Director's Letter Summer 2013

One of the most essential of the Museum’s ongoing activities is the addition of works of art to collections that already number over 80,000 pieces spanning the globe and more than 5,000 years of world history. Each year, gifts to the collections bring works of remarkable quality that would often otherwise be beyond the Museum’s reach, while the generosity of benefactors past and present enables us to shape our holdings through purchases in ways that are unusual if not unique among university museums.  

These new acquisitions typically number in the hundreds each year, enough to keep our curators and registrars busy processing, researching, and, in many cases, preparing to put on view these important new discoveries. This summer the Museum presents fifty highlights from among the many works that have come to the Museum in the past few years in the installation Faces and Facets: Recent Acquisitions. Occupying three galleries, the exhibition thoughtfully presents these works in four thematic groupings designed to provide sometimes surprising juxtapositions and unexpected contexts. 

The history of the collecting of art at Princeton dates nearly to the University’s foundations, thus making it one of the oldest collecting institutions in America. The first works—portraits and objects forming a kind of “museum” of the Enlightenment—came to Princeton’s Nassau Hall in the 1750s, revealing a commitment to teaching from original objects as a way of understanding the wider world. Such an outlook has endured across the centuries. When, in 1882, University president James McCosh charged William Cowper Prime, Class of 1843, and General George McClellan (the former Civil War general and governor of New Jersey) with preparing a curriculum in the history of art, they argued: “The foundation of any system of education in Historic Art must obviously be in object teaching.  A museum of art objects is so necessary to the system that without it we are of the opinion it would be of small utility to introduce the proposed department.”

From the beginning, the proposed museum’s reach was to be interdisciplinary, moving well beyond the fields of art and classics to include “many other branches of the collegiate course.” “Expectations of large future growth,” for which Princeton could “look with confidence to her sons, in all parts of the world,” were to be anticipated. As the revised and expanded Handbook of the Collections to be published in September will emphatically attest, such expectations have been meaningfully advanced but in a sense will never be complete.

New fields of endeavor—whether the work of the Center for African American Studies launched in 2006 or of the new Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment currently under construction—demand new objects for use in their research and teaching.  Demographic and cultural shifts—including the burgeoning interest in China and India as they assume new places on the world stage—ask that we assign new focus to areas of long-standing interest, or that we broaden our understanding of these cultures. The Museum remains fundamentally committed to the art of our own time, too, and recognizes that the best of that art—the work we feel will most compellingly reflect our era—must make its way into our collections before market factors make that a near impossibility. And our dedication to preserving the best of the past also means that we remain committed to developing our collections of European and American painting, even as we expand our reach to new fields.

These commitments place exceptional demands on the Museum and its staff. We are, after all, a midsized museum currently hampered by significant space constraints. Now as in the past, the exceptional support we receive from benefactors far and wide—whether as donors of great works of art or as benefactors to the many responsibilities that such encompassing collections engender—will enable us to fulfill our mandate and to sustain our commitment to object-based teaching for the
benefit of Princeton’s students and for the public good.

James Christen Steward 
Director