Oberlin’s Art Museum Projects Grandeur in a Gemlike Package

A great collection, beautifully arranged, plus a visit to Gibson’s Bakery

W hile I was driving from Cleveland to Toledo a few weeks ago, I saw a sign on the highway telling me the next exit led to Oberlin. Oberlin, home to what’s known as the crazy Trot college, which was once merely eccentric. Oberlin, with a renowned music conservatory. Oberlin, home of Gibson’s Bakery, a family-run stalwart on Main Street. Oberlin, where a race melee targeting Gibson’s and faked by college brass cost the school $36 million, plus attorney fees in the millions. Oberlin, home of the distinguished, esteemed Allen Memorial Art Museum. It’s the college museum. I had never been but knew it would be a treat.

I had thought Oberlin College was near Columbus. I had to go. The Allen’s a gem, with a solid educational mission and a fine collection in a lovely Tuscan Renaissance-style building from 1917.

Off the highway went I. The college, established in 1833, has a fascinating history. It admitted women and African Americans starting in the 1830s and, among small colleges, anchored the abolition movement. Its music conservatory is one of the country’s finest. The college has always had a reformist bent, sometimes with bad results. Among them are an antisemitic streak and a serious race problem. The campus is beautiful.

The Allen — no relation — is a small, elegant museum that has had bells-and-whistles moments but is refreshingly old-fashioned. It opened in 1917 in a purpose-built, eclectic building designed by Cass Gilbert. Dudley Allen, a pioneering surgeon, and his wife, Elisabeth, funded it. I call the building Tuscan Renaissance for its terra-cotta and cloistral Florentine formality, but it’s got mosaics, ironwork, ceiling paintings, and a vast main gallery, with smaller galleries off of it. Is it homey? Not really. It tells us that learning’s serious, as is the past.

I count as a resounding bell-and-whistle a nice addition from 1977 designed by Robert Venturi. It’s a postmodernist retort to Beaux-Arts Gilbert. Venturi’s checkerboard façade uses the same red sandstone that Gilbert used for his façade but seems to turn it upside down. The Venturi building has to be the first time that postmodernism’s inviting, fun ambiguity came to a college art museum.

When I entered the main gallery, my first impression was about how dark it was, and how grand. It was cool and soothing, too, on a very hot day. The art’s eclectic. On one side were some very, very nice French moderns, including the much-underrated Return of the Fisherman, by Henri-Edmond Cross, from 1896, a good, early Monet scene of Paris, and two late Pissarros — one a Paris scene, the other an English country scene. At the far end of the main hall are two full-length portraits by Thomas Lawrence.

Rodin’s big, bronze Prodigal Son, from 1905, writhes with remorse near the middle of the space, perfectly off-center. There are some good American pictures on the wall perpendicular to the French things.

It’s all very satisfying and idiosyncratic, which is what we want in a museum that’s teaching young people about creativity. I’ve worked in three academic art museums, or museums belonging to schools. Asymmetry’s good, as is mixing it up. The Allen’s not a big place, so shifts in style, school, medium, even continent happen fast. Leavening this are Gilbert’s galleries, many of which feel like chapels.

In one gallery, I found a painting by Tanzio da Varallo, a follower of Caravaggio. He isn’t well-known, but his figures, turned taut by passion for Jesus, are distinctive. His St. John the Baptist, from 1618, is anxiety incarnate. He seems to know his head will end up on a platter. Rubens’s The Finding of Erichthonius, from 1632–33, is a big fragment from a giant painting that belonged to the Duke of Richelieu, but no matter. It’s Rubens with all the sheen and sumptuous color we’d want. And the story of Erichthonius — the son of Vulcan and Gaia who was born with snakes for legs — is best savored by teenagers, smitten as they are with oddity.

There’s a pinup Cleopatra by Rizzoli, Ribera’s great Blind Old Beggar, and Crucifixions galore, all displayed near Van de Venne’s Allegory of Poverty, from the 1630s, and Honors Rendered to Raphael on His Deathbed, by Bergeret and from 1806. Napoleon bought the picture about Raphael for his empress, Josephine, so it’s got a classy provenance. Jacopo Ligozzi’s portable altar from 1608 is brilliant. Its painted centerpiece is on copper, so it glows, and it depicts Jesus on the Mount of Olives, so it’s about tragedy, exhaustion, and imminent betrayal. The frame’s made from luxury wood and stones. For a generation with portable devices, a portable altar might not be that foreign, even for the irreligious.

Like everything else in this space, it’s more or less over the top and perfect for today’s overwrought, overstimulated college students. Seriously, the art grabs attention and inspires debate.

