Thomas Hart Benton at the Milwaukee Art Museum

I've been living in Milwaukee for about ten months now. I moved here to spend time with Charlie while he trained for speedskating (he retired at the end of the season), and we'll be moving to DC in the fall, but it's been an interesting experiment spending the year in the Midwest when I've lived my entire life so far on the East Coast. One of the great pleasures has been visiting the local museums and cultural institutions, especially the Milwaukee Art Museum. We became members for the year, and it's been a pleasure to visit the collection, a unique and eclectic representation of art movements around the world. Two of the highlights for me are the American collection (naturally, as I'm trained as an Americanist), which employs one of the most accessible approaches to the decorative arts that I've ever seen, and the folk art collection, which is varied and deep.

I'm kicking myself that I didn't bring my camera when we stopped by yesterday. I had been thinking about finding material to talk about here on the blog (especially as I know I've been remiss about posting all week), and it turns out that the piece that most captured my imagination yesterday, a sculpted clay maquette made circa 1939 by Thomas Hart Benton for his painting Cotton Weighing, is almost completely unrepresented by images online. I was able to find two, a tiny one on MAM's website, and a Flickr image posted by user hanneorla. May this be a lesson to me to staple my camera to my person for the future.

I never knew that Thomas Hart Benton used miniature clay sculptures as studies for his paintings, and now that I know, I'd like to learn more about it. It's certainly a novel way to work. If you're at all familiar with his paintings, you can probably picture the exaggerated, monumental figures, swirling motion, and dramatically tilted perspective that mark many of his paintings; all of these elements were visible in the little clay maquette. In the images above, you can probably even make out that the glass case enclosing the maquette even features a sharply tilted floor, making the perspective even more exaggerated. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed my little step into a tiny 3D version of a Benton painting. What can I say? I'm a sculpture person - I like it when paintings pop out of their frames.

Full disclosure and point of order on blogging: Yesterday marked the six week mark before my wedding, and about the eight-week mark for my cross-country move back to DC. I'm starting to realize that starting a blog at a time like this might have been a weird idea, but I'm going to do my best to keep plugging away, even if I didn't do such a good job of that this week! In the upcoming week, expect some musings on art events as they happen, and the introduction of at least one new blog feature!