FRANKLIN KELLY: Good afternoon.
I'm Franklin Kelly.
I'm Deputy Director and Chief
Curator here at the National
Gallery, and I thank you for all
coming on this lovely day.
First, we'll start with the most
obvious thing,
and that is the word, curator,
And where that word comes from,
what its origin is.
It comes, like so many things,
from the word in Latin, which
stands for care.
And the standard dictionary
definition is, quote,
"one that has the care
and superintendence
of something,
especially one working
in a museum, zoo, or other place
of exhibit."
Now, I also like to think
that the word, care, can embrace
not just the meaning of you're
responsible for the well-being
of something,
but that you also care
for the something
that you are in charge
of well-being.
Now, it's mainly in America--
not exclusively-- mainly
in America that curators, as
in art museum professionals,
are called that.
In England, they are often
called keepers, which
is confusing,
because in this country
sometimes
keepers are the people you
associate with zoos.
And then in France, they're
usually called conservateur,
which is also confusing,
because conservators
in this country
are people who work on works
of art, who restore them,
who fix them when they're
damaged, clean them.
So it's confusing that curator
is what it is.
There are also people who like
to say that what a curator does
is quote curate.
And that is-- as has become
typical--
creation of a verb
out of a noun.
It is not wrong.
In my many years of teaching,
I was chagrined over time to see
the things I kept telling
my students were wrong-- like
split infinitives and like--
that those no longer are wrong.
So curate is no longer wrong.
I don't particularly use it.
I find it interesting how many
walks of life do now.
Fashion designers curate fashion
shows, and people curate staged
houses.
Anyway.
But I've always thought curate
is another word,
and that's curate--
which is, simply speaking,
a member of the clergy
who's in charge of a parish.
That's not what I do.
My father was a theologian,
but he wasn't in charge
of a parish.
Anyway.
So curators at museums.
Now they can take
many different types
of identities.
And often that depends
on the size of the museum.
And we're talking about art
museums specifically.
Small museums often may have one
curator who
is responsible for the breadth
of the entire collections
of that institution, which might
range in chronology
from the ancient
to the contemporary.
They might range in media
from paintings, works on paper,
to crafts, to who knows what.
Medium size museums often have
several curators, most generally
broken down into areas by medium
or by chronology.
So they may have a curator
of ancient art, a curator
of Renaissance, or they may have
curator of paintings.
Curator of sculpture.
And then, in the very largest
museums, like the National
Gallery,
there are many curators.
There more than 30
here at the Gallery, ranging
from assistant curators,
associate curators,
full curators, senior curators.
And then there's
one chief curator-- that's me.
They tend to be in charge
of areas of specific expertise,
or areas of specific expertise.
So particular schools
of painting.
In the case of the National
Gallery, we have curators
of American
and British painting,
French painting, Italian
Renaissance, Northern
Renaissance, Modern--
which is more than painting.
It's sculpture, and all kinds
of things.
But broken down
into those broad areas
of expertise.
And my particular history
at the Gallery--
I've been in the job I'm in now
as Deputy Director of--
I'm starting my 10th year--
but for much longer,
before that,
I was in the Department
of American and British
paintings.
I was a curator
of that material.
American and British paintings.
Now, the 30 or so curators
that we have at the Gallery
are responsible for over 145,000
objects.
And those are in distinct areas.
They include paintings,
sculptures, decorative arts.
And by decorative arts--
that's a very wide ranging term.
It can mean furniture.
It can mean applied arts.
It can mean silver, glass,
all kinds of things.
It's not a huge part
of our collection,
but it is part.
Works on paper, which include
prints and drawings,
photography, photographs.
Modern Art, which can be
all kinds of media, including
time-based now, media.
Video, performance, all sorts
of things.
We are not as wide ranging
in those areas
of our collection,
say, as something
like the Metropolitan Museum,
which ranges from the ancient
to the modern,
and across all world cultures.
The Metropolitan Museum-- I said
we have about 145,000 objects--
the Metropolitan likes to say
they have over 2 million,
although I have a friend there
who tells me it's really more
like 400,000, because they have
some sort of secret caches.
They have a huge collection,
of all things, baseball cards.
So their numbers are somewhat
skewed, but nevertheless,
it's a much larger--
I'd love to have those cards,
by the way.
Can you imagine what they must
have?
In any event,
in that general frame
of curatorial work, whether it's
from a small perspective
of a smaller museum,
a medium museum, or a very large
one, there are basically four
prime areas of responsibility.
Now these don't embrace
everything curators do.
And there are many things
that they do.
But broadly speaking, they fall
into these four categories.
Administer and supervise
the permanent collection.
And by permanent, that means
the collection that the museum
owns and it keeps.
Many works of art, as you know,
that you see in a museum
may be there
for special purposes.
A temporary exhibition.
Whether they're on loan,
or some other reason.
But the works that are
in the permanent collection--
the 145,000 objects that I
mentioned-- those are the areas
that individual curators have
responsibility for.
And I'll look at each
of these areas
in some detail, some more
than others.
The second is conduct research
on works of art.
Again, primarily the works
in the collections
that a curator is
responsible for,
but it can also include others
that are owned
by other institutions,
individuals,
works that are in the area,
again, of expertise
of individual curators.
Organize and coordinate
temporary exhibitions--
another huge part
of curatorial work.
And then, acquire new works
for the permanent collection.
Museums are living and growing--
if they are not frozen in some
fashion by the terms
of their establishment,
by a bequest,
or a donor's wishes--
and they grow.
And they grow in areas where
they can, often exponentially.
In some areas, they don't.
It's very hard to acquire
Italian Renaissance paintings
now.
When I started my career, almost
40 years ago in museum work,
it was becoming harder, but not
by any means
impossible to acquire
great works of American Art.
Historical American art.
Now it has become very
difficult.
So to start with the first
of those areas--
administer and supervise
permanent collections--
that includes a lot of the most,
I think probably, obvious tasks
you might think of.
For instance, museums have
galleries where
permanent collections are
displayed.
Works that can be on view
on a relatively long-term basis,
like paintings and sculpture,
which are not
subject to the disadvantages
of, say, paper works-- prints,
drawings, photographs, which can
fade over time.
But the galleries are more
or less the places where
the permanent collection is
shown.
This is a view of one wall
in one gallery in the suite
of American galleries.
This happens to be
a large gallery of landscape
paintings.
There is always in the museum
environment
a kind of illusion
of permanence, In these, quote,
"permanent collection"
galleries, because they are
meant to be places where you can
go, and have repeated experience
of works of art.
In this case, works by artists
such as Frederic Church, Albert
Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, William
Stanley Haseltine.
But they're anything but that,
because things happen.
Works have to be taken down,
for whatever reason.
Most often, that's
because another institution is
organizing an exhibition.
Let's say they are organizing
an exhibition on buffaloes.
You might laugh, but there are
art museums that do exhibitions
on particular topics
such as that.
This is a Bierstadt of buffaloes
in an extraordinary stormy
landscape.
They might request that work
for the exhibition.
It then goes to the curator
for their evaluation.
They look at things like, what
is the scholarly importance
of the exhibition?
Various things.
Does the museum
or other institution
meet the requirements, in terms
of security,
environmental controls?
A host of things.
With conservators, an evaluation
is made, can the work of art
stand the vicissitudes
of travel?
Can it be packed safely?
Can it be sent, however?
By train-- rarely-- by car,
airplane, safely.
And then, shown and enjoyed
in another institution,
and then brought back?
But every time something
like that happens, you can
imagine, that when this painting
leaves, you suddenly have a gap.
