Director's Letter Fall 2011

We often speak of spring as the season of renewal and rebirth, but for many of us in the academic community it is fall that most strongly speaks of new beginnings—a new academic year, a newly minted class of freshmen arriving for their first classes, new course offerings, and, simply put, a reinvigorated energy and sense of purpose. Although we are now fully a year-round institution— presenting lively exhibitions on a twelve-month basis, with such major projects such as our current lead exhibition The Life and Death of Buildings opening in the summer— September brings a particular burst of energy. The volume of academic and public outreach programs increases dramatically, as this issue of our magazine will attest, and we welcome the launch of several collaborative programs on and off campus as many of our academic and community colleagues return to Princeton.

The Museum’s galleries feature many markers of renewal this season. New selections of masterworks in all artistic media now regularly find their way into the collections galleries, supporting our renewed emphasis on creating lively, changing installations and fresh juxtapositions. These include rarely seen works on paper sprinkled throughout the European galleries, including prints by Dürer and Rembrandt; major twentieth-century works by artists such as Man Ray, Lee Bontecou, Martha Rosler, and Wayne Thiebaud; and new acquisitions by contemporary artists such as Alejandro Cesarco and Thomas Hirschhorn. I’m personally especially excited to welcome back into the galleries an exceptional work by Christian Boltanski, who will visit campus this fall to deliver a major lecture on memory and visual art. The scale and materials of his Autel Chases (1987–88) sadly mandate that it only be rarely installed. Two new collections-based exhibitions in the Asian galleries highlight representations of deities in Chinese and Japanese art and are replete with subtle masterworks.

Other additions will be truly new discoveries for visitors to our galleries, including works never before seen in the United States, such as the extraordinary Saint Paul the Hermit by the great seventeenth-century Spanish-born master Jusepe de Ribera (1588–1656), not previously represented in the collections galleries. On view since late July and on long-term loan to the Museum from a private collection, the painting (tentatively dated to 1614) is a truly smashing addition to our earlier European galleries in its historic—possibly original—frame.

In a similar spirit, two distinguished paintings come to us from extraordinary peer institutions as reciprocal loans, offered in exchange for works from our own collections that we’ve made available to important temporary exhibitions. The first of these is John Singer Sargent’s An Interior in Venice, loaned from the Royal Academy in London. The RA’s collections are limited to works offered by its academicians from its founding in the eighteenth century, and this Sargent—on view in the Mary Ellen Bowen Gallery of American Art—offers a remarkable opportunity for visual dialogue with our own Sargent rendition of Elizabeth Allen Marquand, the painting that set Sargent on his way to becoming the most fashionable portraitist of his time.

The second such exchange loan comes from one of our neighbors to the north, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which judged our Black Friday by Willem de Kooning essential to their once-in-a-generation look at this master of Abstract Expressionism. To help fill the vacuum created by this temporary loss to our galleries, MoMA has lent—with exceptional generosity—Mark Rothko’s No. 3/No. 13 from 1949—a true masterpiece by one of the greatest members of the New York School. Both the Sargent and the Rothko will be on view only for a short time, so don’t miss these exceptional grace notes to our galleries.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight a major program that represents another kind of newness—a project that I believe to be unprecedented in Princeton in the number of cultural organizations that have come together to make it possible. MEMORY AND THE WORK OF ART is the fruit of no fewer than twenty organizations on and off the Princeton University campus, uniting to consider the ways in which the arts shape our understanding of the past and help us to come to terms with catastrophic loss. Offered on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, this project may consider tragedy, but it also speaks in powerful terms to something at the heart of the Museum’s enterprise—the healing power of art.

James Christen Steward
Director