Solid and Shaky Art Museums

How an afternoon at an art museum makes me feel both more and less secure.  I’m thankful for the big strong walls, and I’m also thankful that the art shows me the folly of walls.

Art museums are built to be strong and secure, safe from theft, reassuring sanctuaries from the instability of the outside world.  When I spend an afternoon at an art museum my soul feels curiously stronger and safer as well.  Just the building itself reassures me that countless people have cared enough to collect and secure this art.  Then when I see all the other visitors my faith in humanity is restored a bit; not everyone is spending this day at the mall or in front of a TV.

Stanford University Art MuseumFor example, I spent a pleasant afternoon at the Stanford University Art Museum last week.  I’ve been going there for almost 50 years, ever since I was a Stanford undergraduate. It’s been a happy refuge for me from final exams, a blessed respite from sad work as a chaplain at Stanford Hospital, an entertaining place to take my children, a calm interlude between tense or boring work meetings, a lovely indulgence in the world of California landscape, Egyptian mummies, Northwest Coast Native art, Rodin’s Thinker.  Sometimes I just stop by for a short visit, to sit in front of one favorite painting.

The building itself is reassuring, a neoclassical monolith, with inspiring mosaics of European and ancient world buildings on the columned façade and marble floors and staircases that suggest wealthy permanence.

But I often leave an art museum with my happy life assumptions a little shaken up as well, some foundational assumptions teetering, the art having forced me to rethink my need for a sanctuary from the real world.  Last week I left the Stanford Art Museum a little disquieted, sad at changed assumptions.  Metaphorically it was sort of like the building’s own history; twice in its nearly 125-year history its permanence has been literally shattered when devastating earthquakes in 1906 and 1989 tumbled and crumbled statues and staircases.  I didn’t go through an earthquake last week, but I was a little shaken.

Part of the problem (if it’s a problem, which it may not be) is that I am so very familiar with the building and the collection that I quickly notice changes.  If I’m looking for a static sanctuary then a good art museum, like this one, will show me that no such thing exists.  One example is the slow but inexorable disappearance of the Greek and Roman art.  The museum began 125 years ago with simply the boyhood hodgepodge collection of Roman and Greek coins and pottery that the teenage Leland Stanford Jr. had amassed on Grand Tours with his wealthy parents. Little Leland’s untimely 1885 death from scarlet fever in Rome inspired his parents to found the university, including the museum. 

Gates of HellGood robber barons that they were they augmented the collection with some very fine classical art, which filled the first floor for decades.  But when an art history professor specialist in Rodin befriended a wealthy patron the museum started acquiring Rodins, which now number in the hundreds, inside and out.  (Try visiting the massive two story Rodin “Gates of Hell” at night outside in the Rodin Garden – now that’s unsettling.) Like invasive plants the black marble hands and kisses and anguished burghers, more popular with the public imagination than ancient vases, forced the red and black figure vases first upstairs into the European section with vague labels about how Greece and Rome are in Europe and influenced the Romantics.  On this last visit they were down to one glass case.

Gates of HellIn their place was a student curated exhibit called Blood and Sugar. Unlike when I was a student there are now more exhibits prepared as a class project, often interdisciplinary, like art and engineering, design and medical technology, art history and political science.  A good change of course; this is a university art museum.  Blood and Sugar is about the slave trade and how art patron families in England funded their genteel collections on the backs and dead bodies of sugar plantation slave workers.  I took a course on Latin America colonialism in the Stanford classrooms, but these students took me out of the books and taught me with the ironic and tragic juxtapositions of lovely silver sugar bowls and charming portraits of young English sugar heirs, next to lithographs of African human beings hanging from trees and being sold at auction.

OK, not a charming afternoon with the Impressionists.  As I left I grumbled about political correctness invading the hallowed halls of art museums.  But I haven’t been able to get that exhibit out of my head.  I’ve had to remind myself that art’s job is to challenge as well as console. 

So I will remain thankful for the rich collectors, for building and rebuilding, for strong walls and art to hang on those walls.  And I will thank this bolder administration for opening up the walls to new kinds of exhibits and curators.  I can still spend an afternoon in front of the Georgia O’Keefe or the Edward Hopper (if not the black figure vase.)  I can also ruminate on art and money and colonialism.  A good university helps us tear down as well as build up.  So does art.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter