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Back to the BAC
The latest steward of Paul Mellon’s artistic legacy on Chapel Street is a scholar of natural history illustration who was first lured to Yale by the Center for British Art.
February 2003
by Jennifer Kaylin
Jennifer Kaylin is a freelance writer based in New Haven. Her story about Charles Lindbergh and his Yale connections appeared in the Yale Alumni Magazine last May.
When Amy Meyers graduated from the University of Chicago in 1977, she fully expected to stay on to do her graduate work there. But her father and husband urged her to look at Yale before making a decision. So, one weekend in April of 1977, Meyers made the trip to New Haven. After tea at the Elizabethan Club, a friend suggested they check out the new Center for British Art on Chapel Street, the latest bequest of Paul Mellon ’29.
“When we walked in, I was completely bowled over,” Meyers recalls. “Mrs. Mellon’s spectacular flower arrangements were still in the center hall, and I turned to my husband and said, ‘I have to come to Yale.’”
And so she did. Not only did Meyers get her masters and doctoral degrees in American studies from Yale in 1981 and 1985, but she is now the new director of the very institution that won her heart 25 years ago.
Sitting in her sunny, painting-bedecked office at the BAC (a place so steeped in the love of art that posters of past exhibitions adorn the loading dock), Meyers stops short of saying she feels fated to become the center’s new director. But she does allow that, “I feel like I’ve come home in the most amazing way. I was one of the first students to use this building.”
Which may be one reason why the center’s role as a research institution, and not just a museum, is so important to Meyers, and why strengthening this facet of the facility’s function is one of her top priorities.
Make no mistake, since arriving in New Haven with her husband and daughter in August, Meyers says she’s found the BAC to be “in wonderful shape.” This is largely due to the efforts of past directors, including Patrick McCaughey, who stepped down last June after a five-year tenure that saw an invigoration of the BAC’s once-staid image. Still, Meyers says the institution’s role as a research center “needs fuller amplification.”
To that end, Meyers has already taken steps to expand the fellowship program so visiting scholars can stay for longer than one month. She also wants to strengthen the Center’s ties to the rest of the University and to other institutions, including the Mellon Centre in England and her former professional home, the Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in California, where she was the curator of American art.
“Paul Mellon chose to place his collection [which includes rare books and manuscripts, drawings, prints, and photographs as well as paintings] at a university because he wanted young people to be exposed to it, to study art, and to use it as a scholarly resource,” Meyers explains.
Until his death in February 1999, Mellon was intimately involved in all aspects of the BAC. From his first art acquisition, George Stubbs’s Pumpkin with a Stable-Lad, which enjoys prominent display in the museum, to the Founder’s Room, an intimate meeting room off Meyers’s office that is furnished with Mellon’s domestic artifacts, it is impossible to escape the benefactor’s long shadow.
Far from seeing this as a burden or a hindrance, Meyers views it as “one of the great pleasures of my job.” But it’s not just the ghost of Mellon—his taste, goals, and vision—that Meyers now lives with. There is also the manifestation of these forces. “Mr. Mellon came to think that the healthiest way to create depth was probably to use his funds in areas in which he was most interested,” Meyers says. Since his interests centered around paintings that depict the British sporting life of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Mellon barred the use of his money for the purchase of artwork created after 1850.
But Meyers says this restriction is not a problem. Contemporary art bought with other funding sources may still hang in the museum, and there is no restriction on the BAC’s scholarly pursuits. Besides, “the social history of Britain is already beautifully encompassed by this collection,” says Meyers. “It speaks to the social historical concerns that drive so much of today’s scholarship.”
Known in academic circles for her expertise in the relation of art and natural science, Meyers has taught at six colleges and universities, written more than a dozen papers, and worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art, both in Washington.
Although her conversation is laced with talk of “cross-institutional dialogue,” “triangulation,” “cultivating communities of interchange,” and “creating multiple layers of conversation,” once Meyers gets out of her office and into the exhibition hall, the cool-headed administrator is replaced by an unabashed arts enthusiast. She can’t resist spending a few moments in front of John Constable’s cloud studies. “It’s the most nuanced face of nature,” she says. “They’re some of the most precious works we have.”
Asked if she has a favorite painting in the collection, Meyers at first looks as though she'd been asked to name her favorite child. But then she smiles, and with conspiratorial delight whispers, “Stubbs’s Zebra, I have to admit.”
It is this genuine enthusiasm for art that has won Meyers so many admirers. “Her passion and her ability to articulate her vision are what will make Amy such an effective director,” says Shelley Bennett, who worked with Meyers for 13 years at the Huntington. Bennett, who is the curator of British and European Art, says the strongest asset Meyers brings to Yale is her ability to build bridges between the Center’s scholarly mission and its role as a public museum.
Constance Clement, who has been at the BAC since 1979 and served as acting director after McCaughey’s departure, says she’s looking forward to continuing the momentum begun by Meyers’s predecessors. “This is an exciting time for the Center,” she says. “Every director brings his or her own interests and perspectives. Our job is to constantly figure out new ways to advance the Center’s many missions.”
That process had already begun by October 31, when the BAC, under Meyers’s direction, hosted a major international symposium—“Histories of British Art: Where Next?”—to celebrate the Center’s 25th anniversary.
Not a bad debut for somebody who had only been on the job for two months. But despite her quick start out of the gate and her long history with the Center, there was early evidence that Meyers was still settling in. After returning from a tour of the museum, she stood before her office door and knocked. It took a moment for her to realize what she'd done. Then, slightly flustered, Meyers spun around and laughed. “I’m still not used to this,” she said. “I don’t have to knock—this is my office.”
Now, five months later, with a full calendar of programs, including major watercolor and landscape print exhibits under her belt, such a slip seems unlikely to happen again.  |
