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James Steward: We wanted to answer the question of why an individual work of art matters.
-- why someone who isn’t a specialist in the discipline ought to find something engaging, how does it
relate to its moment, how does it speak to the career output of the artist in question distinct
from it being simply an object in a vacuum? I think one of the real challenges in contending with
art from the past, especially from cultures that seem quite remote from our own, is the challenge
of bringing the original work of art back to life. And instead of simply talking or telling people
verbally about the extent to which European artists re-engaged with the ancient world to consider
how to represent the human form, we’re actually showing it. So, we’re juxtaposing a great anonymous
painting of St. Sebastian with a second-century Roman torso to make very direct that sense of
causality that there was indeed a formal relationship between these objects. Not only is there
intellectual value in doing this, but we can do it because of the sheer breadth and depth of the
collections. So that right now you will find, for instance, our great Vincent Van Gogh painting of
the “Tarascon Diligence” hung with two Japanese prints as companions to say something about how
Van Gogh was drawing visual inspiration.
Caroline Harris: Last year, when we re-hung these galleries, we decided to do them in a way that we’d never done before.
We wanted to integrate, with the paintings and sculptures, works on paper and works of decorative art.
The 19th-century painters like Monet, like Van Gogh, were fascinated by Japanese prints.
These began to enter the Paris market in the mid-19th century when Japan opened up to trade with the West,
and both Monet and Van Gogh collected Japanese prints as well as many other artists at the time. In the Van Gogh
you can see the influence of Japanese prints in several ways. In Japanese prints, of the sort they were collecting,
you often find interesting viewpoints onto a scene. So, here you kind of have a “bird’s-eye view”
down into the space, and then it pushes up and telescopes away from you.
Christopher Heuer: James’ approach is one that is going to make the museum not just kind of more accessible,
more marketable, but will do what museums across the country, across the world are being forced to do now,
which is make art relevant to the present day in a way that’s more than kind of superficial. That’s always
been something we try to talk to students about, but James is also been crucial in opening up the
museum to more than just the University community. These kind of comparisons he’s drawn are just
one way to do that.
James Steward: We have certainly been opening ourselves out much more substantially I think in the last couple of years.
We began our first ever evening hours …we now keep the galleries open every Thursday evening until ten o’clock.
Those evenings are often heavily programmed with things that are again intended to create entry points into
thinking about the visual arts. That might be film screenings, it might be concerts, it might be gallery talks. But
again something that opens out the world of art to someone who doesn’t self-define as an expert.
My view is that every art museum is by definition (or should be) a teaching museum. Through looking at
a broad array of let’s call them cultural artifacts, we can get a better understanding about the
impulses of a culture at any given point in the past. And we’re encouraging students and other
visitors to make these direct connections to see linkages and to re-awaken a sense of: How would
this have been viewed in the time that it was created, and what were the factors in society that
gave rise? Why do paintings or any other works of art look the way they look?
Caroline Harris: This is a portrait of Jean Cocteau by Modigliani and it shows the translation into his
painting of the aesthetics of African sculpture. We have these heddle pulleys (these are actually instruments
used in weaving) in association with the Modigliani because this is exactly the sort of African art that
he was looking at and was interested in. And when you look at the treatment of the face -- the way
that the eyebrow is related to the nose, the elongation of the face and the chin, and the somewhat
diamond shaped mouth -- all of those stylizations of the features really resonate with the African
objects that he was interested in.
James Steward: All work was at some point contemporary. We forget this in a certain way,
and I think that this “period-eye” approach to creating a deeper sense of both historical and visual context is
a way of trying to get at that. And all of this combines, we hope, to create a more accessible approach to very
rich content no matter what one’s background is, whether it’s a Princeton student who has come here to study in a
field that has absolutely nothing to do with the history of art, or, indeed, a member of the community
for whom museum-going may not be something they’ve traditionally experienced.
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