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Art of Our Own
An overhaul of an Art Gallery icon provides a look at long-hidden architecture and a new view of the past.
October 2001
by Bruce Fellman
When the American wing of the Yale University Art Gallery reopened its doors last March after an 18-month renovation, many visitors couldn’t believe what they saw. The artwork was familiar enough—oils by Edward Hopper, Albert Bierstadt, and John Trumbull; bronzes by Remington; an 18th-century highboy by Townsend; fine silver by Paul Revere and glass by Tiffany—but the paintings, sculpture, and examples of the decorative arts were definitely not in their usual surroundings.
“Where did this room come from?” asked more than one museumgoer, scanning an elegant high-ceilinged main gallery that now features graceful wall and ceiling arches, sandstone columns, and a broad expanse of skylights. Actually, these surprising details had been there all along.
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“This is one of the most noble spaces in the University, but it hasn’t been seen like this since the early 1970s.”
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“This is one of the most noble spaces in the University,” says Helen Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, “but it hasn’t been seen like this since the early 1970s.”
In what Gallery director Jock Reynolds is calling a “warmup” for the top-to-bottom renovation of the YUAG that is scheduled to begin in 2003, the Ameri-can wing underwent far more than cosmetic surgery. “We’re in a great period of experimentation as we plan for how we’ll use our space in the future,” says Reynolds. “This particular project gave us the opportunity to rethink the way the American paintings and decorative arts in the collection could best be displayed to provide a great aesthetic experience and to reinforce our primary role as a teaching museum.”
The American wing is part of a building known as the Old Art Gallery. Designed in 1928 by architect Egerton Swartwout, Class of 1891, the Beaux-Arts structure was modeled after several Italian palaces. In its time, it was considered an architectural standout, but by the late 1960s, the palatial look it embodied had become something of an embarrassment. Art museums, huffed one undergraduate, were “snob palaces,” and any building that “wreaked of elitism” was simply out of step with the spirit of the era.
To make this part of the Gallery more appealing, hip, and, well, relevant, Theodore E. Stebbins and Charles F. Montgomery, curators of American paintings and decorative arts, respectively, opted for something suitably radical. They completely transformed their domain on the Swartwout building’s third floor, an interior inspired by the 14th-century Davanzati Palace in Florence, and when the builders were finished in 1973, almost all traces of Beaux Arts splendor were hidden behind wall board and under coats of paint. What remained was a revolutionary way of looking at American creativity.
The chief architect of this revolution was Charles Montgomery, a one-time antiques dealer who came to Yale in 1970 from the Winterthur Museum in Delaware to be curator of the University’s vast collection of furniture, silver, and other examples of the decorative arts that were handcrafted in the colonies and later, the United States, from the time of settlement until about the 1820s. “Montgomery represented what might be called ‘scientific antiquarianism,’” says Edward S. Cooke Jr. ’77, who studied with him as an undergraduate and, appropriately, now serves as the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts. “He emphasized the close study of materials and techniques, not just taxonomy and how to tell real from fake.”
This approach, a combination of connoisseurship and detective work, was a shift from the scholarly interests of Montgomery’s predecessor, John Marshall Phillips, whose popular course, dubbed “Pots and Pans,” was designed to inculcate “a love and appreciation of these objects,” says Cooke, and “an understanding of good, better, and best.”
Phillips certainly had plenty of choice material to work with in his teaching and research. In the 1920s, Mr. and Mrs. Francis P. Garvan began donating their collection of early American furniture, silver, pewter, glass, ironwork, and other examples of fine craftsmanship to what was then the Gallery of Fine Arts. With new gifts and acquisitions over the years, the collection had grown in size and stature.
In the late 1960s, the “decorative arts,” as well as oils, watercolors, and drawings drawn from a collection that dated back to 1832 when John Trumbull donated his Revolutionary War paintings to Yale to establish the first university art museum in the country, were displayed in a rather hodgepodge fashion in the Swartwout building. In addition to the long gallery that housed the main display of Americana, the museum featured a recreation of several rooms from an 18th century house (the contents were a gift from Francis Garvan) and a separate gallery to house the Trumbull collection.
“It was a very traditional installation,” says Patricia E. Kane, curator of American decorative arts. “The furniture was on the floor, there were paintings on the walls, there was no particular chronology to anything, and about the only thing the labels told you was the object’s identity and its date.”
The material under Montgomery’s purview may have been traditional, but his way of interpreting it was radically different. “He had a strong sense of chronology, and he wanted to put the furniture on platforms where it could be treated like art,” says Kane, who also studied at Winterthur and was working as assistant curator of decorative arts when Montgomery arrived.
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“We created a textbook of the American decorative arts that used the objects instead of words and pictures.”
