Press Release RSS

Lynette Roth Appointed as Harvard Art Museums' Daimler-Benz Associate Curator

Cambridge, MA
July 20, 2010

The Harvard Art Museums announce the appointment of Lynette Roth as Daimler-Benz Associate Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, effective January 3, 2011. A specialist in German art of the early 20th century, Roth’s highly disciplined and innovative work in the academy and in the museum has distinguished her early in her career.

"I am happy to welcome Lynette to our staff," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums. "Her academic experience and her original work as a curator and writer make her perfectly suited to this position and to our teaching and research mission."

In 2008, Roth curated a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, in Cologne, Germany, titled Köln Progressiv 1920–33: Seiwert – Hoerle – Arntz, which focused on three core members of the artistic circle known as the Cologne Progressives. The exhibition then traveled in 2009 to the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, Canada, under the title Painting as a Weapon. The accompanying catalogue, edited and authored by Roth, appeared in both English and German and has been hailed as a definitive book on the subject. Roth also has taught at Johns Hopkins University, lectured widely in the United States and abroad on wide-ranging aspects of German art production, and published several articles and essays.

"I am thrilled to be joining the staff of the Harvard Art Museums at such an exciting moment in their transformation," said Roth. "The Busch-Reisinger Museum has a unique and significant history, and its integral role in the American reception and understanding of art from German-speaking countries is essential to the Art Museums’ mission. I welcome the opportunity to oversee and continue to shape such an outstanding collection, and to work together with the staff and the Art Museums’ dedicated supporters towards our common goals."

Roth received a PhD in the history of art from Johns Hopkins University in 2009 and a BA in interdisciplinary studies and German languages and literature from the University of Michigan in 1998. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Cologne (1999–2000), a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellow (2004–5), and a Dedalus Foundation fellow (2005–6). Currently the Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Modern Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Roth’s work there has focused on the museum’s collection of German modernism. Her efforts will culminate in the first comprehensive and scholarly catalogue (forthcoming in 2012) on the museum’s extensive Max Beckmann paintings collection.

The Busch-Reisinger Museum is the only museum in North America devoted to promoting exploration and critical understanding of the arts of the German-speaking countries of Central and Northern Europe in all media and from all periods. Founded in 1903 as the Germanic Museum, the museum originally contained only reproductions, notably plaster casts of major Germanic sculptural and architectural monuments that still constitute a valuable teaching resource. Renamed the Busch-Reisinger Museum in 1950 in honor of the St. Louis families who contributed decisively to its support, the museum now holds over 40,000 original works of art that range in date from the 7th century to the present. The museum has especially important holdings of late 19th-century paintings, art of the Austrian Secession, German expressionism, 1920s abstraction, and material related to the Bauhaus. In recent years, the Busch-Reisinger has focused on deepening its collection of postwar and contemporary art from German-speaking Europe. In addition, the museum has noteworthy collections of late medieval, Renaissance, and baroque sculpture; 16th-century paintings; and 18th-century porcelain.

About the Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums, among the world’s leading art institutions, comprise three museums (Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler) and four research centers (Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums Archives, and the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis). The Harvard Art Museums are distinguished by the range and depth of their collections, their groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of their staff. The collections include approximately 250,000 objects in all media, ranging in date from antiquity to the present and originating in Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Integral to Harvard University and the wider community, the art museums and research centers serve as resources for students, scholars, and other visitors. For more than a century they have been the nation’s premier training ground for museum professionals and are renowned for their seminal role in developing the discipline of art history in this country.

Mary Schneider Enriquez Appointed as Harvard Art Museum’s Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Cambridge, MA
April 2, 2010

The Harvard Art Museum announces the appointment of Mary Schneider Enriquez as Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, effective April 5, 2010. Schneider Enriquez has been Latin American art advisor to the Art Museum since 2002, working with the museum’s director and curatorial staff to identify collection and programmatic opportunities in Latin American art. She brings a long history of curatorial, academic, and administrative experience to this position, including undergraduate teaching, independent curatorial and advisory work for institutions across the U.S., art criticism, and fundraising.

“I am pleased to welcome Mary to our staff,” said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. “With her long and varied background in the art world, especially in Latin America, and as someone who already has an intimate knowledge of the Art Museum and Harvard University, she brings a distinct perspective to this position.”

Currently visiting lecturer in fine arts at Brandeis University, Schneider Enriquez (Harvard A.B. ’81, A.M. ’87) is also completing her PhD in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. She has served as a member of the Advisory Committee for Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies since 1995 and has been a member of the Board of Trustees at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, since 1999. She is also a member of the Harvard Art Museum’s World Visuality Committee, a group dedicated to addressing societies and their artistic traditions that have previously been underrepresented at Harvard. Emphasizing collaboration with other Harvard collecting institutions, notably the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the committee encourages collaboration with faculty as well as student participation in order to bring these collections and programs into a closer working relationship.

“I look forward to the opportunity to work closely with Tom and the curatorial staff at this important moment in the history of the Harvard Art Museum,” said Schneider Enriquez. “In an institution with a remarkable collection and legacy of exhibitions, I welcome the chance to explore ways to continue to integrate modern and contemporary art from a broad range of cultures into the collection that will enhance the teaching and research mission of the museum.”

Schneider Enriquez’s past activities for the Harvard Art Museum include co-curating the exhibition Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection and organizing the accompanying symposium in 2001, and participating in and directing several lecture series, including the Latin American Leventritt Lectures, over the past several years.

An independent art critic, Schneider Enriquez has written extensively over the last sixteen years for ARTnews, ArtNexus and Art in America magazines. She has also written for the Mexico City daily newspaper Reforma. Her past independent curatorial work includes co-curating an exhibition of Chilean artist Roberto Matta’s work in 2004, Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, at the McMullen Museum at Boston College. In 1999 she curated Gerardo Suter: Labyrinth of Memory, a retrospective of photographs and video installations by the Mexican artist, at the Americas Society and the Sculpture Center, New York, which traveled nationally. She also curated Mexico: A Landscape Revisited with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. The exhibition, which focused on the tradition of landscape painting in Mexican art, opened in Washington DC in 1995 and toured internationally.

About the Harvard Art Museum
The Harvard Art Museum is one of the world’s leading arts institutions, comprising three museums (Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum) and four research centers (Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum Archives, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey). The Harvard Art Museum is distinguished by the range and depth of its collection, its groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of its staff. As an integral part of Harvard and the community, the three art museums and four research centers serve as resources for students, scholars, and visitors. For more than a century, the Harvard Art Museum has been the nation’s premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars and is renowned for its seminal role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.

Harvard Exhibition of Visual Media in AIDS Activism Marks 20 Year Anniversary of the Formation of ACT UP New York

Cambridge, MA
July 2, 2009

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museum present ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, an exhibition of over 70 politically-charged posters, stickers, and other visual media that emerged during a pivotal moment of AIDS activism in New York City. On view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts October 15–December 23, 2009, the exhibition chronicles New York's AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation's discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The exhibition opens just over 20 years after the formation of ACT UP and also marks the 40 year anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States. The exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 is co-curated by Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum; and Claire Grace, Agnes Mongan Curatorial Intern, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum and a graduate student in Harvard University's History of Art and Architecture program.

"By highlighting the efficacy of political organizing and activist graphics at the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis, this exhibition opens questions about the possibilities for social and political change today," said Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum. "The history of the United States is a history of the struggle for civil rights; the exhibition hopes to tell part of that story."

"We are extremely pleased to present ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 at the Carpenter Center," said Marjorie Garber, Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. "The exhibition shows the critical intelligence that artists bring to bear when it comes to movements for social change."

ACT UP's demonstrations in the late 1980s and early 1990s reflected the group's outrage against a governing establishment that ignored HIV/AIDS as a national health crisis; that failed to secure funding for medical research, treatment, and education; that profited from inflated costs for therapeutic drugs; and that perpetuated homophobic misrepresentations of HIV and AIDS. ACT UP's successful campaign to achieve concrete changes in legal policy and medical practice prompted changes in clinical trials for antiretroviral drugs and prodded pharmaceutical companies to reduce the cost of these drugs. The group also transformed culturally entrenched ideas about sexuality and civil rights and is largely credited with originating and promoting safe sex education.

Working closely with ACT UP, artist collectives such as Gran Fury, Silence=Death Project, Gang, and Fierce Pussy formed to deploy guerilla marketing techniques to disseminate ACT UP's messages to a mass audience, effectively exploiting the power of art to help put an end to the AIDS crisis. In subway cars, transit stations, taxi cabs, outdoor billboards, and bus panels, their wheatpasted posters and crack-and-peel stickers powerfully communicated ACT UP's outrage and were ubiquitous throughout New York City. Pairing text and image with penetrating anger and searing wit, ACT UP's art collectives targeted specific individuals and institutions at the local and national level, advocated for safer sex and gay and lesbian rights, and galvanized broadband support for the AIDS activism movement.

The Sert Gallery of the Carpenter Center features the Silence=Death Project's iconic neon sculpture of "SILENCE=DEATH" from 1987, as well as a full-scale reproduction of Gran Fury's famous "Kissing Doesn't Kill" bus panel from 1989. Other works on view include posters of demonstration announcements, such as ACT UP's "Declare War. Target An Administration That Kills Us With Neglect. Storm the N.I.H. May 21" (1990); posters that were utilized during demonstrations; and posters disseminated as street-side and print advertisements, such as several versions of Gran Fury's "Read My Lips" series from 1988 that depicted images of same-sex couples kissing. Examples of the multiple crack-and-peel stickers that once carpeted New York City, such as Gran Fury's "Men Use Condoms Or Beat It" (1988), and Little Elvis's "The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over" (1988) are also included. Exhibited for the first time are mock-ups, design-tests, and sketches of some posters and stickers, such as the Gran Fury campaigns "Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head" (1988) and "RIOT: Stonewall '69/AIDS Crisis '89."

Projectors in the Sert Gallery display footage of past ACT UP demonstrations, a snapshot-based slide show of works by Gran Fury in situ around New York City, and various outtakes from Gran Fury's "Kissing Doesn't Kill" photo shoot.

The Main Gallery in the lobby of the Carpenter Center features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project. Fourteen video monitors fitted with headphones provide visitors with continuous access to more than 100 interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York from 2001 to the present. Produced by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, the project provides an extraordinarily intimate and complex record of the group's historic moment. The interviews demonstrate the tremendous commitment, talent, and understanding that empowered ACT UP's economically and racially diverse members to organize collectively, and to revolutionize the face of the epidemic not only in New York City but across the United States. Newly remastered and digitized for this exhibition, this is the first time these videos are collectively shown in this manner. More information about the Project, including full transcripts of the interviews, can be found at: www.actuporalhistory.org.

"We are grateful to Marjorie Garber and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts for partnering with us on this important and commemorative exhibition," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. "The exhibition, along with an extensive range of associated curricula, programming, and events, presents an opportunity to engage audiences across Harvard and beyond, as well as reinvigorate a dialogue that is relevant to our teaching and research mission."

Involvement with Harvard University and beyond
ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 and the related symposium are incorporated as curricular material for a broad spectrum of undergraduate and graduate courses offered across Harvard University in the fall of 2009. In addition, the Harvard Art Museum is hosting a DIY poster-making event for Harvard undergraduates, providing access for students to artist residencies, and reaching out to on-campus student organizations, encouraging them to use the exhibition as a springboard for their own related events.

Public programming organized to coincide with the exhibition includes lectures, a symposium, film screenings, gallery talks, a performance in conjunction with the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.), and a poetry reading in conjunction with Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room. More information about related student and public programming can be found at the end of this release and by visiting www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/ccva.html and www.harvardartmuseum.org.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Harvard Art Museum's Education Department is inviting local health services organizations in the community to visit the exhibition with the guidance of a museum educator in order to stimulate reflection and discussion about sexual health, political activism, and art.

Artist Residency
Four central members of the artist collective Fierce Pussy will participate in a 3-day activism and print media workshop, as well as a site-specific installation, with Harvard College undergraduate students. During their residency, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka will work with students to develop visual material addressing issues of gender and sexuality at Harvard and beyond. Fierce Pussy's residency will also offer an unusual opportunity for students to learn strategies for radical political organizing and collective art production from some of the most experienced and influential women artist-activists at work today.

Credits
ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 has been made possible by support from The Office of the Provost at Harvard University and the following endowment funds at the Harvard Art Museum: The Agnes Gund Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; the Alexander S., Robert L., and Bruce A. Beal Exhibition Fund; the M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Fund; and the Charlotte F. and Irving W. Rabb Exhibition Fund. Gifts and grants have also been provided by The Barbara Lee Family Foundation; The Open Gate: a Fund for Gay and Lesbian Life at Harvard University; Fred P. Hochberg and Tom Healy; Kevin Jennings; the Harvard College Women's Center, the Office for the Arts at Harvard, and Harvard Technology Services with special support from Apple Inc.

About the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
The only building in North America designed by architect Le Corbusier, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA) is the home of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies for undergraduate study in the visual arts and a graduate program in film and visual studies at Harvard University, two public art galleries, and the Harvard Film Archive. The Carpenter Center exhibits contemporary work in support of the curriculum of the department in the Main Gallery located on the ground level of the building, and in the Sert Gallery on the third floor at the top of the ramp. The Carpenter Center hosts a Thursday night lecture series that brings renowned contemporary artists to Harvard to speak about their work, as well as Visiting Faculty artist talks, BYO: Bring Your Own—Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center; the Film Theory/History Seminar, and a wide variety of exhibition-related events and film screenings.

José Ortiz Appointed Deputy Director of the Harvard Art Museum

Cambridge, MA
December 18, 2008

The Harvard Art Museum announced today the appointment of José Ortiz as Deputy Director, effective March 2, 2009. Ortiz is currently Deputy Director/Chief of Finance and Administration at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. A skilled and innovative administrator, Ortiz has a strong record of managing world-class cultural institutions, combined with considerable business and private sector experience, including thirteen years in financial services management.

"I am delighted to have José join our staff, and we are fortunate to gain someone with such a range of skills and talent at this crucial time in our planning for the future," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. "As we prepare for the renovation of our building on Quincy Street and begin to relocate a large part our staff and collections, José will pay a key role in managing the logistics and enormous operational challenges that come with those projects. He also shares in the vision we have for enhancing our teaching and research mission by increasing access to our collections, expanding our audience, and creating a larger role for the Art Museum in Harvard's educational curriculum."

In June 2008, the Harvard Art Museum's building at 32 Quincy Street, formerly the home of the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums, closed to prepare for a major renovation designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano. During this renovation, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at 485 Broadway remains open and has been reinstalled with some of the finest works representing the collections of all three museums. When complete, the renovated historic building at 32 Quincy Street will house the three museums in a single, state-of-the-art facility.

"It is a time of great change and great promise for the Harvard Art Museum, and I am excited to be part of the team that will help realize the creation of a new central home for the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Sackler museums," said Ortiz. "I also look forward to helping make the museums and their great collections even more accessible to a wider range of visitors, both at Harvard and beyond."

As Deputy Director/Chief of Finance and Administration at the Hirshhorn, a position he has held since 2005, Ortiz oversees the daily operations and fiscal planning of the Smithsonian's museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art. This role comprises management of all the museum's support departments, including security, human resources, building maintenance, library, retail operations, and horticulture. He instituted a museum-wide training program to not only assist staff in building managerial and technical skills, but also to develop a better work-life balance, an area of special interest to Ortiz.

Ortiz also serves as project manager for all capital projects and space planning initiatives at the Hirshhorn. He has presided over improvements to the envelope of the museum's building (constructed in 1974), the renovation and expansion of the loading dock to accommodate contemporary works of art, and a redesign of the lobby and gift shop to improve the visitor experience. Facilitated by Ortiz, the Visitor Satisfaction Initiative was a driving force behind the improvements to visitor amenities and the lobby. As a key component of the Hirshhorn's strategic plan, the initiative evaluated and addressed wayfinding, docent services, interpretive guides, and other communications tools to make the museum more accessible to a wider audience.

From 1996–2005, Ortiz served as Manager for Administration at The Cloisters in New York, managing the daily operations and administration of the branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. Prior to that, Ortiz held administrative positions at the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Museum in Washington, DC and The Museum of Television and Radio in New York. He also served as a manager for Citibank in New York, where he worked from 1978–1991.

Ortiz is a graduate of Pace University and completed a graduate program with a Master of Arts degree in Liberal Studies and Museum Studies at New York University in 1994. He previously served two terms on the board of directors of the American National Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-US) and presently serves as a board member on ICOM's International Management Committee (INTERCOM), and is a member of ICOM's Finance and Resources Standing Committee. Ortiz is a regular lecturer and panelist at national and international universities, museums, and conferences, particularly on the subjects of museum administration, leadership development, and management during times of change and transition.

Patricia Cornwell Conservation Scientist Is Established at the Harvard Art Museum's Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies

Cambridge, MA
November 19, 2008

The Harvard Art Museum today announced the establishment of the Patricia Cornwell Conservation Scientist at the museum's Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. This new position is established through a generous $1 million commitment from bestselling author Patricia Cornwell, matching additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Ms. Cornwell is the author of 16 Kay Scarpetta thrillers, including the forthcoming 2008 release Scarpetta, as well as several other works of fiction and non-fiction.

The Cornwell Conservation Scientist will be a key position within the analytical laboratory of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The Center for Conservation and Technical Studies was established at Harvard in 1928, and in 1994, it was renamed the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Specializing in the conservation and study of works on paper, paintings, sculpture, decorative objects, and historic and archaeological artifacts, it is the oldest fine arts conservation treatment, research, and training facility in the United States.

The Straus Center is a pioneer in innovative practices of conservation and conservation science. Conservation science uses contemporary scientific techniques from other disciplines and applies them to art conservation to systemize art materials analysis and develop conservation methods. With the addition of the Cornwell Conservation Scientist, the Straus Center will have an enhanced capability to analyze works of art, employ sophisticated forensic applications to studying works of art, and advance its contribution to the field.

Ms. Cornwell's interest in conservation science stems, in part, from her interests in combining forensic science, the subject of many of her novels, with the arts. A great deal of her own research and scientific investigations have focused on the infamous serial killer known as Jack the Ripper in England in the 1880s. Using forensic techniques, Cornwell discovered compelling evidence to implicate the well-known British artist Walter Sickert as the Ripper murderer, as published in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper — Case Closed (2002).

Cornwell has been a longtime and generous supporter of the Harvard Art Museum and recently donated a major collection of 24 paintings, 22 drawings, and 36 prints by Sickert, as well as 25 prints and drawings by American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler and 6 works by British artist Augustus Edwin John. In addition, Ms. Cornwell previously donated technological equipment to the Straus Center that allows for innovative applications in conservation normally used in forensic science. Her gift to the Art Museum in 2005 of a Foster and Freeman VSC 5000 video spectral comparator — a forensic tool widely used to detect forged passports and counterfeit currency — provides sophisticated technology for the technical examination of works of art through the use of visible, near-infrared, and ultraviolet regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. These applications allow for the detection of forgeries, finding changes or damage to a work of art, examining under-drawings not normally visible, and even uncovering an artist's original intentions.

"I am delighted to thank Patricia for this generous commitment and the important work it will advance at the Harvard Art Museum," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. "Patricia's support brings together two disciplines — science and art conservation — and will promote our teaching and research initiatives in conservation science. Thanks to her support, our scientists will continue to develop new techniques that can advance conservation applications at museums all over the world."

Patricia Cornwell commented, "I am pleased to be able to support the work of the Harvard Art Museum and the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The museum brings together a unique combination of curators, conservators, scientists, and researchers across a wide range of disciplines and continues to be a leader in scholarship in the arts. Harvard is the center of ground-breaking research in many areas of study, and I am confident that the Cornwell Conservation Scientist will make strong contributions to advancing the field of conservation science."

Major Collection of Modern and Contemporary German Art Is Given to Harvard Art Museum

Cambridge, MA
November 7, 2008

The Harvard Art Museum today announced a major gift of German art primarily since 1960 donated by the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The gift comprises 50 to 75 works by contemporary artists and is being assembled under the guidance of art historian Siegfried Gohr in Germany. It celebrates the 25th anniversary of the German-based Friends group and will be donated over the coming years, with the first installment of 26 works this fall. The works of art will enter the permanent collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and will be known as the "Friends Anniversary Collection." The Busch-Reisinger Museum is the only museum in America devoted to promoting the arts of Central and Northern Europe of all periods, with a special emphasis on the German-speaking countries. Among the handful of museums in this country to have world-class collections from this region, it is the only such collection within a university.

Founded in Germany in 1983, the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum/Verein der Freunde des Busch-Reisinger Museum now has more than 240 members, based mainly in Germany, but also in other countries including Austria, Switzerland, and the United States. This dynamic and internationally-minded group supports the multi-faceted work of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, with special emphasis on teaching and research activities. The works of art in the Friends gift are organized in four categories: individual major paintings; representative groups of 8–10 major drawings by significant artists; photographs by members of the so-called Düsseldorf School; and groups of multiples by artists for whom work in that medium is important.

"The Friends have an extraordinary tradition of generosity to the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and we are enormously grateful to Siegfried for initiating, organizing, and contributing to this important project," said Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. "The addition of this splendid collection, generously donated by a range of German collectors and artists, will strengthen the Busch-Reisinger Museum's prominence as a center for the study of German art. It will be the capstone of two-and-a-half decades of sustained support of the Museum by the Friends."

Among the works being donated in the first installment is a major painting by Georg Baselitz, Male Nude (Self Portrait), (1973/74; on view through January 4, 2009 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum), and another early work by Baselitz, Saxon Motif (1964), as well as two paintings by A. R. Penck; multiples by Rosemarie Trockel; photographs by Candida Höfer and Boris Becker; and groups of drawings by Ernst Wilhelm Nay and Markus Lüpertz.

"Since the 1960s, German artists have developed provocative and exciting positions that have influenced the direction of contemporary art," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. "This gift from the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum will significantly enhance our ability to offer scholars, students, and visitors the chance to engage with and learn from fine examples of work by a wide range of prominent modern and contemporary artists."

"Our mission at Harvard is to foster teaching and research with objects," said Nisbet, "and I am especially gratified by the sensitive selection of works in the Friends Anniversary Collection to complement and amplify our existing holdings."

The works in the first installment, by seven different artists from five different donors, effectively showcase the ambition of the Collection.

A. R. Penck is one of the great unclassifiable individualists in postwar German art, and the two paintings in the donation document two very different sides and moments of his career, one (the figurative, anecdotal, and surrealist Venus and Mars of 1977) from the time when he was still living in East Germany, and the other (Rock II of 1984, deploying his more familiar language of signal-like stick figures, mathematical symbols, and schematic composition) from after his move to the West in 1980. A group of drawings by Penck, including a cartoon-like 1967 watercolor of a nude and a bird, is part of the promised future gifts to the Collection.

The two major paintings by Baselitz in the gift also add two very significant aspects of Baselitz's career to Harvard's holdings: an early enigmatic scene of abject fleshy fragments towering over a landscape in Saxon Motif (1964), and the Male Nude (1973/74), a self-portrait that uses the artist's signature technique of inversion to emphasize painterly effects over subject matter. It also uses finger painting to reinforce his questioning of the conventions of high art and the possibilities of representation. Together with two paintings by Baselitz and a wide range of works on paper already in the Museum's collection, these acquisitions enable an overview of the career of an artist who is Germany's most consistently searching and provocative painter since 1960. A set of 8–10 drawings from many phases of Baselitz's career will be added to the Friends Anniversary Collection in the next installment.

The Busch-Reisinger Museum already has extensive holdings of the editioned prints and photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, influential teachers at the Düsseldorf Academy from the 1960s and the founders of a school of conceptually inflected "neutral" architectural photography. It also owns a major work by one of their prominent students, Andreas Gursky. The Friends Anniversary Collection builds on this foundation with important large-format works by two other Becher students, Candida Höfer, known for her stunning, evocative interiors of public cultural spaces (in this case, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York), and Boris Becker, from the younger generation of Becher students, with a haunting view of an abandoned highrise construction project in Poland after the fall of communism, Cracow (1994). A photograph by another student, Thomas Struth, is among the promised future additions to the Friends Anniversary Collection.

By including a category of drawings, the donation is in line with Harvard's traditional emphasis on this most intimate and revealing of media, which can allow access to an artist's process in a manner appropriate to a teaching institution. Groups of drawings by Germany's premier abstract artist of the postwar decades, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, and by a leader of the revival of ambitious figurative painting in the 1960s, Markus Lüpertz, make up this section in the first installment. Paintings by both artists are among the promised future gifts.

The Busch-Reisinger Museum holds one of the world's most comprehensive collections of multiples by Joseph Beuys, the most influential figure in postwar European art. The Friends Anniversary Collection builds on this collection by adding five works by Rosemarie Trockel, whose enigmatic and elusive objects investigate questions of representation, gender, the body, and creativity.

Siegfried Gohr, who is a professor of art history and director of the gallery at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, is coordinating the donation of works in the Friends Anniversary Collection to the Busch-Reisinger Museum by German collectors and artists. Gohr has had a long and distinguished career in the German art world. He has served as director of the Kunsthalle and Ludwig Museum in Cologne and been a professor of art history at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Gohr's long association with Harvard and the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum dates back many years. He has visited and taught at Harvard on a number of occasions. In 1995, he was a visiting senior curatorial fellow at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, where he organized an installation titled History, Self, Society: Self-Portraits by Max Beckmann, Joseph Beuys, and Markus Lüpertz, and gave a major lecture on the topic of German artists, museums, and society.

"Given its history and status," Gohr said, "it is essential that the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard have an outstanding collection of recent German art. I hope that my initiative will inspire many others to undertake similar gifts to ensure this important goal."

Founded in 1901 as the Germanic Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum has particularly important holdings of Austrian Secession art, German expressionism, 1920s abstraction, and material related to the Bauhaus. Its significant holdings of post-war and contemporary art from German-speaking Europe include a collection of the editioned artworks by artist Joseph Beuys.

Works of Art in the Current Gift from the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum

1. Georg Baselitz, Male Nude (Self-Portrait), 1973/74. Oil on canvas, 200 x 169 cm (78 3/4 x 66 9/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.208. [On view through January 4, 2009 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum]

2. Georg Baselitz, Saxon Motif, 1964. Oil on canvas, 195 x 130 cm (76 3/4 x 51 3/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Dorette Hildebrand-Staab, 2008.207.

3. Boris Becker, Cracow, 1994. Chromogenic print, face mounted to acrylic; 200 x 160 cm (78 3/4 x 63 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2008.227.

4. Candida Höfer, Pierpont Morgan Library New York IV, 2001. Chromogenic print, 152 x 186.5 cm (59 13/16 x 73 7/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2008.226.

5. Markus Lüpertz, Factory-dithyrambic, c. 1970. Gouache, crayon, watercolour, and charcoal on paper; 44.6 x 62.3 cm (17 9/16 x 24 1/2 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.218.

6–12. Markus Lüpertz, Untitled (Style), c. 1977. Seven drawings: graphite, watercolor, and ink on paper; each 105.9 x 78.6 cm (41 11/16 x 30 15/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.219-225.

13. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, R-2-67, 1967. Watercolor on paper, 62.1 x 41.4 cm (24 7/16 x 16 5/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.211.

14. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Study for "Cythera," 1947. Tusche and graphite, 43.9 x 61.1 cm (17 5/16 x 24 1/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.217.

15. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Study for female nude, 1945–46. Graphite, 32.4 x 24.9 cm (12 3/4 x 9 13/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.215.

16. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Study for "Femme Rose," 1947. Graphite, 21.5 x 30.2 cm (8 7/16 x 11 7/8 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.214.

17. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Study for figure composition, 1947. Graphite, 20.5 x 30.5 cm (8 1/16 x 12 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.212.

18. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Two Studies, 1950. Graphite, each 14.5 x 21 cm (5 11/16 x 8 1/4 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.213.1-2.

19. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Untitled, 1954. Brush and ink, 48.7 x 62.9 cm (19 3/16 x 24 3/4 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.216.

20. A. R. Penck, Rock II, 1984. Oil on canvas, 200 x 130 cm (78 3/4 x 51 3/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.210.

21. A. R. Penck, Venus and Mars, 1977. Oil on cloth, 180 x 140 cm (70 7/8 x 55 1/8 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.209.

22. Rosemarie Trockel, Alice in Wonderland, 1995. Silkscreen on Rives paper, 101 x 80 cm (39 3/4 x 31 1/2 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2008.228.

23. Rosemarie Trockel, Cutting Pattern, 1994. Color etching on Rives paper, 50.1 x 50.9 cm (19 3/4 x 20 1/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2008.230.

24. Rosemarie Trockel, Dream, 1989. Wood, metal, paper; 38.7 cm (15 1/4 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2008.231.

25. Rosemarie Trockel, She Came to Stay, 2001. Offset and fluorescent silkscreen on paper, 52 x 40 cm (20 1/2 x 15 3/4 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2008.229.

26. Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled (Mouth Sculptures), 1989. Silver-plated chewing gum mounted on board, brochure; chewing gum: 3.1 cm (1 1/4 in.), brochure: 5.5 x 5.5 cm (2 3/16 x 2 3/16 in.), board: 4 x 6 cm (1 9/16 x 2 3/8 in.). Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2008.232.

American Art Campaign Completed at Harvard Art Museum

Cambridge, MA
November 7, 2008

The Harvard Art Museum today announced the successful completion of a campaign to endow the Department of American Art. Highlights of the campaign include establishment of the Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curatorship of American Art, the Diane and Michael Maher Assistant Curatorship of American Art, and the Benjamin Rowland Fund for American Art.

Topping its $10 million goal, the American art endowment fund has raised $10.5 million, which will underwrite the two curatorships and permanently endow ongoing operations in the Department of American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. More than a dozen supporters of the museum and friends of Ted Stebbins, who has served as Harvard's curator of American art since 2002, have endowed the curatorship in his honor. After Stebbins retires, the head curator will be known as the Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curator of American Art. Diane and Michael Maher of Winter Park, Florida, provided the funding for the assistant curator position now held by Virginia Anderson, who will henceforth be known as the Diane and Michael Maher Assistant Curator of American Art.

