From 'accidental' beginnings, college art collections thrive as research, teaching assets
By Frank Lewis
Director of exhibitions and curator,
Wriston Art Center Galleries
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2002
A few years ago I was interviewing an art collector, and I asked, "When did you know you had become a collector?" His reply: "When I had to move to accommodate my artworks."
That situation seems particularly apt to university collections. Few colleges start out with a museum in their charter. Instead, over the years, gifts of artworks and objects purchased for teaching purposes accumulate or are dispersed throughout campus buildings, many finding their way to office walls, a few placed in storage, and so forth -- until someone realizes that a kind of critical mass has been achieved. Even some of the best-known university collections started as accumulations of teaching resources, more like an 18th-century Wunderkammer than a proper museum.
Contrary to what one might believe, this "accidental" collecting has some positive results, as institutions acquire a wide variety of artworks. Granted, some are of lesser quality than might be desired, but the advantage of a period of undirected acquisition is that it prevents a particularly strong-willed curator from directing the holdings based primarily on his or her special interests. For a liberal arts institution like Lawrence, the broad-based nature of the collection helps to ensure that a wide variety of works can be made available to students and faculty members.
Even though the Wriston Art Galleries have been established since 1989 and even though a concerted effort was made at that time to gather all of the artworks on campus under the care of the Wriston, our curatorial instincts suggested that there probably was more gathering yet to be done. Accordingly, in the summer of 2001 the gallery staff and student interns began a systematic inventory of all of the artworks on the Lawrence campus.
On more than one day staff members went home dirty from rummaging in basements and boiler rooms, making sure that, over the course of time, artworks that had come into the college's possession had not been misplaced in the course of painting an office or relocating a department. Some days were like a birthday, when a storage room relinquished a treasure or a painting that had hung so long in an office that it was no longer noticed was discovered to be an important artifact.
Counting, cataloging, and learning
Unlike the more familiar and tedious retail-store inventory, a careful accounting of an art collection offers wonderful opportunities to study works of art and be reminded of the diversity and variety of the objects in a particular collection. A unique object that may often be overshadowed by a larger cohesive collection -- such as Lawrence's Ottilia Buerger Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins or
the works on paper in the LaVera Pohl Collection of German Expressionist Art -- can be seen and viewed on its own merits.
The inventory, despite its focus on counting and cataloging, provided wonderful learning opportunities for the student interns, as they were confronted with objects less familiar to them than the works from our collection that are often assigned as research topics. As they developed familiarity with a wide range of artworks, and as the professional staff took time to explain many of the processes by which various works were created, the students expressed their excitement when they returned from a search claiming to have found a dry point etching and had their observations confirmed by the inventory description.
In one case, Jenny Benjamin, '01, then a senior art history major (see sidebar), and Ester Fajzi-DeGroot, collections manager, returned from a search during which they had opened a hidden storage area in the Chapman Teakwood Room and found a matted and framed print of a crumbling city gate. As the piece had no accession number and due to its size and the film of dirt on the glass, both of them assumed it was an inexpensive commercial reproduction.
Back at the gallery, we carefully removed the print from its frame, only to find that it was an original etching, larger than any other in our collection. The signature, done in pencil at the bottom right edge of the print, was unclear, with only the first name and a few letters of the last name legible.
By this time, other interns had joined in the search for an attribution. Consulting a checklist of artists, they narrowed the field of possibilities, and a lively discussion ensued as to possible date of the still-unknown print. Calling on their familiarity with art history and works in our collection, the students eliminated certain names that otherwise seemed to fit, because the time in which the artists worked didn't mesh with the look of the print. From our discussion of the style of the image and looking carefully at its surface characteristics and the type of paper it was on, all felt strongly that this piece must be a work of the late 19th or early 20th century.
Eventually we all agreed that the strongest candidate was an artist listed as having practiced in Britain at this time. As one intern rushed off to the library to search for a more complete source of information, another checked in our recently revamped computer database, on what we all agreed was the slim chance that we had a print by Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) in our collection.
Surprisingly, though Brangwyn is today known almost solely to specialists in the history of printmaking, the Seeley G. Mudd Library did have a volume published in the 1920s on the work of this artist. By the time we had the book in hand, Ester had pulled the sole Brangwyn print in our collection. Not only did the signatures match perfectly, our library resource specifically discussed a series that the artist had published of images of the crumbling medieval gates and walls of cities throughout Europe.
Our records told us that the smaller Brangwyn print, the one that was properly accessioned, had come to us with the consolidation of Lawrence and Milwaukee-Downer Colleges, as had the book in the Mudd Library. We surmised that the larger print had possibly found its way into a faculty office or classroom in Milwaukee and had come to us un-accessioned by M-DC.
