Departments of European Painting and Sculpture, American Painting and Sculpture, Contemporary Art records

From its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, the Department of Painting and Sculpture has been a vital part of the Brooklyn Museum. A pioneering force throughout the Museum's history, its curators have initiated collecting policies and exhibition practices that have helped define the Museum's mission and its impact in the community. Although the department has recently separated into three distinct departments – European Painting and Sculpture, American Painting and Sculpture, and Contemporary Art – the original vision of innovation in philosophy and practice continues.

In 1897, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences opened the first section of its new "Central Museum" building, an imposing edifice that soon became known simply as the Brooklyn Museum. In 1899, art and architectural historian William Henry Goodyear, who had been titular curator of the Institute since 1890, became curator of the Museum’s new Department of Fine Arts, the predecessor of the Department of Painting and Sculpture.¹ While Goodyear's responsibilities included stewardship of all types of art (paintings, sculpture, drawings, casts, ceramics, glass, metalwork, coins, mosaics, jewelry, and textiles, for example), paintings and, to a lesser extent, sculpture accounted for much of the activity in the department. According to the Museum's first accession book, the Fine Arts department contained a permanent collection of seventeen works of fine art at its inception. The Museum's opening exhibition of European and American paintings in June 1897 consisted almost entirely of loans from private collections.

With gallery and storage space available in the new building, Goodyear began actively collecting and exhibiting artworks and developing the permanent collection. By 1906 he had acquired around 150 new works for the collection. Among these was the bequest of Caroline Polhemus, a collection that included sixty-one nineteenth century American and European paintings and watercolors. In 1909, when John Singer Sargent showed eighty watercolors in New York, the entire group was bought for the Museum by public subscription. A year later the Museum acquired a collection of watercolors by Winslow Homer.

By the end of Goodyear's tenure in 1923, additional notable works by American and European painters such as John Singleton Copley, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Theodore Robinson enriched the collection. Goodyear was also instrumental in securing nearly one hundred plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.

A. Augustus Healy, president of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences, masterminded major painting and sculpture acquisitions during these early years. He gave numerous paintings, raised funds to purchase a large series of gouaches by James Tissot illustrating The Life of Christ, and led the Sargent subscription campaign. In 1906, Healy also helped purchase Henri Fantin-Latour's Portrait of Madame Leon Maitre (1882) for the Museum from the artist's Memorial Exhibition in Paris.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the fine arts collections were exhibited in the West Wing. The Hall of Casts, on the third floor, housed the department's casts of classical sculpture and paintings and sculpture occupied galleries on the fifth floor. William H. Fox, who would become the Museum's director in 1913, recounted his first visit to the paintings gallery in 1912:

The scene that assailed our eyes was awful. The walls of a room one hundred and ten feet long by forty wide with smaller galleries adjacent were covered with three rows of paintings, without regard to their relation to each other, a veritable maelstrom of clashing harmonies, color, subject, and school, resting heavily on a wooden cimaise.²

Fox took on many curatorial responsibilities and implemented changes such as rearranging and bringing some order to the overcrowded gallery spaces. He retired some exhibits and created exhibition alcoves with movable screens. In addition to reinstalling much of the permanent collection, Fox inaugurated a regular series of special loan exhibitions. Many of these exhibitions were organized by Fox and circulated to other institutions after showing at the Brooklyn Museum.

During the teens, the Museum began to provide exhibition space to many Brooklyn art and cultural organizations, an effort that continued for many years and reinforced the connection between the Museum and its community. The Brooklyn Society of Miniature Painters began to exhibit in 1915, continuing almost annually until 1936; the Brooklyn Aquarium Society exhibited from 1914 to 1919; the Brooklyn Society of Etchers exhibited 1916 to 1931; and the Brooklyn Society of Artists showed from 1922 to 1948, to name just a few. Fox also sought to establish a unique mission for the Museum--that of collecting more modern or contemporary art, specifically French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works and American early modern works. This focus away from more traditional European "old masters" afforded the Museum an opportunity to acquire first-rate works from artists not yet fully appreciated by the museum world. In the 1920s important French works by Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gaugin, and Camille Pissarro, among others, became part of the collection. And over the decades, the department's strength in European paintings remained with nineteenth-century works from France. An important early Edgar Degas, Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet La Source, leads a group of five works by this master, and the collection also includes works by Jean François Millet, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Paul Cezanne.

