Baroque brilliance in Florida's horse country

Ocala's Appleton Museum is attracting diverse major exhibitions with its spacious galleries and forceful director. The latest is the drawings of 17th century Flemish stars.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 3, 2002

[Photos courtesy of the American Federation of Arts] Above, Peter Paul Rubens’ Christ on the Cross and, below, Jacob Jordaens’ The Adoration of the Shepherds are part of the exhibition at the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

OCALA -- The road to Ocala slices through forests and farms, and eventually winds through a historic downtown that yields almost immediately to miles of franchise food stops and strip malls.

And then, if you are patient, the road will take you to the Appleton Museum, seven miles from the city epicenter and halfway to Silver Springs.

It's worth the drive.

A good regional art museum in a smallish central Florida city is not improbable. But a museum with the Appleton's aspirations is. In the past 12 months, visitors have seen major exhibitions of 19th and 20th century masters such as Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh and Picasso.

The current show is Flemish master drawings from the 17th century with work by the stars of that era: Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens. It is a quiet stunner you would expect to see at a museum such as the Frick in New York or the Getty in Los Angeles. Yet here it is, in the middle of horse country.

"I don't accept that larger places have larger ideas, that culture occurs somewhere else, never here, that if you're a small place, you should get small things," said Jeffrey Spaulding, director of the Appleton for about three years. "You should aspire to be the finest thing you can be."

"He's doing something extraordinary, astonishing, in a community of that size," said John Schloder, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. "I applaud that."

The Appleton Museum of Art opened in 1987, the gift of Arthur Appleton, a wealthy businessman from Chicago now in his 80s who owns a thoroughbred farm in Marion County. Its permanent collection was his, mostly 19th century European paintings and decorative arts, African artifacts and Oriental art. There were a few standout pieces, but most were of middling quality or uncertain attribution.

Whatever the shortcomings, he built an impressive home for the collection, a classical design in limestone and marble, and one that is exceptionally large, with 30,000 square feet of gallery space that was increased by 4,000 in 1996 with a wing also funded by the Appleton family. By comparison, the Salvador Dali Museum and Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg have about 12,000 square feet of gallery space. Plans for the new Tampa Museum of Art call for 30,000 square feet that would include permanent collection installations. Only the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota will have comparable temporary space when it adds a 30,000-square-foot wing for traveling shows.

Above, Anthony Van Dyck’s Seated Man Leaning Backwards and below, Abraham van Diepenbeeck’s The Penitent King David. Drawings were an artist’s form of note-taking, to study techniques and in preparation for creating paintings and prints.

In 1990, the Appleton family turned the museum over to the joint ownership of Florida State University and Central Florida Community College, though the Appletons are still active supporters, as is the city of Ocala.

Serving several masters, as Spaulding does, is a challenge that he acknowledges, but like other circumstances of the Appleton, he turns it into a positive through the force of his formidable will.

Spaulding was previously director of the art museum at the University of Lethbridge in Canada's Alberta province, as well as a professor of art history and a highly regarded artist. He is considered a master of developing important collections and connections, skills that have helped him put the Appleton on the map.

"I knew that very few truly outstanding exhibitions were coming to Florida," he said. "They tend to get to Atlanta and then swing over to Texas. I began aggressively going after events.

"It was very hard at first. Someone from the North would say, 'Why should we send our art to Florida?' I'd tell them to ask their wealthy board of directors where they have second homes. That's why. Florida is the fourth-most populous state, and (Ocala is) equidistant from Daytona, the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, accessible to Sarasota, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Gainesville and Orlando. If your alternative is to go to Atlanta to see something special, people will come here."

And they have. Attendance jumped from an annual average of about 18,000 to 130,000 last year, bringing an additional $1-million in earned revenue. Spaulding needs those attendance dollars to fund the shows, which cost several hundred thousand dollars each.

Even though the museum exists financially hand-to-mouth, it has an advantage that few regional museums can claim: the luxury of space. After assessing the permanent collection, Spaulding consolidated it and moved it into the newer, smaller wing, which was originally planned for visiting shows. That opened up the much larger gallery space that wraps around the museum's second floor. No other museum in central Florida has that much square footage for visiting shows, a critical consideration for any lending institution.

That, and the good notices Spaulding received from the Art Gallery of Ontario that loaned the Appleton its 19th and 20th century masterworks, helped in negotiating with the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for "Rubens, Jordaens, Van Dyck and Their Circle: Flemish Master Drawings," which runs through Nov. 10. It visits only two other venues, in Pittsburgh and Nashville, before returning to Rotterdam.

Two drawings by Peter Paul Rubens, Profile of a Young Man, done when he was still a boy and copying art, and Young Woman with Folded Hands, completed at the height of his career, show his evolution as an artist.

This is not a flashy show. Artists of that time used their drawings as studies and sketches for their paintings. The pieces were never considered "finished," and most were not signed. But in many ways, they are a distillation of the artists' talent. You will not see, for example, the luminous colors, dramatic lighting effects and compositional brilliance that mark a Rubens painting. But in the drawings, you will see the superb draftsmanship that underpins his work. And they have an intimacy and immediacy that a finished work, for all its grandness and perfection, does not.

The most important work in the show is Rubens' Christ on the Cross, which is as close to a standalone work as any in the collection, a beautiful rendering in chalk and a wash of colors that embodies his Baroque brilliance.

Van Dyck was probably Rubens' most successful pupil. The drawings here are almost exclusively from his time in Antwerp, before 1632, when he was still strongly influenced by his teacher and before he gained fame as a court portraitist in England.

Jordaens, who trained in Van Dyck's studio and became Antwerp's most celebrated painter after Rubens' death in 1640, has the same full and free hand with figures as his predecessors, but sometimes he infuses his work with a boisterous, comedic quality.

The last group of drawings is by lesser artists who worked in the shadow of the marquee names. Interestingly, some of them bear the signatures of their famous mentors, but wall signs explain that like so much art, they were at some point hastily and incorrectly attributed; the "signatures" were added by dealers.

Paintings by contemporary artist Tim Zuck occupy several more galleries. Along with work from the museum's permanent collection of contemporary art, which Spaulding is building rapidly, they form an interesting survey of the road some artists have traveled over the last several decades from abstraction to new forms of representational art. That sounds obscure and cerebral, but the art is surprisingly accessible.

There is enough at the Appleton for at least a half-day of pleasure. A bonus is that it is set in about 12 acres of beautiful parkland, so take a picnic. Or grab a salad and sandwich at the museum's cafe and dine in the glass atrium overlooking the courtyard garden.

REVIEW: "Rubens, Jordaens, Van Dyck and Their Circle: Flemish Master Drawings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen" is at the Appleton Museum of Art, 4333 Silver Springs Blvd., Ocala, through Nov. 10. Also on view are paintings by Tim Zuck, selections from the contemporary collection and the museum's permanent installation of European, Oriental and African art. The museum is open every day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $10, with discounts for seniors and students. Children under 10 are free. The museum also offers special events for families. Call (352) 236-7100 or visit www.appletonmuseum.org for more information.

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