The Harvard-Princeton Fine Arts Club

The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeHarvard Art Museum

The Harvard-Princeton Fine Arts ClubAuthor(s): C. R. MoreySource: Notes (Fogg Art Museum), Vol. 2, No. 1 (Apr., 1925), pp. 30-34Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College on behalf of Harvard Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4300832 .

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THE HARVARD-PRINCETON FINE ARTS CLUB

IT is only three years since the Harvard-Princeton Fine Arts Club was formed. It has thus no long history behind it, but the organization has accom- plished enough to justify a brief retrospect, and what is more to the point, an estimate of its future usefulness.

The purpose of such an organization is a healthy one - to substitute co6peration for competition, and to ally the resources of identical departments in two universities in order that effort may be econo- mized, and facilities opened to a larger number of students and scholars. The two departments that united in this project were peculiarly fitted for the experiment; their founders, Charles Eliot Norton and Allan Marquand, were scholars of divergent temperaments and interests, each giving to the cur- riculum of Fine Arts in his own university a charac- teristic bent. As time went on, it became apparent to the teachers of the subject at both institutions that the two departments supplemented one another more than they overlapped, so that a graduate student, for example, might well spend part of his period of advanced study at Harvard, and another part at Princeton.

In the matter of book-buying, again, it was felt that each institution might well buy intensively in

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fields that especially occupied its own staff and research workers, so that equipment in this expensive category might not be duplicated. It was realized also that each department would profit by an exchange of professors in order that other methods might be learned, and another point of view might be examined at close range and in actual application. Finally there was apparent to the two faculties the need of a periodical which should publish the research of the Harvard and Princeton groups, and afford a practical machinery for the co6peration in such matters that was already making itself evident.

All these desires have been realized in the three years of the Club's existence. The exchange of graduate students is in full swing; a Princeton student is now pursuing his studies at Harvard, and a Harvard student now occupies a Procter fellowship at Princeton. An exchange of professors was ef- fected last year for the first term, and will un- doubtedly be repeated as opportunity arises. The libraries have agreed upon a system of intensive buying of books in special fields divided between the two institutions, and interchange of assistance in research has become the rule. The Club is publish- ing an annual, "Art Studies," of which the second number has just left the press. Above all, during the three meetings that have been held, alternately at Princeton and at Cambridge, the faculties and students in Fine Arts at Harvard and Princeton have come to know each other well, and to reach a basis of understanding of each other's problems and

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aspirations that would make them co6perate in any case, Club or no Club.

It has gradually dawned upon the membership, however, that its responsibilities are greater, and its sphere of usefulness wider, than its modest begin- nings implied. I have called it an organization; it has been so loosely recruited that the term is al- most a misnomer. Every member of either department, past or present, graduate student or teacher, is eligible, and it has transpired that such membership includes a very large proportion of the teachers of the Fine Arts in American colleges and universities, and of the curators in American museums. When the Club assembles for its yearly meeting, the attendance is found to include old Harvard and Princeton students now on the staffs of Columbia, New York University, Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Michigan, Wellesley, Oberlin, Dart- mouth, Brown, and Chicago, as well as those of the museums at Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Prov- idence, Toledo, Detroit, and Cleveland. Its dis- cussions therefore have a national bearing, and bear fruit in nearly all the agencies whereby the education of American taste is to be furthered. Its responsibilities and influence, we have discovered, are nation-wide.

Two things occurred at the last meeting that brought home to its members the broad bearing of its activities, and the interest elsewhere which its formation and purposes aroused. Mr. Otto Kahn took the initiative, promptly seconded by two gen- erous Harvard donors, of providing the means for

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an Institute in the History of Art to be held at Princeton in the summers under the auspices of the Club, and to be open to qualified students of the subject throughout the country. The first session of this Institute will be held next summer, probably in the latter part of August and the first half of Sep- tember. It is planned to have two lecturers on the staff, one a foreigner of note, and the other a leading teacher of the Fine Arts at one of our own universities. The Institute will be open to women as well as to men, and the courses will probably be four in number, two given by each of the lecturers, and one of these of general character, while the other will take the form of a seminar for those who are inter- ested in the particular line of research represented by the lecturer himself.

The other incident was a proposal made by Miss Belle Greene of the Morgan Library, and character- istic of her faith in American scholarship and the steady support afforded it by the Library over which she presides. The proposal had to do with the cataloguing of American collections, which she suggested should be undertaken by the Club through groups appointed from its members. This suggestion is likely to be put into immediate effect with reference to one American collection at least, which would be a salutary step toward the emanci- pation of our amateurs from the necessity, fancied or real, of importing foreigners to write their cata- logues.

It is evident then, that the Harvard-Princeton Fine Arts Club has a career before it, and work it

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must do for the country at large. The two departments that form its nucleus have been for years the training schools from which issued the students that have manned the expanding Fine Arts schools in our universities and colleges, and have taken up as well the broader educational work of our museums. Some agency is necessary to consolidate this power- ful force in the education of the public, and to re- fresh these apostles of taste, in their sometimes up- hill work of combating contemporary materialism, with assurance of the constant support of the parent departments, and the sympathy and solidarity of the other labourers in the cause. This agency the Club will be, and in addition, a clearing house for all progressive movements of scholarship and teaching within the field of the Fine Arts.

C. R. MOREY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

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The Harvard-Princeton Fine Arts Club