Director’s Foreword

Reynolds, Jock

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Director’s Foreword

Jock Reynolds

Description: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University...

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery

The Yale University Art Gallery, the oldest university art museum in America, has long been famous for its extraordinary holdings in American paintings and decorative arts. The major multiyear renovation that the Gallery’s buildings are currently undergoing meant that these celebrated collections would be removed from public view for several years. We...

Author

Jock Reynolds

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00075.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15359

Director’s Foreword

The Yale University Art Gallery, the oldest university art museum in America, has long been famous for its extraordinary holdings in American paintings and decorative arts. The major multiyear renovation that the Gallery’s buildings are currently undergoing meant that these celebrated collections would be removed from public view for several years. We realized that this was a rare opportunity to share these works, such as John Trumbull’s original paintings of the Revolutionary War—which had never before left the Yale campus—with a wider audience in a traveling exhibition.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery is organized to reflect the way the American arts have been taught at Yale. In the belief that works of art are the signposts of our history and culture, revealing in nonverbal ways the ideas, attitudes, and traditions of a nation and its people, this exhibition presents the greatest treasures from these collections in their larger aesthetic, historical, and cultural contexts. They tell the story of America from its pre-Revolutionary beginnings as a people of diverse ethnic and cultural heritages faced with the challenge of establishing a home in the New World, through more than two centuries of economic growth and political expansion, to its becoming a powerful continental nation. Freed from the traditional artistic establishments of their original cultures, these immigrants brought fresh energies to the objects they created on these shores, establishing a visual heritage in paint, wood, ceramic, metal, glass, textile, print, and photography. The story of this exhibition is the story of the American experience as seen through its material culture from the time of the early colonies to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, creating a vivid portrait of a people defining itself culturally, politically, and geographically.

Long before the Gallery was established in 1832 with John Trumbull’s gift of his Revolutionary War paintings and the picture gallery erected to house them, Yale was collecting American art. The growth of these American collections mirrors the art history of our nation. In a sense, Yale has always collected contemporary art: in the early Republic, portraiture was the preferred art form, so it is not surprising that our early acquisitions were largely portraits, many of whose sitters had ties to Yale while others depicted important public figures of the day. Later, when landscape, still life, and genre subjects became popular, the growing collections reflected this change in collecting taste. In the twentieth century, works by America’s greatest modernist artists found their way to Yale, as did the magnificent Mabel Brady Garvan Collection of American decorative arts. Assembled by Francis P. Garvan, this pioneering collection reflected the emerging aesthetic appreciation of American furniture, silver, and other domestic objects, setting the standard and the foundation for what is now one of the country’s greatest collections of decorative arts. Now, in the twenty-first century, extraordinary gifts continue to have a transformative effect on the permanent collection.

Throughout its history, the Gallery has benefited from the generosity of alumni and friends. By far, the largest parts of our American collections are the result of gift or bequest. As such, they reflect the interests and backgrounds of their donors. While these magnificent collections have made the Yale University Art Gallery the important museum it is today, they have also been circumscribed by the particularities of their donors’ enthusiasms. We are not as fully representative as we all might wish; for example, our holdings in African American art are thin. Like the history of the American collections in many of our greatest museums, the Yale collections were largely formed through the prism of English- and European-influenced art, with artists from some regions of the country such as the Southwest, Far West, and South barely represented, and with almost no pieces by or about African Americans, Hispanics, or Native Americans working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the period covered by this exhibition. Until relatively recently, their work was not considered important enough to attract the attention of serious collectors. Happily this attitude has changed, and today their work is prized by museums and collectors. At Yale we are endeavoring to build these areas so that our American collections more accurately reflect the great diversity of our nation and the many peoples who helped create it.

This interdisciplinary exhibition, the largest traveling show ever organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, is the result of an extraordinary scholarly collaboration between the departments of American Paintings and Sculpture, American Decorative Arts, and Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Under the inspired leadership of Helen A. Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, an outstanding team of curators, professors of American art, history, and American studies, cultural historians, and graduate students worked together to build the exhibition’s intellectual framework. Professors Jules David Prown, Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Jon Butler, Joanne B. Freeman, and Howard R. Lamar were enthusiastic supporters from the beginning and helped shape the story we wanted to tell. These eminent scholars, joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough, have further illuminated the project with superb essays for this book. The enthusiasm and tireless efforts of Robin Jaffee Frank, the Alice and Allan Kaplan Senior Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, played a crucial role in every phase of the project. Amy Kurtz Lansing, the former Marcia Brady Tucker Graduate Curatorial Research Assistant, and Janet Miller, Museum Assistant, meticulously coordinated the complex, myriad tasks of compiling the manuscript. Critical throughout the project was the scholarship and guidance of Patricia E. Kane, Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts; David L. Barquist, then Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts; Elisabeth Hodermarsky, the Sutphin Family Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; and Erin Eisenbarth, the former Marcia Brady Tucker Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts. A significant number of established scholars as well as graduate students and interns wrote entries for the catalogue, and their names appear in Helen Cooper’s acknowledgments. I join her in thanking them for their contributions.

This exhibition and publication received crucial and generous funding from Happy and Bob Doran, B.A. 1955, Carolyn and Gerald Grinstein, B.A. 1954, Mrs. William S. Kilroy, Sr., Mrs. Frederick R. Mayer, Nancy and Clive Runnells, B.A. 1948, Ellen and Stephen D. Susman, B.A. 1962, for their special support of the audio tour, the Eugénie Prendergast Fund for American Art, given by Jan and Warren Adelson, and the Friends of American Arts at Yale. We are honored that the Yale collections will be shown in three distinguished museums—the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; the Seattle Art Museum; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama—and I warmly thank their respective directors, Charles L. Venable, Mimi Gardner Gates, and Gail Andrews. We are indebted to them and their staffs for their generous and enthusiastic support.

As America enters the twenty-first century, its rich artistic past has much to teach us about the many roads that creative expression may take. It is our hope that the people who visit this exhibition—whether the descendants of our early colonists or those more recently arrived—will share with us the pride of these earlier American accomplishments and be inspired by them.

Jock Reynolds
The Henry J. Heinz II Director
Yale University Art Gallery

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