I loved a gallery where small things in different media are displayed together in handsome, built-in wall cabinets. One displays a still life by Jean-Baptiste Oudry from 1751 that depicts a dead, young rabbit and partridge above a group of German and Italian ceramics. Next to it is a case of Italian faience dishes. The case next to that displays a group of small Italian bronzes and Beccafumi’s buxom but suicidal Lucretia, from 1515–18 — a dagger’s about to slide between the heroine’s breasts. The art is arranged for teaching. At the end of the gallery is an ornamental fireplace over which hangs a smashing Turner view of Venice.

University museums such as Harvard’s, Yale’s, and Princeton’s are chockablock with masterpieces, but the riches of college art museums tend to be more rarefied, like the Tanzio da Varallo of John the Baptist. Depth tends to come from works-on-paper collections, since they’re best for small classes and close looking. The Allen, for instance, has a first-class collection of Japanese woodblock prints, more than 1,500 of them, most from a single bequest. Many are rare or unique impressions, with all the subjects and star artists represented. The Allen also has Eva Hesse’s archive, which is a treasure.

I also loved the Japanese glazed porcelain hexagonal dish from around 1900 for its rare shape, brilliant color, and wiggling lobster-and-crab motifs. In a college museum, a superb Asian-art collection looms large, which is good. American museums are Eurocentric, but it’s a big world. College museums at their best teach the art of lifelong looking and questioning. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean art as well as African tribal art are so very different that they stimulate curiosity as well as the eye.

There were, depending how we count them, five special exhibitions on view. One, Like a Good Armchair — which closed on July 16 — focused on “the racial, ableist, gendered, and ageist politics of who gets to sit, when and how.” Yawn. It displayed paintings next to high-design chairs. I was only encouraged to skim the labels by Finnegan Shannon’s handsome, blue 2021 bench that reads, “This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. . . . Sit here if you agree.” It’s supposed to be about ableism, I think, which, in this context, means that people who can’t stand for long periods are victimized by museums that don’t provide comfortable seating.

At my age, I’d tend to be sympathetic to this particular cause, but it moved me to feel rebellious against preachy shows. I adored the juxtaposition of Alice Neel’s 1976 portrait of Oberlin art historian Ellen Johnson against the actual — and trademark — cardigan sweater she wore.

The exhibition was much ado about very little, but the art was good — all from the Allen’s collection — and, smartly, the curator opted for a soft sell. I’m not sure the chair theme worked, but Gilbert Rohde’s Z Semi-arm Chair, from 1934, was good to see. The show presented it in the context of Modernist form-follows-function thinking and Depression-era austerity.

Refiguring Modernism: A Fractured and Disorienting World is about art in the 20th century, which, like all centuries, had its ups and downs. The Allen’s great Modigliani nude and Picasso’s Cubist Glass of Absinthe, from 1911, are in it.

Between Page and Picture — closed August 6 — was a great show of illustrated versions of the epic Persian poem “The Book of Kings.” Illustrated books from the 15th through the 17th centuries were displayed along with works by Iranian-American artist Ala Ebtekar, who draws from old Persian traditions. I thought it was inspired, knowing, as I did, nothing about the subject. It was near another good exhibition on Muslim portraiture and what Islam allows and forbids.

The art in Femme ’n isms, Part I: Bodies Are Fluid, a collection exhibition that also closed August 6, was wonderful. The introductory theme — “forces of oppression” that are “interlocking and compounding” racism and classism — was formulaic. Old-time feminists, we were told, ignored these forces. Eat your own, baby, I thought. Aside from this moment, I enjoyed it. The show needed an edit, but Audrey Flack’s 2013 Ecstasy of St. Theresa, a riff on Bernini’s sculpture of the orgasmic saint, and Kathleen Gilje’s Louise Bourgeois After Dürer’s Portrait of Bernhard von Reesen, from 2012, were great to see. The talented, unusual Gilje starts with Old Master portraits as a model, repainting them with the face of a living person.

Bodies Are Fluid, the Islam show, and the show about the “Book of Kings” were in narrow galleries built as part of the 1977 addition. It’s an impossible place for classes, and, in any event, many of the objects are too small for a group to see. With a very strong collection like the Allen’s, curators want to get as much of the art in the vault on the wall as they can. I understand the impulse since the Addison, where I was the director, did the same thing for the same reason. This creates a curatorial treadmill as well as packed galleries.

If I were the director, of the Allen or any other college museum, I’d banish the word “oppression” from every label, press release, and catalogue, as an experiment. No one will die. I’d bar all words ending in “ism,” too, unless they define an art movement, like “Impressionism.” Out the door with “racism,” “ableism,” “sexism,” whatever-ism, and I’ll probably have to add words ending with “phobic” and “ist,” too. They’re all clichés, or words meant for chants, or mere insults. This would force curators to define and develop their concepts, to sharpen and enrich them. Interpretation supports the art but catch words reduce it to illustration or, worse, to billboards.

