,” which is the artist’s first solo exhibition in an American museum and the first retrospective survey of her drawings. Known primarily for her sculptures and installations of “nonfunctional architecture” as she likes to call them, this large exhibition shows the museum’s ambitions and gives viewers a large of Aycock’s drawings. Her structures, with their whimsical uselessness, are often described as fantastical, and these drawings appear to be the playground for her imagination.
Upon first seeing these drawings, one feels slightly underwhelmed and unsure of what to make of them. The colors are muted, the imagery is dense and none of the drawings really stands out. But this seems to be part of Aycock’s strategy. Lacking a sudden impact and visual pop, these drawings encourage the viewer to go up close to see what they are really about, and after spending a little time thinking them through, it’s hard not to become intrigued by these complex compositions riddled with all sorts of symbols and peculiar juxtapositions.
Alice Aycock (American, born 1946), The Celestial City Game, 1988. Black ink and watercolor on cream paper, 61 1/2 x 91 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Museum purchase with Funds provided by the Parrish Art Museum Collector’s Circle
Almost all the drawings seem to have two main components: one objective and the other subjective. Aycock begins with things that are considered objective: mathematical and geometrical forms, games (defined as they are by a set of known rules), maps (both terrestrial and celestial), or, in the case of The Rosetta Stone City Intersected by the Celestial Alphabet (1985), an archaeological artifact. She then superimposes subjective imagery, and symbols from her imagination and different cultures, onto or into them. She puts architectural schematics on star maps, surrounds a snakes and ladders game board with a city plan from an eighth-century illuminated manuscript, and liberally incorporates hieroglyphics, characters, and pictographs into her work, thus linking the objective to specific human experiences and interpretations of reality.
Aycock puts down a lot in these drawings, leaving viewers with the tough task of picking it all up. I detected an interest in mythology, dream interpretation, psychoanalysis, literature, archeology, postmodernism, post-structuralism, physics, machinery, and structural engineering, but at root these works seem to suggest something like what Nietzsche did—that there are no facts, only interpretations. An alternate explanation would be that these works really are just Aycock’s dream world spilled out on paper. Whatever the case, Aycock certainly lures you into her world with these drawings, and it’s not always easy to find your way out.
John Henry Twachtman, (American 1853-1902), Horseshoe Falls, Niagara, ca. 1894. Oil on canvas, 30 ½ x 25 3/8 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Littlejohn Collection
The remaining galleries are dedicated to exhibitions of works from the museum’s permanent collection, something that wasn’t possible in the old Parrish’s limited confines. There’s a small exhibition of works by twentieth-century realist painter and Southampton resident Fairfield Porter, a larger exhibition on the subtle and elegant abstractions of Esteban Vicente, and two exhibitions on the works of American Impressionist William Merritt Chase (the Parrish has the largest public collection of Chase paintings and an extensive archive on his life and work). One of these focuses on paintings, chiefly portraits, from different points in Chase’s career, and the other features landscapes of America and abroad by Chase and fellow American Impressionists John Henry Twachtman and Frederick Childe Hassam, but both exhibitions remind one just how good some of the American Impressionists really were.
Willem de Kooning (born Netherlands, 1904-1997), Untitled XXXVIII, 1983. Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Museum Purchase, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun Fund, Mrs. Lawrence B. Dunham Fund, in Memory of Lilian Haines Crittenden, and Alice Crocker Bequest Fund, and with funds from Ambassador and Mrs. Ronald Lauder, and Ahmet and Mica Ertegun
And finally there is a beautiful late de Kooning painting, Untitled XXXVIII (1983), which I hope never leaves its current position. Heavily worked under layers of red and blue break through a smooth, almost powdery, field of white in gentle curves and els. It is a painting with the clarity of composition befitting an artist in old age who knows what he wants to do and has the experience and ability to realize it.
So what to make of the new Parrish? The most important thing about the museum is that this new building, and its 12,000 square feet of gallery space, allows many more of the Parrish’s 2,600 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper to be displayed. The museum’s permanent collection now has room to breathe and new gifts are said to be coming in faster than ever. Though I thought some of the larger gallery spaces were a bit empty and easily could have accommodated a few more works, this feels like a minor growing pain symptomatic of the transition to such a dramatically larger space. It seems that director Terrie Sultan has all the pieces to turn the Parrish into the cultural center for the East End of Long Island that she wants it to be. The task now is to make sure it doesn’t fall short of its potential. If these early exhibitions are any indication of the museum’s overall direction, I think it is off to a very good start.
The Parrish Art Museum is located at 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, N.Y.; (631) 283-2118.