Golden Age of Discovery ... Down in the Basements.
GALLERIES usually get all the publicity, but at many museums the biggest news is happening in the basement.
In
recent years, curators, visiting scholars, interns and even students
have discovered — or rediscovered — cultural treasures lurking on site.
The
finds, including a rare Picasso in storage, a long-lost recording of a
Martin Luther King speech in a cardboard box and an entirely new species
of mammal in a specimen drawer, change the image of museum storage from
a climate-controlled purgatory for art and artifacts into an organic
part of cultural institutions, where history is often being made, or at
least demanding to be re-evaluated.
“You
never know what you are going to discover,” said Timothy J. Standring, a
curator at the Denver Art Museum. He speaks from experience. As part of
a process he calls “spring cleaning,” Mr. Standring routinely inspects
art that might not have been seen in decades.
At
first, he hunts for clunkers — candidates for deacquisition
(museum-speak for getting rid of something). But in 2007, he found a
keeper in a bin: a filthy oil painting of a Venice piazza in a battered
frame. He suspected that the painting, which was attributed to a student
of the Italian landscape painter known as Canaletto, might be by the
celebrated teacher himself.
“Underneath
all the grime of discolored varnishes, I was able to detect that there
was some really stunning painting going on,” said Mr. Standring. His
hunch proved right; in 2012, after extensive research and restoration by
the museum, an eminent Canaletto scholar pronounced Mr. Standring’s
find an early work by the old master. “Venice: The Molo From the Bacino di S. Marco” now hangs in the Denver museum.
History
can hide in plain sight, too. Bob van der Linden, chairman of the
aeronautics department at the National Air and Space Museum in
Washington, recently removed a map of the Caribbean used by Charles A.
Lindbergh from an exhibition. “Out of curiosity, and to protect the
chart better when in storage, I decided to unfold it. When I did, I saw
that the chart was covered in writing,” said Mr. van der Linden by
email.
On
the back of the map was a speech Lindbergh wrote and dated Feb. 8,
1928, promoting commercial air travel. At the time, he had been on a
public-relations swing through the Caribbean in the Spirit of St. Louis,
the plane of his historic 1927 trans-Atlantic crossing. “To give you
some idea of how good a pilot he was,” said Mr. van der Linden,
“Lindbergh wrote the speech while flying the unstable aircraft. The
handwriting is quite legible.”
Though
the American Alliance of Museums encourages its members to regularly
inventory collections, no policy requires museums to undergo
self-examinations of storage areas. “That would be hard to mandate,”
said Ford W. Bell, the trade association’s president, who noted that
museums possess a “staggering” number of objects in storage; the group
estimates that 96 to 98 percent of collections are not displayed. “The
reality is that’s what collections are there for — to make discoveries,”
Mr. Bell said.
Museums
frequently battle collection creep, observed Ann Stone, author of
“Treasures in the Basement: An Analysis of Collection Utilization in Art
Museums,” a paper published by the RAND Corporation in 2002. “The
forces that contribute to collection growth are much greater than
collection control and management,” she said. Museums have been known to
over-collect from donors who demand that major gifts include hits as
well as misses, face restrictions on culling undesirable objects, and
often struggle with a fixed amount of exhibition space for an expanding
collection.
Mr.
Standring of the Denver Art Museum advises colleagues to plan periodic
expeditions to the basement. “If you have the resources, I would hope
institutions would allocate time and resources to conduct at least an
annual due diligence.” But taking inventory is not “sexy,” he
acknowledged, and demands staff members. Large and heavy paintings, Mr.
Standring pointed out, “are not like poker chips where you can just toss
them around,” so he recruits a team of art handlers for his forays into
storage. Smaller institutions, he frets, might squander opportunities
to find hidden masterpieces: “A ma–and-pa operation with two helpers?
Forget it.”
In
2012, after researching the whereabouts of a rare Picasso sculpture,
Guernsey’s auction house in New York alerted the Evansville Museum of
Arts, History and Science in Evansville, Ind., that it might own the
work, titled “Seated Woman With Red Hat.” Arlan Ettinger, the president
of the auction house, characterized the initial response he received
from the museum as “Picasso? What Picasso?” But the museum’s director
soon called back in a state of “euphoria,” Mr. Ettinger said. The prized
sculpture was found hanging on an art rack in storage.
Picasso
produced it in the 1950s using a technique to layer colored glass
called gemmail (and known by the plural gemmaux). The Picasso’s original
owner, the industrial designer Raymond Loewy, donated the Modern work
to the Evansville museum in 1963, promising to later transfer the
sculpture. When it arrived five years later, the museum, according to
its website, attributed “Seated Woman With Red Hat” to the phantom
artist Gemmaux — confusing the name of the technique with the artist’s
name. The Evansville Museum intends to sell the sculpture, which Mr.
Ettinger values at $30 million to $40 million, dwarfing the museum’s
$6.4 million endowment.
Developments
in technology, like CT scans and DNA sequencers, enable researchers to
extract new findings from old collections. “Collections are not stagnant
and not in storage collecting dust,” said William Stanley, an expert on
mammals and head of collections at the Field Museum in Chicago, by
email from Tanzania, where he was about to embark on traditional field
work. “Rather, they are being examined and remeasured and photographed
in scanning electron microscopes on a daily basis, by people from all
over the world, and this allows us to figure out what makes this planet
tick.”
Museums
can increase the odds of a rediscovery by welcoming visiting scholars.
