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04/20/2017 12:01 AMTwo years ago, when The Kate (Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center) in Old Saybrook and The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme partnered to bring their audiences together to view a new series of fine art films, no one imagined that two years later, one of them would feature an exhibition at the museum. Titled The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, the film will be shown on Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, April 30 at The Kate.
Brett Elliott was just coming on-board as the theater’s executive director when he and Chuck Still, former executive director, approached David Rau, director of education and outreach at the Florence Griswold, about working together to show the series of films being produced by Exhibition on Screen, based in Brighton, England.
“At The Kate the last couple of years, we have really formed a lot of partnerships—with Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, the Community Music School in Essex, Eastern Connecticut Ballet, [etc.],” Elliott says. “We’re stronger because we have such strong partnerships and can cross collaborate.”
Elliott and Rau agree that this is a unique way for the two organizations to bring their audiences together and at the same time, Elliott says, “transport them to other places they don’t have to jump on a plane to get to—they can just come to The Kate.”
The 90-minute films, now in their fourth season, feature exhibitions by renowned artists from Michelangelo to Monet and Van Gogh to Goya at the world’s leading art museums, including the National Gallery, the Tate Modern, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London; the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, among others. Sixteen films have been produced to date.
“They’re high definition and so visually, on the big screen, they’re really captivating,” Rau says. “The films pan very slowly across a painting to give you time to look up close and personal at a work of art. It feels like you can get even closer to the painting than in a museum without a guard telling you to step back!
“And although they get top curators and professors, people who know what they’re talking about to [narrate} the films,” Rau adds, “it’s not all talk, talk, talk. There’s a relaxing, beautiful music [score] and you actually feel when you come out of the theater that you’ve been somewhere. Everyone comes out smiling, like you did it together. It’s a real communal experience.”
“The films are really well done because of the way Exhibition on Screen puts the story and visuals together,” Elliott concurs. “At the first screening, we were hoping for at least 40 people and by the end of the first season we were actually selling some of the shows out. I think people have latched on to the quality of the films.”
Taking it to Old Lyme and Back in Time
Rau explains that last year (season three) Exhibition on Screen produced a different kind of film with Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. The company’s producer and creative director Phil Grabsky, who has been making award-winning documentaries for 30 years, saw the interest generated by the film and wanted to further explore the connection between art and gardening.
“They found out we were having The Artist’s Garden...exhibition and contacted us, saying they were thinking of doing an American film related to the garden,” Rau explains.
Things moved quickly, since it was already late spring, the exhibition was only up until September, and the museum’s colorful gardens were almost at their peak.
“They filmed a lot here and a lot of our gardens and grounds because we’re a center of American Impressionism,” Rau says. “They also visited other key sites [in New England] to tell the story of American Impressionism [including] Weir Farm (in Wilton), and the Isle of Shoals (off the coasts of Maine and New Hampshire). The idea was to show paintings of the gardens juxtaposed with the actual gardens.”
Local artists were filmed painting in Miss Florence’s heirloom gardens, as they regularly do, carrying on the tradition of the Lyme Colony artists, who painted in the same location more than a century earlier.
The film features interviews with the museum’s curators Amy Kurtz Lansing and Jenny Parsons, as well as Anna Marley, who curated The Artists Garden exhibition when it was at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, prior to coming to Old Lyme. Rau notes that Bill Gertz, one of the most famous scholars of American Impressionism, is also on camera in the film, which is presently being shown in more than 1,500 theaters in 50 countries.
“Both the Florence Gris and The Kate are interested in expanding audiences and want to see folks we haven’t seen, in addition to our regular patrons, and I think this film series has opened that up with a mix of new and old faces of varying ages,” Elliott says. “We’re very proud to be in this partnership with the Florence Griswold. It’s a wonderful working relationship for both of us.”
The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism, a 90-minute feature film, will be shown at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, April 31 at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center, 300 Main Street, Old Saybrook. Tickets are $15 general admission and can be purchased online at www.katharinehepburntheater.org or at the theater’s box office.
DVDs of previous films shown in the Exhibition on Screen series are available for purchase in the Florence Griswold Museum gift shop.