Riches of the City: Portland Collects is up now at the
Portland Art Museum through May 22nd. The exhibit, taking it's title from the museum's founder and long time patron, C.E.S. Wood, is a terrific celebration of collecting in Portland.
The show includes valuable works from Asian Art to Contemporary and demonstrates that there is a lot of great art tucked away in Portland.
While
there are great examples of why exhibits of this scope can be lousy, this exhibit is not one of them (
Things I love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch at the
MFA, Boston in 2005 was a good example of a collector's show turned "museum-owed-me-one" spectacle. It featured among a smattering of art: trophies, a large collection of Magnums and even larger wine vessels (already opened) and even two sailboats installed into the front lawn).
It is the stronger, lesser seen work hanging in
Riches that made it enjoyable.Among those pieces was a great
Adolphe Braun photograph lent by
Stu Levy.
The untitled photograph(not featured here, but very similar)has an aged sepia glow that, along with it's mundane subject matter of a tabletop bouquet and date of around 1855, would be easily dismissed simply as an early photographic study.
Looking closer and minding the eerie, narrow focus and clumsiness of the image (never mind the unusual, truncated composition) it's apparent that the flowers are wilted, dying.