In 1921, the department instituted an exhibition series that would be an important and popular attraction for over forty years. Known as the International Watercolor Exhibition, these biennial exhibitions featured paintings by both established and emerging American and European watercolor painters who were invited to show their work. Curators selected paintings nationally and abroad until the series' final year, the twenty-second biennial, in 1963.

After Goodyear's death in 1923, Paul J. Woodward became temporary head of the department, followed in 1925 by Herbert B. Tschudy, who was the first department head with the title, "Curator of Painting and Sculpture." Under Tschudy, the department became active in exhibiting surveys of contemporary art movements, beginning in 1925 with the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by the Société Anonyme, and continuing in 1928 with a showing of the Carnegie Institute's International Exhibition of Paintings. While the nineteenth-century collection was growing during the twenties and thirties, the department also laid the foundation for a modern collection with the acquisition of paintings by new American artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth and John Marin. Important acquisitions during this period also included works by the more established American painters John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, and the French painter Berthe Morisot.

Fox retired as director in 1933. His successor, Philip Newell Youtz, concentrated on making the Museum a leading art institution, dissolving the natural history department and even removing from display the plaster casts avidly collected earlier in the century. He was also interested in providing the public with a superior education in the arts. In 1934 he reorganized the department into three components, based on important historical periods in Western art: Medieval Art, under Marvin C. Ross; Renaissance Art, with Frederick A. Sweet as curator; and Contemporary Art, under Herbert Tschudy. He also re-installed the Museum collections in the galleries "so that the contents of the Museum will present to the public an organic and orderly panorama of the various fields…without such an arrangement, a Museum is likely to be either a dead store-house or a mausoleum containing a series of private memorials."³ Like the division of the department, the reorganization of the collections was divided along historical periods so that visitors could travel through the centuries of art in a chronological and logical way as they proceeded through the Museum. Each successive floor exhibited the next period in history. For instance, the third floor contained Ancient Art; fourth, Medieval; fifth, Renaissance; and the sixth floor held the Gallery of Living Artists.

During the late 1930s, the curators continued to rearrange gallery spaces. A general reinstallation of the Museum's contemporary paintings and sculpture separated the various schools and periods more clearly. American oil paintings were reorganized, and separate sections were created for the Impressionists and for the Munich school. The sculpture gallery was also reinstalled in a more chronological order.

On December 6, 1935, the Medieval Hall officially opened with a special exhibition of manuscripts and the Museum's collection of medieval objects became accessible to the public for the first time. There was one gallery devoted to Byzantine art, one to Western Medieval art, one to examples of the medieval style from later centuries, and a gallery for temporary exhibitions. Soon after the Medieval Hall was established, its collection was augmented by gifts and purchases.

The Renaissance Art division was responsible for both paintings and sculpture up to the nineteenth century and for European decorative arts. In 1936, John I.H. Baur succeeded Frederick Sweet as curator and also assumed the curatorship of Contemporary Art when Tschudy retired.

By 1941, the collection of European applied arts such as glass, ceramics, ivories, and metalwork had been transferred to a new Department of Decorative Arts, and collection, research and special exhibitions of paintings and sculpture were reunited under one curator: Baur.

Under the leadership of Baur, an American art history scholar, the department strengthened its American collection, acquiring important works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American painting and sculpture including additional works by John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer. Baur organized a series of well-received exhibitions of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century artists such as Eastman Johnson (1940), William Sidney Mount (1942), "The Eight" (1943-44), Theodore Robinson (1946-47), and John F. Peto (1950). Baur also installed an extensive survey on the past fifty years of American painting, Revolution and Tradition (1951-52). New acquisitions to the collection focused on American works. In the early 1940s, the Museum purchased works by the nineteenth-century American painters George Bingham; Thomas Doughty; expressionists Marsden Hartley and Max Weber; the Colonial portraitist William Williams; and sculptor William Rush. After 1942, works by Robert Feke, Thomas Birch, and Gilbert Stuart were also added to the painting collection. In the early 1950s, Baur instigated a monthly exhibition series of recent accessions to the paintings collection in the fifth floor rotunda.

