Harvard Art Museum Receives Major Gift
Emily Pulitzer Gives Important Art and Endowment
By: Mark Favermann - Oct 17, 2008
There are good university art museums. There are even very good university art museums. But then there is the Harvard Art Museum. It is on an entirely different level. Closed during late June 2008 for major renovations and expansion designed by architect Renzo Piano, the Harvard Art Museum is considered not only a great university art museum but one of the world's leading arts institutions.
It includes three museums (Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum) and four research centers (Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum Archives, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Turkey).
The Harvard Art Museum is distinguished by the range and depth of its collections. It isc renown for its provocative and often groundbreaking exhibitions, and highly regarded for the original research of its staff. For more than a century, the Harvard Art Museum has been the nation's premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars. It is recognized for its seminal role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.
On October 17, 2008, it was announced that Harvard Art Museum has received a gift of 31 major works of modern and contemporary art and $45 million from Harvard alumna Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a former Harvard Art Museum curator. She and her late husband have been longtime major benefactors and friends of the museum and of Harvard University. She is the widow of the late Joseph Pulitzer Jr. The generous donation of modern works include important paintings and sculptures by Brancusi, Derain, Giacometti, Lipchitz, Miró, Modigliani, Picasso, Rosso, and Vuillard.
The contemporary art includes major works by di Suvero, Heizer, Judd, Lichtenstein, Nauman, Newman, Oldenburg, Serra, Shapiro, and Tuttle. This gift is one of the most significant donations of works of art ever received by the museum. The financial gift itself is the single largest donation in the history of the Harvard Art Museum.
During a period of financial angst, Mrs. Pulitzer's gifts come at a time when the Art Museum has launched a major fund-raising initiative. The gifts will enable it to better advance its mission as a leading center for research and teaching in the visual arts. A central part of the plan is to increase integration of the museum's collections and programs into the academic life of Harvard University.
Mrs. Pulitzer's formal involvement with the Art Museum began in 1957 when she served as assistant curator of drawing. She worked under the legendary and often intimidating curator Agnes Mongan, a position Mrs. Pulitzer held until 1964. She received her master's degree in the arts from Harvard in 1963 and has served in numerous leadership roles at the Art Museum and at Harvard, including as a chair and member of the Art Museum's Visiting Committee and Collections Committee, beginning in the early 1990s. She also serves on the University's Board of Overseers and is a member of its Standing Committee on Humanities and Arts, as well as the President's Advisory Committee on the Allston Initiative.
In addition to their other support of the University, the Pulitzers provided a gift to endow the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professorship of Modern Art in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which was activated with the appointment of Yves-Alain Bois in 1991. Also, Mr. Pulitzer served as the editor and publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chairman of the Pulitzer Publishing Company for 38 years. He also served as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1955 through 1986.
In 1958, Mr. Pulitzer anonymously established a fund for the acquisition of modern art, which enabled the Art Museum to acquire a major Mondrian drawing and a painting by Jackson Pollock. True art benefactors, over the following years, the Pulitzers donated funds for art history student fellowships as well.
As stated in earlier articles, Massachusetts Museums Expand and Renovate, Link to Part One Link to Part Two the full Harvard Art Museum is not expected to reopen until 2013. So, we can only hope that some of the Pulitzer collection's treasures will be shown at other venues.
Harvard Art Museum is not like any other university art museum, nor are its history of distinguished and generous benefactors like the Pulitzers. Like Harvard University to other colleges and universities, the Harvard Art Museum is what other university art museums and many art museums in general aspire to be like when they grow up. And that is the Veritas.