Is It Okay to Sell the Monet? by Julia Courtney

Author:Julia Courtney [Courtney, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

A Lasting Legacy for the Liberal Arts

As mentioned above, in October 1967, members of the Art Visiting Committee passed a motion that Adra’s bequest “be made available for use in the classroom, for study and research” and that “students be involved in the work of cataloguing, study and research” of the collection.177 Now more than a half-century later, her gift has been used for all of these purposes and for others that were, perhaps, not imagined by the committee. In addition to serving as pedagogical tools and as primary sources for researchers on- and off-campus, objects in the bequest or purchased with the Fund have been exhibited in Wheaton’s galleries and incorporated into fundraising and marketing campaigns. They have also been used to train several generations of work-study students, many of whom have gone on to graduate study in related fields and/or to work in museums and galleries.

The first purchase using the Fund was made in 1981 when a Greek Black-Figure Attic Amphora178 was purchased from a gallery in New York City. Classics faculty, who, prior to notification of Adra’s bequest, had asked the Wheaton administration for funds to acquire high-quality antiquities for teaching, had long coveted such an item. Once the decision had been made to sell most of the glass in the collection, faculty in the Art/Art History and the Classics Departments drew up a list of high-priority items for acquisition. A “Black-Figured Greek vase of quality” topped the list, followed by a “Red-Figured Greek vase of quality [and] a good example of Greek marble sculpture, perhaps a head” as well as a Roman or Hellenistic portrait bust; an example of a Roman wall painting and of a Roman mosaic; a few small Egyptian items; and examples of Bronze Age artifacts.179 In the decade that followed, the departments held to this list, acquiring a third-century-CE marble Head of Gallienus in 1985,180 a Roman mosaic floor fragment depicting Terpsichore,181 and a Greek marble head of a child.182 Over the next twenty-six years, nineteen more objects were purchased, including a sixteenth-century Book of Hours183 and a complete thirteen-volume set of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Opera Omnia.184 Most recently, in 2013, the fund was used to purchase Grant Wood’s Sultry Night, a 1937 lithograph printed as part of a subscription offered by Associated American Artists.185 This latter purchase is somewhat unusual, given that the language of the endowment indicated, “first preference [for acquisitions] should be given to items which relate to Classical Studies and Ancient Art.”186 The acquisition of Sultry Night was justified because the work, which features an image of a nude male farmhand, could serve as a contemporary example of the ancient Greek practice of depicting male nudes.

As of October 1972, when use of the Newell Bequest was reported to the AVC and Wheaton’s administration, three articles had been published on the Newell glass: two articles by Israeli archaeologist and numismatist Dan Barag187 and a 1971 article by American archaeologist Elsbeth B. Dusenbery, who argued that the “material suggests the collector was as much, or more, interested in shape than in surface technique.

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