Looking From The Outside In
It isn’t a barn, it’s a shed. Long and narrow, this and similar wooden buildings with cladding boards that could be propped open to allow for air circulation exemplified the kind of utilitarian structure that would be praised for pure geometry and no-nonsense beauty. Beginning in the 18th century, these sheds appeared with some frequency along the extent of the Connecticut River, stretching from vermont and Massachusetts through central Connecticut.the navigable river allowed for easy transport to coastal shipping and urban markets. The sheds were built to shelter a crop not usually associated with the Northeast: tobacco. Inland prosperity was supported in part by this cash crop, which may have been one of reasons that Patrick Garvan and his wife, Mary, set up housekeeping in Connecticut after emigrating from Ireland in 1848, fleeing the devastating famine of that year. Their financial security was also attributed to Garvan’s paper making business. By the next generation, in a familiar story of the progress from self-made prosperity to a world of broader opportunity, a son, Francis Patrick Garvan (1875-1937), matriculated at Yale and, after graduation in 1897, studied law in Newyork City, graduating two years later. An early appointment in the district attorney’s office provided the practical experience for what became a successful legal practice. Among the cases Francis Garvan participated in was the prosecution of Harry K. thaw for the murder of renowned architect, Stamford White. (Following the narrative, one of his sons, Anthony N.B. Garvan, became a distinguished professor of American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.) As the United States entered the First World War, Francis Garvan was appointed chief of the United States Bureau of Investigation and manager of the New York office of the Alien Property Custodian. America had been largely dependent on German chemical production and the post-war award of 4,500 patents along with new legislation to protect this country’s chemical production; and thus became significant factors in the U.S. industrial expansion. Garvan was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to head a newly created Chemical Foundation which managed those patents, a role he filled for the rest of his life.
Garvan’s professional journey paralleled
a pathway to achievement of many newly minted Americans and instilled in him the desire to share the lessons and the rewards of American citizenship with fellow countrymen—especially those beyond the narrow confines of the East coast.
After his marriage in 1910 to the daughter of the Albany-based millionaire Nicholas Brady, Garvan and his bride, Mabel, began to acquire typically fashionable French and English furniture to furnish their home. But as Garvan became suspicious of the possibility of fakes in what was evolving into a collection, he replaced his early acquisitions with American antiques. There began a collecting journey which eventuated in the acquisition of over 10,000 historic American works in all media.
The switch from European to American antiques was similar to the story of Henry Francis dupont, the chemical heir, who also made that transition, ultimately acquiring over 70,000 objects of the type made or used in America and now housed in the museum he founded in his family home ,winterthur, in Delaware. (Garvan and dupont were, for a time, the principal competitors for highquality American works.)
Garvan broke the mold of most collectors of his day by envisioning a public purpose for his collections. What motivated his expansion beyond the confines of his residences to the massive accumulation of work is a matter of speculation but what is clear is that he saw a much larger purpose in the enterprise. And an enterprise it was. He enlisted the help of the pioneering generation of American art curators, principally Luke Vincent Lockwood at the Brooklyn Museum, and R. T. Hanes Halsey at the Metropolitan Museum, each of whom were shepherding newly established American collections at their institutions, the first major art museums to thus consider American work as art. Garvan additionally engaged a host of scholars, specialists, antiques dealers and personal assistants to ferret out works, negotiate acquisitions, and research authenticity. He provided detailed instructions on how to find pieces in both public and private locations and how best to arrive at a comfortable value or a winning price. Filling in gaps in the collection was a bit of a guessing game as the literature on much of the material was limited and sometimes only anecdotal. In fact, the whole field of American antiques was something of a cottage industry, with dealers and pickers scouring the rural and urban landscape for likely objects.
Sources included everything from farmhouses, churches, small historical societies ,local libraries ,and recent collectors as well as inheritors of family antiques. The motivation for assembling American antiques in this country had roots in antiquarian interests and New England. In fact, Hartford, in the area where Garvan grew up, was a significant location for American antique collecting and early publication. Whether Garvan’s own interest can be traced to that is a matter of conjecture but what is clear is that his collecting was for him a way of celebrating his own American roots as a child of immigrants and what he saw is that great story of American opportunity, enterprise and achievement. And this perspective can be seen, to some degree, as the kind of embrace that firstgeneration Americans often bring to their unflagging love of the country.
