Director's Letter Summer 2015

One of the characteristics of institutions that collect and house objects is that they are grounded in place. As a vessel for objects, a museum or a library or an archive occupies a physical reality that sets it apart from a musical performance or from digital collections accessible from any laptop the world over.

Two recent events have turned my mind to the importance of place in our experience of what I will call “the thing itself”—the unique work of art in time and space. The first was the arrival in my office of the book Art and Soul, a history of the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Its cover shows, in period black and white, a woman painting at her easel in what is recognizably the landscape of Vermont’s Green Mountains. Its pages are replete with images of the region’s landscape, of its Colonial and revival homes, and of the men and women who sought out the beauties of rural Vermont as a venue for making art. Shown in the field and in the studio, these artists—including Edwin Child and John Steuart Curry—responded to the region’s particularities, its light and its contours, differently than they might have to coastal Connecticut or to Cape Cod. The book does a captivating job of conveying this to a reader like me, who is susceptible to Vermont’s largely uncorrupted charms. The second event was the death of Michael Graves, who for decades made his career and his home here in Princeton. Although I only came to know Michael personally since moving to Princeton six years ago, in that time I had the good fortune to visit with him variously in his home and office. That home, known as “The Warehouse,” was Michael’s since he spotted it as a “ruin” while walking with his daughter one Sunday in 1970. Across the intervening decades, Michael made and remade it on multiple occasions—including after the infection that left him paralyzed in 2003—filling it with personal treasures that embodied his passion for the classical tradition. Biedermeier furniture, ancient Greek pots, and neoclassical paintings by Corot and Prud’hon were gathered in an unforgettable ensemble in the house that was—to put it slightly grandly—Michael’s Monticello, the remade Italian villa-cum-laboratory on the edge of Princeton’s “tree streets.”

Neither of these instances—the community of artists in southern Vermont nor Michael Graves’s Warehouse—is replicable or transferable. And neither are the world’s great museums. They exist in time and place as reflections of cumulative local histories and of the directors, curators, collectors, and patrons whose legacies make the institutions we know today, even as they are perpetually changed by new generations. That this Museum should, for example, have exceptional collections of the art of the ancient Americas and of photography can be traced to specific individuals of vision and commitment. It is a sadness for me, therefore, when I visit other museums to see the ease with which we seem to forget our own histories or ignore our particular corner of the world. Too often the museum can feel closed off from the world around it, lacking even windows from which to gain a perspective on the surrounding landscape and on the community of which we are a part. Too often the hang of the art can feel interchangeable, a suite of canonical artworks past and present as happily at home in New York as in Paris or Doha or Beijing. Not long ago, I was actually startled to hear the accents of museumgoers around me—so familiar was the sequence of art and artists that I had forgotten I wasn’t in New Jersey anymore.

This is to be resisted. Even as globalism grows in importance, and thus the importance of a museum like ours with a global reach in its holdings, I think it essential that we find ways to ground the stories we tell in the particularities of time and place. What does it mean to collect and exhibit the world of art here at Princeton, on the grounds of a university founded in the Age of Enlightenment, at what began life as a school for preparing young men for the Presbyterian church? In a location all but midway between New York and Philadelphia? At a private university committed to the nation’s service and thus to the public good? It seems no accident that many of the museums we most frequently admit to loving are ones that are grounded in the particular, such as the tastes and collecting interests of a Henry Huntington or a Duncan Phillips or a Dominique de Menil. These institutions tell us human stories that we recognize, distinct from the all-encompassing reach of our largest institutions. Despite the fact that the origins of this Museum date all the way to 1755, I am only the eighth incumbent to sit in this chair. And as such, I shall strive to understand and reflect the narratives of our past and the people who have joined over time to make the Princeton University Art Museum what it is in 2015—both of Princeton and of the world.

James Christen Steward

Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director