Emerging From The Fogg

It's past closing time at the Fogg; its galleries, hung in the first thread of twilight, are deserted. Suddenly Seymour Slive, the museum's new director, throws himself into an exhibit just hung for a course in 18th-century French art. He stalks backwards, arms out-flung, palms raised, beckoning. "Look at this picture," he commands, his bulging, saucer eyes electric under the flu's rheumy glaze. "It's a wreck, a total wreck. But I think some of its qualities can still be appreciated, that I can help in our teaching." Slive is right. The canvas is a patchwork of flaking paint, but it's still--well--pleasing.

And Slive, who has worked up a sweat this term trying to get his Fine Arts 13 students to take a look at art, launches into an explanation of his dual role as a teacher-museum director. "Our job is to teach the student to assess, judge, appraise and weigh works of art," he says. To this end, according to Slive, the Fogg is unique.

"No other museum in the greater Boston area can bring these things together for teaching purposes," he asserts, sweeping his arm about the gallery, filled with textiles, enamels, paintings and drawings borrowed from collections from across New England. And on top of this, the Fogg is, according to John Rosenfield, chairman of the department of Fine Arts, "one of the greatest art museums in the world."

But Slive becomes moody, thumbing through racks of paintings in one of the Fogg's storage depots. Over twenty gun-metal grey, ceiling-high, metal-mesh racks line this long, narrow hall on the museum's second floor. They are hung with a "big slice of the cultural history of mankind," as Rosenfield says. And though resonant with a strenuous, discordant mixture of competing styles and periods, none of them can escape a certain loneliness, a quiet desperation when shoved back into their dark recess. Pulling out one rack then another, Slive runs through the depot, lingering over one canvas then passing on to the next. On one, four Renoirs are hung, on another two Davids. He's calling the pictures by name--and wincing. Most of these, Slive knows, won't make it out of storage this year.

And this holds for the Fogg's collection in general. At any given time, more than 90 per cent of the Fogg's work are in storage--not including their 50,000 points and 3000 drawings which have to be stored to protect them from sunlight.

"The Fogg is desperately over-crowded. We don't even have the space to show our principal works of art." Slive says.

And the space they do have is often in poor shape. A report drawn up in 1972 by the Visiting Committee on the Fogg states. "The physical building has not been touched in 44 years and much of it is shoddy and uncommodious." Due to the lack of atmospheric controls, there has been a general rotting away of the museum's collection. "Anything that is really critical can be gotten to," says chief conservateur Arthur Beale, but there is a two year backlog of work in all four laboratories"--painting, objects, paper and research.

Both problems--space and climate control--come down to a question of money, and raising that money will be Slive's highest priority. The planned installation of a system to filter dust and pollutants out of the air and control the relative humidity inside the Fogg will necessitate closing a third of the building at a time for three-month stretches.

But at present, the museum is already short of about 35,000 square feet of space and could not absorb its holdings from the areas that would be closed off. So the climate control system, whose cost was estimated at $500,000 five years ago, really can't be installed until the Fogg gets its addition, which Slive says will cost at least $7,000,000. And so he sits in his office, surrounded by a selection of the Fogg's surplus holdings, waiting for the knock of some donor who will liberate them.

While past directors have influenced the Fogg through their efforts as collectors. Slive's efforts will be directed more towards ensuring the well-being of what the museum already has. "His main challenge will be to refurbish the building, to expand it, to make the Fogg's fiscal structure sound," says Rosenfield. "The museum is at a crossroads in this sense."

But Slive is not primarily an administrator. Crimson-faced and sweaty-haired, he's out of his element when not confronting the students in his museum and producing reactions between them and its works of art. Naturally he sees the Fogg as a teaching tool.

"We are here as a laboratory for the department." Slive says. This conception is widely shared by the museum's staff.

Louise Cort, assistant curator of Oriental Art, says her needs are "almost more a matter of adequate storage and work space than of more exhibition space." The Fogg has no room where students in the field can examine objects closely, she says.

In the department of Ancient Arts, the problem is much the same. Nearly the entire collection, ranging from Cycladic objects to Roman pottery, is stored in assistant curator Jill Brennan's office. "The strength of this department lies in the study of original works of art, and this is becoming more and more difficult." Brennan says.

Slive agrees. "It's a private affair this encounter between the individual and the work of art," he says, and it is an affair that is being threatened. The Photography department has to share exhibition, storage and study space with the Prints department, which has resulted in over-crowded facilities for both. And though the Indian-Islamic collection "just moved out of the broom closet in January," according to Cary Welch, lecturer in Fine Arts, it will take three years for most of its important holdings to get out on display.

But except for expanding the Fogg, Slive doesn't see any radical changes in its future. Any change that does occur, moreover, will be made in conjunction with the department of Fine Arts. For Rosenfield, "our priorities aren't in getting things but in using what we have." As he sees it, the Fogg is a great museum and would still be so even if it never acquired another work of art. But the Fogg staff, whose job is, after all, to strengthen their muscum, might tend to see their roles in a more acquisitive light.

Conflicts of this nature led to the resignation of Daniel Robbins as the Fogg's director last year. Robbins, intent on acquiring a large collection of modern art, had plans to turn the Busch-Reisinger Museum (which is effectively run by the director of the Fogg) into a museum of 20th-century art. Members of the department, however, protested the move as being contrary to the original aim of the Busch, a museum for Northern European art.

Now Rosenfield says. "We try to diminish distinctions between the museum and the faculty." He himself is curator of Oriental Art, G.M.A. Hanfmann, John E. Hudson Professor of Archacology, is curator of Ancient Art, and Slive is Gleason Professor of Fine Arts. It's not suprising that the Fogg's director "can't see where there's a conflict between the museum and the department."

Slive doesn't really have to worry about the strength of the Fogg's collection: it is generally acknowledged to be one of the strongest university museums in the country, and in many fields--Chinese jades, early Renaissance Italian painting, 19th century French painting, and prints, for example--its holdings are among the strongest anywhere in the world. The Fogg's "friends," who have donated over 90 per cent of the museum's works, make the collection seem to grow by itself, according to Rosenfield. In the Fogg's one weak area, that of modern art, Slive plans to strengthen it, while in the field of "art and anthropology" he plans to expand it, in conjunction with the Peabody Museum.

For though he is a specialist in 16th and 17th century Dutch painting, "the breadth of Slive's sympathies is astounding," says associate professor Michael Fried, a specialist in modern art. "I can't imagine Slive won't do a tremendous job," Fried says.

But the museum is still threatened by a severe shortage of money. The future of the Fogg as a great teaching museum, depends on Slive's ability to increase its endowment, something which will enable him to assemble teaching exhibits and display them. If the museum's new director has the same effect on potential donors as he has on the Fogg's staff be should be a success for as Rosenfield says, Slive the people in the museum."