Professor John Wilmerding of Princeton University, a distinguished scholar and curator in the American field, and like Ted Stebbins a former student of Professor Benjamin Rowland at Harvard, has established the Benjamin Rowland Fund for American Art. Rowland served on the Harvard faculty in the Fine Arts Department from 1930 to 1972 and was a legendary figure and instructor of many outstanding scholars of American art. The newly established Rowland Fund will support the department's activities, including publications, exhibitions, student internships, and acquisitions.

"The generosity of many friends and donors will allow Ted Stebbins and the Department of American Art to continue the important scholarly research into our existing collection and its energetic expansion that has characterized this department since it was formally established six years ago," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. "It strengthens the university's commitment to the arts, and we are enormously grateful to everyone who has helped in this important effort."

"Working at Harvard has been the most gratifying and rewarding experience of my professional life," said Stebbins. "I deeply appreciate the support and generosity of my friends and colleagues. The establishment of a permanently funded Department of American Art is a dream come true. With the upcoming renovation of the museum's facilities we will have dedicated gallery space for American art for the first time, and we look forward to playing an active role in the reenergized museum."

The Harvard Art Museum's collection of American art is among the most distinguished in the United States and yet has remained undiscovered by many. It was built over the course of three centuries, however the Department of American Art was not established until recently, in November 2002, when Stebbins was appointed its first curator.

Among the department's nearly 3,000 works of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts are masterpieces such as John Singer Sargent's contemplative oil painting The Breakfast Table (1883–84), and Albert Bierstadt's Rocky Mountains, "Lander's Peak" (1863). There is a strong historical collection built around a core of commissioned portraits of Harvard presidents and donors by some of the best artists of the times: John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and Sargent. And yet before the creation of the American Art Department in 2002, the collection had come together without a clear plan. There were gaps, Stebbins noted, especially in the 20th century. "In 2002, we had no Georgia O'Keeffe, no Arthur Dove," he said. Major paintings by both artists have since been acquired for the museum, as well as important works by Jacob Lawrence, Joseph Stella, and Willem De Kooning.

In the six years since the formation of the American Art Department, Stebbins, in collaboration with Anderson and former assistant curator Kimberly Orcutt, has mounted six exhibitions, acquired 93 new works of art (including 27 portraits), and written six publications, including the 543-page catalogue American Paintings at Harvard, Volume Two: Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels, and Stained Glass by Artists Born 1826–1856 (2008), the first of a planned three-volume set.

Stebbins is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars of American art and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. He holds a law degree as well as a master's and a doctorate in Art History from Harvard. From 1968 to 1977 he served as Curator of American Paintings and Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at Yale University. Following that, he held the position of Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1977 to 1999. He is much admired for his work there, organizing more than a dozen major exhibitions and directing the acquisition of more than 300 American paintings to the collection, including Copley's Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) (1765) and Winslow Homer's Driftwood (1909). He is perhaps best known for his work with the MFA's Lane Collection. Working with William and Saundra Lane, he guided the acquisition of nearly 100 works, including important paintings by Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, and many other American modernists.

Wilmerding commented: "When Ted Stebbins leaves Harvard, which I hope is far in the future, he will leave behind an important legacy, both in having set very high standards of scholarship and acquisition, and in passing on a fully funded department to his successors. He deserves our thanks and congratulations."

Donors who endowed the Stebbins curatorship include: James W. and Francis McGlothlin, Charles O. Wood III and Miriam M. Wood, Russell C. Ball III, the Estate of Horace D. Chapin, Lawrence J. and Michelle Lasser, Daniel and Susan Pollack, Mildred S. Lee, Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum, Saundra B. Lane, Frank Gren, Tunie Hamlen Howe, Michael Kempner, Logan D. Delaney, Jr., the Heinz Family Foundation, and two anonymous donors.

Those making major gifts to the American art endowment include John Wilmerding, Richard and Elizabeth Gosnell Miller, John and Catherine Coolidge Lastavica, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Bolton Fund, Gift of the Payne Fund, and an anonymous donor.

Harvard Art Museum Receives Major Gift from Emily Rauh Pulitzer

Cambridge, MA
October 17, 2008

Harvard University today announced that the Harvard Art Museum has received a gift of 31 major works of modern and contemporary art and $45 million from Harvard alumna Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a former Harvard Art Museum curator, longtime supporter and friend of the museum and of Harvard, and wife of the late Joseph Pulitzer Jr. The modern works include important paintings and sculptures by Brancusi, Derain, Giacometti, Lipchitz, Miró, Modigliani, Picasso, Rosso, and Vuillard. The contemporary art includes major works by di Suvero, Heizer, Judd, Lichtenstein, Nauman, Newman, Oldenburg, Serra, Shapiro, and Tuttle (complete list below). This gift represents one of the most significant donations of works of art ever received by the museum. The financial gift is the single largest donation in the history of the Harvard Art Museum.

The Art Museum concurrently announced previous gifts of 43 other modern and contemporary works (both outright and partial gifts) from Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer Jr., and Mr. Pulitzer and his first wife, Louise (who died in 1968). These gifts were made between 1953 and 2005 and were never formally announced as donations to the Art Museum, and included paintings by Braque, Cézanne, Miró, Monet, Picasso, and Stella, and works on paper by Cézanne, Degas, and Delaunay. In addition, the Pulitzers have provided financial support over the years that helped the Art Museum to purchase 92 works of art, including paintings by Baselitz, Braque, and Mondrian, works on paper by Ellsworth Kelly, LeWitt, Marden, Serra, David Smith, and Twombly, and an important collection of Indian paintings on paper. The Pulitzers' sustained history of donations to build the collection at the Harvard Art Museum and their wide-ranging support of the institution have played a significant role in enhancing the University's commitment to the study and appreciation of the visual arts.

Mrs. Pulitzer's gifts come at a time when the Art Museum has launched a major initiative that will enable it to better advance its mission as a leading center for research and teaching in the visual arts. A central component of the plan is an increasing integration of the museum's collections and programs into the academic life of the entire University. The Art Museum, working with architect Renzo Piano, has embarked on an extensive renovation and expansion of its historic facilities at 32 Quincy St. in Cambridge. The new design will allow a far more effective presentation of the collections and exhibitions of the three museums that compose the Harvard Art Museum — the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum — in new exhibition galleries and study centers and will greatly enhance the museum's research and education facilities.

"The Harvard Art Museum's distinguished collections and dedication to teaching and research in the arts have had a significant impact on the field, on scholarship, and on my own life," noted Mrs. Pulitzer. "Both Joe and I have supported the Art Museum over the years in recognition of Harvard's unparalleled role in the development of professionals in the arts worldwide and because of our belief that the arts are a cornerstone in learning and education in all fields. My gift is also a way of thanking Harvard for the enrichment of my life and the defining role that art has played for me. The Harvard Art Museum's new project will expand the ways that art advances education even further and I am very proud to support the museum as it moves forward."

"I am especially grateful for this remarkable gift because it is the continuation of a lifetime of giving of art, financial support, and time to the Art Museum and Harvard by Emmy and Joe," said Drew Faust, president of Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History. "The arts are central to the academic life of Harvard University. Emmy's generosity will help ensure that they play an even more robust role on campus and in the lives of all our students, whether they are studying the arts, economics, law, medicine, physics, or other disciplines."

"Emmy has been the Art Museum's most active and dedicated benefactor, and her and Joe's long-term, substantive support has enriched the experience of countless students, researchers, and visitors," noted Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. "This current gift provides tremendous new strength in the museum's holdings of modern and contemporary art. Emmy and Joe's personal involvement and profound generosity stand as a model of institution-building and will advance scholarship in the visual arts for generations to come."

Mrs. Pulitzer's formal involvement with the Art Museum began in 1957 when she served as assistant curator of drawings — working under the legendary curator Agnes Mongan — a position Mrs. Pulitzer held until 1964. She received her master's degree in the arts from Harvard in 1963 and has served in numerous leadership roles at the Art Museum and at Harvard, including as a chair and member of the Art Museum's Visiting Committee and Collections Committee, beginning in the early 1990s. She also serves on the University's Board of Overseers and is a member of its Standing Committee on Humanities and Arts, as well as the President's Advisory Committee on the Allston Initiative.

Mr. Pulitzer was a member of the Harvard College Class of 1936 and, like his wife, filled many leadership positions at the Art Museum and the University, including:

Member, Board of Overseers, 1976-1982
Member, Visiting Committee, Art Museum, 1971-1993, and vice chair, 1976-1983
Member, Visiting Committee, Fine Arts Department, 1949-1971 and 1976-1982, and chair, 1976-1982.

In addition to their other support of the University, Mr. Pulitzer provided a gift to endow the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professorship of Modern Art in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which was activated with the appointment of Yve-Alain Bois in 1991. Mr. Pulitzer served as the editor and publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chairman of the Pulitzer Publishing Company for 38 years. He also served as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1955 through 1986.

Mr. Pulitzer's support of the Art Museum was both far-ranging and farsighted, beginning in 1939 when he anonymously pledged $6,000 — $2,000 a year — for a Fogg Museum Fellowship in Modern Art for postgraduate study abroad. The fellowship was administered by a small committee that included Edward Forbes, Paul Sachs, Alfred Barr, and eventually Meyer Schapiro. Fellowships were granted over the next three years to Francis Catlin, Milton Brown, and John McAndrew, all of whom became distinguished art historians. In 1958, Mr. Pulitzer anonymously established a fund for the acquisition of modern art, which enabled the Art Museum to acquire a major Mondrian drawing and a painting by Jackson Pollock. In 1976, for his 40th reunion, Mr. Pulitzer established a named endowment, the Joseph Pulitzer Jr. AB '36 Beneficiary Aid Fund, which continues to this day to support research travel for undergraduate art history concentrators.

Emily Rauh Pulitzer and her late husband Joseph Pulitzer Jr. have been prominent supporters of the arts and built one of the country's premier private art collections. The Pulitzers have made generous gifts to many organizations and institutions, especially those in St. Louis, the city in which they have deep roots and commitments. These include gifts of works of art and a leadership gift to the capital campaign of the St. Louis Art Museum, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Grand Center, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Washington University.

Owing to the Pulitzers' commitment to St. Louis and to further strengthen the experience of the arts, Mrs. Pulitzer founded The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in a developing neighborhood. It opened in St. Louis in 2001 in a building designed by architect Tadao Ando. Through art exhibitions, programs, collaborations, and exchanges with other institutions — including the Harvard Art Museum — the Pulitzer Foundation aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of art and architecture and is a resource for artists, architects, scholars, students, and the general public.

Works of Art in the Current Gift from Emily Rauh Pulitzer

1. Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Mask of Beethoven, c. 1905. Bronze with brown patina, partially gilded, hollow mask form (sand cast); 42.1 x 29.8 x 15.2 cm.

2. Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse II, 1926. Polished bronze, 16.5 x 19.1 x 29.2 cm.

3. Constantin Brancusi, Torso, 1909. Plaster, 25.4 x 15.6 cm.

4. Aimé-Jules Dalou, Portrait of Georgette Dalou, 1876. Bronze with dark brown/black patina (lost wax); h.: 37.6 cm; h. w/ base: 51.6 cm.

5. André Derain, Sailing Ships, c. 1905. Oil on board (unvarnished), 25.2 x 34 cm.

6. Mark di Suvero, Ariel, 1970. Raw steel, partially painted yellow, 96.5 x 99.1 x 109.2 cm.

7. Alberto Giacometti, Portrait of David Sylvester, 1960. Oil on canvas, 116.2 x 88.9 cm.

8. Alberto Giacometti, Tête qui Regarde, 1930. White marble, 41 x 29.5 x 7.9 cm.

9. Michael Heizer, Untitled # 2, 1967–72. Three joined panels cotton duck; top and bottom painted with black pigment, aluminum powder and PVA; middle panel left raw, 221 x 444.5 cm.

10. Donald Judd, Stack, 1970. Stainless steel, violet Plexiglas; 10 boxes; Overall h.: 320 cm.

11. Roger de La Fresnaye, Still Life with Set-Square on Black Disk, c. 1913. Oil on canvas, 64.5 x 65 x 54 x 54 cm.

12. Roy Lichtenstein, Sleeping Muse, 1983. Bronze, 65.4 x 86.4 x 10.2 cm.

13. Jacques Lipchitz, Still Life with Musical Instruments, 1918. Stone relief, 60 x 74.9 cm.

14. Jacques Lipchitz, Gertrude Stein, 1921. Bronze, 34.3 x 19.1 x 25.4 cm.

15. Joan Miró, Woman in the Night, 1945. Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 162.6 cm.

16. Amedeo Modigliani, Head of a Woman, 1941. Limestone, h.: 66 cm.

17. Bruce Nauman, Henry Moore Bound to Fail, 1967–70. Cast iron; 64.8 x 58.4 x 8.9 cm.

18. Barnett Newman, Untitled, 1949. Oil on canvas, 60.3 x 15.9 cm.

19. Claes Oldenburg, Baked Potato, 1963. Exterior skin and two pieces of butter: burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel; interior: jersey stuffed with kapok, 17.6 x 35.1 x 24 cm.

20. Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1918. Oil on canvas, 147.3 x 67.3 cm.

21. Pablo Picasso, Landscape, 1909. Oil on canvas, 39.1 x 47.3 cm.

22. Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Dora Maar, 1938. Pastel and ink on commercially pre-primed canvas with sand texture, 58.4 x 49.8 cm.

23. Richard Pousette-Dart, Imploding Light, 1967. Oil on canvas, 203.2 x 203.2 x 5.1 cm.

24. Medardo Rosso, Carne Altrui, 1883. Wax over plaster, 23.5 x 22.2 x 17.1 cm.

25. Medardo Rosso, Ecce Puer, 1906. Bronze (with investment), 43.8 x 24.8 cm.

26. Richard Serra, Untitled (Corner Prop Piece), 1969. Lead plate and lead pole rolled around one-inch steel pipe; plate: 121.9 x 121.9 cm; pole: 151.8 cm, diam.: 7.6 cm.

27. Joel Shapiro, Chasm, 1976. Cast iron, 30.5 cm.

28. Rebecca Salsbury Strand, Devout Woman (Painting of Saint), 1932. Painting on glass, 25.1 x 20 cm.

29. Richard Tuttle, Untitled, 1967. Tintex dye on shaped, hemmed, unstretched canvas; 130.8 x 142.9 cm.

30. Jacques Villon, Portrait of Joseph Pulitzer, 1955. Oil on canvas, 61 x 46 cm.

31. Edouard Vuillard, Self-Portrait, c. 1892. Oil on canvas, 38.4 x 45.9 cm.

Major Survey of the Harvard Art Museum Collections to Open in September 2008

Cambridge, MA
June 26, 2008

A comprehensive selection of works from the Harvard Art Museum's three constituent museums — the Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum — will be shown together for the first time in the exhibition Re-View, opening September 13, 2008 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. The Harvard Art Museum holds one of the country's preeminent art collections, and Re-View reflects the diversity and richness of these holdings. The survey features Western art from antiquity to the turn of the last century, Islamic and Asian art, and European and American art since 1900. With a varied sequence of installations — some traditional and some surprising — the exhibition offers a new way of looking at the collections, which have historically been exhibited in separate facilities.

The works on display in Re-View were selected by the curatorial staff of all three museums, working both independently and collaboratively. The exhibition represents a powerful distillation of the collection, balancing a wish to make available major works, familiar works, and works integral to the Art Museum's core mission of teaching and research. As a result, unique groupings of objects are being re-presented in new spaces with new and interesting juxtapositions. A mix of beloved objects will be intermingled with works that have not previously been on display or have not been on view for many years.

The Art Museum's historic building at 32 Quincy Street — current home of the Fogg Museum and Busch-Reisinger Museum — closes on June 30, 2008 for a major renovation and expansion project designed by architect Renzo Piano. During the renovation, Re-View will be on long-term view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at 485 Broadway to provide an ongoing display of the Art Museum's collection. The 32 Quincy Street renovation and expansion project is scheduled to be completed in 2013 and will unite all three of the museums in one state-of-the-art facility.

"The reinstallation of the Sackler galleries marks a visible step toward our goals of transforming our facilities, integrating our collections, and making them far more accessible," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. "We are fortunate to have the opportunity to continue to provide a teaching environment by keeping a portion of the collection on view and accessible to students, scholars, and the public, all while we are working to build new facilities that will vastly improve our ability to use all of our collections to their fullest potential."

Works on View
The ground floor gallery of the exhibition is devoted to European and American art since 1900, and is the result of a collaboration between the Fogg Museum's modern and contemporary department and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, whose collection consists of art of the German-speaking and related cultures of Central and Northern Europe. The works on view illustrate artists' challenges and reconsiderations of long-standing traditions of representation in art, such as the genres of landscape and portraiture, and recent experimentation with nontraditional materials. Works on view from the Busch-Reisinger collection include Max Beckmann's oil on canvas Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927), Joseph Beuys's cast iron multiple Back Support for a Fine-Limbed Person (Hare Type) of the 20th Century AD (1972), and the Museum's recent acquisition of Rosemarie Trockel's sculpture Shutter (c) (2006). Glenn Ligon's neon sculpture Untitled (Negro Sunshine) (2005), one of Jackson Pollock's signature "drip technique" paintings No. 2 (1950), and Franz Kline's abstract black-and-white oil on canvas High Street (1950) are among the works on view from the Fogg collection.

The second floor galleries showcase the Sackler Museum's collections of Asian and Islamic Art from 5000 BC to the present. The installations highlight regional and cultural styles, but also demonstrate relationships and commonalities, such as the long ceramic dialogue that engaged potters across East Asia, West Asia, and Europe, and the widely felt need to give visual expression to religious experience. Among the objects on display are the Large Bowl with Hadith Inscriptions in Black and Red (10th century), a superb example of an earthenware vessel with a quotation attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions written in Arabic script, and the bronze sculpture Standing Rama Wearing a High Headdress and Dhoti (13th century), a processional image which was made for use in a South Indian temple. The evolution of Buddhist sculpture across India, the Himalayas, China, Korea, and Japan is also examined; among the works in this installation is a recently acquired elegant Korean gilt silver Buddhist Triad: Seated Buddha Sakyamuni Flanked by Two Standing Bodhisattvas (mid-15th century). Subsequent galleries feature East Asian painting, Chinese and Korean ceramics, including imperial wares, and the Standing Saddled Horse with Roman-Style Bridle Ornaments (probably 2nd century), a near-perfect example of an earthenware sculpture that was made expressly for burial in a tomb. Also on view are the Sackler Museum's renowned holdings of archaic jades and ritual bronze vessels, including the famed cast bronze Chinese Ritual Wine-Pouring Vessel (Guang) with Tiger and Owl Decor (13th century BC) and the nephrite Configuration of Dragon, Bird, and Snake (4th–3rd century BC).

The fourth-floor galleries present painting, sculpture, and other objects, mainly in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the late 19th century. The galleries on this floor are generally arranged in chronological order. In several instances, however, works from different periods are juxtaposed, drawing attention not only to technical and stylistic innovations, but to continuities and revivals of themes and styles, such as those derived from Greek and Roman antiquity. In addition to highlighting the continuing strength of the classical tradition, the installation also places art from Europe and North America alongside works from other societies with which people of European heritage came into contact (Near Eastern, Egyptian, Asian, Islamic, indigenous American, African), emphasizing both different approaches and artistic interconnections. Highlights from the Sackler Museum's ancient collection include a recent acquisition of a Greek terracotta Red-Figure Bell Krater: Phlyax Scene (c. 370 BC), a marble Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek Statue of Meleager (late 1st–early 2nd century AD), and two Egyptian bronze Enthroned Lion-Headed Deities (c. 664–525 BC). Works from the Fogg Museum's collection of European art include Orazio Gentileschi's The Virgin with the Sleeping Christ Child (c. 1610), not on view for many years; Rembrandt van Rijn's oil on oak panel Bust of an Old Man (1632); Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Odalisque with a Slave (1839–40); and Jean Frédéric Bazille's Summer Scene (1869), a painting of young men bathing in the South of France. Also on exhibit are works from the Fogg Museum's American art collection, among them Sarah Miriam Peale's oil on panel Still Life with Watermelon (1822), a recent acquisition depicting an intensely naturalistic arrangement of sliced melons and grapes on a tabletop; Winslow Homer's painting of Civil War soldiers playing a game in Pitching Quoits (1865); and Albert Bierstadt's luminous oil on canvas landscape In the Sierras (1868).

The majority of the Fogg's celebrated Maurice Wertheim Collection, an important collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, sculptures, and drawings, is also on display. The paintings and sculpture on view include Pablo Picasso's oil on canvas Mother and Child (c. 1901) and works by other artists such as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Matisse, and van Gogh.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, light-sensitive works, such as textiles and works on paper, will change periodically. In addition, a special teaching gallery on the fourth floor will feature three or four temporary installations annually, tied primarily to university courses, as well as other special installations.

Credit
This exhibition has been made possible in part by a generous grant from the NBT Foundation.

Visitor's Guide
A new brochure, providing information about the reinstallation of the Sackler Museum, will be available for visitors in early September. The brochure will contain floor plans as well as descriptions of each gallery.

Harvard Art Museum Announces New Name

Cambridge, MA
April 30, 2008

The Harvard University Art Museums — a leading center for research and teaching in the visual arts comprised of three museums and four research centers — today announced that it is changing its name to the Harvard Art Museum, effective April 30, 2008. The new name, selected because it better expresses the institution's mission, grows out of an initiative to further unify and integrate the museum's collections and programs.

The Harvard Art Museum will maintain the identity of its three museums, the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, as well as its research centers, among them the Straus Center for Conservation.

The Harvard Art Museum has previously announced that it will be integrating its collections, which are currently divided among three buildings, into a single facility. This facility, located at 32 Quincy Street, will undergo a substantial renovation expected to begin sometime in 2009. The building will close to the public on June 30, 2008. While 32 Quincy Street is closed during this project, selected works from the Harvard Art Museum will be on public view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at 485 Broadway.

"We have been operating as a single entity for over two decades, yet we have a name that does not connote unity," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director. "Along with comprehensive academic and facilities planning, we also needed to evaluate how we could better present ourselves as a united organization with a common mission. Our new name and our new facilities will reflect an interdisciplinary, unified approach to research and teaching and will enable us to open our collections and our resources to more students, scholars, and visitors."

"It is essential that the care of the different areas of the collection, scholarship, and education be undertaken by those with specific expertise and experience, and that will continue at the Harvard Art Museum," added Lentz. "But to separate the art of middle Europe from the rest of Europe and the United States, or to separate the art of Europe from that of the Middle East and Asia, does not make sense."

The new name also accords with the style used by many other Harvard institutions (for example, Harvard Business School, Harvard Film Archive, Harvard Law School, Harvard Museum of Natural History, etc.), in which the word "university" is not used. The name Harvard Art Museum better represents a single administrative organization under the care of Harvard.

A new graphic identity system was developed in conjunction with the new institutional name. Aligned with the plan to bring all three museums physically together under one roof, the new graphic system brings the three constituent museum names together under one institutional name that clarifies the organizational structure. The graphic representation presents Harvard Art Museum as the anchor, creates a clear picture of the unified constituents, and retains the distinct identities of each. The naming and graphic identity project was conducted by the Harvard Art Museum in partnership with 2x4, a multidisciplinary studio focusing on design for arts and culture clients worldwide.

Harvard University Art Museums Announce Appointment of Ray Williams as First Director of Education

Cambridge, MA
December 13, 2007

The Harvard University Art Museums announce the appointment of Ray Williams as its first director of education, effective January 14, 2008. A highly respected museum educator with over twenty years of experience, Williams will plan, develop, and implement all aspects of the Art Museums' educational and public programs. The creation of Williams' position and an expanded education department mark a renewed commitment by the Art Museums to enhance arts scholarship at all levels. Through the collection, the museums engage students, faculty, and the community in object-based teaching, research, education, and learning, and the new director of education will continue a collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Education in those efforts.

"We are delighted to have Ray Williams join our staff," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Ray shares our vision to establish the Art Museums as an educational and cultural resource for both the University and community. As an experienced museum educator and arts consultant, Ray is well prepared to develop programs that reinforce our teaching and research mission."

Williams comes to the Art Museums from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (RISD) where he served as director of education. At RISD, Williams taught courses on museum education and developed a series of workshops for hospice caregivers. He also taught courses at Brown University and Rhode Island College and previously headed education departments at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries, as well as the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A graduate of Western Carolina University, Williams holds an MA in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as an individualized master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Study centers are a key component of the Harvard University Art Museums' teaching and research mission, and will be a central focus of the planned renovation, expansion, and transformation of the facilities adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums recently announced plans to begin the renovation of the building at 32 Quincy Street to bring together their three museums — the Fogg Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum — in one state-of-the-art facility. Among other improvements, the newly renovated building will feature a study center for each of the three museums that allows for close, intimate encounters with works of art.

In November, the Harvard University Art Museums released a collaborative report on study center learning with Project Zero, a research group at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Project Zero explored visitor experiences at the Fogg's Agnes Mongan Center and the Busch-Reisinger Study Room to investigate the types of learning that take place in museum study centers, the distinctive strengths of object-based teaching, and how this learning can be enhanced and applied to new contexts and audiences. The Project Zero report may be read at: www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/HUAM.htm.

The Art Museums also announced last month a major gift to the Department of Education by Dorothy and Milan A. Heath, Jr., who pledged to endow a position in the department. Under Williams' leadership, the Heath's generous gift will enable the department to continue programs for school-aged children and advance the Art Museums' educational mission.

Harvard's Fogg Art Museum Presents First Major Survey and Museum Exhibition of Moyra Davey's Photographs

Cambridge, MA
November 27, 2007

The Harvard University Art Museums present Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey, on view from February 28 through June 30, 2008, at the Fogg Art Museum. This exhibition of 40 photographs marks the first survey of Davey's work, and her first major exhibition in a museum. The photographs on view provide a comprehensive look into Davey's 20-year career, which has included multiple solo and group exhibitions in galleries and group exhibitions in museums in the United States and Canada.

Moyra Davey's work focuses on the humble and mundane accumulations of everyday objects such as stacks of newspapers, books, records, and money. Her images of domestic interiors feature dust, bookshelves, and the stuff that accumulates on top of refrigerators. Her New York City street pictures focus on the disappearing world of newspaper vendors. Shying away from contemporary practices of large-scale, digitally manipulated, and staged photography, Davey works on a small scale — typically in 20 x 24 inch format — and prints her own work. Her modest scale encourages viewers to focus their attention and consequently increase their awareness of everyday life.

Davey's photographs and videos have been featured in exhibitions at Alexander and Bonin, New York; American Fine Arts, Co., New York; Artists Space, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York; LACE, Los Angeles; the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal; Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, and the Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; as well as other galleries and museums. She recently collaborated with Jason Simon on a video for 50,000 Beds, a project by Chris Doyle at Artspace in New Haven, CT, and is currently one of twelve founding members of Orchard, a cooperative exhibition and event space in New York City's Lower East Side. She was also one of ten recipients of the 2004–05 award from the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation.

Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, curated the exhibition, and collaborated closely with the artist on this survey. "Working with Moyra Davey on this exhibition has been a lesson in subtlety; whether it's how one looks at the overlooked or how one threads together passages from numerous books, Davey's work invariably offers a kind of intellectual and aesthetic "time out." She slows things down and hushes the room so that everyone can not only have their own thoughts but can hear them as well."

Also an established author, Davey has written The Problem of Reading (2003), an essay ruminating on the act of reading, and edited Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (2001), a compilation of writing by artists and writers on the struggles and joys of being a creative producer and a mother. In her essay "Notes on Photography & Accident" in the accompanying catalogue, Davey expounds on the idea that "accident is the lifeblood of photography." With an interest in traditional photography's reliance on the notion of accident, she contemplates the philosophical and psychological problems posed by photography, largely by parsing the work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Janet Malcolm.Though her photographs of cluttered desks are interspersed with this essay, they are not intended to function as illustrations; rather, they run parallel to her questioning of the differences between photographers and writers and the similarities between taking photographs and taking notes.

Molesworth was appointed in February 2007 as the Art Museums' first full curator of contemporary art. Since her appointment, she has become the first incumbent of the Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curatorship of Contemporary Art, an important gift that supports the Art Museums' mission of collecting contemporary art.

"In establishing an endowed curatorship of contemporary art, we have renewed our commitment to living artists and the unique inspiration and discoveries they enable us to share with scholars, students, and the wider public," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "This exhibition, Davey's first museum retrospective, reflects our intention to highlight the work of artists who are not yet part of the canon, but from whom we have a great deal to learn."

Featured Works
The entryway to the gallery features 100 of Davey's Copperheads (late 1980s–early 1990s), in a 10 x 10 grid form under Plexiglas. This series, taken with a macro lens, depicts extreme closeups of President Lincoln's profile on various pennies. Each image shows a different penny whose surface has been nicked, scarred, gouged, and tarnished, or a combination of all mutilations that make it sometimes impossible to discern the profile. Other works feature LP's, as in Shure (2003) or Greatest Hits (1999), focusing on the persistence of analog technologies in our digital age. Books and magazines play an enormous role in Davey's oeuvre in such works as Early (1999), Newsstand No. 3 (1994), and Yma (1999). In Davey's pictures, books accumulate wildly, mimicking the feeling of endlessness one has in a library; but books also gather dust, and Davey's pictures are as much about how books can produce feelings of entropy and death as they are about the ability of books to propagate knowledge.

Credits
Funding for the exhibition and catalogue was provided by the Alexander S., Robert L., and Bruce A. Beal Exhibition Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Wynn Kramarsky.

Catalogue
The catalogue that accompanies this exhibition includes an introduction by Helen Molesworth and an essay by Moyra Davey entitled "Notes on Photography & Accident." Also included are a transcript of Davey's video Fifty Minutes and 67 color photographs. The catalogue is published by the Harvard University Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press.

Carpenter Center Exhibition
Two or Three Things I Know About Her, an exhibition also curated by Helen Molesworth, is running concurrently at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, adjacent to the Fogg Art Museum, at 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA. The exhibition is on view February 28 through April 6, 2008, and features Moyra Davey's video Fifty Minutes, along with video, sound, and slide pieces by fellow artists Wynne Greenwood, K8 Hardy, Sharon Hayes, and Ulrike Müller. Please see www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/2or3things.html for more information.