And it's not always the case
that you have something exactly
appropriate,
and the right size, everything,
to put right into that gap.
So frequently-- and this can
drive art handlers and others
crazy--
curators end up installing--
reinstalling-- entire galleries,
because of one painting going
out on view.
That's if you're lucky.
Sometimes you can actually
do two or three galleries.
But it's a tremendous sort
of juggling and moving
around of works,
but still trying to maintain
both the representation
of the collection,
but also that notion of a kind
of permanence of experience.
Also, I mentioned conservation.
Curators are responsible,
with conservators,
for evaluating works of art
in terms of their condition,
both in terms of,
are they suitable for loan?
Are they suitable for display?
But do they need attention
in any way?
And that can be in myriad ways.
And that can be, they may just
be a simply--
have a discolored varnish that
would be taken off
to great advantage
to show the painting more
clearly.
They may have areas of what's
called over paint,
where damage in a previous time
has been touched up
by previous restorers.
And sometimes that can be done
quite expertly.
Sometimes it can be done not so.
Most often, you find
old restorations of paintings
tend to do too much.
Where there might be a small,
let's say,
the size of a dime, loss
of paint in a sky,
of a landscape,
it's not unusual for someone who
restored that--
rather than just try to paint
that little spot,
and make it blend in,
repaint an entire area
of the sky.
Curators evaluating that sort
of thing with conservators
try to make judgments about how
can the work best be treated,
and best be shown
in its optimum way
for our viewers and visitors?
This is a view of our paintings
conservation lab.
One part of it.
You see a lot of things here.
You see, actually, here is
a Italian Renaissance painting,
lying on a table
for examination.
It's a panel painting,
but it's actually on something
that's called a cradle.
That's an early way of trying
to stabilize a panel,
a wooden panel,
to keep it from moving
as humidity and temperature
change.
And as these paintings--
particularly works that have
been in, say, a chapel, or one
setting for hundreds of years--
are moved to other places,
they may experience changes
in these environmental issues
that will make them move.
Now it was long ago thought
that creating this kind
of bracing mechanism,
which is made up of--
this is if you ever want to know
everything about cradles
in about 30 seconds.
They're made up of cross pieces
of wood, that are meant to move.
And they brace the panel,
and they move slightly when
the panel moves
with the changes.
Unfortunately,
the wooden members
of the cradle,
those cross-pieces,
also swell with humidity
and change with temperature.
They tend to lock into place.
So they become rigid, and make
the problem worse.
That is often something that you
have to make a judgment call
about, whether to remove it.
To redo something that was done
with good intentions.
Most often, the starting point
is do no harm.
So if you can leave it alone,
maintain
proper environmental controls,
probably it won't need that.
There are all kinds
of other things that we use.
This is a light.
But there are
stereo microscopes.
There are various ways
of looking at paintings.
This is a very large painting.
I believe it's Manet's
Old Musician.
Can't quite tell.
But you're seeing it there
in either a large infrared
or x-ray view.
Here's
another large Italian painting.
This is actually part
of a huge Joshua Reynolds,
called Lady Delme
and Her Children,
which was under conservation
at that time.
Reynolds was a notoriously
difficult artist
for our future generations
to deal with,
because he used paints that
didn't always dry properly.
He blended paint and varnish.
Did all kinds of things.
Anyway, there are
many challenges for this kind
of care and treatment
of permanent collections.
And as I say, these are worked
out between curators
and conservators, with the hope
that, in the end,
there'll be a good result. Often
times, we undertake conservation
and learn a great deal
about a work of art
that we didn't know before.
That can be from, literally,
just from close examination
with a microscope.
I once looked at a date
on a painting that, for as long
as could be remembered,
was read 1860.
Absolutely, that's what it
looked like.
And when I was working on that
particular painting-- it was
by an artist named Fitz Henry
Lane--
I began to wonder.
He died in 1865,
and in the last couple of years
of his life, his style changed
a little bit.
And I began to wonder
whether this painting didn't fit
better with that later style.
And looking at the date
under a stereo microscope,
we were able to discern
that the final digit was in fact
a 3.
1863, not zero.
Couldn't see it otherwise.
In any event, we often learn
many things.
And often we undertake
examinations of paintings where
they're not treated.
They're examined so that we do
understand more about them,
particularly when we're getting
ready to work on them
for some particular purpose.
Now, I mentioned that leads
into research.
There is a responsibility, that
is true for all curatorial work,
to understand as much
as possible
about the works that are
in your care.
In some areas,
that can be enormous numbers
of objects.
The collections
of American and British
paintings are somewhere
around 2000, but that dwarfs
in comparison to something
like 80,000 prints,
for instance.
No one can be expected to know
every single thing there is
to know
about every single print.
But you can aspire to know as
much as possible.
There are enormous numbers
of questions that can be raised
by works of art.
And they're very, in many cases,
very, very basic ones.
For instance, who painted it?
That may be obvious.
It may be long associated
with a particular artist.
This is a Thomas Cole painting.
It is also signed, as this tells
us right here,
in the inscription.
But that doesn't always mean
it's true.
There are false signatures.
Where was it painted?
When was it painted?
What, if anything, does it mean?
Who owned it in the past?
That can be very important.
Where has it been exhibited?
Both in its own time,
1826 in the case
of this painting,
and in the years since.
What is its condition?
What are we seeing?
Are we actually seeing
everything here as the artist
meant it, or have things changed
over time that can affect how we
understand it?
There are also specific types
of questions that can be raised
by specific types of paintings.
With a portrait, there's always
the question of who the sitter
is.
And that is something that,
again, may seem to be perfectly
obvious.
You are given a painting
by a family, they said this is
Great Aunt Mirabelle.
She lived 200 years ago.
And she was painted by John
Singleton Copley,
the great Boston painter.
That's wonderful.
And that may well be exactly
what they believe,
but that can often not be true.
There's a lot of invention that
happens in family histories,
as you probably all know.
And it often takes the form
of claiming ancestors who aren't
necessarily your own.
But nevertheless, it's
part of the job of a curator
to untangle that.
Genealogy.
The researching of family trees,
history.
That's one of the skills you
learn if you're working
on portraits.
With a landscape painting,
like this.
Where is it painted?
Is it a real place?
Or was it something the artist
imagined?
With a still life painting,
there is the identity of what's
depicted.
The fruit, or the flowers,
or whatever.
And that can lead
to other questions.
Again, is it a real kind
of image?
Did the artist actually place
all those fruits or flowers
together on the table,
and paint them?
Or, as we've learned,
in many cases, did they actually
paint fruits from one season
and flowers from another,
and create
these wonderfully sort
of creative combinations?
So there are a lot
of different skills
that you might need to hone
as a curator.
And let me just briefly walk you
through some of the basic ones
that you need in identifying
the fundamental aspects
of a work of art
when you're doing research.
This particular page I'm showing
you here is information that
would be ultimately published
in what's called
a systematic catalog.
The Gallery, over the last 40
years, has been publishing--
originally in print, we're now
doing it online--
catalogs of all of the objects,
eventually,
in the permanent collection,
documenting them as thoroughly
as possible.
So this work by Thomas Cole.
It starts with some very
enigmatic numbers.
If you don't know what that is,
that's called an accession
number.
It simply is our record number.
Tells you certain things,
if it's done a certain way.
The work entered the collection
in 1989.
It was the 24th work of art
to enter the collection in 1989.
And in this instance,
it was one object that came
at that 24th moment.
There could be several objects
that came, by gift or whatever.
But basically, that tells us
that.
