Word: fogg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Undergraduates are for the most part only passive observors of this process. For them the museum is simply a visual library, but Coolidge has made every effort to make it a good one. Years back, Wilhelm Koehler resolutely ignored the Fogg's collection and taught his course on Romanesque sculpture from battered photographs. But last semester Linda Seidel used the originals to teach a course on restorations and forgeries in Romanesque sculpture. Coolidge says, "You cannot discuss the nature of genuine surface or the problems of recutting by studying beaten-up photographs...
...Fogg staff sets up displays for almost every Fine Arts 13 section meeting and provides more modest exhibits for other courses and hangs specific paintings for students from Brandeis, Wellesley and other neighboring schools. Concentrators are most tenderly cared for; at times the Fogg even permits them to run their fingers over a painting's surface...
Part of Coolidge's job the past 20 years has been simply to preside over the museum as a museum--and here his successes have been far more conventional. When he became director in 1948 the Fogg was virtually broke. Post-war inflation made earlier budgets inadequate and the generation for whom the museum had counted on gifts were no longer providing them. A few opportune, bequests and steady cultivation of new sources has brought the Fogg back to solvency and Harvard now spends eight times what it did when Coolidge started. (Much of this money, however, is spent...
...objects on display are only a fraction of Coolidge's acquisitions. The rest, like 3/4 of the objects the Fogg owns, are never shown to the public. Sculpture fragments, torn paintings, forgeries and most prints and drawings are stored in the basement and print and drawing rooms and are used only for study and instruction. Many large bequests of miscellane- ous art must be attributed and sometimes restored before the works which are good enough to be exhibited can be separated from those which...
...shown at any one time. Some objects are usually up on the fourth floor being cleaned and restored by the conservation department. Others are on loan to the Harvard Houses. In exchange for the privilege of borrowing from other museums for special exhibits like the Degas monotypes, the Fogg lends out works to other museums, and it has to pull paintings off the wall to make room for its own special exhibits and course displays...