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Musings on museums
Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Lee Rosenbaum
Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust, edited by James Cuno, with essays by James Curio, Philippe de Montebello, Glenn D. Lowry, Nell MacGregor, John Walsh and James N. Wood, Princeton and Cambridge, Princeton University Press and Harvard University Art Museums, 2004; 208 pages, $29.95 hardcover.
"How much did we contradict each other? I felt an almost suspicious consensus," James Wood of the Art Institute of Chicago said to his colleagues a month after the last of six Harvard lectures by prominent museum directors on the subject of "Art Museums and the Public Trust."
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Wood posed his question at a roundtable discus stun among the participants, who gathered two years ago at the office of Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. James Cuno, who had organized the lecture series as then director of the Harvard University Art Museums, assured Wood that the group's solidarity was no accident: "I thought other voices had already been heard, in newspapers and magazines, and in the almost hagiographic elevation of a couple of our colleagues. So I thought this is a chance to offer another point of view."
The consensus in Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust is squarely on the side of sober stewardship, as distinguished from the venturous, sometimes dicey exploits of the two repeatedly disparaged colleagues, Arnold Lehman of the Brooklyn Museum and Thomas Krens of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. While hardly subjects of "idealizing or idolizing biography," as hagiography is defined, those two have had unusually high profiles as risk-takers and rule-breakers. The traditional directors chosen by Curio clearly relished the chance to discredit the renegades, while also repeatedly decrying the commercialization, overcrowding and dumbing down of art museums everywhere.
This revealing compilation, which permits us to eavesdrop on the lectures and roundtable, might have been more tellingly titled Six Directors Kvetching. The faultfinders also included Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nell MacGregor of the British Museum, London; and John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Anne d'Harnoncourt of the Philadelphia Museum of Art took part in the roundtable but not the lecture series.) Though customarily discreet and controversy-averse, the directors express themselves in these pages with refreshing candor. They fret over characterizations of museums by art critics and commentators as arrogant, greedy and superficially entertaining, while taking pride in the way their institutions boost art's capacity to provide "consolation," "deep experiences" and "extraordinary moments."
But the most surprising revelation in these museological musings is not the high level of agreement they disclose but the inner conflicts that the speakers unwittingly display--the disconnect between what each of them claims museums should be and what they have managed to achieve at their own institutions. Instead of asking how much his colleagues contradicted each other, Wood might better have asked, "How much did we contradict ourselves?"
That said, there was one crucial area of disparity among the participants--their perceptions of the subject at hand. Cuno, who just took over Wood's Chicago job in September, apparently left the definition of "public trust" up to each participant, resulting ill widely different interpretations: public confidence in museums' authority; moral accountability to the public; holding objects in trust for the public; trusting in, rather than pandering to, the public; giving people from all backgrounds access to public collections. This conceptual confusion makes the book an exercise in free association, rather than a forum for focused discourse.
Because the assignment was so amorphous, the directors' responses became an inadvertent Rorschach test, more revealing of their distinct characters than of "the public's regard for and trust in art museums"--Cuno's own sense of the topic, as expressed in his preface to the book.
MacGregor and Walsh emerge as the two most sympathetic characters in this disjointed volume, having held fast to the quality that got them into this business in the first place--a passion for art. Their essays suggest that they kept their eyes on that prize, even while attending to the dullest administrative chores. Their ability to retain this verve and vision might be owed, in large measure, to their relative freedom from financial worries--MacGregor as then director of London's government-subsidized National Gallery, Walsh as former director of the abundantly endowed Getty.
For MacGregor, the public trust involves allowing people from all walks of life to "use their pictures" for the purpose most meaningful to each. He movingly described Winston Churchill's telegram forbidding the planned shipment of the National Gallery's paintings to Canada for safekeeping during World War II. "Bury them in caves or in cellars," he commanded then director Kenneth Clark, "but not a picture shall leave these islands." The museum then decided to display one old-master work a month. "The picture that the public wanted most of all was Titian's 'Noli Me Tangere,'" MacGregor recounts, describing it as "surely the deepest investigation in Western painting of a love that survives death.... It is an incomparable meditation on love continuing without physical contact."
