Taking stock

WAM displays Chapin Riley's collection

by Leon Nigrosh

THE RILEY COLLECTION: FROM VAN GOGH TO HOCKNEY
At the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, through August 6.

Not long ago it was Robert and Helen Stoddard. Now it's Chapin Riley. Once again, the Worcester Art Museum honors, acknowledges, and thanks its hometown benefactors for the generous donations they have made to WAM's permanent collection. Scion of Worcester industrialist Robert Stanley Riley, founder of the Riley Stoker Corporation, Chapin Riley is this most recent celebrant. He became increasingly interested in the art world after viewing the 1933 Chicago Art Institute Show that highlighted work by the "new" American Regionalists. He became so enamored of Thomas Hart Benton's (1889-1975) painting style that in August 1946 he flew to Martha's Vineyard to meet with Benton and procured one of his canvases, Corn and Winter Wheat. This work, along with 27 others from Riley's collection, is now on view in WAM's 19th-20th Century European galleries.

Take a short tour of the space and you will quickly see that, as an art collector, Riley has an eccentric view and eclectic tastes -- which, in this case, is very fortunate for WAM and its visitors. The museum has acquired and is scheduled to receive a number of works in a range of styles, eras, and materials that it might not have otherwise been able to obtain. The charming painting of a long-haired, four-year-old Claude Renoir playing with his food, Coco Eating His Soup, painted in 1905 by his then 64-year-old father, Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, is a case in point. Early in his collecting career, Riley purchased this playful image for his enjoyment, and then in 1991 presented it to the museum.

Much earlier, in 1964, Riley donated another important masterwork to WAM, Paul Signac's (1863-1935) Golfe Juan. This landscape is an excellent example of the Neo-Impressionist movement that briefly flourished in the late 1800s. Signac like Georges Seurat (1859-1891) attempted to formalize the informality of Impressionism through the introduction of tiny dots of "pure" color, designed to optically fuse in the viewer's eye. This technique, known as "pointillism," is particularly effective in this re-creation of the bay view with its gnarled trees in the foreground and the lighthouse and old Vauban fortress of St. Tropez on the opposite shore.

Riley served in many capacities on WAM boards and committees from 1949 until he moved to California in the late 1970s; but he is still accumulating art and has made arrangements for a number of objects to become part of WAM's permanent collection. Among these works is a painting by the American artist Thomas Fransioli (b. 1906), which depicts Copley Square as it looked in 1948. The view is fairly accurate -- but a little too orderly. The Romanesque-styled Trinity Church is at center, while off to one side we can see the first John Hancock Building under construction. All the cars are "modern" teardrop-design sedans; the brick buildings are in perfect alignment; and even the clouds are floating by in aircraft formation. Contrast this with an untitled acrylic-on-paper by California artist Sam Francis (b. 1923). Produced with the Japanese haboku, or "flung ink" technique, this completely abstract piece is alive with color sloshed over the surface, pooling where the paper was wet, splattering where it was left dry.

Riley's varied tastes also extend to sculpture. And it is here that we observe the widest stylistic swings within the eight objects on display that are slated to become part of WAM's holdings. Two small bronzes by Norwegian Ornuff Bast (b. 1907) and French sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) both display the same sensitivity to the female nude by arranging their formal elements with classic Greco-Roman simplicity. Then there is Modernist Gaston Lachaise's 1926 The First Ogunquit Torso, a voluptuous and polished bronze shell that borders on the lascivious with its exaggerated proportions. Finally, at the totally abstract extreme are two mobiles by Connecticut sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976): Red, Yellow and White Discs, which is only eight-inches tall and balanced on the head of a pin, and Thirteen Black Elements, which revolves lazily overhead.

As WAM director Jim Welu has said, "This museum is extremely fortunate to be the beneficiary of Chapin's great enthusiasm for art. Little did he, or anyone else, realize what he would accomplish as a collector when he began over 65 years ago. [He] will always be very special to the Worcester Art Museum."

Stop by this show and see for yourself.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (508) 799-4406.