The Williamstown Art Conservation laboratories at the Lunder Center at Stone Hill on the Clark Art Institute campus in Williamstown, Massachusetts, are dedicated to conservation, examination and treatment of various forms of art. These specialized services rely heavily on the science and research of materials and methods.
As part of the Williamstown + Atlanta Art Conservation Centers, this facility leads a partnership of two regional centers dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage in a field committed to science and education. Art matters, and navigating paths through it can be complex with everyone’s journey being different.
Drawings, paintings, prints, multiples and sculptures are more than just things that hold space in our designed interiors, or our exterior gardens. Objects of art are something else entirely. Art itself is something else entirely. Ann Norton’s work on S. Flagler Drive, a few minutes north of downtown Lake Worth, defines this essence well.
The monumental works are more than just roadside attractions offering unique and seemingly unusual glimpses through the key hole of her material choices, the work embodies continuity. It is part of an ongoing dialogue with the creative process that Marcel Duchamp defined so well in his essay, “The Creative Act,” delivered in Houston in 1957.
“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone,” Duchamp writes, “the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualities and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
The essay resonates with anyone discerning the “verdict of posterity” and the shifting of focus from physical craft to intellectual exchange; the fruit of contemplation and, for some, the necessary precursor of leisure.
American Art in the 1970s had a cultural footprint in Ponte Vedra Beach that was rooted metaphorically in the same slurry of minerals and mediums that preserved handprints on limestone more than 67,000 years ago in another part of the world; the form of stenciled marks left on rock: “I was here. This is what I saw.”
Only the materials and methods have evolved. Some might argue they’ve devolved, but that is an issue of aesthetics. The chemistry and alchemy of turning the lived experience into enduring symbol is part of the human experience and in the end, it’s the pigment, the medium, the substrate, supporting the marks that become the manifestation of our encounter with art. The proof is in the chemistry.
In 1978, the poster “Expose Yourself to Art,” featuring Portland mayor Bud Clark flashing a bronze statue became a cult phenomenon. In Ponte Vedra Beach in the ’70s, Ponte Vedra Style meant quietly preserving examples of the art of our time. Some of the most important works are works that can be hidden in books. Champions understand the intimacy of living with art and the responsibility the vocation demands.
When I was 9, I saw my first Jasper Johns on the wall of a den in a home on Solana Road. I saw my first Old Master engravings and Dutch landscape in a low light climate-controlled room in a home on the Boulevard. My first ancient ceramics, in the Koger Collection in Jacksonville.
But it was Jasper Johns, and his work hanging in the collection on Solana Road that held my interest the most. It was my first encounter with an object that resonated, and its owner, its collector, its custodian, recognized my connection and gifted me my first New York exhibition catalogue that she had brought back from Manhattan as a souvenir. It was “Technics and Creativity: Gemini G.E.L.,” created for the July ’71 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
“Children begin by collecting catalogues,” she told me as she handed me the white plastic box containing a reproduction of Johns’ original work that included three watercolor pats of red, yellow and blue with a brush. It invited, but did not insist upon collaboration beyond the visual, that is, if the work was to be interpreted literally.
In Jacksonville in the 1970s, it was Sally Ann Freeman and Jacqueline Holmes who helped define and clarify the role of art in the daily life of many Ponte Vedrans.
Gallery Contemporanea on the mezzanine of the newly opened Independent Life Building was the contemporary art lightning strike Jacksonville needed for PV to feel the electricity of a new generation of young executives eager to begin collecting.
Princeton graduates, kids on the Boulevard and families with generational collections gathered at Gallery Contemporanea regularly with others from Jacksonville to examine the gallery’s work. Once, after school at Bishop Kenny, I walked through San Marco to the St. Johns, across the bridge, and to Independence Square, just to visit the gallery.
The “Shock of the New” had spread south from New York. Atlanta was claiming its role as “the next New York” and Jacksonville was fulfilling its promise as the consolidated “Bold New City of the South.” Culturally, the term, “That’s interesting,” politely replaced the more colloquial, “I have no idea what I’m looking at."
The Reynolds, Smith and Hills offices in the Koger Center on Beach Boulevard championed Favela’s “Sinusidal Lines” and “Three for the Show” that opened for one month only at the Jacksonville Art Museum; Favela, Rumpel, and Wall, from March 27 to April 27 in 1975.
Bill Marshall’s “West Bay Street” chronicled the changes rippling through a disappearing Jacksonville and hung prominently at Gallery Contemporanea. Marshall shared the office suite with our father Byron at RS&H, as did Frank Smith III, who with his wife, Jean, championed the arts in both Jacksonville and Atlanta. Frank had studied with Buckminster Fuller.
Ponte Vedra Beach was becoming a proving ground for the tastes of a newer generation of collectors throughout the 1970s. For our family, the decade cultivated our aesthetic, and it wasn’t until decades later when a colleague remarked that he felt I had ruined the Jasper Johns exhibition catalog as a kid that I realized his criticism was less about my actions and more about his envy.
Was it the artist’s intent for me to make the decision to pull loose the brush, wet the color pats and make my own mark? Or was the piece to exist in a perpetual state of coming into existence as unfulfilled potential? Was this the silence John Cage spoke about so eloquently at Black Mountain College? Was this the moment after the ping but before the echo returns, if indeed, it ever actually returns? Art appreciation can sometimes land hard, and it can take many forms through its perpetual progress.
But unquestionably, there's a distinct role for the artist in our daily lives.
When I read John Yau’s “A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns,” almost 20 years ago, and almost 30 years after my first encounter with Johns' work, I decided to write the artist with no expectations of ever receiving an answer. I wanted to tell him about his work that I was introduced to in Ponte Vedra in 1971. I wanted to thank him, and I wanted to tell him that somewhere, out in the world is one of the exhibitions catalogues he created for MoMA that now contains both of our names, because of a choice he invited me to make to dislodge the brush, wet the color pats and apply the pigment to the target before gluing the brush back in place. I wanted to tell him that I lost track of that catalogue over the years, and it was on its own journey. I wanted to tell him about the comment that I ruined the piece, and my reflections about whether or not the piece was actually ruined.
Perhaps I did ruin it. “We all have regrets.” Or perhaps it will resurface one day, renewed, conserved, ready to be worked on again or preserved in an unchanging state. No matter its future, its roots will always be firmly planted in Ponte Vedra Beach.
To my surprise and great appreciation, Mr. Johns responded in his own handwriting on a postcard, Number 8, from his Color Numeral Series 0-9. 1968 – 1969, Bid-Kunst Bonn 1998: “Dear Mr. McIntyre, Thank you for your kind letter. I send best wishes to you and your wife. Jasper Johns.”
The message got through.
Ponte Vedra Beach is now only two years away from its 100th anniversary, a milestone that honors everyone who has contributed to its success. There is no better time to immerse a new generation in art. Not merely images, however, but actual art; the cultural “remains of the day.” These will be the very things connoisseurs will fight to protect in 50 years.
Art will always be the constant, quiet, and contributing companion for so many in this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach. Home is where the art is.