It tells us
the physical dimensions,
the physical nature--
oil on canvas.
It tells us who gave it to us,
and why, sometimes.
Inscriptions.
Technical notes.
As much as you can summarize--
and curators write
these technical notes
in consultation,
again, with conservators.
As much as you can summarize
what is known
about the painting, what
its present condition is, when
it was most recently treated,
discolored varnish was removed,
painting restored in 1990.
Provenance.
Very, very important.
The history of ownership
of a painting.
In this case,
we have both good provenance,
and we have bad provenance.
As in, we have
absolute, clear knowledge
of where the painting first
began its life.
Who owned it.
Who, in fact, commissioned it.
A man named Robert Gilmore
of Baltimore, who died in 1848.
We know that, in 1826, he
commissioned from Thomas Cole
a painting that he left
the subject matter up to Cole.
We'll go on about that
in a moment.
What we don't know is--
and when there is a period
in a provenance line,
that means stop.
We don't know what happens next.
If it's a semi-colon,
then we're telling you what
happened next, we think.
And you'll see.
What happened next?
Somebody named Robert Hall
in Hamden, Connecticut,
in 1968--
when it says until 1968,
that simply means we know they
owned it in 1968.
We have no idea when they owned
it previously.
How they got it.
Anything.
So from the time of Gilmore's
death in 1848, to 1968,
no trace of this painting
whatsoever.
So what does that tell you?
Well, it tells you a lot
of things.
Most importantly, it tells you
that there's a mystery there
that you ought to try to solve.
And as a curator,
I worked on this painting.
One of the first things I did
was I went to Baltimore.
Robert Gilmore was a very well
known Baltimorean.
And in the 19th century,
he made major art collections.
There's a lot of documentation
about him.
His will exists.
I went to the Baltimore Register
of Wills.
I spent time going
through his will.
And unfortunately, I only found
miscellaneous listings
of paintings.
He owned so much that there was
no inventory specifically
documenting every work,
and where it ended up.
Where it was going.
In fact, I even know,
from some correspondence
between Robert Gilmore
and his sister,
that he had paintings that he
owned,
lent to his siblings,
and his relatives.
They were all over the place.
So that was no help.
Also discovered that many
of the papers that might have
helped with research
on Gilmore-- and this
is true of other Baltimore
figures-- were destroyed
in an early 20th century fire
that burned up some archives
that were very important.
So I don't know anything.
Well, how do I know that it
showed up in Hamden,
Connecticut, in 1968?
Because a dealer in New York,
Kennedy Galleries--
and a parentheses
means that it was owned
by a dealer, but they had it
for sale.
They were not collectors.
They were owning it in the terms
of--
or they were owning
or representing it--
for an owner.
They were selling it.
We know
that because their records tell
us that they got a phone call
in 1968 from somebody named
Robert Hall in Hamden,
Connecticut, who said,
I have a painting.
It says Thomas Cole.
Would you be interested?
To which they obviously said,
yes.
And they subsequently sold it,
almost immediately--
semi-colon--
to Mr. and Mrs. John D
Rockefeller, who ultimately gave
it to the National Gallery
in 1989.
Now, interestingly enough,
in my researches into Gilmore's
history, I found out there was
a branch of the family named
Hall.
And I thought, well, that is
very exciting.
That might tell me something.
Except, I could find no trace
of Robert Hall
from Hamden, Connecticut.
Period.
Nothing.
So I have no idea whether he was
a family member, a descendant,
or whether the painting could
have changed hands umpteen times
in those missing years.
Maybe someday it will be
discovered.
I don't know.
But I never found out.
But there are
some other questions a painting
like this raises.
Where does it fit in an artist's
general career?
This is very early for Cole.
This is really the second year
of his professional career.
He's discovered in 1825.
He rises very quickly to fame.
This turns out to be a crucially
important painting
in that process.
But what do we know about it,
in terms of what it portrays?
It's called Sunrise
in the Catskills.
And that's a rather generic
term.
The Catskills are a whole range
of mountains in New York state.
There's nothing here that says
particularly any very
recognizable mountain, or series
of mountains.
And there's nothing in the title
that gives us any clue, the way,
for instance, a later painting
by Cole is quite specific.
The Notch of the White
Mountains, parentheses, Crawford
Notch.
That tells us exactly where this
is.
In the White Mountains, there's
a place called Crawford Notch.
And that's a place that's real.
It exists.
You can go there.
I've gone there.
This is another side benefit
of being an art historian
working on landscape painting,
is you get to go
all kinds of places,
sometimes dragging unwilling
companions,
trying to find places
that you never find.
But anyway, Crawford Notch
is easy.
But having found it,
and looked at it in comparison
to the painting,
it raises a whole host
of other questions.
Is this really that?
This is Mount Webster.
We know exactly what Mount
Webster is.
Here it is.
He painted it this way.
It's much taller.
It's steeper.
This is the notch.
This is the famous elephant
head, as it's called.
See?
You get to get very
interested in all kinds
of things here.
That looks like an elephant's
head.
You can actually see it better
in Cole's vantage point here,
but he's made it bigger.
More prominent.
He's also made the notch,
the pass, into this mountain
valley steeper, and narrower.
He's taken license here
in his creative approach.
He's obviously done things
like he's put in a sawn tree
stump in the foreground,
a natural stump
here, a little building,
dead trees, a man on horseback,
building.
All kinds of things.
They may or may not have been
there when he sketched
this place, which we know he did
earlier.
We have his pencil sketch
of this actual site, and not all
those details are there.
Nor is that stormy sky there.
Probably saw it on a nice clear
day.
So he's done a lot of things
here to--
not embellish
in a negative sense-- he's added
to the picture.
He's done things.
Now, there are a lot of reasons
that can be speculated about why
he did some of these things,
and other things.
And if you wish to punish
yourself by studying all
those reasons, you can read what
I wrote about his painting
in the systematic catalog,
where I go on at great length,
I assure you.
But it's interesting.
It's interesting to me.
But we don't have that advantage
with the painting I was just
talking about,
because Sunrise in the Catskills
tells us only
a general location.
But we do have--
Cole was aware of his own,
perhaps, significance
and his early career--
which as I said, was kind
of jumpstarted in 1825--
he kept a list of paintings,
at various times in his life.
But particularly
in this early moment, from 1825
to about 1827, meticulous list
of paintings that he did.
And another thing you must learn
if you're doing this sort
of research
is how to read handwriting
of all different kinds.
Sometimes it's easy.
Sometimes it's not.
I know Cole's handwriting very
well.
I can tell you that this says,
"View from the top of the Falls
of Kaaterskill.
Hone" something.
Hone.
H-o-n-e.
I know who that is.
That's a man named Philip Hone,
New York patron who commissioned
a work from Thomas Cole,
of the Falls of the Kaaterskill
in the Catskill Mountains.
"Sunrise from the Fly--" capital
F-l-y--
"Mountain, Gilmore."
That's the name we'd know
already.
Robert Gilmore.
This is that painting.
Just to show you, this is "view
down the clove--" the valley.
And this is sunrise and sunset.
Small.
See how easy that is to read?
Let me tell you, Cole could also
write in the tiniest handwriting
I've ever seen.
And he did that on his drawings,
where he would record things
like color and details.
And it's maddening to read it--
or try.
OK.
So in this case, we get a clue
here that this is something
sunrise, which we already knew
from the title,
from the Fly Mountain.
Now.
In Washington, there are all
kinds of resources that we have.
And in fact what I did, when I
was trying to puzzle this out,
was I called the US Geological
Survey, and I said,
let me have the person who's
an expert on the Catskills.
