The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2007
A Hidden Treasure
UA Museum of Art houses a world-class collection
by Donna Kreutz
The University of Arizona Museum of Art is a hidden treasure, housed in a brick box of a building in a corner of the fine arts complex. But behind the quiet façade is a distinguished collection, with art dating back to the 14th century and going all the way up to the 21st.
“This is absolutely a world-class collection,” executive director Charles Guerin says. “It’s small — but probably 90 percent of what’s in this museum would be desirable for any other museum in the United States.”
The “Retablo of the Cathedral of the Ciudad Rodrigo,” just for instance, is a stunning array of 26 painted panels that once adorned a church in Spain. Painted by Fernando Gallego and his assistants in the 1480s, the panels tell the story of the Gospels, recounting the life of Jesus in jewel-like colors. But the collection also includes works by such 20th century lumiaries as Salvador Dalí, Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. In fact, the permanent collection consists of more than 5000 pieces of art.
These gems, along with changing exhibitions of works not in the collection, attract students and some out-of-town art lovers, but the UAMA remains an untapped destination for local residents and alumni returning to campus. The museum’s leaders are trying to change that, by curating interesting themed shows and expanding the museum’s programs.
“The University of Arizona is a major flagship university and its museum of art should be a major leader in the visual arts,” says Guerin, who came to the UA seven years ago from the University of Wyoming Art Museum. “We can be that.”
The latest museum initiative is the creation of a new American Visual Arts Archive. Guerin hopes to model the repository on places like the Archive of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and the UA’s Center for Creative Photography, collecting materials that offer glimpses into an artist’s life and creative process. The Center for Photography’s notable collection includes the prints, notes, and contact sheets of Ansel Adams and other outstanding photographers.
“If this is a good idea for photography, it’s a good idea for other visual arts,” says Guerin.
“When an artist dies, the archival materials — diaries, notebooks, and correspondence — often end up in boxes and after a decade or a two, relatives get tired of pushing the stuff around and it ends up in the dump. This is something that I’ve worried about for years.”
But such materials, properly preserved, help us understand how an artist works. Instead, the coded notebooks of da Vinci, for instance, have offered generations of scholars insight into his forays into architecture, engineering, and medical science.
“These incredible drawings and notebooks … demonstrate the breadth of da Vinci’s creative ventures,” Guerin explains.
Without them, art historians “would have a very different perception of the man.”
The UAMA isn’t likely to get hold of any da Vinci papers, but the museum has high hopes for acquiring the artwork and papers of other artists. And the first gift has already been promised to the new archive. Robert McCall, a longtime NASA artist who also worked for Life magazine back in the 1960s, has announced that he will donate more than 200 of his paintings.
Two UA alumni donors, John Norton and Norm McClelland, have made challenge gifts to launch the project, and the museum is already renovating a warehouse in downtown Tucson to serve as temporary housing for the archive.
Back in the 1930s, the University didn’t even have a museum, just a gallery. Nevertheless, the Depression-era Works Projects Administration donated more than 200 lithographs and prints created by artists on its payrolls. That gift became the “humble beginnings” of the museum, wrote the late director Peter Birmingham, Ph.D., who shepherded the museum for some 20 years, from the late 70s to the late 90s.
The WPA gift was followed by many others over the last seven decades, making the UAMA the creation of numerous visionaries. In 1944, alumnus C. Leonard Pfeiffer gave American paintings from the 1920s to the 1940s, including works by Edward Hopper and Reginald March. Holdings in European art were strengthened enormously by the donation of the Samuel H. Kress Collection in the early 1950s. Its 50 European paintings — including the famed “Retablo” — date from the 14th through the 19th centuries. They include works by such luminaries as Tintoretto and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Yet few of these paintings are on permanent view.
“Less than five percent of the UA art collection is on display at any time — giving visitors a good reason to return,” says Dr. Lisa Fischman, chief curator, who has the delightful task of showcasing selections from the collection in ever-changing exhibits. “This museum has been totally under the radar. It is an unbelievable hidden gem.”
