Portland Art Museum

The claims on their own website and on the Wikipedia Greenberg article both turn out to be exaggerated. They don’t have his annotated personal library or any real scholarly material. That stuff is all in the Smithsonian (where it belongs, frankly).

What they do have here are a bunch of catalogs from shows that Greenberg went to. It’s pretty striking to see pencil notations in his own hand, but it amounts mostly to simple check marks. There was one David Smith catalog where the remarks were slightly more interesting. He wrote “weak” next to a photo of one sculpture, and next to two others he wrote “back view,” I suppose in exasperation at catalog photographers he must have viewed as inept for photographing the wrong side.

But the librarian seemed to feel sorry about my disappointed expectations (and she warned me they would probably be disappointed). So she very kindly let me in the art gallery itself through a secret back entrance using an employee pass key, and there one could see the works from Greenberg’s private collection. Those were all good works, as you might expect.

Portland has a surprisingly nice collection beyond that, as well.