It’s a small world, and Dorchester is a big part of it. Imagine my surprise when I came across one of our own last month regally ensconced on El Paseo del Prado, in Madrid, perhaps the most fashionable boulevard in all of Europe. There, at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, one of the world’s finest private art collections, you will find artworks from the Early Renaissance to Pop Art, with samples from just about any period in between, including Impressionist paintings by Childe Hassam, a famous artist who grew up on Olney Street.
The Thyssen family started in steelworks and went on to found the company that manufactures the elevators that are now in place all over the planet. One scion of this powerful German family was Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon, who preferred art to industry, and turned to collecting in the 1920s. The mission was carried on by Heinrich’s son, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who died in 2002.
The choice of Madrid as the home for this collection is a consequence of the late baron’s infatuation with a certain caberet bombshell and former Miss Spain named Carmen “Tita” Cervera. The baron married Tita in 1985, making her Dowager Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva. However, her title goes unrecognized in Spain because that rank of nobility no longer exists within the Spanish monarchy.
The baron’s fortune permitted him to acquire a small mountain of paintings and sculpture, which collection gives the impression that therein was quickly loaded two of everything, if that’s possible, making his museum into a veritable Noah’s Ark of Art. This is very different from the Prado Museum across the street, a collection sourced through inter-generational connoisseurship and aristocratic privilege that took centuries to build. By comparison, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum came together in the blink of an eye. Nevertheless, to be included in the Thyssen is an honor, something like getting a slot on the hit parade of Western art history’s greatest masterpieces.
The museum is separated into galleries featuring work from specific eras and regions, with three large rooms devoted to 19th century North American art. Labels in an art gallery can be distracting, but those provided at the Thyssen are vital to art spectators trying to figure out the flurry of culture that flashes by as they breeze through the galleries. Alongside each painting is a small plaque on which is printed information about the painting, including the place and birthdate of the artist. That’s where you will see Dorchester represented among the names of the towns where Fra Angelico, Bellini, Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, and Velazquez were born. The text reads: Dorchester (Childe Hassam, b. 1859).
Childe Hassam is well-known to Bostonians for his atmospheric painting of winter twilight on Boston Common that is hanging today at the MFA on Huntington Avenue. At the Thyssen, Hassam is represented by three oil paintings, “The French Breakfast,” “Plaza de La Merced, Ronda,” and, “September Clouds.” There are no paintings of Dot Ave. on the premises.
Hassam took his first art lessons at the Mather School and attended Dorchester High School. When his father’s business was devastated in the Great Boston Fire of 1872, Hassam left school and went to work, eventually getting a job as a wood engraver. With little formal art training, he managed to achieve early success as an illustrator. His passion for art was further stimulated by a trip to Europe in 1883. In 1884 he was teaching at Cowles School of Art on Dartmouth Street. In 1886, he moved to France to study at the Academie Julian in Paris.
Hassam was a leading practitioner of the impressionist method of painting in the United States, better known as American Impressionism. He was a terrific painter, an important painter, influential to a new class of young American artists. Hassam was also a good salesman with a strong work ethic and knack for business, two Yankee traits that served him well. Major museums lined up for his work and the price for his paintings dramatically increased. In 1906, he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Mr. Hassam was not what is called a bohemian artist.
His status as one of America’s pre-eminent artists was unchallenged for decades until Modernism clicked in for good, and Hassam suddenly became anachronistic. Late in his career, he railed against the “art boobys” behind Cubism, Surrealism, and other avant-garde movements. Hassam exhibited at the New York Amory Show of 1913, where he and another older colleague were nicknamed at a press dinner as “the mammoth and the mastodon of American Art.”
Hassam’s paintings were produced at a time when the vogue for art had become a middle-class pastime. The new “museum-goer” could find mythological allegory and royal portraiture on a majestic scale at public galleries, which displayed huge canvases that are the instruments of power and prestige. On the other hand, Hassam’s smaller paintings were made to hang in cozy drawing rooms, where the family could “withdraw” from formal society to relax and enjoy the simple charms of domestic felicity.
Modern artists are once again producing works of art that intimidate people through sheer size and plague the viewer with a funk of bewildering impressions, but Hassam’s bucolic landscapes bring us back to a time when art was comfortable, reassuring, and no challenge to bourgeois values. The Thyssen is a treasure chest full of old paintings and sculptures. Today, we have museum as icon, and the museum itself is often the work of art – think of the Guggenheim in Bilboa, Spain, or the Institute of Contemporary Art on Northern Avenue.
What has the museum become? Every visit is like making a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine (expensive), and the experience of seeing a painting, the expectation of which can increase its scale to enormous dimensions in the imagination, can be anti-climactic, as when the artwork in question is finally recognized as an object measurable by any hand-held ruler.
It’s almost enough to know that a painting exists, and to believe that it has meaning, than to actually see it. Sometimes a museum offers so much going on that it’s hard to concentrate, and you are left wondering: “Am I getting this?” The next time you are near the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, or any other museum, go inside and decide for yourself.