This was no mere mechanical exercise. While Garvan brought a lawyer’s perspective to test the credibility of an object, he also had the passion of a collector when it came to quality. That passion was especially evident in his silver acquisitions and the collection ranks as the premier assemblage of American silver, with masterworks by both the most highly acclaimed makers as well as the lesser known craftsmen. Garvan was willing to pay top prices for the most desired objects although, when he realized that du Pont was his major competitor, he suggested in a letter that neither should allow a vendor to play them off against each other—a mild bit of collusion that also included the possibility of exchanging work from each collection if one had something the other desired more.
And there was plenty to choose from on both sides. Especially during the 1930s when the economy was stagnant, many gems appeared in the market and were easily acquired. Garvan would occasionally buy an entire collection, not only because it contained many desirable works but also a documented history, and a level of selectivity that he admired.
Opportunity did not cloud vision and both Garvan and dupont brought a discerning eye to the game. Dupont, however, was creating period rooms and settings for his enormous house, and his
acquisitions were planned to complete an ensemble. For Garvan, it was the chronicle that mattered, especially as he saw the collection as an educational tool which is why he determined to place his collection at Yale, his alma mater.
Writing to the treasurer of yale in 1930, he dedicated the gift of the collection to his wife, Mabel Brady Garvan, in honor of their 20th anniversary. He imagined the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection and an associated institute and foundation, not only as a tool for education at the college, but as a vast lending library. In an era when loan exhibitions were rare, Garvan was inspired an exhibition of Dutch Masters he had seen in England in 1929.
He realized that the potential for sharing the collection, managed by Yale, could afford an unparalleled opportunity for underserved communities. He noted that objects from the collection “are not to be selfishly hoarded in yale’s own halls but to become a moving part in a great panorama of American Arts and Crafts, which under the leadership of Yale, shall be made to pass over the years before every man, woman and child in our country….”.
The collection was not frozen in other ways but was to grow and be pruned to acquire finer examples as they became available and to fill existing gaps. By all standards, this was an enlightened view and an unlimited vision. He even laid out the possibility of broad public education through lectures and programs on radio and ultimately on television which he saw as a promising tool even in the early 1930s. At the Yale gallery, Garvan installed John Marshall Phillips to catalog the collection and, in turn, Phillips would develop the first-ever American university course on decorative arts, jocularly known as “Pots and Pans.”
During the seven years following the initial donation, Garvan more than doubled the size of the collection, which was amplified by further gifts from his widow in the years following his death in 1937.
It was just a year later that the M & M Karolik collection was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, influenced by a similar agenda, to provide a view of American arts for a broad public. Actually, the 1938 gift was the first of three Karolik Collections to come to Boston. Martha Codman (1858-1948) a Boston brahmin, was a descendant of prominent and successful early families and the heir to a considerable fortune. She became a dedicated preserver of family treasures accumulated over many generations. Ultimately, she passed a collecting passion on to her husband, who subsequently began a campaign of new acquisitions which, like Garvan’s, was dedicated to celebrating American history.
His narrative was not the history of the upper classes but that of the ordinary citizen as evidenced by art that celebrated their place in the American chronicle. Karolik’s enthusiasm for the citizenry was probably not product of his own birth in Russia in 1893, but rather one of admiration for the achievements of this country’s population at large. (While discussing his vision of his collection as a public resource, Garvan had noted: “I believe that every man, woman and child in the United States is entitled to participate in the enjoyment of all the achievements of modern civilization and ancient and modern culture, not through Bolshevism or Socialism, founded upon hate and envy or other destructive attempt at compulsory sharing…”) Having arrived in the U.S. in 1922, it seems likely that Karolik harbored a similar antipathy while, as an orthodox Jew, he didn’t see his mission as based Christian beliefs as Garvan did.
Karolik planned to make a career as a singer, having been trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.and it was as a singer that he met Martha Codman during his performance at thewashington, D.C., house that Martha’s cousin Ogden had designed for her in 1907. There was an immediate attraction between Martha and Maxim. When they married the following year, he was 35 and she, twice his age.
