She is the stuff of legend -- a guardian angel in graceful marble who survived two major earthquakes to keep watch over Stanford’s art treasures. The first time the bricks came tumbling down, in 1906, three galleries at the Stanford Museum of Art were demolished. But Athena, a life-size sculpture by Antonio Frilli, stood her ground on a second-floor perch overlooking the main lobby. The 1989 Loma Prieta temblor proved less ruinous, damaging only five of the collection’s 30,000 pieces. Rather than simply make structural repairs, University officials seized the opportunity to expand the museum and rethink its purpose.
Nine years later Athena is getting ready to face the crowds again. She’s drawing good-luck winks and friendly pats from curators and construction crews as they prepare for the museum’s reopening in January. The original bronze front doors depicting artistic stopovers on the Stanford family’s tours of Europe–the Louvre in Paris, Siena’s Palazzo, St. Sophia in Constantinople–are freshly buffed and polished. Mosaics that Jane Stanford commissioned in Venice were exhumed from under layers of paint in the north rotunda and restored to splendor by specialists in architectural conservation. A massive Native American canoe has been assigned a new berth in Gallery 205.
The result is more than a mere revival. The $38 million effort has created a whole new arts complex. The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts boasts 50 percent more space than the old museum–and a bolder, more expansive mission. Director Tom Seligman envisions a cultural hub whose enhanced resources will attract artists, scholars and scientists alike. He also sees the center as a place for experimentation. "Research and development is expected everywhere in this university, and it should be expected in the museum, as well," Seligman asserts.
At this pivotal point in the museum’s development, the director must play a dual role as visionary and drill sergeant. Seligman relishes detail. Decked out in a white hard hat, he was a peripatetic fixture on the construction site throughout the renovations. He schlepped through winter muds, climbed an occasional scaffold and studied blueprints in his trailer, picking design nits or approving the etching on a piece of transom glass. One day, he had the newly poured concrete steps outside the auditorium torn out with jackhammers and replaced because architectural specifications weren’t precisely met.
Polshek & Partners of New York won the architectural competition for the Center, with Richard Olcott as principal designer, and the groundbreaking ceremony took place on October 26, 1995. A topping-off celebration in August 1997 marked the completion of the project’s structural-steel phase. Work crews went on to beat the El Niño odds and finished the roofs on the buildings before the worst of the winter storms of 1997-98 drove them indoors.
In the final months, almost 200 dry-wallers, carpenters, framers, plasterers, plumbers and electricians worked elbow to elbow to finish on schedule. When they all poured into Lomita Plaza each morning at 10 to meet the lunch wagon, the spectacle rivaled a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood set. "It’s a lifetime opportunity to do this kind of restoration work," said one craftsman between bites of a burrito one sunny morning. "It really makes me think about how many guys it took to build this."
But Seligman’s concerns were not all cosmetic. The museum tapped the latest Bay Area seismic thinking and technologies, and construction crews fortified and virtually rebuilt the historic museum building. They installed bracing walls, behind the bricks, and retrofitted steel beams, some of which have been left exposed in the renovated north and south rotundas.
Meanwhile, Seligman and staff worked to refine the museum’s mission as an educational institution, looking for ways to make its resources more accessible to Stanford faculty and students. That effort influenced the center’s interior features. New seminar rooms on the ground floor, which have cabinets where objects from the collections can be stored while on loan to classes, have been equipped with security doors. The intimate Gibbons Gallery will be available to departments that want to showcase visual projects, and the more formal auditorium can accommodate large lecture audiences.
Seligman believes there must be room for innovation in museum programming and offers examples: working with the medical school to put together an exhibition of functional, exquisitely designed hip-replacement joints. Or inviting Stanford’s anthropologists to showcase their debate about culture vs. biology visually.
"And just as we don’t expect every physics venture to be a success, there has to be an understanding that there is room for failure in our R&D," Seligman says.
Like the University itself, the original museum was intended to memorialize the Stanfords’ only son, and its holdings reflected the family’s tastes. Leland Stanford was one of a handful of influential San Francisco railroad men who began to invest in American paintings in the early 1870s. At the same time, Jane Stanford was indulging her Victorian tastes for Italian Baroque and religious motifs. The Italianate villa the couple built on Nob Hill in 1874 was modeled on the palaces of Renaissance merchants and featured an art gallery, a Pompeian room and a frescoed rotunda. Not to be outdone by his parents’ displays, Leland Junior installed a Cabinet of Curiosities on the third floor and filled it with stuffed birds, minerals, Native American pottery and mementos from his first trip to Europe with his parents in the spring of 1880.
By the time the family returned to the Continent in late 1883, the teenager had studied Cypriot antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and was familiar with the research of contemporary archeologists and anthropologists. During a stopover in Paris, Leland Junior went to the Louvre to copy hieroglyphics from sarcophagi and scarabs. In Greece, he explored the Acropolis and even pocketed an inscribed fragment of a column he found at the Sanctuary of Eleusis. The Stanfords spent a day in Athens with Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of the site of Troy and the gold of Mycenae.
Two months later, in March 1884, Leland Junior died of typhoid fever in Florence. Inspired by the Egyptian, Greek and Roman art objects her son had collected, Jane was determined to establish a museum in his memory. The Leland Stanford Jr. Museum of Art opened in 1894, with Jane serving as its de facto director, financial adviser and chief of acquisitions until her death in 1905.
