THROUGH JAN. 31
At the Florence Griswold Museum, one of the claims we stake is to the Connecticut landscape because the museum is here because artists came to Old Lyme to paint landscapes.”
The participating institutions — which include such local sites as the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, the Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, Mystic Seaport, and Flo Gris, along with those farther afield — lent to the Flo Gris exhibition some major works from their collections. Landscape is the overarching topic, but that breaks down into a wide range of images here, since it reflects the ways in which the landscape has transformed over the course of 200 years.
With a nod to the digital world, “The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape” is organized by keywords.
Kurtz Lansing says, “Everybody has had the experience of doing a search on the Internet for images,” she says. “You’re not surprised by many of the results, but then other things you wonder, ‘Why did that one come up?’ Somehow the algorithm plugged that in as the answer to what you were looking for. This show seemed like a chance to add that element of the unexpected.”
These keywords create thematic categories — such as factory and farm, road and town — and the exhibition notes that, in the digital terrain, “we are empowered to consider Connecticut’s landscape in more dynamic ways as an entity whose meaning can and does change.”
There are, of course, natural landscapes represented here, such as Childe Hassam’s dramatic “The Ledges, October in Old Lyme,” from 1907 and owned by the Florence Griswold Museum. Back in 1908, a New York Times writer opined of the painting, “perhaps there is no contemporary artist who can render with greater distinction the sharp joyousness of the Autumn color and the Autumn air.”
But “The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape” explores beyond that. Consider two images of New London that hang next to each other, both featuring Parade Plaza and both on loan from the Lyman Allyn Art Museum. One is a dramatic painting of a blaze raging on Bank Street, with firefighters trying to quell it and city folks looking on. “Union House Fire on Bank Street, New London, November 8, 1854” was created that year by Frederick L. Allen, who was a New London pharmacist, politician, and fire-company founder.
Some of the same buildings depicted here still exist, as do some of the open spaces like the Parade. In other cases, too, parts of the past can still be seen in the modern landscape.