331 works of art and $45 million from a trustee’s estate will transform one of America’s best small museums.
It’s the end-of-the-month-in-the-news time. I’ll write today mostly about how we in America support the world’s most vibrant, eclectic high-culture scene. No, it’s not with vibes, joy, brat, a cascade of cackles, or memories of nice lawns in Montreal. It’s philanthropy. Powering almost all American museums are gifts of art and money from local people. They’re privately owned and run, too, which also explains their diversity. There’s no government-imposed taste or model for doing things. Caring, committed donors and good curators can act on innovative ideas. In Europe, nearly all museums are government operations, which explains why they were so sclerotic for generations.
Just in my little postage-stamp-size world, the boonies in southwestern Vermont, are four good and very different art museums: the Bennington Museum, and across the Massachusetts state line, the Clark Art Institute, the college museum at Williams, and Mass MoCA, which is the world’s biggest contemporary-art museum. All four are private museums. Intellectually and aesthetically, they’re distinctive, yet they very much spring from local heritage.
The big art-news story in the country this week has to be the immense gift of art and money announced on Tuesday by the Clark. I’ve written off and on about the Clark, located in the very corner of northwestern Massachusetts. I worked there as a curator and went to Williams, whose campus abuts the Clark’s. The museum got a gift of 331 works of art and $45 million from the estate of Aso Tavitian (1940–2020), who served as a trustee there. A chunk of the money will go to build an addition to the museum to display the art.
Talk about a transformative gift. The Clark isn’t a big place. The collection is about 8,000 objects, nearly all European and American, dating from before 1900, and displayed in an intimate, human-scale building surrounded by the Berkshire Mountains. Though very few people like the 2014 addition to the Clark’s original Neoclassical home, the place is both plush and comfortable. It’s renowned and much loved for its 40 Renoir paintings but also for its collection of paintings by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, its Old Master prints, among them an impression of nearly every print that Dürer made, and its English Rococo silver.
Left: Jacques Louis David, Portrait of Dominique-Vincent Ramel de Nogaret, 1820, oil on canvas. Right: Wallerant Vaillant, Self-Portrait in a Turban, 1650–75, oil on canvas. (Photos courtesy of Clark Art Institute)
Tavitian’s gift is mostly Old Master art and mostly portraits. Paintings by Rubens, Giulio Romano, Van Dyck, Bronzino, David, Boilly, and Girodet are among the gems, and I use “gems” because the scale is home-size. The Clark has very few big things.
The galleries aren’t big, and the original museum, built in 1955, was meant to have a domestic feel. The founders, Sterling and Francine Clark, weren’t much impressed by gigantism. They lived in an apartment in a corner of the museum. The place was always meant to evoke a home. That so much of Tavitian’s gift is portraiture suits the Clark’s character. Everything will look very much at home.
It’s a brilliant gift in so many ways. First of all, the Clark displays nearly everything it owns, aside from light-sensitive prints, drawings, and photographs. Most art museums show only a tiny fraction of their art. The Met, the MFA in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and many other big places own art that has lived in the vaults for years. Donors of works of art want their things to be seen and used. Tavitian wanted his collection to be kept more or less intact. His gift of money for a new wing will make this possible.
The addition will go between the 1955 building and the Clark’s 1973 Brutalist addition, which houses the works-on-paper collection and the Clark’s superb, 300,000-volume library, which I use religiously. The museum has already hired Annabelle Selldorf, the New York architect who handled the renovation of the 1955 building a few years ago.
Selldorf is a safe pair of hands. By contrast, the 2014 addition, designed by Tadao Ando, could not have been more chaotic. For so massive an expenditure of money, the Clark has little to show for it.
Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Blonde Bather, 1882, oil on canvas. (Public domain/via Wikimedia) Right: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Child with a Bird (Mademoiselle Fleury in Algerian Costume), 1882, oil on canvas. (Photo courtesy of the Clark Institute)
Tavitian’s gift also pushes the boundaries of the Clark. The Clarks had idiosyncratic taste, preferring Renoir’s work from the 1870s and early 1880s but not after, loving the work of Degas but not Cézanne, Gauguin, or Seurat, and acquiring 600 French 18th-century teacups. Sterling Clark liked Homer’s muscular seascapes but otherwise bought very little American art. He started his art collection around 1913 with Old Masters, a conventional field for rich Americans. He bought well — his first purchase was a painting by Piero della Francesca — but soon turned to Impressionism. Tavitian’s gift, rich in Old Masters, gives the Clark a new strength. About a hundred of the artists represented by the gift are new to the Clark collection. In addition to paintings, the gift includes dozens of Old Master sculptures, not an area of great strength for the museum.
The Clark hosts Williams’s distinguished graduate program in art history, so it’s a teaching museum. This means that the Tavitian gift will be used by students, which was surely another draw. Alas, the Clark’s scholars program, meant to bring serious curators and academics to the museum from around the world to do their research, has gotten the DEI disease.
Left: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Countess Matilda of Canossa, 1630–39, bronze. (Photo courtesy of Clark Art Institute) Right: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Modello for the Fountain of the Moro, 1653, terra-cotta. (Public domain/via Wikimedia)
Years ago, the Clark botched the acquisition of a splendid Bernini terra-cotta modello for the figure of the Moor in one of the fountains in the Piazza Navona in Rome. The opportunity came as the trustees were beginning to understand the high cost of the Ando addition. The terra-cotta was $2.5 million. This wasn’t outrageous for the Clark, which had a history of buying expensive things. The trustees balked. Pricey building projects often rob acquisitions, which, in my opinion, are far more important than boutique architecture buildings. The Bernini modello now lives at the Kimbell in Fort Worth.
Over the past 20 years, because of the huge expansion project and consequent debt — the Clark didn’t raise enough money for the Ando building — the Clark has purchased nothing of distinction.
I was delighted to see a Bernini bronze as part of the Tavitian gift. Better late than never.
Tavitian didn’t build his collection with the Clark in mind, though it’s a perfect match for the Clark. He also didn’t have a longtime association with the museum. He had a weekend house in Stockbridge, about 40 miles south of Williamstown. He wasn’t a trustee for long and, unlike most Clark trustees, had no connection to Williams. He fled the board around the time it became clear that the Clark’s Ando addition had spawned a financial pickle. Tavitian was born in Bulgaria, getting out of what was then the Communist country in the late 1950s, first to Beirut and then to New York. He learned English in Beirut. In the late ’60s, after he got a degree in nuclear engineering from Columbia, he formed Syncsort, a software company specializing in data security. He was a lovely, low-key person, elegant, gracious, and grateful as well as proud to be an American.
His gift is fantastic news for the Clark and an example of brilliant philanthropy.
Also in the news this week is a $2.25 million gift by artist Julie Mehretu to the Whitney in New York, allowing the museum to provide free admission to visitors under 25. Mehretu has done well as an artist. Her large, abstract paintings sell for millions, and though she doesn’t see all of that money, she decided to make a difference for young people. The Whitney, like most big New York museums, charges a hefty $30 for admission. Even students have to pay $24. That’s outrageous, and it’s a telling measure of how unserious museums are about accessibility. They talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
That said, the Whitney, unlike the Met, isn’t loaded. Mehretu understands this and knows that art makes a difference in the lives of young people, especially young artists. I think all museums should be free, but often it takes donor money to fund it.
Good for her to take the initiative. MoMA spent hundreds of millions on two building expansions, and the Met is currently doing the same for a contemporary-art wing that’s nice to have but hardly essential. Donors should instead fund free admission or, better still, direct their philanthropy to places like the Brooklyn Museum and the Hispanic Society, both of which are worthy and needy.