They put me right
through to someone who was
an expert on the Catskills.
And I said, where is Fly
Mountain?
And they said, there's no Fly
Mountain.
I said, well, I know there must
be.
There's a painting that we have
of Fly Mountain.
He said, it's not.
You don't have a painting.
There's no Fly Mountain.
He said, could it be Vly?
V-l-y Mountain.
I said, Vly Mountain?
He said, there is a Vly
mountain.
I said, where is it?
And he said, oh, it's
in present day Halcott township,
blah blah blah.
I said, well,
that's interesting.
Where's that on a map?
And he told me.
And I looked at it.
I also knew, from letters--
which fortunately survived--
between Thomas Cole and Gilmore.
I know lots of things.
I know, for instance,
this painting was delivered
to Baltimore on Christmas Day,
1826.
Because that's in the letters.
But I also know,
before the painting got there,
Cole described it to Gilmore.
Said, I think you'll like it.
It's very nice.
It's a dramatic picture.
It's from a scene
in the Catskills
near the headwaters
of the Delaware.
He meant the Delaware River,
which does actually rise
in the Catskill Mountains.
And guess what?
The headwaters, the beginning
of the Delaware River
is very close to Vly Mountain.
So, Vly is the word.
And somebody, at some point,
went in, and either corrected
what they thought was a mistake,
or more likely--
many of the names
in the Catskills-- indeed,
Catskill-- ultimately derives
from a Dutch word.
It may have been that Vly was
in the local pronunciation
something more like Fly.
I don't know.
But they changed it thinking
they were going to be helpful.
They weren't.
But mystery solved.
It's very satisfying
to do something like this,
admittedly, on a level
that not many people are going
to find that interesting.
But I do.
Now, I mentioned that this sort
of work is primarily directed
at permanent collection,
and that's where
your primary responsibilities
are.
But if you have expertise
as a curator-- and all
of the curators in the National
Gallery of Art do have areas
of expertise and great depth
of knowledge--
you are often called upon
by the outside world
to help them with questions
about works of art.
In my case, one of the artists
I've spent a lot of time working
on is named Frederic Edwin
Church, actually a pupil
of Thomas Cole.
And I wrote
my doctoral dissertation
and my first book
on this artist.
And over the years,
I have been asked many questions
about Church.
But most often I am asked,
can this painting be a Frederic
Church?
Not surprisingly, the market
for an artist
can affect how often you'll
be asked that question,
because people find things.
They think it looks
like a Frederic Church.
Someone may have thought
that earlier
and signed it a Frederic Church.
Most often, far most often, it's
not.
I try to help as best I can.
I try to say,
this may be something--
in some cases, you even are sent
reproductions.
And you have to help explain how
that is, without, hopefully,
being a little bit too
devastating to the person.
But sometimes there are works
that turn up that are right.
And these come out of the blue.
Especially since the creation
of the internet, they can come
from anywhere.
I got an email from,
I think it was somewhere
in Ohio, two years ago,
with a photograph
of this painting, which was
clearly right by Frederic
Church.
I had no knowledge of it
whatsoever.
I had never seen a photograph
of it.
I'd never read a description
in a contemporary reference that
seemed to describe it.
It was signed and dated.
It looked to me--
I can't show you the detail--
but it looked to me like it said
1858, which fit perfectly
with what I thought
was its style when it was
painted by this artist.
I subsequently went to New York
to examine the painting
in person.
And looking at it
with a magnifying glass,
found out that it was actually
painted in 1853.
So in fact, that turned upside
down what I thought I knew
about this painting.
It was five years earlier than I
thought,
but that's another matter.
Totally undiscovered,
unpublished painting.
No idea where it came from.
But it's absolutely right.
It's an addition
to our knowledge of the body
of work of Frederic Church.
Also, last year, I got
another inquiry
about this painting.
Which I immediately recognized,
not because I'd ever seen
a photograph of it or anything,
but because I knew, in 1875,
Frederic Church had painted
something called After the Rain
Storm.
Which was dramatic enough
that several people wrote
about it--
about how dramatic it was.
They described this lifting
of a dark cloud
after a storm,
and this big tree,
and all sorts of things.
So I had an idea specifically
what this painting must have
looked like.
It actually was nothing
like the picture looked like.
What I imagined
wasn't this at all.
I imagined something very
different.
Nevertheless, when I saw it,
I knew what it was, and was
able to fill in one more
piece of the puzzle.
In fact, in 1989, when I did
an exhibition on Church here
at the Gallery,
in the Introduction,
I wrote about the fact
that we knew a lot now
about Frederic Church,
some almost 90 years
after his death in 1900.
And I said there were only a few
major paintings still unlocated.
That was one of the ones
I mentioned.
After the Rain Storm.
So now it's been discovered.
So there are other ways
that one's curatorial expertise
can come into play,
and to be of use, and to help.
And we do try to answer
such inquiries.
We're not allowed, here
at the Gallery--
and this is true in most
museums--
to provide
formal authentications.
I can't write a letter that
says, this is a Frederic Church.
We can get into trouble
with that sort of thing.
Nor can we provide
monetary evaluations of what
something is worth.
We kind of refer owners
to all kinds of sources which
might help them.
Auction houses, dealers,
et cetera, et cetera.
Now to back up a little bit,
how does one get to the point
of doing the sort of things I've
been talking about as a curator?
How do you get there?
What's your background?
How do you do it?
Well, I used tell my students--
I taught for many years
at the University of Maryland--
don't follow my example.
I went to college
to be an English major.
But what I really wanted to do
was to be a rock and roll
musician.
And if you asked me what was
my earliest memory of a job
that I wanted, I would tell you,
I was probably about five years
old.
And I realized that
my life's dream would be to do
something that combined two
major interests
of my five-year-old self--
dinosaurs and heavy
earth-moving equipment.
And I realized that, if I could
be a paleontologist working
for the American Museum
of Natural History in New York,
maybe I could do both.
I didn't realize you needed
little tiny picks, and whisk
brooms, and things like that.
I thought, somebody has to dig
them up.
So why not drive a bulldozer,
and be a paleon-- it's sort of
like Indiana Jones
with a hard hat.
And that's the first inkling
that I had of some profession,
and it happened to be a museum
profession.
It ended up being nothing
at all, obviously, like I went
on to do.
I ultimately changed my major
to Art History,
for reasons I won't go into.
I went on to study Art History
at the graduate level
and earned a master's degree,
a doctorate.
Much of my training
as a graduate student, however,
was in Medieval Architecture
and Sculpture.
Nothing to do
with American and British
painting.
But that's another matter.
I went on to specialize in that.
There are now courses that offer
advanced degrees-- master's,
doctorates--
with curatorial tracks.
There were, at the time
I was in graduate school,
actually degrees in Museum
Studies.
Those are all legitimate ways
of moving
towards a curatorial career.
Again, I also told my students,
if you target something,
like, I want to be a curator
of American and British
paintings
at the National Gallery of Art,
you've lowered the window
of opportunity significantly.
There are only a few such jobs
out there, and you need to be
aware of that.
I was constantly told
as a graduate student
by my advisors,
it's going to be hard to find
a job.
And don't expect to make a lot
of money.
Now, to give you just some proof
of how true this is, we were
told by our former President
once, as an example,
do something that would give you
a living.
Make a living.
Don't become an art historian.
And here's Conan O'Brien saying
that President Obama apologized
for saying a person with an art
history degree
doesn't earn a lot, and then he
turned to an art history major
and ordered a frappuccino
with soy.
