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[TV reviews]

Work of art
Sister Wendy makes the MFA look good

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

I love Sister Wendy: she’s warm, she’s witty, and she has such a handle on everyday life that you’d never guess her normal existence is a cloistered one. Still, can even she just blow into Boston (we’re part of her new six-museum " American Collection " ) and " explain " our MFA to us? Can she discover more about our museum in a few days than we have in decades?

In a word, yes. I grant it’s disconcerting to hear her tell America that Boston is " as energetic and modern as any great American city " but nevertheless " revels in her colorful past. " Once inside the MFA, however, Sister Wendy delivers. You might have expected her to be overwhelmed by the Monets and Renoirs and Van Goghs; in fact, the word " Impressionism " never passes her lips. What she’s looking forward to, she reveals, are the " glories of Chinese and Japanese art " at the MFA; what she didn’t expect is that " this museum celebrates like no other America’s own heritage. "

So we begin with two American works from 1768: John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere and Revere’s Sons of Liberty bowl. That’s not the real beginning of American art, of course: next up is a bowl made by the Mimbres people of New Mexico between 1000 and 1150, and a pot descended from that tradition made in 1985. Reminded that the MFA has " the finest collection of Oriental art under one roof, " we next find Sister Wendy sitting in the chair that a Chinese scholar once sat in, examining his spirit rock, his ink stone and cake, his brush, his brush holder and washer, and the work he produced.

After a look at the range of contemporary chairs the MFA has commissioned ( " a brilliant idea " ) for us to sit in, she goes on to Gauguin’s D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? and then a yakshi, or tree spirit, from north central India, 25 BC–AD 25. One surprise after another follows: the earliest extant six-octave piano (1796); rooms from Elizabeth Derby West’s Oak Hill mansion; Georgia O’Keeffe’s White Rose with Larkspur No. 2 (1927) and photographs of her by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz; the Garden of the Heart of Heaven outside the West Wing; Martin Johnson Heade’s Approaching Storm: Beach near Newport (1867); seven glass seashapes by Dale Chihuly (1982); Roy Lichtenstein’s Glass V (1978); three exquisite examples from the Oriental collection; El Greco’s portrait of Frey Hortensio Felix Paravicino (1609); John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882); and, finally, a double chest commissioned in 1782 by Mrs. Elias Hesketh Derby for her grandson Johnny to take to his Harvard dorm room.

She brings to all this her usual pawky humor and idiosyncratic insights. Portrayed without a jacket, Copley’s Paul Revere may look like a working man, but she points to the gold buttons on his vest and recalls that 1768 was the year the ladies of Boston made 100 ells of linen (in defiance of England’s decree that all colonial linen had to be imported). This is American linen, and so Revere’s shirt is a political statement. She notes that the room in which Sargent painted the daughters of Edward Boit is not their home but a rented apartment in Paris whose furnishings seem more important than the children; observing how their white pinafores grow darker from youngest to oldest, she reminds us that none them ever married. Sitting in the Garden of the Heart of Heaven, she looks at the sand, reflecting that " the water is dry water, water of the mind " and that " it’s your mind that walks across the bridge. " Sister Wendy even plays the Broadwood piano, the Adagio cantabile of Beethoven’s Pathétique; within just a few bars you can hear a bigger picture beginning to emerge.

There’s also a bigger picture in the way she moves from one object to another. The beautiful young girl to the left in the Gauguin segues into the female torso of the yakshi; the " water " of the zen garden becomes the threatening waves of the Heade painting; the Boits’ rented apartment is followed immediately by Johnny’s double chest, " a little cupboard for his socks and Granny’s poundcake and a book or two. " And I have to think she’s responsible for the pairing, in this first two-hour segment, of the MFA with Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum, the MFA’s opposite in every way (it’s young and airy and maintains a limited collection, just 300 items) in a city that couldn’t be more different from Boston. Sister Wendy calls herself " the ultimate non-artist, " but that’s beside the point: she’s a work of art.

Issue Date: August 30 - September 6, 2001