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The Arts and the City
Major exhibitions at Yale galleries this fall serve as a potent reminder of the University’s unique commitment to the arts. Elsewhere, such commitment has been harnessed as an engine of urban renewal. Will the Elm City be next?
October 1996
by Bruce Fellman

In the world of the arts, the intersection of York and Chapel streets on the edge of the Yale campus is a very high-rent neighborhood. On the northwest corner is Paul Rudolph’s 1963 Art and Architecture building, a landmark in architectural history that houses two of Yale’s leading professional schools. Directly across the street is the University Art Gallery, the first major building designed by the renowned Louis Kahn and arguably one of the best teaching museums in the country. To the right is the Yale Repertory Theatre, which regularly draws raves in the New York Times for its innovative Drama School productions of work ranging from Shakespeare to John Guare. And just down Chapel toward the Green is the British Art Center, Louis Kahn’s last work and home to the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom.

The power of these institutions is being highlighted this fall with an extraordinary concentration of exhibitions. The BAC’s contribution is “British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage,” a show that includes works as diverse as portraits by Van Dyck, china by Wedgwood, watches, jewelry, and a bathtub-sized, sterling-silver winecooler. Meanwhile, the Art Gallery is mounting “I, Claudia,” an exhibition of 170 works illustrating the public and private lives of women in ancient Rome. On a smaller scale, but hardly less impressive, is “Thomas Eakins: the Rowing Pictures,” an exhibit at the Gallery of studies and finished paintings by one of America’s most admired turn-of-the-century masters.

Such exhibitions may be a testament to the power of the arts at Yale, but now the unique assemblage of institutions that have sponsored them is being looked at in a new light. From New York’s SoHo to Chicago’s River North area and SoMa (south of Market Street) in San Francisco, the arts have long proven to be one of the most effective catalysts for urban uplift, reinvigorating whole neighborhoods that had fallen into decline. And officials from both Yale and New Haven are beginning to focus on the potential of the local arts institutions to do the same for their own distressed downtown. “Every community is looking for a way to become a destination, and the arts have always been a major draw,” says Matthew Nemerson '81MPPM, president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce. “Yale’s longstanding tradition of investing in museums, galleries, and theater performances brings vitality to streets that might otherwise be dark.” Bitsy Clark, the president of the New Haven Arts Council, is even more optimistic. The arts, she recently told a reporter for the Yale Daily News, “will be the savior for New Haven.”

This is hardly the first time the Elm City has heard predictions of a renaissance. In the 1960s, a massive infusion of money from Washington was supposed to transform Yale’s hometown into a “model city.” And intermittently since then Yale Presidents and local politicians alike have heralded the potential of initiatives like Science Park and the Ninth Square. (See “The Emerging Urban University,” April 1995.)

In city after city, however, the arts have proved singularly successful as a source of both civic pride and increased revenue. And New Haven has more than its share of arts organizations. The problem is that until now they have never been exploited in any coordinated way for the common good.

Yale’s first step in this direction is a campaign to renovate its own arts facilities. Two years ago, the University convened an “arts area planning committee,” a group composed of professional-school deans, department heads, museum directors, librarians, planners and administrators, and an outside architectural consultant (James Stewart Polshek and Partners), to conduct a thorough review of the buildings serving the schools of art, architecture, and drama, as well as the galleries. (The Music School, which occupies a mini-arts district of its own on the other side of the campus, was not a major part of this review.) The committee, chaired by Jules Prown, the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, finished its work last winter. “Refurbishing the physical fabric of the University is, of course, a top priority,” says Prown. “There’s no way we can dodge the deferred-maintenance bullet.”

According to President Levin, planners are now reviewing options that over a period of years may involve a “nine-figure investment” in the reorganization and upgrading of many of the University’s artistic endeavors. “We have a rich treasure here, but it’s housed in facilities that are either inadequate for the demands of the next century or are in serious disrepair,” says Diana Kleiner, Yale’s deputy provost for the arts. The Art Gallery, for example, has leaky windows and needs a new roof. Masonry has been known to fall from the ceiling of the University Theater. The Art and Architecture building is only now getting adequate heating and cooling systems.

The space crunch is becoming critical. “We’re an art museum housed in a work of art,” notes Susan Vogel, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the gallery, “but we haven’t grown since we opened in 1953. Our collections, on the other hand, have grown exponentially, and we need to be able to make our holdings more accessible to scholars, students, and the general public.” While the details of how to accomplish this remain to be worked out, preliminary discussions have touched on the construction of a building that would provide both increased storage for works of art and better facilities for their display and study. Well aware of the sensitivity of the city to any such undertaking, planners have also discussed adding such now-familiar amenities as gift shops or a restaurant.