Funny.
Interestingly enough,
Obama got all kinds of mail
from art historians who said
that's just not fair.
And he wrote letters--
some very nice letters
of apology-- but there's
some truth to this.
And indeed, if you were to think
about what a society perceives
art historians, curators, art
historians-- what is it they do?
How do they spend their time?
Well, here's a nice illustration
of that.
What my friends think.
I look at paintings all day,
of course.
Here's Picasso's Guernica.
I'm asked that all the time.
What do you do all day?
Just look at paintings all day?
No, I don't but I would love to.
What my mom thinks I do.
Serious, in the library,
studying all the time, you know.
What society thinks I do.
Some sort of crazed individual
here,
who is deep into the books,
and lost to the world--
the real world.
What do my professors think
I do?
Well, what you don't see here is
the typical environment
for studying art history,
is a darkened room with slides.
And as a professor who taught
for 18 years, I can assure you,
this is not something you see.
You hear it.
All too often.
You learn not to be--
to take it personally.
What do I think I do?
I get to unveil to the world
great masterpieces
like this Vermeer.
The last one in private hands.
What do I really do?
Play video games.
Well, when I was
a graduate student, video games
were not what they are today.
They were some very
rudimentary--
Pong and things like that.
And in fact, when I was writing
my dissertation,
and when I would go
crazy with just--
I've got to do something--
I would play
on my early computer, Space
Invaders.
So maybe there's some truth
to that.
Until I became an Admiral
in the fleet and I could hang up
my Space Invaders card for good.
Anyway, it's interesting.
But there are
some particular aspects--
and I'm talking
about my experience
because that's what I know
best--
that had a huge bearing
on my ultimate decision
to work in museums
and become a curator.
And one of them was, straight
out of college, with an Art
History degree--
which I had no idea what I would
do it with an undergraduate Art
History degree--
I went back to my home.
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia.
And lo and behold, someone told
me there was an advertisement
in the newspaper-- back
in the classified ads, in those
days--
that said they were looking
for an Artmobile curator.
I had no idea what an Artmobile
Curator was.
But I found out quickly.
The museum in Richmond,
the Virginia Museum of Fine
Arts, is a state museum.
It has a role across the state,
not just in its headquarters
in Richmond.
And it tried to fulfill
that role in many ways.
The most inventive, the most
remarkable of those,
was in 1953, the museum
commissioned a custom
tractor-trailer unit that could
be used like a bookmobile,
to create installations,
exhibitions, and then
moved from town to town,
around the state,
to be visited by citizens,
students, anybody who wanted
to come, free of charge.
And with that mobile gallery,
there was a curator.
There was someone who drove it.
That was not me.
There was someone who did
everything else.
And that is, set it up,
do things like-- it doesn't look
like much, but these stairs are
made of metal.
And they have to be picked up
every time.
Fold down that door.
Put those things on,
by yourself.
I mopped the floors.
I set the lighting.
I packed the objects
in the exhibition.
Now this is about 1953,
and you see this wonderful view
of the original Artmobile.
There were ultimately four
Artmobiles working the circuits
in Virginia.
I started in January, 1975,
and I did it for about a year
and a half.
Three complete terms,
on a circuit.
I've been to every single county
in Virginia.
And I'm not saying that
facetiously.
I enjoyed it.
I mean, I learned a lot
about that.
You can see that in its--
this was not
an unambitious program.
This is an exhibition, on one
of the early Artmobiles,
of works from the collection
of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.
Some of these you'll recognize.
This is a Gauguin.
They're here in the Gallery.
Gauguin's Self Portrait.
A Degas.
The famous Manet, Plum Brandy.
These are masterpieces.
And they were circulated
in this way.
Mr. And Mrs. Mellon were patrons
of the Virginia museum.
An extraordinary opportunity
for people who couldn't come,
for whatever reason,
to Richmond to visit
the headquarters museum.
What was most influential for me
was not just learning
about my first exhibition,
that I had to take out
on the road in January, 1875--
I mean-- 1875 [LAUGHTER]
I once was said,
you live in the 19th century,
you know, you're talking
about all these old things.
But 1975, was on Art Nouveau.
French, English, Belgian,
a few American things.
All kinds of objects--
Tiffany lamps, stained glass,
silver, posters, sculpture,
all kinds of things.
I knew nothing whatsoever
about that.
And I studied for about a week
in the museum library.
And then literally hit the road.
And give tours,
give school talks, all
of that sort of thing.
I also had to learn,
for the first time in my life,
literally how to handle works
of art.
Actually pick them up, and put
them in a packing case,
and make sure they were secure.
And secure the packing case,
get to the next place,
do the opposite.
Unpack it, put it on a pedestal,
put it in a case,
change the lighting,
make sure everything's right.
That was enormously influential
on me.
Because up to that point,
other than the odds and ends
that I had encountered
in my family--
they had some paintings,
and they had this and that--
I had never actually had
the experience
of a physical work of art
in that way.
Sitting in a classroom
is very divorced from that.
I have a saying which is, you
don't learn that
in graduate school.
I don't know that I ever saw
a slide in graduate school
of a painting that showed me
the frame.
And so when I became a curator,
one of the first things I had
to get up to speed on
is, my God, these all have
frames.
And, you know,
are those original?
Are they appropriate?
Has the frame been damaged?
All sorts of questions.
I certainly, in school, never
was taught how to pack works
of art,
or what
their intrinsic qualities were.
That was very influential on me
because it brought home to me
the real quality of works
of art.
The physical nature.
That they exist in space
and time.
Also, I spent eight hours a day
sitting--
either going to a school
and lecturing, or mainly,
sitting and giving tours.
Or sometimes just sitting,
because there was very little
traffic, in the proximity
of works of art.
And there's a very discouraging
statistic one sometimes will
encounter about how much
the individual visitor
to a museum, how much time they
may spend looking
at a work of art.
And maybe something like 45
seconds, on average.
It takes time to understand
works of art.
And when you are spending
literally hours looking
at these works of art,
in addition to talking
about them, you will see things
that you never imagined you
would see.
You will also sometimes be told
things by visitors that you
hadn't realized.
I had a show on landscape
painting-- it was one
of my Artmobile exhibits--
I had been with that show
for several months, had about 18
paintings in it.
And I thought I pretty much knew
everything there was about that.
Went from the late Renaissance
up to about the 1940s.
Someone-- it was a young
person--
came to me and said,
do you know that there is water
in every single one
of these paintings?
And I said, no, I didn't.
And we went around.
And they pointed it out to me.
I mean, in one case,
it was a little puddle.
But it was true.
It was water.
I hadn't seen that.
Mr. Expert.
So I learned a lot.
But I also learned that there's
a kind of magic in dealing
with real objects.
Real works of art.
Again, that was not something
I was necessarily taught
in school, graduate school
included.
You could be-- you could express
those interests.
You could get internships
in museums
and that sort of thing.
But at the time I was
a graduate student the 1970s,
it was still not uncommon
for your professors
to discourage you from going
into museum work,
because they thought it would be
much
better in the academic setting,
where you could do the highest--
what they considered the highest
sort-- of achievements
of scholarly research, etc.
That's changed a great deal
in the years since.
In a way that recalls
my youthful desire to be
a paleontologist-heavy equipment
operator, I also came up
with an idea
that, when I hit the job market
I thought it'd be perfect if I
could
be a curator at a university
museum and teach.
Which never actually happened,
although it happened once I
became a curator here, that as I
said,
I became a member of the faculty
also at the University
of Maryland.
And I taught there for 18 years,
and was able to do
that combination.
