Photo: Kathryn Geurin

Summer Getaways: Berkshire County

Rolling hills, roosters, and a raft of world-class art

My arm is curved a round the soft neck of a Holstein calf, its gritty tongue dragging along my elbow. Across the barn my husband butts heads with a mischievous goat. Our bellies are full from lunch at Rita Marie’s, a tiny pink-and-white shingled restaurant where our sandwiches were delivered by a grandmother simultaneously barking orders at the crew. Nestled in my pocket are two glass marbles (a gift for my once-marble-champion mother) unearthed for pennies at a roadside antique shop. Earlier today—not 20 minutes from the farm where we now stand wrist-deep in the impossibly soft fur of a llama—we wandered museum halls, basking in Renoir, Degas, Monet, Gauguin.

“We’re vacationing in the Berkshires this year,” we would say before our trip, usually with a drippingly haughty air. Undoubtedly one of the finest cultural jewels in the Northeast, the Berkshires have developed quite an elegant reputation. And elegant is not likely the first word that would be used to describe our little family. An artist and a writer, both with a generous share of curiosity, we adore galleries, theater, history, museums. But we can do without the silk trappings of high culture. So, any day that starts off by taking in John Singer Sargent’s Fumée d’Ambre Gris and a rare first printing of the Bill of Rights, finds room for roosters, and ends with soft ice cream at a picnic table by twilight is just about perfect in our book.

We navigated our entire trip from a hand-drawn tourist map my husband referred to as “the Six Flags map to the Berkshires.” On Route 43 we stumbled upon a used bookstore, run by an aging beatnik, with quotes and canceled checks signed by Kerouac tacked to the window frames. It was the first of many roadside shops we were drawn to for their teeming clutter of treasures. One antique shop unfolded around racks brimming with vintage hats. Another had—honest to goodness—the Lone Ranger’s rifle.

Of course, we always made it to our destinations, most of the scattered towns around 15 minutes from the last. Along our paths, arrows pointed to nearby Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Shakespeare & Company, Barrington Stage. The Berkshire Botanical Garden is the rambling home to more than 3,000 plant species. The Mount and Arrowhead open the doors to the historic homes of literary giants Edith Wharton and Herman Melville. This time around, we focused our destinations into an art tour of the area.

MASS MoCA is celebrating its 10th anniversary with an array of new and ongoing exhibitions. Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, a grand installation diagramed by Lewitt and executed by 65 artists is not to be missed. The newly renovated Berkshire Museum presents a surprising collection of fine art in its sweeping upstairs galleries. The balance offers hours of interactive exploration and discovery for adults and kids alike.

As always, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute shines with a brilliant and growing collection. The French impressionists are highlighted in the main galleries. From the window, a field rolls into a broad pond laden with water lilies. One cannot help but imagine Monet settled on the small stone bench.

Williams College Museum of Art should absolutely not be overlooked. The museum’s galleries house more than 13,000 works spanning from ancient cultures to contemporary icons; the fusion of modern art and history is curated with powerful results. A massive Warhol self-portrait looms in the main atrium; the stairs carry visitors past the radiating swaths of color of one of LeWitt’s wall drawings. Upstairs, the current exhibitions explore the roots of our nation. The founding documents, one of the great treasures of Williams College, and usually housed in the rare-book library, are on display while a new library is built. In an adjoining gallery, Lincoln to the Nth Degree draws on a fascinating anthology of works: decorative parlor printings of the Emancipation Proclamation, political cartoons, portraits, a newspaper’s first known printing of the Gettysburg Address, assassination announcements, wanted posters, memorials—to honor the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. In the center of the room, a plaster cast taken of the young president’s face, creased and pockmarked, clean shaven, rests like a ghost in a glass case.

Tucked in the hills of Stockbridge, the Norman Rockwell Museum is home to the largest collection of work by the illustrator. You’ve seen his iconic images hundreds of times, but their impact in person is infinitely more powerful. His sketches and studies—particularly an animated piece depicting the tragic fire at his first studio—allow a peek into the artist’s mind and methods. The grit, hope and humility of his series The Four Freedoms would remind even the most cynical what is truly important.

Rockwell’s studio (pictured), situated behind the museum, is open to the public and, when we went, the guide at the tidy and peaceful studio was Wray Gunn, who, it turns out, was one of the models for Rockwell’s New Kids in the Neighborhood, an illustration commissioned for a Look magazine story about one of the country’s first integrated housing developments. The original painting hangs in the gallery, but it comes alive in the studio through Gunn’s stories and pictures.

Strolling through the rolling grounds, the mountains rising around us, fine art nestled in the nooks and valleys of farm country, the Berkshire’s gifts of culture and relaxation were clear. We tucked our illustrated map away and set off to get ourselves lost.

—Kathryn Geurin

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