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Behind
the Art Gallery Scenes
Even
if it can deliver the occasional blockbuster, a teaching museum's
main role is to provide a resource for scholars. At Yale, that means
pretty much everything from ancient textiles and silver spoons to
a painting on glass and John Trumbull's bones.
March
1994
by Mark Alden Branch
Most
out-of-town visitors to the Yale
University Art Gallery come to see Van Gogh's The Night Cafe, di Giorgio's Annunciation, or John Trumbull's The Declaration
of Independence. Modernists may arrive in search of a Calder
or a Brancusi. And when a show of Chinese prints or the American
West goes up, it is likely to draw all the big-time art critics.
But in the course of a normal academic day, the real action at the
gallery goes on behind the scenes, in the offices and storage rooms
where undergraduates and Sterling professors alike pursue the real business of scholarship: studying
how art is made and what it means, and mapping new connections among
old objects, many of them too rare or fragile to go on public display.
Although
the most important works in the gallery are almost always on view,
and
many others are brought out occasionally on a rotating basis, only
around 10 to 15 percent of the collection is exhibited at any given
time (not including the enormous collection of works on paper).
After all, the gallery has been adding to its holdings ever since
John Trumbull established it as the nation's first university art
gallery with a gift of nearly 100 paintings in 1832.
Even
Mary Gardner Neill, who will have been director of the Yale gallery
for seven years when she leaves in May to head Seattle's art museum,
has seen only a portion of the roughly 100,000 works of art in the
institution's care.
Deciding
just what goes on display and why is no simple matter. It depends
to some extent on how firmly different departments have established
"canons" that certify some works as more important than
others. For example, the gallery's exhibit of contemporary art is
changed frequently, while most of the collection of 19th-century
French paintings -- including works by Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, and
other bankable names -- is on permanent display.
But even
those works that are rarely exhibited serve an important function.
Unlike most museums, a university gallery has two constituencies:
the general public and the academic community. So while Yale may
leave its most famous pieces on display for the benefit of the larger
community, it also maintains a vast collection -- among the nation's
finest -- for teaching and scholarship.
In keeping
with the gallery's origins in the Trumbull gift, its greatest strength
is in American painting and decorative arts, including the 10,000
pieces in the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, given by her husband
Francis P. Garvan, Class of 1897. The gallery also has two important
collections of 20th-century art, the Societe Anonyme
Collection (given by Katherine Dreier) and the Katherine Ordway
Collection. Other holdings include the Jarves, Griggs, and Rabinowitz
collections of Italian paintings, the Stoddard Collection of Greek
and Etruscan vases, the Moore Collection of Asian and Near Eastern
art, and the Olsen Foundation collection of Pre-Columbian objects.
With
such extensive holdings -- and with exhibition spaces that have
not been expanded
since the wing designed by Louis Kahn was finished in 1953 -- curators
face tough choices in trying to balance the public's desire to see
the greatest works with their own desires to use the collection
to educate. "It's hard to take a superstar off view to put
in the second string," says Patricia Kane, curator of American
decorative arts.
Helen
A. Cooper, curator of American paintings and sculpture, says she
is able to display only 6 percent of the museum's collection of
American paintings, and adds that she could put up another 6 percent
"with no diminution in quality." But there is more than
quality involved in the calculations of a curator at a teaching
institution. In Cooper's view, the power of the museum's greatest
works can be amplified considerably by juxtaposing them with pieces
that preceded and followed them, providing the full artistic context
for a first-rate work. For example, the gallery has a number of
paintings by second-generation Hudson River School painters. Displaying
those, Cooper maintains, would make a forceful statement about the
influence exerted by the first generation. "We want to show
the impact of an idea as well as its high points," she says.
But space
limitations and other factors -- including the fragility of certain
works -- conspire to keep much of the collection out of view, although
most of the gallery's holdings are accessible to scholars from Yale
and elsewhere. Patricia Kane has in her care some 5,000 eminently
bendable silver spoons, most of which were given by collector Carl
Kossack '31S. About 10 percent of the Kossack collection is on display -- in
drawers -- in the American decorative arts collection. There is simply
no room to show the rest.