Harvard's Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art Announces Landmark Gift of Barnett Newman's Studio Materials

Cambridge, MA
September 7, 2007

The Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art (CTSMA), a leading research center of the Harvard University Art Museums, announces a major gift of Barnett Newman's studio materials and related ephemera through the generosity of The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation. These materials, most of which have never been seen outside of Newman's studio, include painting tools and supplies, damaged or unfinished paintings and multiples, drawings, sketches, notes and models, as well as paint trials and canvas fragments. The gift complements CTSMA's existing archive of correspondence and conservation treatment reports related to Newman, as well as works of art donated to Harvard by his wife, Annalee Newman. Together, these remarkable gifts create an unrivalled resource for scholarship on Newman's materials and techniques and establish the Center as the premier resource for technical scholarship on Newman's work.

The collection of tools (brushes, rollers, spray atomizer), materials (paints, inks, glues) and other ephemera included in the artist's catalogue raisonné offers students, scholars, and the public rare insight into Newman's work and creative process. Among the ephemera are unpublished sketches, discarded paint trials and Plexiglas multiples, and cardboard models of his best-known sculpture, Broken Obelisk (1963). Along with Newman's paint-splattered studio hat and shoes, painting table and ladder, these items provide a glimpse into the artist's private studio practice.

The Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, one of four research centers of the Harvard University Art Museums, investigates the materials and issues associated with the making and the conservation of modern works of art and serves as a resource for conservators, scholars, and students by collecting, preserving, and presenting relevant materials and research. In pursuit of its mission, CTSMA collects and makes available for research artists' materials, artists' interviews, documents related to relevant conservation assessments and treatments, and ephemera associated with the creative process. The Center facilitates the dissemination of such information through teaching, lecturing, and publication.

This gift advances the Art Museums' long-term interest in technical studies and represents the first modern component to its material collections that include the Forbes Collection of Pigments, the Gettens Archive of Aged Pigments, and the Gluck Archives of British Artists' Materials. As with these collections, Newman's material will be used for teaching by CTSMA, the Straus Center for Conservation, and the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. Accordingly, the Newman studio materials and related ephemera will be catalogued and eventually made publicly accessible.

Born in New York City, Barnett Newman (1905–1970) was a leading member of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He studied with Adolph Gottlieb at the Art Students League in Manhattan and attended City College of New York. After working as a substitute teacher in New York, Newman launched an unsuccessful bid to become mayor of the city on a cultural ticket. In 1946, Newman joined the Betty Parsons Gallery and in 1948, he created Onement 1, often cited as "the beginning of [his] present life." The painting remains a seminal work in his oeuvre. Newman continued to create abstract paintings defined by single vertical bands, which he called "zips," for the next two decades. After suffering a severe heart attack in 1957, Newman painted steadily through the 1960s and achieved critical recognition by representing the United States at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1965 and by exhibiting his Stations of the Cross at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1966. Newman died of a heart attack on July 4, 1970. Now considered to be one of the most influential painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement in American art, Newman's paintings and sculpture define a crucial moment in the artistic and intellectual development of the 20th century. The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation is a charitable trust established in 2000 under the Will of Annalee Newman.

Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the founding Director of CTSMA and Associate Director of Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is co-author of Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné. "Given my long association with the work of Barnett Newman," Mancusi-Ungaro said, "I am gratified that his studio materials will be preserved and made available at the Harvard University Art Museums for future generations of researchers. The items, many of which have never been seen outside of Newman's studio, offer rare and often critical information about the material nature of his art. We are enormously grateful to The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation for recognizing the research potential of this special collection and look forward to many years of fruitful inquiry."

"We are grateful to The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation for the gift of this remarkable archive," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "These materials will play an important and continuing role in our teaching and research initiatives on modern art. Barnett Newman's exacting technique and complex methods produced some of the most influential paintings of the post-war period in American art, and we eagerly await the insights of scholars as they make use of this rich resource."

Exhibition at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum Reveals the Original Colors of Ancient Sculpture

Cambridge, MA
August 24, 2007

The Harvard University Art Museums present Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum from September 22, 2007 through January 20, 2008. This traveling exhibition of over 20 full-size color reconstructions of important Greek and Roman works challenges the popular notion of classical white marble sculpture, illustrating that ancient sculpture was far more colorful, complex, and exuberant than is often thought. The reconstructions will be displayed in the Sackler's galleries of ancient art alongside some 35 original statues and reliefs — primarily from the Art Museums' own collections of Greek, Roman, Near Eastern, and Egyptian art. Gods in Color breaks new ground as it constitutes the first large-scale effort to recreate the original appearance of ancient sculpture. The exhibition at the Sackler Museum is the first U.S. venue of the traveling exhibition, which was previously shown in Amsterdam, Athens, Basel, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Istanbul, Munich, and Rome.

A closer look at the surfaces of many ancient statues and reliefs reveals traces of their painted decoration, suggesting that plain white marble sculpture was not so much an ancient reality as an invention of the Renaissance and neoclassical periods. Evidence of painted and gilt stone sculpture, of colorful bronze statuary, and of statues of gold and ivory puts Greek and Roman art in harmony with artistic practices in Egypt and the Near East, and with those of the subsequent medieval period. The color reconstructions presented in Gods in Color are based on extensive visual and scientific analysis of original sculptures. Two short films that document the process of their creation and a display of pigments used in antiquity — as well as for the modern reconstructions — will also be shown in the galleries.

Susanne Ebbinghaus, George M. A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art, and Amy Brauer, Diane Heath Beever Associate Curator of Ancient Art, are the curators for Gods in Color at Harvard. "White marble statues are so much a part of the traditional view of classical art that one can only begin to imagine the effect of color when confronted with these full-scale, three-dimensional reconstructions," said Ebbinghaus. "Of course, the color reconstructions are only approximations, but I hope that they will be as eye-opening to others as they have been to me — and that they will show how much has yet to be discovered in ancient art." Brauer adds, "The faint traces of pigment that bear witness to the originally brightly painted surfaces of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture have long been known to specialists, but have proved too faint to bring about a shift in perception. With the ongoing development of scientific methods of analysis, these sculptures are just beginning to be seen in their true colors."

The exhibition was organized by the Stiftung Archäologie and the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich, Germany. It represents more than two decades of research on the polychromy of ancient sculpture, undertaken by the leading authority, Dr. Vinzenz Brinkmann (formerly Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich, now Liebieghaus, Frankfurt), in museums around the world and in collaboration with a number of scholars from different countries.

Research for Gods in Color included technical examination of the scarce traces of paint that remain on a number of ancient works of sculpture. Raking light — extreme side light — can reveal incised details as well as subtle patterns caused by the uneven weathering of different paints on the stone surface. Similarly, ultraviolet light brings out slight surface differences — often all that has survived of the painted decoration. Analysis of pigment remains by various techniques, including polarized light microscopy, X-ray fluorescence and defraction analysis, and infrared spectroscopy, provides information on the materials and colors used. The reconstructions were painted with authentic pigments by the archaeologist Dr. Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, with the help of Sylvia Kellner.

"The research and documentation connected with this exhibition present an opportunity to look at our own sculpture collections in a new light, and especially reflect on our role as a teaching and research institution," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "We are grateful to the Stiftung Archäologie and the Glyptothek for the opportunity to display these reconstructions of classical sculpture and create public awareness of an exciting direction in the study of ancient art."

Featured Works
In the galleries of the Sackler Museum, the color reconstructions are juxtaposed with original statues and reliefs of the same time periods in their current, colorless state of preservation. One gallery is dedicated to Greek sculpture of the archaic and classical periods, another to sculpture of the Hellenistic period and the time of the Roman Empire. The third gallery presents examples of prehistoric sculpture from the Greek Cycladic islands, and a sampling of colored sculpture from Egypt and the Near East.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a partial reconstruction of the west pediment of the Temple of Aphaia — a local goddess — on the Greek island of Aegina, carved in the years 490–480 BC. The color reconstructions of the pediment include representations of the goddess Athena, of two archers in different costumes, and of two warrior's shields. Like the pediment, a frieze from the Treasury of the Siphnians at Delphi shows scenes from the Trojan War. These scenes were identified only when traces of the painted name inscriptions were discovered. Other painted copies of Greek sculptural works include three stelai, or grave markers, displayed alongside the original marble Grave Stele of Melisto (c. 340 BC) from the Art Museums' collection. Based on a marble statue of c. 530 BC from the Athenian Akropolis, the two reconstructions of the "Peplos" Kore offer interpretations of what was once thought to represent a young woman or girl. Close study of the painted decoration has revealed that she is in fact wearing the dress of a goddess, probably Artemis.

Brightly colored reconstructions of part of the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus of c. 320 BC can be seen next to the Art Museums' original Amazon Sarcophagus of the late 2nd–early 3rd centuries AD, while a rosy-cheeked head of the Roman emperor Caligula (37–41 AD) allows visitors to imagine what Harvard's Statue of the Emperor Trajan (c. 120 AD) may originally have looked like. The exhibition also includes a copy of a Roman bronze head complete with gilding and inlays.

Credits
This exhibition was organized by the Stiftung Archäologie and the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich. It was conceived by Vinzenz Brinkmann, Liebieghaus, Frankfurt, and Raimund Wünsche, Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich; and curated at the Harvard University Art Museums by Susanne Ebbinghaus, George M. A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art, and Amy Brauer, Diane Heath Beever Associate Curator of Ancient Art. Funding for the exhibition and its publications was provided by Christopher and Jean Angell, Walter and Ursula Cliff, Mark B. Fuller, the German Consulate General Boston, the German Foreign Office, Evangelos D. Karvounis, James and Sonia Kay, Roy Lennox and Joan Weberman, Marian Marill, Markus Michalke, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani, Samuel Plimpton, Laura and Lorenz Reibling, the Ida and William Rosenthal Foundation, and two anonymous donors.

Publications
A six-page gallery guide, featuring ten color reproductions, an essay by curator Susanne Ebbinghaus, and a checklist of the reconstructions presented at the Art Museums, accompanies the exhibition. A family activity guide, created especially for families and children to use together in the exhibition will also be available. The guide is filled with activities, games, pictures to color, and searches, is completely self-guiding, and is free to everyone who visits the exhibition. A fully-illustrated catalogue, Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, edited by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Raimund Wünsche, published by the Stiftung Archäologie and the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich, will be available for purchase in the gift shop or by calling 617-496-5698.

Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum Presents Exhibition of 20th-Century Chinese Ink Paintings from the Collection of Chu-tsing Li

Cambridge, MA
July 10, 2007

The Harvard University Art Museums present A Tradition Redefined: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Ink Paintings from the Chu-tsing Li Collection, 1950–2000 on view November 3, 2007 through January 27, 2008 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. This traveling exhibition of 63 works, drawn entirely from the collection of Chu-tsing Li — the finest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in the West — is the first to survey Chinese ink paintings produced during the second half of the 20th century. In examining this five-decade period, the exhibition demonstrates the dramatic evolution of Chinese ink painting in recent times and lays a foundation for understanding the international-style work that is being created in China today. In addition, the exhibition illustrates parallel lines of development in different geographical areas by artists active in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and abroad, thereby bringing to light differences in style and technique from one area to another. Many of these paintings have not previously been exhibited in the West.

Robert D. Mowry, Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art, Harvard University Art Museums, co-curated the exhibition with Janet Baker, Curator of Asian Art, Phoenix Art Museum; and Claudia Brown, Professor of Art History, Herberger College of the Arts, Arizona State University, and Research Curator for Asian Art, Phoenix Art Museum. All three curators did their graduate work in Chinese painting at the University of Kansas, studying with Chu-tsing Li. "Our research on Professor Li's collection of modern and contemporary Chinese ink paintings provides an unprecedented view of the new artistic directions that Chinese ink painters explored between 1950 and 2000," said Mowry. "Since the majority of the works in the Li collection were acquired directly from the artists, the authenticity of the paintings is above question; thus, this exhibition, and particularly its catalogue, will serve as a standard by which authenticity can be measured."

A Tradition Redefined features works by artists who have reconsidered numerous aspects of classical Chinese painting and who have in various ways synthesized elements of Western modernism with Chinese abstraction. In the early 20th century China experienced a drive to modernize; as part of that phenomenon, young Chinese painters, tired of the sanctioned styles and codified brushwork of their predecessors, eagerly began to explore Western styles. These experiments of China's first generation of modern artists were cut short by evolving historical circumstances including Japanese invasions from the 1930s through World War II, the Chinese Civil War (1927–50), and the rise of competing governments in Beijing and Taipei. Mainland China's postwar focus on reshaping its economy, government, and society in the Communist model meant that artists were actively discouraged from exploring foreign artistic styles. Artists working in Taiwan and Hong Kong, by contrast, were free to experiment with foreign idioms, so that painting styles followed different lines of development from one geographical area to another. Contemporary Chinese artists continue to struggle with a balance of traditional and international styles, all the while maintaining a reflection of their own inner personality and continuing the powerful legacy of their Chinese ancestry.

The exhibition at the Sackler Museum includes 51 paintings grouped into five categories: Tradition Uprooted includes works by established artists who were displaced following the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Tradition Abstracted features artists active in Taiwan after 1949 who sought to combine Western modernist elements with traditional Chinese abstraction. Tradition Embraced refers to artists working outside mainland China who actively sought to perpetuate and expand traditional Chinese ink painting styles. Tradition Reasserted groups the work of those artists from the PRC who adapted their styles and subject matter to values of the Communist republic but reasserted aspects of traditional painting. Tradition Transcended presents paintings by artists whose idiosyncratic works are beyond categorization-individualist rather than either strictly modernist or traditionalist.

A Tradition Redefined carries forward the work begun with last year's exhibition and brochure The New Chinese Landscape: Recent Acquisitions (Aug. 12–Nov. 12, 2006) and continues to commemorate forty years of growing awareness in this country of modern and contemporary Chinese painting. The New Chinese Landscape presented works by five living artists, and borrowed its title from the first exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting to tour the United States (1966–68), which was organized by Chu-tsing Li and Thomas Lawton, an American scholar of Chinese art.

"The research and presentation of this exhibition continue to underscore the Art Museum's active involvement in Asian art, both classical and modern," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "We thank Chu-tsing Li for his loan of these paintings — for his generosity and his belief in our teaching and research missions — and are pleased to offer this exhibition and catalogue in his honor."

Chu-tsing Li
Professor Chu-tsing Li is one of the pioneers in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese ink paintings. His interest in art began while he was studying for his BA in English literature at Nanjing University in the early and mid-1940s. He befriended Michael Sullivan, a young architect from Cambridge University who taught English at Nanjing University but who also offered an introductory course in Western art history. Sullivan and Li shared many of the same interests, and the two attended exhibitions and visited with artists, becoming friends; through this association, Chu-tsing Li became interested in art history and, almost by coincidence began his first contacts with modern and contemporary art.

Li came to the United States in 1947; after completing his MA in English literature at the University of Iowa in two years, he switched to their art department to study northern Baroque painting. In 1955 Li completed his PhD at Iowa, where he then taught classes in Baroque painting and was urged to teach modern and Asian art as well. Preparation for these new courses awakened a deep interest in both fields, and he subsequently immersed himself in the history of Chinese painting. Best known for his studies of classical Chinese paintings, particularly paintings of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), he was also developing a second specialty in modern and contemporary Chinese painting by visiting artists and studying their work first-hand. At this time, Li began to acquire contemporary works and to form lifelong friendships with artists.

After ten years of teaching at Iowa, Li in 1966 moved to the University of Kansas, Lawrence, where he established a doctoral program in Chinese art. He was Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History until his retirement in 1990. In 1975 he offered the first course in modern Chinese art taught in the West — perhaps the first course in this subject taught anywhere; he wrote most of his best-known works on classical Chinese paintings and on modern and contemporary Chinese art while at Kansas.

As an art historian well-trained in both Eastern and Western art, a specialist in Chinese painting, and an acclaimed author of scholarly works on modern Chinese painting, Li has been in a perfect position to assemble a collection of modern and contemporary Chinese ink paintings. His collection ranks among the finest and most comprehensive in the West; though wide ranging, it is particularly strong in works created during the second half of the 20th century.

Featured Works
The majority of the works in the Chu-tsing Li collection were acquired directly from the artists who created them, and many of the paintings include personalized dedications to Professor Li and his wife Yao-wen Li. Liu Guosong, a pioneering artist who founded the Fifth Moon Group, the first modern painters' society in Taiwan, features prominently in A Tradition Redefined with five works, including the abstract ink scroll Wintry Mountains Covered with Snow (1964), which was exhibited this past spring in a retrospective show of Liu's paintings at the Palace Museum, Beijing, and the dramatic painting with collage High Noon (1969). Zhao Shaoang, a renowned painter, poet, and calligrapher, is represented by an ink and color horizontal scroll entitled Baoguo Temple on Mount Emei (1959), which depicts a Buddhist pilgrimage destination on one of China's sacred mountains. Other important works include self-taught Yu Chengyao's hanging scrolls of complex landscapes Deep Ravine, Rushing Torrent (early 1960s) and Zephyr at Huangshi (1988); Lu Yanshao's political work Electric Power Station in a Mountain Village (1976); the ink and color scrolls Clearing after Snow (1983) and Rugged Hills of North America (1989) by Wan Qingli, a painter, connoisseur, teacher, and respected scholar of Chinese painting; and Chen Qikuan's playful Monkeys (probably 1989). A small, companion exhibition, Downtime, which is also on view through January 27 in the Sackler's second-floor Asian galleries, features four contemporary ink paintings from the Sackler's permanent collection.

Credits
A Tradition Redefined is co-organized by Phoenix Art Museum and the Harvard University Art Museums. Phoenix has received generous support for the exhibition from the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation and the Blakemore Foundation. For its part, Harvard has received generous support for the exhibition and catalogue from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and from Joel and Lisa Alvord, Winnie and Michael Feng, Dorothy Tapper Goldman, the family of Earle Jen-Shyong Ho, James M. Kemper, Jr., Marilyn J. Stokstad, Jacqueline B. and Alan L. Stuart, Martha Sutherland and Barnaby Conrad III, and Gilbert and Stephanie Zuellig.

Catalogue
A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes essays by the exhibition's three co-curators: Robert D. Mowry, Janet Baker, and Claudia Brown, as well as by artist and independent scholar, Arnold Chang. Chun-yi Lee, ink-painter and graduate student in the history of Chinese art at Arizona State University, Tempe; and Melissa Moy, assistant curator of Chinese art, Harvard University Art Museums, also made important contributions to the catalogue. In addition to a color illustration of each work in the exhibition, photographic details of signatures and impressed seals are reproduced at actual size along with transcriptions of the seals and English translations of inscriptions. A brief biography of each artist represented in the exhibition is also included. The catalogue is published by the Harvard University Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press.

Dates
The exhibition premieres at the Harvard University Art Museums, from November 3, 2007 through January 27, 2008, after which it will travel to Phoenix Art Museum, where it will be on view June 28 through September 14, 2008. Other venues include the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (October 11, 2008 through January 4, 2009), and the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence (February 11 through May 24, 2009).

Exhibition of German 20th-Century Sculpture on View at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum

Cambridge, MA
April 26, 2007

The Harvard University Art Museums present Making Myth Modern: Primordial Themes in German 20th-Century Sculpture, a tightly focused exhibition of seven sculptures by Franz von Stuck, Renée Sintenis, Max Beckmann, Gerhard Marcks, Bernard Schultze, and Joseph Beuys at the Busch-Reisinger Museum from July 14 through December 30, 2007. This exhibition brings together for the first time important sculptures from the Busch-Reisinger Museum's permanent collection and includes some of the foremost German artists from the turn of the century to the early 1980s. The works employ mythological themes to address broad subjects such as creation, nature, and gender relations. But after a closer look, it becomes clear that these interpretations also strongly reflect the artists' personal lives and the turbulent history of 20th-century Germany.

The exhibition is organized by Solveig Köbernick, 2005–2007 Michalke Curatorial Intern at the Busch-Reisinger Museum and Ph.D. candidate in the department of History of Art at the University of Leipzig, Germany. "I was inspired by the exceptional sculptures by well-known 20th-century artists in the Busch-Reisinger collection, and the remarkable way they deal with mythological themes. I wanted to understand why these artists turned to myths to express themselves," said Köbernick. "I was also interested in the fact that artists who were renowned painters like Franz von Stuck or Max Beckmann were overlooked as sculptors. For example, one understands the work of artists such as Bernard Schultze much better by examining the relationship between sculptures and paintings in his work. My hope is that by focusing exclusively on sculpture, this exhibition will illuminate the importance of that medium in German 20th-century art."

With the introduction of Romanticism in the late 18th century, the perception of myths changed dramatically as they began to be considered as symbols of deeper truths and the primal unity of the world. This important shift in perception freed myths from their traditional iconography and opened the door for more individualized interpretations and the creation of new myths. From this point forward mythological figures became mirrors of the artists' states of mind and contemporary historical conditions. This makes the examination of the artists' use of myths in 20th-century Germany so compelling, given Nazi persecution of modern artists, the Third Reich's ideological misuse of myths, and the cultural and political transformation in the country after the Second World War.

The works in the exhibition encourage the exploration of sculpture in German 20th-century art through the study of different approaches by artists to material, form, and surface — from Franz von Stuck's bronze sculpture of around 1900, already pointing towards an abstraction of form, to Bernhard Schultze's colorful, biomorphic, and surrealist-influenced relief sculpture of the 1960s, and Joseph Beuys' minimalist-influenced and readymade-looking, but highly designed sculptures of the 1980s.

"We are always looking for ways to use the collections to their fullest potential, especially to educate and illuminate," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "These works have not been chosen simply based upon their aesthetic appeal, but carefully selected by Solveig to encourage a dialogue about their role in the history of contemporary German art and their impact on society."

Featured Works
Making Myth Modern contributes to the increasing scholarly and public interest in the role of myths in 20th-century art and in the medium of sculpture. It examines how German artists over the course of eight decades interpreted myths, and how their personalized myths reflected German history and artist's concerns. The interpretations of myths became as multifaceted as the artists' works. In his sculpture Amazon (1897), Franz von Stuck identified himself with a mythological figure in order to position himself as a successful artist within the turn-of-the-century German art world, whereas Renée Sintenis adapted the Daphne (1930) figure to reflect her status as a successful female artist in the late Weimar Republic. Max Beckmann's powerful sculpture Adam and Eve (1936) demonstrates the search for basic truths of life in a time of increasing political pressure by the National Socialists. The desire for a new beginning following the exploitation of myths in the Third Reich is reflected by Gerhard Marcks' Prometheus Bound II (1948), and Bernhard Schultze's sculpture Migof Bloody and Blooming (1965) is an example of his attempt to create a wholly new myth. In Pala (1983) and ELEMENT (1982), Joseph Beuys used myths to stimulate environmental engagement and express the idea of creative and spiritual energy in his work.

Brochure
The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure featuring 12 color reproductions, an essay by curator Solveig Köbernick, and a checklist.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Curatorship of Asian Art Established

Cambridge, MA
April 5, 2007

David Rockefeller has agreed to establish a new Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Curatorship of Asian Art within the Harvard University Art Museums, Thomas W. Lentz, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, announced today. This new position has been made possible because of significant appreciation in the endowment originally contributed in 1957 by David Rockefeller S.B. '36, LL.D. (honorary) '69, when he established the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professorship of Asian Art in honor of his mother. The Rockefeller Curator will join the Department of Asian Art at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum, led by Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art Robert D. Mowry.

Lentz added, "I am deeply grateful to David Rockefeller for agreeing to extend the reach of his gift. It allows the Art Museums to capitalize on one of its greatest strengths — our Asian collections — by providing resources to bring this collection to greater light as a tool for teaching, research, and outreach. We are also deeply honored to pay tribute to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a seminal figure in the art and museum world, with a curatorship in her name here at Harvard."

The Art Museums' Department of Asian Art houses one of the finest collections of Asian Art in the United States and the finest such collection at a university-based museum anywhere in the world. The holdings include more than 17,000 works, with particular strengths in the fields of Chinese archaic jades, bronze ritual vessels, Buddhist sculptures and ceramics; Korean paintings, sculptures, and ceramics; and Japanese lacquer, calligraphy, and woodblock prints.

The Rockefeller curatorship is broadly defined and will provide resources for a senior curator to study, research, exhibit, and publish on any discipline within the Asian Art collection (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian). The curator will also collaborate with relevant faculty from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874–1948) was the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and a prominent arts patron in her own right. She and her husband began to collect Asian art in the early 1920s. Hundreds of her Japanese woodblock prints were later given to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, where a gallery was named for her. Also in the early 1920s, she started collecting American folk art. Her impressive collection of 18th, 19th, and early 20th century art and artifacts formed the basis for the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, an important colonial town in Virginia, which her husband began restoring in the late 1920s.

Mrs. Rockefeller made perhaps her greatest mark in the area of modern art. She began seriously to collect the work of contemporary European and American artists in the mid-1920s, and joined a group of like-minded collectors in 1928 to establish the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA, as it is widely known, opened in 1929. Mrs. Rockefeller served as a trustee until 1945. She and the Fogg Art Museum's legendary associate director, Paul Sachs, selected Alfred Barr as MoMA's first director.

The Rockefeller Curatorship continues a grand tradition of generosity by David Rockefeller at Harvard, including the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Peggy and David Rockefeller Professorship for the Study of Latin America, The Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Scholar Fellowship, and the David Rockefeller Professorship in Latin American Studies, among many other gifts.

Exhibition of Rarely Seen American Pre-Raphaelite Works on View at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum

Cambridge, MA
March 15, 2007

The Harvard University Art Museums present The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle, an exhibition of over 50 watercolors and drawings by the American followers of John Ruskin, including nearly a dozen rarely seen works by Ruskin himself. The exhibition is on view from April 7 through July 8, 2007 at the Fogg Art Museum. Ruskin, the 19th-century British writer and water-colorist, never came to the United States, but had great influence on a group of artists who considered themselves American Pre-Raphaelites. These artists specialized in small landscapes and floral studies and were active in New York during the 1860s. While earlier scholars surmised that the movement died out by 1870, this exhibition examines a second flowering of the Ruskinian style in the U.S.

This resurgence was centered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and owed a great deal to Harvard's first professor of art history, Charles Eliot Norton and to his protégé, the artist Charles Herbert Moore. Drawn from the collections of the Fogg Art Museum and supplemented by loans from public and private collections, The Last Ruskinians demonstrates how a group of long-overlooked artists remained dedicated well into the 20th century to the highly detailed, "truth in nature" style advocated by Ruskin. These artists executed floral and landscape compositions, and followed Ruskin's practice of documenting the architectural monuments of Venice and Florence, eventually expanding that practice to Egypt and Japan.

The Last Ruskinians is organized by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., curator of American art, and Virginia Anderson, assistant curator of American art. Many of the artists featured in the exhibition are connected to Harvard through Charles Eliot Norton, Ruskin's closest American friend, who taught art history at Harvard from 1874 to 1898. "Norton himself never drew or painted, but he played a key role in establishing Ruskinian taste in this country," said Stebbins. "Norton was both a collector who patronized the young Ruskinian painters he believed in, and a teacher whose strong feelings about the importance of art influenced several generations of American collectors and museum-builders." Among Norton's students and admirers were Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, as well as the builders of the modern Fogg Art Museum, Edward W. Forbes and Paul J. Sachs.

The exhibition also brings to light the work of Charles Herbert Moore, a distinguished artist who has been largely overlooked, despite his influence as one of the most important watercolorists of his day. Moore was one of the original American Pre-Raphaelites in New York, a co-founder in 1863 of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art and a critic for the publication The New Path. Moore was a close colleague of both John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, and brought his passion for Ruskin's philosophies with him to Harvard in 1874. As an instructor, Moore worked in watercolor to copy details from a number of early Italian Renaissance paintings and numerous works from the British Museum collection. He brought these facsimiles back to Harvard, where he used them to teach art history and studio art in the days before color photography or survey texts. Moore became the first director of the Fogg Art Museum in 1896 and remained an instructor and director until his retirement in 1909.

"Charles Eliot Norton and Charles Herbert Moore are significant figures in the development of both the discipline of art history and the Art Museums here at Harvard," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "We are happy to be able to showcase these works in the spirit and tradition of two important-and often unrecognized-followers of John Ruskin. Both believed, as we do today, in the capacity of art to educate, and in the contribution art museums make to society."

A fine group of Ruskin's own drawings and watercolors, and those of two British painters he greatly admired, Joseph M. W. Turner and William Henry Hunt, are also featured in the exhibition along with works by such important Americans as Henry Roderick Newman, Francesca Alexander, and Joseph Lindon Smith. Working largely in watercolor, these artists were active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and their small nature studies and copies after art and architecture were painted with technical precision and in rich color. In Ruskinian style, they made highly realistic images of great delicacy and beauty.

Credit
The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle was organized by the Department of American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, Harvard University Art Museums, with support from the Annemarie Henle Pope Special Exhibitions Fund.

Featured Works
Most of the works in the exhibition are drawn from the permanent collection of the Fogg Art Museum, supplemented with generous loans from public and private collectors. The Fogg's holdings include a superb group of nearly 70 drawings and watercolors by John Ruskin, as well as the most extensive collection of works by Charles Herbert Moore.

Catalogue
The accompanying catalogue examines Ruskin's significant influence on taste, collecting, and art instruction, with special emphasis on the role of his close friend and emissary in America, Charles Eliot Norton. The 104-page catalogue features original essays by curator Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., with independent scholar Susan C. Ricci, assistant curator Virginia Anderson, and curatorial assistant Melissa Renn. The essay by Stebbins and Ricci focuses on the broad influence of Ruskin and of Norton, who shaped the taste of some of Boston's greatest connoisseurs and collectors. Anderson's essay discusses Ruskin's influence on the evolution of Moore's artistic career, and Melissa Renn has written on Moore as an instructor at Harvard. The catalogue also contains 57 color and 24 black-and-white illustrations. The publication was funded by the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund in the Andrew W. Mellon Publication Funds.

