Day 21: Grand Rapids to Flint

114 miles; 1:42 hrs

Making progress slowly, from art museum to art museum.

Flint Institute of the Arts

The Flint Institute has programs in art, music and theater. A private school, it has newish low buildings in a pleasant green campus, a very low-key sort of place. The museum is a pleasant, one-story building that is spacious, airy, and has a learnable lay-out. Arriving at lunch time, we started at the snack bar where the best we could do was a lunch-meat sandwich; it was dull but was quick. We each went through all the galleries more than once.

Flint Institute of the Arts

The rarest treasure at the museum was a work by one of the earliest women artists, Elisabetta Sirani. Not only was she an independent painter at the age of 19, but after her painter father was incapacitated, she ran his studio and supported the family. She produced about 200 works, and died at the age of 27.

Elisabetta Sirani, 1638-1665
Cleopatra, n.d.

A small painting by Goya touched me. It shows Joseph, Jesus' earthly father dying in the arms of his son and his wife Mary. It is a nice thought, that Jesus would reappear to ease Joseph's passing, and Mary would surround the pair with love. Child angels, known as putti, are ready to carry the saint directly to heaven.

Francisco Goya, 1746-1828
The Death of St. Joseph, 1787

John Singer Sargent went all out to create a touching portrait of two children; this is his dream of the innocence of childhood.

John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925
Garden Study of the Vickers Children, 1884

One of the advantages of visiting regional museums is that you sometimes see excellent work by regional artists. Flint had several examples. An Ohio-based artist named Clara Deike had an intriguing modernist style. After training with diverse painters, including Hans Hoffman and Diego Rivera, she settled down to teach art at a high school in Cleveland.

Clara Deike, 1881-1964
Westside Cleveland, 1943

The Transcendental Painting Group, which was founded in 1938 in Santa Fe, NM, included a few artists whose works I really like, such as Raymond Jonson and Agnes Pelton. I was happy to discover this painting by a member of the group who created only twenty-five works is this exalted style.

Stuart Walker, 1904-1940
Movement, c. 1939

The New York School of Abstract Expressionism included a painter who died only recently, in 2012, named Paul Jenkins. Though his is not a big name, he has been collected by many museums in the U.S. and Europe. He dribbled paint onto loose canvases, allowing it to roll, pool and bleed. Here is a particularly luminous example.

Paul Jenkins, 1923-2012
Phenomena Forking Paths, 1968

Eschewing abstraction, despite its dominance when he started his career, Jenkins' contemporary, Philip Pearlstein, still living, became a great realist painter. This example is one of his best works.

Philip Pearlstein, b. 1924
Entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, Daytime, 1992

A contemporary artist who is considered a major force in the Op Art movement is Richard Anuszkiewicz. He likes to make your eyes dance.

Richard Anuszkiewicz, b. 1930
Inflexional I, 1966

The sculpture collection includes several examples hyper-realistic sculpture. This style was first started by Duane Hanson, who developed new techniques and materials for making 'life-casts.'

Duane Hanson, 1925-1996
College Student, 1990

Canadian artist Evan Penny has advanced this form to an unprecedented level. He usually produces busts that are flat enough to hang on a wall.

Evan Penny, b. 1953
(Old) No One - In Particular #4, Series 2, c. 2005

All in all, the museum provides students at the Institute of the Arts with important historical examples of most of the major trends in art, plus high-quality examples by regional artists. We enjoyed our afternoon there very much.

In contrast to our motels in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, which were right in the thick of very busy and interesting neighborhoods, our motel in Flint is on a triangular island with highways on each side. There were a few other businesses on the island, but they are now defunct. So we drove into downtown Flint for dinner at Blackstone's Pub and Grill on Saginaw Street because it was highly recommended. It lived up to its reputation. When we got back that evening, a thunder shower poured down briefly, then there was a lovely pink sunset on billowing clouds.

Sunset storm, Flint, Michigan