For Mary Morton, art is about pleasure.
Morton will never forget the afternoon she whisked the great-grandson of celebrated French Impressionist Camille Pissarro off for a quick tour of the European collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. When they got to Henri Matisse's Woman in a Purple Coat, Joachim Pissarro actually moaned out loud.
Her guest's visceral response to the painting inspired Morton to take a closer look. Pissarro remarked upon the striking use of black--by an artist known for vibrantly colored works--and pointed out Matisse's unusual technique of using both ends of his brush. Now, when Morton views the painting, she pictures a paint-splattered Matisse applying pigment to the canvas with his bristle, then rotating the brush and scratching away the color with the butt.
Morton, '86, is entitled to spend her workdays "getting off on how gorgeous" such masterpieces are. As associate curator of European art at the nation's fifth-largest art museum, she acquires, preserves, displays and loans out paintings and sculpture from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Curators, Morton observes, are "a shivering band of nerdy people who get pushed around a lot by administrators and public relations types." But she hardly fits the description. Six feet tall, willowy and blonde, she could have been an Impressionist's muse. And in her lilting voice, she talks about "cranking up the buzz" on the works of art in her care.
Morton's job contains elements of flea- market haggler, sleuth, Martha Stewart, scholarly academic--and doting mother. Like a good parent, she must not play favorites. "There's an obvious group of great paintings," she says, "but even with the second- and third-tier objects, you must love them, too."
Once she decides to acquire a new work, Morton must figure out how much to pay for it and investigate its history of ownership. Several museums have recently lost multimillion-dollar paintings that were appropriated from their rightful owners by the Nazis.
Morton spends some of her time directing the restoration and reframing of paintings. "Frames can be really beautiful decorative art objects in their own right," she says. She also supervises the installation of exhibitions, arranging pieces so they complement one another aesthetically, topically or historically. She even chooses a palette for the wall colors.
She also writes the little blurbs, known in the trade as wall techs, chats or didactics, that accompany each work. They're supposed to illuminate an aspect of the piece--perhaps its subtle shading or crazy compositional effect--so the viewer sees it "in a more aggressive way." But sometimes, there's not all that much to say. "Talking about class tension or the Industrial Revolution or gender relations in an Impressionist painting is not really the point," Morton says. In a water lily painting by Monet, for example, "pretty is pretty much just pretty."
Pretty, in other words, is the point. And becoming a curator has helped Morton realize that. As a doctoral student in art history at Brown University in 1997, she intended to pursue a professorship. She applied to the Houston museum so she could join her then-fiancé, Keith Forman. (The couple is now married and has a daughter, Lily, 8 months.) Despite scant museum experience, she landed the job. "The demands on scholars in academe and on scholars in museums are radically different," says Morton's boss, Edgar Peters Bowron, curator of European art. "Mary bridged the two cultures beautifully. Masterfully, really." And her colleagues appreciate her academic background. "She's very up on new theory and scholarship," says Alison de Lima Greene, the museum's curator of modern and contemporary art. "It's fun to bat ideas back and forth with her."
For her part, Morton is grateful she ended up a curator. In university art departments, she says, "it's not correct to talk about pretty pictures." She's still an art scholar--she recently edited a catalog and co-authored a book on the museum's European collections--but she can share the beauty of the paintings with a wide public audience.
And the public is paying attention. "When I was little," Morton says, "museums were dead, dank places where schoolteachers might take kids. Now, they're hopping." Attendance figures are up nationwide--art venues attract more people than professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey games combined&emdash;and most major museums are expanding. A year ago, the Museum of Fine Arts opened the $83 million Audrey Jones Beck Building, doubling its exhibition space. Now, Morton says, "Houston has a real art museum" that can tell the whole story of Western art, not just display the pieces it happens to own.
The next chapter in the story will be written at the end of 2002, when the museum debuts an exhibition never before seen in the United States. The show, from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, covers 200 years of French painting, from the historical scenes of Nicolas Poussin to the decorative patterns of Matisse. It's "one of the greatest collections in the world, if not the greatest," Morton says. And she'll help curate it--with pleasure.
