The Hall Art Foundation opened in Reading, Vt., in 2013, and until last weekend, I had almost completely ignored it.
Part of the reason is that the Hall is an outlier among Upper Valley visual art institutions, in that it costs 15 bucks to go there. It sometimes is open for free, but seldom, and it isn’t open much at all on Saturdays and Sundays from May through November.
The other half is that all of the foundation’s art belongs to Andrew J. and Christine Hall. Andrew Hall is a British-born former oil trader who achieved an unusual level of notoriety for the $100 million bonus he was due to receive in 2008, at the tail end of the Great Recession. The New York Times has documented how ultra-wealthy art collectors are opening private museums near their homes as tax shelters, and included the Hall.
Some of the Hall’s offerings have been tempting. An exhibition of Joel Sternfeld’s photographs last summer almost overcame my aversion and my schedule.
Finally, this summer, the exhibitions in Reading were too thick with irony for me to continue to sidestep. How could I not take in a group show called “A Farewell to the Western World,” housed in the Vermont tax shelter of a man whom the Financial Times has called “the most successful oil trader of his generation?”
The art at the Hall is, of course, not unenjoyable. There are five galleries in renovated structures that were part of the same farm and an array of outdoor sculptures linked by walking paths. Property records show that the Hall occupies a corner of a 392-acre parcel. One of the mown paths, which traverses a meadow full of milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, red clover, asters and Vermont hay grasses, runs close to a four-strand wire fence.
Hanging on the wire fence was a sign that said “Posted and Patrolled.” I clambered up for a closer view and saw “Newhall Farm” on the sign, though the foundation owns the entire property. The Halls have a part-time residence in Reading that’s five-miles away from the foundation.
The showpiece of the outdoor art is “Waterfall,” first erected by Olafur Eliasson in 2004. Water gently cascades down seven falls that are held up by what looks like haphazardly assembled metal scaffolding. It is a clever commentary on the provisional quality of the modern world next to the natural miracles we take for granted. There’s also a natural waterfall nearby on the north branch of the Black River, for contrast.
I started in the gallery farthest from the parking lot and worked my way back, which meant that the first show I saw was about the destruction of art. “Made to be Destroyed,” a 2016 film by the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay, strings together clips from movies in which characters push over sculptures or stoneware, or hit it with hammers, tear or cut or set on fire paintings and drawings and otherwise ruin art made as part of a film set.
The 22-minute supercut starts with a clip of Buddhist monks gently erasing a sand mandala, a more deliberate acknowledgement of art’s impermanence. The rest is just Hollywood violence. Movies have to use action to demonstrate emotion, so tormented artists, or their tormented loved ones, have to destroy things to show their discontent. Some of the scenes are funny, including one from an action movie in which a large canvas is used as a weapon.
The big show of the summer, though, is “A Farewell to the Western World,” which takes up three of the galleries. The show takes its title from that of a 2007 painting by Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie that shows an artist seated in a dark space with models of New York skyscrapers and buildings from classical antiquity. The downcast figure of the artist appears to be sitting among ruins.
Overall, the show is an exploration of the radicalisms of our present moment. It includes such well-known works as Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph “The Terror of War,” of a Vietnamese girl struck by napalm, which hangs as a kind of diptych with Robert Capa’s famous photograph of a militiaman being shot during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
Those images help set a tone of dread and foreboding for more recent works in the show that lean more heavily into satire or the winking humor of post-modernism.
The news media comes in for its share of mockery, in works by Aleksandra Mir that ape the tabloid newspaper coverage of Donald Trump, back when he was merely a loud-mouthed real estate hustler and not the “leader of the free world.” The quotation marks there are not optional. Guy Richard Smit’s blurry paintings of New York Times front pages, with satirical headlines, such as “I Have Found God,” take aim at a big target and still somehow miss.
There are works by such boldface names as Leon Golub, Philip Guston and Andy Warhol, but the standout works are from unexpected corners.
“Ashfall I,” a 2022 painting by the Iraqi painter Mohammad Sami, now living in the UK, is a large-format wonder, with rectilinear forms of traditional Mesopotamian architecture that dissolve into smears of ochre paint up close. The falling ash look just like that, but on closer inspection, some of the flecks are nearly human-scale, like bodies on the buildings.
“The Edge of the Empire,” a 2008 painting by the Romanian artist Serban Savu, which shows a clutch of people who appear to be waiting for a bus in a Soviet-era cityscape, has a touching warmth of feeling for its anonymous citizens. And Sophie von Hellerman’s “The Explosion,” from 2010, is a painting so kinetic that I couldn’t help but think of Negativland’s 1987 punk outburst “Car Bomb.”
And there are works that couldn’t help but make me think of the Hall’s namesake collector. Adel Abdessemad’s “Ocean View,” from 2005, consists of five $1 bills folded into two small boats that sit in a plexiglass vitrine above a stack of 15 panels of blue Styrofoam insulation. A commenter quoted in the foundation’s guide to the show calls the piece “a mocking metaphor for the circulation of capital.”
Looking at art like this, while bearing in mind who collected it, is frankly exhausting. Arts writers generally try to ignore where the money that paid for the art came from, but should we? I don’t think so.
Over the past 20 years, the Upper Valley has seen investments in the arts that boggle the mind. Smaller venues, such as Newport’s Library Arts Center and even AVA Gallery and Art Center, in Lebanon, have been able to grow and serve a local population of artists, students and viewers.
But that’s not where most of the investment has gone. In addition to the Hall, we’ve seen Dartmouth College build the Black Family Visual Arts Center, and add a wing to the Hopkins Center funded by a real estate investor and former friend of the above-mentioned “leader of the free world.”
These facilities are indeed splendid, but does attending them mean we’re engaging in a form of laundering? I think so. Money and power have replaced community as a central value in American life, and the tens of millions spent on these art buildings and their contents are a sign of how that inversion has played out in the Upper Valley.
It’s something to bear in mind, not a reason to stay home and pretend the art isn’t there.
The last show I looked at in Reading, closest to the parking lot, was Piotr Uklanski’s photo installation “The Nazis,” from 1998. Uklanski assembled film still headshots of actors portraying Nazis. There are dozens of them, all in rows. Clint Eastwood, Rutger Hauer, William Shatner, Robert Downey Jr., Steve McQueen, Telly Savalas, on and on. It’s simultaneously chilling and hilarious to see Hollywood’s ongoing fascination with and commodification of the marriage of corporate and state power that led to the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
Like the other art, it’s part of the Hall’s collection, which was assembled by an oil trader. Again, something to bear in mind.
For more information about the Hall Art Foundation, go to hallartfoundation.org.
Correction: The Hall Art Foundation owns all of the nearly 400-acre parcel it’s situated on, and that parcel is not contiguous with the part-time residence owned by Andrew and Christine Hall, which is roughly five miles away. Those details were incorrect in a previous version of this story.
