The Newbury Boston’s Hotel Art Collection Is Fit For A City Museum

In recent years, hotels around the world have promoted a flowering of fine art in their typically enormous spaces. Owners might put their private collections on display, while in many cases, acquisitions are curated to reflect and pay homage to the host city’s history and local color. For its part, The Leading Hotels of the World group of some 400 properties prides itself on cultural elements being one of the primary motivations for membership.

Put those two elements together and you’ll encounter a most striking art collection in Boston’s Back Bay at the newly restored and rebranded Newbury Boston, originally the city’s preeminent 1927 Ritz-Carlton. Working artists and curators, Mike Carroll and Lynne Kortenhaus shaped the Newbury collection in part to pay homage to Boston’s rich past in emulating 19th-century European salon culture, a time when Isabella Stewart Gardner was known as the most prominent art patron.

The contemporary artists they selected for the Newbury work in all manner of media, and all either come from the Boston region or are active in the area’s arts education community. Many also have works in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the city’s Institute of Contemporary Art (the Newbury offers package bookings with these institutions).

The Newbury looks over the majestic Boston Public Garden. One of the driving ideas behind the collection is to bring the park in spirit into the hotel, in the use of bright and often verdant colors, materials and subject matter. And that ethos starts where it should, at the entrance, or entrances really, depending on whether you come in from the Arlington Street or the Newbury Street sides (with the latter being the new official front entry).

The first object with a natural world connection that draws the eye is a functional one, a selection from Jeffrey Beers International who designed the public areas. Romanian sculptor Andreea Braescu is known for her lighting works in the form of delicate ceramic ginkgo leaves. Centering the Newbury lobby, her lovely leaf chandelier takes you back to the Public Garden whose eight specimens from the world’s oldest living tree species are celebrated.

Beyond the chandelier, the front desk jumps out at you from a distance as well with an unmistakable art history reference on the wall behind it. Should there be any doubt, the title of the Elis Ansel painting behind the desk will clear it up fast: Déjeuner (2020). Commissioned for the Newbury, the piece also essentially links into the Public Garden, albeit with its Manet-ish picnickers rendered abstractly.

On the Newbury Street lobby side, two diminutive photographs in porthole format by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are vividly painterly in their landscape elements, and also lend themselves to certain historic references if you let your mind wander a bit. In Letterfrack (2018), a figure’s posture as seen from behind might be reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. The other, All the Things (2018), depicts a woman whose look and pose hint at Pre-Raphaelite tableaux, while she seems to be embracing a collection of mementos, including a human skull.

The hotel’s Library manages to fit in a world of eclectic art works within its comfy little space. Yousuf Karsh and his wife Estrellita had lived for a time in the hotel’s residences, and she allowed access to his signature black and white photographs. A collection of nine portraits on one wall include I.M. Pei, Le Corbusier, Hemingway, and O’Keeffe. Legend has it that Tennessee Williams, seen smoking over his typewriter, wrote parts of A Streetcar Named Desire in the hotel.

Depicting figures in African American history, We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue and I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (2020) take their titles from Curtis Mayfield and James Brown songs. Set in the book shelves, artist Lavaughan Jenkins’ diminutive oil paint and foam figurines (he describes them as 3D paintings) look as if covered in thick cupcake frosting.

By the entrance to the Street Bar, another nod to Boston that the Newbury commissioned can be found in Richard Baker’s gouache on paper Boston Authors Book Cover Paintings (2020). Right down to dog-eared edges, the paperback books he paints are hyperrealistic and honor authors like Hawthorne and Thoreau who lived or wrote in the area.

While sipping drinks in the Street Bar, guests really will have the sensation of being in a salon. By African-American Boston artist Steve Locke, the two works Homage to the Auction Block (2020)—one a silkscreen, the other a painting—honor locations in the city where enslaved people were sold. The pieces are also in homage to German abstract artist Josef Albers.

As the title promises, Lauren Ewing’s American Landscape (2020) is a small oil paint work that uses coal ash to produce a stunning natural scene under a tone of pure blue light. Depicting a lone swan on a pond, the piece was placed for maximum effect by windows that look toward the Public Garden, famous for it own swans.

Going up to the second floor public spaces, guests pass under the Brand van Egmond lighting firm’s dazzling chrome Grand Staircase Chandelier, a sculptural work meant to evoke sea kelp waving in the sea.

As you move toward the top of the stairway, artist Sarah Lutz’s oil and mixed media work Doublet (2009-2010) doesn’t become any more well-defined as to just what these two mounds of dessert-like colors against a sky blue background are. It’s an attention grabber for sure, so just make sure you don’t trip if you’ve been celebrating up in the ballrooms.

And then, you see Modigliani and his famous subject Jeanne Hébuterne in the next salon room. Or, so you think you do. As you enter further, a series of other figures pop up that are recognizable as well from the brushes of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso—only sort of. These large photo prints by Amy Arbus (yes, daughter of Dianne) are rightly called After Images (2012). In a twist, the subjects’ faces, along with some of their clothing, were first made up and painted, with the photos then hand colored as well for mesmerizing effect. You know the personages, but then not quite.

Leading into the ballroom, Boston photographer David Akiba’s five oversized prints—aptly titled Emerald Necklace Series (1980s)—depict lush spots within Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1,00-acre Emerald Necklace of linked urban green spaces to which the Boston Public Garden is also connected.

Another commissioned work that hangs by the ballroom, the stunning Garden Crossing (2020) is a hand-cut white on white collage by Chinese American artist Fred Liang that reflects the Public Garden as well in its plant and avian life.

If you haven’t booked a room in the Newbury Boston yet, your grand art tour may have you needing one soon, lest you succumb to Stendhal Syndrome, that temporary condition brought on by aesthetic overload.

The Leading Hotels of the World

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