Best little big museum
We're not sure what the first exhibit was that we saw at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Maybe it
was "Philip Guston's Poem Pictures," Guston's collaborations with poet friends such as Bill Berkson,
Clark Coolidge, William Corbett, and Stanley Kunitz. Or maybe it was the exhibition of Robert Frank's
1959 landmark photograph series "The Americans." We'd seen pictures from "The Americans" before, but
always intermittently, reproduced in various books or on postcards. But here they were, the entire series,
in sequence as Frank intended them. There were other exhibits: Arthur Dove, Alice Neel, the recent exhibit
of small paintings by Alex Katz (which is now at the Whitney Museum in New York). And there was the
one-of-a-kind exhibit "To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and
Universities." The Addison, founded in 1930, is the only major museum of American art we know of that's
housed on the campus of a secondary school. Its permanent collection includes both the definitively
American and the definitively New England: Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley, Elkins and Homer,
Whistler and Sargent. The surroundings are bucolic and the museum is mercifully proportionate: it's
just big enough.
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, (978) 749-4015.
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