Richard
S. Field, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, says that
the print rooms of any museum typically include the most unexhibited
material, and his rooms are no exception. He estimates that he has
around 100 works on display at any given time, out of a collection
of more than 40,000. He explains that, because these works are highly
sensitive to changes in light and atmospheric conditions, they cannot
be displayed for more than six to twelve weeks at a time without
risk of deterioration.
A particularly
vulnerable piece in Field's care is an 1887 color lithograph of
a painting by the American artist William M. Harnett, titled Old
Violin. What makes the work both rare and fragile is that the
lithograph was applied directly to the surface of a piece of glass.
"I haven't displayed it for fear that it would break,"
Field says. It resides in one of Field's print storage rooms.
Like
works on paper and glass -- and for essentially the same reasons
-- textiles must also have short display cycles, if any.
The curator of ancient art, Susan Matheson, carefully guards 2nd-century
cloth fragments from the Dura-Europos excavations, a University
dig in Syria in the 1920s and 1930s that yielded a world-class collection
of Near East antiquities for the gallery. Among them are silk fragments -- reminders
of the ancient silk route through the Near East -- and a small piece
that, when its pattern was extrapolated, resembled a very early
version of cable-knitting.
Matheson's
collections also include a Roman sarcophagus from the 3rd century
that once belonged to the architect Stanford White. For many years,
it was on display in the gallery's sculpture garden, but was moved
indoors when the New England winters began taking a toll. The piece
is displayed from time to time, but only for limited periods to
prevent further wear and tear.
Other
works end up out of view because interest in them has declined.
Helen
Cooper's domain includes one of Yale's peculiar strengths, a set
of paintings numbering in the dozens by the 19th-century artist
Edwin Austin Abbey. Largely forgotten today, Abbey was an American
illustrator who moved to England and became popular for his Shakespearean
scenes, most notably Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and the Lady Anne
and The Play Scene in Hamlet. After his death, Abbey's wife
gathered his paintings together in the hope of building a museum
for them. When she died, the collection came to Yale. (Abbey was
the first artist to receive an honorary degree from the University.)
Although the gallery mounted an exhibition of the paintings in 1973,
all but one or two of them are now usually in storage, partly because
of their great size and partly because, as Cooper puts it, "There's
been no market for Abbey art historically."
But
a recent resurgence of interest in Abbey demonstrates that the "market"
can change over time, as new generations apply new critical yardsticks
to works of the past. "Tastes change," says Cooper, "and
we find things in storage that make us say, 'What is this doing
down here?' Things that wouldn't have been so valued 25 years ago."
With
all this material, it is tempting to imagine that forgotten masterpieces
lie neglected in dark corners of the gallery's storage facilities.
Curators don't like to encourage that notion, but they do offer
a few stories about valuable finds. Neill herself, while she was
curator of Asian art, "discovered" a pair of figurines
of dancing women from the Tang dynasty (7th century) among the gallery's
Asian holdings. The one-foot-tall earthenware figurines are now
an important part of the permanent Asian exhibit.
Richard
Field remembers that, not too long ago, the manager of the gallery's
gift shop found a box in the basement containing a series of drawings
by John Ferguson Weir, the Art School's first director. They turned
out to be studies for his two most important paintings, including Forging the Shaft, a well-known work that now hangs in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Field contends that the gallery's
best prints are by now well accounted for. "I think we're through
finding things," he says.
Some
of the works that are not on display at the gallery can be found
elsewhere on the campus.
Of the
gallery's six paintings by Yale alumnus Frederic Remington, for
example, one is currently on tour, one hangs in the American collection,
and the others are divided between the President's house at 43 Hillhouse
Avenue and his Woodbridge Hall office, put there at the request
of the Western historian Howard
Lamar while he was President. The presence of such artifacts
in the offices of University officers is, says Kane, "an echo
of Yale in the 1930s," when such items were lent out more freely
to embellish the campus with appropriate examples of Yale's interest
in art.
Few people
know that the Payne Whitney Gymnasium once served as something of a satellite to the main art gallery.