In 1950, Baur and Hertha Wegener, the assistant curator, began a new exhibition series in the Museum’s tradition of supporting Brooklyn artists. This series, which provided biennial exhibitions for a decade, was very successful and in 1958 expanded to include artists living farther out on Long Island.

After a prestigious career at the Brooklyn Museum, Baur resigned in 1952 and John Gordon succeeded him as curator of the department. In his first year, Gordon was deemed a curator whose "sensitivity to contemporary art trends and his seasoned understanding of the Museum's point of view in this field brought new leadership to the department."⁴ Under his guidance the Museum continued to acquire many important works of the twentieth century, notably William Glackens' Nude with Apple as well as canvasses by Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, and Willem de Kooning.

Two exhibitions mounted in 1954 symbolized the dual interests of the department: publicizing major works by important artists, and exhibiting works by local and lesser-known artists. Gordon curated the American Panorama benefit exhibition, selecting 45 pictures by well-known artists, works that he believed represented the best of the American painting collection. That same year, the department showed a small exhibition of a previously unknown Brooklyn painter, Harold Magnus Larson.

In 1957 a new sculpture and watercolor gallery opened with the installation of Gaston Lachaise's Standing Woman, which was lauded as "one of the most impressive and heroic pieces of sculpture of the twentieth century."⁵ Works by two upcoming young contemporary sculptors, Seymour Lipton and Luciano Minguzzi were also added to the collection.

In 1961 Axel von Saldern became the new curator. Like many of his predecessors, von Saldern emphasized American art in his collecting policy. He noted that "the great strength of the department lies in its collection of American paintings. Through the judicious selection of previous administrations it now ranks among the best in this country."⁶ He also wanted to further improve the galleries and the educational experience for the visitors. Among the changes he established were a new labeling system. Instead of an individual identification label, the gallery walls featured introductory panels describing the relevant historic periods to the artwork. In addition, the ropes and rails which kept the public at a safe distance from the works were removed and replaced with less forbidding footboards. By the late 1960s a new "Study Storage Gallery" opened on the fifth floor allowing visitors to view large portions of the collection on moving racks. The watercolor gallery was relocated from the fifth floor mezzanine to around the perimeter of the Sculpture Court, which provided better lighting.

Von Saldern and Donelson F. Hoopes, who succeeded him in 1966, continued an active exhibition program throughout the 1960s. For the first time private collections of American art, those of Daniel and Rita Fraad and Herbert A. Goldstone, were displayed in the Museum, accompanied by scholarly catalogs. During this period there were many one-artist shows, including surveys of the paintings of James Hamilton (1966); drawings and sculpture by William Zorach (1964); works by the Italian contemporary painter Pietro Annigoni (1969); and Milton Avery (1970). In an effort to make modern art more meaningful and appealing to visitors, in 1968 a truly distinctive exhibition was installed. Listening to Pictures provided visitors with audio of contemporary American painters and sculptors to accompany the works in the show. Using headphones, which were available in front of each art object, the viewer could hear each artist interpreting his or her work. These audio recordings had value beyond the exhibition. According to Arlene Jacobowitz, the assistant curator who conducted the interviews, "by establishing this living archive, additional interest has been focused on the art of our time."⁷

Among the major acquisitions during this time were The Man Who Posed as Richelieu by Robert Henri, purchased with the help of Roy Neuberger; Frederick Church's South American Landscape; John Singleton Copley's Portrait of Mrs. Eppes; and a bequest from the Estate of Laura L. Barnes which included paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Henri Matisse, and Chaim Soutine.

