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Williams College Museum of Art

Established	1926
Location	Williamstown, Massachusetts
Director	Christina Olsen
Website	wcma.williams.edu/

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is one of the premier small college art museums in the United States. Located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, just miles from the Clark Art Institute and MASS MoCA, the museum is a part of Williams College, a four-year liberal arts institution widely considered one of the finest institutions of higher education in the country. The museum is committed to the support not only of Williams’s stellar art department, but to the broader interdisciplinary educational mission of the college. WCMA’s collection of more than 14,000 works encompasses every major art historical period, with special strengths in contemporary and modern art, American art, and the art of world cultures. The museum is free and open to the public.

History

The College’s first art collection was donated by Eliza Peters Field, a prominent art collector, in 1887. These eighty-five objects, which consisted primarily of European and American oil paintings, were housed in Williams’s then-library, Lawrence Hall. When the library moved to the newly built Stetson Hall, however, Karl Weston, an alumnus and art history professor, expressed a different vision for the collection. Affirming the educational value of the unmediated experience of art, Weston decided to dedicate Lawrence Hall as the college’s art museum in 1926 and began soliciting donations from alumni. At the same time, Weston began to expand the newly renamed Department of Fine Art, whose classes were also held in Lawrence Hall in order to foster the department’s hallmark, and at that time unique, commitment to the aesthetic study of art, rather than the purely historical.

Lawrence Hall, soon to be the Williams College Museum of Art, just after the addition of Francis Allen's two wings in 1890

During World War II, WCMA housed the finest objects of the collection of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, when MFA curators feared that Boston would come under attack by Axis enemies. According to MFA director G.H. Edgell, Williamstown was located a perfect distance from the coast, just far enough to avoid destruction by bombing and close enough to allow continuing research by scholars associated with the MFA. The collaboration resulted in “Masterpieces of Painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” on view in 1944.

Karl Weston handed leadership of the Museum to former student S. Lane Faison, Jr., in 1948. Under the direction of Faison and his colleagues Whitney Stoddard (Williams Class of 1935) and William H. Pierson, Jr., a trio jokingly termed the “Holy Trinity,” the Museum’s American art collection, for which it is now best known, grew dramatically, with help from the many generous alumni who, having studied art at Williams, had begun to build notable collections of their own. Faison and his colleagues continued to emphasize the importance of the physical object in teaching art, and their inspirational pedagogy turned many financiers-to-be into art historians and collectors. During their long tenure—Pierson retired in 1973, Faison and Stoddard in 1976—Williams educated the cadre of men whom John Pope-Hennessy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would call the “Williams Art Mafia,” a group of prominent curators, museum directors, and art historians for whom the Williams Art Department would soon become famous.

The 1980s saw the expansion of Lawrence Hall under the direction of then-director Thomas Krens. Charles Moore led the renovation, which doubled exhibition and office space, enabling the Museum to double its staff, inaugurate an education program for children, and launch a vigorous schedule of changing exhibitions. During this time, WCMA also acquired a collection of around 400 watercolors and sketches done by American painters Maurice and Charles Prendergast, donated by the estate of Charles’s wife, Eugénie, who, though not associated with the Museum, appreciated its approach to the incorporation of the object of art into teaching. The Museum’s Prendergast Archive and Study Center now houses this collection, which has since been digitized, and the Museum maintains a close connection to the Prendergast Foundation.

WCMA marked its seventy-fifth anniversary with Louise Bourgeois’s Eyes (Nine Elements), which has since become a symbol of the Museum’s commitment to public art. In the past fifteen years, the Museum has also prioritized the diversification of its staff and collection, creating the position of Mellon Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Arts in conjunction with the Mellon Foundation in 2009. Christina Olsen took over leadership of the Museum in 2012, and her tenure has sought particularly to increase both curricular and extracurricular student interest and involvement in the Museum. In 2014, for example, the Museum inaugurated a hugely successful art loan program through which students can borrow original prints to hang in their dorm rooms for the semester (WALLS, Williams Art Loan for Living Spaces).

Monuments Men

During World War Two, a body of nearly 350 servicemen and women was established to recover and protect artwork from areas affected by the conflict. This organization was known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program (MFAA), or more colloquially, the "Monuments Men." Among the ranks of this enterprise were Williams graduates Charles Parkhurst '35 and Lane Faison '29, who both returned to WCMA to serve as museum directors after the war. In 1945, Faison was commissioned to write the official top-secret report of the stolen artwork in Hitler’s collection, and oversaw the return of the works to their home cities, which included Vienna and Paris. In February 2014, Sony Pictures released The Monuments Men a feature film directed by George Clooney that has revived interest in these lesser-known heroes of the war.