The facility was the largest privately owned museum in the United States. Modeled on the National Academy of Science in Athens, where the Stanfords had met with Schliemann, it was the country’s first neoclassical museum––and the first major one to be partially built of reinforced concrete.
Still, the April 1906 earthquake leveled three-quarters of the building: its wings, basically brick, collapsed. Only the main building and two rotundas were left standing. The ’89 Loma Prieta quake rendered those spaces uninhabitable.
Over time, the University strayed from Jane’s intentions for the museum. In 1909, its newly built annex became home to the medical school’s departments of anatomy, physiology and bacteriology. Several years later, The Governor Stanford locomotive was installed as an exhibit in the north rotunda. President David Starr Jordan, a celebrated ichthyologist, placed his collections of fish and invertebrates in the south wing.
When Lorenz Eitner became chair of the art department in 1963, he devoted himself to reclaiming the museum for art. He shipped the locomotive to the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento, evicted the biology department’s specimens and, over the course of several decades, turned the facility into a respected university museum and laboratory for teaching. Under Eitner’s direction, faculty, staff and volunteers worked to refurbish the museum’s galleries and strengthen its holdings. Today, the permanent collection’s 30,000 pieces span the history of art and represent a broad spectrum of cultures–"everything from the mummies forward," says curator Hilarie Faberman.
Eitner’s retirement in 1989 prompted a search for a permanent museum director. That brought Seligman to campus in 1991 from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, where he was deputy director of operations.
The museum’s transformation, with a full-time director and a curatorial staff, promises a new era for art on campus. "It represents a quantum leap in administrative faith, commitment and desire to make the visual arts an integral part of Stanford’s culture," says art professor Wanda Corn.
The centerpieces of the complex are the 78,000-square-foot historic museum building and the 42,000-square-foot wing addition. Among the new features: a café, a bookstore, and more outdoor art. The café, managed by the tantalizingly named Edible Art, will serve visitors on a terrace overlooking sculptural gardens blossoming with works by Auguste Rodin and Willem de Kooning. The north side of the complex will be devoted to more abstract sculpture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Call Me Ishmael, a monumental steel sculpture by Richard Serra, is on loan and prominently installed outside the multipurpose auditorium and bookshop. Another outdoor showcase, the McMurtry Family Terrace, will be home to Space Lace, a 10-foot-tall circular steel construction of rotating disks that resembles a satellite, by Bay Area sculptor Linda Fleming; Plate Drawing #12, a series of bronze plates propped against each other, by Fletcher Benton; and Space Churn Red, by kinetic artist George Rickey, who rotates rings on a tall column.
When the doors open in January, more of the 30,000 permanent holdings will be on display than ever before–up to 1,000 pieces at any given time in 18 renovated, sherbet-colored galleries. While the museum was closed, curators and conservators took inventory. They traded 2,800 pieces to other institutions and acquired 3,000 new objects through gifts and purchases.
Some of these acquisitions, as well as works on loan, will bolster the collection of contemporary art. "The contemporary world is such a real part of this University and the interests of our students that it is an obvious emphasis," Seligman says. "Works are available, and there are lots of collectors and interested folks, such as our Contemporary Collectors Circle, who have formed groups to improve the holdings."
The center will display works from the 1960s forward in the Freidenrich Family Gallery, a spacious room with blond maple floors and white and gray walls that fills most of the second floor of the new wing. Ocean Park #94, an oil painting in soft blues and whites by Richard Diebenkorn, ’44, is a recent gift from the artist’s widow and a riveting attraction at the south end of the long airy space. Works by figurative artists from the San Francisco school of abstract expressionism, among them Stanford emeriti professors Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobdell, are displayed alongside mini-exhibitions of California funk, photographs, minimalist sculpture and realist works. Duane Hanson’s Slab Man, a life-size construction worker that is a gift from cosmetics tycoon Ronald Lauder, stands eerily lifelike.
More than 200 other contemporary works -- including prints by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Frank Stella -- are on loan to the center and will be in place for the opening.
Sculpture is a cornerstone of the expanding contemporary collection, but Seligman says the key word for him in collecting and programming is "balance." In every five-year snapshot of future museum exhibitions, he expects to see an Asian project, a European Old Masters show, an exhibition dealing with the art of Africa or the Pacific and perhaps two or three contemporary projects.
Stanford art scholars are involved in future exhibitions. Pacific Arcadia: Images of California 1600-1915, the first major show after the center’s launch, will open in the spring of 1999 under sponsorship of the Ford Motor Co. Based on the dissertation of guest curator Claire Perry, a Stanford doctoral student, the exhibition explores imagery of the California dream and shows how the state was promoted to outsiders and idealized by those who had a stake in its development. Richard Vinograd, chair of art and art history, plans to have his students work with 19th and 20th century photos of Japan and China that are on long-term loan to the Center. Assistant professor Pamela Lee has proposed a project that will focus on conceptual art.
Seligman has also been talking with professors in classics, history, anthropology, applied materials and communication, as well as those in the schools of law and education. His goal is to broaden the ways in which the museum is used. That should please Athena. In different times and places, she was worshipped variously as the goddess of wisdom, war, agriculture and crafts. Now the multipurpose deity has a multipurpose museum.
Diane Manuel is a writer with the Stanford News Service.