Now the third major area I'll
touch just briefly on
of the curatorial
responsibilities
I've been outlining,
is organize exhibitions.
And that can be,
again, a wide range of things.
They can be small.
An exhibition can be one
painting.
It can be 200+ paintings,
as in the case of the exhibition
that my colleague, the late Nick
Cikovsky and I did in 1995,
on Winslow Homer.
There's all kinds of work
involved.
This was a 5-year project,
from 1990 to 1995,
when it went up on the walls.
It involved travel.
Three years of travel,
visiting museums,
private collectors,
getting lost, doing all kinds
of things.
This was before MapQuest.
It was fun though.
My colleague, Nick, and I had
a little game we would play.
Because we would often
go to a town in this country
where there was an art museum
where perhaps neither of us
had ever been.
And we would put aside
the directions that we'd been
given.
And we'd say where's the art
museum likely to be?
Because the history of an art
museum, and the history
of a town, a city, a village,
whatever, may give you a clue.
And in fact, older museums
in established communities
tend to be
downtown, like the Worcester Art
Museum,
if you know that, in Worcester,
Massachusetts, where
the Museum of Fine Arts
is not right downtown in Boston,
but it's close.
More recent ones often tend
to be further out,
more into the suburbs, this sort
of thing.
So we would guess.
OK, we're coming to Dayton.
Where's going to be the art
museum?
Let's guess.
And we would guess.
And we would drive
around looking for it.
And invariably, I don't know
why, we either found
a Masonic temple
or we found the art museum.
I use Dayton because, actually,
the Masonic temple that we found
was next door to the art museum.
I don't know why.
But anyway, all kinds of things
would go into organizing one
of these exhibitions.
Choosing the works.
Writing a catalog.
They are productions that
involve many, many people to see
their realization.
Curators are associated
with them, but they're just
one part of the task.
And I like to liken a major loan
exhibition, such as Winslow
Homer in 1995,
is very much, in a way,
like a movie
or a grand theatrical
production.
You're there to enjoy it.
You're not there to think
about every last thing that went
into making it happen.
But if you're interested, when
the credits roll at the end
of the movie,
you'll see how many people it
took.
Or when you look at the playbill
for a theatrical production.
Or if you read
the acknowledgments
in an exhibition catalog.
Many, many people are involved
in making these happen, not just
the curators.
I'm going to go now just
to the end,
and to what is probably
the most, for me personally,
exciting and in some ways
most challenging
part of the job of a curator,
and that's make acquisitions
for the collection.
As I mentioned, museums tend
to be growing institutions.
Collections can be developed,
can be enriched.
When I came here, first in 1980,
the American painting collection
was relatively small.
There were, for instance,
to my knowledge, only two still
life paintings
in the collection.
There were a few landscapes,
but a lot of portraits.
Since then, the collection,
through the efforts of a lot
of people, not just myself,
has grown to be one
of the greatest in existence,
if, in fact, not the greatest
in existence.
And acquisitions
over the last 40 years or so
have been very, very important
parts of that.
Acquisitions happen
in many ways.
Every curator can tell you
stories.
They'll all be different.
They don't follow patterns.
What I've always felt
is you need to be flexible,
and you need to be adaptable,
because you never know.
I used to tell my students.
They said, how do you find works
of art
to buy or to acquire
for the museum?
I said, you never know what's
out there.
And if you're not out there
looking, you'll never know.
So be out there.
Visit dealers.
Read auction catalogs.
Look in newspapers.
Do whatever.
Don't ignore phone calls,
because sometimes you'll find
out about something.
So let's start with maybe one
of the most straightforward
ways.
Go shopping.
Go to New York, where,
for instance, if you're doing
American historical paintings,
the real center of the market
was.
And in the 1980s and 90s,
there were a dozen
major galleries handling
historical American art.
Historical, I mean, you know,
pre-mid-20th century.
There are very few now,
because the supply has dried up,
as more and more works were
acquired and put
into either museum collections,
or in some cases,
private collections.
You never know what you'll see
at a dealer.
I walked into a place called
Herschl & Adler, which still
exists, in New York,
around 2003, I think it was.
And the proprietor of Hirschl
& Adler immediately said, come
here.
I want to show you something
in my office.
Now that means you're not going
to look at something that's
in the public area
of the gallery, where they often
have an exhibition.
You're not going
to the traditional viewing room,
where quite literally, they'll
often have velvet curtains
and easels, where they'll very
dramatically unveil something
for you to see.
If you're going
to the proprietor's office,
you're probably going to see
the most important thing they
have right then.
Because that's where the owner
wants to have it.
They want to look at it.
They keep it from too
many people seeing it.
So I walked into his office,
and this painting was
on the wall.
And I did not at first know who
the artist was.
But he told me immediately
that this was an Asher B. Durand
painting.
And when he told me that,
by a good stretch of luck
and good fortune, I knew exactly
what it was.
Because, when I'd been working
on Frederic Church,
Church had painted a scene
of a ruined ship, a wrecked
ship, in 1852, that I was
researching.
And I was curious.
Who else did that subject
that he might have known?
Did Cole do it?
Did Asher Durand do it,
for instance?
Another major landscape painter
in New York.
Well, it turns out, yes.
Asher Durand, in 1844,
painted a picture
of a stranded ship that was well
received.
There were critical notices
of it.
Descriptions.
But as far as I knew,
had disappeared completely.
Again, no photograph of it.
Nothing like that.
So see?
This is good luck, that I
actually had done that research,
and knew what this painting was.
I always love to kind of show
dealers up a little bit.
And they said, you ever seen
anything like that?
And I said, no, because Durand
only painted two images
of wrecked ships, one of which
was shown in 1838,
the other ones is this one,
in 1844.
At which point, you know,
the dealer's-- hands over
the ears, you know.
But I recognized not just what
it was, but the importance
of it,
because it's a rarity
in this artist's body of work.
Not the kind of thing
they did very often.
This, which is another painting
in the Gallery's collection,
is more typical.
And we owned
several typical Durands.
So it was the example of a work
that didn't really correspond
to what you thought
of as an artist's
normal creation.
And we acquired it.
Now what happens
in an acquisition?
Well, you've got to go
to a committee that's formed
of your trustees,
or a subset of your trustees,
and they evaluate
certain things.
What they don't evaluate
is this kind of thing.
You know, is it going to be
a fridge magnet, or whatever?
But you do try to evaluate
the relevance, the importance,
the quality, all
of these things,
so that the decision that's made
can be a sound one.
And one you hope doesn't prove
mistaken in some way
in the years to come.
National Gallery does not
deaccession works of art,
other than the exception,
the rare exception,
of so-called duplicate prints,
which is very rare.
So when you buy, or acquire
by gift, some work of art
for the collection, it's here.
And that's a very--
I think it's a very good policy.
And one that makes you very much
aware of what you're doing.
Now, luck, again, can come
in various ways.
I was working
in another capacity,
helping a museum, the Albany
Institute of History and Art,
prepare a catalog
of their collection of Hudson
River School paintings,
which was rich in Cole,
and Church, and some
of the artists
that I had worked on.
And one of the paintings I was
working on was this Thomas Cole
of a ruined tower, in the Albany
collection.
Wonderful painting.
And as I worked on it,
I tried to identify
as many other examples
by Cole of that subject.
The ruined medieval tower.
The remnants
of some great castle.
I knew he'd done it
in a major painting called,
The Present.
Here, it was one of a pair
of paintings.
Also, this may look
like a detail of that,
but this is just a small sort
of knock off of this.
