Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum
Book celebrates 100 plus years
By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 24, 2007
The Busch-Reisinger Museum: Harvard University Art Museums
Edited by Peter Peter Nisbet with an essay by Joseph Leo Koerner. 280 pages, illustrated. Published by the Harvard University Art Museums in association with Scala Publishers Ltd. London, 2007. http://www.scalapublishers.com
Perhaps in keeping with the eccentric, anti-classical nature of the Busch-Reisinger Museum itself this richly illustrated, attractively designed book is not the kind of historic summary and useful volume that one would anticipate in celebration of the centennial of such an unique and renowned institution. For starters, this publication appears some time after the actual centennial year of 2003. But there is nothing predictable about this venerable museum.
The brief essay by Peter Nisbet, the Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, takes a conceptual rather than didactic or pedagogical approach. In a bit of coy gamesmanship he posits a conceptual hypothesis of the works comprising a kind of political body with its own constitutional rights and privileges which comprises an entity within itself implying a secondary relationship to a public. Or something like that. The construct is far too complex for the general reader to navigate without mishap through its twists and hairpin turns of thought. The only sense to be made is that Nisbet opted to zig rather than do the usual zag. He refers to the fact that he has published more conventional handbooks to the collection that offer straightforward information and that this publication was an opportunity to create a text which is to be perceived as a work of art in the same creative spirit as the collection that it celebrates. We encourage Nisbet to pursue other opportunities for literary and philosophical whimsy. Arguably, this was not really the right place for that.
The primary essay by Joseph Leo Koerner starts as a similar giant slalom down the slippery slope of Germanic (a difficult, imprecise but, by default, usable term) cultural history. We are initially embedded in the experience conveyed by Professor Koerner of teaching a seminar on art history at Harvard that entailed a field trip to the Busch and the direct experience of a multiple among the hundreds of such works by Joseph Beuys owned by the museum. It entails describing a rather simple object comprising two ordinary tin cans, connected by "biodegradable" twine which, when stretched, becomes a primitive science class demonstration of the mechanical prototype of a phone. It must be amusing to precocious Harvard students who are generally endowed with cell phones. The author explores the full potential of the metaphor of the Beuys object as we slog along with the school lesson and learn, as an aside, the significance for Harvard students of the direct experience of actual art objects and the hands on nature of the intentionality of Beuys. While insightful, this little lesson on Beuys is widely available elsewhere and need not take up precious space in an expensively produced volume with its premium on space; a luxury that the designer of the book has exaggerated by leaving a thick area of white space, approximately half of every page of text. This is equivalent to an architect creating a vast, vaulted, marble lobby with potted trees and large plants in an otherwise utilitarian building.
But having taken us to school Koerner settles down to deliver the meaty part of the essay which is loaded with dense and fascinating information on the complex nature of Germanic identity and the its essence of the Gothic, Northern European tradition as essentially volkish, indigenous, original, and anti classical. He sketches for us in a succinct and fascinating manner how the original mandate for the Busch was the gathering of plaster casts, photographs and other forms of reproduction for the teaching of Germanic (that messy word again) language, literature and culture. It was not until the anti Nazi spirit of the 1930s and 1940s that the Busch started to collect original works as a kind of support for the condemned "Degenerate Artists" of the Third Reich. The masterpiece of this anti-fascist liberation of art in exile was the 1941 purchase of Max Beckmann's "Self Portrait in Tuxedo" (1927). Professor Koerner also clarifies that the Busch works were intended as specimens or objects for teaching and that works of Gothic origin and tradition lacked the kind of comfortable aesthetic status of the works from the classical French and Italian traditions of the Fogg Art Museum. Even when works from the Busch are shown in the Fogg Koerner implies that there is a kind of edgy dissonance.
During the course of its history the Busch changed venues several times until its current incarnation as a wing of, or museum within a museum, of the venerable Fogg. This evolution may well be traced to the decision to gradually separate itself from the plaster casts and other simulacra and to opt instead for original works of which it now has some 30,000 objects covering many categories from fine arts through decorative arts, through a time frame of several centuries and a number of modern nations rooted in Germanic culture. The range of this reach includes the Dutch artist, Mondrian, and the Russian, Malevich, within its Germanic grasp. The essays slip and slide around a precise definition of its mandate. One would expect a common use of the German language but there are also geographical boundaries and traditions. As a result the museum and its collections have cast a wide if somewhat vague net.
There is also complexity in defining just what role the Bush Reisinger has as an institution at Harvard. It was not originally designed as a museum but rather as a teaching institute. The University has other similar entities such as the Peabody Museum and its ethnographic collections with depth in Native American objects. There is the Semitic Museum, the Sackler Museum, as well as fine arts under the roof of the Fogg Art Museum. The head of all this is the director of the Harvard University Art Museums. So Nisbet is curator not director of the Busch. Some of this congestion and confusion will be sorted out when the museums are expected to expand including new facilities in nearby Allston across the river near the Business School campus. There will also be an expansion and build out of the Fogg Art Museum with new galleries taking over what is currently administrative space.
The Korner essay demands careful and repeated readings as it attempts a comprehensive and insightful overview of very complex issues and history. It is arguably a reference for other inquiries. Why has Boston's cultural history often been more Germanic than French particularly in the arts of the 20th century? The Museum of Fine Arts, for example, passed on Picasso and Cubism but made a few forays into German expressionism during the time of Perry T. Rathbone (a Fogg Alumnus) during the 1950s. During most of its history the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been noted for German romantic music. When I was a student at Boston Latin School the famous only choice was between the study of German or Greek. This in addition to six years of Latin and four years of French. Boston has long had an active Goethe Institute and, back in the 80s, the Institute of Contemporary Art partnered with the MFA to present an ambitious exchange of exhibitions "The Binational" with comparable German museums.
The current publication is not to be approached as a history or handbook of the Busch-Reisinger although it does comprise those elements including a chronology of major moments. The many superb reproductions are organized in an interesting manner. The book presents them from the most recent contemporary acquisitions, including works familiar only to experts in the field, as well as the more familiar artists- Andreas Gursky, Bernd and Hiller Becher, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Dieter Roth, Otto Piene, and Anselm Kiefer, through the masters of Expressionism- Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Ernst Barlach, Erich Heckel, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Kathe Kollwitz, the masters of Dada and the Bauhaus, and back through the 19th century and into the earlier periods and styles. Nisbet titles his essay as "Representatives" and presents the illustrations as a kind of exhibition or slide show of selections rather than as masterpieces or greatest hits. There is another of his conceits of presenting the images with just titles and medium and no attempt at explaining or contextualizing the works which are intended to speak for themselves. This is an accepted debate for curators, to label or not their exhibitions, but it seems rather arch to extend this to publications about a collection where the norm it to provide text offering further information. Nisbet suggests that having direct, uncluttered exposure to superbly reproduced images will encourage us to visit the museum and see the actual works.
It is difficult to speculate whether this strategy will result in more traffic in the galleries of the museum. In my case it preaches to the converted as I grew up with and was greatly shaped by exposure to this great and fascinating collection. Perhaps it is a part of why I have always responded to the darker Dionysian aspect of Germanic expressionism and less to the "joie de vivre" of the French. While the Fogg offers Italian and French pastry the Busch provides the reality check of "strum und drang" or "fear and loathing." That the glass is half empty has always seemed the more realistic and pragmatic approach to art and culture. The beautiful is seductive but not to be trusted where the horrific hits us where we live. The deep reach of the "Germanic" is that is often meets at the intersection of those polarities. Heaven and hell in real time.