The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard

The Fogg Museum of Art at HarvardAuthor(s): Ella S. SipleSource: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 50, No. 291 (Jun., 1927), pp. 306-307+309-311+314-315Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/863215 .

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THE FOGG MUSEUM OF ART AT HARVARD BY ELLA S. SIPLE

N the past twenty-five years we have seen a remarkable evolution of methods of art instruction. The creative artist has felt the need of turning from nature now and then

to study the art of the museums, and the layman has been encouraged to develop his. aesthetic sense by intimate contact with the best original works of art within his reach. From the old method of studying scantily illustrated books, the instructor has turned, first to photographs, then to stereopticon slides and, finally, to originals. No doubt it is the aim of every col- lege and university Division of Fine Arts-as, indeed, it is the aim of the Division at Harvard -to form a collection of works of art to supple- ment the instruction offered. The Fogg Museum at Harvard is unique, not in the kind but in the quality of its achievement. It has done and is doing a distinguished work, and the opening of the new museum in June will mark the beginning of a period of still greater growth and service.

The Fogg Art Museum is an institution in which the Division of Fine Arts of the Univer- sity and the art collections are housed under one roof in such a way as to bring about the greatest harmony between the two, and, in con- sequence, the greatest usefulness. The development of the institution has proceeded along the following lines. First, the department was established. It owed its prestige in large measure to the distinguished scholarship of the late Charles Eliot Norton, who was appointed Professor of the History of Art at Harvard in 1875, and who occupied very nearly the same position in the realm of art criticism in America as did John Ruskin in nineteenth-century England. Professor Norton was a friend of Ruskin, as was also the first Director of the museum, Professor Charles Herbert Moore. At that time the collection at Harvard consisted largely of photographs and casts and a small group of original drawings. It was to house this collection that the first Fogg Art Museum, the bequest of Mrs. William Hayes Fogg in memory of her husband, was built in 1895. A few years after that a number of early paintings came to the museum through the generosity of its Director, Mr. Edward W. Forbes, its Associate Director, Professor Paul J. Sachs, and other friends. By 1906 the exhibition space was so inadequate that plans for a new building were under way. That was twenty years ago. In the interval these plans have been dis- cussed and re-made again and again by those who were using the museum and understood

its needs. Finally, the designs were turned over to architects for completion, a million dollars were raised for the building and another million for endowment, and the beautiful structure now nearing completion was the result.

Before any adequate understanding of the suitability of the new museum can be reached, it is necessary to know something of the present Division of Fine Arts and the scope of the collection. The aim of the Division, as it is expressed in various courses, is the development of aesthetic appreciation based on sound knowledge of essentials. Emphasis is laid on quality, design, colour, draughtsmanship, history, and technical processes. It is the purpose of the directors to secure for the permanent collection only those works which are the best of their kind, and, as a result of the pursuit of this high ideal Harvard students have before them day after day works of such quality as Simone Martini's Crucifixion [PLATE II, A] and a tenth-century Cambodian head which is con- sidered the finest in America. They can study the superb design of opposing diagonals in Tintoretto's Diana and the architectural orna- ment of the twelve Romanesque capitals [PLATE I, B] from Moutier-Saint-Jean. They become sensitive to line and colour through acquaint- ance with Oriental paintings and textiles, or, for example, with the recently acquired eighth- century Bodhisattva from T'un-huang [PLATE I, A]. In draughtsmanship the student has his standards set by original drawings by Mantegna, Tiepolo, Rembrandt [PLATE II, C], Fragonard, Ingres [PLATE II, D], and others, or he may turn to the print collection which is one of the largest and best to be found in any of our museums.

In connexion with the courses in the history of art it has been both impossible and unneces- sary to form a collection representative of all periods and countries. Harvard students have access to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and to Fenway Court, and the purchases made by the Fogg Museum have been principally in fields which were not already well represented in these other institutions. The development of European painting, and of drawings and prints by the masters, can be studied at the Fogg, however, in an important series of works. There are, among other things, a panel attri- buted to Guido da Siena, a Pesellino (?), a Fra Angelico, a Botticelli, a Venetian Madonna which is perhaps by Bartolommeo Vivarini, a Byzantine painting of the Garden of Gethsemane [PLATE III, A], an Adoration of the Kings by Cosimo Tura, a Clouet portrait drawing of

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Francis I, Van Dyck's Portrait of Nicolas Triest, Gainsborough's Count Rumford, and some fine Turner sketches. The loans include a Madonna and Child with Saints by Benvenuto di Giovanni [PLATE III, B], and St. Peter Martyr by Lorenzo Lotto [PLATE II, B]. These are but a few.