James and Maisie Houghton Establish Curatorship of Contemporary Art

Cambridge, MA
February 23, 2007

Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, has announced the establishment of the Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curatorship of Contemporary Art. This new position was funded by a gift from the Houghtons, and will be filled by its first incumbent, Helen Molesworth, when she begins her new role at the Harvard University Art Museums this month.

"I am thrilled to be able to announce and celebrate the Houghton Curatorship, as well as Helen Molesworth's arrival as the first Houghton Curator," said Lentz. "Having the support of such respected leaders as Jamie and Maisie Houghton is of enormous help to the Art Museums. This is an especially critical time for us, as we plan for our new art center in Allston, where Harvard's collection of contemporary art will have even greater visibility. I am deeply grateful to Jamie, Maisie, and the Houghton family for once more demonstrating their commitment to Harvard and their support for the arts."

James R. Houghton is the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation and recently retired as chairman and CEO of Corning Inc., the world's leading producer of optical fiber and a global manufacturer of laboratory glassware, electronics, and light bulbs. He is a 1958 graduate of Harvard College and a 1962 graduate of Harvard Business School. Houghton is the seventh member of his family to lead Corning Inc., which was founded by his great-great-grandfather in 1851. In addition to his many roles at Harvard, he also serves as a trustee of the Corning Incorporated Foundation, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he chairs the board. Maisie Kinnicut Houghton is a 1962 graduate of Radcliffe College. She and Jamie have two children: James D. Houghton '86 and Nina B. Houghton. The Houghtons are collectors of contemporary art, with a focus on glass.

Jamie Houghton's family has a long history of philanthropy to Harvard, including the Houghton Library, the Houghton Professorship of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the Houghton Professorship of Theology and Contemporary Change. In 1997, the Houghtons established the Houghton Endowment for Women and Leadership in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"Maisie and I are delighted to be able to support the Art Museums at this time and in this way," said Mr. Houghton. "We have been very impressed with the quality of Tom Lentz's leadership. We applaud his vision to create a new art center in Allston focusing on contemporary art, as well as his plan to renovate and transform the Art Museums' facilities at 32 Quincy Street. We are particularly looking forward to Helen Molesworth's arrival as the new Houghton Curator."

In February 2006, the Harvard University Art Museums announced a comprehensive master plan to transform its facilities for teaching, research, and presentation of its renowned collections. Part of this multifaceted plan includes an increased commitment to contemporary art. Central to that is the Houghton Curatorship and a new art center in Allston with public galleries, primarily for the exhibition of the Art Museum's growing collection of modern and contemporary works.

Molesworth becomes the first full curator of contemporary art since the Art Museums established a department of modern and contemporary art in 1997. A distinguished scholar, Molesworth comes to the Art Museums from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, where she has been serving as chief curator of exhibitions since 2003, with oversight of the center's exhibitions, programs, and publications. In her new position at the Art Museums, Molesworth joins the current curator of modern art, Harry Cooper, in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Harvard's Fogg Art Museum Presents Rare Exhibition of Works by Fernand Léger

Cambridge, MA
February 20, 2007

The Harvard University Art Museums present Fernand Léger: Contrasts of Forms, a tightly focused exhibition uniting two landmark paintings with eleven works on paper from major museums and private collections, at the Fogg Art Museum from April 14 through June 10, 2007. The selection of paintings and drawings from 1912–14 encompasses still-lifes, landscapes, depictions of the figure, and abstractions, giving the exhibition great scope. These landmark works are arguably from Léger's most important period, as they are central to both the cubist revolution and the emergence of abstract art. The last presentation of Léger's works in the region was a 1945 exhibition at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Fernand Léger: Contrasts of Forms is organized by the University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, where it is currently on view through March 18, 2007. The exhibition is curated by Matthew Affron, associate professor of art history at the University of Virginia and director of special curatorial projects for the University of Virginia Art Museum. The Fogg Art Museum's presentation, the second and final venue of the exhibition, is cocurated by Harry Cooper, curator of modern art at the Harvard University Art Museums. "This is exactly the kind of exhibition we dream about hosting," said Cooper. "It offers a focused look at a pivotal moment in the career of one of the great artists of the 20th century, and it gives special emphasis to rarely seen works on paper that are as radical and powerful as anything Picasso, Braque, and Matisse were doing in the same years."

Between 1912 and 1914, Fernand Léger executed a large cycle of works known as Contrasts of Forms. The series embraces the genres of landscape, still life, and figure, but at its core are numerous arresting compositions that sweep aside recognizable subject matter to focus on an abstract motif. The common denominator is a complex vocabulary of mingled cones, cylinders, cubes, and planes, vigorously outlined and scrubbed with color in the paintings and with black ink and white gouache in the works on paper.

Contrasts of Forms are essential to two great chapters in the history of modern art in the years before World War I: first, the development of cubism, and second, the emergence of abstract art. In 1915, the painter described some of the last works in this open-ended series of compositions as "fairly abstract investigations (contrasts of forms and colors)." These words highlight the experimental thrust of the series as a whole.

"Our collection contains only a few works by Léger, but none from this crucial early moment in his career," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "We are grateful to our colleagues at the University of Virginia Art Museum for giving us the opportunity to display these important works, as well as the lending institutions and private collectors that have generously lent them for this exhibition. The exhibition is significant for the Art Museums not only for its presentation of the history of modern art, but also for the role it plays in our teaching and research."

Credits
The exhibition Fernand Léger: Contrasts of Forms was organized by the University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, Virginia, with the generous support of The Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust; University of Virginia Art Museum Volunteer Board; the Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences and the Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art History, University of Virginia; Nicholas Acquavella; Sheila and Ted Weschler; Sheridan W. and Thomas F. Nicholson; and an anonymous gift.

Catalogue
Fernand Léger: Contrasts of Forms is accompanied by a comprehensive fifty page catalogue featuring color illustrations of all works in the exhibition, as well as original scholarly essays by curator Matthew Affron and Maria Gough, associate professor of art history at Stanford University. The exhibition catalogue was made possible by the Oakwood Foundation.

Comparative Exhibition of Multiples on View at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum

Cambridge, MA
December 21, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums present Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus, an exhibition of nearly 200 works including printed and object multiples, photographs, and unique objects, at the Busch-Reisinger Museum from February 24 through June 10, 2007. This pioneering exhibition stages a dialogue between the work of German artist Joseph Beuys and that of the loose international collective known as Fluxus, and in particular, its principal organizer George Maciunas, and examines the role of the printed or object multiple in these artists' pursuit of an expanded notion of what art could and should be. Drawing from the significant holdings of Beuys and Fluxus in the permanent collections of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Fogg Art Museum respectively, the exhibition will offer a unique pairing of the two through a number of carefully considered thematic groupings and juxtapositions.

In the 1990s, the Willy and Charlotte Reber Collection, a rare, nearly complete assembly of multiples by Joseph Beuys, was acquired by the Busch-Reisinger Museum; and in 2005, the Fogg Art Museum acquired the Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection, a remarkable first-owner collection that places Harvard's Fluxus holdings among the most significant in North America. Fluxus and Beuys have each been the subject of numerous large-scale exhibitions over the past few decades; however, this will be the first time any institution has mounted an exhibition specifically examining the relationship between the two bodies of work. Although objects from the Moore collection have appeared in other major Fluxus exhibitions, this will be its first public exhibition at Harvard.

Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus is organized by Jacob Proctor, Ruth V S Lauer Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Prints, and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. "These objects challenge us to think differently about art and to ask what role it can play in society, as well as to reconsider long-held, perhaps unquestioned, ideas about the relationship between art object, viewer, and institutional frame," said Proctor. "In different ways, both Beuys and Fluxus used their art to stimulate collective social and political engagement. I hope that this exhibition will not only challenge received wisdom and critical assumptions about these works, but also ensure that art maintains an active and critical role in the intellectual life of students. At the same time, viewers will see that there is a strong aspect of play, humor, and wit to these works."

The avant-gardists of the early 20th century launched a succession of assaults on the concept of aesthetic autonomy, perhaps the most devastating of which were Marcel Duchamp's "readymades." Duchamp developed the term readymade in 1915 to refer to found objects chosen by the artist as art. By suggesting that a preexisting, industrially produced object — such as his notorious Fountain (1917), a urinal that he turned on its side, signed "R. Mutt," and submitted to the first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists — could be considered a work of art simply by virtue of the artist's having designated it as such, Duchamp asserted that there was no longer a fundamental difference between making art and naming art. Considered scandalous during the time of their production, by the early 1960s many of Duchamp's readymades had taken the form of authorized, limited edition, handcrafted replicas and were considered valuable works of art that seemed to contradict their original intention.

In the 1950s and 1960s the term multiple came to be applied to a new type of art object that, while intended to be produced in numerous copies, fell outside the parameters of such traditional forms as printmaking and cast sculpture. Often fabricated using the materials and techniques of mass production, these objects typically existed in very large, or even unlimited, editions. Unlike painting and sculpture, or even traditional fine art printmaking, the multiple engaged directly with the conditions of industrial production, mass communication, and an increasingly global economy.

For the artists of the international avant-garde known as Fluxus, the multiple presented a means to revive and reformulate the readymade's critique of aesthetic autonomy. Fluxus emerged in the early 1960s as a loose, collaborative effort to fundamentally redefine the terms of artistic production. The group coalesced around the Lithuanian-born American artist George Maciunas (1931–1978), who served as Fluxus's principal organizer, designer, publisher, and impresario. Fluxus sought to dethrone "serious" culture by creating objects and performances demonstrating that, as Maciunas said, "Anything can be art and anyone can do it."

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) also looked to the readymade as he sought to bring art and life into closer proximity. But unlike Maciunas and the Fluxus artists, Beuys almost immediately distanced himself from the readymade's inventor. In a live appearance on German television in 1964, Beuys dramatically inscribed a large placard with the statement "The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated." Duchamp's readymades had signaled the obsolescence not only of traditional works of art but perhaps even of the notion of art itself. For Beuys, the readymade became part of a larger effort to reinvest artistic activity with metaphorical, ritual, and even spiritual significance.

Although they often differed in their choice of strategies, Beuys and Maciunas shared many of the same goals including using art as a means of realizing social and political change, recognizing the importance of collective action, and eliminating the boundary between art and life. The production of multiples played a key role these efforts, often acting as a mediator between the production of objects and a growing emphasis on artistic process and action unfolding in real time.

Beuys, for his part, referred to his multiples both as vehicles for the spreading of ideas and as anchors that encouraged people to make connections between objects and across media. Maciunas began producing multiples as an extension of his activities as a publisher and initially conceived of the multiple as a challenge to conventional modes of cultural production and distribution, while his position and use of multiples became more complex and multifaceted over time. It is certainly true of both Beuys and Fluxus multiples that the significance of a group of objects is almost always greater than the sum of its parts. Variously conceived as carriers of ideas intended to circulate through the world as absurdist send-ups of consumer products and as invitations to direct participation by the viewer, many of their works attempt to undermine the very concept of the art museum and the notion of aesthetic autonomy it implies.

"In addition to showcasing two important collections of postwar art, the ability of this exhibition to both perform and stimulate intellectual study makes it particularly appropriate to our mission of teaching and research," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "While the exhibition is drawn almost entirely from our collections, its potential for scholarship reaches far beyond our basic ability to showcase these works and extends to our role as a teaching museum. In posing questions, creating opportunities for dialogue, and offering comparisons to students, scholars, and the public, this exhibition points to the efforts of both Beuys and Maciunas to transform the ways in which art is exhibited and distributed."

Featured Works
On view in the exhibition are significant works from Joseph Beuys, George Maciunas, George Brecht, and Robert Watts, as well as Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, Chieko Shiomi, Alison Knowles, Claes Oldenburg, Ben Vautier, and many others. Particularly iconic works include an early example of the Fluxkit (1964). The Fluxkit was designed and produced by Maciunas as an ambitious effort to present the scope of Fluxus production in one container. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-Valise (the Fogg's c. 1961 copy of the Boîte is also included in the exhibition), the Fluxkit gathers its array of Fluxus editions and printed matter in a specially-modified briefcase. Also featured are other anthology editions Fluxus 1 (1964) and Flux Year Box 2 (late 1960s). The exhibition includes rarely-seen, often unique, maquettes and prototypes for editions. These objects are both compelling in their own right and offer a unique glimpse into the creative process. Examples include the collage maquette for Robert Watts's 1962 SafePost/Jockpost/K.U.K. Feldpost, Peter Moore's 1967 Venetian Blind, and the aborted 1966 Claes Oldenburg edition False Food Selection. Also included in the exhibition is the rare first version of Chieko (Mieko) Shiomi's Spatial Poem No. 1 (c. 1965), in a wooden box with densely packed paper flags arranged so that they nest together when the box is closed. Only a few examples were assembled in this way; the assembly was so painstaking and labor-intensive that even the notoriously meticulous Maciunas was stymied and resorted to placing the flags on a flat board for the majority of the edition. The selection and installation of objects in the exhibition highlights the interconnections between Beuys's multiples and his social and political activism. In addition to showcasing many lesser-known works, this emphasis offers new insights into such seminal Beuys editions as the Felt Suit (1970), Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee (1969), The Silence (1973), Evervess II 1 (1968), and Intuition (1968).

Credit
Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus is made possible, in part, by the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Brochure
The exhibition is accompanied by a brochure, featuring 13 illustrations and an essay by curator Jacob Proctor.

Arthur M. Sackler Museum to Display Harvard's Social Museum Collection

Cambridge, MA
December 4, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums present Classified Documents: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931, an exhibition featuring more than 100 original exhibition boards with photographs and graphical illustrations from the Social Museum collection, on display from January 20 through June 10, 2007 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Established during the turbulent Progressive Era as the cornerstone of Harvard University's new Department of Social Ethics, the Social Museum promoted a comparative study of social conditions and institutions — from health to housing, industry to government, education to crime, welfare to recreation, and race to religion — in America and abroad. The exhibition presents a compelling case study for a broader understanding of the development and use of social documentary photography, the graphic illustration of reform subjects, the techniques and strategies of exhibition display, and the role such museums played in the formation of the modern research university.

The Social Museum remained open and in use into the 1930s when the Department of Social Ethics was absorbed into the newly formed Department of Sociology. In the late 1960s, material from the Social Museum was among the historical photograph collections rescued by and placed under the care of Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The only significant public exhibition of works from the Social Museum collection in the past 60 years occurred in 1974 when renowned Carpenter Center curator Barbara Norfleet organized the ground-breaking exhibition The Social Question, which traveled to the Museum of Modern Art. It is the remarkable survival of the Social Museum photographs and graphical material affixed to the original exhibition boards and the intriguing context in which they were created that makes the collection unique.

Classified Documents: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931 is organized by Deborah Martin Kao, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, and Michelle Lamunière, Charles C. Cunningham Sr. Assistant Curator of Photography. In 2002, Kao and Lamunière prepared the photograph collections of the Carpenter Center to move to the Fogg Art Museum, where they have been placed on permanent deposit. "Among them we were surprised to find still housed in their original wooden cabinets the more than 6,000 reform-era photographs and graphical illustrations that comprise what survives of Harvard University's Social Museum collection," said Kao, "Seeing this time capsule motivated us to recover its historical context and interpret the use of this unique institution and remarkable collection." Lamunière adds, "Discovering the boards in their specially designed storage and display cabinets was a particular thrill because it enabled us to experience the material in ways similar to the original visitors to the Social Museum, thus informing our own decisions about how to present these works."

The progressive social reform movement transformed American society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Spawned by the nation's rapid industrialization, the unprecedented growth of urban centers and the massive influx of immigrants in the decades following the Civil War, its backers sought to illuminate and improve the conditions under which the impoverished and immigrant populations lived and worked. It was during this time that Francis Greenwood Peabody, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals from 1886–1913, established the Social Museum at Harvard University in order to document the existing social conditions and to affect changes in industrial and social life.

Peabody touted the Social Museum as the first attempt to "collect the social experience of the world as material for university teaching." Although open to the public, the Social Museum was established as a resource for Harvard's Department of Social Ethics to provide specimens of social science for use in teaching and study as a means to understand "social evolution" and "social progress." Peabody envisioned the Social Museum would function in the ways that other museums served the fields of anthropology, art history, and natural history through the rational comparison of specimens.

Nearly 4,500 photographs and 1,500 graphical illustrations and other examples of ephemera (albums, blue prints, plans, diagrams, booklets, hand-written matter, and handcrafted objects) survive from the original Social Museum collection, mounted on boards and captioned in the style of reform exhibitions of the time. The collection includes approximately 3,000 such boards, which were meticulously classified by such highly charged topics as: Charity, Crime, Defectives, Education, Family, Health, Housing, Industrial Problems, Races, Religious Agencies, Social Conditions, Social Settlements, and War.

Made by professionals and amateurs, the photographs in the Social Museum collection encompass a broad range of styles and formats, from carefully composed large-format pictures to modest snapshots and from luscious platinum prints to crude halftone reproductions. The diversity of technique and inconsistency of approach expose the expansive use of photography as a social document decades before the codification of a documentary style and collide with the institution's obsessive system of classification and regimentation of display. This disjuncture also reveals the uncanny capability of the photographs to simultaneously index and elude their framing contexts.

Peabody's enthusiasm for photography as an essential primary source for the Social Museum reflected the medium's vital role in the larger progressive movement, which affected every aspect of the social program and raised issues regarding society's obligation to the individual that still resonate today. Social activists used photographs as if they were incorruptible specimens of social problems and solutions, capitalizing on the power of the image to persuade, especially in connection with text and statistics.

"In addition to the importance of these works to the history of photography, the access they provide for students, scholars, and the public to other fields of study underscores the value of such a collection to a teaching museum," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, "We are fortunate to have a largely intact group of primary source documents that present the opportunity for research not only in the arts, but also in the history of museums, the history of the social reform movement, and the development of the discipline of social science here at Harvard and around the country."

Featured Works
The exhibition features compelling examples of social documentary photography, including a series of photographs from Ellis Island's Immigrant Station that convey the threat of deportation, the requirements for admittance, and attempts at Americanization. A remarkable range of Social Settlements, as well as the educational and social activities they provided, are depicted in photographs from Chicago to Kentucky and from San Francisco to Boston. Private and state-funded institutions for the care and education of the poor, aged, sick, indigent, and mentally disabled, are documented in photographs from the Medfield Insane Asylum, the first state-operated institution for chronic cases of insanity in Massachusetts, and New York's Institute for Feeble-minded Children, one of the largest of its kind. Historic photographs illustrate workers' cooperative societies in Europe, among them exquisite portraits of a German cooper and stone mason by Waldemar Franz Herman Titzenthaler. The exhibition also includes large-scale prints by Lewis Wickes Hine, mounted to hand-lettered display boards from an exhibition of the 1907 Pittsburgh Survey, a pioneering sociological investigation of the living and working conditions of workers in one of America's most industrial cities. Examples of corporate "welfare work" (employee benefits) by such model companies as the H.J. Heinz Company in Pittsburgh and National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio are on display, as well as Percy C. Byron's related series on the employee recreation facilities established for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company's workers.

Credits
The Widgeon Point Charitable Foundation has provided major support for this exhibition.

Websites
In conjunction with the exhibition, an interactive website will serve as a searchable database of objects in the Social Museum Collection. The site will provide scholars and the public with access to a resource of material reflecting the international social reform movement at the turn of the 20th century. The conversion of these historical sources to electronic form will allow teachers to incorporate them into their course syllabi, and expose students to the nature of primary sources, historical analysis, and research. The website, which goes live in early 2007, is at: www.harvardartmuseum.org/socialmuseum.

Digital access to material from the Social Museum collection is also available through the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program website, which creates comprehensive, subject-based digital resources that link Harvard's libraries, museums, and research institutes, at: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu.

The Open Collections Program provided major support for the digitization of the Social Museum collection.

Harvard University Art Museums Announce Appointment of New Curator of Contemporary Art

Cambridge, MA
October 27, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums announced today the appointment of Helen Molesworth as its new curator of contemporary art, effective February 5, 2007. Molesworth becomes the first full curator of contemporary art since the Art Museums established the department of modern and contemporary art in 1997. A distinguished scholar, writer, and curator, Molesworth comes to the Art Museums from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio where she has been serving as chief curator of exhibitions since 2003, with oversight of the Center's exhibitions, programs, and publications.

"We are delighted to have Helen join our curatorial staff," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "She is well respected in the field of contemporary art, and her knowledge and depth of experience will be vital in our efforts to build our collections and increase our ability to exhibit and interpret contemporary art." In February, the Harvard University Art Museums announced a comprehensive master plan to transform its facilities for teaching, research, and presentation of its renowned collections. Part of the multi-faceted plan includes an enhanced commitment to contemporary art including the development of a new art center in Allston which will house public galleries primarily for the exhibition of the Art Museums' growing collection of modern and contemporary works, as well as other museum operations. More information on the Art Museums' facilities planning can be obtained from the contacts below.

In her new position at the Art Museums, Molesworth joins the current curator of modern art, Harry Cooper, in the department of modern and contemporary art. "I am very excited to join the staff of the Harvard University Art Museums at a moment when the institution is thinking so expansively about the role of modern and contemporary art," said Molesworth.

While at the Wexner, Molesworth organized the recent exhibitions Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back), an exhibition of new and old works by Louise Lawler, and Part Object Part Sculpture, which charted a genealogy of transatlantic sculpture produced in the wake of Marcel Duchamp's erotic objects and his hand made readymades of the 1960s. Prior to her position at the Wexner, Molesworth served as curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art from 2000–2003, where she organized Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post-1960s art, and BodySpace, which explored the legacy of minimalism for contemporary artists. From 1997–1999, she was director and curator of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY Old Westbury.

Molesworth recently served as senior critic at the Yale School of Art and has held teaching positions at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, SUNY Old Westbury, and the Cooper Union School of Art. She was a co-founding editor of Documents, a magazine of contemporary visual culture, and is the author of numerous articles appearing in publications such as Art Journal, Artforum, Documents, Frieze, and October. She received a Ph.D. in History of Art from Cornell University in 1997.

Harvard University Art Museums Acquire the Walter C. Sedgwick Collections of Japanese Buddhist Sculpture and Early Chinese Ceramics

Cambridge, MA
October 13, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums today announced a major acquisition of Asian works of art through the generosity of Walter C. Sedgwick and the Walter C. Sedgwick Foundation. Three Japanese Buddhist sculptures and more than three hundred early Chinese ceramics, previously on loan to the Art Museums, will enter the permanent collection of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum's Department of Asian Art. The works are exceptional in their beauty, historical significance, and cultural value, and will make a vital contribution to the Art Museums' mission of teaching and research. These unique qualities and the objects' early dates of creation make these works among the most important to enter Harvard's Asian art collections, as well as some of the most significant to enter the general holdings of the Art Museums, in many decades.

"A number of experiences have led to my interest in enhancing the Harvard University Art Museums collection of Asian art through the gift of my collection," said Walter C. Sedgwick. "Professor John Rosenfield, the noted art historian and a mentor during my undergraduate days at Harvard, had a great influence on me, as well as an enormous impact on the understanding of Asian art in the United States. Equally as rewarding has been my ongoing collaboration with the Harvard University Art Museums and curator Robert Mowry. Bob has been accessible, continually interested and intellectually engaging, and he is the architect and a partner in the building of this collection."

Sedgwick adds, "To me, art is meant not only for admiration but also to continuously teach scholars, students, and the public. What distinguishes a teaching museum is the focus on scholarship and the access to original works of art, unlike other museums that keep much of their collection in storage or in other ways inaccessible. I wanted this collection to be utilized to its fullest potential in a teaching museum where there is a community of scholars, supporters, objects, students, and art conservators, just as there is at Harvard. I hope that this collection will inspire additional scholarship in Asian art, just as I also hope that my gift will spark additional donor support, particularly of endowed curatorial positions. Endowments are essential to getting the best curators, like Bob Mowry. In turn, the curators are the connectors, the center of the wheel between collectors, students, objects, conservation, and the advancement of knowledge."

The three Japanese Buddhist sculptures given by Walter C. Sedgwick represent one of the most significant such groupings outside of Japan. The preeminent work of the three, a magnificent statue of Prince Shotoku at Age Two, portrays the legendary cultural figure Shotoku Taishi (AD 574–622) as a toddler, when he was said to have joined his hands in prayer, chanted the Buddha's name, and performed the miracle of manifesting a small Buddhist relic. Later, as an admired political leader, Prince Shotoku went on to actively promote and foster the Buddhist faith in Japan. After his death, he was revered as a religious and cultural hero. Of the many three-dimensional representations of Prince Shotoku — some as a child, some as a youth of sixteen, and others as a mature statesman — depictions of the prince as an enlightened child are by far the most popular. The Sedgwick statue is the earliest datable and most elegantly crafted of the hundreds of such sculptures in existence.

The Sedgwick Shotoku figure is also unique in that it arrived in the United States in 1936 with all of its dedicatory items intact. The sculpture was created using the assembled wood-block method of construction, which creates a hollow interior where ritual items can be placed. Many Japanese sculptures have lost their original interior objects, but the Sedgwick Shotoku was preserved with all of its more than seventy ritual items, including tiny Buddhist relics, miniature devotional statues, a beautiful twill-weave silk bag, a number of Sanskrit paper charms, and printed and hand-written texts. One such text, an extremely rare Chinese woodblock-printed sutra datable to 1160, is now in the Library of Congress, the only original interior object not kept with the sculpture at Harvard. The latest dated item, a manuscript of 1292, suggests the date for the entire ensemble, including the sculpture itself. As such, the Sedgwick sculpture predates all others of Prince Shotoku by at least a decade.

The Sedgwick gift also includes two important Heian-period (794–1185) Japanese Buddhist wooden sculptures. The earlier of the two is an exquisite mid-eleventh-century Head of a Bodhisattva that appears to have come from one of a series of celestial figures which served as frieze decorations adorning the upper walls of the Byodo-in, a famous Buddhist temple near Kyoto. This head, from one of the temple's fifty small relief bodhisattva sculptures, is believed to be unique among Western museum collections. The second Heian-period image is a statue of Zochoten, Guardian King of the South, originally from a set of four armor-clad deities that stood watch over a Buddhist temple. It was probably carved circa 1075 for a small private aristocratic altar.

"The Harvard University Art Museums have excellent holdings of Japanese woodblock prints and surimono (privately-commissioned, luxury-edition prints), just as we have great strength in Japanese lacquer, calligraphy, and certain types of painting. Until now, however, we've not had significant holdings in Japanese sculpture," said Robert D. Mowry, Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art and head of the Art Museums' department of Asian art. "Walter Sedgwick's generous gift will redress that need, bringing to the Art Museums three exceedingly important early Japanese Buddhist sculptures that are of — or at least approach — National Treasure quality. Countless generations of students and scholars will study them to great intellectual reward, just as countless generations of museum goers will delight in their sensitivity and freshness."

Over the past decade, the Walter C. Sedgwick Foundation has assembled what is unquestionably the finest and most comprehensive collection of early Chinese ceramics in the West, and perhaps anywhere in the world. The Foundation has enabled the Art Museums to acquire the collection through a partial gift / partial purchase arrangement. Comprising more than three hundred works that range in date from the Neolithic period (as early as 6000 BC) through the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), the collection includes examples of all major ceramic types produced during that nearly seven thousand-year period. The Sedgwick Foundation collection illustrates better than any other the aesthetic, stylistic, and technical development of early Chinese ceramics and represents major turning points in terms of the medium's historical development.

Most Western museums and private collectors alike have focused on later Chinese ceramics — those from the Song (AD 960–1279) through the Qing (1644–1911) dynasties — not because those wares are more important, but simply because their striking decoration and colorful glazes have held immediate and enduring appeal. A number of Western museums have managed to acquire a few important early Chinese ceramics, but no museum outside of Asia has comprehensive holdings in that field. Even in Asia, there are few, if any, comprehensive early Chinese ceramic collections, with most museums specializing in the early wares of only one particular region or province. In that regard, the Sedgwick Foundation collection is unique, as it brings to the Harvard University Art Museums one of the world's few truly comprehensive collections of early Chinese ceramics — objects that are not only exceptional historical artifacts but beautiful and compelling works of art.

The Walter C. Sedgwick Foundation's collection provides a vital resource for the study of the evolution of ceramics in Asia and, by extension, the world. By the Tang dynasty, the achievements of Chinese potters set in place the aesthetic, stylistic, and technical foundations for all later Chinese ceramics. At that time, Chinese potters were the world's best, producing the most artistically refined and technically sophisticated wares ever seen. By focusing on China's early ceramic traditions, one can see how Chinese potters reached that level of artistic and technical attainment. The Sedgwick Foundation collection brings together a significant and coherent body of works that will permit those achievements to be studied by students and scholars for years to come.

"These are unquestionably the most important additions to our collection of Chinese art during my tenure here at the Harvard University Art Museums," said Mowry. "Specialists in several different disciplines — including art history, archaeology, and scientific and technical analysis, among others — are collaborating with our curators in the study of the Sedgwick Foundation collection of ceramics. Eventually, this scholarly collaboration will lead to the exhibition and publication of the collection, and what we anticipate will be a new methodology for the study of early ceramics from all cultures. We very much hope that, as the collection becomes better known through those efforts, more students and scholars will be encouraged to study and research these wonderful works of art."

"The Sedgwick collections of early Chinese ceramics and Japanese Buddhist sculptures will play an exceptionally important, even transformative, role in the teaching of Asian art here at Harvard," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "The ability of students to study objects through direct observation is the foundation of our teaching mission. These ceramics and sculptures complement the remarkable Asian works in our Grenville L. Winthrop collection, as well as the significant objects amassed more recently by Bob Mowry, thus creating a link to our existing collections and providing an important resource for studying the evolution and history of Asian art. We are deeply grateful to Walter for strengthening our collections with these works."

Harvard University Art Museums Showcase Contemporary Works in Three Fall Exhibitions

NOTE: Some information contained in this press release may not be current. Please contact the Public Relations Department at 617-495-2397 with any questions.

