Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
It doesn’t bode well for Crystal Bridges Museum’s stewardship of Fisk University’s Stieglitz Collection that the Arkansas institution’s inaugural display of the 101 works (in which it controversially purchased a half-share for $30 million) will run for a mere three months—Nov. 9-Feb. 3.
In giving the collection to Fisk, artist Georgia O’Keeffe had stipulated that the works be kept together and on constant view. Not only will Fisk’s students and faculty now be deprived, for two-year stretches, of access to the collection that was intended for their enjoyment and study, but Crystal Bridges’ audience will have only limited access to the works once the initial three-month display is over.
I had foreseen this further violation of donor intent in my August 2012 analysis of the court-approved agreement between Fisk and Crystal Bridges:
The agreement appears to provide some wiggle room for deviation from donor O’Keeffe’s stipulation that the entire collection be exhibited intact. The Collection Committee can, at its discretion, authorize “an appropriate curatorial representation of the collection,” with selections from each of five categories. The stated purpose of this fractional display is “to follow appropriate practices and guidelines for preservation of the Collection”—a concern that’s appropriate for light-sensitive works on paper, which need to be rotated off view, but seems less pertinent to painting and sculpture.
Also not boding well for Crystal Bridges’ informed stewardship of the works is its botched “History of the Collection” at the end of its press release announcing the soon-to-open show (linked at the top of this post). It erroneously lists one of the institutions among which O’Keeffe divided her voluminous holdings as the Museum of Modern Art. (By the time you read this, that error may have been corrected.)
Actually, it was that other big museum in New York City—the Metropolitan. Kevin Murphy, who recently resigned his curatorship at Crystal Bridges for a post at the Williams College Museum of Art, would have surely known this and caught the error.
UPDATE: Now they’ve corrected it online.