DR. AMY GALPIN

Miami, FL, (305) 348-2890, frost.fiu.edu

I am thinking quite a bit about artistic relationships between the United States and Cuba from the mid-19th century through the 1950s. Specifically, I have been researching how Cuba was represented by artists like Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, William Glackens, among others and sifting through turn of the century

illustrations.

How did it happen.why was I asked to write a column for this magazine? At this moment in time when we are being obliged to spend a lot of quiet time, isolating ourselves from the social milieu that, to some degree, defines us, there is some reason to ponder and assess the past and consider what things will be like going forward.

The request to write a column, like many things in my life and professional career, was the result of chance rather than planning. Shortly after American Fine Art Magazine was founded, the editor, Josh Rose, came to Newyork during the autumn auction season when American art was being offered.the still young American Art Fair was making a name for itself as a significant venue for American art dealers to offer works generally of equal or better quality than what was on the auction block.

The director of the fair, Catherine Sweeney Singer, introduced me to Josh, providing an important endorsement. Subsequently I saw Josh everywhere—auction previews and sales, gallery events and possibly a local bar. Seeing so many in the field speak to me, Josh assumed I knew something about the art market and he slyly suggested that he would like to do a profile of me. It was published in this magazine, and the only flaw was that he didn’t sign it. It was so complimentary that some assumed I had written it myself. Not so. But it led Josh to ask me to write a column.while I thought he had no idea what he was getting into, I ultimately agreed to write “about anything I wanted to and for as long as it interested me.” An offer hard to refuse. And so, for the last half dozen years, I have done exactly that. The planned subject of the current column, celebrating the 150th birthdays of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York didn’t feel right to me at this moment.this gives me the opportunity to provide some background on my own experience which has informed what I write and write about.

Most careers follow a relatively straight path: college, graduate school, requisite degrees, a pre-determined sequence and, with opportunity, a position that was envisioned. My trajectory was entirely different. Everything I have done has been mostly the result of happenstance rather than planning. Opportunity, flexibility and a willingness to engage in an unfamiliar arena have been the touchstones.and, along the way, the usual complement of disappointments and failures.while this chronicle may appear to be an easy flow from one thing to the next there were regular dry periods early on, causing great anxiety.

Art history? No cultural exposure in my childhood background. No museums,historic sites,classical concerts (in fact nothing beyond a high school band performance).and college was something my parents had not achieved and only partially understood. It was assumed you only went to a “good school” if you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. Since neither of those appealed, the state university would be just fine. So, when a high school classmate was going to interview at Cornell, where my brother, the dentist to be, was studying, I went along for the ride to visit.waiting for my classmate’s interview to conclude, it was suggested that I interview also. I did and the interviewer said that he didn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t be accepted. I wish all interviews had gone that well. By chance, my freshman advisor was an art historian and I signed up for a course, Art History 101. Something totally different, the kind of thing that distinguished college from high school. Thus, having explored economics, biology, sociology, English literature and French, and with only one subsequent course in the field, I decided that art history was what I wanted to do.“art history—that’s not why we sent you to college” was the parental response.and when I told my advisor of my decision, he wished me good luck and told me he was moving to Newyork. Cornell was not known for art history, but that didn’t matter. It was all new and an adventure even if I couldn’t say how I would make a living. Importantly, at some point, I went into the decade old college art museum and asked for a job. From managing the front desk, I graduated to the print room.

The head of the art history department had come from Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, my hometown.

Winterthur had only recently opened to the public and subsequently established a graduate program in American material culture. My professor, Albert Roe, (nicknamed Shad), suggested applying to thewinterthur program.my six classmates there were focused on the collections, most dating to before 1840. I wrote my thesis about architect James Renwick Jr. (Smithsonian Castle, Corcoran Gallery,vassar College, St. Patrick’s Cathedral), whose career began in 1842 and ended in 1895. It then seemed totally logical to follow Anne Hanson, who had been a visiting professor at Cornell to her new perch at Bryn Mawr where men were accepted in graduate school.the plan was to work on late 19th-century French painting.a few weeks after I got to Bryn Mawr and became Anne’s teaching assistant, she became ill and I had to pinch hit. And by the end of the year, it was clear that this kind of academic art history was not my strong suit. By chance, Morrie Heckscher (now recently retired as head of the Americanwing at the Met),who preceded me in thewinterthur program suggested a fellowship at the Met and within months

I was living in New York on a Chester Dale Fellowship at a time of great excitement in planning for the museum’s 100th anniversary in 1970.

And I would have been at the Met through that centennial had the phone not rung one day and I was introduced to Howard Weaver, the dean of theyale School of Art.yale was also planning an anniversary for the school which had been founded 100 years earlier as the first collegiate art school in the country. Howard had gotten my name from Jules Prown,yale’s distinguished historian of American (and subsequently British) art. I had met Jules once or twice but had not been his student. “Would I consider organizing an exhibition for the Yale celebration?” Howard asked.after we met, it was agreed that I would curate a show starting the end of my fellowship a few months later. I left the Met (a sendoff party in Central Park was a kite flying contest with the invitation saying that the Museum had told me to go fly a kite—not so, but who could resist?).