Cambridge, MA
September 21, 2006

This fall, the Harvard University Art Museums present three special exhibitions that highlight their increased commitment to the field of contemporary art. Each of the three art museums — the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum — currently has an exhibition of contemporary works on view. Together, these exhibitions represent a diverse range of media, objects, and geographical classifications. The exhibitions reflect the Art Museums' initiative to increase their capacity to show and collect contemporary art by expanding their holdings of these works, while planning for future facilities in Allston Brighton where gallery space will be designed primarily for modern and contemporary art exhibitions.

Nominally Figured: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art, on display at the Fogg Art Museum through February 25, 2007, represents the most recent acquisitions of contemporary works by the Harvard University Art Museums. The installation reflects an emphasis on work using the body, body parts, schematic notation, or figures of speech and text. While the dialogue between figuration and abstraction dominated much of the discourse around mid-20th-century art, this exhibition features works with an expanded notion of the figure as an artificial construction that is evident in most art today. The installation includes drawings, sculpture, paintings, photographs and video by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Carl Andre, Liz Larner, Richard Artschwager, Frank Egloff, Paul Feeley, John Wesley, Mel Bochner, Paul McCarthy, Dennis Oppenheim, David Hammons, Steve McQueen, and Bruce Nauman. The exhibition was organized by Linda Norden, former associate curator of contemporary art, and will be installed in two rotations. The first rotation runs through October 15, and the second will run October 21, 2006 through February 25, 2007.

German Art of the 1980s from the Heliod Spiekermann Collection is on view at the Busch-Reisinger Museum through December 3, 2006. Over 25 years ago, Heliod Spiekermann began collecting art by her contemporaries, becoming a deeply involved, passionate, and acute observer especially of the rise of Cologne as an art center in the 1980s. Getting to know artists through extensive studio visits and as patients in her dentist's chair, she has gathered a distinguished personal collection that provides an ideal starting point for looking back at the art of a decade currently undergoing renewed scrutiny and reevaluation. This exhibition of generous loans presents five major paintings and sculptures by Georg Baselitz, Georg Herold, Albert Oehlen, and Rosemarie Trockel. The focus is strongly on the individual works, although these artists also stand for important tendencies of the 1980s: Baselitz for the revival of expressive, gestural art making marked by the persona of the artist; Oehlen and Herold for a spirit of neo-Dadaist skepticism about art, style, and ideology; and Trockel for the emergence of a rigorously intelligent art prompted by feminist concerns. The exhibition was organized by Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

The New Chinese Landscape: Recent Acquisitions, an exhibition showcasing the Harvard University Art Museums' most important contemporary Chinese acquisitions to date, is on display through November 12, 2006 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. This tightly focused exhibition of six paintings and one sculpture represents an often overlooked category of works that push the boundaries of what the term "contemporary" means in non-Western contexts. Identified as contemporary Chinese ink paintings, these works are characteristic of both classical ink landscapes and contemporary art. In some instances, it is an entirely new approach to the Chinese landscape. In others, it is a newly invented type of brushwork or a reliance on classical Chinese models different from those sanctioned by earlier generations of traditional artists. The artists' use of new techniques, styles, and both Western and Chinese sources of inspiration, while working within the framework of traditional materials, formats, and subjects, clearly sets their works apart from traditional Chinese ink paintings and distinguishes them as contemporary. The exhibition was organized by Robert D. Mowry, Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Asian Art.

As announced this past February, The Harvard University Art Museums have unveiled a comprehensive master plan to transform its facilities for teaching, research, and presentation of its renowned collections. A core goal of the plan is to improve the ability of the Art Museums to exhibit contemporary works of art. To achieve that goal, the plan calls for the renovation of the historic 32 Quincy Street site in Cambridge, the current home of the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums, and the development of new facilities in Allston Brighton. The planned Harvard University Art Museums Allston Brighton Center will house public galleries primarily for the exhibition of the Art Museums' growing collection of modern and contemporary art, the scale and nature of which frequently requires larger and/or more flexible exhibition spaces than are available in their current facilities. The Allston Brighton Center will also include spaces for public programs, a study center, teaching and research facilities, conservation laboratories, collections, and offices for staff. During the renovation of the Quincy Street site, the Art Museums will maintain a campus presence in Cambridge with highlights from its three museums on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, located on Broadway adjacent to Quincy Street.

"We envision a future when the Harvard University Art Museums can exhibit contemporary works of art in facilities that are specifically designed for that purpose. A large part of our current planning has developed with that objective in mind," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "As we look forward to new facilities in Allston Brighton, we are building our collection of modern and contemporary art and enhancing our programming in that area. These three exhibitions are an indication of our commitment to offering our students and visitors the chance to study and interact with a wider range of visual art."

Harvard to Commemorate Composer Dieterich Buxtehude with Series of Organ Recitals throughout Academic Year

Cambridge, MA
September 13, 2006

In recognition of the 300th anniversary of the death of composer Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707), Harvard University presents The Buxtehude Tercentenary at Harvard, a series of organ recitals in historic Adolphus Busch Hall, beginning on Monday, September 25, 2006. Buxtehude is regarded as the most important composer of organ music before J. S. Bach and one of the most influential musicians of the 17th century in Northern Europe. Throughout the 2006–07 academic year, the complete organ works of Buxtehude will be presented in the series of eight concerts. Performed on the legendary D. A. Flentrop organ, all programs will be played by internationally acclaimed organist James David Christie, organist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, professor of music at Oberlin College, and artist-in-residence at The College of the Holy Cross.

Buxtehude belongs to the generation of organists before Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach and other composers, including Handel, traveled to hear Buxtehude perform at the historic St. Mary's church in Lübeck, Germany, where he served as organist for forty years from 1667 until his death in 1707. "For many, Buxtehude exemplified the ideal universal musician, and his influence spread over Scandinavia, England, and Germany," said Christoph Wolff, Adams University Professor at Harvard, Curator of the Isham Memorial Library, and Faculty Advisor to the Harvard-Radcliffe Organ Society. "In particular, Handel's and Bach's formative years were largely shaped by Buxtehude's musical authority and by his achievements as a composer." Professor Wolff is also the general editor of the forthcoming release of Buxtehude's Collected Works, the last volume of organ works which will be published in conjunction with the concert series.

James David Christie is a renowned expert in the performance of baroque music and of Buxtehude in particular. Dr. Christie has been internationally acclaimed as one of the finest organists of his generation. He has performed concerts and given master classes throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Iceland and has performed and recorded with major symphony orchestras in Vienna, London, Stuttgart, Koblentz, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Baltimore, New York, and Boston. He was the 1979 First Prize winner of the prestigious Bruges (Belgium) International Organ Competition, the first American ever to win that prize and the first person in the competition's eighteen year history to win both the First Prize and the Prize of the Audience.

The concert series will open on Monday, September 25, 2006 at 8:00 p.m. in Adolphus Busch Hall at 29 Kirkland Street on the campus of Harvard University, followed by performances on October 16, November 13, December 11, 2006 and February 12, March 19, April 2, and April 23, 2007. The series is sponsored by the Harvard University Art Museums, The Memorial Church, the Harvard Organ Society, and the Harvard University Department of Music, with Professor Christoph Wolff as series advisor, and is funded in part by the President and Provost's Fund for Inter-Faculty Initiatives. Tickets are $175 for the series ($60 for Harvard students) or $25 for individual performances ($10 for Harvard students), and seating is very limited. For ticket information, please call Visitor Services at the Harvard University Art Museums at 617-496-2672.

Harvard's Fogg Art Museum Presents Exhibition of Artworks and Artifacts with both Aesthetic and Historic Considerations

Cambridge, MA
August 18, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums present "A Public Patriotic Museum": Artworks and Artifacts from the General Artemas Ward House from October 14, 2006 through February 11, 2007 at the Fogg Art Museum. The exhibition is drawn from the holdings of the General Artemas Ward House, a Harvard-owned museum in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Artemas Ward commanded the Patriot militia beseiging British-held Boston from April 1775 until the appointment of George Washington in July. Subsequently he served in the Provincial and Continental Congresses, the second and third U.S. Congresses, and as chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas of Worcester County. On display will be a variety of extraordinary late 18th- to early 20th-century artworks and artifacts from the Ward homestead, including paintings, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glassware, and domestic and agricultural tools. By presenting artworks and domestic artifacts for aesthetic attention, the exhibition also questions the common assumption that the aesthetic qualities of artworks and artifacts are irrelevant to the writing of history.

The exhibition is organized by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard, and Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator in the Department of European Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts and senior lecturer on history at Harvard. The organizers seek to establish that art museums can and should encompass a range of disciplinary viewpoints, including philosophy and history, which border the aesthetic. In turn, they propose that historians can address aspects of artifacts other than the purely instrumental.

"We acknowledge that aesthetics played a role not only in the uses to which the Wards put their possessions, but also in our choice of objects for this exhibition," said Ulrich. "Although the objects we have chosen for the exhibition have served many purposes over time, they function as artworks on this occasion." Gaskell adds, "The objects we have chosen are varied. They include paintings that none would refute as artworks, as well as furniture, ceramics, and quilts that could enjoy a place within any art museum's decorative arts collection. In contrast, some of the objects in the exhibition would once have been relegated to the realm of craft or that of amateur work. Intrinsic value as well as cultural equity now prompts art museums to accept as artworks objects such as these that might previously have been overlooked or left to anthropologists."

"A Public Patriotic Museum" focuses on a small selection of objects associated with General Ward himself, kept and displayed as signifiers of his public eminence. These are presented in counterpoint with objects owned or made by his female descendants. Unlike the general's, their lives remained entirely private, yet it was through their efforts that his memory was in large part preserved. Successive generations of women had preserved the general's personal items — including his cloak, tricorn hat, snowshoes, razor and strop, an inkwell, and books — and had accorded them the status of relics. The maintenance of the house and the general's possessions assured that his posthumous reputation remained intact, and also served to preserve the standing of the family. Following his death, the women fostered a domestic culture in which no artifact could be dispensed with, passing down their own possessions along with the general's to future generations. The exhibition reveals an aspect of women's roles in the creation of family, local, and national mythology.

Derived from a conference course taught jointly by Gaskell and Ulrich, the exhibition involved considerable original research by students on artifacts from the house. It also embodies conceptual and philosophical work by the organizers on the place of aesthetics in the production of history from artifacts. "This exhibition presents a unique collaboration between two leading historians that challenges assumptions about the relation of the aesthetic to history," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "It pushes the limits of what might be expected to be shown in an art museum, and is an example of our continued efforts to find new ways to integrate those students and faculty that are outside of the discipline of Art History into the museums."

Funding has been provided by a grant from the Office of the Provost, Harvard University.

Featured Works
Two oil paintings, Artemas Ward (1727–1800) (1795) by Raphaelle Peale and Elizabeth Denny Ward (1760–1846) (c. 1820) by Ethan Allen Greenwood, depict the general and his daughter-in-law. Among the general's personal effects are General Ward's tri-corner hat with lacquered paper cockade (late 18th century), General Ward's cloak (late 18th century), General Ward's Windsor writing chair (late 18th century), and General Ward's snowshoes (late 18th century). Items from the homestead and successive generations include Grain riddle (late 18th century), Hair bouquet (family register) (c. 1850–70), Willow pattern covered tureen and ladle (c. 1825–35), and the book Old Times in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts: Gleanings from History and Tradition (New York, 1892) by Elizabeth Ward. The most spectacular of the domestic artifacts is an early 19th-century feathered vine pattern indigo quilt, Quilt: feathered vine pattern (c. 1810–40).

Brochure
The exhibition is accompanied by a brochure with six illustrations, an essay by curators Gaskell and Ulrich, and an exhibition checklist.

Exhibition at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum Features Prints Critical of Dominant Ideologies from the 16th through the 21st Centuries

Cambridge, MA
July 21, 2006

DISSENT!, an exhibition of 62 prints, books, postcards, posters, magazines, t-shirts, and playing cards, presents an historical survey of printed images that express resistance to oppressive religious, political, and social systems. The exhibition, organized by the Harvard University Art Museums, will be on view at the Fogg Art Museum from November 11, 2006 through February 25, 2007. Featuring the many forms that printed protest has taken, the exhibition looks at the important role printmaking has had in the history of dissent. Since their inception, prints have embodied the viewpoints of their day, and over five centuries, those made in opposition to prevailing perspectives have been distributed privately or posted publicly — on walls, billboards, and now, on the web.

By their very nature, prints are an ideal medium for dissonant expression. Because their production is uncomplicated, requiring only a printing press, matrix, and paper, prints can be produced inconspicuously, and if necessary, clandestinely. Thousands of like images can be made inexpensively and quickly, in prompt response to an event or action. As multiples, prints have served as the carriers of ideas, communicating information to a larger and wider audience than unique works such as paintings or sculpture. DISSENT! demonstrates the role of artists in the dissemination of opinions and the cultivation of public debate and dialogue, and showcases how important these works were during a number of significant historical periods, many times leading to social or political change.

The exhibition was organized by Susan Dackerman, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints. "It is important to exhibit and explicate works such as these within the setting of a museum, especially a teaching museum where we encourage the unsettling of settled opinions," said Dackerman. "Through the course of history, artists have played an important role in the promulgation of dissonant opinions through printmaking. I hope this exhibition will provide the opportunity to examine that role by turning the gallery into a place of public discourse and initiating a critical dialogue about the work, its history, and most importantly, its implications for the future."

Several of the works in the exhibition were created by Harvard students during the student protests of the late 1960s, and much of Dackerman's research was conducted in the Harvard University Archives. Reading through the records of the negotiations between students, faculty, and administration, and gathering copies of the posters, t-shirts, and armbands that the students printed, she was able to create a picture of life at Harvard during this tumultuous time and establish the importance of printmaking in the students' efforts. The exhibition substantiates that printmaking has always been related to current social and political issues and can also be relevant to contemporary student life. Dackerman adds, "Teaching students how they can and should participate in a democratic system is invaluable."

"This exhibition allows us to reach out to the larger student population and engage them in the exploration of an artistic practice that can be meaningful to their lives," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Our mission has always been focused on teaching and research, and that focus is never limited solely to art history students or to Harvard students. We strive to create an atmosphere in the museums with exhibitions, programs, and our study centers that encourages the active participation of all students and an intimate examination of the works of art."

The exhibition is supported by The Anthony and Celeste Meier Exhibitions Fund.

Featured Works
From the 18th century, three of Francisco de Goya's etchings from Los Caprichos disparage political, intellectual, and social life in Spain following the erosion of the progressive ideals of the Enlightnment. They include The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), Here Comes the Bogeyman (1799), and They Spruce Themselves Up (1799). Jose Posada's Calavera de D. Francisco I. Madero (1912) mocks Mexican president Madero in a political caricature, questioning his regime and predicting his eventual execution. Designed as postcards and imitating American comic strips, Pablo Picasso's Dream and Lie of Franco (1937) feature bitterly satirical etchings condemning General Francisco Franco, the threat of fascism, and the atrocities of war. Andy Warhol's screenprint Birmingham Race Riot (1964) uses published photographs of the events of the time to capture police brutality. STOP B S (2004) by Richard Serra is a manipulation of his STOP BUSH drawing, eliminating the "u" and "h" from the president's name to produce the colloquial abbreviation for bullshit. The poster Corporation as Forked-Tongue Snake (1969) is one of many pieces made by unknown Harvard students in their workshop at the Graduate School of Design during the student strikes. Sister Corita, a nun and civil rights activist, combines a photograph of Coretta Scott King with the words "BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL" in her screenprint If I (1969).

Brochure
The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure featuring 11 illustrations, a checklist, and an essay by curator Susan Dackerman. The brochure is supported by an anonymous donor.

Rembrandt Exhibition at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum Features Groups of Works and Encourages the Study of Technique

Cambridge, MA
July 17, 2006

Selected primarily from Harvard collections, Rembrandt and the Aesthetics of Technique, an exhibition at the Busch-Reisinger Museum from September 9 to December 10, 2006, will invite visitors to engage intensively with nearly fifty drawings, paintings, and prints by the master, his pupils, and his contemporaries. The exhibition will focus primarily on the role of technique — the artist's manipulation of his materials — in enabling the innovative visual effects that distinguish Rembrandt's creative achievement. Arranged in several small groups of works, the installation will encourage visitors to make comparisons that highlight, through similarity or contrast, some of the artist's technical decisions. The exhibition was organized at the Harvard University Art Museums by William W. Robinson, Maida and George Abrams Curator in the Department of Drawings, and Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator in the Department of European Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. Robinson and Gaskell are two of the world's leading scholars in the field of 17th-century Dutch studies.

Rembrandt's technical skill tends to be overshadowed by his genius and by his mastery of so many other elements, including invention, iconographical innovation, and expression. Yet technical factors — such as the use of pen strokes that are thick in some areas and thin elsewhere, broken or continuous, densely packed or widely dispersed — determine much of the aesthetic impact of his or any artist's production. "With each stroke, he chose to produce a particular mark in a particular form with a particular material using a particular instrument in a particular place on a particular surface," said Gaskell. "The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said of the relationship between talent, genius, and skill, 'Genius is what makes us forget skill.' While there is no disputing Rembrandt's genius, we are determined to explore the skill involved in the making of the objects by proposing visual comparisons among works to draw attention to technical features."

The exhibition provokes viewers to look carefully at what can only be seen when confronting the original works of art. The focus on technique, using carefully selected groups of works in conjunction with an encouraged first-hand visual analysis of the objects, is what sets this exhibition apart. "It is only through the close examination of the actual works that this technical proficiency is revealed," said Robinson. "These traces of technique are lost or distorted in the reproductions in books, slides, or digital images. Although technological developments in the media through the years have helped to promote the appreciation of art and the study of art history, in this exhibition we are presenting a case for people to engage with the original works in a more intensive way and, we hope, come away with a different understanding."

The installation features groups of works that are divided into categories that illustrate various techniques for rendering tonality, emotional expression, perspective, space in landscape, and other effects. One group consists entirely of landscapes with rustic buildings. Although they share the same subject matter, the different media — drawing ink, wash, chalk, printer's ink — applied with a wide range of strokes, produces an astonishing array of impressions of space, light, shadow, and texture. Another group focuses the visitor's attention on Rembrandt's inventive use of drawn and etched lines to evoke the psychological interaction between two figures in scenes from the Bible.

While the two curators served as the senior organizers of the exhibition and collaborated in the development of the concept, much of the research to establish pairings or small groups of objects was conducted by Willemijn Lindenhovius, curatorial intern in the Department of Drawings, and Edward Wouk, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, and Mellon Intern in the Department of European Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. "This exhibition is fundamental in terms of its support of our mission of teaching and research," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "While it exemplifies innovative, transdisciplinary curatorial scholarship, it also points to the essential role of the Art Museums in educating graduate students and advanced level interns by means of both theoretical discussion and guided practice."

A grant in support of the exhibition came from The Netherland-America Foundation, Inc. Additional funding for the exhibition came from Dr. Alfred Bader and Johnny Van Haeften and also from The Annemarie Henle Pope Special Exhibitions Fund.

Featured Works
Featured works by Rembrandt in the exhibition include the painting Portrait of an Old Man (1632), the renowned pen-and-ink drawing Landscape with a Farmstead (Winter Landscape) (c. 1648–50), the drawings A Farm on the Amsteldijk (c. 1650–52) and Zacharias and the Angel (c. 1635), and impressions of several important etchings, such as The Three Trees (1643) and Landscape with a View Toward Haarlem (The Goldweigher's Field) (1651). Also included will be one of only seven known letters written by Rembrandt from the collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Brochure
A gallery guide will accompany the exhibition. It contains the essay "Rembrandt's Genius, Wittgenstein's Warning" by curator Ivan Gaskell and a checklist of objects. A grant in support of the gallery guide came from the Consulate-General of the Netherlands, New York.

Exhibition of Sharon Lockhart Film and Photography to be Shown at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum

Cambridge, MA
June 30, 2006

Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat, an exhibition featuring photography and film segments from internationally renowned film maker Sharon Lockhart, will be presented by the Harvard University Art Museums from August 26 to November 19, 2006. The gallery installation at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum will feature daily screenings of segments from the film Pine Flat, as well as 19 portraits of the film's subjects taken by Lockhart. The Harvard Film Archive will also show the film in its entirety throughout the course of the exhibition in conjunction with an accompanying series of related films featuring children.

Shot over the course of one year, the latest film from Sharon Lockhart is set in a small, rural village in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. During a three year period, Lockhart immersed herself in the life of the pastoral, working-class bedroom community. Because of its geographic location and rural setting, the town offers its residents little beyond its topographical beauty, and many of the town's residents must travel to work in nearby cities, leaving their school-age children alone for long periods of time. Lockhart spent most of her time observing these kids during their parents' absence. The activities the children devised for themselves, using little more than their natural surrounds, provide the basis for Lockhart's film. More than just an anthropological look at adolescence, Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat takes advantage of a specific location, a self-contained village on the edge of the wilderness, to look at a place through its progeny.

The 16mm film comprises two one-hour reels, each of which is further divided into six, ten-minute segments. Part one features individual adolescents in solitary activities typical of their rural environment; part two presents groups of children interacting together in activities similarly characteristic of their bucolic setting. None of these activities, such as swimming, reading, hunting, or playing on a swing, would seem to offer inherent dramatic appeal. However, Lockhart's directorial approach, including foregoing a professional film crew in favor of more intimate interaction with her subjects, reveals unexpectedly charged mixtures of pleasure and anxiety in the film. For presentation in the gallery, two segments from the film, one individual scene and one group scene, will be shown in continuous loops each day on a six day rotation. Thus, the installation reflects the relationship between the two parts of the full-length film.

The exhibition was organized by Linda Norden, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard University Art Museums, and has traveled to the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao, Spain and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN before coming to Harvard's Aurthur M. Sackler Museum. The related film series was developed by Lockhart with Bruce Jenkins, former Director of the Harvard Film Archive and current Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "Lockhart's work celebrates the habits and activities most of us fail to register as important," said Norden. "In her film making and photography, Lockhart resists spectacle and dramatization and works with her subjects to stage movements and poses that owe more to the late 1960s dance choreography of artists such as Yvonne Rainer and to painterly composition than to documentary film or photography."

In addition to the film, the exhibition will feature 19 color photographs taken by Lockhart over the course of the year following the film's completion. Setting up her temporary residence in the community as an open studio, she invited the children to come in at their will and pose for her still camera. The resulting portraits evoke a sense of performance and offer an illuminating addition to the more elaborately structured and time-based film segments. "This exhibition encourages the exploration of the complex relationship between film and photography and presents a provocative juxtaposition of the two media in the gallery," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "In this case, the photographs create an additional dialogue that is both separate from and complementary to the film, which itself has been reconceived for gallery presentation."

Film Series
The full-length version of Pine Flat and other films featuring children will be screened at the Harvard Film Archive over the course of the exhibition. See the HFA Bulletin or www.harvardfilmarchive.org for a list of films and screen times.

Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by a 148-page catalogue produced by Lockhart. Conceived as a photo album, it includes stills from the film, all 19 portraits from the exhibition, and text from curator Linda Norden, director of the Walker Art Center Kathy Halbreich, and artist/writer Frances Stark.

Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Landscapes at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum Introduces an Emerging Stylistic Genre

Cambridge, MA
May 30, 2006

The New Chinese Landscape: Recent Acquisitions, an exhibition showcasing the Harvard University Art Museums' most important contemporary Chinese acquisitions to date, will be on display from August 12 to November 12, 2006 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. This small exhibition of six paintings and one sculpture represents an often overlooked category of works that push the boundaries of what the term "contemporary" means in non-Western contexts. Identified as contemporary Chinese ink paintings, these works are characteristic of both classical ink landscapes and contemporary art. The artists' use of new techniques, styles, and both Western and Chinese sources of inspiration, while working within the framework of traditional materials, formats, and subjects, clearly sets their works apart from traditional Chinese ink paintings and distinguishes them as contemporary.

Modern and contemporary Chinese art is only now coming to the attention of Western audiences, and most exhibitions of contemporary Chinese painting feature Western-style works that follow international trends. Historical factors are a significant source of the pervasiveness of this singular view of contemporary Chinese art. In the early 20th century, many younger Chinese painters were eager to explore foreign styles, as China experienced a drive to modernize and debate raged about the value of old, or classical, learning. Over the course of the 20th century, political upheaval and social change in China brought about three factions of artists, each searching for recognition and identity. One group remained strictly allegiant to tradition, but another chose to travel to and study in Western countries and adopt foreign styles. Since this second group of artists no longer works in the traditional style, their work is more easily identified as contemporary. The third group, including those artists featured in The New Chinese Landscape, experimented with a synthesis of foreign and traditional styles, resulting in works that challenge the notion of contemporary Chinese art.

To this latter group, contemporary Chinese ink painting is a genre of great importance, because it represents a reinvigoration of an ancient tradition with a very distinguished lineage. Accepting the validity of their ancient artistic legacies, they work within the framework of traditional materials (brush, ink, and paper), formats (hanging scroll, handscroll, and album leaf), and subjects (landscapes). However, these artists reject the formulaic compositions, prescribed stylistic modes, and codified brushwork that for centuries were the foundation of classical Chinese painting, and incorporate into their works new media, techniques, or elements borrowed from foreign styles. In some instances, it is an entirely new approach to the Chinese landscape. In others, it is a newly invented type of brushwork or a reliance on classical Chinese models different from those sanctioned by earlier generations of traditional artists.

"It is important to ask why these artists choose to paint in the traditional style," said Robert D. Mowry, Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Asian Art and organizer of the exhibition. "They have all lived and trained in the West, and one has even taught art at a university in the U.S. However, they have also had access to the great repositories of classical Chinese painting in Beijing, Taipei, and the United States. They have great admiration and respect for the classical Chinese tradition, just as they also have a passionate desire to revitalize it and rescue it from becoming stagnant and languishing in the past. Through this exhibition, we hope to create a dialogue by awakening interest in this heretofore neglected field and encouraging scholarship on it."

The exhibition is also one of the first to incorporate works by contemporary Chinese artists working in geographically diverse parts of the world, both East and West. Exhibitions of modern and contemporary Chinese paintings typically include works by painters from just one region. The New Chinese Landscape includes works by Chinese artists working in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and abroad. These artists identify strongly with the legacy of their Chinese ancestry and feel it is their responsibility to perpetuate that legacy and advance Chinese culture. They want to be recognized not just as accomplished artists but as accomplished Chinese artists. "In that context," says Mowry, "the artists and their works are strongly patriotic, representing a love of their country while still, at times, being critical of its political or social circumstances. Given that audiences typically expect contemporary artists worldwide to work in an international style, it might be argued that these artists have chosen the more difficult path — to redirect and reinvigorate an old tradition and to make it relevant to the contemporary world."

Despite its world-class holdings of traditional Chinese art, the Art Museums began to systematically collect modern and contemporary Chinese ink paintings only in 1993. The works in this exhibition are the most important of the 25 contemporary Chinese works acquired by the Arthur M. Sackler Museum since that time and reflect the Art Museums' commitment to a new area of concentration in its collections. "Although small in size, this exhibition is an important one in terms of its presentation of this emerging style of Chinese painting," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "We consider these works to be a significant part of a new genre of contemporary art, and we hope this exhibition will be a landmark in demonstrating to our visitors the evolution of this field, as well as specific and valid Chinese responses to modernity and the contemporary world."

The exhibition borrows its title from the first exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting to tour the United States from 1966 to 1968 and commemorates 40 years of growing interest in this country of Chinese art and modern and contemporary Chinese painting in particular. Organized by Chu-tsing Li and Thomas Lawton, the original New Chinese Landscape featured works by six painters from Taiwan. The New Chinese Landscape: Recent Acquisitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum foreshadows an autumn 2007 exhibition of more than 60 contemporary Chinese ink paintings from the collection of Chu-tsing Li, co-organized by the Harvard University Art Museums and the Phoenix Art Museum.

Funding for The New Chinese Landscape: Recent Acquisitions was graciously contributed by Kaikodo, New York; Conor Mahony; Christophe Mao and Chambers Fine Art; Alexandra Munroe and Robert Rosenkranz (Law School Class of 1965); and Shelby White.

Brochure
The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure with seven color reproductions, a short essay by curator Robert D. Mowry, artist biographies, and a checklist. Production of the brochure was generously funded by Michael E. and Winnie Feng; Jane and Leopold Swergold; and Martha Sutherland and Barnaby Conrad III.

Exhibition Checklist

1. Li Huayi, Mount Huang, 2004. Hanging scroll; ink and light colors on paper; with signature reading Li Huayi; with artist's square red relief seal reading Hua Yi

2. Li Junyi, Sacrifice, 1990–91 and 2005–06. Set of twenty-four album leaves; ink on paper; each leaf with signature reading Li Junyi

3. Li Junyi, What a Glorious Land!, 2005. Handscroll; ink on paper; with signature reading Li Junyi

4. Liu Dan, Ink Landscape, 1991. Hanging scroll; ink on paper; with artist's square red intaglio seal reading Liu Dan Zhi Yin

5. Liu Guosong, Early Spring, 1966. Horizontal wall scroll mounted on a panel; ink and colors on cotton paper; with signature reading Liu Guosong; with artist's square red intaglio seal reading Liu Guo Song

6. Liu Guosong, Water and Clouds Share the Same Source, 1977. Hanging scroll; ink and colors on cotton paper; with signature reading Liu Guosong; with artist's square red intaglio seal reading Liu Guo Song

7. Zhan Wang, Sculpture in the Form of a Nine-Hole Scholar's Rock, 2001. Hammered, welded, and highly polished stainless steel set on a wooden base designed by the artist; edition 3/8; with incised signature in Chinese reading Zhan Wang 2001 3/8

Harvard University Art Museums Announce Selection of Architect for Art Center in Allston-Brighton

NOTE: Some information contained in this press release may not be current. Please contact the Public Relations Department at 617-495-2397 with any questions.

Cambridge, MA
May 16, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums today announced the selection of Daly Genik Architects of Los Angeles to design the first Harvard visual arts center in Allston-Brighton, MA for students and the public. The art center will provide teaching and research facilities, an object-based study center, conservation laboratories, and gallery space primarily for the exhibition of modern and contemporary art. Daly Genik, a firm known for its adaptive reuse of large-scale structures and sensitivity to building in existing neighborhoods, will create the new facilities from two adjacent Harvard-owned buildings at 1360 and 1380 Soldiers Field Road. The project marks the first step in establishing a vital University arts and culture presence that will evolve as a part of Harvard's Allston campus over the coming decades.