This sad state of curatorial thinking isn’t unique to the Allen, and neither is the obsession with “intersectional” grievance. On the one hand, “who am I” is a young person’s central question and dilemma. On the other, group identities reduce individuals to pack animals. They’re tired, trite, and demeaning. I did many exhibitions considering race and sexuality, but they were all art-driven, and all invited and demanded multiple meanings, based on the individual’s point of view.

For the future, the Allen will need to expand its physical space to display more of the permanent collection. The Gilbert building was renovated and modernized around 2010, but the last expansion — the Venturi addition — happened nearly 50 years ago. The Allen wants to absorb an adjacent building currently housing the art-history department and the studio-art department. This would present the college with two big construction projects, since this building will need repurposing and the two art departments, their classrooms, studio spaces, and library will need a new home. This is expensive, and faculty are about as moveable as hobbits.

The staff is small — tiny, really — with a senior curator focusing on Asian art and two junior curators, one covering older American and European art and another focusing on modern and contemporary art. Andria Derstine, the director, started at the museum as a curator. She’s an Old Master European art specialist and surely still does curatorial projects.

Given the size of the staff, the Allen does a tremendous amount. Its collection is the college’s biggest financial asset as well as a source of pride on campus, in the town, and among alumni. My take on the thrust of some of its exhibitions isn’t, again, targeting the Allen. Rather, the grievance machine infects almost all college art museums, undermines their scholarship, and confuses students. The Allen does a better job than most in letting the art deliver its own messages, in part because the collection and setting are sublime.

Of course, I visited Gibson’s Bakery. Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College is, together with the 2006 Duke University lacrosse debacle, the supreme flower of rot in American academia. The incident that spurred the lawsuit took place in 2016, the day after Trump’s election victory. An Oberlin College student stole a bottle of wine from this little bakery and convenience store, a fifth-generation family-run business dating to 1885. A bakery employee — who was a son and a grandson of the owners — resisted the theft. The shoplifter, a black man, with two other black Oberlin students, assaulted the employee. The students’ fury — and yen for a drinking binge — arose from Trump’s win, some say.

Within days — actually, within hours — Oberlin student protesters blocked the entrance to the bakery, located on Main Street in front of the campus. Prodded by the wicked Meredith Raimondo, who was the dean of students and college vice president, students and faculty claimed that Gibson’s was a racist business and demanded that the college end its longtime practice of buying the store’s baked goods for its dining halls. The news went national.

Gibson’s sued in Ohio state courts for libel, emotional distress, and tortious interference with business. The college fought this small business’s lawsuit every step of the way, with vicious allegations, from a jury trial that found it guilty all the way to the Ohio supreme court, where Oberlin lost for the last time. In early December 2022, the college paid the family $36.59 million, the extraordinary award for damages and plaintiff attorneys’ fees. The jury gave Gibson’s millions more, but Ohio law caps punitive awards.

Last week, Oberlin announced it was suing its insurers, who won’t reimburse the college, in part because the trustees rejected the insurers’ advice to settle the case early and for far less. May the insurers win.

Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College is a glass-hive case. It shows us a busy though sealed world where privilege and grievance hold hands, where tenured faculty manipulate naïve, ignorant students, where vengeance supplants kindness and fear silences common sense. A jury of average Ohioans told Oberlin — and higher education — what the public thinks of it. There’s no better word to describe the college brass than “cruel.”

The pastries didn’t entice me, but I bought a Gibson’s baseball cap and asked the clerk whether things were calmer. She said they were, which was good to know. The family still runs the place, though the 85-year-old owner and his 65-year-old son died while the case was winding through the courts.

Did Oberlin learn anything? It took a hit, but, at a billion dollars, the endowment has hardly suffered a fatal wound. Who knows? Academia’s packed with very smart people with a dumb streak, as well as lots of people educated beyond their intelligence. If Oberlin ever had a critical mass of conservative, commonsense donors, they’ve long ago dropped it. College trustees who focus on risk management probably took note.

Carmen Ambar has been president of Oberlin since 2017, so she came a year after the Gibson’s fiasco. She was the president of a tiny, minor branch of Rutgers’s New Brunswick campus. For a board driven by race and gender optics, she ticks the correct boxes. That said, I think Oberlin’s smug, disastrous defense wasn’t her doing but the board’s. Chris Canavan, the board chairman, works for Soros-linked Cygnum Capital. Leading the board since 2016, he bungled Oberlin into its costly courtroom nightmare.

Why is he still there? Every trustee who resisted an early deal with the Gibson family ought to quit for cooking an imbroglio that, counting its own legal bills, had to cost Oberlin more than $40 million. If that’s not negligence, I don’t know what is. And that $40 million could have paid for the Allen’s expansion, the art faculty’s resettlement, and Champagne and caviar for all.