In June 1965 the Frieda Schiff Warburg Memorial Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum's tribute to sculptured architectural ornamentation, was officially opened. At the opening, Director Thomas Buechner remarked that "more than two hundred pieces of New York City were installed in our backyard this year."⁸ Designed by landscape architect Alice Recknagel Ireys and with financial support from Mr. and Mrs. Walter N. Rothschild, the sculpture garden, a memorial for Walter Rothschild's mother-in-law, was installed in terraced beds beneath a grove of London plane trees. The collection contains examples of ornamental stonework, wrought iron, cast iron, and terra-cotta salvaged by the Anonymous Arts Recovery Society and an art dealer, Ivan Karp, from a diverse cross-section of demolished New York structures such as Penn Station, Steeplechase Park, and Al Capone's "Emporium." The garden's pavement was originally constructed from cobblestones and bricks retrieved from all five boroughs of New York City.

As the late 1960s and early 1970s defined a time of upheaval and change in American society, at the Museum a new sensibility to underrepresented and marginalized groups helped to expand subjects and themes deemed appropriate for exhibition. For African-American artists, 1969 marked an important turning point. In that year, the exhibition New Black Artists traveled to the Museum from The Harlem Cultural Council. This exhibition exposed Museum visitors for the first time to a whole new group of living artists who explored their heritage and culture within their art. Acknowledging the cultural significance of recognizing these artists and the value of their work, curator Edward K. Taylor described the show as "really only a beginning, a hint of uncovered ground and a new area of exploration."⁹ In the years to follow, more shows featuring black artists and the interpretation of works with African-American themes came to or were curated by the Museum. These included Two Centuries of Black American Art (1977), Black Folk Art in America (1982), and Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940 (1990).

Like African-American artists, women artists were largely underrepresented in the museum world. Although as early as 1928 the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and a few women were featured in one-artist shows (Bessie Potter Vonnoh, 1913; Dorothea Dreier, 1925), women artists still struggled to achieve adequate exposure. In the 1970s the Museum encouraged a more serious evaluation of women artists. The retrospective, Women Artists: 1550-1950 (1977) was one such exhibition. Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition curators' intention was to make more widely known the achievements of women artists who had previously been neglected.

In the early 1970s the department organized a large reinstallation project in the fifth floor galleries in order to show the Museum's rich collection of American paintings from the mid-eighteenth- to the mid-nineteenth-centuries with an updated educational approach. The installation was arranged chronologically, with works grouped by topic and style. As curator Sarah Faunce wrote, "the gallery as a whole will have no single 'target audience' in that it will provide the best of the American collection of this period in a well lit, comfortable, and attractive setting for all visitors, whether they be serious students or casual visitors."¹⁰

In 1983, the department celebrated the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge with The Great East River Bridge: 1883-1983, curated by Barbara Head Millstein, associate curator of the Sculpture Garden. Although organized primarily by the Painting and Sculpture department, many curatorial departments participated in the show's development and provided objects for exhibition. Included in the show were paintings, prints, photographs, etchings, postcards, engineering plans, and artifacts.

The department underwent another important restructuring in 1984. Unlike 1934, when the department was divided into historical periods, these more recent changes divided the department geographically: American Art under Linda Ferber and European Art under Sarah Faunce. The Contemporary Art division, under Charlotta Kotik, covered both geographic areas from 1945 to the present. In 2001 these divisions became three separate curatorial departments.

The Brooklyn Museum had fallen behind in the collecting of contemporary art in the postwar period, but by the mid-1980s that curatorial activity was firmly re-established and developing. The department presented an international program of contemporary exhibitions, including an exhibition of ten large panels which made up The Voyage (Il Viaggio) by Italian abstractionist Albert Burri in 1982. The fall of 1984 brought another important exhibition, Six in Bronze. This traveling exhibition of bronze sculpture by six artists continued the Museum's tradition of importing survey exhibitions of leading artists' work. A panel discussion with several of the artists also provided an interested audience with personal anecdotes concerning both the creative act and the process of casting bronze.

During Charlotta Kotik's tenure as curator of Contemporary Art more than 250 contemporary works have been added to the approximately 530 works already in the collection. In 1992 she oversaw the reinstallation of the West Wing's fifth floor gallery to display nearly 80 contemporary works: 23 sculptures and 57 paintings. She paid particular attention to the acquisition of works by contemporary sculptors, exemplified by Ursula Von Rydingsvärd and Eduardo Paolozzi.