The creation of the art center is a key component in the multifaceted institutional restructuring plan of the Art Museums, announced this past February, to increase and improve access to collections, outreach to new audiences, and collaboration across its three art museums — the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. It will serve as the provisional home for the three museums during the extensive renovation of the Art Museums' historic building at 32 Quincy Street on Harvard's Cambridge campus, which currently houses the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger. As part of the University's master planning with the Allston community, the Art Museums and University arts leaders and faculty are also exploring the development of another facility — a comprehensive arts and culture complex on the University's developing Allston campus that would provide exhibition, performance, research, and teaching facilities.

The art center will allow the Art Museums to explore and develop new models for programming, research, and presentation of its collections, considered among the foremost in the U.S. It will also house the Art Museums' offices and provide storage for most of the more than 250,000 objects in the collections. The University and the Art Museums are currently in the process of seeking necessary regulatory approvals for the new art center, and anticipate that work will begin in early 2007. The art center is projected to open to the public in late 2008, following the closing of the Quincy Street building. During the renovation of the Quincy Street site, highlights from the three museums will be on display in the Sackler Museum, adjacent to Harvard Yard, providing the Harvard community and the public with ongoing access to many of the Art Museums' greatest works of art.

As previously announced, internationally renowned architect Renzo Piano will design the changes to the facilities at 32 Quincy Street. A thorough renovation and reconfiguration of the Quincy Street site has long been needed and will enable the Art Museums to further its mission of teaching and research, and to continue its legacy as the premiere training ground for art museum professionals. In the renovated facilities, each of the three museums — Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Sackler — will remain a distinct institution with its own dedicated exhibition galleries and its own object-based study center. The reconfiguration of the Quincy Street site will foster collaboration among the various curatorial departments of the three museums and Harvard's faculties, resulting in a flexible and innovative new model for exhibitions, cross-cultural study, and learning.

"The selection of Daly Genik to design our facilities in Allston-Brighton is another important step forward in realizing our vision for an enhanced and expanded role for the Art Museums in the life of Harvard University and the wider community," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "It is gratifying to move closer to what will be not only improved facilities for the Art Museums, but also a new resource for the Allston-Brighton community. We are looking forward to providing distinctive exhibitions and programming for our new audiences across the river, and to strengthening our role in the cultural vitality of both Cambridge and Boston."

Daly Genik has extensive experience in the reconfiguration of existing structures into state-of-the-art facilities. Their work on similar projects makes them well qualified to transform the Allston-Brighton site into facilities that will serve a variety of Art Museum needs. Recent award-winning projects include the South Campus at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, developed from a former wind tunnel testing facility, and the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy in Los Angeles, created out of an abandoned mini-mall. Daly Genik will partner with CBT, a Boston-based architectural firm, on the Harvard project.

"Through the renovation of the buildings on Soldier's Field Road, we can take vacant private buildings and make them accessible to the public, both visually and physically, allowing the community to reclaim lost urban space," said Kevin Daly, principal and co-founder of Daly Genik. "We see this as a smaller but critical part of two larger projects: the renovation of the Quincy Street building and the development of the Allston campus. In this sense the project is both a destination and a gateway to the arts at Harvard."

Following the reopening of the 32 Quincy Street site, the art center in Allston-Brighton will continue to provide the Art Museums with space for galleries, teaching, research, and other museum operations while plans continue to develop for Harvard's Allston campus. The Art Museums and the University envision the future development of an arts and culture complex in Allston, with the long-term goal of having a permanent museum presence in Allston as well as at the renovated Quincy Street site in Cambridge. The Allston portion of Harvard's campus will provide space for new forms of collaborations between faculty and departments in the sciences, the arts, and the professional schools; new facilities for the School of Public Health and Graduate School of Education; new graduate student and community housing; and new undergraduate housing along the Charles river, as well as other amenities to be shared by the Harvard and Allston communities.

Chris Gordon, COO for Harvard's Allston Development Group added, "This announcement and the recent selection of Behnisch Architekten for Harvard's first Allston Science complex mark the beginning of a multi-decade process to build Harvard's 21st century campus in Allston. We are very excited to be working with such accomplished architects as we realize a campus that will enhance Harvard and enrich our contributions to the communities around us."

For additional information about Harvard's Allston campus, go to: www.allston.harvard.edu.

Exhibition of Sketchbooks at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum Provides a Glimpse of the Artist at Work

Cambridge, MA
May 4, 2006

Under Cover: Artists' Sketchbooks, an exhibition of over 70 sketchbooks and 45 drawings that were originally part of sketchbooks, will be on display at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum from August 1 to October 22, 2006. The exhibition will feature works from the Fogg collection of nearly 150 sketchbooks, ranging in date from the eighteenth century to the 1990s. Intact sketchbooks from this remarkable collection will be displayed by means of a single opening of each, including those by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, Sanford Gifford, Edward Burne-Jones, John Singer Sargent, Henri-Edmond Cross, Reginald Marsh, George Grosz, and Christopher Wilmarth. Also on view will be drawings that were removed from sketchbooks before they were acquired by the Fogg by artists such as John Constable, Paul Cézanne, Henry Moore, and Brice Marden, as well as sketchbooks and drawings on loan from Harvard's Houghton Library and Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The exhibition was organized by Miriam Stewart, Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings. "It's almost as if we're catching the artist unaware," said Stewart. "In many cases, these sketchbooks resemble a diary. One can follow the artists on their travels or trace the progression of an idea. While the sketchbooks range in date, their use has remained surprisingly unchanged. Artists from all eras have confided their travel sketches, figure studies, and notes of every kind to their sketchbooks."

Designed to be easily portable, sketchbooks are often kept in artists' pockets and many reflect that in the permanent curvature of their covers. These distinctive characteristics, along with the nature of the drawings themselves, document an unusually personal view of the artist at work. The drawings and notes in these sketchbooks vary from nature and figure studies, to travel sketches, copies after old masters, expense accounts, and lists of pictures. Some sketchbooks are self-conscious and conceived as a whole, with every page signed, while others are more spontaneous and filled with a random assortment of hastily drawn sketches and doodles.

Intact sketchbooks are uncommon, as over the years the majority of them have been disbound and sold as individual sheets. Many of the sketchbooks in the Fogg collection may not be loaned or made available for study due to their fragility. Under Cover: Artists' Sketchbooks gives visitors, students, and scholars an opportunity to see a selection of these unique works that are not often put on view.

"Sketchbooks have rarely been the sole subject of an exhibition, and ours have never been exhibited together," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "The Fogg has an important collection of sketchbooks that has been built over the past century, and we think audiences will find them fascinating. Much time has been devoted to the proper cataloguing and conservation of these works that play such a significant role in teaching, particularly in relation to artists' working methods and investigations into artistic process."

The exhibition comes on the heels of an extensive five-year cataloguing project in the Department of Drawings. Most of the sketchbooks in the Fogg collection have been carefully catalogued in the Harvard University Art Museums' collections management database, including detailed descriptions of every page and any relevant research on the role of the sketchbook in the artist's career. Some of the larger sketchbooks have over 50 pages, and others contain numerous tangential items such as photos or notes, making the cataloguing process a time-consuming but important project.

Notable Works
The exhibition includes several outstanding sketchbooks, including Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Sketchbook from the First Italian Period (c. 1756–61), Jacques-Louis David's two sketchbooks for The Coronation of Napoleon (1805–6), George Grosz's Sketchbook: Manhattan Skyline and Mice (1950–51), and a selection of sketchbooks by Edward Burne-Jones, Sanford Gifford, and John Singer Sargent. Also featured are exceptional "orphans," drawings formerly part of sketchbooks, including Jan van Goyen's Three Studies of a Cow and Landscape with Cottages and Figures (c. 1650), John Constable's Warwick from Priory Park (1809), Edouard Manet's Study for "Interior at Arcachon" (1871), Paul Cézanne's Corner of the Studio and Portrait of a Man (Emile Zola?) (c. 1877–84), Brice Marden's Untitled Work Book Drawings (1983–84), Henry Moore's Ideas for Sculpture (1940), and several pages from a disbound sketchbook by David Smith, including studies for sculptures Pillar of Sunday, The Billiard Player, and Home of the Welder (1945).

Website
The exhibition will be further enhanced by an interactive website that will focus on about ten sketchbooks, allowing users to scroll through images of every page along with accompanying text. The website can be found at: www.harvardartmuseum.org/sketchbooks.

Harvard's Fogg Art Museum to Exhibit American Watercolors and Pastels for the First Time in 70 Years

Cambridge, MA
March 1, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums will present American Watercolors and Pastels, 1875-1950, at the Fogg Art Museum from April 8 to June 25, 2006. The exhibition features 52 watercolors and pastels primarily drawn from the extensive holdings of the Fogg, as well as significant works lent by friends of the Art Museums. This will be the first showing of these treasures of American art since 1936, when the Fogg presented American Watercolors from the Museum's Collection, and will give the public an opportunity to examine a selection of works that are rarely put on display because of their sensitivity to light. The exhibition focuses on works created during what scholars consider the medium's "golden age" of experimentation and development.

The period from 1875 to 1950 saw the status of the watercolor shift dramatically. Works on paper until that time usually served only as studies or preparatory works for finished oil paintings, but beginning in the late 19th century, drawings and watercolors were exhibited more regularly in their own right. Artists such as Winslow Homer began painting complete scenes in watercolor and exhibiting them as finished works in commercial galleries. Homer pushed the medium formally, scratching into the surface of the paper to create highlights and experimenting with washes, opaque applications of paint. John Singer Sargent also helped to establish the merits of the medium, preferring watercolor for its portability, and utilizing it on his travels to make informal sketches that stood on their own and did not necessarily serve preparatory ends.

By the early 20th century, gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz introduced modernism to a skeptical New York audience with exhibitions of watercolors by John Marin and Charles Demuth, drawings and watercolors by Georgia O'Keeffe, and pastels by Arthur G. Dove. American modernism contributed significantly to the evolution of the watercolor and helped to establish its status as an important American medium. O'Keeffe developed her signature style by exploring abstraction in watercolor and pastel, inexpensive and quick materials that lent themselves to experimentation. She and her contemporaries like Marin and Stuart Davis took advantage of this ease of experimentation to develop formal innovations, resulting in unique pieces that were displayed as finished works. Today, these watercolors are among the most highly valued objects of the American modernist period.

The exhibition was organized by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curator of American Art, and Virginia Anderson, Assistant Curator of American Art. "The exhibition came out of our work on a comprehensive collections catalogue of American painting, watercolor, pastel, and stained glass at the Harvard University Art Museums," said Stebbins. "As we compiled the list of objects for that catalogue project, it became clear that the Fogg's collection from this period and in these media was particularly strong and deserving of an exhibition." Anderson adds, "This is an opportunity to present to the public a wonderful selection of important American works, the majority of which are unpublished. Through this exhibition, we can bring these works to light so that they can receive critical and scholarly attention."

The Fogg Art Museum has long been known for its collection of works on paper and a significant portion of the collection includes some six thousand American drawings, watercolors, and pastels dating from the 18th through the early 21st century. This serious interest in American watercolors stems from the period of the 1910s and 1920s, a time when the medium was winning new levels of recognition in the U.S. The Fogg's collection was driven by two former directors and by the generous gift of an important collector. The Fogg's second director, Edward E. Forbes, who served from 1909 to 1944, was himself an amateur watercolorist of some ability, and his assistant director from 1915 to 1944 was the legendary drawings collector Paul Sachs. Together, Forbes and Sachs energetically built the collection, pursuing works by Homer, Marin, Demuth, and Hopper, and they exemplified the Fogg's commitment to depth and strength in a specific area by acquiring several pieces by each artist.

The Fogg's holdings of 19th century American watercolors and pastels were greatly enhanced with the bequest of the Winthrop Collection in 1943. Grenville L. Winthrop is best remembered for his magnificent collection of Asian art and for his superb holdings of French and British paintings and drawings, but he also collected extensively the work of a quartet of American masters of the late 19th century: Homer, LaFarge, Whistler, and Sargent. Winthrop's gift of 136 American drawings, watercolors, and pastels, along with 57 paintings and 35 sculptures, makes him Harvard's most important donor in this field to date.

"Our collection of American watercolors and pastels is extraordinary, and it's a pleasure for us to bring them to a new generation of students, scholars, and the public," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "I am also particularly grateful to the private collectors who generously lent us some of their most treasured objects, which allow us to present this rich view of American art."

Works
The exhibition features a comprehensive presentation of American artists in this field and includes a number of outstanding examples from the Fogg's collection. Homer's Mink Pond (1891), and Hunter in the Adirondacks (1892), Sargent's Group in the Simplon (1911), and La Farge's Chinese Pi-tong (1879) are significant works from the 19th century. From the 20th century, de Kooning's Reclining Woman (c. 1948–49), Demuth's Fruit and Sunflowers (c. 1925), Hopper's Highland Light (1930), two versions of Mt. Chocorua by John Marin from 1926, and Rothko's untitled (1944–46) are all notable works. In addition to presenting these highlights from the Fogg's collection, there are a number of significant works on loan from private collections, including Chase's Self-Portrait (c. 1884), Stuart Davis's Study for Eggbeater #3 (1928), Georgia O'Keeffe's Portrait—Black (1918), and Helen Torr's Zinnias (c. 1929–35).

Brochure
The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure with 12 color reproductions, a checklist, and a short essay by curator Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. The brochure is made possible by the Bolton Fund for American Art, Gift of the Payne Fund.

Harvard University Art Museums Announce Comprehensive Academic Plan to Transform Facilities for Teaching, Research, and Presentation of Its Renowned Collections

NOTE: Some information contained in this press release may not be current. Please contact the Public Relations Department at 617-495-2397 with any questions.

Cambridge, MA
February 22, 2006

The Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which together comprise the Harvard University Art Museums, today announced a comprehensive new plan that will enable the institution to better fulfill its mission as a leading center for research and teaching in the visual arts. A core goal of the plan is to more effectively integrate its collections into the academic life of the entire University, as well as to further the Art Museums' mission of teaching, conducting research, and advancing professional development in the visual arts. The plan includes an extensive renovation of the historic building at 32 Quincy Street on Harvard's Cambridge campus, which currently houses the Fogg Art Museum and the Busch-Reisinger Museum. During the renovation of its Quincy Street site, the Art Museums will move to an interim facility located in the former Citizens Bank building at 1380 Soldiers Field Road in Allston. The Art Museums are also participating in University discussions about the development of a permanent arts and culture complex in Allston, with the long-term goal of moving to a two-site model including the renovated Quincy Street site.

The Fogg Art Museum is dedicated to Western art from the Middle Ages to the present; the Busch-Reisinger Museum focuses on art from Central and Northern Europe with a special emphasis on the art of German-speaking countries; and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum is dedicated to ancient, Islamic, Asian, and later Indian art. Each museum is currently housed in a separate facility, hindering the presentation, installation, and comparison of works across geographical and disciplinary boundaries.

The new plan seeks to improve and increase collaboration across the three art museums. Each will remain a distinct institution with its own dedicated exhibition galleries and its own object-based, multi-media study center. Following a needs assessment study already completed by the Art Museums, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano has been retained for this project. A thorough renovation and reorganization of the 32 Quincy Street facility will enable the institutions and their respective staffs to work together more effectively and make the collections more visible and accessible to students, scholars, and other visitors. The end result will yield a flexible and innovative new model for cross-cultural study and learning.

The close, intimate study of works of art is central to the Art Museums' role as a preeminent training ground for museum professionals. The three new study centers will provide the opportunity for concentrated study of the collections and will be designed to reflect the distinct nature and character of each museum. The Art Museums will use the successful development and configuration of its two existing study centers — the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and the Busch-Reisinger Museum Study Room — as models for the new centers. No other major art museum gives object-based study centers such a central role.

The new plan will enable the Art Museums to exhibit its permanent collections — among the foremost in the United States — more effectively. The vision calls for reconfiguring the Quincy Street site's interior spaces to provide for better circulation and easier use, and brings together the curatorial teams of the three museums. The 32 Quincy Street building is an historic property located on a constrained site. Opportunities to create additional space through better use of below-ground areas, reconfiguring space to create greater efficiency, and a possible addition will be explored. The Quincy Street site will continue to serve as the home of the Straus Center for Conservation, one of the world's leading laboratories for conservation and conservation science, and the U.S. offices of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis in Turkey.

The Art Museums are close physical and intellectual neighbors of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Fine Arts Library. Maintaining these relationships and physical proximity are important priorities of the Art Museums. Presently, the Art Museums are participating with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Provost's Office in a collaborative planning process aimed at improving the facilities of the Department and the Library and maintaining the close relationships among the three.

The renovation of 32 Quincy Street cannot begin until the Art Museums temporarily relocate its offices, staff, and collections to the interim site at 1380 Soldiers Field Road while work is underway. The interim site will also house public galleries primarily for the exhibition of modern and contemporary art, as well as teaching and research facilities, conservation laboratories, and other museum functions. Because of its immediate availability and proximity to the Harvard community, this site represents the best option to meet the goals of the Harvard University Art Museums' facilities master plan. Particularly, the speed of site delivery time minimizes delays that could affect the schedule for the renovation of the 32 Quincy Street site. The University and the Art Museums are currently in the process of seeking necessary government and community regulatory approvals and hope to begin preparing the site for use in early 2007. Harvard hopes to select an architect for this site in spring 2006.

The University has also indicated that arts and cultural facilities will be a significant component of Harvard's future Allston development. While planning continues and no final decisions have yet been made, University arts leaders and faculty have discussed creating an arts and culture complex in Allston that might provide exhibition, performance, research, and teaching space for several of the University's arts institutions — including the Harvard University Art Museums. It is clear that, even after the renovation of the 32 Quincy Street site, the Art Museums will require additional space for galleries, lectures, object-based teaching, open storage, the Harvard University Art Museums' Archives, and the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, a joint initiative with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In particular, the Art Museums need exhibition spaces specifically designed for the presentation of their growing collections of modern and contemporary art, the scale and nature of which frequently requires larger and/or more flexible exhibition spaces than are available at the Quincy Street site.

The Art Museums planning process is a critical part of the University's long-range planning for the future in Allston. Harvard's Allston master planning process is currently underway and is guided by broad consultation within Harvard and the community. The Art Museums play a vital role in the cultural vitality of Cambridge and Boston. With this planned investment in enhanced and new facilities for teaching, research, and exhibition of its renowned collections, the Art Museums will further bolster its contribution to the region's arts and culture.

"The Harvard University Art Museums have a multifaceted mission that includes education and research, and the ways in which we work with and present our collections are absolutely central to fulfilling our mission," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "The world has moved far past a model where cultural and artistic traditions are viewed as existing in isolation. Our new, shared facilities will enable us to reach across boundaries that have been placed between the visual histories of different cultures, periods, and media. While we will continue to encourage the study of individual disciplines, at the same time we will move toward a model where different aspects of the collection can be viewed in close relation to one another, fostering multidisciplinary and collaborative approaches."

"Our current configuration is not only intellectually and programmatically limiting," Lentz added, "it is physically limiting as well. In order to address all these pressing needs and to accommodate the ongoing growth of our collections, new and renovated facilities that offer greatly enhanced flexibility for viewing, studying, and interacting with the collections will present far more possibilities for students, faculty, and the public."

First Exhibition of Marianne Brandt's Photomontages to be Displayed at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum

Cambridge, MA
January 25, 2006

Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, a pioneering exhibition of over 30 works, will be on display at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum from March 11 through May 21, 2006. The montages, created by Brandt in the mid-1920s and early 1930s, offer visually dynamic and intriguing pictorial investigations of technology, gender roles, and entertainment culture through a medium not often associated with this artist. Although Brandt is better known for her iconic metal work designs for the Bauhaus, these works reveal an artist entirely at home in the medium of photomontage. Brandt is not known to have shown the photomontages until over 40 years after their creation, and this exhibition brings together all but a handful of them for the first time.

"This exhibition is a perfect compliment to the Busch-Reisinger Museum's outstanding holdings of Bauhaus art and design," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "The Busch has a commitment to exploring the richness and variety of modern German art, with a special concentration on the Bauhaus era."

In the early 1920s, Brandt had fully completed her studies as a painter when she attended a Bauhaus exhibition; she promptly burned all of her paintings and joined the school. In 1924, she became the only woman to apprentice and complete studies at the Metal Workshop. She went on to create signature metal works, including teapots, ashtrays, and bowls, that would become icons of Modernist design. After moving to Paris in 1926, she began to work intensely in photomontage, a medium that has increasingly come to be seen as quintessentially modern.

Brandt created the photomontages using fragments of popular and media culture, drawing upon the vast array of visual material made available by the period's burgeoning illustrated press. The works explore and critique a moment of great changes in German culture and society, one in which dramatic shifts were taking place, including the advent of Germany's first parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic, and the granting of suffrage to women. The montages may have been intensely personal reflections, but they also use the mass media imagery of the time to comment on key social issues. Many of the works display and investigate the rise of the New Woman, a figure seen to embody the free spirit of the time, and explore themes of freedom, judgment, and limits placed upon women by male figures around them. Other works focus on varied images of men — boxers, business tycoons, imperialists or soldiers — to represent and indicate the problematic links between manhood, aggression, and militarism in the wake of the First World War.

The exhibition was organized by Elizabeth Otto, assistant professor of art history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, for the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin and was coordinated at the Harvard University Art Museums by Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Otto based the exhibition on her PhD research, in which she uncovered a great deal of new information about the photomontages including the existence of works that were thought to be lost.

"During my research, I met with collectors and gallery owners who knew Brandt or who held unidentified works and documents on the artist," said Otto. "I was able to find photographs of two montages that were previously unknown to scholars and archivists and located several works that had been missing. I also spent time exploring the illustrated press of the time. This helped me to identify many of the sources of Brandt's imagery, thereby adding depth and resonance to the works' interpretation." Nisbet adds, "As a result of the research and collaboration with the Bauhaus, this exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to discover, enjoy, and evaluate an often overlooked body of work by one of Germany's leading women artists of the cultural efflorescence during the Weimar Republic."

The presentation of the exhibition at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum is made possible, in part, by the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, a group of European patrons of the Busch.

Featured Works
The exhibition contains over 30 works from European and American public and private collections. Brandt's strong sense of design is evident in the abstract forms of her metal works, but it also flows through her photomontages. Reflecting her proficiency for composition, some works are comprised of only a few elements, while others are built up through intricate layers fitted together with a delicate touch.

Notable works in the exhibition include:

Untitled (with Anna May Wong), c. 1929. Assemblage of newspaper clippings, glass, celluloid and metal on cream board. The Asian-American film star Anna May Wong is presented with other exemplars of female beauty, some curiously, and perhaps disturbingly, compared to exotic wild animals.

me (Metal Workshop) in 9 years of the bauhaus. a chronicle, 1928. Photomontage of original photographs on white board. This montage features the Bauhaus building in Dessau, along with products and members of the Metal Workshop — including Brandt and László Moholy-Nagy, head of the Workshop.

Help Out! (The Liberated Woman), 1926. Photomontage of newspaper clippings with graphite on gray board. Disjointed images of modern masculinity, violence, and warfare spiral around the head of a pipe-smoking New Woman.

Catalogue
A 176-page, fully illustrated catalogue is a companion to the exhibition. The catalogue features analysis by curator Elizabeth Otto of all 45 surviving or documented photomontages. Otto also contributes an introductory essay, a chronology of the artist's life, and a checklist of documented works, including those currently not located.

Harvard University Art Museums Announce Appointment of New Curator of Ancient Art

Cambridge, MA
January 20, 2006

The Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) announced today the appointment of Dr. Susanne Ebbinghaus as the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art. Dr. Ebbinghaus has been serving as a Curatorial Research Associate in the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics at HUAM and recently spent a year at the University of Toronto, investigating cultural exchanges between Greece and the Near East on a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The appointment will become official in early February.

"I am pleased to announce that Dr. Ebbinghaus will be leading our Department of Ancient Art," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "She brings an enormous amount of experience and knowledge to the Art Museums, and I feel strongly that her presence will begin a new chapter in the important work of this department."

Dr. Ebbinghaus studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient History and Art History at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She received an M.Phil. in Classical Archaeology in 1993 and a D.Phil. in Classical Archaeology in 1998 from Oxford University. Upon completion of her studies, Dr. Ebbinghaus worked as a member of the academic staff in the editorial office of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, an encyclopedia of Greek and Roman representations of myth, based in Basel, Switzerland. In 1999, she became a graduate intern in the Antiquities Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum before coming to HUAM in 2000. In her previous role at HUAM, Dr. Ebbinghaus was responsible for the publication of Greek, Roman and Near Eastern bronzes, an ongoing project. She has also taught courses on Greek art and archaeology at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Exhibition of Islamic Drawings at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum Explores the Development of the Medium in Islamic Art

Cambridge, MA
January 13, 2006

Twenty-eight drawings primarily from the 15th through 18th centuries will be featured in The Tablet and the Pen: Drawings from the Islamic World, on display at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum from February 18 to July 23. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to understand how the medium of drawing emerged as a powerful and dynamic mode of expression in the eastern Islamic lands. The works exemplify the creative experimentation of Islamic artists in Turkey, Iran, and India through their underdrawings for painted compositions, drawings intended to transfer designs to other media, and finely executed and detailed works on paper that were meant to be autonomous pieces of art in their own right.

"This small but potent exhibition offers a fascinating glimpse into the motivations and mechanisms behind the construction of images in Muslim culture," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "It also involved a great deal of research by students on a significant number of drawings from our collection, giving them the opportunity to reveal new information about material and technique, which in turn has led to a deeper understanding of artistic process and sources of inspiration for this unique visual tradition."

The Tablet and the Pen was organized by two doctoral candidates in the history of art and architecture, Ladan Akbarnia and Chanchal Dadlani, in coordination with Mary McWilliams, Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic Art at the Harvard University Art Museums, and David J. Roxburgh, professor of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Akbarnia and Dadlani attribute the exhibition's name to the centrality of the tablet and the pen in the Islamic idea of creation, saying "The Qur'an states that God's first creation was the pen, and that all existence was written with the pen on the 'safely-preserved' tablet." As early as the 16th century, Muslim writers associated the various traditions of Islamic art with this moment of creation and recognized the importance of tasvir, an Arabic term for the act of "depiction."

Works on display
The exhibition includes exquisite works from Harvard's own holdings, as well as four drawings loaned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from the prestigious collection assembled by Viktor Goloubew. Goloubew (1879–1945) was a connoisseur and scholar at the Ecole de l'Extrème Orient. Most of the drawings were created under the Safavid dynasty in Iran (1501–1732), but there are also examples from the Timurid dynasty in Iran and Central Asia (1370–1506), the Ottoman dynasty in Turkey (1299–1922), the Mughal dynasty in India (1520–1857), and the Qajar dynasty in Iran (1779–1942).

A particularly fine work, Mystical Journey (Iran, c. 1650), is a chaotic-looking swirl of ink dervishes, animals, and insects on marbled paper. Technical analysis by Craigen Bowen, deputy director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, revealed that the composition was not random, as had been thought. Instead, microscopic examination made it clear that the artist had incorporated and drawn inspiration from the swirling forms created during the process of marbling the paper.

Among the MFA drawings on display will be A Peri with a Flask, executed in black ink and opaque watercolor on paper sometime during the second half of the 16th century in Ottoman Turkey or Safavid Iran. This work is distinguished by its delicacy and remarkable detail and shows a peri, a winged spirit beloved in Iranian and Turkish folklore, holding a flask that depicts a fantastic bird similar to the Chinese phoenix.

"These drawings show a freshness, vivacity, and experimental quality that one wouldn't see in a painting," said McWilliams. "By the 17th century, people in the Islamic world had come to appreciate drawings as a stand-alone art form."

The Tablet and the Pen a collaborative effort
This exhibition is an example of the collaboration that the Art Museums encourage between its curators and the faculty and students in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. Both student curators are preparing their dissertations under the supervision of Roxburgh, an expert in Islamic art. Akbarnia has an interest in the Chinese influence on art in Iran and Central Asia during the 13th through 15th centuries and the development of that theme in later drawings. Dadlani is a specialist on the Mughal period in India.

The students were able to select and study the drawings for the exhibition and to closely examine the works under magnification and ultraviolet light with conservators at the Harvard University Art Museums and the MFA. "We examined each of the drawings in detail, from the finest to the most richly textured lines, and began to understand how pen and brush were used to execute these compositions," said Dadlani. "This allowed us to truly consider how artists explored and exploited the qualities of this particular medium." Akbarnia adds, "If visitors leave with a clearer sense of the great skill displayed by the artists in these drawings, as well as a basic understanding of the technical aspects and challenges of the medium, they will have an appreciation of the comprehensive nature of Islamic drawing, and ultimately, of its great value in the field of Islamic art."

Funding for the exhibition has been provided by Melvin R. Seiden, the Arthur Urbane Dilley 1897 and Theron Johnson Damon 1905 Fund for Islamic Art and Culture, the Eric Schroeder Fund, and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.

E. Power Biggs Memorial Organ Recital at Harvard to Commemorate the Great 20th Century Organist

Cambridge, MA
January 12, 2006

Harvard University Art Museums will present the E. Power Biggs Memorial Organ Recital on Saturday, February 4 and Sunday, February 5 at the Adolphus Busch Hall on the campus of Harvard University. Organist Richard Benefield will play a program that includes Mozart's Adagio and Allegro (K. 594), the world premiere of Daniel Pinkham's The Garden of the Muses, and works by Buxtehude and J.S. Bach. Saturday's performance will begin at 8 p.m. and will be followed by a reception with cake and champagne to celebrate the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. An encore performance will take place on Sunday at 3 p.m.

One of the preeminent organists of the 20th century, E. Power Biggs (1906–1977) presented a popular CBS radio program each week from 1942 to 1958, in which he played live from Adolphus Busch Hall on an organ designed by G. Donald Harrison. This popular program and his widely-heard recordings for Columbia Records helped set new standards for organ playing and popularized a large repertory. Biggs later replaced the organ with an improved one by Dirk A. Flentrop, which in time he donated to Harvard. The 1958 Flentrop organ made famous by Biggs has remained in Adolphus Busch Hall where it is used often for recitals and concerts.