Space has also been an issue for art and architecture, which have cohabited since the Rudolf building opened in 1963, not always with the greatest of ease. (The sculptors long ago outgrew their quarters on York Street and are now housed in Hammond Hall, which is near Ingalls Rink.) “Separating 'A' and 'A' better serves both disciplines,” notes David Pease, who recently stepped down as dean of the School of Art. “We need a lot of flexible space that enables us to respond to changes, and we'd like to consolidate our programs, if not under one roof then at least in the same neighborhood.” Accordingly, officials have been looking at nearby properties that might be converted to a freestanding art headquarters.

A similar situation prevails at the School of Drama, whose operations are scattered among four campus buildings. Campus planners hope to bring all these fragments together in a more cohesive “community of artists and scholars,” not just for the University’s organizational purposes, but for the positive effect such a concentration could have on New Haven. There are hurdles, though, and they are more than structural. “We’re natural allies, but we’re also painters, actors, curators, and so forth—and as such, we have a loyalty to our own home base,” says Pease. “How do we get all these tribes to become a nation?”

One way to build community, Pease and his colleagues have suggested, is to mix compatible disciplines: If the Art School gets a new home, planners have suggested that it could profitably share its headquarters with, say, experimental theater. “Increasingly, the future belongs to people who have learned to collaborate,” says Pease. “The lone-wolf idea, which has always been the basis of being an artist, is a frontier kind of attitude that seems to be shifting, and a major cause of the shift is the computer.”

Spurred by its dean, Fred Koetter, the Architecture School is already heavily involved with computer-aided design, and the ubiquity of computer networks has made possible a kind of “virtual community” in which an unprecedented degree of collaboration and communication is routine. To enhance this, Koetter, Pease, Richard Benson—a professor of photography who is succeeding Pease as dean of the Art School—and other committee members have proposed creating a “visual imaging center” as a key part of a throughly overhauled and updated library system for the arts.

“We deal with images all the time,” says Prown, adding that the ease with which the computer can store, retrieve, and manipulate artwork that has been translated into digital form is already changing the face of scholarship in the arts. And though it was once denounced as the “anti-Christ,” the computer is now accepted as an artistic tool that has opened new creative opportunities. The fact that the proposed imaging center will be a core facility used by many different kinds of artists should, say planners, promote the kinds of interactions that are considered critical. “The membranes that have separated the arts are becoming more permeable,” says Prown. “Everything is coming together.”

If the computer is the means by which artists mingle, then artistic productions, particularly gallery exhibitions and theater performances, are a prime method of bringing the University and the outside community into contact with each other. There is no better illustration of this than the “Treasures from the Hermitage” exhibit that opens this month. “Even if you went to St. Petersburg, you couldn’t see what you’ll see in New Haven,” says Patrick McCaughey, who last April became director of the Center for British Art. “The Hermitage show will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

McCaughey, a 53-year-old Australian who favors oversized bow ties, taught art history both in his native country and at Harvard, and served as director at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum before coming to New Haven. In all of those roles, he showed a taste for the controversial, and an affinity for publicity. In 1990, while still at the Atheneum, McCaughey brought the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s highly controversial “The Perfect Moment” show to Hartford. The exhibit had already provoked the wrath of several U.S. legislators, and it eventually resulted in an obscenity indictment against Dennis Barrie, then director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, when he attempted to display the photographs. (A jury later found Barrie innocent.)

Museums, says McCaughey, have an obligation to show art that is “difficult and arresting,” and while he says it would be “cheap and nasty” to seek out notoriety for its own sake, it would be equally irresponsible to avoid it. “We shouldn’t be timid,” he says.

To be sure, the “Treasures” exhibit will not prompt visits by the police or antipornography protesters, but bringing the mammoth show to Yale was certainly not an undertaking for the faint-of-heart. The exhibit is the result of a conversation its chief curator Brian Allen, the director of studies at London’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, had in early 1994 with Larissa Dukelskaya, keeper of prints at the Hermitage and at the time a visiting fellow at the BAC’s counterpart in England. “We knew that among the millions of objects in that museum was a significant collection of British paintings, many of them collected by Catherine the Great,” says Allen, who asked Dukelskaya to float the idea to her boss in St. Petersburg of loaning Yale a modest selection of this artwork for a show in New Haven.

Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky proved agreeable, and when Allen and Duncan Robinson, who was then the BAC’s director, traveled to Russia to make selections, they discovered that the Empress had been a consummate Anglophile whose desire to surround herself with things British was part of a major shift in Russian society. “The rulers were beginning to look westward,” says Allen.

With the enthusiastic cooperation of Hermitage officials, and with a major grant from the Ford Motor Company and additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, Allen and his colleagues put together a much more ambitious show than originally planned. The New Haven audience (and later, audiences in Toledo and Saint Louis) can view “a group of rarely seen and thoroughly splendid objects from a time when Russia was shifting from being an insular feudal society into a great world power,” Allen says.

The “Treasures” show will also help advance the state of the art scholar’s art. “Blockbuster shows have become the vehicles for the promotion of new scholarship,” notes BAC director McCaughey. “The best recent monographs in English have been the catalogs of major exhibitions, and equally important, such shows provide an opportunity for new knowledge to be widely disseminated to an audience that wants the highest level of artistic and intellectual stimulation.” The “Treasures” catalog, which includes 12 essays produced by scholars from Russia, Europe, and the United States, should provide the precise blend of the “critical and the creative” that McCaughey wants the BAC to represent.

The “I, Claudia” show that opened at the Yale Art Gallery in early September (and will travel to San Antonio, Texas, next January and to Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1997) is no less ambitious. The story of Roman women has never been told entirely through works of art, notes Deputy Provost Diana Kleiner, who is also Dunham Professor of Classics and the History of Art and is co-curating the exhibition with Susan B. Matheson, the Gallery’s curator of ancient art. “We’ve assembled an extraordinary collection of objects, many of which have never traveled before, from museums throughout the U.S. and Canada,” says Kleiner. Among the objects are statues, busts, funeral vases, portraits, pieces of furniture, papyrus divorce and marriage certificates, as well as coins, jewelry, perfume bottles, and toys, including one of the oldest rag dolls in existence. To create a sense of the ancient context, the organizers have built architectural mock-ups—complete with authentic graffiti—of the settings in which the objects would have been used.

Through artifacts and architecture, the show demonstrates how Roman women of all ages and social classes lived. “Women certainly weren’t liberated and they couldn’t vote, but they were often political movers and shakers, and they played a significant role in society and the arts,” says Matheson. “They had many values and virtues, particularly family values, we can relate to now. Through art, we can bring real women to life.”

An exploration of social history is also an important part of the “The Rowing Pictures,” the Eakins exhibit that opens at the Gallery this month following its June debut in Washington, D.C. (From New Haven, it will travel to Cleveland.) “Rowers are not like other people,” notes Helen Cooper, curator of American paintings and sculpture, who put the show together. “There’s a unique sense of discipline and hard work behind the sport, and the people involved never forget the experience. Viewers will discover that Eakins, a rower himself, was every bit as intense and disciplined as his subjects.”

In comparison to its counterparts, this is a relatively small show. There are 23 works of art—oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings—that were done between 1871 and 1874, when a rowing race was front-page news and drew crowds of thousands. It was also the beginning of Eakins’s professional career as an artist, and by assembling all the known pictures he did on rowing—the first time this has been done, says Cooper—“We’re providing a window on one period of someone’s life.”

Apart from the scholarship behind them, what distinguishes all three of these exhibitions is a heightened interest in making that scholarship available in a form that engages as well as informs. And in this, the shows seem an appropriate vehicle for the underlying message of University planners about exploiting Yale’s artistic riches to help improve its host city.

Those efforts are being accompanied by some significant collaborations between Yale and New Haven. Last spring, Yale joined the city in backing efforts to put the >Shubert Performing Arts Center, which has been one of the premier tryout stages for Broadway-bound plays, on firm financial footing. In June, Yale helped sponsor and host New Haven’s first annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas. The five-day festival, the brainchild of Anne Calabresi, a longtime champion of the arts in the city (and wife of former Law School dean Guido Calabresi), included such performers as Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ellis and Branford Marsalis, Cirque Baroque, and Buffy Sainte Marie, and attracted an estimated 50,000 people. And in August, Mayor DeStefano announced that the long-stalled plans for a luxury hotel on the Green were going forward with a commitment by the Omni Hotel corporation to renovate the shuttered Park Plaza. According to DeStefano, the result will be “the finest four-star hotel between New York and Boston.” One of the attractions of the project, DeStefano emphasized, was that it “links us to a strength: arts and entertainment.”

Boosterism aside, by concentrating on an area in which they have unquestioned strength, Yale and New Haven may craft something greater than the sum of their parts.  

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