Advanced courses in the processes of painting are also conducted at the Fogg. The students prepare the plaster themselves and work in fresco. They carry tempera painting through all its stages from the original panel through the application of the gesso and the bolo, the laying on of the gold and the pig- ments. They use the Venetian method of underpainting and become familiar with trans- parent glazes. This experience with materials and the opportunities afforded for the close examination of originals enables the student to detect forgeries and repainting, or, at any rate, shortens by a number of years the road to the acquisition of such critical ability.

Supplementing these laboratory studies the museum has in its collection early encaustic portraits, a fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio, numerous Italian tempera paintings, and several panels painted in the Flemish medium. The unfinished Diana by Tintoretto not only reveals that artist's individual method of pro- cedure but is an excellent example of the brown underpainting and rich glazes of the Venetian school. Several restored paintings have been acquired for study purposes. One of these is the Crespi Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, a painting which was almost entirely destroyed by the heat of a fire in the hold of the vessel which brought it to America. The remaining parts were transferred to aluminum and restored with the idea of preserving as much as possible of the beauty of a great work. Carlo Crivelli's much mutilated Pieta, which was exhibited in the Burlington Fine Arts Club group of forgeries, has also been acquired by the Fogg for purposes of study. The Christ had been completely destroyed and a new figure forged, the figure at the right had been un- necessarily repainted, and the figure at the left much worked over by the restorer. It is the purpose of the directors to have the figure at the right cleaned and to reveal in this way three stages: pure Crivelli, pure forgery, and Crivelli repainted. Close study of such a picture is a lesson in discrimination.

The X-ray has been employed at Harvard with interesting results. Through its use the student is occasionally enabled to see original painting underneath repainted areas and to proceed with assurance to have the restoration removed. In this way a strong Franz Pourbus1

was discovered beneath a superficially pretty Flemish portrait, and an evidently repainted head in a canvas by Tintoretto was found to conceal a fine, characteristic one beneath.

We have stressed the correlation between the Division of Fine Arts and the Museum. It now remains for us to see how the new building promises to cement the bond and to provide an attractive and practical setting for works of art as well as for classes and laboratory work. The building has developed from the inside out. Function has been the prime con- sideration, but, as in the case of many practical objects designed for use, the integrity of structure and elimination of irrelevant detail have resulted in harmonious design.

The exterior of the museum [PLATE IV, A] conforms to the traditional Georgian style of Harvard, and, like the new museum in Provi- dence, is in keeping with the history and tem- perament of New England. There are no tower- ing columns to flank the entrance, no grand and dismal flight of wide white steps within, no pomp of marble and brocade. Art has come down from her pedestal in very friendly fashion. One enters through a simple portal not unlike those in Salem, and finds oneself in a vaulted vestibule which leads directly into the central court. This court is the nucleus and the dominant note of the interior. It is constructed of Italian travertine, soft in texture and tone, and is a replica-multiplied by four- of the early sixteenth-century facade of Sangallo's House at Montepulciano. The sur-

prising thing is that so simple and restrained is the design of the court and of the whole

building that one is conscious of no lack of

unity between the exterior, reminiscent of the Corinthian, the Italian Renaissance court, with its surrounding arcades and round arches sup- ported by Ionic columns, and the strictly twentieth-century galleries and class-rooms with their straight lines and unworried sur- faces. The simplicity of design brings the whole into close harmony.

Nearly every gallery and room on the three floors opens on the arcades. This gives the visitor glimpses of the beauty of the court in

ever-changing light and from ever-changing angles [PLATE IV, B]. It is reasonable to hope that when the installation is completed the Fogg Mluseum will have brought to America much of the charm of the cloister-museums of Europe, the Musde de Cluny, San Marco in Florence, the Musde des Beaux-Arts in the Augustinian convent in Toulouse. And it bids fair to combine this charm with a very practical, sanitary, modern, working plant.

The laboratories, lecture rooms, library, and galleries are so arranged that students must pass through the court and come into contact

1 This painting is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

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A--Christ in Gethsemane. Byzantine School; probably sixteenth century. Panel.

B-Madonna and Child with Saints, by Benvenuto di Giovanni. Panel. (Lent by Mr. Edward W. Forbes to the Fogg Museum)

Plate III. The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard



A-The Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard

B-The corridor and court, Fogg Museum

Plate IV. The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard



with the collections whenever they enter the building. In order to reach the large lecture room they must cross the Great Hall with its sixteenth-century carved ceiling from Dijon and its tapestries of the same period. In this way even the casual undergraduate will get something of the " contagion " of art.