Daniel Pinkham, a recipient of six honorary degrees and current senior professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, is a prolific and versatile composer. Pinkham's catalogue includes four symphonies and other works for large ensembles; cantatas and oratorios; concertos and other works for solo instrument and orchestra for piano, piccolo, trumpet, violin, harp, and three organ concertos; theatre works and operas; chamber music; electronic music; and 20 documentary television film scores. With The Garden of the Muses, Pinkham has composed a major new work for organ. The piece was commissioned by the Harvard University Art Museums through the generosity of Kathryn & Dr. Lee Edstrom and Richard Benefield & John F. Kunowski.

Richard Benefield, organist, singer, conductor, and musicologist, received the first doctor of musical arts degree ever awarded by the New England Conservatory of Music in 1995. He has taught on the music faculties of Baylor University, Paris (TX) Junior College, Boston University, and Providence College. His career has included a long and fruitful relationship with composer Daniel Pinkham, singing in numerous compositions in which Pinkham was conducting. Benefield has also served as both conductor and organist for many other Pinkham compositions, including a 1987 performance of the world premiere of his Sonata No. 3 for organ and strings. Dr. Benefield is currently Deputy Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, has oversight of Adolphus Busch Hall, and holds a separate appointment at Harvard as keeper of the Flentrop organ.

Harvard's Fogg Art Museum Shows Drawings & Paintings from 18th-Century France

Cambridge, MA
November 9, 2005

French paintings and drawings from the collection of Harvard alumnus Charles E. Dunlap, including an exquisite portrait of Madame de Pompadour by François Boucher, will be on view at the Fogg Art Museum December 17, 2005 through March 12, 2006.

"To Delight the Eye": French Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Charles E. Dunlap captures a period in French history primarily during the reign of Louis XV (1715–74) when collectors fancied charming, graceful pictures of pretty subjects. Many of the works in the Dunlap collection, for example, depict nobles dressing, chatting, playing cards, and otherwise going about their elegant lives.

Artists represented in this exhibition of 30 works include Boucher (1703–1770), Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837), Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), Charles-Joseph Natoire (1700–1777), and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867).

"The images in Mr. Dunlap's collection show little sadness, no hard labor, and no hint of death or religion," said Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Jeffrey E. Horvitz Research Curator in the Department of Drawings at the Fogg. "Today his taste would be decried as frivolous, but these exquisitely produced scenes were some of the most innovative works produced in 18th-century Europe. Scholars have only just begun to assess the visual and social significance of these seemingly lighthearted images."

"This exhibition is significant beyond the works of art represented here," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Many of our most notable holdings have come to us through the generosity of friends and alumni who were themselves passionate collectors. But none of us really knew very much about Mr. Dunlap and how he had come to possess such treasures until Alvin Clark began his research."

Who was Charles Dunlap?
Charles Edward Dunlap (born in 1889, Harvard Class of 1911) was a wealthy Philadelphian who developed his taste for French art from his uncle and mentor, the coal-mining magnate Edward Berwind, and a family friend, the collector Forsyth Wickes.

From his teenage years, Dunlap spent a great deal of time at The Elms, the grand Newport mansion that his uncle built in the style of a French chateau and furnished with elegant 18th-century French paintings and furniture. In Newport, Dunlap often came into contact with Wickes, a successful New York lawyer who ardently collected fine and decorative arts from 18th-century France. Eventually, Dunlap and Wickes became friendly rivals for the same works of art.

By the late 1930s, Dunlap had built a substantial collection of English and French art and became a generous donor to Harvard. This led to his 1940 appointment to the Visiting Committee overseeing the University's fine-arts department and the Fogg. Through the efforts of various museum officials, including Agnes Mongan (then curator of drawings), Dunlap's relationship with the Fogg grew. In 1956, he helped the Fogg acquire Bacchanal, the splendid Natoire drawing featured in the upcoming exhibition. During his association with the Fogg, and upon his death in 1966, he gave the museum 10 paintings and 44 drawings — all but four of which were French.

Boucher portrait of Mme. Pompadour a highlight
A highlight of the exhibition will be the portrait of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour painted in 1758 by Boucher, who became first painter to King Louis XV around 1765. Pompadour was the king's powerful mistress and confidante, and an avid patron of the arts who also studied drawing and printmaking with Boucher. This portrait is among several she commissioned around 1750.

Boucher's painting apparently began its life as a small, rectangular, head-and-shoulders portrait, according to research performed at the Harvard University Art Museums' Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies by Teri Hensick and Eugene Farrell with Alden Gordon of Trinity College. Pompadour apparently gave the original portrait to her brother, the Marquis de Marigny, who may have damaged it while traveling in Europe.

Perhaps because of this damage, Boucher took it back and expanded it — adding several strips of canvas and then painting in narrative details depicting its subject at a dressing table, applying her makeup for the day. In this version, Mme de Pompadour wears a dressing gown over her elegant court costume as she pauses in the application of her rouge. On her wrist is a jewel-encrusted cameo bracelet bearing the profile of her beloved, the king of France.

Important Fragonard study also on display
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, along with Watteau and Boucher, was one of the three greatest artists of 18th-century France and in his later years, director of the Louvre. His most important commission, often referred to as The Progress of Love, now at the Frick Collection, is a masterpiece of the rococo. However, it was rejected by the countess who had commissioned it, perhaps because it no longer seemed stylish at a time when neoclassicism was ascendant.

Dunlap acquired Fragonard's Young Girl Abandoned, the only known composition study related to this commission. This black-chalk and charcoal drawing with brown and gray wash of circa 1790 depicts a young girl swooning at the base of an ornamental pillar in a garden. Five other works by Fragonard are also on view.

Bacchanal, by Natoire
Charles-Joseph Natoire was an exquisite draftsman, the director of the French Academy in Rome (1751–75), a colleague of Boucher, and an enormous influence on many of France's most promising artists. The Fogg's Bacchanal — done in watercolor, black chalk, brown ink, and a variety of washes and gouache — is one of his masterpieces. Its classical theme was an unusual choice for Dunlap, but he purchased this one work directly for the Fogg at the urging of Mongan.

Works by Ingres
Dunlap's gifts to the Fogg included three 19th-century works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, including an 1855 drawing of his second wife, Madame Delphine Ingres, who kept it close to her until the end of her life.

First Exhibition Exploring Frank Stella's 1958 Works Created During Artist's First Year After College to Premiere at Harvard February 4, 2006

Cambridge, MA
October 14, 2005

The first exhibition to examine the seminal work Frank Stella created in 1958, the year he graduated from Princeton University, will be presented by the Harvard University Art Museums at its Arthur M. Sackler Museum from February 4 to May 7, 2006. Frank Stella 1958 brings together more than 20 works from this period of tremendous experimentation and productivity, and provides new insight into Stella's career and his development as an artist. A number of the works have only recently been rediscovered as part of the research for this exhibition and many of the others have rarely been on public display.

After its premiere at the Harvard University Art Museums the exhibition will travel to The Menil Collection in Houston, TX (May 25–August 20, 2006) and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH (September 9–December 31, 2006). A symposium on the artist will be presented at Harvard on April 8, 2006. The exhibition is curated by Harry Cooper, Curator of Modern Art, Fogg Art Museum, and Megan R. Luke, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art & Architecture, Harvard University.

In developing the exhibition, curators Cooper and Luke conducted interviews with Stella himself as well as several of his closest friends and early colleagues — including artist Darby Bannard and art historians Michael Fried and Robert Rosenblum — to gain new insight into the genesis of the works and the debates roiling the art world in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

At that time, a tension was emerging between the advocates of abstract painting (like Fried) and those artists (like Carl Andre) who were already making raw, minimal sculptures — the two artistic visions that would dominate the 1960s. Stella's work from this year reveals the influence of both of these artistic directions. His 1958 paintings are distinguished by their repetitive compositional elements, thick stretchers, and workmanlike paint application, all of which were crucial for Stella's emergent minimalism. At the same time, their radiant fields and stripes of color are closely related to the work of other painters at the time, both the abstract expressionists and the younger generation of color-field painters. But Stella's work of this year is already very much his own: its large scale, optical impact, dazzling pattern, brilliant, sometimes garish color, and serial permutations set the course for much of what followed in his illustrious career.

"This exhibition offers new insight into the creative process of one of the most influential postwar American artists," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Presenting collaborative research by a graduate student and a curator, Frank Stella 1958 exemplifies our teaching and research mission. Shedding new light on Stella's body of work, the exhibition may be especially resonant for a student audience at the same stage of life as Stella was when he created these dramatic works."

"The works created by Stella in this year are almost 50 years old, but they still feel as if they are fresh from the studio. These pieces were created not for the halls of a museum but rather at a moment of exuberant experimentation. The fact that they are full of obvious, undisguised revision and overpainting distinguishes them from the methodical canvases that Stella painted from then on and makes them especially interesting as both aesthetic and material objects," noted Cooper.

"There is no substitute for experiencing these paintings directly, let alone a significant number of them together," Luke said. "While these works provide the earliest examples of the striped patterning made famous with Stella's subsequent Black paintings of late 1958 and 1959, half their story is to be found in their materiality and manufacture. I think viewers will be surprised by how tactile these paintings are, by how Stella could radically alter his touch in works of almost the same composition. This exhibition will change our understanding of Stella while offering a new perspective on minimalism, a movement that is just now in the throes of serious reevaluation."

Notable works in the exhibition include:

Cricket/Kit Construction, an early sculptural assemblage that has never before been seen publicly
Morro Castle, one of the first Black paintings, which has not been viewed in the United States since the 1960s
Them Apples, a painted construction of cardboard and wood that highlights the influence of Jasper Johns on Stella's practice
Astoria, a yellow monochrome from the Museum of Modern Art, and Blue Horizon, a blue monochrome from Brown University, a stunning pair of paintings never before exhibited together

To provide a view of Stella's later works in context with the pieces in the exhibition, two later paintings from the Harvard University Art Museums permanent collections, Hiraqla II (1970) and Bechofen II (1972), as well as rarely seen drawings, will be on view in the Fogg Art Museum galleries during the run of the exhibition.

Catalogue
Frank Stella 1958 will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue by Cooper and Luke, which examines the 1958 works within the broader context of the New York art scene at the time. Catalogue essays will discuss Stella's artistic collaborators in 1958 — including those with artists Carl Andre, Darby Bannard, and Hollis Frampton; his early friendship with art historian Michael Fried; and his interest in artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, and Josef Albers. Luke's essay traces Stella's early history in detail and considers his ambivalence about the materiality of Johns's assemblages; Cooper's essay looks closely at both Stella's statements and the works in the exhibition in relation to contemporary discussions of opticality and perceptual psychology.

The catalogue will also contain reproductions of all 37 known Stella works from 1958 as well as examples of works by his collaborators and major influences. The catalogue is co-published by the Harvard University Art Museums and Yale University Press.

Busch-Reisinger Museum Features "Stratification: An Installation of Works Since 1960"

Cambridge, MA
September 26, 2005

An exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture from the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum is on display at the Museum through February 26, 2006.

The exhibition features seven key works made by artists from Germany and Switzerland (all but two of whom are living), in keeping with the Busch-Reisinger's mission to collect and display art from the German-speaking countries and related cultures of Central and Northern Europe.

Stratification: An Installation of Works Since 1960 borrows its name from one of the principal objects on display, Thomas Lenk's black Plexiglas sculpture, Stratification 21A (1967). Given to the Busch-Reisinger in 1979, it was installed for a time on the roof of the John F. Kennedy School of Government but has never been seen at the Art Museums since its acquisition. The sculpture anchors the far end of the gallery space and demonstrates the artist's preoccupation with layered constructions. The orderly stacking of flat basic square forms materializes ideas about surface, space, depth, and illusion, all themes that run through the exhibition.

Along with the sculptures, Stratification features five paintings and a rotating selection of drawings, prints, and photographs. Dramatic, oversized canvases by Gerhard Richter (Said, 1983) and Georg Baselitz (Triangle, 1991) dominate one wall. A mixed-media work on polyester fabric by Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Abstract Red Transparent Picture with Arrow Pointing Upward) (1990), hangs near Max Bill's slender ribbon of gold-plated bronze, Endless Surface in the Form of a Column (1958), while Richard Paul Lohse's vibrant acrylic painting, 15 Serial Rows of Equal Amounts of Color with Bright Emphasis (1958/1987), is displayed alongside Rudolf de Crignis's luminescent ultramarine blue Untitled (1999).

"This small, focused exhibition of paintings and sculpture by some of the most important German and Swiss artists of our time allows us to explore the methods, both aesthetic and technical, by which those artists approach the concept of layering," said Thomas W. Lentz, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Art Museums.

The Materials of Art
"This exhibition encourages viewers to look at and beyond the surface and to consider how the artists employ their materials," said Celka Straughn, who organized the show as part of her 22-month tenure as the first Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Intern at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. "Each piece reveals a different structure, application of materials, and overall physical process of formation." While organizing the exhibition, Straughn corresponded with Richter, visited sculptor Thomas Lenk in Germany to learn how he made Stratification 21A, and consulted with several conservators at Harvard's Straus Center for Conservation.

Straughn, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, conceived and implemented the exhibition under the supervision of Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. "Advanced, graduate-level internships are a key aspect of our educational mission," Nisbet commented. "Celka has invigorated our engagement with the permanent collection through her identification of a theme, her considered and strong installation, and her research, which has turned up significant new information about some of the works in the exhibition. We could not be more pleased with the results."

The Stephan Engelhorn Internship was endowed in 2003 to honor the late Stefan Engelhorn (1951–2002), a doctor, chemist, and patron of the arts. Each year, 8 to 12 talented individuals with advanced degrees are awarded curatorial or conservation internships at the Harvard University Art Museums.

A brochure featuring images of the principal works will be available in the gallery, and books about the artists will be available for perusal in the reading area.

The Works
The touchstone of the exhibition is Polke's Untitled (Abstract Red Transparent Picture with Arrow Pointing Upward). Polke created this abstract work by applying a variety of colors primarily to the verso (reverse side) of a sturdy polyester fabric coated on both sides with a transparent varnish. This work, one of a series of abstract "transparent" paintings that Polke made in the 1980s and 90s, "breaks down the physical processes of formation," Straughn wrote in the gallery brochure. Polke brushed, poured, and dripped paint onto the translucent support, mocking "the principles of the rational, modernist grid, stressing instead instability, mutability, and disorder."

Viewers will also see Said, which Richter created with fairly conventional modern materials and tools along with a more unconventional implement — a homemade squeegee that he used to create the yellow smears and speckles across the center of the painting. "In works like Said, color functions as the primary means to reveal the various manipulations of the artist's array of instruments, media, and techniques," Straughn explained.

In the brochure, the curator compares Lohse's canvas, 15 Serial Rows of Equal Amounts of Color with Bright Emphasis, to Richter's painting, noting that it "contrasts dramatically with Lohse's orderly squares, but both use color to create an experience of optical intensity."

Supporting Works
From September 17 through November 30, visitors will see several supporting works by Polke that illustrate his multilayered experiments with different motifs, media, and techniques. From December 3 through February 26, photographic manipulations by Richter, Isa Genzken, and Valie Export will be featured. When not on display, these and other related works on paper may be viewed in the Busch-Reisinger Museum's study room during its public hours, Tuesday through Friday, 2:00–4:45 p.m.

Colonial-era Silver and Shawls from India on Display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum

Cambridge, MA
August 8, 2005

Kashmir shawls and silver tableware produced in India during the Colonial period (18th and 19th centuries) will be on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum August 27, 2005 through January 29, 2006.

Silver and Shawls: India, Europe, and the Colonial Art Market will feature some 30 pieces of silver and 11 shawls, most loaned by private collectors. The objects, which illustrate the influence of colonial patrons and the international market on the design and form of Indian decorative arts, were created at a time when foreign demand for Indian textiles and luxury goods was at its peak.

"This exhibition is a refreshing change for us with its focus on decorative arts — an area we would like to devote more interest to," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Visitors will see why Kashmir shawls were the most sought-after textiles in 19th-century Europe, and how brilliant Indian silversmiths incorporated 'exotic' elements into the restrained Georgian-style designs favored by the British."

"The exhibition hinges on two opposing stylistic developments," said Kimberly Masteller, assistant curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, who co-organized the show with guest curator Jeffrey B. Spurr. "The shawls become closer to European taste, whereas the silver takes on more exotic, Indian design elements." Spurr is Islamic and Middle East Specialist in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library.

Colonial Silver
The silver tableware on display in Silver and Shawls chronicles the dynamic changes in form that took place in Indian metalwork during the Colonial period. As early as 1720, jewelers and goldsmiths from Britain were working in Madras, and shortly after in Bombay, Calcutta, and elsewhere in India. By the late 1700s, they expanded their production to silver tableware based on European forms but redesigned to accommodate local styles of cooking and serving. Specialized containers and utensils were developed to warm and serve curries and roasted meat, to filter milk and claret, and to cover drinking water.

In the 19th century, many expatriate gold- and silversmiths began to employ Indian craftsmen who had been trained in indigenous styles. During the mid- to late-1800s, these smiths began to embellish European-style objects with local designs. This hybrid style became popular after it was displayed in the Indian section of the Great Exhibition of London in 1851.

One famous workshop represented in the exhibition was that of Peter Orr & Sons, founded in Madras in 1851 by Peter Nicholas Orr, a watchmaker from London. One of the largest and most successful silver manufacturers in India, the Orr workshop produced tableware and gold, gilt, and silver "swami" jewelry populated with Indian deities and exotic scenes.

In the exhibition
Visitors will see several pieces made by Peter Orr & Sons, including an oval tray with serpent border created in 1904 for presentation to a captain in the Ooregum Gold Mining Company of India; a "swami-style" gold necklace and earrings bequeathed to the Fogg Art Museum in 1895 by its founder, Mrs. William Hayes Fogg; and an engraved circular racing trophy from 1884 that is an exact copy of a gold dish given to the Prince of Wales on his visit to India in 1875 and 1876.

Hybrid silver was also produced in Indian-run workshops in other regional centers, particularly Lucknow, the capital of the Muslim kingdom of Awadh. Awadh was known for its traditional metalsmithing and enameling, and its manufacture of textiles with gold and silver brocade and embroidery. Lucknow is represented by two objects: a Renaissance Revival Ewer, made in 1860 and embellished with applied palmettes and round faces representing Surya, the Hindu sun god; and an unmarked silver presentation bowl decorated with fish, the emblem of the Awadh kingdom.

From Kutch, a major center for textiles, embroidery, leatherwork, and jewelry in western Gujarat state, comes extremely ornate silver that was favored by Europeans. Six objects in the show are from the famous workshop of Oomersi Mawji, who marked his silver with the initials OM and — true to his background as a cobbler — punched his designs into metal from the exterior. Visitors will see a striking claret jug, circa 1880, completely covered in punched-out foliage designs and embellished with a long silver cobra curled to form the pitcher's handle; a two-handled cup from around 1880 decorated with figures from Greek mythology; and a creamer jug from around 1894.

Other silver pieces in the exhibition were made in Calcutta and Kashmir. Most of the objects on display are from the Collection of Richard Milhender; the remainder are from anonymous private collections.

Kashmir shawls
The history of the Kashmir shawl reaches back centuries before colonial silver. What had been a local product with limited distribution and distinguished by the fineness and rarity of its materials became a product of exacting technical quality and artistic refinement under the Mughal emperors.

The first Mughal ruler, Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) had a large collection of shawls and favored wearing them two at a time, stitched together back-to-back. This construction hid the loose threads on the reverse of the garments and offered added warmth and bulk. The emperor's shawls were renowned for their fine material (pashmina, the fine winter underhair of the Himalayan goat), exceptional technique, and refined decoration.

"The shawl was a favored court dress worn mostly by men, but it became very popular among people who served in the colonies," said Masteller. "If you owned one, it was a real status symbol."

The heyday of Kashmir shawls coincided with the peak of European colonial expansion around 1800. Traveling soldiers, officers, and merchants brought the costly garments back to Europe, where they rose to the height of fashion and became wildly popular with women. The shawls were also exported to Iran and turned into common accessories for both men and women. Domestic manufacturers in Iran and Europe began replicating the shawls, but without the fine materials and workmanship that distinguished the originals.

Through the years, the workshops of Kashmir adapted their muted designs to suit the exuberant tastes of Western, Victorian-era consumers. Up until the 1870s, when the industry collapsed, there were between 14,000 and 24,000 looms operating in Kashmir. Each loom employed two to three weavers and also involved wool cleaners, spinners, dyers, embroiderers, and shawl washers. In the 1860s, for example, about 100,000 women worked spinning the goat hair into yarn; records from 1823 indicate that 5,000 embroiderers touched up and sewed shawls together. The finest shawls were entirely woven; lesser quality garments contained some woven material supplemented by embroidered panels or some that were entirely embroidered.

"This exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to see how remarkably beautiful Kashmir shawls are and to begin to understand a tradition that affected fashion, textile production, and design ideas wherever it was introduced," said Spurr, the co-curator.

Among the textiles on display in Silver and Shawls will be:

a fragment of a twill tapestry-woven pashmina shawl made in Kashmir circa 1810 to 1815;
an 1810 painting by Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) portraying Abu'l Hassan, the Persian ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1809–1810, wearing a Kashmir shawl wrapped around his head as a turban in a style highly popular in Iran at the time;
an open-field white shawl dating to 1805, which features the buta (literally, "flower") design, progenitor of the Western "paisley" motif.

Harvard University Art Museums Acquire the Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection

Cambridge, MA
July 12, 2005

The Harvard University Art Museums today announced the acquisition of the Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection, one of the most important groups of Fluxus materials in North America. The acquisition is a partial gift from Barbara Moore, and a partial purchase made through the Museums' Margaret Fisher Fund. The Moore Collection is a large and comprehensive group of works assembled by Barbara and Peter Moore, both of whom were intimately involved with the Fluxus movement as close friends and sometime collaborators with artist George Maciunas, the movement's principal organizer. This intact, first-owner collection adds a crucial element to the Fogg Art Museum's collection of postwar art and places HUAM's Fluxus holdings among the most significant Fluxus collections in the United States.

The Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection features a remarkable range of Fluxus editions and multiples dating from the movement's inception in the early 1960s through the late 1970s. The Moore collection consists of 121 works, some of which are themselves collections of many smaller pieces. These include works by Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht, and Christo, among many others, as well as early and rare examples of many key multiples, a number of unique and rare works, and prototypes or models for editions. Taken together, the Moore Collection constitutes a vital research tool that gives scholars a glimpse into the creative process by demonstrating through variations of the same work how the conception of each object changed over time, and revealing paths not taken through editions that were planned but never realized.

The Harvard University Art Museum's educational mission makes it an ideal home for Fluxus works, providing students and researchers the close interaction with these objects that is so crucial to understanding the ideas that led to their creation. To foster this type of intimate study, the Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection will be available to museum visitors in the Fogg Museum's Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

The Moore Collection also complements the Willy and Charlotte Reber Collection of multiples and unique works by Joseph Beuys held by Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum, enabling scholars and students to study these works in close counterpoint.

"The Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection is a key addition to the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, continuing our commitment to building our holdings of works from the last half of the twentieth century," said Thomas Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Following our long tradition of access to and study from original works of art, students and scholars will now be able to experience these works directly, in the interdisciplinary spirit of Fluxus."

Fluxus
Fluxus — from the Latin for 'flow' or 'change' — was the name given by the movement's principal organizer George Maciunas to a loosely-affiliated, international group of artists in the 1960s and '70s. Fluxus remains an active movement today, although with new artists and constantly evolving practices. The original Fluxus group worked across a wide range of media, including poetry, music, film, performances, and ephemeral "events," in its efforts to contest the cultural conception of what is "Art" and the prominence of the individual artist. Under Maciunas's leadership, the concept of the multiple lay at the heart of Fluxus object-making.

From posters, broadsheets, and handbills to stamps, tablecloths, playing cards, and a variety of boxed multiples, Fluxus objects continue to defy easy categorization even within the context of postwar art. In contrast to Pop Art, in which mass culture was imported into the realm of high art, Fluxus attempted the inverse: to integrate the production of art into the realm of everyday experience, often willfully pushing the distinction between the two to its breaking point. The Fluxus approach involves the design and fabrication of inexpensive, theoretically unlimited editions using commercial methods and materials. It often requires the participation of the viewer in order to complete the work.

Barbara and Peter Moore
Barbara Moore is an art historian, writer, and former rare-book dealer specializing in avant-garde art of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. She was first editor (1965–66) at Dick Higgins's seminal Something Else Press. Since then she has written essays on and curated exhibitions of artist's books, multiples, and alternative media, covering the work of Dieter Roth, Lawrence Weiner, Charlotte Moorman, Peter Moore, Boekie Woekie, and many others. Among numerous projects on the subject of Fluxus, she curated the first Fluxus exhibition in New York, Collectors of the Seventies, Part III: The Sohm Archive (The Clocktower, 1975); wrote George Maciunas: A Finger in Fluxus, about Maciunas's graphic design (Art Forum, 1982), and curated George Maciunas: More Than Fluxus — Graphic Design, Objects, Ephemera (Ubu Gallery, 1996).

Peter Moore (1932–1993) photographed Fluxus activities, happenings, Judson Dance Theater, and multimedia and other innovative performances from the 1960s through the 1980s. Selections from his extraordinary photographic archive, consisting of several hundred thousand black-and-white and color images documenting this era, have been exhibited and published internationally. Moore began his career as assistant to the photographer O. Winston Link in the 1950s, studied with W. Eugene Smith among others, and was Senior Technical Editor of Modern Photography magazine (1978–1989). His visual history of the demolition of Pennsylvania Station was published in 2000 in The Destruction of Penn Station: Photographs by Peter Moore, edited and with an introduction by Barbara Moore.

"Girls on Film" — Artists' Installation Inspired by Restored Vintage Film to be Presented at Harvard's Sert Gallery July 16–September 18, 2005

Cambridge, MA
July 8, 2005

Opening at the Harvard University Art Museums this month is Girls on Film, an installation by artists Julie Buck and Karin Segal of 70 photographs depicting female film-studio workers who posed for what are known as color-timing control strips. Buck and Segal retrieved these beguiling images from discarded film leaders — usually blank film attached to the ends of a print to protect it from damage when it is threaded through a projector. They created the photographic prints in the installation by restoring, editing, and enlarging selected frames.

On view July 16 through September 18, 2005, at Harvard's Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Girls on Film presents the artists' interpretation of this provocative imagery in a panoramic display that forms a continuous work of art. A tension develops between the found images and the formal and material effects the artists achieve with their edited and enlarged prints.

The installation foregrounds a technical process in film that is normally hidden from public view. "Through their compelling retrieval of these formerly discarded and anonymous images, Julie Buck and Karin Segal offer insight into a little-known aspect of film production," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "In the process, they introduce a type of image that should offer a new point of entry into discussions of both the cinema and its representations of women."

Color timing is a fundamental tool the film industry used from the 1920s to the 1990s to establish visual continuity between shots that may have been filmed over several months, under different lighting conditions, and even on different film stocks. Color-timing strips — or "China Girls," as they came to be known — were film frames of variously posed women that technicians in the processing lab used to achieve consistent color balance and tonal density throughout a film. Women's skin was thought to offer a particularly nuanced tonal gauge. Some of the women posing for these shots were lab secretaries or technicians; others were models or actresses hired for the job.

Although these shots had a utilitarian purpose, the way the women were posed, lit, and filmed often mimicked the representational codes of commercial cinema. As the artists note, "If it were just about a [color] standard, no more than 20 prototypes would have been necessary. Obviously, the format offered an opportunity to play out poses that were a lot more than functional." Perhaps as a result, these color-timing control strips took on a life of their own, sometimes reappearing as "pin-ups" in projection booths, for example. According to a lab technician familiar with the genre, says Buck, some of the most appealing of these strips were reproduced more than even the most successful Hollywood films.

Both artists conceive of their practice as rescuing these women from the margins of cinema, recasting them as movie stars in their own right. It was the creative exploitation of the format and the obsolescence of the functional device, however, that initially attracted Buck and Segal to these images. "As with so many processes, color timing is now accomplished digitally," said Segal. "It is ironic, therefore, that the very digital technology that allowed us to recover and rework these images — elevating them to the status of icons or portraits — has also made them all but disappear from the film industry."

About the Artists
Julie Buck and Karin Segal have worked in the film and art fields for the last 10 years. Girls on Film, their latest project, premiered at the Courthouse Gallery at the Anthology Film Archive in New York City in February 2005 before traveling to Harvard.

Julie Buck, born in 1974 in Walnut Creek, California, is the head of conservation at the Harvard Film Archive. She has a degree in film history from Brigham Young University and a certificate in film preservation from George Eastman House. Buck has taught film at several Boston institutions and has curated film series throughout the Northeast. Buck is also a collage artist. She currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Karin Rywkind Segal, born in 1973 in Tel Aviv, holds a degree in fine arts from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and has exhibited her art in Boston, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv while curating film and video series in Boston. She is the assistant conservator and publicist at the Harvard Film Archive and resides in Boston.

Harvard's Fogg Art Museum to Highlight Extraordinary Range of Photographic Practice from the Beginning of the Medium's History to the Present

Cambridge, MA
June 24, 2005

An exhibition opening August 6 at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum will present images from a vast collection of photographs, negatives, and related material collected during four decades by curators at the University's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The images reflect a range of uses of the medium, including social documentary, vernacular, and art photography.

A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection, will feature 70 photographs and ephemera selected from the 28,000-object collection, which was placed on permanent deposit at the Fogg in 2002. The title of the exhibition comes from a 1967 Harvard Alumni Bulletin article reporting the establishment of the Carpenter Center collection and heralding photography as "a new kind of historic evidence." The collection contains some of photography's most famous images and is an extremely valuable resource for scholars and researchers. Visitors to the exhibition will see works from the four components of the Carpenter Center's holdings: the Fine Art Photographers Collection, the Social Museum Collection, the American Professional Photographers Collection, and the Boston Transit Collection.