In her efforts to better promote the works of contemporary artists, Kotik initiated the Museum's Grand Lobby installations, a series of site-specific one-person exhibitions that began in 1984. The expansiveness of the lobby with its high ceiling, wide main wall, and a broad open space punctuated by two structural columns, gave artists an opportunity to make and exhibit art on a large scale. For instance, Pat Steir's work The Breughel Series (A Vanitas of Style), installed in 1984-85, consisted of two composite paintings comprised of 64 different parts, each in a particular style. All of the segments made up an enormous image based on a Breughel painting. In 1990, Kotik presented Joseph Kosuth's The Play of the Unmentionable in the Lobby. This show presented controversial works from previous eras during a time when politicians were reconsidering funding to artists whose art could be considered offensive.

In the fall of 1985 Kotik inaugurated another exhibition series: Working in Brooklyn. Installed in the Rotunda, West Gallery, and Lobby Gallery, Working in Brooklyn has featured works by mid-career, emerging, and relatively unknown Brooklyn artists in various media: painting, sculpture, installation, multimedia, photography, and artists books. The Working in Brooklyn series furthered the public's recognition of the Museum as a New York institution responsive to contemporary artists.

From the late 1980s onward the department continued to expand its collections, renovate gallery space, and offer important and original exhibitions. Among the acquisitions during this time were important American works such as Worthington Whittredge's View near Brunnen on Lake Lucerne (1857), Francesca Alexander's oil painting Woman Sewing (ca. 1860s), and Girl in Japanese Costume by William Merritt Chase. Also during this time, the European collection was reinstalled twice. In the fall of 1987 the department installed a new collection of Rodin sculptures, given by Iris and B. Gerald Cantor, in the fifth-floor Rotunda, and renamed the space as the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery.

During the 1980s and 1990s various curators organized small thematic exhibitions from the collections as part of the Curator's Choice Exhibition series. The Curator's Choice series were exhibitions that featured works from the Museum's rich permanent collection. Among the department's shows were Home Scenes: American Genre Painting in The Brooklyn Museum (1987), The American Watercolor Movement 1860-1900 (1988) and Making History at The Brooklyn Museum, John I.H. Baur (1988). Large scale shows also occupied the department during this time. In 1988, curator and department chair Sarah Faunce organized a seminal exhibition on the early French Modernist painter Gustave Courbet, Courbet Reconsidered. This well-received exhibition was listed as one of the opening projects of the French Bicentenary celebration and it received the patronage of the Ambassador of France to the United States. In 1991 chief curator and curator of American Painting and Sculpture Linda Ferber organized a retrospective of the works of Albert Bierstadt, an important yet often overlooked nineteenth-century American painter. This monumental show, Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise, was the first retrospective exhibition of Bierstadt's work in almost two decades. This exhibition upheld a tradition begun with Baur's pioneering retrospectives from the 1940s, as detailed earlier, and continues to thrive through retrospectives on Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1996), Eastman Johnson (1999), and William Merritt Chase (2000).

Like the inter-departmental cooperation for the Great East River Bridge show in 1983, the last few years have seen more shows combining the expertise of curators across disciplines and departments. In 1996 curators from Painting and Sculpture, Decorative Arts, and the Department of the Arts of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, coordinated an exhibition of objects from colonial South America which were dispersed among these various curatorial collections. A cataloging and research project on American Colonial art in the Museum collection that began in the late 1960s was the impetus that culminated in this ground-breaking exhibition Converging Cultures: Art & Identity in Spanish America.

The long-term reinstallation, American Identities: A New Look, which opened in September 2001, also crossed departmental lines. Organized by Teresa A. Carbone, curator of American Painting and Sculpture and Barry R. Harwood, curator of Decorative Arts, the installation features American decorative arts, furniture, paintings, sculpture, photographs, and prints. They organized the exhibition around a framework of eight themes -- some based on time periods and others based on more general subjects. Throughout the galleries a change in the wall color signals entry into each new theme and large text panels offer an introduction. In addition, individual objects have text labels, some of which offer quotations by artists and historical figures, offering more detailed background and context.

In 2000, the Painting and Sculpture department became three departments divided along the traditional divisions of European, American, and Contemporary art.