Several months before the pandemic I was on my way to a family wedding in Sonoma, California and took a side trip to a winery that I had heard about. Now that it has re-opened post-pandemic, I found the photos I took that day and decided to share the experience. Wine and art have a common ground. There is a certain craftsmanship and artistry that goes into the making of fine wines. It’s fairly common for wine collectors to also collect art. But what I found at this winery was a vintner’s passion for making wine that transcended into an extraordinary passion for art.
The entrance to the Hess Collection winery and Hess Art Museum in Napa, California.
The family-owned Hess Collection winery in Napa, California is at the end of a long, winding road through fields of vines. Founded in the 1980s, the vineyard produces an excellent portfolio of wines. I went there looking for a winery adventure and was astounded to find that the property also houses the Hess Art Museum, a remarkable art collection of paintings, sculptures and photography above the tasting rooms and barrels of aging wine.
Barrels of wine aging on the bottom floor of the Hess Collection building.
(L) Wine tasting room; (R) Crushed tank left as a reminder of the 2014 Napa Valley earthquake.
Wine tasting at the Hess Collection with works by (L) Per Kirkeby and (R) Arnulf Ranier.
Spanning over 1000 pieces (not all on view), the art has been personally assembled since 1966 by the Swiss-born vintner, Donald Hess, and is ranked among the world’s most important private contemporary collections. Purchased from living artists who he personally came to know, Hess used his own intuition to collect, developed organically, not from “passing trends or fashions that besieged the art world.” The collection includes renowned artists such as Frank Stella, Morris Louis, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, Francis Bacon, and Gerhard Richter, along with an eclectic international group of artists who are far less familiar, distinguishing it from most museum visits.
Tabernacle Fuss by Robert Rauschenberg in the Hess Art Museum.
Sacramento Mall Proposal #5 by Frank Stella
Now in his 80’s, Hess’s philosophy has been to spend time with art, not just to look at it or ask what it is. In an interview he once said, “Is it something which excites me, is it something which depresses me, is it something that is joyful?”
There I am on the right — becoming one with sculptures made of resin, plastic, fabric and other media by Deryk Healy, a little-known South African artist.
To encourage this personal discovery and founded in Hess’s belief that collections should be accessible to the public for fostering appreciation, the Museum allows visitors alone-time with the art, up-close, on the honor system under the watchful eye of cameras. Housed in a beautifully designed 13,000-foot contemporary space abutting an original, early 1900’s stonework building, it’s an astonishing experience as if in the extended living room of a great collector.
Surface Tension by Andy Goldsworthy, created with horse chestnut leaf stalks connected with hawthorn thorns (without glue).
I lieu of a bottle of wine, I decided to buy the Hess Art Collection book. In the forward by Hess, this especially resonated for me:
“In today’s society we are rarely encouraged to follow our own intuition, and we often defer to the alleged experts to tell us what we should be thinking…Naturally the academic study of art has its place. But at some point one needs to be able to go beyond words and concepts and allow oneself to be touched (or not touched) in a more profound way. In that sense, walking through an exhibition is not only a journey of discovering an artist and his or her work, but also a journey of discovering yourself.” – Donald M. Hess
A Lunar Eclipse in Forest by Japanese artist Katsura Funakoshi.
In addition to the Museum in Napa, the family also established the James Turrell Museum at the Hess winery in Colomé, Argentina, which seems like another wine-art adventure worth taking.