Art Museums Mull Overhaul

Anticipating renovations and the selection of a new director, one of the world’s wealthiest university museums will draw up blueprints for its future in the coming months.

Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) administrators are currently preparing proposals for significant renovations to the nearly 80-year-old Fogg Museum complex. The museum lacks up-to-date climate control and wiring and simply does not have space to display much of Harvard’s 160,000-piece collection.

The proposals for renovation, which museum administrators plan to give to the provost’s office by the end of December, include a drastic plan to consolidate the collections of three of Harvard’s museums—the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger and Sackler—in a single building.

Meanwhile, the art museums’ director, James Cuno, plans to leave Harvard at the end of December to head up a London university museum.

Under Cuno for the last decade, the art museums have found financial stability and strengthened their well-known divisions for curating and restoring art.

His departure comes after a multi-year battle with residents of Cambridge’s Riverside neighborhood over the proposed construction of a new modern art museum there—a project Harvard abandoned in July in the face of community opposition.

Now, the art museums stand at a critical juncture.

Although Cuno does not yet have a replacement, the decisions currently under consideration—from the provost’s office to the offices of HUAM administrators—will shape the University’s museums for decades to come.

The Search Begins

In the next few months, the provost’s office—along with an eight-person advisory committee whose membership is still being finalized—will lead the search for a replacement for Cuno.

The provost’s office has already compiled a list of about 80 potential candidates from both within and outside Harvard.

“The fact that there are 80 names simply means that we have received a very large number of suggestions,” Provost Steven E. Hyman writes in an e-mail. “In fact the realistic number of candidates is much smaller.”

The search committee plans to present University President Lawrence H. Summers with a short list of names sometime in the spring, according to Hyman.

Cuno says a good candidate needs experience in how university museums operate, so that they are “comfortable working in the culture of the University.”

An internationally respected art historian—and the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors—Cuno doubled HUAM’s staff and budget since becoming the director in 1991.

His efforts also expanded the Straus Center for Conservation, forming a partnership with the Whitney Museum that brought a well-known expert in art conservation to form a new Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard.

Once Cuno leaves, Marjorie B. Cohn, who has worked for HUAM for 41 years, will serve as the interim acting director, a role she filled 11 years ago before a search committee chose Cuno.

She says she hopes a replacement will be selected soon who can lead the museums through the important upcoming set of decisions permanently—rather than in an interim capacity.

“I am glad to be the acting director, but I don’t want to be director, and I don’t want to be acting director for long,” she says.

Still, she says she believes the search may last until the beginning of 2004. When she last served as interim director, she held that job for 11 months.

Proposals for Change

But she says renovations to the museums may not be able to wait for the appointment of a new director.

To show the urgent need for improvements, Cohn holds an antiquated light-switch fixture from the Fogg in her hands. On the back, one wire is missing, and the other is old and rusty.

“This building was built in 1927,” she says. “It has never been rewired, never been replumbed.... Something needs to be done.”

Around six years ago, art museum administrators had planned for renovations to the Fogg complex to take place this year.

As a result, a large portion of the museums’ holdings—the Grenville L. Winthrop collection—will leave the museum in January to travel around the world for the next two years.

But improvements to the Fogg were placed on the back burner, while Harvard focused its energy on the now-defunct plans for a new museum and other building projects.

Now, with the Riverside museum project abandoned, the focus has shifted back to Harvard’s existing museums buildings, Cuno says.

But Cuno, who is leaving for London just as these plans get underway, says he is concerned that the absence of a permanent director could slow the process.

“The big question is what my leaving will do to this,” he says. “Will the University suspend consideration of options on this site until a new director is found, which I think would be a mistake?”

According to Cohn, HUAM and its architects have created schematics for three types of renovations—ranging from minor to more drastic—and they expect to present final plans including cost estimates to the provost’s office by the end of December.

The most significant renovations call for the consolidation of the Sackler, the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger—whose collection is already housed in a new wing of the Fogg—in a single building, according to Cohn.

The Sackler, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of Eastern, Islamic and Asian art, resides in a building across the street.

The plan, according to Cohn, would move the Sackler’s collection into the space currently used as the Fogg’s Fine Arts Library. The library, then, would relocate to the Sackler’s current building.

She says this “unified” museum would have advantages despite its logistical complexities.

“I do feel strongly that if we could bring the Sackler in [to the Fogg complex] it would be wonderful for teaching,” she says. “Having an academic museum where all of our museums could cross-pollinate would be great.”

Other plans include simply charging the engineering of the building to fix structural and mechanical problems.

But Cohn says these renovations would be as expensive as the more drastic change and would cause “frustration at doing something for the Fogg that does not enlarge its resources.”

“I’d rather do it right once,” she says.

Cuno says he agrees that renovations should be wide-scale, particularly since there is no additional museum currently in the works.

“We need to do as much as we possibly can on this site,” he says.

But any renovations will have a high price tag. And Cohn says it will be more difficult to solicit donors without the enticement of their name on a new building.

“I want to find the people who want their names on freight elevators,” she jokes.

Moreover, she says, any renovations are bound to be difficult, as they will likely require removing a substantial portion of the collection that is not currently displayed to some temporary space—a process that risks damage to the artwork.

She says the museums may also need to find a temporary public exhibition space for the work on display.

Hyman says that while the renovations will be expensive, he agrees with their urgency.

“Given the poor state of the physical plant and the risk to irreplaceable art, we simply must find a way to get the renovation done,” he says. “HUAM has some funds for the renovation, but additional funds will have to be raised.”

In the meantime, Cohn says, she plans to keep the frayed light-switch on her desk as she serves out her tenure as acting museum director.

Longer-Term Plans

But museum administrators worry that renovations won’t be enough to solve the larger space crunch.

They say the museums struggle with inadequate space both for public display of the collections and for behind-the-scenes conservation and administrative work.

Even though the plans for a Riverside modern art museum have fallen through, they say Harvard still needs to consider building a new museum to house the work that currently goes undisplayed.

“We always assumed that we would renovate this as a complement to the new site, as part of a larger building project,” Cuno says.

But Cohn is concerned that her calls for Fogg renovations will make the prospect of a new museum even less likely.

“That scenario [substantial renovations] puts off into an even more distant position the question of a new museum,” Cohn says.

Cohn says the question of museum expansion will “inevitably” involve the University’s land in Allston.

One of Hyman’s four committees on planning for Allston is charged with cultural development of Harvard’s space across the river. Cuno sits on the committee to represent the art museums.

While moving part of the collection to Allston would alleviate space concerns, Cuno says he worries that, long-term, there will be a push to entirely relocate the museums’ holding across the river.

He says this move would cause the museums to lose their focus on teaching and their interaction with Harvard’s History of Art and Architecture department.

“The museum’s mission and program is very closely linked to teaching within the College and Faculty of Arts and Science,” Cuno says. “So unless there is some representation of the College across the river or some sort of spectacular transaction…if we were over there it would radically alter our mission and I think that would be a mistake.”

But both Cohn and Cuno agree that Allston could hold some promise for additional museum space.

“One can envision a kind of complex, maybe with a performing arts space,” Cohn says.

For instance, she suggests, HUAM could also find offices, temporary exhibition space and storage locations across the river—options that are all up in the air pending more “general planning” of Allston.

“At this point, everything should be rethought,” Cuno says. “We shouldn’t limit our thinking.”

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.