Fischman, armed with a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, arrived two years ago. She took over as chief curator from Peter Briggs, Ph.D., a specialist in Latin American art who curated dozens of shows during his 14 years at the museum. (Briggs now holds an endowed chair at the Museum of Texas Tech.)
But Fischman has put her own stamp on the museum, organizing lively shows, including one that brought the prized WPA prints out into public view for the first time in years. She’s also reworked the museum’s wall colors, lights, and flooring. Curator of education Lisa Hastreiter-Lamb adds events that complement the exhibitions, staging everything from African drumming and martial arts demonstrations, to live music inspired by visual art.
A recent exchange program has provided Fischman with extraordinary new curating opportunities. The UAMA has lent its valuable “Retablo” panels to the Meadows Museum in Dallas and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Experts at those two institutions are using infrared, X-ray, and other high-tech tools to analyze layers of paint in hopes of finding hidden instructions, sketches, and alterations under the surface of this singular religious masterwork.
In exchange, the UA is receiving four suites of first-edition prints by the master Spanish artist Francisco de Goya on temporary loan. The museum has the enviable task of staging no fewer than four exhibitions of these extraordinary early 19th century etchings in the course of a year. The series, titled “Goya’s Mastery in Prints,” continues through June 2008.
“What’s fabulous about these works,” Fischman says, “is that they are the first imprints off the copper plates, which means they are of exceptional quality and most closely realize the artist’s vision.” The “amazing details” in these small, dark etchings are simply not visible in later prints or book reproductions, she notes.
Goya (1746-1828) had “enormous influence on generations of artists that came after him,” Fischman says. “He was so instrumental in shifting what art was allowed to do, the way that art makes social and political critique, and the way that art might reveal the inner mind.”
But the museum is not only displaying these fantastic historical works. The staff is making the Goya shows come alive — especially for today’s students — by linking each of the historical suites with a contemporary artist whose work is somehow in conversation with the Spanish master’s.
“La Tauromaquia” is Goya’s chronicle of bullfighting in Spain, filled with wild scenes of matadors killing bulls, and sometimes bulls killing matadors. Last spring, assistant curator Susannah Maurer paired that exhibition with dramatic black-and-white photographs of American rodeos by Tucson’s Louise Serpa, a pioneering female rodeo photographer. The juxtaposition allowed viewers to connect two eras to a common theme — man’s attempt to prove his mastery over untamed animals in a public arena.
The second suite, “Los Disparates,” consists of nightmarish engravings created at a time when Goya was “deaf, in exile, and beset by his own demons,” Fischman says. They were coupled with paintings by Victor Huerta Batista, a young Cuban artist never before exhibited in a U.S. museum.
“Like Goya’s, Batista’s work is full of strange surreal configurations, dark and imaginative, with lots of references to ships and other modes of escape,” Fischman says.
The chief curator enjoys setting up conversations across time, and with more than 5,000 pieces of art at her fingertips, that’s not hard to do. In last summer’s exhibition, “Lost in the Woods,” Fishman juxtaposed works from different epochs, all of them related to humans finding — or losing — their way in the world. The pairings were startling. Engravings on paper of Adam and Eve by Jan Saenredam, 1604, joined edgy contemporary lithographs of Red Riding Hood, from the “Father Gander” portfolio by Peregrine Honig, 2006, and digital prints of nymphs in a grotto, “The Vivian Girls,” 2006 by John Largaespada.
The museum will continue its four-exhibition cycle of Francisco de Goya’s prints, with the presentation of “Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War),” 1810-1820. The etchings in this suite were inspired by the artist’s strong reaction to the Peninsular War of 1808-1814 — including the French invasion of Spain, the guerrilla war against Napoleon Bonaparte, and the enormous impact of these events on life in his homeland. The exhibition runs from October 11, 2007, to February 3, 2008.
“I want to let people know there is something incredibly lively going on here,” Fischman says. “In this age of Google and instant communication, you expect answers in seconds. It’s a different experience when you come to a museum. You calm yourself down and read about something, look at it again, and think about it. There’s a lot to learn.”
Related story: UA Museum of Art aquires the Robert McCall collection of space art.
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