The Whitney Collections of Sporting Art came to Yale with the dedication
of the gymnasium in 1930. The 49 paintings, 20 sculptures, and close
to 900 prints were actually from the collection of Francis P. Garvan,
who named the collections for his college friends Payne Whitney,
Class of 1898, and Harry Payne Whitney, Class of 1894. These works
-- including such gallery mainstays as Thomas Eakins's John Biglin
in a Single Scull -- were installed in the gym to demonstrate
that the "temple of sweat" catered to strong minds as
well as healthy bodies. (An embarrassing legacy of those days is
a series of prints that were removed by Kingman Brewster because
they depicted African Americans in what were deemed racist caricatures.)
The most valuable of the works that once hung in the gym have been
moved back to the gallery over the years; those that remain include
assorted horse racing and pugilistic scenes.
Much
of the art that hung elsewhere around campus was rounded up by the
gallery in the 1960s, when the threat of campus unrest made curators
nervous. One such work was a large statue of what was thought to
be the goddess Athena. The figure loomed over the main drafting
room in the Art and Architecture building,
creating a dramatic counterpoint to Paul Rudolph's muscular concrete.
The students of the time assumed that it was a plaster cast like
the others that formed part of the building's original decoration,
and subjected it to a fair amount of good-natured abuse that included
dressing it up in various outfits and festooning it with Christmas
lights. After the statue survived the 1969 fire at the building,
the gallery realized that the "Athena" was no cast after
all, but a valuable 2nd-century Roman copy of a Greek cult statue.
The rescue operation that followed involved bringing in a crane
to pluck the statue out of a skylight at A&A, then backing it
down Chapel Street to the gallery's Sculpture Hall, where it stands
today.
A few
on- and off-campus loans aside, Yale's voluminous collection exists
mostly for academic study.
Virtually all of the items are available for viewing by appointment,
and scholars from Yale and other institutions take full advantage
of the opportunity. "I feel we are all public servants,"
says Field. "I take that responsibility very seriously."
Field's
own archive consists mainly of rows of drawers containing matted
prints and other works on paper. As such, it is among the most accessible
storage. Also relatively user-friendly is the basement "study
storage" for paintings, where viewers can pull out sliding
panels containing several paintings. But because of space constraints,
some items are harder to unearth. Kane's spoons, for example, are
stored in plastic bags inside boxes.
Kane
cites the Garvan Furniture Study as a model of a storage system
that provides adequate access. The furniture study was created in
1958 by Meyric Rogers, who was then curator of the collection. Rogers
obtained 14,000 square feet in the basement of the former Yale University
Press building at 149 York Street for a working display of the furniture.
Visitors to the collection -- which includes some contemporary pieces,
although the collection's strength is in 17th- and 18th-century
American furniture -- enter a single big room laid out in aisles
like a supermarket. One wall is lined with a procession of grandfather
clocks; other works of varying sizes and pedigrees mingle in the
aisles.
David
Barquist, an associate curator who oversees the Garvan collection,
points out a few Yale-related curiosities, including William Howard
Taft's chair from Osborn Hall, a 17th-century English caned chair
that belonged to Abraham Pierson, and a set of chairs and octagonal
tables from Alumni Hall ordered by Theodore Woolsey in 1853 for
use in administering written examinations (which were then a new
idea).
The
furniture study hosts groups of museum trustees and students from
other colleges, and last year was the site of an art history class.
It is also open to the public by appointment. The collection is
one of the most accessible outside the gallery and has set a provocative
example for improving the other study collections.
Some
such improvements may soon be underway.
In 1992, Teresa Heinz, widow of the late Senator John Heinz III
'60, gave the University $10 million that the gallery hopes to apply
toward the establishment of a "Center for American Art and
Culture" to better focus on one of the gallery's (and Yale's)
longtime strengths. For the moment, the gallery's first capital
priorities include a new roof, windows, and climate-control system
for the Kahn building, but the center has emerged as an important
goal.
Should
it go forward, however, the planners may well have to deal with
a part of the collection that no outside visitor to the gallery
has ever seen. As a condition of his 1832 gift, John Trumbull specified
that his remains and those of his wife should forever rest beneath
his paintings. To accommodate that wish, the gallery has twice moved
the bones -- first to Street Hall, in 1866, then across High Street,
in 1928, to their present location in the Old Art Gallery. One of
the first things Neill's successor as director will have to learn
is that failure to observe the terms of the deed in the planning
of any expansion would result in the transfer of the entire Trumbull
collection to his alma mater -- Harvard.  |
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