Fogg Director John Coolidge Is Retiring After Two Innovative Decades with Museum

The champagne glasses were filled and refilled the evening of May 27 in the Fogg courtyard. Thomas Hoving had a previous engagement, but Evan Turner of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Thomas Messer of the Guggenheim were here, and so were Perry Rathbone of the BFMA and Charles Buckley of the City Art Museum of St. Louis. A dance band played, but most of the black-tie crowd preferred just to chat, drifting at times through the first floor galleries which had been set aside for "Purchases of Two Decades"--an exhibit honoring John Coolidge '35, resigning as director of the Fogg after 20 years.

The majority of the Harvard community has probably never met or even heard of the man all the hoopla was about. The Fogg Art Museum and the Fine Arts Department it houses are, after all, neither the largest nor most controversial segments of the University. Coolidge himself has said that the Fogg has never been dominated by one man, and he has been no exception to the rule. But the Fogg has been transformed, substantially if quietly, in directions Coolidge is largely responsible for during his 20 year reign.

Coolidge was born a Boston Brahmin (his father Julian Lowell Coolidge was a mathematics professor here) and looks it. Still handsomely distinguished at 54, he looks and talks like the epitome of a well-bred gentleman. It is easy, as he leans back in his chair reflecting on a question, to see him as the image of Wisdom and Moderation--the kind of man you could entrust a Cezanne collection to with the assurance that it would be put to the best of all possible uses.

But instead of running the Fogg as a sedate mausoleum of art, Coolidge committed the museum to expanded educational services, so that it now serves as both a display center for Fine Arts classes and a workshop for grad students studying curatorship. Coolidge came to Harvard as an assistant professor of Fine Arts in 1947, the year before he became director, and will go back to full-time teaching after stepping down from the directorship. He taught courses most of the years in between and tried to combine the museum staff and Fine Arts Faculty into a single community of scholars to study and judge art.

The Fogg is the summit of the establishment among American University museums, and its tradition gives it a peculiar responsibility for training curators. Almost all the museum directors in the United States have attended Harvard at some time. And approximately 47 per cent of all trustees of all American museums went to Harvard.

The Fogg gives its graduate students a huge role in running the museum and the results are often sensational. The Degas Monotype exhibit which has filled three galleries for the last two months is Mrs. Eugenia Janis's Ph.D. dissertation in visual form. The Fogg's 1966 Art Nouveau exhibit was a project for Coolidge's graduate seminar in art museum problems. A grad student made a slide-tape presentation of Poussin's "Birth of Bacchus" and two are now making a movie of Rodin's "Burghers of Calais," starting from the collection of Rodin sculptures left to the Fogg by Grenville Winthrop. In 1965, a graduate student named Michael Fried wrote the introduction to the catalogue of the Fogg's 1965 Noland, Olitski, and Steela exhibition, and that essay has been highly influential in developing an approach to these flat, color-preoccupied, conceptual paintings.

The Fogg's reputation and contact with exstudents who work at other museums make it easy for grad students like Mrs. Janis to borrow works and set up exhibits. And the practice in setting up exhibits is valuable to would-be and will-be curators. In fact it gives graduate education in Harvard's Fine Arts department a distinct bias to producing curators rather than educators.

Coolidge maintains that "encouraging graduate students to involve themselves in the museum is not do-goodism. Rather it is a calculated response to a basic change in the nature of the American art world." He argues that the art historian today must be a generalist, ready to teach a course, write a book or put together an exhibition. Accordingly he has tried to make the Fogg a homogeneous community where there is no distinction between curator and professor or grad student and junior staff member.

In an article in The Art Journal Coolidge assigned some rather large responsibilities to this community of scholars. He wrote that because the church, the court, and the legislature no longer command influence in molding opinion, the university has become a "tribunal of intellectual appeal," and the university art museum must pass judgment on aesthetic ideals.

Undergraduates are for the most part only passive observors of this process. For them the museum is simply a visual library, but Coolidge has made every effort to make it a good one. Years back, Wilhelm Koehler resolutely ignored the Fogg's collection and taught his course on Romanesque sculpture from battered photographs. But last semester Linda Seidel used the originals to teach a course on restorations and forgeries in Romanesque sculpture. Coolidge says, "You cannot discuss the nature of genuine surface or the problems of recutting by studying beaten-up photographs."

The Fogg staff sets up displays for almost every Fine Arts 13 section meeting and provides more modest exhibits for other courses and hangs specific paintings for students from Brandeis, Wellesley and other neighboring schools. Concentrators are most tenderly cared for; at times the Fogg even permits them to run their fingers over a painting's surface.

Part of Coolidge's job the past 20 years has been simply to preside over the museum as a museum--and here his successes have been far more conventional. When he became director in 1948 the Fogg was virtually broke. Post-war inflation made earlier budgets inadequate and the generation for whom the museum had counted on gifts were no longer providing them. A few opportune, bequests and steady cultivation of new sources has brought the Fogg back to solvency and Harvard now spends eight times what it did when Coolidge started. (Much of this money, however, is spent by the Carpenter Center, and the Fine Arts Library, now no longer under the Fogg's control.)

As the "Purchase of Two Decades" exhibit shows, there has been no simple pattern to Coolidge's acquisitions. Morris Louis' "Color Barrier" (1961) hangs across from a Japanese painted screen of Magnolia blossoms against a gold background, and a Rembrandt is close to a Persian miniature. The exhibit (and Coolidge's purchasing pattern) is heavy on 17th century Dutch works because few gifts have been received from that period, and light on Impressionist paintings, which Harvard received in abundance from the Wertheim bequest.

The 42 objects on display are only a fraction of Coolidge's acquisitions. The rest, like 3/4 of the objects the Fogg owns, are never shown to the public. Sculpture fragments, torn paintings, forgeries and most prints and drawings are stored in the basement and print and drawing rooms and are used only for study and instruction. Many large bequests of miscellane- ous art must be attributed and sometimes restored before the works which are good enough to be exhibited can be separated from those which are not.

Even among the works suitable for exhibitions, only 2/3 to 3/4 are shown at any one time. Some objects are usually up on the fourth floor being cleaned and restored by the conservation department. Others are on loan to the Harvard Houses. In exchange for the privilege of borrowing from other museums for special exhibits like the Degas monotypes, the Fogg lends out works to other museums, and it has to pull paintings off the wall to make room for its own special exhibits and course displays.

As the collection has grown steadily, the amount of display room has stayed the same and the Fogg is starting to feel the pinch. It plans to expand within the next five years, proably by building an addition to house the offices and workrooms now on the third and fourth floors. That would free these floors for gallery space, and they would be opened to the public.

Coolidge now is leaving the business of expansion to other minds. He will be teaching here again (his specialty is architecture and he used to give Fine Arts 13) after taking a year's sabbatical during 1968-69.

Agnes Mongan, now Curator of Drawings, is expected to occupy the director's office for a year. Who the next long-term director will be and how he and the projected expansion will affect the Fogg are anybody's guess.

The museum today remains, despite Coolidge's innovations, a quiet, eminently civilized place, a refuge from an outside world which is more Dada and Surrealism than Currier and Ives. This quietude is conscious; the Fogg has resisted the kind of publicity New York's Metropolitan Museum gained from its disclosure of the forged Greek horse, and it is unlikely to sponsor Alan Kaprow's next happening. Certainly the scholarship and aesthetic judgment Coolidge values so highly can thrive in this quietude. But whether the impact of this intellectual activity may be obscured, whether the intelligent decisions may lose the impact they have traditionally had in an age when one has to scream to be heard, Coolidge's successor must decide