Fall 2005 PDF - Milton Academy

Post ScriptTreasures in unexpected places:Caring for discoveries at HarvardEmmy Norris ’62Imagine opening the door to a utility closet and findingon a shelf inside some long-forgotten film footage of theelderly Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The artist is seated in awheelchair, talking to his dealer and to his model. Withhim are Ambrose Vollard, his dealer, and “La Boulangère,”his longtime model and servant. It is the only knownfootage of Renoir; it is also the only known film of anyFrench impressionist. The film was found because a phonecall to a retired department administrator jogged her memoryof an old film canister up on a shelf behind the Dranoand the paper towels.This happened in May 2001 at Harvard University. But itcould happen anywhere.Old institutions like Harvard often have a bewildering varietyof objects that are not catalogued. There is little informationon works owned by its various units; they sometimesdisappear or suffer considerable environmental damagebecause nobody is looking out for them. Such objectsmay be works of art, antique furniture and carpets, silvertrophies, donations that should be tracked, and other itemsof monetary, artistic or cultural interest. Their acquisitionby its nature has been haphazard. It shouldn’t be a surprisethat the documentation has been haphazard as well.I first became interested in these scattered objects when Iwas a curator at the Harvard University Art Museums.Assorted Harvard-owned artworks, frequently called“orphans” by museum staff because they were undocumentedand unsupervised, would arrive for conservationtreatment after somebody noted a torn canvas or damagedsculpture or butter on a painting in a dining room. Theworks were treated and then sent back, since the art museums,overwhelmed with their own collections, could notundertake managing additional objects.The most famous example of neglect was a series ofmurals painted by Mark Rothko. In the early 1960s, theartist completed a series of large “color field” murals oncommission from Harvard, in the penthouse of HolyokeCenter, the university’s chief administration building.Rothko bought cheap paints, and the light levels in thepenthouse were high. Nobody checked on the muralsbecause there was no procedure in place to do so, and theygradually deteriorated. By the ’70s, the murals’ rosy colorshad faded from excessive light exposure and the effect wassomething like an x-ray of the originals. The murals arenow stored at the Fogg Art Museum, but their colors haveessentially died.It seemed to me that it was high time for the university tomanage these unsupervised objects scattered throughoutthe campus, and I was interested in doing the job myself.In 2000, armed with facts, figures and photos, I persuadedHarvey Fineberg, former university provost, to fund a survey.The selling points were numerous: good inventory50 Milton Magazine