Tree-fecta of museums

Went on a little museum-hopping spree these last three days. Images of trees weren't my main object (except in the third) but were of course there in abundance. I started at MoMA, to see the Käthe Kollwitz show, but in the vast atrium found recent paintings of trees across the four seasons by nonagenarian Alex Katz. (Kollwitz' prints are largely treeless.)

Yesterday I popped over to the Brooklyn Museum, which is showing its splendid set of Hiroshige's 100 Famous Views of Edo, amplified by copies on various scales by Takashi Murakami. Hiroshige's scenes area all about what's in the foregound, which often made trees secondary (though billows of blooming sakura abound).

 

But the whole world of 19th century Edo was made of wood (the structure behind the fabrics and willows above is one of many fire towers in the Views), something indirectly shown in this scene, ostensibly of a ferry crossing at Zenkoji temple. Hiroshige's supposed objects are almost always obscured; the temple here is behind the title box! For its part the ferry has barely made it into the frame and will have to dodge a series of lumber boats.

The fabulously gnarled branches of plum trees get to be foreground and obstructed background here. This was one scene Murakami reproduced on a huge canvas, adding some fun little snibbets of color, perhaps a subtle nod to Von Gogh's copy of this same image, which also got Murakami's grand treatment.

And today, finally, we drove up to Hartford to see the Wadsworth Atheneum, the oldest public museum in the US (opened 180 years ago!), and a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. I was blown away by its European collection, especially a Caravaggio and a Poussin, but for the tree lover I was pleased to find a rendering of gawky Eastern white pines in Thomas Cole's "View on Lake Winnipiseogee" (1928).

I was joined by a young family admiring Rockwell Kent's "Vermont" (1923-7), the mother trying to steer her kids to appreciate that sometimes realism wasn't a painter's only concern. (I was entranced by the ghostly dead tree on the right.) As for the painting I'd gone in hopes of seeing, my old pash Georgia O'Keeffe's "The Lawrence Tree," I learned it was on loan to another exhibition! But, I was told, I could get a poster in the gift shop. I was tempted: O'Keeffe apparently said the painting could be hung any way the viewer wished.