Un Voyage aux Berkshires

Earlier this summer, AFL members journeyed to the rolling hills of the Berkshires where they toured cultural institutions, private collections, and historic properties. AFL members began their trip with a private tour of Edith Wharton’s summer home, The Mount. While best known for her depictions of Gilded Age New York, France appears often in her work, including the closing scene of The Age of Innocence, which made Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. Following her divorce in 1910, Wharton permanently moved to France, where she enjoyed greater intellectual and romantic freedom, including secret rendezvous with lovers at the Louvre.

Continuing their time in the Berkshires, AFL members and patrons spent the next few days visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio, where artists George L.K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen lived and worked. Works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger are installed throughout the home. At a private collection visit, the group explored work by Nick Cave, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and El Anatsui. The group also enjoyed a private tour of Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation at the Williams College Art Museum, which featured work by Sadie Barnette and Sable Elyse Smith, among others.

The AFL member trip to the Berkshires concluded with the opening of Guillaume Lethière at the Clark Art Institute. Co-organized by the Louvre and the Clark, this exhibition shines a spotlight on the mostly-overlooked Neoclassical painter who was born in Guadalupe in the 1760s, the son of a white plantation owner and French government official and a mixed-race enslaved woman. Despite the adversity he faced, he traveled to France, survived the French Revolution, and ascended to the highest levels of artistic recognition in his time.