Chapters on Ohio
Marco Goldin

In spring, when the rains have ended and before the long, warm days of summer arrive, the landscape is delightful. The village lies in the middle of the meadows, but behind the meadows are the woods. In the woods there are many secluded corners, quiet and cheerful places where lovers go to spend Sunday afternoons. Through the trees, one can see the fields, the farmers at work, and people along the road. In the village, the bells ring, and sometimes a train passes by, made to look like a toy by the distance.

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

1
In the happy time of discovering the world, on a spring morning, I heard the name Winesburg, Ohio for the first time. For the first time, I heard the name of its author, Sherwood Anderson. Just hearing them, I already felt I liked them, because they carried the color of light, the scent of the wind passing through a wheat field, and the fragrance of a forest undergrowth in full bloom.

I was twenty years old, attending my first university courses, and of course, I had never been to Ohio. The professor seemed to digress, just as I liked. When one starts from a poem and eventually arrives at a painting, and at the same time feels the breath of life. That feeling that sometimes catches you by the throat.

I listened and thought of Ohio, looking beyond the window at the clear sky of Venice, with seagulls in flight and the dark waters of the Grand Canal, crisscrossed with boats. Those stood out, shimmering from red to green like fruit. And then the shouts, the Venetians calling from one bank to the other, greeting passersby. And we students up there, attending class on a bright May morning, when you’d rather be elsewhere, perhaps walking on a beach by the sea.

In that elsewhere, in that moment, on that precise May morning, this name—Ohio—entered my life. The professor, now slightly digressing at the end of the year, just before the start of the exam session, lingered on the great American literature of the twentieth century, which in fact was not the topic of the monographic course. But I liked that he behaved this way. And speaking of Hemingway, he said we should consider his debt specifically to Sherwood Anderson, especially his book Winesburg, Ohio.

I’ll skip the rest, which would make this story too long, because what mattered was that that afternoon, returning to Treviso from the university, I immediately went to a bookstore and asked for a copy of Winesburg, Ohio. I immersed myself in it for the following hours, and by evening I had already finished reading it. For me, who, like all twenty-year-olds of the time, loved Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology—with the unforgettable musician Jones, made even more immortal by Fabrizio De André less than ten years earlier—it was a complete revelation. That book was the sum of people and landscapes, of souls and impossible journeys. I loved how the apparent simplicity became boundlessness, an immense expansion within space. 

2

Then, for at least fifteen years, Winesburg, Ohio became a memory, left on one of the shelves of my library. Until something began to happen that, back in university, it didn't seem foreseeable to me. Under the heading “profession,” my identity card listed the following occupation: “art critic.” I moved among the painters of twentieth-century Italy, though, of course, this was not noted in any way on that document. But at a certain point, my field of action—if we can call it that—expanded, and I began to turn into a profession what I had been studying and loving all along.

In short, the great international painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I had begun to travel throughout Europe, from Russia to France, visiting museums and collections from which I tried to borrow works that, gradually, formed the first international exhibitions I curated.

At the beginning of spring in the year 2000, I decided that the time had come to try crossing the Atlantic Ocean. With a certain apprehension, it must be said. I was working on an exhibition about the birth of Impressionism, a very large show in terms of the number of works. It was my first truly historically and internationally significant exhibition. So, with the few contacts I had at the time, I scheduled a few appointments at museums in the United States, no more than three or four.

A couple in New York, then in Philadelphia, and finally—before flying to Buenos Aires and São Paulo—somehow I chose to go to the Toledo Museum of Art, right in the state of Ohio, on the southern shore of Lake Erie. In this way, I was testing my knowledge of geography, a subject that had always fascinated me at school, and on which I often competed with my brother to see who could remember the most names of mountains, rivers, and capitals around the world. Even if I try to go back to that moment, I cannot quite pinpoint why I chose to go there, rather than, say, Cincinnati or Columbus. Or perhaps Detroit, where I would eventually land.

Of course, I immediately thought of that book that had accompanied me during my university days at Ca' Foscari. In fact, I dusted off the Einaudi edition for the occasion, taking it off the bookshelf to reread a few pages, almost as if to prepare myself emotionally. What follows is the story of how that early spring weekend in Toledo, Ohio, went.

The agency handling my travel had booked me a flight from Philadelphia to Detroit on Friday morning. My appointment with the curator at the Toledo Museum was scheduled for the afternoon, and to be honest, I had been explicitly asked whether I wanted to spend the weekend in the city or rather stay in Detroit for Saturday and Sunday before catching a flight on Monday morning. With Sherwood Anderson’s words lingering in my mind, I chose to spend those two days of rest—on my first American trip—right in Toledo. In Ohio.

The driver waiting for me at Detroit airport took me to Toledo in about forty-five minutes. After dropping off my suitcase at the hotel, I set off toward the museum, walking along quiet avenues in an area that wasn’t downtown. I had already developed my own technique, which consisted of arriving at a museum a couple of hours before the loan meeting so that I could calmly look through all the rooms with the artworks and perhaps come up with new ideas beyond those I had arrived with. A useful idea for a provincial like me.

I knew that the Toledo Museum of Art had an extraordinary collection, and as I browsed so many masterpieces, I dreamed of being able to borrow some for the exhibition I would organize a few months later in Treviso. But I quickly brought myself back to reality, telling myself that it would be impossible—unknown as I was in the world of international exhibitions, proposing a city and a venue completely unfamiliar on the global stage. I marveled at how Toledo, not part of the American metropolitan circuit, possessed a collection of such value.

The moment for the meeting arrived, and intimidated as I was, I had decided to focus, in my conversation with the curator, on a painting whose loan I thought might be less demanding for the museum. Yet it was certainly perfect for the sections preceding it in the exhibition path I had designed, covering the birth of Impressionism. Jean-François Millet’s The Quarriers—incidentally, the painter so beloved by Van Gogh in his emotional education in art—thus became the very first painting an American museum ever lent me. For this reason, it remains unforgettable for me. I cherished it in the dream of that moment, and when I left the office where the meeting had taken place, I returned to the museum galleries to see it again, imagining where I would place it in Treviso.

With a broad smile, I immersed myself in the clear light of an Ohio afternoon that was drawing to a close. I thought of Millet, I thought of Van Gogh, of the exhibitions in Treviso that had begun a couple of years earlier without anyone being able to predict where they would lead. I thought of Sherwood Anderson and the American literature of vast spaces, feeling its allure and mystery. That relationship of man with perilous nature, the friction with time, everything I had discovered about twenty years earlier while reading and taking notes on The Old Man and the Sea. I thought of all this as I left the Toledo Museum of Art.

Then the memories blur a little over that weekend in Ohio. I spent it walking, kilometers and kilometers each day, along a canal that started from a peripheral area of the city. One could walk on the high grassy bank, and gradually the countryside would unfold before you, and I recognized, twenty years after reading, the lights and spaces Anderson had described. From time to time, little voices, and the still-cold wind of early spring, with the sun. On Monday morning I left Toledo to head to the airport in Detroit. Since then, I have returned to Ohio several times, but never to Toledo.