via

Years ago, when I was barely a teenager and a student at the High School of Music and Art, my parents organized an outing to a recently opened museum in the Berkshires. “It has some wonderful Impressionist paintings,” my father told me; I knew about them from New York museums. I have only fragmentary memories of that first visit to what I later learned was called the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, but I recall the excitement of arriving—after what seemed like an interminable drive—at a symmetrical white building in a bucolic setting. I can remember, too, being both horrified and fascinated by two hyper-realistic paintings, one of a naked boy with a snake and one of a gang of naked women encircling a man with goat’s legs, pictures that I was sure one of my art teachers, the exacting Miss Ridgeway, who had studied at the Bauhaus, would have termed “utterly without merit.” As to the promised Impressionists, I recognized a lot of rather sugary paintings by Renoir. Several of Degas’s dancers were pointed out to me with the expectation that, as an advanced student at the School of American Ballet, I would love them. I didn’t. By the standards of those of us under George Balanchine’s tutelage, those robust, turned-in girls in long tutus were hopeless, and I certainly didn’t identify with my near-coeval, the Little Dancer Fourteen Years Old. Most vivid is the recollection of my first encounter with a