{"id":10796,"date":"2015-07-23T11:01:33","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T15:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=10796"},"modified":"2015-08-04T18:23:59","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T22:23:59","slug":"a-world-becalmed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/a-world-becalmed\/","title":{"rendered":"A World Becalmed"},"content":{"rendered":"

July\/August 2015 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Shh! This is an art gallery, not a library. “A Magnificent Stillness: American Art From a Private Collection.”<\/h3>\n

By Colin W. Sargent<\/p>\n

\"JA15-Magnificent-Stillness\"<\/a>Jack London describes silence\u2013the shock after a deadly ship collision\u2013as a \u201cterrible quiet.\u201d Federico Garcia Lorca is sly: \u201cthe silence of an overturned locomotive.\u201d Rick Moody frightens with his 21st-century entry, the \u201creloading pause.\u201d In the lovely hush of Portland Museum of Art\u2019s exquisite A Magnificent Stillness: American Art From a Private Collection<\/b>, the silence will knock you over. Fifteen paintings collected by Dr. Walter B. Goldfarb and his late wife, Marcia Finberg Goldfarb (1933-2013), bring the world to a crashing halt. According to the Portland<\/em> Press Herald<\/em>, the Goldfarbs met while he was an undergrad at Brown and she was top of her class at Brown\u2019s Pembroke College. Her parents owned Maine Hardware. They married in Portland in December, 1955.<\/p>\n

Moving here in 1968, he quickly rose to become a respected surgeon while she earned a second degree at Bowdoin and became \u201can expert at two-dimensional electrophoresis, the separation, identification and quantification of proteins in a variety of biologic and other industrial fluids\u2026In 1985, Marcia left Ventrex to start her own biotech company, Anatec\u2026with customers and contracts all over the world.\u201d Together as art lovers and collectors with a home on Bowdoin Street in the West End, this high-power couple built their collection with a dazzling, exacting eye.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou learned this from the obituary, correct?\u201d says Dr. Goldfarb when we called to learn why his collection was so astonishingly quiet. \u201cI provided that information. I miss her so much I had to have her name on the collection.\u201d There\u2019s a pause. \u201cBut I\u2019m the one with the eye.\u201d But why not whirlwind painters of motion like Warhol or Dahlov Ipcar? Surely it\u2019s too easy to suggest Dr. G. loves these exacting works in near absolute silence because he\u2019s a surgeon? \u201cIt isn\u2019t quite that easy,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to explain. I had a very busy practice at Maine Medical and Mercy. These paintings appealed to me. It\u2019s like love, you look across the room and it connects. It\u2019s chemical. I never thought of the quietude as I collected them, but I guess they have it. I\u2019d come home, look at these paintings, and feel so at ease. I\u2019ve attended lectures by John Wilmerding and Richard Estes,\u201d who guided him deeper into stillness until it excited his passions. \u201cWilmerding is the chairman of the board of trustees at the National Gallery, as well as a professor of art at Princeton, before that at Dartmouth. Very erudite as a scholar and collector, Dutch realist\u201d in his tastes. \u201cHe was aware of my Fitz Henry Lane (I admit I still call him Fitz Hugh Lane), and in 2004, when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan included three Fitz Henry Lanes in a show, one of them was Wilmerding\u2019s. Because he knew about my paintings, one of them was mine.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Wilmerding, who vacations in Northeast Harbor, and Estes, who also has property there, appeared together at a lecture at the Holiday Inn By The Bay, someone asked Estes\u201d\u2013the pop star and a founder of photorealism\u2013\u201chow he did it. He said, \u2018You know, I just do it.\u2019 I\u2019ve donated five of the fifteen paintings in this collection to Portland Museum of Art. I\u2019ve gone to see the show almost every day since it\u2019s been up, because I miss it in my bedroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

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July\/August 2015
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