But how will the new museum further the specific aims of the Department? How will it enable the collection to play a more important r61e in the development of aesthetic judgment. In the first place the increased space will allow each work of art to express itself to the full, without undue competition from other works placed in too close proximity to it. The quality of the collection will thus become more apparent. The new small galleries will afford opportunity for interesting grouping of related works, which will facilitate instruction in the history of art. Increased laboratory and library facilities will stimulate research. Objects and pictures not on exhibition will be available for study as they have never been before. The large north-lighted room, in which paintings not installed in the galleries will be arranged on sliding screens, will make it possible for the student to examine originals in a quiet, pleasant, well-lighted place. This daylight storage is an important contribution which the Fogg has made to museum technique.

In these ways the Fogg Art Museum, under the leadership of its able Directors, Mr. Forbes

and Professor Sachs, is extending to wider and wider circles of influence. These men have in co-operation with them the Division of Fine Arts, the staff of the museum, the friends of the Fogg. They are reaching the undergraduate, the alumni, the collectors of art. And they are gathering about them each year groups of graduate students, who enjoy intimate contact with the museum and its problems and are fitted, through actual experience, to go out into the museum field and assume places of responsibility. There is need for more thorough art scholarship in America and Harvard is doing her best to encourage scholarship. One evidence of this, in addition to those just mentioned, is the maintenance in co-operation with Princeton of an endowed publication, Art Studies, in which the fruits of research are set forth.

Yet there is no rattling of dead bones at the Fogg. It maintains a liberal policy with regard to the exhibition of contemporary art. It has recently linked itself very definitely with the present by creating a department of the motion picture and laying plans for the preservation of the best films of each year. Harvard thus becomes the first educational institution in America to recognize the art of the motion picture and the necessity for its preservation and encouragement. The Fogg Museum is looking forward as well as backward. In link- ing the past with the present and the future it is making a vital contribution to art in America.

THE FRANCONIAN SCHOOL AND THE MOSAN COUNTRY BY MARGUERITE DEVIGNE

ONSTANT exchanges, commer- cial as well as artistic, took place in medieval times between the Rhine and the Meuse. Dr. 0. von Falke and H. Frauberger in their

study of the Mosan goldsmiths,' have shown the extent of their influence over the Cologne schools. For it was chiefly with Cologne, especially at first, that the artists of the. ancient principality of Liege had dealings. Between the Rhenish metropolis and the towns of Lidge and Maestricht relationships were active and reciprocal. M. J. Klein has pointed out,2 in the works of the second half of the twelfth century, preserved in Cologne territory, traces of the 'influence of Mosan, or more pre- cisely, of Maestricht art, whilst a work isolated in the north of the Low Country, the Egmond

tympanum, is influenced by Cologne. The great decorative style of the thirteenth

century, the French Gothic, was late in pene- trating to the valley of the Meuse. It may have arrived there by a roundabout way, that is to say, by way of those German sculptors who, in 1279, came to work on the doorways of the old St. Lambert Cathedral in Li6ge.s The south entrance of the church of St. Servais, in Maestricht, is probably only a heavier repeti- tion of one of the St. Lambert portals and must date from the last years of the thirteenth century. Now this portal of St. Servais reproduces exactly the iconographical theme of the portal of Senlis (France), which was the death, resur- rection and crowning of the Virgin. This last portal was probably the model used by the

1 0. von Falke and H. Frauberger. " Deutsche Schmelzar- beiten des Mittelalters " (Frankfurt a. M. (1904). 2 Johannes Klein " Die romanische Steinplastik des Niederrheins " (Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 184, Strasbourg, 1916).

s This hypothesis was put forward by R. Ligtenberg in " Die romanische Steinplastik in den nirdlichen Niederlanden I. (The Hague, 19z8), p. 77. I myself put it forward in 1912 in presenting a doctorial thesis (not yet published) to the jury of the Faculty of Art and Archaeology in the University of Li6ge.

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A-Bodhisattva; Chinese, eighth century. From T'un-huang

,B-Romanesque capital from Avignon

Plate I. The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard



1! r

iz

A-Crucifixion, by Simone Martini. Panel

B-St. Peter Martyr, by Lorenzo Lotto. Canvas (Lent by Mr. Edward W. Forbes to the Fogg Museum)

C-Studies, by Rembrandt. Pen and wash D-Mme. Hayard, by Ingres. Pencil

Plate II. The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard



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The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard