UTICA, NY.-Collecting Modernism European Masterworks from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute showcases the Museum of Art’s small but distinguished collection of painting, sculpture and drawings by artists such as Salvador Dalí (1904-89), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). In the years immediately following World War II, Institute Trustees approved an acquisitions policy formulated by Community Arts Director Harris K. Prior and long-time Institute patron Edward W. Root. Although the Museum was founded as a collection of art from the United States, Prior and Root believed that assembling a small collection of modern European art would be beneficial. In an April 1952 letter to MWP President Thomas Rudd, Root stated, “I believe that Harris Prior and I can use [the money] to give the Institute’s collection of 20th-century American Art a certain amount of European background. This ought to give a kind of context to the collection, since it was in Europe that the rather strange developments of this century were initiated.” Prior and Root were extremely judicious, as were subsequent Museum personnel, so that the European modernism collection represents each artist at the height of his powers.
Longtime Institute patrons point proudly to the fact that pioneering avant-garde artists whose works are collected by the most important museums around the world are also well-represented in Utica. To a larger audience, however, because the Museum has a strong reputation as an American collection, its European art remains largely unknown. Collecting Modernism, therefore, is the most recent in a series, begun in 1989, to publish and tour important aspects of the Museum’s collections of paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts. Among these collection projects, European modernism has an important, additional goal, which is to publish for the first time the history of ownership (provenance) of each piece to comply with the Association of Art Museum Directors’ 1998 Task Force on the Spoliation of Art During the Nazi Era.
Collecting Modernism is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue for which Mary E. Murray, curator of modern and contemporary art, authored an introductory essay about the collection’s origins and guest scholars, who have expertise about specific artists and movements, wrote essays on each of the 24 works in the show. With this new research, for instance, the Museum has learned from Michael Taylor, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that Salvador Dalí’s painting Cardinal, Cardinal! was originally titled Goldfinch, Goldfinch.
In preparation for Collecting Modernism the Museum of Art removed 24 works of art from public view to conduct research and to assess condition. Conservation was deemed necessary for several pieces, which were treated at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, in Williamstown, Massachusetts and supported by important funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The focus of conservation for five paintings, interestingly enough, was to undo treatments by an earlier generation of professionals. Thomas Branchick, painting conservator and Director of WACC, has noted “the profession has evolved into a ‘kindler, gentler’ approach. New materials and a more empathetic attitude to the original intent also determine a ‘less is more’ treatment path.” This will be the subject of his June 5 lecture and gallery talk.
