E-Mail This Article to a Friend The many, the one, and the two Bill Koch at the MFA, Brother Thomas at the Pucker, Cézanne and Pissarro at MoMA BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	"Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch" In the Museum of Fine Arts’ Torf Gallery through November 13. "How Great Is Our Joy: New Porcelains by Brother Thomas" At Pucker Gallery September 10 through October 16. "Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne & Pissarro 1865–1885" At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through September 12.
	Related Links The Museum of Fine Arts' official Web site The MFA's exhibition page for "Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch." Pucker Gallery's official Web site Jeffrey Gantz reviews "Brother Thomas: Creator of Luminaries." The Museum of Modern Arts' official Web site

Malcolm the merciless has struck again. Last spring he packed the MFA’s Gund Gallery with sleek, gleaming Porsches and Ferraris for "Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection." Now he’s snuck into the Torf Gallery four Monets that MFA patrons don’t ordinarily get to see plus a Renoir, a Cézanne, a Grant Wood, two Picassos, two Mirós, and a Modigliani that museum directors worldwide are drooling over, not to mention the two America’s Cup finalists from 1992 presently beached on the MFA’s front lawn. He’s not even allowing you to pay for the privilege: this new show is free with your MFA admission. The man has no shame.

That’s one way to look at "Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch," the latest "controversial" show from MFA Ann and Graham Gund director Malcolm Rogers. It’s not the only way, but I confess I don’t understand the controversy: this is not the first personal collection to grace the Torf Gallery, and it’s hardly the least worthy. And if Rogers had the thought that mounting "Things I Love" might induce Koch to send a Monet or a Modigliani in the museum’s direction, what’s wrong with that? Over the past three years the MFA has presented shows focusing on Impressionist still life, Dutch painting, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Gauguin, and Art Deco, so it’s not as if we weren’t getting the traditional blockbusters. But does all our art have to be painting and sculpture? Can’t we make room for Ralph Lauren’s cars and Bill Koch’s boats?

Of course, I used to be glued to the TV for Formula One and America’s Cup races (when the Cup went Down Under, I’d stay up watching till 2 am), so I’m not the most objective judge. But the question here, I should have thought, is not whether this is a "vanity collection" but whether it’s good art. It’s not uniformly good, but it is uniformly interesting, especially when Koch explains, as he did to the press a week ago Tuesday, why he bought each piece and what it means to him. If there’s anything shameful here, it’s the museum’s failure to record Koch’s remarks and turn them into an audiotape guide. (Bill likes to talk — maybe there’s still time?)

Koch himself grew up in Kansas, went to MIT, built a billion-dollar alternative-energy company, became an MFA trustee, and turned his interest in sailing into an America’s Cup campaign that in 1992 defeated the mighty Dennis Conner and went on to defend the Cup for the San Diego Yacht Club. (That’s his boat, America3, and Il Moro di Venezia, the Italian boat he defeated and later bought, out on the MFA’s front lawn.) "Things I Love" proceeds from an entry room highlighted by Grant Wood’s Arbor Day and three America3-sized celebratory wine bottles to a room of "Impressionism and Its Affinities" (including canvases in Monet’s Morning on the Seine and Water Lilies series), a room for Koch’s Western art (guns owned by Jesse James and Bat Masterson as well as work by Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell), and a room for "Modern and Contemporary Art"; it spills out into the hallway for his maritime paintings and his models of America’s Cup boats (all the way back to the first winner, America, in 1851), and then there are the Fernando Botero sculptures on the West Wing lawn and the two yachts, their 125-foot masts dwarfing the museum.

"I decided I’d like to have things around me that remind me of happy feelings — of happy moments in my youth — and make me feel comfortable, peaceful, pleasant," Koch explains in the well-turned-out catalogue that accompanies the show. That’s where, as a museum exhibit, "Things I Love" falls down: too many "pleasant" works. But Koch also reaches out to things that aren’t so pleasant, like Grant Wood’s nightmarish perspective, and that gives the show balance. It’s Europe versus America not only in the celebrated 1813 battle off Gloucester between the HMS Shannon and the USS Chesapeake (commanded by Koch’s distant relation James "Don’t give up the ship" Lawrence), but in Louis-Eugène Boudin’s Canaret, Fishing Boats Anchored in the Port next to Fitz Henry Lane’s The Golden Rule, or Joan Miró’s Bird Woman next to Thomas Wesselmann’s Seascape #20, or Dennis Miller Bunker’s The Brook: Medfield next to Monet’s Field of Oats and Poppies. Where Boudin’s boats are orphans in the storm, Lane’s sun-dappled ship rules the waves; it’s a standoff between yanked and Yankee. But Wesselmann’s ’60s seashore breast looks dated beside the still explosive Miró, and Bunker’s sea of grass is like a photograph in the midst of the Monets.

