A Manhattan-style gallery in the heart of New Hampshire

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David Ecclestone visits the Currier Museum, Manchester, New Hampshire

I was in Manchester, New Hampshire recently as a fugitive from Hurricane Irene, which was threatening to swamp my vacation on Cape Cod.  Manchester is an old mill town that has had to reinvent itself after the decline of the textile industry in the 1920s.  It is now a commercial, industrial hub with a regional airport and six university or college campuses.  All the same, there’s not a lot to draw the tourist, as the limited coverage in my travel guide implies. Yet there is one feature that will always make Manchester worth a visit: the Currier Museum of Art. 

The building arises impressively on an extensive lot in the middle of a hinterland of churches of various denominations, interspersed by disparate villas, some of which are visibly suffering from multiple occupancy.  An ambitious museum extension was completed in 2007 and now provides the best approach, from the north via Prospect Street.  The entrance plaza is dominated by Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Origins, 2001–4, a towering yet proportionate structure in red and partly unpainted steel, firmly balanced on a tripod and reaching ambitiously upward with both closed and open forms.   Beyond it, the museum’s reception area is open and welcoming, with seating to allow a moment’s pause before deciding on your approach to the collections.  If further reflection is needed, there is a café in the winter garden, which is in fact the now-enclosed south entrance of the original building.  Bringing the entrance within the new building provides protection for its sumptuous mosaics.

This regional museum is ambitious enough to invite comparison with the big boys in Manhattan.  Like the Frick, it was founded by a legacy from a wealthy individual, and also like the Frick it waited upon the subsequent death of the widow for the plans to be pursued.  Moody Currier, lawyer, banker and politician, had died in 1898, but it was on the death of Hannah Currier in 1915 that his plans to start an art museum, using their home and land to provide premises, were enacted.  The museum was not opened to the public until 1929, two years before the Whitney in New York.  Unlike both the Manhattan galleries the legacy did not include a significant personal collection of art works.  The Curriers were not collectors; their legacy was simply the premises and the funds.  Recently the Museum has benefited from another substantial bequest: 43 million dollars, plus his own collection of paintings and paperweights, from industrialist Henry Melville Fuller, a long-time friend of the gallery and for some while a trustee.  This sum is very much in the same league as the record 72.7 million dollars grant by the Annenberg Foundation to the Metropolitan in New York.

What, then, does the Currier have to offer apart from its impressive buildings and its continuously expanding educational programme?  What of the collection itself?  It is quite properly weighted towards American art, which is not to deny the presence of significant European works, particularly works on paper.  There is a series of pre-Reformation, darkly expressive, Durer woodcuts (regrettably not currently on view except on the website), which contrast sharply with the cool objectivity his 1526  Erasmus of Rotterdam.

One fruitful way to explore the Currier is to embrace the American accent, but to look all the time for the European linkages.  Even something as uncompromisingly American as the work of the Hudson River School (strongly represented at the Currier) throws up a painter constantly on the move between continents.  Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900) did finally settle in the Hudson Valley (upstate New York) but only after long stays in Rome and in London.  This transatlantic lifestyle was common among artists in the later nineteenth century: John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeil Whistler are other illustrious examples.  Cropsey’s  An Indian Summer Morning in the White Mountains  of 1857 was in fact painted in England and shown for the first time at the spring exhibition of the Royal Academy.  His reputation was soon established on London (he enjoyed an audience with Queen Victoria in 1862) and it preceded his return to America. 

The feeling of frontier settlement, such a central part of the ante-bellum American national narrative, is feelingly captured in Cropsey’s oil of 1859, Winter Landscape, North Conway, NH.  Cropsey handles the restrained palate of the snow scene with great subtlety, using tonality to tell the story.  The only figure is minute and mid-tone, formally insignificant, and his dog has almost disappeared; but this all makes him more heroic, pointing with his axe at the tonally assertive group of buildings that he has established in the wilderness and that only the mountains can overshadow.  A portrait of ‘Manifest Destiny’ that was soon to be tested almost to destruction in the Civil War.

Another part of the American story that the Currier tells well is of the massively influential group of artists who congregated around the figure of Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who was so influential in leading towards an American artistic identity distinguishable from that of Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.  Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand are all represented in the collection, but, if a choice has to be made, the title should perhaps go to Georgia O’Keeffe, whom Stieglitz married and whose art he championed.  Cross by the Sea, Canada of 1932, continues her exploration of the cross as motif that had emerged from her encounter with Los Penitentes in New Mexico, her escape from New York, in the late 1920s.  The Canadian cross is a monument to a young priest who drowned in the waters off the Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec in 1875.

Running parallel and often overlapping with the Stieglitz thread, is that of American Realism with its origins in the Ashcan School.  That is yet another story that the Currier is able to tell from its collection.