Now Playing at a Local Museum

Tools, Unvarnished, Reimagined

By Arthur Stampleman

The Bruce Museum in Greenwich brings us an art exhibit that is both thought-provoking and humorous, and has an unusual central motif: tools. “Re Tooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection” is on loan from the International Art and Artists Association, a nonprofit organization that manages traveling exhibitions.

Forty works — prints, sculptures, photographs, mixed media, and more — representing 28 artists from the Hechinger Collection are on view at the Bruce until the end of the year. The major artists represented include Arman, Anthony Caro, Richard Estes, Red Grooms, Jacob Lawrence, Fernand Leger, and Walker Evans, as well as pop artists Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist.

The works are shown in four sections: Objects of Beauty, Material Illusions, Instruments of Satire, and Tools: An Extension of Self.

In Objects of Beauty, the pieces and artists here have removed the tools from their everyday functions and present them as objects to be revered. Berenice Abbott’s <Spinning Wrench> (1958 photograph) captured the effects of motion by showing successive views of a wrench as it moves through the air suspended from a wire. Jim Dine’s series of nine works, <Toolbox> (1966), places screen print images of tools in ascetic, yet energetic compositions. These artists work to reveal the rare vulnerable beauty of everyday tools taken out of their work environments.

Material Illusions presents tools through a distorted lens — artists reimagine tools and render them useless in unusual contexts to question their functionality. F.L. Wall’s <Summer Tool> (1983 sculpture) presents an oak lawn mower cutting each blade of grass at a uniform height. Hans Gado Frabel ‘s <Hammer and Nails> (1980 glass sculpture) displays a work that could not possibly function as a hammer, even though it is made of Borosilicate glass, a harder than normal glass.

This collection highlights the growing distance between modern society and the simple tools that used to be synonymous with American progress, now replaced by the computer and other technological tools.

In Instruments of Satire, artists play with tools by injecting sharp humor and wit into their works. Claes Oldenburg drastically lionizes an everyday object in <Three Way Plug> (1965 offset lithograph) by rendering the plug with a larger-than-life status that verges on the comical. In <Blue, Red, Brown> (1988 mixed media) viewers see an example of Arman’s Accumulations style, his commentary on the consequences of mass production: in this case a collection of identical paint brushes on a canvas. <Man on a Limb>, a 1985 papier-mâché sculpture by Stephen Hansen, shows a man sawing off the wrong end of a wood spur he is sitting on.

In Tools: An Extension of Self, the artists show how tools can be an extension of an artist or representative of a nation or industry’s spirit. Here we see a work of Jacob Lawrence famous for his 60-panel “Migration Series”. <Carpenters> (1977 lithograph) explores his interest in themes surrounding construction and building, incorporating his own personal observations of construction workers while growing up in Harlem. Howard Finster’s <Mountains of People Use Tools>, 1990 enamel paint and marker on wood and metal, shows why his work is often labeled as folk art, outsider art, naïve art, and visionary art. Fernand Leger’s 1951 lithograph <Les Constructeurs (The Builders)> depicts workers on a construction site cooperating on the project.

These works and 300 more were brought together in the 1980s by John Hechinger, owner of a hardware store chain in the mid-Atlantic region. His intent to beautify a new company headquarters led to the acquisition of a tool-inspired collection of diverse 20th-century art. “I felt that if I could show my associates how so many artists had celebrated the handsaw or the hammer or the paint brush, they would be aware of the intrinsic beauty of the simple objects that they handled by the tens of thousands,” said Hechinger. “They were not only the focus of their workdays, but our company’s very lifeblood.” Hechinger later donated his collection to International Arts & Artists.

The Bruce Museum is located at 1 Museum Drive in Greenwich. Hours are 10 to 5 Tuesday to Sunday. For information, call 203-869-0376 or visit www.brucemuseum.org.