F. Scott, Zelda and More!

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Elliott, Four Quartets, Little Gidding

(the photo above is of a small garden pool at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and these words are carved in the concrete around the edge of the pond)

Dear Readers! If you were expecting scenic beach photos, lush tropical gardens or natural wonders, then I suggest you check out another blog. However, if you wish to dabble a little with art and investigate some literary folks, then let's get started.

Now you may be wondering what a wagon train has to do with great works of art and literature, but you see, we had to get from our campground to the museums. It was another blue sky beautiful day, so we decided to ride our bikes. If you read Tuesday's blog, you know Kathy's bike had a terrible blowout that destroyed the tube and tire.  Luckily, we had a spare tire back at the rig.  When we got home yesterday, we replaced the tire and tube and Kathy's bike was good as new. As for the wagon train, there is a rodeo in town this weekend.  These folks are making their way to the Fairgrounds about four miles down the road.  We passed them and wished them luck.

We started putting some distance between ourselves and the traffic jam the wagon train was causing when all of a sudden....

Psssssssss!

Oh, no! Not again.  This time it was Dave's tire that suddenly went flat. Luckily, the tire itself was not too damaged, just a small slice in the tread. We got out the handy dandy duct tape that, since Tuesday, we now carry in our bike bags and proceeded to duct tape the slice and then insert a new tube. Montgomery, Alabama has now cost us 2 tires and tubes.  This has become a very expensive place to bike.  Here is Dave showing off the hole in his tube.

Before we got Dave's bike back on the road, the wagon train caught up to us. You can just imagine the comments we got - "Try a horse next time!"; "Did you throw a shoe?" It was all in good fun.  They did ask if we needed help, but we assured them we could make the repairs ourselves.  We are getting quite good at it by now. By the time we caught back up to the wagon train, they were arriving at the Fairgrounds.

We continued on our trek into Montgomery and pedaled through the campus of Alabama State University. Founded as a school for African-Americans, today Alabama State University is a widely respected, world-class institution of higher learning which welcomes students of all races.  It has an attractive entrance arch and football stadium:

Just on the other side of the campus, we arrived at our destination - the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum. The couple had only lived briefly in this house, from 1931-1932, since they spent most of their time moving among New York, Los Angeles and Paris, Frances.  The Fitzgeralds made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair. Zelda Fitzgerald was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband "the first American Flapper." The Fitzgeralds were celebrities.

Zelda was also a very accomplished artist. After her death, much of her artwork has been reappraised as interesting in its own right. After spending much of the 1950s and '60s in family attics—Zelda's mother even had much of the art burned because she disliked it—scholars began to examine the art. Exhibitions of her work have toured the United States and Europe. A review of the exhibition concluded that her surviving corpus of art "represents the work of a talented, visionary woman who rose above tremendous odds to create a fascinating body of work—one that inspires us to celebrate the life that might have been." Zelda's family owns 64 of her paintings and the museum owns eleven, some of which are shown below:

Others of her artworks are held by art museums, as we'll mention further below.

The museum is in the process of collecting all things Fitzgerald, including objects relating to their daughter, Frances Scott ("Scotty") Fitzgerald. Her childhood was as tempestuous as the life her parents lived, having been thrown out of her boarding school in 1938. She was subsequently accepted to Vassar College and went on to write musical comedies about the Washington social scene which were performed annually to benefit the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Washington. Here is Kathy looking over Scotty's clippings.

After leaving the Fitzgerald Museum, we stopped for lunch at Martin's. Martin's Restaurant has been in business since the 1930's. A family owned and operated restaurant serving a "meat and three" style lunch since the 1930's. It is one of the oldest full service restaurants in Montgomery, Alabama. While the decor probably hasn't changed since the 1930's, the fried chicken chef salad was outstanding.

After lunch, we pedaled over to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.  Here is a view of the museum from across a nearby pond:

The museum is located in the Wynton M. Blount Cultural Park. Mr. Blount and his wife Carolyn, were philanthropists and notable patrons of the arts. Together they founded the Blount Cultural Park, which is home to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The Blounts donated the land and a 100,000 square foot theatre as the new home of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1985. The cost was $21.5 million and at the time was the largest private donation to an American theatre. The park has several lakes.  As we walked around the museum to its entrance, we paused under this cherry tree for a beautiful view of ducks and one of the ponds:

Embraced by the museum and overlooking the pond is a whimsical garden based on T.S. Elliot's quotation above and the garden that is a theme in Four Quartets.  This statue overlooks the garden pond shown in the first photo of this blog entry:

We thought these guys were so cute, we took a second picture of them from inside looking out.

The garden has some other unexpected sculptures.  Here is Dave making a new friend.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1930 with the mission "to collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret art of the highest quality for the enrichment, enlightenment, and enjoyment of its public." The museum is the oldest fine arts museum in Alabama and was the first museum in Alabama to be accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in June 1978. The museum moved to its current home in the Blount Cultural Park, in 1988. The space is spectacular.  Here is a view through artistic stained glass windows in the Lowder Gallery:

The museum contains some striking art.  We thought you might appreciate a sampling of some pieces that got our attention.

This is "Cazador de Nubes (Cloud Hunter)," 2005, by Edgar Soberon (American, born Cuba 1962):

Another cloud painting also is diverting - "Clouds, Giverny," 1911, by Theodore Earl Butler (American, 1860-1936), which calls to mind Monet or Van Gogh:

This painting - "South of Study Butte," 1952, by William Lester (American, 1910-1991) - is a representation of an area near Terlingua, Texas, by Big Bend National Park, where we stayed for two weeks:

Recalling our tour of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, we found one painting, "Hope," ca. 1938, by Zelda Fitzgerald (American, 1900-1948):

We thought this doughnut sculpture was particularly interesting because it is constructed from large tree branches that have been cut on the bias and smoothed so that the grain show.  These are the light-colored shapes in the doughnut below.  The dark-colored areas between them are empty, three-dimensional spaces that go deep into the doughnut:

Yet another painting we liked was "View of Manhattan from the Terminal Yards, Weehawken, New Jersey," 1913, by Abraham Leon Krill (American, 1884-1974):

We discovered two paintings in the museum, by different artists, that are directly related.  One is "New York Office," 1962, by Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967) --

-- and the other is "Requiem for a Planet, to Moran and Hopper," 2000, by David Bierk (Canadian, born USA, 1944-2002), which contains a representation of Hopper's painting, but with significant differences:

Bierk created this work specifically for The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, referring to two paintings in the museum’s collection: "Dusk Wings", by Thomas Moran and "New York Office", by Edward Hopper. These works, created about one hundred years apart, are iconic depictions of the American landscape, one rural and bucolic, the other urbanized. Bierk physically separated Moran’s pure landscape (a world made anew each day, pristine and unspoiled by man and his needs) from Hopper’s city scene by surrounding the earlier work with wide, dark, steel plates, which may suggest that we have imprisoned nature now in our constructions and technology.  Hopper’s image, on the right, has no such literal framing element, but in a sense, as Bierk revealed, the built environment of office window and street isolates the female figure like a confining frame. The painting’s title, "Requiem for a Planet", further explicates Bierk’s theme. There is danger in overtaxing the resources of nature, he implied; to do so is to compromise its ability to support our very lives. The melancholy image of the woman behind the window resonates with our own feelings of loss and disconnection from a natural world that is slowly devolving into oblivion.  At least this is what the museum curator's notes say.

And so ends our cultural foray into Montgomery, Alabama. Tomorrow we move to Augusta, Georgia.