“I’m more apt to make a find of something in another museum than my
own,” said Mark A. Norell, curator at the American Museum of Natural
History’s Division of Paleontology, who stands in a long corridor on the
museum’s fifth floor. It is lined with stacks of gray cabinets called
“cans,” where the museum keeps many of its more than 33 million
specimens, only a fraction of which are on display. A visiting
specialist in a particular field, Mr. Norell said, might be able to spot
a discovery that a museum without a dedicated expert in that area of
research could easily miss.
While
he was a visiting scholar to the Field Museum, Kristofer M. Helgen, a
curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
discovered a new species of mammal. In 2003, he was rifling through a
large metal cabinet deep in the recesses of the museum, examining the
skins of olingos (a raccoon relative) collected in the 1950s. Some of
the skins with red-orange fur stood out.
“Mammal
museum specimens usually consist of a skin and a skull, and when I
pulled the skulls for the red skins out of their boxes, I could right
away see how different their teeth and their ear bones and the shapes of
the skulls were,” said Mr. Helgen by email.
He
refers to his revelation as “a true eureka moment.” After a decade of
additional research, Mr. Helgen announced in 2013 the finding of the new
species, which he named the olinguito.
Mr.
Stanley hailed his colleague’s achievement: “Because of this, our
understanding of one of the most infamous groups of mammals has
changed.”
Not
only experienced scientists make discoveries in museums and archives;
interns and students offer fresh eyes and reservoirs of energy.
Like
many cultural institutions, the New York State Museum is re-examining
its collection during a digitization initiative. Last year, an intern on
the project noticed a reel-to-reel tape with a label that read “Martin
Luther King Jr., Emancipation Proclamation Speech 1962.”
The museum had uncovered the only known recording of a speech
Mr. King delivered in New York, marking the centenary of President
Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In a slow yet
powerful cadence, Mr. King analyzes the unfulfilled promise of the
Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation. “History reveals that
America has a schizophrenic personality where these two documents are
concerned,” booms Mr. King. “On the one hand, she has proudly professed
the basic principles inherent in both documents. On the other hand, she
has sadly practiced the antithesis of these principles.”
The
New York State Museum’s find followed the 2012 discovery of an audio
recording of a speech Malcolm X gave at Brown University in 1961.
Malcolm Burnley, a senior at Brown in 2012, was leafing through old
copies of the student newspaper while researching a nonfiction writing
assignment, when he spotted a photo of Malcolm X and a brief article
recounting a visit to the campus by the Nation of Islam leader. “To see
that he gave a speech, and it was so little documented, I found very
shocking,” Mr. Burnley said.
Mr.
Burnley later learned that Malcolm X had asked to speak at the
university after reading an essay in The Brown Daily Herald (edited by
Richard C. Holbrooke, then a student, later a top American diplomat),
criticizing the Nation of Islam. School administrators “were not
interested in dipping into the racial dialogue at the time,” Mr. Burnley
said. “If they were going to invite a black speaker to campus, it
wasn’t going to be Malcolm X.” But Mr. Holbrooke, who had invited
Malcolm X to campus, protested; he threatened to move the student
newspaper off campus, prompting administrators to back down.
Katharine
Pierce, who wrote the critique that inspired Malcolm X to speak at
Brown, tipped off Mr. Burnley that she had donated a tape of the
long-forgotten speech to the university’s archive. “It had just been
sitting there, not digitized,” said Mr. Burnley, who found the speech
revelatory.
As
Malcolm X makes the case for black nationalism in the recording, many
in the audience can be heard gasping, Mr. Burnley recounted. But “by the
end of the hour, he is getting applause from almost the entire
audience.”
“He’s making jokes,” he added. “I can definitively say that he was one of our greatest orators.”
Occasionally,
discoveries at cultural institutions spur controversy. At the turn of
the 20th century, the Springfield Science Museum in Springfield, Mass.,
acquired an artifact that it labeled “Aleutian Hat” and socked it away.
Last year, Ellen Savulis, the museum’s curator of anthropology, learned
about the object while planning a new exhibition about Native Americans
of the Northwest. “We have the opportunity to do more in-depth research
when we are designing exhibits,” said Ms. Savulis, who ventured into the
museum’s storage area for a look at the hat. On a shelf, she found the
sculptured head of an eagle-like bird with a prominent beak “carved from
a solid piece of wood that still retains the original colors,” she
said. After research, Ms. Savulis concluded that it did not resemble an
Aleutian hat.
The
Alaska State Museum later identified the artifact as a valuable Tlingit
war helmet (circa 1800-1850), one of fewer than 100 in existence.
Tribal leaders now want their warrior’s helmet back. The Central Council
of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska intends to request
repatriation of the helmet, a lengthy and costly process. “I would trust
the Springfield Museum will understand that the sacred value of this
hat lies in its return to its home,” Rosita Worl, vice chairwoman of the
Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit cultural organization, told
The Alaska Dispatch.
In
rare cases, a discovered artifact can threaten the existence of the
institution where it is found. In 2012, the Bishop Bonner’s Cottage
Museum, a local history museum for Dereham, England, uncovered three
live grenades in a box marked “bomb” from its archives. The local bomb
squad removed the explosives, and Ray Fraser, chairman of Dereham
Antiquarian Society, which owns the museum, believes it is now
grenade-free.
But Mr. Fraser offered a word of caution to other museums: “Don’t take in anything that looks like it could explode on you.”
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