Post Tagged with: "college museums"

On the Rose Art Museum

On the Rose Art Museum

Editor’s Note The upsetting story of the Brandeis Trustees’ decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell the entire collection has been circulating the internet for a while now.  My decision to go into art history and museum work was largely due to my wonderful experiences at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, and so I was deeply disturbed and saddened by what happened at Brandeis.  Below is an excerpt from an article in the Vassar student newspaper written by our equally concerned contributor, Gabrielle, on the event.  If you are interested in encouraging this decision to be revoked, please sign the ‘In Opposition to the Closing of the Rose Art Museum’ petition. –Chelsea

Art is a profitable commodity and always has been. But this is not an art auction at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Brandeis is a reputable academic institution, and its art museum, much like Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Gallery, is an indispensable resource for students, professors and members of the community. Furthermore, the Rose Art Museum has always supported itself by raising its own funds independently of the University. It prides itself on works of art from private donors, to many of whom the plan to close the museum was seen as a bald-faced insult.

[...] The Trustees are robbing the Brandeis community of a significant resource, and they’re tainting the University’s reputation in the process. Instead of cutting costs in multiple areas of the University, the trustees are striking a blow solely to the visual arts, compromising Brandeis’ reputation and credibility as a higher learning institution. Even if the Trustees were to re-open the museum in the future, under better economic conditions, who would donate to it, now that its reputation has been sacrificed?

The imperativeness of appreciating the resources available to us as students of the liberal arts is reinforced by Brandeis’ abrupt decision to close its art museum. Being able to study in an environment that values cultural exploration and resources is a luxury, not an entitlement. In a declining economy, nothing is certain and nothing can be taken for granted—least of all art.

Read Gabrielle’s full article at the Miscellany News website.
For more information on this topic, see the most recent article in the NY Times, which reports that the building will “remain open as a teaching and studio facility;” Tyler Green’s Q&A with Michael Rush, Rose Art Museum director; as well as CultureGrrl’s wrap-up of the responses to the incident.

Monday, February 16, 2009 0 comments
Getting back to basics

Getting back to basics

Today, for the first time, I had the great fortune to don a pair of curator’s gloves, sit down in front of a museum-acquisitioned painting, and examine the work I was holding up with my own hands.

This post is a little more personal, persay, than I’d ever really planned to write in this blog, but I wanted to share this experience and the thoughts it’s inspired.  I’m in a museum studies seminar this semester.  It takes place in the art museum on my university’s campus and is taught by the museum’s director.

In the course, as you can see, we have the opportunity to engage with works of art literally firsthand.  And one of the things I’m learning from being able to do this is the importance of getting back to the basics.  When you look at art, especially if you know a bit or even a lot about art history, it’s so easy to get carried away by what (you think) you know.  The class emphasizes focusing on what we can SEE — not the figures or objects depicted on its surface or sculpted shapes, but the actual material the painting is made with and on, the substance the sculpture’s been made out of.  For example, even if you can’t pick up a work of art, you can still go to an art museum and do essentially exactly what we did in class this week.  Without looking at the label, and divorcing the work from the objects in the galleries around it as much as possible, decide what material the support (or backing — like canvas, wood panel, paper) of the work is made out of.  Look at the texture of the surface; the way the pigmet (paints or charcoal, etc.) sits on it; look at the edges of the support against the frame.

These details have the potential to tell you so much more about the work of art than simply by looking at what the artist depicted on it (though of course, that’s still important!).  The type of wood, for example, can tell you what time it was made in, or even place — northern artists in the Renaissance favored a heavier, denser wood, southern artists a lighter, thicker type like poplar.  The quality of the paint — if it’s shiny or flat, if it has a yellow tint — can tell you what sort of technique the artist used: was it oil, with many painstaking layers, was it varnished, was it brushed on quickly?

Things like this can only be seen in person.  Of course, that ties back in to the importance of museums and going to see what are really looks like up close.  And obviously the experience of actually holding a painting — of lifting it up to see how heavy it is, helping identify what kind of wood the paneling could be — isn’t something you can do in an art museum.  But looking really closely, examining its edges, beginning to deduce its history?  That, anyone can do.

Thursday, January 29, 2009 0 comments