Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art
at the Fogg Art Museum
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
September 21, 2002–February 16, 2003
Whatever you do this month, get yourself to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There you will
find a perfect exhibition from a heretofore anonymous art collector
named Lois Orswell (1904–1998).
In life unknown to nearly
everyone in the art world, Orswell assembled one of the most
sensitive private collections of modern art. At her
house in rural Connecticut, she carried on an intense friendship of correspondence and
mutual support with David Smith, and quietly donated her
collection to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, without fanfare, into
the hands of curators like Marjorie B. Cohn, who now presides
over the current exhibition of her bequest.
In mounting a show of this kind—an exhibition of a
collection—a curator must confront not only the provenance of the
art but to varying degrees the provenance of the collector. More
often than not, the collector fades to the background, mentioned
in the exhibition titles but little elsewhere. The splendid “Thaw
Collection: Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, Acquisitions Since
1994,” on view at the Morgan Library in New York last fall, is one
case in point: here the intelligence of the collection spoke
silently of the intelligence of the collector.
In “Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art,” however, Marjorie
Cohn has placed Orswell center stage.
Her collection extends from Arshile Gorky, Auguste Rodin, Max
Beckmann (his Actors [1941–1942] is remarkable), Jacques Lipchitz,
Eduardo Paolozzi, and others in her early years of aquisition to
important items of African, Asiatic, and ancient art later on, to
one of the more important collections of Gaston Lachaise in the
United States, to the most personal collection of David Smith
anywhere (Terpsichore and Euterpe [1947]; Fish [1950–1951];
Detroit Queen [1957]; Doorway on Wheels [1960]; numerous
paintings, photographs, and studies). Assembled from the 1940s to
the 1960s, her inventory grew to over 340 items, all donated to
the Fogg, with 140 works now on display.
Yet it is the provenance of Orswell herself that equally attracts.
Marjorie Cohn, who developed a friendship with Orswell late in
Orswell’s life, has infused the show with the personality of this
spirited, tenacious individual. (The show’s working title was, I
note, “Passionate and Obstinate.”)
This show has everything going for it. The exhibition catalogue
includes a long essay by Cohn that in its inquiry into
the soul of a collector approaches high literature. The editor Sarah
B. Kianovsky also
includes the complete correspondence between
Orswell and Smith, sixty-six letters now in the Fogg archives.
Example:
Dear LO—
On the bronze—if you want it outside—I’m lacquering the new
wooden base about 20 times. Now—if it was on a base in the
garden how high should it be—I guess about 24-30 inches—will
proportion its height in relationship to sculpture—what do you
think—where should it go—relationship bushes etc—
Regards David S
And Orswell’s response:
Thanks. Not quite sure—it should be low—but if in among
plants—a little higher than on terrace—I had thought of those
incinerator blocks. Hope you have ideas.
Excited—L.O.
If Orswell’s isolation from the art world in the 1960s was
notable, her
distance from the theory-crazed establishment of the 1970s only
became more marked. This, from a letter to Marjorie Cohn:
I
suppose you know that the renowned Rosalind Krauss has been made
Columbia’s Prof. of ART HISTORY. WHOOOFFF. We might see if the
Disney company could run your department.
Orswell’s gift to the Fogg was almost
sidelined, in fact, by what Cohn calls her “lifelong venomous memory of a visit
in about 1966 from Rosalind Krauss, at that time a student [at
Harvard]. [T]he Museum was lucky not to have lost them.” “Do they
want us ALL to look and sound like Roaslind K?” wrote
Orswell to Cohn. “I wonder if any one predicted that feminism
would join up with that nonsense. But then I never like the ones
like Steinem anyway.” (Orswell was, among other things, a
subscriber to The New Criterion. According to Cohn, she often
“passed along copies to me, with
underlining and marginal
exclamation points.”)
The art collection of Lois Orswell is united by a shared
spirit of life, discovery, and humor (just note the buxom
Lachaises). Orswell often called her
collection “her children.” At the Fogg, we may consider ourselves fortunate
that Orswell’s family will continue to live under one roof.