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Art of Our Own
An overhaul of an Art Gallery icon provides a look at long-hidden architecture
and a new view of the past.
October
2001
by Bruce Fellman
When the
American wing of the Yale
University Art Gallery reopened its doors last March after an
18-month renovation, many visitors couldn't believe what they saw.
The artwork was familiar enough -- oils by Edward Hopper, Albert
Bierstadt, and John Trumbull; bronzes by Remington; an 18th-century
highboy by Townsend; fine silver by Paul Revere and glass by Tiffany -- but the paintings, sculpture, and examples of the decorative
arts were definitely not in their usual surroundings.
"Where
did this room come from?" asked more than one museumgoer, scanning
an elegant high-ceilinged main gallery that now features graceful
wall and ceiling arches, sandstone columns, and a broad expanse
of skylights. Actually, these surprising details had been there
all along.
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"This
is one of the most noble spaces in the University, but it
hasn't been seen like this since the early 1970s."
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"This
is one of the most noble spaces in the University," says Helen Cooper,
the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture,
"but it hasn't been seen like this since the early 1970s."
In what
Gallery director Jock Reynolds
is calling a "warmup" for the top-to-bottom renovation of the YUAG
that is scheduled to begin in 2003, the Ameri-can wing underwent
far more than cosmetic surgery. "We're in a great period of experimentation
as we plan for how we'll use our space in the future," says Reynolds.
"This particular project gave us the opportunity to rethink the
way the American paintings and decorative arts in the collection
could best be displayed to provide a great aesthetic experience
and to reinforce our primary role as a teaching museum."
The American
wing is part of a building known as the Old Art Gallery. Designed
in 1928 by architect Egerton Swartwout, Class of 1891, the Beaux-Arts
structure was modeled after several Italian palaces. In its time,
it was considered an architectural standout, but by the late 1960s,
the palatial look it embodied had become something of an embarrassment.
Art museums, huffed one undergraduate, were "snob palaces," and
any building that "wreaked of elitism" was simply out of step with
the spirit of the era.
To make
this part of the Gallery more appealing, hip, and, well, relevant,
Theodore E. Stebbins and Charles F. Montgomery, curators of American
paintings and decorative arts, respectively, opted for something
suitably radical. They completely transformed their domain on the
Swartwout building's third floor, an interior inspired by the 14th-century
Davanzati Palace in Florence, and when the builders were finished
in 1973, almost all traces of Beaux Arts splendor were hidden behind
wall board and under coats of paint. What remained was a revolutionary
way of looking at American creativity.
The chief
architect of this revolution was Charles Montgomery, a one-time
antiques dealer who came to Yale in 1970 from the Winterthur Museum
in Delaware to be curator of the University's vast collection of
furniture, silver, and other examples of the decorative arts that
were handcrafted in the colonies and later, the United States, from
the time of settlement until about the 1820s. "Montgomery represented
what might be called 'scientific antiquarianism,'" says Edward S.
Cooke Jr. '77, who studied with him as an undergraduate and, appropriately,
now serves as the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative
Arts. "He emphasized the close study of materials and techniques,
not just taxonomy and how to tell real from fake."
This
approach, a combination of connoisseurship and detective work, was
a shift from the scholarly interests of Montgomery's predecessor,
John Marshall Phillips, whose popular course, dubbed "Pots and Pans,"
was designed to inculcate "a love and appreciation of these objects,"
says Cooke, and "an understanding of good, better, and best."
Phillips
certainly had plenty of choice material to work with in his teaching
and research. In the 1920s, Mr. and Mrs. Francis P. Garvan began
donating their collection of early American furniture, silver, pewter,
glass, ironwork, and other examples of fine craftsmanship to what
was then the Gallery of Fine Arts. With new gifts and acquisitions
over the years, the collection had grown in size and stature.
In
the late 1960s, the "decorative arts," as well as oils, watercolors,
and drawings drawn from a collection that dated back to 1832 when
John Trumbull donated his Revolutionary War paintings to Yale to establish the first university art museum in the country, were displayed
in a rather hodgepodge fashion in the Swartwout building. In addition
to the long gallery that housed the main display of Americana, the
museum featured a recreation of several rooms from an 18th century
house (the contents were a gift from Francis Garvan) and a separate
gallery to house the Trumbull collection.
"It was
a very traditional installation," says Patricia E. Kane, curator
of American decorative arts. "The furniture was on the floor, there
were paintings on the walls, there was no particular chronology
to anything, and about the only thing the labels told you was the
object's identity and its date."
The material
under Montgomery's purview may have been traditional, but his way
of interpreting it was radically different. "He had a strong sense
of chronology, and he wanted to put the furniture on platforms where
it could be treated like art," says Kane, who also studied at Winterthur
and was working as assistant curator of decorative arts when Montgomery
arrived.
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"We
created a textbook of the American decorative arts that
used the objects instead of words and pictures."
