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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 Société 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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