Ogden Codman also designed a house in Newport for Martha in 1910 and that 22-room mansion, designed in a “colonial revival” style, provided the perfect setting for Martha’s family heirlooms. Over the years, she had expanded her acquisitions into a true collection of American decorative arts, moving beyond the confines of family and New England association to encompass some of the most stunning works produced in American during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Two hundred and seventy-five objects, including high style furniture and related decorative arts and a few contemporaneous paintings, were presented to the Boston museum, helping to transform the American collections from one with a regional focus to a significant national resource. George H. Edgell, then director of the museum, astutely characterized both the purpose and the achievement of the donation:“the motive behind the gift was to open the eyes of the common man, to reveal to him for all time, the beauty and importance of American art in the period involved. It is a gift not for the glorification of the donors, not for the enrichment of the Museum of Fine Arts, not for the elite and the sophisticated in art, but for the common people of the nation.” These words were not totally surprising given the economic hardships of the Depression era and the focus on “the common man” that characterized much of the rhetoric of the period.and as if to prove the point, the Karoliks did not even attend the opening when the collection went on public view in 1941. While Maxim was something of an outsider (and apparently always considered so by his wife’s family) he had become a true partner in the collecting journey and the next two parts of the M & M Karolik Collection became his personal project. By war’s end, Maxim had begun his own collecting journey, acquiring the 232 American paintings that would comprise the second gift and would fill a significant gap in Boston’s collection. Its focus on early New England work and paintings by the turn of the century Boston school now expanded to include genre, still life and landscape paintings by artists who could be considered a lost generation, those working throughout the country from 1815 to 1865.That collection led to the rediscovery and reevaluation of a neglected period of American art. Neglected, and yes, underpriced as well. According to Vose Galleries, a well-established Boston institution, Karolik bought more than 50 paintings from them and paid less than $1,000 for all but three.
Karolik not only relied on established dealers in Boston and Newyork for most of his purchases but relied on the advice and approval of the museum’s curators. The paintings were, in fact, not hung at the Karolik home but were delivered directly to the museum.thus, like Garvan, the public purpose was uppermost in the collector’s thinking. But unlike Garvan, whose paintings acquisitions were for the most part ancillary and often conventional, Karolik was charting new territory. Never shy, he contributed to the pioneering publications that accompanied each part of the collection, describing his motive and ideals.writing to the museum’s director, he noted:
“You and Mr. Constable (the curator) know well what our present collection of nineteenth century American paintings means.you know also the reason why it was made. Now, after we have finally removed the rigidity from the deadly word “permanent” and agreed that Father Time makes “stipulations” and “conditions” die a lingering death, I can tell you that my wife and I are ready to offer the collection to the people through the Museum of Fine Arts…it was made for one purpose only:to show what happened in this country in the art of painting in the period of half a century—from 1815 to 1865—and to show the beginning and the growth of American landscape and genre painting.the aim was to make a collection not of “Americana” for the antiquarian, but of American art for the nation…our approach to this collection was primarily from the artistic point of view. It was the same approach as that to our eighteenthcentury collection—now belonging to your Museum. Each painting was judged and acquired on the basis of artistic merit. Names and history were of secondary importance… We discarded the motto of the fashionable connoisseur: “Tell me who the painter is and I will tell you whether the painting is good.” Our motto was:“tell me whether the painting is good and I will not care who the painter is.” The artists included in this collection have now come to be recognized as some of the best talents of their period and have also served to elevate the reputation of American artistic achievement.the third collection, including a vast array of folk art and works on paper, brought the Karolik gift to over 2,000 works and made the Boston Museum a major center for the public display of American art.
As a child of immigrants or as an immigrant himself, Garvan and Karolik, like many commentators who looked at America with a different perspective. they helped to enhance an understanding of the unique achievement and particular personality of a nation still in the process of imagining itself.and they were able to give back in a significant way at a strategic moment in American history.
While Karolik had a vibrant personality, he was extraordinarily modest in describing the paintings gift:“…in offering this collection to the people through the Museum of Fine Arts my wife and I are not making ‘noble gestures.’ …We are not ‘Patrons of Art’ or ‘Public Benefactors.’ We refuse to accept these banal labels. We accept with pleasure only one label: ‘Useful Citizens.’”