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T he two scholars, collaborating with museum designer Ivan Chermayeff '55BFA, put together the display that became known as the Mabel Brady Garvan Galleries. Most of the paintings were moved to side rooms, and the decorative arts took center stage in what had been the long gallery. In keeping with the “throw out the past”—or, at least, the elitist past—ethos of the 1960s, Swartwout’s ornate architectural references to Italian palaces were covered up and the main gallery was carved into smaller spaces that were used as a kind of syllabus for the two-semester survey course Montgomery developed. “We created a textbook of the American decorative arts that used the objects themselves instead of words and pictures,” says Kane.
Montgomery brought his students to the gallery often, and though he displayed furniture off the ground, his intention, says Cooke, was to “knock the items off their figurative pedestals. By hanging furniture on the walls, which was one of Montgomery’s radical innovations, and displaying, for example, a deconstructed chair, he encouraged you to be curious about how it was made. This approach had the effect of making the objects more accessible and less intimidating and hands-off.”
In his teaching, the professor emphasized the comparison of regional construction techniques, and he encouraged students and colleagues alike to examine objects from the 19th and 20th centuries, including material from the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century, as well as architect-designed objects from the post-World War II era. “This field had essentially focused on the individual hand of the craftsman at work, so scholars were primarily interested in objects made before the 1820s. But Montgomery wanted to investigate more modern methods and designs,” says Cooke.
Montgomery died in 1978, but the installation and its way of looking at the decorative arts, would endure for another 20 years. Throughout the 1990s, however, the field was changing, embracing new regions of the country, such as the southwest, and Native American material cultures. In addition, decorative arts scholars were increasingly interested in studying 20th-century material, and, in concert with this direction, the Gallery, through its donors, had added new material to its collections.
“The problem was that the Montgomery installation was a rigid and inflexible system—there was no way to break out of it,” says American art curator Helen Cooper. “In planning for the future, we realized that it simply had to go.”
Cooper and Kane were not alone in rethinking their space. Gallery director Reynolds had already asked the curators of every department to overhaul their displays, and in the late 1990s, the museum was engaged with architect James Polshek and Partners and others in Yale’s arts community to develop a $250 million master plan to upgrade the arts area complex. The project calls for the Gallery to double in size, from 87,000 square feet to about 168,000 square feet, fully renovate its landmark Kahn and Swartwout buildings, and construct a new facility nearby that will be used for additional exhibition space, classrooms (the Gallery currently has only two; it will gain nine more), the study and storage of the collection, conservation laboratories, and new offices. It will also expand into Street Hall, as the History of Art department moves into a building next to the School of Architecture that is currently being designed by Richard Meier.
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“We’re not going to close the Gallery when we renovate—it’s too integral to the life of the University.”
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In this project, the American wing was seen as pivotal. “We’re not going to close the Gallery when we renovate—it’s too integral to the life of the University,” says Reynolds.
Instead, the core elements of the collection will be moved into this “swing space” in the Swartwout building as construction proceeds around it. The fact that the American wing would prove so useful silenced concerns that it was fiscally imprudent to undertake such an extensive—and, as it turned out, expensive—renovation in advance of the actual Gallery project. The fact that it looks so handsome also helped eliminate criticism.
In all, the American wing restoration cost $1.5 million. All the false walls that Montgomery had erected came down, the paint that covered the skylight was removed (as was asbestos that was discovered in the ceiling, which added considerably to the project’s cost), and the gallery’s contents were flipflopped. In the new configuration, most of the paintings and sculpture were moved back into the main room and either placed on the walls or on floating panels.
“I didn’t want this installation to be coercive,” says Helen Cooper. “I wanted visitors to feel they could wander and discover the paintings and sculpture for themselves.”
The artwork is set up in roughly chronological order, starting with the Hoppers of 1950s vintage and moving backwards in time toward the refurbished Trumbull gallery, which houses a collection from the 18th century.
The decorative arts material, which now inhabits the rooms alongside the main gallery, is also arranged by period. “We’ve attempted to display the collection as a continuum through time,” says Kane, “and because scholars are now studying everyday objects instead of just the contents of aristocratic households, we’ve done things like put fine silver tea pots alongside their more humble pottery equivalents. This opens a new perspective of what each time period, from the early colonial to the modern, was like for many members of American culture.”
Ned Cooke suspects his namesake professor and mentor would be pleased with the new installation. “It doesn’t throw out the old—there are chairs still hung on the walls—but we have a different lens now, and the strength of this collection is that it accommodates change,” says Cooke, who teaches a four-semester course in the decorative arts. “We can compare rooms, and techniques, and resonances by looking at the objects and understanding how they worked with each other over time. Separately and together, these objects have stories to tell.”  |
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