The Galleries of Milwaukee

Pitstopping in Milwaukee on my way to my granddaughter’s first birthday, I lucked out. Although the 100-minute Greyhound trip from Chicago was 15 minutes late, I was able to arrive at the Milwaukee Art Museum by hopping on a local bus ($1) a half hour before its 5 pm. closing.

Lo and behold, the press lady informs me I’ve arrived on Gallery Day, a first-time-ever for the city’s museums, galleries and the Easttowne merchants to hold a Friday evening walkaround starting at 5:30, when the youngish MAM director Russell Bowman gave a slide lecture on the biggest international expo they’ve ever fielded—a triptych of Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and Sigmar Polke. Buffet welcomes at the nine participating institutions lasted until 9 pm.

The lecture was solid art history, although it made me nervous when he felt constrained to assure the lively summery crowd three times that he wasn’t going to lecture them. Why the hell would people take their TGIF time at a museum if they weren’t ready and willing to be lectured at? It also gave me the creeps to hear the same protesting-too-much lecturer skid off the road of Standard English with a “between you and I” type bit of suburbanese solecism. Is it being snooty to expect museum directors to speak SE when “not lecturing?”

No matter, I love this museum, beginning with its architecture by Eero Saarinen. Along with the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga, sited ever so nobly high on a bluff over the Tennessee River, MAM, which lords it over Lake Michigan in a levitating way, would be a winner even if its contents were marginal, which they aren’t.

Three Harry Bertoias grace one of the galleries overlooking the lake. What a surge! And in a nearby room there are no fewer than seven Milton Averys—“The Card Players” (1945) and “Red Rock Falls” (1947) being especially delectable. And six Stuart Davises are particularly instructive because the five cubist larks are followed by what he started out doing—an Ashcan realist canvas rightly entitled “Settlement Scene” (1912), as dreary a contrast to his eye-popping abstracts as you could devise—if you were trying to make a pedagogical point, which I take it MAM was.

And kicking Kenosha, for Kandinsky’s sake, there are 11 Gabriele Munters, thanks to one wealthy Milwaukee lady names Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, who shared my passion for Wassily’s sidekick. (I’m convinced, in spite of the smallness of her oeuvre, that she’s a more interesting artist than her lover, and I’m always exhilarated when I see examples of her work.) “The Green House / Murnau” (1911), which I fell in love with at her first and only American retrospective at Princeton a few years back, retains its pull on my retinas.

And I can’t recommend highly enough the Flagg Collection Masterpieces of Haitian Art. The level is extraordinarily high both in the paintings and in the metal sculptures. My only gripe is the nonexistent positioning of the callow American viewer into the stream of Haitian history. If I had not gone through a Black Studies phase in the 1960s, they’d just be a lot of pretty exotic pitchers. Great art deserves great explicating.

Elated by such an abundance of solid art and encouraged by a brochure with a readable map, I vowed to push on to the Haggerty Museum of Marquette University. I have a morbid fascination with Jebbie U’s anyway, and the promise of a Berlin artist of the Weimar period proved irresistible.

So I trudged back up the bluff to Wisconsin Street (I was prepooped by a hard-slog morning hovering Chicago museums) and took the bus up Wisconsin to 12th. Bingo! “Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s: A city of Decadence, Revolt and Chaos: Watercolors and Drawings of Bruno Volgt” is a superb intro to an unknown associate of Otto Dix and George Grosz.

He, like them, was sacked for decadence, but unlike them he did not flee to America, was wounded badly on the Eastern front and after the war went East again, choosing to live in the DDR, where he became a museum curator until his retirement. Strange that you discover a neglected Communist artist at a Jesuit U. Those guys do earn their way.

But the top treat at the Haggerty is a really enjoyable display of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original drawings for The Hobbit (hadn’t you noticed that the cult fantasy created by the Oxford professor of Anglo Saxon is 50 years young this year?). I may be the only American who has never succumbed to the lure of Tolkien, but I’m also about to make up for my lassitude.

His drawings (from the Bodleian / Oxford) are simply scrumptious. They are Art Nouveau, but they also have Deco vibes. Maybe such worldly isolates like Tolkien learn to live and create out of time. Whatever, they alone would make a trip to Milwaukee famous (through September 30).

Let’s just say hat the mix in Milwaukee is marvelous, and I haven’t even touted the old buildings like the 1890 Pfister hotel or the 1986 Holme bridge over the Milwaukee River, a soaring geometrical feat of dazzle do. Both the Sentinel (a.m.) and the Journal (p.m.) have literate and handy Friday weekend get-out-and-go supplements.

I’ve been a Milwaukee fan ever since I got my first liberty there in 1944 from Great Lakes boot camp as a swabbie who needs a new pair of glasses. It’s gotten much, much better to look at over these years, as the innovative Gallery Crawl indicates. Try Milwaukee soon, as a side trip from the Windy City, or on its own (the hotels are cheaper in the medium M than in the Big C, for a start, and it’s also an Amtrak stop.)

And the Brewers play there, as every third male seemed to remind me with a hat or an actual baseball shirt! Good pitstop, Milwaukee is.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, September 23, 1987