two museums in Massachusetts

The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum, Springfield. Springfield, ex-industrial city and birthplace of basketball, was also the home town of Ted Geisel aka Dr. Seuss. For many years the city has had a sculpture garden of his characters, and since my last visit they've added to the cluster of city museums (art, history, science) a Dr. Seuss museum in a converted old two-story building. It's obviously the most popular of the bunch, and the only one they give you a timed entry for at the cluster's ticket counter. If I hadn't been there at opening time on a weekday, I expect it would have been very crowded, especially with children.

At least the ground floor. The upper floor is a conventional museum, with a reproduction of the study in his house in San Diego with a lot of his books and kipple, and it looks just what you'd expect Dr. Seuss's house to look like. There is also lots of unpublished art, especially as included in letters. Contrary to the usual image of Geisel as disliking children, he wrote the children of his acquaintance lots of birthday cards and other letters. Most interesting was the long correspondence donated by his great-nephew Ted, in which you can see Geisel advancing his discourse as the boy grows up, but always remaining whimsical. (There's also a serious letter on logistics for a visit to his grown niece, Ted's mother, which he nevertheless signed with a goofy pseudonym.)

Downstairs, however, is a Seussical fantasia, with rooms full of statues of Seuss creatures designed for kids to climb on or play with. I wish I'd gotten a photo of the four kids, all wearing t-shirts designating them as Thing #1 through Thing #4, sitting on Mr. Gump's seven hump Wump as their mother, whose shirt read "Mother of All Things," took their photo. They were obviously there with enthusiasm.

Also downstairs and in Seussical style is the history of his early life in Springfield. This is accompanied by captions, in both English and Spanish, in imitation Dr. Seuss verse. Nobody who isn't Dr. Seuss can write pastiche of his verse that isn't gawdawful, and this is no exception. I give you one example for the taste, for providence could stand no more:

Ted's dad ran a zoo that was not far from home,
It was a lively placed where animals roamed.

Yes, that is a typo, and yes, it is there on the placard. So is the grammatical error and so is the clunky near-rhyme and off-rhythm and so is the general inanity of the description.

The Clark, Williamstown. Small town up in the far corner of the state with a prestigious college and, quite separately from it, this - quite large for its subdued rural locale - art museum. Officially it's the Clark Art Institute, but it's known locally just as The Clark. ("Look what we found in the park in the dark. / We will take it home. We will call it 'Clark'.") It's named for a serious and prolific art collector who established this museum in the 1950s, though the current building is much newer and starkly modern. Over on one side is the permanent collection, and on the other in a basement an equally large space currently hosting a show of Renoir, specializing in his nudes. Clark, it turns out, was a big Renoir collector, and many of the pieces are from the permanent collection, except that Clark hated Renoir's late period, and I can see why if it's because the faces, previously realistic, become something grotesque and microcephalic. Anyway, I got a good sense of Renoir's development from this, and I liked best the period in the 1870s and 80s when the figures were clear and crisp but the background was weird and colorful and impressionistic. (ETA: And here's an unbridled review of the exhibit.)

Here's the weird thing. All the time I was looking at the Renoir paintings, I was trying to remember the name of the guy whose sculptures are a major feature of the Stanford campus. I know his name well, but it had fled from my mind at the approach of Renoir. It was his contemporary, Rodin. But when I looked it up, I found that now I could not remember Renoir, until I looked that up. It took considerable work before I could retain both names in my mind at once. Maybe it's because they're contemporaries who begin with R. Maybe it's because they had the same given name, Auguste (which I didn't notice until I looked that up). Maybe it's because I don't know that much about either.