In a serendipitous footnote, a few months later, as the staff was picking up some paintings by Milwaukee-Downer art professor and noted artist Emily Groom for our fall exhibition, Professor Groom's niece, from whom we were borrowing some works, had a Brangwyn drawing on her wall. When I asked about it, the lender exclaimed, "Oh yes, Aunt Em studied with Brangwyn when she visited England around 1909." We unveiled our newly accessioned, though not recently acquired, Brangwyn work in an introductory gallery to the Emily Groom exhibition in the fall of 2001.
Locating the 'unlocated'
When I first arrived at the Wriston Galleries, almost two years ago, I spent some of my first few weeks reading through the files and sifting through our collections in order to familiarize myself with the variety of works in our care.
In one of the many files I reviewed, I came across a letter from the estate of Martin Ryerson. As I had worked some years ago at the Art Institute of Chicago, I recognized the name. Ryerson had been a member of the board of the Art Institute, and his name is on many of the most important works in the AIC's collection. The letter, dated August 28, 1938, stated that, although the Art Institute of Chicago had garnered the first pick of Ryerson's vast collection on his death, the executors wished to give numerous Midwestern institutions a chance to receive some redundant works as a donation. Lawrence had been chosen as one of those institutions.
Checking the collection database, I found that three of the works that were received from the Ryerson bequest were listed as "not located" during an inventory done in July of 2000. I made a note to myself to pay extra attention to any likely candidates that we hoped to uncover. Of particular interest was the listing of a watercolor by the French artist Maxime Camille Maufra (1861-1918). Though I had only a passing knowledge of Maufra, I was very excited to find that the Wriston Galleries may well have a work by an artist who had worked closely with many of the better-known impressionists.
Some weeks into the inventory, Ester called from Raymond House to tell me that she might have located the Maufra. Returning to the galleries, she produced a framed work, covered, like the Brangwyn discovered earlier, in a thick layer of dust.
Once more we gathered the interns and meticulously unframed the piece, being careful to preserve the frame and the glass. On removing the paper backing, we found that the watercolor was still on its original backing, which was crowded with paper stickers, including the label of the Parisian framer of the piece. Of great interest to all of us were the various museum labels, which recorded the work's presence in a number of early 20th-century exhibitions. This sort of evidence of provenance helps our students understand how the history of an object does not stop with its creation but that it continues to acquire layer after layer of cultural meanings and importance.
The two other pieces listed as "unlocated" on the earlier inventory also turned up in our search. A vibrant Paul Signac watercolor (Signac was equally influenced by Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat) and a painting by an American artist, William Penhallow Henderson, who had spent some time in Brittany with Paul Gauguin, add much to the educational value of the collection and will soon be used for both research and display.
As much as we learned from the now-completed inventory and as many welcome surprises as we had during the process, the growth of the galleries' collection does not always happen through discovery. We are fortunate that many dedicated benefactors contribute to its holdings.
A new acquisition
While we have always felt that interns help us as much as we help them become familiar with various aspects of museum practice, a recent example of an intern's gratitude speaks volumes about the Lawrence experience.
Sarah Bowen, '01, was already a Wriston Galleries intern when I arrived on staff. During my initial weeks on site, the student taught the teacher. Sarah worked diligently, graciously, and tirelessly, answering my questions and guiding me around the campus. As a fine art major Sarah was particularly dismayed by the collection's dearth of art done after World War II. Though she never voiced such sentiments, I also perceived that she was disappointed to find few women artists represented in the collection.
A few weeks before her graduation, Sarah came in to tell me that she had petitioned a family foundation to donate funds specifically to be used for the acquisition of a work of art. Though the gift came otherwise unencumbered, the staff, in consultation with the gallery committee, decided to seek a work by a female artist and produced after World War II.
In late fall 2001, the Wriston Galleries acquired "Night Sounds" by the American artist Louise Nevelson. Nevelson was one of a few internationally recognized female artists working in the late 1950s and until her death in 1988. Her works, primarily sculptural, are constructed from detritus and flotsam found on numerous walks through New York City. They are a part of major museum collections throughout the world. In keeping with our strong tradition of print collecting, "Night Sounds" is a lead relief print, made by embossing lead sheets with thin scraps of wood, found metal, and paper.
Exhibitions such as the recent "Portraits of Power: Selections from the Ottilia Buerger Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins" remind us of the significance of major gifts of works of art, but the task of preservation and protection that necessitates periodic inventories offers staff and students alike the chance to re-discover old friends and to develop new relationships with the wide variety of works that compose the collections of Lawrence University and the Wriston Art Galleries.
Frank Lewis, a veteran art magazine editor and art educator, joined the Lawrence staff in 2000. Founder and first editor of Art Muscle magazine, he also edited Metalsmith, a magazine devoted to artwork in metal, and was Wisconsin editor of The New Art Examiner, as well as writing art criticism for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His previous museum posts have included the UW-Milwaukee Art Museum and the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan.
