Spring/Summer 2025 | Director’s Letter: The Return of and to Objects

The last time I saw the galleries of our old Museum building “normally” installed was five years ago, during a mad dash of taking photographs and shooting videos as we prepared for lockdown. I still occasionally revisit the photographs I took on my iPhone during those harried days, for by the time I was next in the Museum, deinstallation had begun in order to prepare for  the demolition of the old building and, ultimately, the making of our new facility. It might surprise you to learn that, over the subsequent years, I had little more direct access to the masterpieces of art in our care than you did; most of our engagement with these works—programmatically, in teaching, and in planning the installation of our new galleries—was for me (if not our curators) carried out digitally, including through wonderful three-dimensional imaging tools that have dramatically expanded our planning resources.

Imagine, then, my delight as a lifelong museumgoer and as a museum director now in my twenty-seventh year—my sixteenth at Princeton—when, on Monday, February 10, I made my way to the new building, through its staff entrance, up the Grand Stair to the second floor, and into the gallery spaces to be met, for the first time, by original works of art. As I entered the galleries for European art, a cluster of Mannerist and Baroque paintings was being laid out along the floor to affirm that the spacing and sequence we had planned—in this case led by Alexandra Letvin, Duane Wilder Associate Curator of European Art—worked as well in the physical reality of the space as it had on paper and on screen. Indulge me for a moment when I write that happy tears were shed, and not just by me.

Shortly thereafter, on the same morning, I found another team of art handlers and registrars gathering around Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Senior Curator of American Art, as he readied what will  become five new galleries of American art. Even as the gallery plans feature a more inclusive definition of American art, to include both Indigenous practice and Spanish colonial art made on this continent, what was inescapable was a beloved old friend. Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington at the Battle of Princeton was securely held by a lift against the gallery wall as tweaks were made to its hang height (funny what eighteen-foot-high ceilings will do to our perception of works of art in space!). While it may have found new neighbors, how fitting that this painting—commissioned by the then College of New Jersey in 1782 as a new wave of art purchases began at the close of the Revolutionary War—should be the first work of art hung on the walls of our long-awaited new home.

These works were not the first to make their way into the new building’s galleries and public spaces. That honor goes to the monumentally scaled works of art that have recently been embedded architecturally and structurally in the building—including a selection of the most important of our mosaics from ancient Antioch-on-the-Orontes as well as our sixteenth century Spanish staircase. Visitors to the old Museum will have encountered many of these works, often less than ideally, roped off from public view or installed in historically inaccurate ways. In an act that I now see as one of audacious bravery, we made the decision to install them integrally into the architecture of the building. Three of the most important of our ancient mosaics are now sunk into the floors in purpose-designed cavities shaped to hold them, protected by industrial-grade glass on which visitors can stand and walk. The Spanish staircase—arguably our largest single work of art—now faces off with the functional Grand Stair in what will be one of the most visited areas of the building. Gloriously conserved for the occasion, these works represent some of the most complex elements of the project, having been disassembled, removed, restored, and returned, sometimes in dozens of custom-made art crates, cared for by the best conservators and art handlers in the business.

I can, for now, only paint word images of the glories of these objects and so many more as the collections make their return from their temporary quarters to the new Museum. This is a process not of days or weeks, but of months, as we transfer thousands of objects into their new gallery locations and many more thousands of works into new on-site art storage. It is the work of about seven or eight months, in fact, so I must once again ask your patience as we move toward your own rediscovery of the collections.

Commingled with renewing our acquaintance with old friends—seeing Angelica Kauffmann’s portrait of Sarah Harrop, which I acquired for the Museum as her masterpiece in portraiture, was truly like greeting an old friend who hadn’t aged a bit in five years—is the discovery of so much that is new. From potent purchases made since we closed the old building by artists such as Mary Cassatt and Martin Johnson Heade to new commissions from artists Nick Cave and Diana Al-Hadid, the coming months will bring a surfeit of fresh encounters—first for the Museum team and then, come this fall, for you. We shall do our best to give you glimpses over the coming months, but in these turbulent times, what a joy to be transported by beauty.

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