Williams Art Mafia

Educated by the indomitable professorial trio of S. Lane Faison, Whitney Stoddard, and William Pierson, a generation of Williams art history students began in the 1980s and 1990s to take prominent positions in the American museum world. Now termed the “Williams Art Mafia,” the group includes:

• Roger Mandle '63, former president of the Rhode Island School of Design
• James N. Wood '63, former director of the Art Institute of Chicago and head of the J. Paul Getty trust
• Earl A. Powell III '66, director of the National Gallery of Art and chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts
• John R. "Jack" Lane '66, president of the New Art Trust
• Kirk Varnedoe '67, former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art
• Thomas Krens '69, former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
• Glenn Lowry '76, director of the Museum of Modern Art.

The art department continues to produce the finest art historians, curators, and museum directors in the country.

List of Major Directors (1926-present)

Director	Tenure
Karl E. Weston	1926-1948
S. Lane Faison	1948-1976
Franklin W. Robinson	1976-1979
Thomas Krens	1980-1988
Linda B. Shearer	1989-2004
Lisa Corrin	2005-2011
Christina Olsen	2012-present

Collection

Consisting of more than 14,000 objects, WCMA’s collection is one of the finest among American small college art museums. Though it encompasses all time periods and all regions of the world, it is particularly strong in American art, modern and contemporary art, and the art of world cultures. The Museum has also committed itself to providing commissions and display space for new artwork, such as the mural designed by Nubian-born Fathi Hassan for the 2015 exhibition Migration of Signs.

American

WCMA’s greatest strength is its collection of American art, encompassing works from every period of American history with a particular emphasis on modern and contemporary artists. Best known are Grant Wood’s Death on the Ridge Road (1935) and Edward Hopper’s Morning in a City (1944), both oil paintings. In 1983, Eugenie Prendergast’s donation of the collection and archives of painters Charles and Maurice Prendergast founded WCMA’s Prendergast Archive and Study Center, the foremost research center for the study of the two artists in the world. The museum also holds a nearly complete collection of the books self-published by Pop Artist Andy Warhol early in his career, in addition to well-known prints such as Jackie (1964) and his self-portrait of 1986.

Other important American works include:

• Benjamin West, The Deluge (1790)
• George Inness, Twilight (1860)
• Winslow Homer, Children on a Fence (1874)
• Thomas Eakins, Portrait of John Neil Fort (1898), one of Eakins’s finer late portraits, depicting close friend and art critic John Neil Fort
• Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster (1895). Recently confirmed to be genuine, this bronze sculpture became an icon of the disappearing American Wild West at the beginning of the 20th century
• A collection of more than five hundred Rube Goldberg cartoons and sketches donated by his son, George W. George, Williams Class of 1941
• Morton Livingston Schamberg, Study of a Girl (Fanette Reider). Shown in the 1913 Armory Show, Schamberg’s portrait of his close friend helped to introduce the techniques of European modernism to the American art scene
• Georgia O’Keefe, Skunk Cabbage (Cos Cob) (1922), an early work that helped to establish her reputation as a prominent figure in American modernism
• Man Ray, Électricité (from Électricité: Dix Rayogrammes) (1931), a experimental photographic advertisement for a French electric company designed to align the company’s cutting-edge technology with the artistic avant-garde
• Jacob Lawrence, Radio Repairs (1946), part of a series of paintings designed to show African Americans contributing to post-war recovery and technological innovation
• Joseph Cornell, Sun Box, 1956
• Edward Kienholz, Bunny, Bunny, You’re So Funny (1969)
• Robert Motherwell, Open No. 1975 (ca. 1970)
• Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXV (1971-2), a multi-media work whose outcry against the marginality of women in the art world attracted much critical interest in the 1970s
• Robert Morris, Hearing, 1972

Modern (non-American)

In addition to the museum’s expansive holdings in modern American art, WCMA has acquired many prominent works of the European 20th century, such as Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934), Yves Tanguy’s Equivocal Colors (1943), and works by Willem De Kooning and Josef Albers.

Old Masters

The museum holds a fine collection of Spanish and Italian Baroque pieces, including Jusepe de Ribera’s The Executioner (ca. 1640-50), José Moreno’s Annunication (ca. 1660-70, attribution disputed), Frans Pourbus the Younger’s Portrait of Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (1599-1600), and a number of prints by Albrecht Dürer.