Among the photographs on display will be Edward Weston's classic Nude (1936), from the Fine Art Photographers Collection; Frances Benjamin Johnston's comparative photographs (c. 1899) of a poor person's crumbling shack and the tidy two-story house of a graduate of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, once displayed in the Social Museum to show the benefits of education; Harry Annas's 1949 studio portrait of a boy in a cowboy outfit, Untitled (Lockhart, Texas), from the American Professional Photographers Collection; and Paul Rowell's E.R. Warren, Motorman — a 1907 portrait of a young, mustachioed man in a double-breasted full-length coat and conductor's cap, from the Boston Transit Collection.

The Carpenter Center Photograph Collection was established by Harvard University in the mid-1960s as a resource for teaching the history of photography and its aesthetic practice. The collection initially consisted of photographs gathered from various Harvard departments and repositories. It was significantly expanded by Davis Pratt, founding curator (1966–72), and by Barbara Norfleet, a social psychologist, noted photographer, and the collection's visionary curator for three decades until her retirement in 2002.

"The Carpenter Collection doubled the size of the Fogg's photography holdings and transformed our Museum into an important center for the study of social documentary and vernacular photography," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Visitors will see the extraordinary range of material that is available to them for research and study at virtually any time in our Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs."

The exhibition was organized by Michelle Lamunière, the Charles C. Cunningham Sr. Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs, with the collaboration of curatorial assistant Kate Palmer and former Boston University student intern Julia Dolan. The Widgeon Point Charitable Foundation has provided major support for work on the Carpenter Center Photograph Collection, including this exhibition.

The History of the Carpenter Center Collection
Although photographs had been collected at Harvard since the early days of the medium, their special importance wasn't recognized until the mid-1960s, when photographic history became a discipline in its own right. The University created a repository at the Carpenter Center to consolidate its holdings of significant historical photographs, and the collection began with the transfer of 19th-century prints belonging to the Geology Department Library. At the same time, the Carpenter Center took over responsibility for about 6,000 photographs, diagrams, and publications collected by social ethics professor Francis Greenwood Peabody for the Social Museum he founded in 1903.

Davis Pratt, the collection's first curator, scoured the University for photographs of historical and artistic value, such as an early daguerreotype portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin Ellis Stowe and fine albumen prints from government surveys of the western United States in the 1870s. He also acquired works from modern and contemporary photographers including Minor White and Robert Frank.

When Pratt left in 1972 to become the first curator of photography at the Fogg, he was succeeded by Barbara Norfleet. During her 30-year tenure, Norfleet challenged existing paradigms about the meaning and function of photography and transformed the Carpenter Center's collection into a significant resource for the study of social documentary photography.

The Fine Art Photographers Collection
The approximately 5,000 works from this collection span the history of aesthetic approaches and interpretations of the medium. A New Kind of Historical Evidence will feature 18 photographs, including Aaron Siskind's Gloucester (1944); O. Winston Link's Living Room on the Tracks, Lithia, Virginia (1955); Bruce Davidson's Untitled (Alabama) (1965); and Josef Koudelka's Czechoslovakia (1968). Guard at Sugar Plantation, Outside Kampala, Uganda (1980), was made by Alex Webb, a former student of Norfleet's in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Also on display will be Marion Post Wolcott's 1939 image titled "Negro" Using Outside "Colored" Stairway to Enter Movie Theatre, Belzoni, Mississippi. This gelatin silver print shows an African-American man, clad in coat and felt hat, silhouetted against a glaringly white brick wall as he ascends a staircase labeled "Colored adm. 10 cents." An old signboard is propped against the staircase, and the sun casts sharp shadows from the rungs of a leaning stepladder. In the far left corner of the image, opposite the lone man, is a decrepit white door labeled "White Men Only." Wolcott captured this poignant image while working for the Farm Security Administration, a government-sponsored project to document the effects of the Depression on American society.

The Social Museum Collection
Eighteen objects will be on view from this assemblage of about 6,000 photographs, diagrams, and publications amassed by Professor Peabody for his Social Museum at Harvard. That museum, which opened in 1907, was intended to document the international social reform movement at the turn of the 20th century and complement Professor Peabody's teaching.

"Peabody compiled an incredible collection of primary source material, which today serves as a time capsule for the study of subjects across many disciplines," said Lamunière, the curator.

Visitors to the exhibition will see two views of Pittsburgh from the turn of the 20th century. One, a gelatin silver print of solemn-looking children in a vacant lot, was made in about 1908 by preeminent social photographer Lewis Hine (1874–1940), who, as a staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, documented the exploitation of children on farms, in mines, and in factories. This image was part of the Pittsburgh Survey, a study of labor practices and living conditions in the immigrant communities of this industrial city.

The second image shows 13 women in floor-length skirts, starched white aprons, and caps posing near cast-iron stoves at the H. J. Heinz Company. The work, made by an unidentified photographer around 1900, documents the Pittsburgh company's pioneering attempts to provide a fair and satisfying workplace for its employees by offering cooking classes, rooftop gardens, lunchtime concerts, and weekly manicures for all food handlers.

These and other selections from the Social Museum Collection are available on-line through the Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program at http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww. Click on "Browse the collection," and then "Browse by genre" (Photographs). Photographs and archival material are organized there by theme.

The American Professional Photographers Collection
This assemblage of 1,500 prints, several albums, and more than 15,000 negatives was acquired in the 1970s by curator Barbara Norfleet. She traveled the country between 1975 and 1977, culling forgotten prints and negatives from the sweltering attics and damp basements of more than 25 professional studios that were active predominantly in the 1930s through 1960s. Norfleet felt it was vital to preserve the posed and candid images — which recorded families, consumer goods, the working world, and community activity — because the work of professional photographers was not being published or preserved.

Twenty-seven photographs from this collection will be on view, including two versions of Harry Annas's cowboy portrait Untitled (Lockhart, Texas) (1949); Clement McLarty's bridal portrait Untitled (Boston, Massachusetts) (1965); and Francis J. Sullivan's Untitled (first haircut, Derry, New Hampshire) (1949).

"These images reflect a compelling blend of desire and reality," said Palmer, who organized this section of the exhibition. "But they are also surprising, humorous, and often poignant revelations of American social customs at the time they were made."

Visitors will see, for example, Untitled (Betty's first bike, Chamberlain, South Dakota), Orrion Barger's 1948 black-and-white image of a skinny girl smiling shyly into the camera as she holds the handlebars of a fat-tired bicycle. The print was made by Norfleet and her assistants at Harvard in the 1970s from a negative acquired from Barger's South Dakota studio. In 1978 Norfleet located Betty, the girl in the photograph, and learned that she had won the red Schwinn bike in a drawing sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce in Chamberlain, South Dakota. Barger took the photograph for the town's newspaper.

The Boston Transit Collection
The approximately 700 glass-plate negatives and prints in this collection chart urban growth in the greater Boston area from the late 19th century to the beginning of World War II. The public transportation corporations serving the city and surrounding towns regularly employed professional photographers to document subway and elevated railway construction. The result was over 200,000 images that provide a visual catalogue of streets and neighborhoods before, during, and after the city's radical physical transformation. The images in the Boston Transit Collection were originally part of a larger Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority archive that is now housed at the Cambridge Historical Society and Historic New England.

Seven images will be on view in the exhibition, but the entire Harvard-owned transit collection can be seen online at www.harvardartmuseum.org/btc beginning August 6.

One glass-plate negative in the exhibition, Harvard Square Progress View, was made by photographer Paul Rowell on March 9, 1911. It shows the partially completed Harvard Square subway station with the brick buildings of Harvard Yard in the background.

In its entirety, Harvard's Boston Transit Collection provides an invaluable record of the city's architecture and the construction techniques used to build Boston's subway and elevated railway lines.

Harvard University Art Museums Announce First Director of Institutional Advancement

Cambridge, MA
May 27, 2005

Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, today announced the appointment of Bradford W. Voigt as the first Director of Institutional Advancement for the Art Museums. Voigt will join the Art Museums in this new position on July 18, 2005.

"Brad is a seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience in arts, cultural, and educational organizations," said Lentz. "His expertise and vision will be critical to our continued financial stability far into the future."

Voigt comes to the Art Museums after a successful fundraising campaign and Grand Opening celebration at the new Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. As the Director of Development at PEM he successfully completed a $194 million comprehensive development program, managed a staff of 14, and increased philanthropic support by 167% in three years. Prior to joining PEM, he served as Assistant Dean for Development at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he completed a $208 million campaign as part of the $2.6 billion University "Campaign for a New Century."

"I am delighted to be returning to Harvard, this time as part of Tom Lentz's team," commented Voigt. "I am impressed by the vision, intelligence, and thoughtful planning Tom has brought to the Art Museums, and I am eager to begin helping him achieve his goals for the institution. I look forward to working with my new colleagues and the community of supporters and volunteer leaders to build upon the Art Museums' remarkable legacy."

A 1982 graduate of Brown University, Voigt has directed several fundraising campaigns for major organizations including Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Beth Israel Hospital, Massachusetts Audubon Society, and Boston Ballet.

This appointment comes at a critical time in the history of the Harvard University Art Museums as the groundwork is laid for the renovation of the 1927 Fogg Art Museum facility, expansion of art storage for one of the ten largest collections in the U.S., and development of space for exhibition of contemporary art and art of the last half of the 20th century. The Harvard University Art Museums have a complex administration with almost 300 employees and an annual operating budget in excess of $20 million. Future operational and capital needs require successful fundraising initiatives, even though the Art Museums are supported in part by a sizable endowment. To that end, as Director of Institutional Advancement, Voigt will oversee all aspects of membership, individual giving, capital fundraising, and institutional support.

Harvard University Art Museums to Present Its Distinguished Collection of Degas Masterworks August 1–November 27, 2005

Cambridge, MA
April 19, 2005

This August, the Harvard University Art Museums will present Degas at Harvard, an exhibition examining Harvard University's distinguished holdings by Edgar Degas — one of the most important collections of the artist's work in the United States. The exhibition will draw together more than 60 works by Degas from the collection of the Fogg Art Museum, together with promised gifts to the Fogg, as well as works from The Houghton Library at Harvard and Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. Organized by the Fogg Art Museum, the exhibition encompasses drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture, and photographs, and will be on view at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum from August 1 to November 27, 2005.

In 1911, the Fogg was the first museum in the world to mount an exhibition of works by Degas and was the only one to do so during the artist's lifetime. Degas at Harvard brings together for the first time Degas works in various Harvard collections, from very early works created in his student days to masterworks made at the height of his career. The exhibition explores the range and depth of Degas's artistic innovation, and Harvard's pivotal role in fostering understanding and scholarship of his works through the commitment of its curators, collectors, and the generations of scholars who have worked with the collection at the Fogg. A key figure in the remarkable relationship between the work of Degas and the Fogg, its staff, and students at the University was Paul J. Sachs (1878–1965), former professor of fine arts at Harvard and associate director of the Fogg. Not only does the Fogg owe the heart of its collection to Sachs's eye and generosity (some 22 works by Degas were given or bequeathed by him over the years) but his inspirational teaching had a profound impact on the wider reception of Degas in the United States.

"The Degas collections at Harvard are an exceptional resource that provides a multidimensional examination of Degas's work and contributes to the Art Museums' great tradition of teaching, research, and close interaction with works of art," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "The work of Sachs and those he drew to Harvard was central to the recognition and acceptance of Degas as one of the influential artists of his day — and ours. Sachs's passion, vision, and legacy of scholarship has resulted in outstanding contributions to the field and collections that are used on a daily basis in classrooms and study rooms. By making these works more accessible, we can explore new ideas and take a fresh look at what we think we know well."

The Harvard University Art Museums initiated new research in preparing the exhibition, including extensive conservation and analytical research that allowed curators and conservators to reexamine in careful detail much of the collection. Building upon recent extensive technical analysis of a number of the Fogg's paintings, all of Degas's works on paper in the collection were subjected to a rigorous examination in the museum's Straus Center for Conservation. A highlight of this substantive study was the unframing, for the first time in many years, of one especially fragile drawing, which revealed a section of the drawing hitherto hidden under the mat, providing new insight into the work. The technical research was complemented by significant archival research in order to examine the history of the prized collection of Degas's work at the Fogg. Through this new research and ongoing study, the exhibition underscores the Harvard University Art Museums' commitment to making opportunities available for scholars and visitors to explore and enjoy exceptional works of art.

Degas at Harvard is organized by Edward Saywell, Charles C. Cunningham Sr. Curatorial Associate in Drawings, and Stephan Wolohojian, curator in the Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. The 62 works in the exhibition will be organized thematically into sections of portraits, landscapes, ballet scenes, bathers, and horse scenes, highlighting the strength and range of Harvard's collections.

"Edgar Degas was a brilliantly innovative artist and the Harvard collections reveal his constant experimentation with new techniques and bold ideas," said Saywell. "Despite the broad familiarity of his art, the more we study it, the more we realize just how much there is still to discover about Degas's remarkable creative process. In subjecting the works to detailed analysis in our conservation labs, and then presenting the results through exhibition and lectures, we intend to make a lasting contribution to the scholarly consideration of Degas's art."

Significant works featured in the exhibition include:

The Rehearsal (1873–78), the only work in the current exhibition to also be shown in the pivotal 1911 exhibition. Lent by a private collector for the first show, The Rehearsal came to Harvard in the 1951 bequest of Maurice Wertheim.

After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself (1893–98), which will be shown to the public for the first time in 40 years. Due to its extreme fragility — the work is drawn on very thin and brittle tracing paper — the drawing has remained in the care of the Fogg's paper conservation laboratory since the 1960s because techniques for conserving the work have not yet advanced to a point where the work can be handled or presented on a regular basis.

Alice Villette (1872), an oil painting purchased by the Fogg in 1925, its first Degas acquisition.

Untitled (Self-Portrait in Library) (c. 1895), a gelatin silver print that shows Degas's fascination with portraits and his skill as a photographer.

Dancers, Nude Study (1899), a drawing of ballet dancers bathing, combining two of the artist's most famous subjects. The drawing is a partial and promised gift of Emily Rauh Pulitzer, chair of the Visiting Committee for the Harvard University Art Museums, in honor of former Harvard University Art Museums director James Cuno, who taught a popular course on Degas while he was at Harvard.

Two rare landscape photographs from the 1890s, Untitled (Cape Hornu, near Saint-Valèry-sur-Somme), and Untitled (The Hourdel Road, near Saint-Valèry-sur-Somme), both probably taken in early September 1895, when Degas spent five days in Saint-Valéry.

The exhibition will include archival material pertaining to the University's collecting history as well as an autograph letter to Paul Albert Bartolomé and an extremely rare book of sonnets written by Degas, both loaned from Harvard's Houghton Library. The sonnets vividly evoke Degas's life in the ballet world. Due to the size of the Degas collection at the Fogg, a number of prints and drawings will not be able to be presented within the Sackler galleries and these will be available for close study during the public open hours of the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs in the Fogg.

Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by Degas at Harvard, a fully illustrated catalogue containing essays by Harvard curator Marjorie Benedict Cohn and one of the world's most prominent Degas scholars, Jean Sutherland Boggs, an independent scholar and former pupil of Paul Sachs, as well as a poem by Richard Wilbur inspired by the Degas works he studied at the Fogg as a Harvard graduate student in the late 1940s. The 128-page catalogue with 90 illustrations, 50 in color, is published by the Harvard University Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press ($19.95).

Harvard University Art Museums Announce the Appointment of a New Curator of Prints at the Fogg Art Museum

Cambridge, MA
March 4, 2005

Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, today announced the appointment of Susan Dackerman as the new Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Fogg Art Museum. Dackerman will assume the position on July 5, 2005, after the retirement of the incumbent, Marjorie B. Cohn, longtime curator and conservator and former acting director of the Art Museums.

"Susan brings exceptional enthusiasm, dedication, and experience to the position," Lentz said. "Her insights as a scholar and educator and her expertise in curatorial affairs make her an ideal choice to lead our teaching, collecting, and program efforts in the area of prints, and a worthy successor to Jerry Cohn."

Dackerman comes to the Fogg after two years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and nine years at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she rose from assistant curator to head of the prints, drawings, and photographs department. While leading the department's staff of eight and maintaining a collection of 65,000 works on paper, she continued to organize exhibitions, raise funds for acquisitions, and undertake research.

The result of Dackerman's most significant recent scholarship was the celebrated exhibition Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, which broke new ground in the field. Presented with its accompanying catalogue at the Baltimore museum in the fall of 2002, the exhibition demonstrated that painting prints was a highly regarded practice during the Renaissance and overturned longstanding assumptions about 16th-century prints as purely monochromatic images.

Commenting on her appointment, Dackerman said, "I know personally the significant role that a good university museum can play in the lives of its students, scholars, and publics. Studying real artworks is an inspiring and unparalleled experience, one that can stimulate a lifelong visual and intellectual engagement with art. I am grateful for the opportunity to work alongside a talented staff toward our shared goal of continued excellence in scholarship."

Dackerman is a graduate of Vassar College in art history (B.A. '86) and holds advanced degrees in art history from Bryn Mawr College (M.A. '91, Ph.D. '95). Her partner, Helen Molesworth, is chief curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

Marjorie (Jerry) Cohn, the current Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, has worked at the Harvard University Art Museums for 42 years. She was a conservator and served as director of the Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (now the Straus Center for Conservation) before assuming her present position, and has twice filled the challenging role of acting director of the Harvard University Art Museums. Cohn is also a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and serves as president of the Print Council of America, the North American organization of curators of prints, drawings, and photographs.

"I am pleased and made proud by the appointment of Susan as the next Weyerhaeuser Curator," Cohn said. "I am pleased because she will be a great curator and proud because she was once an intern at the Fogg under my supervision, and every teacher wants to be succeeded by her student!"

Print Collection at the Fogg Art Museum
With over 60,000 works from around the world, the print collection at the Fogg Art Museum is the largest and best university print collection in the country. It is particularly strong in old master etchings, engravings, and woodcuts, with extensive representation of the works of the early Italian engravers, Schongauer, Dürer, Rembrandt, Ostade, Castiglione, Ribera, Testa, Canaletto, and Goya.

The 19th- and 20th-century holdings boast outstanding examples by Blake, Turner, Constable, Daumier, Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and, especially, Munch. Among 20th-century works a particular strength is in German expressionism, with substantial representations of Kirchner, Nolde, Heckel, and Schmidt-Rottloff. A fine selection of post-World War II prints, especially by American artists from the 1960s to the present, is currently expanding.

Exceptional Collection of Edgar Degas Masterworks to be Presented at Harvard University Art Museums August 1–November 27, 2005

Cambridge, MA
February 16, 2005

This August, the Harvard University Art Museums will present Degas at Harvard, an exhibition examining Harvard University's comprehensive holdings by Edgar Degas — one of the most important collections of the artist's work in the United States. The exhibition will draw together more than 60 works from the Fogg's own collection, together with promised gifts and significant works from The Dumbarton Oaks and Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., and The Houghton Library at Harvard. The exhibition, which is organized by the Fogg Art Museum, will include paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs. Degas at Harvard will be on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum from August 1 to November 27, 2005.

In 1911, the Fogg was the first museum to mount an exhibition of works by Degas and was the only museum to do so during the artist's lifetime. This exhibition explores the range and depth of Degas' artistic innovation, and Harvard's pivotal role in fostering understanding and scholarship of his works through the commitment of its curators, collectors, and the generations of scholars who have worked with the collection at the Fogg. Among the works featured in the exhibition will be the bronze sculpture Little Dancer, Fourteen Years Old (1880), the pastel Chanteuse de Café (c. 1878), and the photograph Untitled (Self-Portrait in his Library) (c. 1895).

Degas at Harvard is curated by Edward Saywell, Charles C. Cunningham, Sr., Curatorial Associate in Drawings and Stephan Wolohojian, Curator, Department of Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Harvard curator Marjorie Benedict Cohn and Jean Sutherland Boggs, an independent scholar and former pupil of former Fogg director Paul Sachs, and a Leventritt lecture series involving many of today's leading Degas scholars.

Professor and Curator Collaborate on Exhibition Highlighting Literature and Art in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna

Cambridge, MA
February 4, 2005

A Harvard professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures has collaborated with the Busch-Reisinger Museum on an exhibition of art and literature from turn-of-the-century Vienna that can be seen through June 12, 2005.

This teaching exhibition, which complements the University's core-curriculum course "Repression and Expression: Literature and Art in Fin-de-Siècle Germany and Austria," focuses on the dramatic breakdown and transformation of art and literature around 1900, when the Hapsburg empire was fading and artists and writers alike were rebelling against traditional forms of expression.

Many young artists of the time were challenging the art establishment's emphasis on naturalism and realism, which they found tradition-bound and inadequate. At the same time, writers felt that the literary realism of the 19th century was no longer an appropriate mode of representing the world as they experienced it. Some artists and writers came close to questioning whether language and art could accurately render experience at all.

On view are 42 objects, most from the collections of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and Harvard's Fine Arts Library and Houghton Library, that illustrate the crises in art and literature that occurred in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Drawings, prints, illustrated books, and textile samples from artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Josef Hoffman will be on display adjacent to early edition books by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, playwright Arthur Schnitzler, and poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In addition, the curators are providing an exhibition reader for the gallery that will include excerpts from most of the literary works on display, along with the syllabus for the class. The quotation in the exhibition's title is taken from Hofmannsthal.

"This exhibition is an impressive example of how our collections can be creatively integrated with Harvard's academic program," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "We have always organized teaching exhibitions for art history students, but this partnership with a professor of Germanic languages and literatures has produced a fascinating and unexpected look at the common threads in art and literature at that time."

The exhibition was co-organized by Laura Muir, Charles C. Cunningham, Sr., Assistant Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Professor Peter J. Burgard, of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, with the assistance of head teaching fellow Doris McGonagill. It was made possible by the Museum's Ernst A. Teves Fund.

Burgard considers the exhibition a vital part of his course "Repression and Expression." "The exhibition allows the students to experience the intersection of the literature and art of this time and place with an immediacy that lectures can't offer," he said. "We will hold section meetings in the gallery, and the students will visit the exhibition frequently enough to become well acquainted with it and to be tested on it."

Works on Display
One of the key objects in the exhibition is a large black-and-white photographic reproduction of Klimt's mural Jurisprudence (1903–07, destroyed 1945), one of three paintings commissioned by the University of Vienna for the ceiling of its Great Hall. "Jurisprudence is a powerful and unsettling image that provoked a great deal of controversy and debate and is emblematic of the crisis and themes this exhibition explores," said Muir. Although the university's faculty angrily rejected the murals, all three were shown in exhibitions mounted by the Vienna Secession — a group of artists who broke away from the conservative Viennese art establishment in 1897. Klimt was the Secession's first president. Klimt's 1903 painting Pear Tree — the Busch-Reisinger's one great painting from this period — will also be on display. Using quasi-pointillist brush strokes, he transformed a grove of fruit trees. "The painting is meant to represent a pear tree, but in fact it comes very close to being a complete abstraction," Muir noted.

Visitors will be able to view 12 fabric samples created by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser for the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops), a design collaborative inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement that created ceramics, fabrics, furniture, and other decorative art objects from the time of the group's founding in 1903.

Five works by Egon Schiele will be on display, including the Busch-Reisinger's Sleeping Figure with Blanket, a 1910 watercolor and charcoal on paper in which Schiele uses a tartan blanket's bold geometric pattern to begin to abstract the female form beneath it. In another 1910 work by Schiele, Kneeling Girl, Disrobing, one can see how — unlike Klimt, who used mosaic-like decorative elements associated with the feminine as his primary means of abstraction — Schiele made the female figure itself the vehicle of abstraction.

Houghton Library has lent ten rare literary works to the exhibition, including the first edition of Sigmund Freud's Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), published in 1905; poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Letter of Lord Chandos," published in the newspaper Der Tag on Oct. 18 and 19, 1902; and Oskar Kokoschka's illustrated book The Dreaming Boys, published by the Wiener Werkstätte in 1908.

Additional loans to the exhibition include two works on paper and an illustrated book from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a major gouache by Schiele from the New York collector Lowell M. Schulman, a drawing from the Boston collector Tom Rassieur, and an important poster from the distinguished graphic design collection of Merrill C. Berman (Harvard A.B. '60).

About the curators
Peter J. Burgard is a professor of German and a faculty associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard. He teaches courses on Goethe, Baroque literature and art, Nietzsche, and Freud. In the University's core curriculum, he teaches a Foreign Cultures course on early modern German culture and its reception in the 20th century, as well as Literature and Arts C-65, "Repression and Expression," upon which the current exhibition is based.

"Repression and Expression" examines German and Austrian literature and art between 1880 and 1920. Students trace the Nietzschean critique of language and the Freudian revolution in thought on human sexuality in order to explore the ways in which the literature and art of the period reflect one another in their treatment of these central themes and in their innovative modes of representation.

Burgard's research interests include German Baroque literature and European Baroque art, the Age of Goethe, turn-of-the-century literature and art, and 20th-century European drama. Burgard is the author of numerous essays and "Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay," and is editor of Nietzsche and the Feminine and Barock: Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche.

Laura Muir has been the Charles C. Cunningham, Sr., Assistant Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum since 2001. She organized the exhibition Surface Tension: Works by Anselm Kiefer from the Broad Collections and the Harvard University Art Museums in 2002 and the ongoing installation Basic Research: A Selection of Postwar German Paintings and Sculpture. She has also worked as a research associate in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she organized the exhibitions Dancing on the Roof: Photography and the Bauhaus (1923–29) and Pictorialism in New York: 1900–1913.

Other teaching exhibitions at the Busch-Reisinger
The Busch-Reisinger Museum has organized several teaching exhibitions for large-enrollment undergraduate classes in various departments of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. They include: Russian Modernism in 1992, for Professor John Malmstad, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; The Body Politic: Surrealism on Both Sides of the Atlantic 1924–1947 in 1995, for Professor Susan Suleiman, Department of Comparative Literature; and A Laboratory of Modernity: Image and Society in the Weimar Republic in 1998–99, for Professor Eric Rentschler, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.

"The Sport of Kings: Art of the Hunt in Iran and India" on Display at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum Beginning January 22

Cambridge, MA
January 19, 2005

A new exhibition of Islamic and Indian art with the hunt as its theme will be on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, from January 22 through June 26, 2005. Some 43 objects — most 200–500 years old — illustrate the princes and warriors of West and South Asia engaging in various aspects of the royal hunt.

Among the objects to be exhibited in The Sport of Kings: Art of the Hunt in Iran and India are powerful paintings from the Rajput courts of India; meticulously rendered paintings from the Iranian epic poem the Shahnama (Book of Kings); a 200-year-old ceremonial shield made in India from water buffalo hide and vividly adorned with images of lions in combat with real and fantastic animals, rendered in watercolor, lacquer, gold, and silver paint; and various Persian and Indian weapons borrowed from a New England collector.

"Hunting is one of humanity's oldest pursuits, and its imagery plays a key role in the arts of Iran and India," said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "This exhibition offers visitors a chance to enter that world, to understand it both as an activity of great cultural significance and as a powerful source of visual creativity."

Most of the works on display come from the collection of the Harvard University Art Museums, including valuable manuscript pages and a 1,000-year-old earthenware bowl given to the Art Museums in 2002 by collector Norma Jean Calderwood. Twelve objects were loaned by Richard Wagner, a local collector; two came from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and two were loaned from a private collection. One of these, a gold-and-watercolor portrait of a hawk, is attributed to Mansur, one of the finest painters in the court of Mughal emperor Jahangir, who ruled in Northern India from 1605 to 1627.

Works show hunting's royal history
"Hunting as a royal activity has a long history in the Middle East and was thought to be physically, mentally, and morally beneficial to rulers," said Kimberly Masteller, assistant curator of Islamic and later Indian art, who co-organized the exhibition with Mary McWilliams, Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic Art; and Rajeshwari Shah, the Norma Jean Calderwood intern. "Kings and princes also used the hunt to survey their territories, intimidate potential enemies, forge alliances, and train their warriors for battle."

Works in the exhibition illustrate royals hunting with falcons and cheetahs, or pursuing big game such as water buffalo, lions, and tigers. In some cases, it appears that artists even accompanied the hunting parties, returning with sketches that were later developed into more formal paintings.

An Iranian earthenware bowl dating to the late 9th or early 10th century shows a collared, spotted feline atop an imposing horse. Cheetahs, known for their lightning speed but not for their stamina, were brought to the hunt on horseback. There they would be set loose on gazelles, rabbits, or other quarry.

Folios from the epic poem the Shahnama illustrate the hunt in ink, watercolor, and gold on paper. One folio, which dates to the 14th century, shows one of the best-known hunting exploits in Persian literature: the hunter-king Bahram Gur trying to impress the harpist Azada with his virtuoso skills as an archer. Later, angered by the harpist's taunts, he trampled her to death. This work, produced when the Mongols occupied Iran, is from one of the earliest surviving, illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama.

Also on view will be various hunting implements, including a rarely seen type of hand-thrown spear called a jared, a 19th-century Indian rifle adorned with silver, ivory, and gold inlay; and ceremonial swords.

One such sword, made in the 19th century in North India, features a steel blade depicting scenes from a royal hunt and a gold-inlaid hilt. On one side of the blade we see the king, seated on his elephant, leaving his palace accompanied by a retinue of armed nobles on horseback, local huntsmen on foot, dogs, and musicians; and in another scene, hunting tigers with a gun. On the reverse the triumphant hunting party returns to the palace with a tiger.

Another sword from North India, dating to the early 18th century, features a watered steel blade with gold inlay and a silver enameled hilt. An inscription on the blade dedicates the weapon to a Mughal emperor, and its hilt is covered with brilliantly colored motifs of flowers and falcons wrought in Meenakari, a process that involves applying colored glass to precious metals (in this case, silver).

Buffalo Hunt, a Rajput painting from the early 1700s, is an ink drawing with opaque white watercolor that shows a raja from the kingdom of Kotah seated atop an elephant leading a buffalo hunt. In this highly animated drawing, buffalo fruitlessly attempt to flee as the hunting party approach. The raging buffalo charge, killing a nobleman's horse, but they are eventually slain. The painting is a promised gift from Stuart Cary Welch, former curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art at the Harvard University Art Museums.