There are probably
8, 10 major paintings that Cole
did of these ruined towers,
in the late 1830s,
in particular.
But what struck me was
that there was one such painting
that Cole wrote
about extensively.
And he particularly wrote
to Asher B. Durand, in fact,
in New York.
Cole was living in Catskill
at this point--
New York, where he was painting.
And he talked about painting
a picture that he described
quite specifically.
Here part of that description.
And I thought, well,
can this help me identify
anything?
Does it correspond to the Albany
painting?
And clearly, it does not.
Talks about islands
out in the ocean.
It talks about the moon is
ascending, which it's not.
It talks about a shepherd, who
was seated on a fragment
of the ruin.
And other things, like
a distant vessel.
None of that
was in this painting.
And we know that Cole finished
that painting 1838.
He exhibited in New York.
It apparently went to a New York
collector.
And then, as far as we know,
it vanished.
No trace of it again.
No photograph of it that I was
aware of.
No record.
I came back in 1993
from vacation in the summer
to my office in this building,
and on my desk
were a stack
of black and white photographs
of this painting on the left.
And I had never seen
this painting before.
And I asked my assistant, where
did this come from?
And they said, oh, someone
showed up at the loading dock
in a station wagon with this
painting, looking for you--
because they knew that I was--
had some knowledge about Thomas
Cole-- and they asked to see
you.
And you weren't here.
And they said, oh, I wanted
to show him this painting.
And my assistant, fast thinking,
said, let us make
some photographs of it
real quickly.
And we'll show it to him when he
gets back.
Which they did.
And there it was.
Literally, out of the blue,
photographs exactly
corresponding.
The moon ascending.
The shepherd seated on the ruin.
This was the painting I'd been
reading about.
It had literally fallen
into our laps.
We had several major examples
by Cole,
but not one
of these European subjects
of a ruin.
It fit very well
with our aspirations
for developing the collection.
So we acquired it.
Again, you never know.
I answered the phone once.
Late on a Friday afternoon.
Friday afternoons are
in the news again, because
of so-called news dumps
and things like that,
but you know you always used
to hear, Friday afternoon.
Don't buy a car made Friday
afternoon.
You know.
I was sitting at the assistant's
desk at the Department
of American and British
Paintings.
I was the only one there.
The phone rang.
I answered it.
And a very nice voice, a woman's
voice, said, Oh, hi.
This is Mrs. So-and-so.
Do you have any work by Frank
Benson?
And I said, yes, we do.
We have a painting of a woman
in a white dress.
And she said, oh.
Well, I don't suppose you'd want
another one, then.
And I said, well, please, tell
me.
Tell me more.
And she said.
She went on to tell me that one
of her relatives, an ancestor,
had been in a part
of the family, and they had
shared a vacation destination
in Maine, next door to where
the American Impressionist
painter, Frank Benson, summered.
And while in this place, Benson
painted one of his major works--
called Summer, 1909--
it's in the Rhode Island School
of Design Art Museum--
and he had used for the figures
in this great work
several people who were there,
including the daughter
of the family next door--
this young woman-- as one
of the models.
Each one of these
was a specific person that he
based on someone he knew there.
And she said, when the painting
was finished,
her family and the families
of two of the other young women
said, wouldn't it
be wonderful to have
our own paintings
of our daughters?
So Benson painted
separate canvases of each
of the other two.
This one, this one,
and this one.
And this had descended
in her family.
When she told me this story,
I knew what the large painting
looked like.
And I said, pardon me
for a minute.
I went and got a book
and pulled it out,
and I said, tell me more.
And she said, she's the one
with red hair.
She's in the right corner.
We have this little painting
of her.
And I no longer can take care
of it.
And we would love to see it
in a good home.
And I said immediately, this
is very different than what we
have.
Ours that we have
is an interior.
It's earlier in his career.
This is
a classic Impressionist painting
by this artist.
We would love to see it.
Where do you live?
And-- politely.
And she said, I live
on the eastern shore
of Maryland.
I said, we'll be there.
So we did.
Nick Cikovsky,
my late colleague, and I went
there the next Monday.
And lovely, lovely person.
Very, very generous.
Gave it to the Gallery.
We arranged to have a copy made
for her to keep.
And, you know, again--
I answered the phone on a Friday
afternoon.
Wasn't looking for a Benson.
Had no particular reason
to think one
would land that way.
I once went with a collector who
asked me to take them to New
York, to look for, specifically,
they were interested in Hudson
River School landscapes.
Things like that great Cropsey,
there, on the Gallery's
collection.
And colonial portraits.
American portraits, like Copley,
another painting in the--
that's what they were looking
for.
So I called the dealers that I
knew and I said, this is what
I'm looking for.
We're coming.
I made an appointment.
So we went around.
And we'd visit dealers.
And they would have what they
had to show us.
One dealer that went to,
we went up into the office,
again.
Sort of special circumstances,
I suppose.
And they had a seascape.
And they had a portrait.
But in the corner of the room,
I saw this.
And I was immediately struck
by it.
I knew what it was.
It was a painting by an artist
named Joseph Decker,
a still life painter,
late 19th century American.
He did various subjects.
But the greatest works,
I thought, and many others
thought,
were these extraordinary images,
still life of growing,
of actual--
in this case, pears--
hanging on a tree branch, seen
from below.
And this wonderful notion
that the pears are just getting
to the point of ripeness,
and even overripe.
Here they're being eaten
by yellowjackets.
I was mesmerized by this.
And I actually said, I'm sorry.
Would you please excuse me?
I'm going to stop looking
at what you're showing me.
May I go look at that painting?
Which we did.
And I was even more fascinated
by it when I saw it.
Extraordinary things,
like the artist using
his fingerprints to push
the wet paint,
to make the wrinkled texture
of the--
just-- amazing-- a wonderful
thing.
And I had never seen it before.
I knew nothing about it.
I said, where did you get this?
And they said, somebody called
us from California.
They'd done an internet search
on Decker.
Our name showed up because we
did a show on Decker about 10
years ago.
They called us and said,
I found this at a garage sale
in California.
Would you be interested?
And they were.
And the gallery, the dealer,
acquired it.
I was struck by this.
And the person I was with,
who was looking for Hudson River
School paintings and colonial
portraits was also struck.
But I knew that we already
at the National Gallery,
had two superb works by Decker--
Green Plums and Hanging Grapes.
Actually, also knew that there
was a third painting promised
to us, which would eventually
come to the Gallery.
And I thought, this is not--
this can't be a priority.
We don't really, quote,
"need" this.
The next Monday-- the collector,
by the way,
was also struck
by this painting,
and although this was not at all
what they were looking for,
they said, let me go home
and talk to my wife.
We'll think about it.
Maybe it's something we can buy.
It's just not what we're looking
for.
The next Monday, I came in
to work.
I parked my car.
And our director, Rusty Powell,
was parking his car.
And we walked in together.
And Rusty said, how was
your trip to New York?
Did you see anything?
And I said, I saw
this extraordinary painting
by Joseph Decker.
And I described it.
And I said, of course,
we've already got really good
Deckers.
And this was also the week
that our Board of Trustees
was meeting.
So any acquisition proposal
was already way overdue.
This should have been
on the agenda, should have been
put forward.
And to his great credit,
Rusty said, if it's that good,
get it here.
So we did.
We got the painting here.
I called the collector.
And I said, we're really
interested in this painting.
Are you thinking of proceeding
with buying it?
With the hope that, if he did,
that he would ultimately give it
to us.
And he said, no.
We've decided.
We can't.
But since you're
interested in it, we'll help you
buy it.