The day I started on the Yale project full time, the Art and Architecture building, designed by Paul Rudolph and roundly disliked by the students, was gutted by fire. Rumors about the cause during this period of collegiate unrest in the late ’60s were never proven! And my job was over.

Back to the Met, to work freelance in the American Wing on the innovative exhibition 19th Century America. I was engaged in other projects as well. I wrote an article for the Met bulletin on museum buildings in 19th-century America, worked with Edgar Kaufmann Jr. on an exhibition on American architecture and with the museum’s director, Tom Hoving, on an audio guide to the building amongst other projects. (It was through an editor I met while working on the Kaufman project that I was subsequently engaged to write a book aboutwinterthur).working with curators, collectors, scholars and editors was an invaluable experience. When a friend suggested that I could teach a course at Long Island University, I pocketed his card pinned to my resume and absentmindedly took my jacket to the cleaners. My dry cleaner obliged and sent my resume to the school and I got the job. I became a freelance art historian, writing articles for scholarly lessons in exhibition design and organization.

I subsequently worked with a museum planning company and curated an exhibition on 300 years of Connecticut architecture so, it was gratifying when the host museum,thewadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, subsequently asked me to organize an exhibition for the 100th anniversary of the Mark Twain house for 1974. At the same moment, decorative arts curator Jane Nylander suggested me to create a loan exhibition at Sturbridgevillage about the rural New England landscape as it was affected by the decline of agriculture and the development of industrialization in the first half of the 19th century. Only 40 miles from the Wadsworth, it proved an exciting opportunity, so I did both. I traveled 30,000 miles around New England, meeting collectors, curators and local historians in search of paintings, prints and drawings that we assembled into an exhibition, The Landscape of Change. (I believe that history looks kindly on the results of both projects).

I was then rescued from penury when a friend who had become involved in the founding of the International Center of Photography in Newyork took a summer program on non-profit management at Harvard and a fellow student, the director of the Worcester Art Museum, mentioned his search for someone to do a catalog of their American paintings. Next stop,worcester, Massachusetts, also conveniently 30 miles from my rented barn home in Connecticut.

interview, there was a total blackout in Newyork, July 1977.A job was ultimately offered, but I explained that I couldn’t start until the end of the year. I hadn’t signed a contract and was still not sure that being in the auction business was what I really wanted to do. I knew nothing about the art market for one thing. And when a phone call from Dartmouth College looking for someone to teach American art in the fall semester as their long-time professor, John Wilmerding, had just announced his departure for the National Gallery, I thought this would give me one more chance to consider teaching.arriving on campus, I saw bumper stickers for “Dartmouth College, Hangover, New Hampshire” and I wasn’t convinced that this would be all I had imagined. But my future was determined when a column in the Newyork Times that fall announced that I would be coming to Christie’s to start their American pictures (quaint) department. It was not, in the end, fake news. I was there for 20 years, having steered both American paintings and subsequently museum services after Perry Rathbone’s retirement.

Museums have a love-hate relationship with the art market but often relied on advice and expertise which provided further insight.and although there was great suspicion of anyone who had been in trade, the door was no longer shut between the two as it once had been. My story comes, to some degree, full circle with my involvement with the Georgia O’keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. This is especially meaningful as the benefactor who founded the museum,anne Marion,died earlier this year.it was this determined and resourceful woman who realized the need for such a museum to celebrate that artist who, though indelibly associated with New Mexico, was barely represented in any museum there.

A decade after O’keeffe’s death in 1986, the Fine Art Museum in Santa Fe decided to add to the handful of works she had bequeathed to them. Stanley Marcus, the presiding genius of Nieman Marcus and a part-time resident of Santa Fe, approached Anne Marion on their behalf to request a gift of works from her collection. She had a better idea and set about creating a museum for O’keeffe. A year and a half later, the museum opened. Stanley had asked me to be on the development committee and after the first meeting, I felt the vision could be enlarged. Subsequent conversations by way of friendly advice led to my being asked to become the president of the museum.the position, which I accepted for a six-month period, involved getting the museum up and running, reconfiguring some of the spaces, and organizing opening events. Everything from post cards, publications and parking to creating an orientation video, establishing policies about tours, fund raising, public relations, marketing and food services were a part of the president’s responsibilities.while I had no direct experience with most of these, with the support of an enthusiastic staff, we pulled it off. Anticipating 150,000 visitors a year, we clocked our 200,000th on New Year’s Eve, five and a half months after we opened, and around 370,000 by the end of the first full year.the six months turned into a year as I became acting director during the search for a new director. I returned to Newyork to continue overseeing a catalog raisonné of Mary Cassatt’s work, a project that had begun during my time at Christie’s and was now being underwritten by Adelson Galleries.

So, when Josh Rose asked me to write a column, assuming that I could write something worthy, I accepted that challenge hoping that my varied experiences had equipped me with an understanding of the field and a useful point of view. Not having been trained in most of the things I have done, it had been a great learning experience, buttressed by random opportunity.

I hope to bring the kind of curiosity and insight that I have gained to my discussions in these pages—going beneath the surface and behind the promotional glitz to discuss things that you, the reader, may never have thought about. For museums and for magazines it is, in the end, the audience that counts! And, for me the why is as important as the what. I aim to be a commentator, not a journalist, and hopefully to provide a good read.