Director's Letter Spring 2012

There’s an adage that all art was contemporary in its day. Sadly, this is often not the lesson one takes away from museums, where we’re given the iconic, the safe, the inevitable march across the centuries. Great artists are probably no more prescient than the rest of us, a fact with which art historians have grappled in recent decades, seeking to move away from a linear history that left little room for the outliers—the individuals or movements that don’t fit the pattern. The traditional structures of museums have perhaps made this more difficult, as gallery arrangements often have conformed to the old chapters of art history. As recently as twenty years ago many museums clung to chronologies and the cult of genius with such vigor that they wouldn’t lend to thematically focused exhibitions that sought to link art and social history or that sought to look at the upheaval of a moment in time.

It takes no small effort to put aside what we know now in favor of opening our eyes to how something might have looked at the moment of its creation. We often discuss, for instance, the “fathers” of modern art, those pioneers who led the way from figuration to abstraction, from traditionally defined subject matter to art-making as the subject of art. But Paul Cézanne no more knew what Pablo Picasso would do after him, and Jackson Pollock after Picasso, than did the first photographers understand how profoundly that wholly new form of image-making would reshape the very ways in which we see the world.

Our spring exhibitions confront these matters. John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum is an opportunity to delight in one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, an artist who is often cited as one of the English masters. Yet when he was painting on Hampstead Heath in the 1820s, daubing his canvases with unresolved flecks of pigment under the open sky, this eventual outcome would by no means have been clear. Not only was Constable breaking the mold of studio practice at the time, he was also fundamentally challenging what it meant to create a “finished” work of art. As the postscript to the exhibition makes clear, Constable was essential to the art that came after: Constant Troyon, Eugène Boudin, and Claude Monet, in turn, drew on his example. Even as this helps us understand his impact, we must seek to imagine the shock that these pictures represented when first seen.

Presenting Constable in this light is an act of what I’ve termed “re-radicalization,” looking again at the art of the past through period eyes, seeking the adventure, the risk, the tumult of the new. Princeton and the Gothic Revival: 1870–1930 does this, too, though perhaps more quietly. The Princeton University campus has become one of the most admired college campuses in the world. Every year thousands of visitors come to discover the Georgian front campus and the Gothic Revival open quadrangles that romantically tumble down the hill from Nassau Street to the lake. In its comforting familiarity and the way in which it seems to embody the classic American campus, it is a place that is easy to embrace—and one that lifts my spirits every day. Yet in this too there was nothing inevitable. As the exhibition reminds us, the choice to adopt this visual vocabulary was closely tied to institutional reinvention—with looking to the language of the so-called ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge in order to reshape what had been the College of New Jersey into the forward-looking university it wished to become. It can be no accident that the College renamed itself at just the same moment.

My invitation to you is not only to discover these two exhibitions but also to consider the shock of the new throughout our galleries. Whether in the hands of artists who looked to precedent in order to turn it on its ear or those consciously seeking to do something wholly new, great works of art continue to have meaning because they speak to our contemporary world while opening windows to periods and cultures that are far removed from our direct experience. Moments of recognition collide with moments of transport and discovery: for me, some of the most extraordinary visual experiences come from that collision. Museums at their best can be gloriously safe places in which we are able to open ourselves to the new.

James Christen Steward
Director