The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, unlike most city art museums, is located far from downtown, on a country campus that may be technically within the city limits but feels like far away.
And there’s a story for that. And a name. Wynton M. Blount, known as “Red,” largely funded the museum’s present building, which opened in 1988 as part of the 250-acre Blount Cultural Park, and he provided the museum with one of its most important collections, 41 paintings, largely by American masters such as John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper, John Sloan and Winslow Homer.
The park also hosts the Alabama Shakespeare Festival as well as pond and trails and even a dog park. It’s not hard to learn a lot about the park and Blount; the young staff member who greeted me on a slow day knew a lot about him, including his service as Postmaster General under Nixon.
But there’s a lot more to the museum than just the Blount Collection, including this sculpture, by Edward Lee Hendricks, who said they were intended “to give physical substance to the grace and power of the wind.” And when the wind is up, they are popular with birds who ride them as they spin in the breeze.
Indoor sculpture includes “Self Portrait: Where the Left Side of the Brain meets the Right Side of the Brain” by Charlie Lucas. Outdoors, there’s an extensive sculpture garden with both permanent pieces and traveling exhibits.
Above, the sculpture garden pool, an untitled work by Charlie Lucas, and Karen LaMonte’s “Reclining Nocturne #3.” Below, “Square Peg” by Chakaia Booker and “Rough and Tumble” by Patrick Dougherty, inspired by the pyramids of ancient Nubia.
A whimsical but more conventional piece by George Segal stands just before the exit from the garden. It’s called “Chance Meeting.” When I first saw it out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was fellow museum visitors!
Window spaces in the wall separating the galleries from the garden have also been put to artistic use.
One of the first paintings to catch my eye was a neo-Impressionist view by Ernest Lawson of what I took at first to be rural valley. I was surprised to find from the caption that it’s a view just after World War I of the upper Manhattan Inwood neighborhood, which I’ve only known as a thickly-settled area of large apartment houses and Fort Tryon Park. I believe the hill to the right is the one that is now the location of The Cloisters museum.
Two paintings from the Blount Collection struck me as unusual choices for a millionaire who made his money in construction and machine tools and served in the Cabinet; they both depict corruption among the elite and the political class. “Daniel,” by Joseph Hirsch shows the Biblical prophet in modern dress pointing to the ‘writing on the wall’ at Belshazzar’s Feast. The other, by Jack Levine, is titled “Election Night II.”
On a lighter note, the collection also includes John Sloan’s wonderful view of New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 1924.
Other forms of art are on view in an extensive Porcelain and Glass collection, which features both works from Asian and European traditions as well as quite a few pieces of very recent glass art.
Above, pieces by Stephen Powell and Lino Tagliapietra; below, another by Tagliapietra.
A gallery of quilts, originating in the region, shows off the deep artistic roots in what might often be thought of as humble crafts…
And a small gallery of prints and pieces made with unusual techniques or materials.
The museum has, usually, an extensive art outreach program that works with local schools, although that has been interrupted during the pandemic.
