Atheneum Matches Poets With Artists For ‘Poetic Musings’ Exhibit

George Washington wasn’t known as a poet, but a few times he let his muse carry him away. When he was a teenager, he wrote to a young lady:

“From your bright sparkling Eyes, I was undone;

Rays, you have, more transparent than the sun,

Amidst its glory in the rising Day,

None can you equal in your bright array.”

That young lady didn’t turn out to be his chosen one; Martha Dandridge, the nation’s first, first lady, did. Portraits of George and Martha hang side-by-side at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, looking into each other’s eyes, accompanied by George’s little romantic verse.

The James Sharples portraits are part of the new exhibit “Sound & Sense: Poetic Musings in American Art,” which combines poetry with artworks that accentuate, complement or sometimes directly reflect the subject of the poem.

“Every work in the show can have a different meaning when it has a poetic counterpoint,” said Erin Monroe, assistant curator of American paintings and sculpture. Monroe inherited and oversaw the exhibit conceived by Alyce Perry Englund, the former associate curator of American decorative arts, who left the Atheneum to become assistant curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Poets ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herodotus, William Carlos Williams, Hartford’s own Lydia Sigourney and an anonymous letter-writer in an 1845 edition of The Courant are featured.

A Daniel Chester French full-body sculpture of President Abraham Lincoln is accentuated by a snippet from a legendary Walt Whitman poem written upon the death of Lincoln: “O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills, for you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths — for you the shores a-crowding, for you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.”

A portion of Robert Frost’s “Tree at My Window” accompanies three paintings, “The Lawrence Tree” by Georgia O’Keeffe, a Rockwell Kent rendition of a tree and Charles DeWald Brownell’s 1857 oil-on-canvas of Hartford’s Charter Oak. “Tree at my window, window tree, my sash is lowered when night comes on; but let there never be curtain drawn between you and me. Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground, and thing next most diffuse to cloud, not all your light tongues talking aloud could be profound. But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed, and if you have seen me when I slept, you have seen me when I was taken and swept and all but lost.”

A charming bit of verse by Yone Noguchi — “Oh, how cool — the sound of the bell that leaves the bell itself” — sits next to an adorable little sculpture by the poet’s son Isamu Noguchi, a white human figure shaped like a bell, that resembles a ghost with arms. A more somber Isamu Noguchi work, a bust of Lincoln Kerstein, stands beside an excerpt from Kerstein’s 1964 poem “Vet”: “Just three weeks after our great act he can’t recall half his own wild sobbing advance. High on a dune, this prematurely aging child, a mite of history he helped make, rubs stubble chin, and spends a sigh, tomorrow he’ll be down the line waiting one more chance to die.”

A painting of African American cotton-pickers by Clementine Hunter and a desk carved by emancipated slave William Howard illustrate an 18th-century fieldhands’ song: “Caller: Old Joseph was a wood workin’ man … When he got old he lost his way … Makes that boss man right mad … Needs a young man to learn his trade,” with a recurring chorus of “Hoe Emma Hoe, you turn around dig a hole in the ground, Hoe Emma Hoe.”

Some items directly appeal to children. A 1914 earthenware bowl adorned with geese by Albina Mangini sits beside the nursery rhyme “Goosey goosey gander, whither shall I wander? Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber. There you’ll find a cup of sack and a race of ginger.”

The cross-generational appeal is important, Monroe said, because one of the goals of the exhibit is to emphasize the importance of reading. “Everything now is all about making it shorter and faster and turning it into text-speak,” she said. “This reminds people of how words sound. It’s important to understand the intentionality of how they are used.”

“SOUND & SENSE: POETIC MUSINGS IN AMERICAN ART” will be at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford, until April 17. thewadsworth.org.