Assyrians in Maine

Last week I went to Brunswick, Maine, to hear Jenn read from her just-completed novel and to attend her graduation from the Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing—an intimate and touching ceremony that featured a guitarist playing Pomp and Circumstance.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is barely half a block from the dorms where the Stonecoast students stay, but the program is so demanding that it was not until her last residency that Jenn (and I) were able to go.

It’s a small museum, but well worth visiting. In fact, I visited twice in the same day, an indulgence made easier because admission is free. The first floor is currently given over to an exhibit on Edward Hopper’s Maine, but upstairs you find a wonderfully eclectic collection of art.

At the top of the stairs stands a series of massive Assyrian stone reliefs, positioned so that sunlight falls on them and brings out the fine detail of the carving as the light shifts.

In the next gallery is a grimacing skull-like head on a burning red background, by Basquiat. Keep going and you find a fine Rockwell Kent painting of Asgaard, his Adirondack home, and a brooding study of the Pennsylvania coal country by Robert Henri—a canvas so dark that I missed it my first time through.

There’s more:

• A Fra Angelico featuring what is allegedly Venus in an aureole but looking more like a gray alien

• St. Jerome looking as if he wants to demonstrate that you really can squeeze blood from a stone

• A small painting that makes you look closer when you read that the figure of Peter Martyr “can be identified by the transparent knife embedded in his head”

In the next room is an ancient amphora like many you’ve probably seen—only this one is encrusted with the shells of marine animals, including a worm shell coiled near the lip of the vessel. Seeing that, you can imagine a storm, a foundering ship, and the long years that this object spent at the bottom of the Mediterranean.