Indian Art

WCMA contains the most complete collection of Indian art of any college art museum in the country. Its works from the Mughal period (16th century-19th century) are particularly stellar, most notably Chateri Gumani’s The Lion Hunt of Maharao Umed Singh of Kota (1779), which depicts a ritual hunt that formed part of the annual ahaireya, or Spring Festival.

Photography

The museum’s collection of photography from the 19th century through the present day also stands out among college art museums. Its assemblage of early 20th century photographs include pieces by Walker Evans, who briefly studied at Williams and others supported by the Farm Security Administration, though it also includes many of the works of prominent landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams and Robert Adams. The museum also holds a significant number of works done after the 1950s, most notably those of American photographer and film director Cindy Sherman. More recently, the museum has focused on collecting the photography of contemporary South African artists such as Zanele Muholi.

New Directions

Since the 1980s, WCMA has committed itself to supporting African-American and female artists not only by purchasing their work but also by commissioning new installations for WCMA’s gallery spaces, which later become a part of WCMA’s collections. In The Hampton Project (2000), for example, Carrie Mae Weems used period photographs in order to reflect on the assimilation of distinct cultures and ethnic groups, particularly former African-American slaves and Native Americans, into late 19th-century American society. The work was designed to reflect on the legacy of Hampton University, an educational institution for young blacks and Native Americans established by Williams alumnus Samuel Chapman Armstrong in 1868.

One of the more controversial installations was Rock Fan, a part of the 1997 exhibition Yardbird Suite designed by African-American artist David Hammons. The piece consisted of a large boulder topped by electric fans, and was placed rather incongruously in front of Williams’s elegant Chapin Hall. When questioned by angry students, Hammons noted his desire to challenge the aesthetic sensibility of a campus accustomed to the architectural and artistic legacy of white America. The work was dismantled five months later and replaced with a smaller model, now a part of WCMA’s collection.

WCMA has also commissioned several works of public art across campus, beginning with Louise Bourgeoise’s Eyes (Nine Elements) (2001), and Jenny Holzer’s 715 Molecules, both of which have become iconic elements of the Williams campus.

In recent years, the Museum has taken a variety of steps to increase public access to its collection. Collaborative projects such as ArtStor and Google Art Project have allowed objects in WCMA’s collections to be shared by other museums and academic institutions, and WCMA has also recently completed the creation of its own online database, available at wcma.williams.edu. This project has included the complete digitization of the Prendergast archives and collection, also available on WCMA’s website.

Past Exhibits

Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project (2000) In this installation, Weems knit her concerns about individual identity, class, assimilation, education, and the legacy of slavery into a series of photographic banners that forced viewers to reassess their own moral and ethical boundaries, as well as the political and socioeconomic realities of twentieth-century America.

Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1906–1913 (2002) In 2002, eleven arts and cultural institutions in the Berkshires organized The Vienna Project, which brought together Viennese art over the course of four centuries. As WCMA’s contribution to the project, “Prelude to a Nightmare” drew on Austrian material culture—paintings, posters, pamphlets, film footage—in order to examine the city’s artistic and political impact on the young Adolf Hitler, who, as a watercolor painter, spent five years in the European art mecca, and the subsequent horrors of the Holocaust and World War II.

Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1890–1910 (2005) Showcasing approximately one hundred paintings and fifty films, “Moving Pictures” explored the relationship between American art and the new medium of film at the turn of the 20th century.

Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2006) This exhibition of photographs drawn from contemporary art, advertising, and photojournalism, explored the ethics and aesthetics of the depiction human suffering.

Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987

Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy (2007) Sara and Gerald Murphy are best remembered as the captivating American ‘expats’ who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. This exhibition examined the couple’s weighty contributions to the modernist movement in Paris in the early 20th century, and included both their own art and that of the contemporaries whom they supported and inspired, such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse.

Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 (2012) “Elite of the Obscure” was the first retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco. Taking their name from the forceful Spanish word for disgust and nausea, the Los Angeles-based group used performance, public art, and multimedia to respond to social and political turbulence in southern California and beyond.

Fathi Hassan: Migration of Signs (2015) The artwork of Fathi Hassan makes Arabic script intentionally illegible in order to highlight the ambiguity of the written word and the illegibility of cultural sign systems. In recent years, Hassan, himself a Nubian born in Egypt, uses his collages and murals to address the migration and upheaval associated with the aftermath of the recent Arab Spring. “Migration of Signs” included a site-specific floor-to-ceiling wall drawing.

External links

Williams College Williams College Museum of Art