Koch’s American West is a battle between Remington and Russell and their attitude toward Native Americans, one scornful, one almost worshipful. Remington tells stories, simple ones in The Trooper and Evening on a Canadian Lake and Coming to the Call, more perturbing in An Argument with the Town Marshal, where the marshal has half a dozen deputies and the "argument" looks like a bigger deal than the O.K. Corral. Russell borders on sentimentality with his Native Americans, but Scattering the Riders, balancing as it does between the individual and the community, could be a scene from a John Ford film.

The "Modern and Contemporary Art" room is dominated by the female body, often decorative and yielding, but in Modigliani’s Reclining Nude and Picasso’s Night Club Singer a match for the male voyeur’s gaze. That gaze is subverted by the tenderness of Picasso’s Two Children (Claude and Paloma Picasso, one blue, one red, making art) and Gabriele Münter’s Child with Doll (the barren artist’s portrait of a neighbor’s child). And the three pictures by Raoul Dufy — Rowing on the Marne, Regatta at Cowes, and The Coronation of George VI — move from individualism to community to celebration. Perhaps that’s the lesson Koch, a genuine American maverick, learned in making the transition from Remington’s The Bronco Buster to the skipper whose team won the America’s Cup.

"Art is something seen about something unseen," is one way in which Brother Thomas Bezanson describes what he does, and maybe that’s the best defense of cars and boats as art. Brother Thomas is a potter from Nova Scotia who entered a Benedictine monastery in Vermont in 1959 and then in 1985 became artist-in-residence at Mount Saint Benedict in Erie, Pennsylvania. He’s having his 15th show at Pucker Gallery in what’s become a biennial event.

If William Koch’s collections bespeak the many, Brother Thomas’s porcelain bespeaks the one. That might seem an odd statement to make about an artist whose glazes run from black-and-copper tenmoku to iron yellow, red copper, celadon, ice crackle, night-sky blue, and oil spot in infinite variations and whose vases alone range from tall and square to spherical to long-necked to canteen-like. (There are also tea bowls, jars, flasks, and plates.) But his work keeps moving, like Stephen Dedalus in his famous conversation with Lynch, toward defining Thomas Aquinas’s three characteristics of beauty: integritas, consonantia, and claritas, growing simpler and more focused in essence even as it grows more complex in appearance. Beauty here is not the perfect white pot; it’s a large cut-lip moon vase with teadust tenmoku glaze that looks like lava spilling out of the Earth’s crust, or a set of four "infinity" vases in tenmoku, purple copper, eggshell glaze, and blue kairagi, or a pair of kairagi-with-rutile tea bowls that suggest the earth cracking open ice in spring.

The votes are in and the critical decision appears to be unanimous. "Not since the similarly titled ‘Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism,’ in 1989-90, has MOMA, or any other museum that I can think of, produced such a pitiless comparison of stylistically related painters, one great and one just very good," concluded Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker. Writing for the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz put it more succinctly: "Poor Pissarro, steamrolled by Cézanne."

They’re talking about "Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne & Pissarro 1865–1885," the summer blockbuster that you can still see (through Monday) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And it’s a reminder that art history, like every other kind, is written by the winners. Pissarro and Cézanne worked outdoors together in Auvers and Pontoise in the early 1870s, and their landscapes aren’t always easy to tell apart, though Cézanne’s always have more earth in them and Pissarro’s more air. Cézanne went on to see painting more as object than as representation; his canvases are forthrightly two-dimensional whereas Pissarro’s temporize in every sense of the word, still equally open to time and weather. Modern — that is, 20th-century — painting followed Cézanne’s line into Cubism and Abstraction; Pissarro holds open different possibilities. Cézanne is Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, Pissarro Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Do we need one and not the other? Is it too late to ask for a recount?