The Outlander column in the online gay-interest website Queerty calls Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art the “most fabulous museum,” suggesting that “this art collection has far too much camp factor and sexually-charged male flesh to be a coincidence.” The Outlander is kidding — mostly. Images run with the article include those illustrating why he is making the joke, among them a couple of paintings by Paul Cadmus and Marsden Hartley’s “Madawaska — Acadian Light-Heavy.”
The unidentified writer also credits museum founder Alice Walton for hiring a gay man as her museum’s director (now president, Don Bacigalupi, who lives with his partner and child in Bentonville). “Insert gasp here,” the Outlander writes.
The column gives me an opportunity to post once again one of my favorite paintings at Crystal Bridges, the angular, muscular and backlit “Madawaska.” It has been added to the Bill Paley collection now on exhibit at CBM, “A Taste for Modernism,” to which the Times traveled with a bus load of art lovers on Saturday. Another full bus, great art and celebratory mimosas.