So like that-- again, a painting
I wasn't looking for.
Not even the type of painting I
was looking for.
Came into the collection.
And it was, again, when I say,
you never know,
you truly never know.
I'll just finish with one
other example, which
is the longest chase of a work
of art in my particular career,
which began in 1983,
when this painting by Charles
Sheeler--
which is one of four
that the artist did of the Great
River Rouge Plant, the Ford
plant, south of Detroit.
It was part of a commission
of photography that Sheeler was
hired to do in 1927.
He was a commercial photographer
before he was
famous as a painter.
He went.
He took pictures of the Rouge
Plant.
And then several years later, he
created four
extraordinary paintings that are
considered key breakthrough
works in his career,
and indeed in the history
of early 20th century
American art.
Of those four,
three were in museums.
The Museum of Modern Art,
the Whitney Museum,
and the Worcester Art Museum.
The fourth was in a sort
of museum.
It was in the Edsel and Eleanor
Ford home, a house museum
in Detroit.
This was the only painting,
Classic Landscape, that had been
acquired by the Ford family.
It had descended in the family,
been given
to that historic house.
So one didn't necessarily think
it would ever be available.
But in fact, it was sold,
in 1983, at auction
at Sotheby's, for what was then
a record price
for an American painting,
a million and a half dollars.
1983.
Very high price.
I went to work
at the Minneapolis Institute
of Arts.
That was June of 1983.
I went there in August of 1983.
And I immediately went
to my director--
a wonderful man named Sam
Sachs-- and I said, I'm here.
And I've got a great idea
for acquisition.
There's this fantastic painting.
It was sold at auction.
I think they want 2 and 1/2
million dollars for it.
And he looked at me like, you're
crazy.
He said, I understand.
This is a great painting,
but we do not have that kind
of resource.
So I thought, well, let's see
what happens.
Part of my job, immediately
upon arriving in Minneapolis,
was to coordinate and install
a big traveling exhibition
on American Abstract painting
from 1927 to 1944.
Organized by another museum,
organized by John Lane and Susan
Larson, two wonderful colleagues
in American art.
And it was coming
to Minneapolis, traveling show,
and I was to install it, be
the coordinating curator,
give tours, all that sort
of thing.
And in studying the catalog--
here's the cover
of the catalog--
I was fascinated by a number
of the paintings in it.
Some of these
were not by well-known artists.
An artist I only knew the name
of, Jean Xceron, a Frenchman
who came to America
in the pre-war period.
And this example
was in the show.
This extraordinary sort
of Mondrian, not Mondrian,
abstract painting.
I was intrigued by it,
And a lot of other
works in the show,
as I was studying to try
to prepare myself
for the installation to come.
In Minneapolis at that time,
the special exhibitions were
held in a kind
of generic modern wing, which
butted right up
against this beautiful
neoclassical--
McKim, Mead and White
neoclassical building--
the original part
of the building.
And that place, where you went
from the one to the other,
was this extraordinarily ugly
doorway.
It was a big door, with two side
doors with pneumatic hinges.
And then it was just
a big square thing, a sort
of rectangle in the middle.
It was really ugly.
And all they would do
is put a sign up that said,
Abstract Painting and--
whatever.
And I-- in some fever dream--
decided, well, let's
do something interesting.
And I decided we should take
inspiration from a painting
in the exhibition.
In this case, it was the Jean
Xceron.
And we should paint that doorway
so that it evokes the spirit
of the exhibition.
Doesn't recreate the painting,
specifically, but evokes it.
So I worked with one of our art
handlers in Minneapolis.
We came up with this, which I
was actually quite pleased with.
It was very striking.
Not long afterwards--
the exhibition had opened--
I got a call from someone
I knew.
And they said, do you know
the name Barney Ebsworth?
And I said, no.
And they said, he owns
the painting in that exhibition
by Jean Xceron, that you--
I can't remember the word they
used.
It wasn't a bad word.
But anyway, borrowed, to create
this odd thing in Minneapolis.
I said, oh God.
And it never occurred to me
that I would need to get
permission to,
quote, "reproduce."
It wasn't a reproduction.
And I thought, oh, well.
Gee.
And he said, well, you should
know Barney Ebsworth,
because he's one
of the major collectors
of 20th century American art.
And you're probably thinking,
Classic Landscape.
That Sheeler was probably
in this exhibition.
1927?
You know it's the exact period.
It was painted in '31.
But it wasn't.
So he told me, Barney Ebsworth
is the guy who's now bought
Classic Landscape.
And he said, he's fascinated.
Someone sent him a picture
of that doorway, and he said,
who came up
with this weird idea?
And he said, I think I know who
it was.
It was our mutual acquaintance.
And he said, he'd love to meet
you sometime if you're ever
in St. Louis.
And I thought, oh, this
is wonderful.
This is the man who owned--
he's not mad at me.
He owns Sheeler's Classic
Landscape.
So I called a friend of mine who
was teaching Art History
at Washington University in St.
Louis.
And I said, how would you like
me to come down there
and give a lecture on Frederic
Church?
And she said--
I'm not making any of this up,
I promise you.
And I said, for free.
And she said, sure.
Great.
And I said, one condition.
Do you know somebody named
Barney Ebsworth?
And she said, well, I know who
he is.
Everybody knows who he is.
He's a major collector.
I said, I would love to meet
him.
She said, well, I don't know
what I can do.
But I know someone.
The chairman of the department
knows him.
He's been very
friendly to the university,
dot, dot, dot.
Maybe he'll come
to your lecture.
Well maybe became yes, he did
come to my lecture.
And I met him.
And he said, I thought that was
quite interesting,
what you did with my painting.
And would you like to see
the rest of the collection?
This was in 1985, now,
I think it was.
And I said, I'd love to.
We went to his office,
where he had some works.
We went to his home,
where he had others.
This painting was actually
at the St. Louis Art Museum.
We went there also, because he
had already made this part
of a foundation, which meant
it had a separate role.
He couldn't hang it
in his house.
It was-- had various kinds
of tax implications, et cetera.
But it meant the likelihood was
very strong that he might one
day give it away.
Give it to an art museum.
And I was still working
in Minneapolis at this point.
And I don't think I would have
had the nerve to say something
like, would you ever give
the painting to Minneapolis?
Or, in fact, people told me
that he was so
devoted to his hometown of St.
Louis-- born and raised there--
that most likely,
his collection would go
to the St. Louis Art Museum.
Well, fast forward many years,
to the late 1990s.
I've kept in touch with this man
all these years.
Followed what he's been doing
as a collector.
And we decided to do
an exhibition at the National
Gallery of his collection.
And when exhibitions
of that type
are done of private collections,
it can be a very tangled path,
because you don't want to do
something that can be perceived
as enhancing
the value of privately
owned property.
And most often
the accommodations that are made
are some sort of benefit
to the institution,
particularly the gift of works
of art
that will enrich the collection.
And the work that I personally
was most interested in,
in this particular collection,
was Sheeler's Classic Landscape.
So our director asked if this
could be part of a gift
to the National Gallery,
in the year 2000,
on the occasion
of the exhibition
of the Ebsworth Collection.
And that happened in 2000.
So in 1983, I first learned
of this painting's availability.
In the year 2000, it happened.
It is true.
It ain't over till it's over,
as Yogi Berra said.
But as I hope maybe I've given
you some glimpse of, there's
a lot that goes
into curatorial work.
There's a lot.
It's fun.
It's interesting.
A lot of skills you learn.
And so next time you have
trouble, keep calm and let
the Art History major handle it.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