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T he
two scholars, collaborating with museum designer Ivan Chermayeff
'55BFA, put together the display that became known as the Mabel
Brady Garvan Galleries. Most of the paintings were moved to side
rooms, and the decorative arts took center stage in what had been
the long gallery. In keeping with the "throw out the past" -- or,
at least, the elitist past -- ethos of the 1960s, Swartwout's ornate
architectural references to Italian palaces were covered up and
the main gallery was carved into smaller spaces that were used as
a kind of syllabus for the two-semester survey course Montgomery
developed. "We created a textbook of the American decorative arts
that used the objects themselves instead of words and pictures,"
says Kane.
Montgomery
brought his students to the gallery often, and though he displayed
furniture off the ground, his intention, says Cooke, was to "knock
the items off their figurative pedestals. By hanging furniture on
the walls, which was one of Montgomery's radical innovations, and
displaying, for example, a deconstructed chair, he encouraged you
to be curious about how it was made. This approach had the effect
of making the objects more accessible and less intimidating and
hands-off."
In his
teaching, the professor emphasized the comparison of regional construction
techniques, and he encouraged students and colleagues alike to examine
objects from the 19th and 20th centuries, including material from
the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century, as well
as architect-designed objects from the post-World War II era. "This
field had essentially focused on the individual hand of the craftsman
at work, so scholars were primarily interested in objects made before
the 1820s. But Montgomery wanted to investigate more modern methods
and designs," says Cooke.
Montgomery
died in 1978, but the installation and its way of looking at the
decorative arts, would endure for another 20 years. Throughout the
1990s, however, the field was changing, embracing new regions of
the country, such as the southwest, and Native American material
cultures. In addition, decorative arts scholars were increasingly
interested in studying 20th-century material, and, in concert with
this direction, the Gallery, through its donors, had added new material
to its collections.
"The
problem was that the Montgomery installation was a rigid and inflexible
system -- there was no way to break out of it," says American art
curator Helen Cooper. "In planning for the future, we realized that
it simply had to go."
Cooper
and Kane were not alone in rethinking their space. Gallery director
Reynolds had already asked the curators of every department to overhaul
their displays, and in the late 1990s, the museum was engaged with
architect James Polshek and Partners and others in Yale's arts community
to develop a $250 million master plan to upgrade the arts area complex.
The project calls for the Gallery to double in size, from 87,000
square feet to about 168,000 square feet, fully renovate its landmark
Kahn and Swartwout buildings, and construct a new facility nearby
that will be used for additional exhibition space, classrooms (the
Gallery currently has only two; it will gain nine more), the study
and storage of the collection, conservation laboratories, and new
offices. It will also expand into Street Hall, as the History of
Art department moves into a building next to the School of Architecture
that is currently being designed by Richard Meier.
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"We're
not going to close the Gallery when we renovate -- it's
too integral to the life of the University."
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In this
project, the American wing was seen as pivotal. "We're not going
to close the Gallery when we renovate -- it's too integral to the
life of the University," says Reynolds.
Instead,
the core elements of the collection will be moved into this "swing
space" in the Swartwout building as construction proceeds around
it. The fact that the American wing would prove so useful silenced
concerns that it was fiscally imprudent to undertake such an extensive -- and, as it turned out, expensive -- renovation in advance of
the actual Gallery project. The fact that it looks so handsome also
helped eliminate criticism.
In all,
the American wing restoration cost $1.5 million. All the false walls
that Montgomery had erected came down, the paint that covered the
skylight was removed (as was asbestos that was discovered in the
ceiling, which added considerably to the project's cost), and the
gallery's contents were flipflopped. In the new configuration, most
of the paintings and sculpture were moved back into the main room
and either placed on the walls or on floating panels.
"I didn't
want this installation to be coercive," says Helen Cooper. "I wanted
visitors to feel they could wander and discover the paintings and
sculpture for themselves."
The artwork
is set up in roughly chronological order, starting with the Hoppers
of 1950s vintage and moving backwards in time toward the refurbished
Trumbull gallery, which houses a collection from the 18th century.
The decorative
arts material, which now inhabits the rooms alongside the main gallery,
is also arranged by period. "We've attempted to display the collection
as a continuum through time," says Kane, "and because scholars are
now studying everyday objects instead of just the contents of aristocratic
households, we've done things like put fine silver tea pots alongside
their more humble pottery equivalents. This opens a new perspective
of what each time period, from the early colonial to the modern,
was like for many members of American culture."
Ned Cooke
suspects his namesake professor and mentor would be pleased with
the new installation. "It doesn't throw out the old -- there are
chairs still hung on the walls -- but we have a different lens now,
and the strength of this collection is that it accommodates change,"
says Cooke, who teaches a four-semester course in the decorative
arts. "We can compare rooms, and techniques, and resonances by looking
at the objects and understanding how they worked with each other
over time. Separately and together, these objects have stories to
tell."  |
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