ART MUSEUMS ANNOUNCE THE DEATH OF LONG-TIME BENEFACTOR

Contact: Kate McShea Ewen - (617) 495-2397
Released: December 15, 1998

Cambridge, Massachusetts -"With the death on December 9, 1998, of Lois Orswell, the Harvard University Art Museums have lost one of their most loyal and generous benefactors," Art Museums director James Cuno announced yesterday. "Her numerous gifts to the Art Museums both during her lifetime and at her death have enriched every curatorial department in the Art Museums. Among her greatest gifts were extraordinary modern drawings, paintings, and sculpture, including and especially major works by the artists of her own generation, Willem deKooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, and David Smith. Indeed, her gift four years ago of more than forty works by Smith, including ten sculptures, make the Fogg Museum the single largest, public repository of his work anywhere in the world. Her generosity is not only a testament to her belief in the teaching mission of our museums, but a result of her high regard for and warm friendship with the Fogg's curator of prints, Marjorie B. Cohn."

Lois Orswell's gifts of works of art began modestly forty-five years ago with the donation of an ancient stone sculpture, but in 1955 the scope and focus of her collecting was announced by her gift of The Actors, the magisterial Max Beckmann triptych from 1941-42. Although she had no formal or personal connection with the University, she was reassured by the confidence and gratitude of John Coolidge, then director of the Fogg Art Museum. Over the next few years, as she transferred her residence from Rhode Island to Connecticut and her personal commitment from art collecting to environmental rights concerns, she continued to donate works from her art collection or put them on deposit at the Fogg for future donation and bequest, without ever losing her passionate commitment to the value of art or her interest in museums. "You must know," she wrote, "I begin to shrivel up if I do not see a work of art for a few days."

Today, every curatorial department in the Art Museums holds works from the Orswell collection, with the Beckmann and the somber Immermann Strasse by Paul Klee that was donated to the Fogg now on deposit at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and works in the Asian, Ancient, and Islamic departments formerly in the Fogg now transferred to the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Even African art was included in her collection; her favorite African object, she declared, was "the lovely PAHOUIN head (carried in funerals) that once belonged to Matisse. Do take care of it. I loved it."

As the above indicates, Mrs. Orswell's tastes in art were catholic, but she was not indiscriminate or passively receptive. In her early life, she trained as a classical musician, and more than a half-century later, she would write to the Fogg's print curator, Marjorie Cohn,who had become a personal friend, "Much gratitude for your letter and the joy of discussing things of the mind and emotions. I suppose the latter is something I use too much but art is that to me, whether paint or stone or organ or piano. I love luscious paint and sensuous paint strokes and grand climaxes. Sorry to say and I wish I were, but I am not the Apollonian I admire in others."

Although she declared more than once that the art works she loved most were Assyrian reliefs and Sassetta paintings, she found in the art of France and the United States, of the late- nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the works that matched her taste and were available to her purse. Her paintings include a landscape by Cezanne, a cubist still-life by Picasso (to her death she maintained that "Cubism was the greatest moment in twentieth century art"), and Franz Kline's High Street. She had neither the means nor the domestic wall space to collect widely in paintings, however. The Beckmann, for instance, had to hang in her stair hall, where she would lean over the banister to admire it. Instead, she concentrated on sculpture and drawings. Her magnificent Picasso drawing, Standing Nude Woman of 1907, the moment when the artist had abandoned the sentiment of his Rose Period and was moving toward the Demoiselles d'Avignon and cubism, is probably a more important addition to the museum's collection than her Picasso painting. Other European drawings, such as those by Rodin, Seurat, Klee, Gaudier-Brezska, Lachaise, Lehmbruck, Giacometti, and Henry Moore, were outnumbered and even overshadowed by American drawings, particularly those from the New York school of the 1940s and '50s. She owned characteristic works, of the highest quality and of their best period, by Kline, de Kooning, John Graham, and especially Arshile Gorky.

Most important were her drawings by sculptors, and in many cases she also owned superb examples of their sculptures, most notably among the Europeans an exquisite large-scale bronze cast of Rodin's Iris, Messenger of the Gods and a series of important smaller sculptures by Lachaise, including a plaster and plastilene working model. Probably the work she cherished above all others, in any medium, was Brancusi's Torso of a Young Woman, carved from a sensuous gray-white marble block. Among the Americans, she owned sculpture and also often drawings by Lipchitz (whom she visited at his New York studio after his emigration to this country), Stankiewicz, Chamberlain, Hare, Nevelson, and others.

Among all sculptors, however, pride of place belonged to the drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures by David Smith. With her donations and those from the artist himself, who was inspired to his generosity by her commitment to Harvard, the Fogg Art Museum owns the largest collection in any public institution of works by Smith, the most important sculptor of twentieth-century America. David Smith became Mrs. Orswell's personal friend, even coming to her home and hanging his paintings inside and mounting his sculptures in her gardens and meadows. Though she was forced for financial reasons to stop acquiring his works after he became a widely admired success (and thus the Fogg does not have a representative of his late stainless steel work), she continued to be committed to the importance of his work and to treasure memories of her association with him. When Mrs. Cohn suggested she go to an exhibition at Storm King, where the museum had lent some of her Smiths, she replied, "actually I have no desire to see STORM KING. I saw Bolton the hills the house the offspring the pickled cucumbers the Victorian sofa and the LLBean stove and best of all the workshop with the sheets of silver and the drawings on the walls. That is enough."

Mrs. Orswell's allegiance to Harvard was based on her sense that the works in her collection would not only find their place in exhibition. They would be studied and they would be sources of inspiration and learning. To this end she gave not only her collection of David Smith's works, forty-three in all, but also a group of sixty-six letters from the artist to her, hoping they would be useful to scholars. Her larger interest in Harvard as an educational institution is brought home by her response to our solicitation as recently as this year, after she had stopped acquiring art of any kind. A collection of photographs by David Smith was being dispersed; the Fogg hoped to purchase several, and we approached her for funds. She purchased one of our choices for us, but her check was followed by several disapproving letters: "I still feel so sad that the collection of Smith photos was broken up. You should have had them as a collection. But why fuss, it is as it is and I am glad you have one anyhow. But from looking at the catalogue they all fit together. Oh well......I still think that photo thing is outrageous at least for the Fogg which was DS's favorite museum There was so MUCH material there they could have very well gathered these together and given them to Fogg. It would have made them more interesting, too."

Mrs. Orswell was always particularly pleased when we exhibited Smith paintings and drawings along with his sculpture, for she accounted him a full artist in all media, but she refused to take any personal credit for Harvard's richness in his works. When the museum mounted a small exhibition of Smith's works after her donation of the entire group in 1994, and wrote suggesting that she come to see it, she replied to Mrs. Cohn, "As for the show itself you and Dr. Cuno are so kind to suggest lunch and (lovely) a garden party. Of course it would be nice but really I am not what should be honoured in that way -- David made the sculpture not me. And I am but a sort of conduit pipe."

Mrs. Orswell did insist that the credit line on her gifts bear her name, but only because she felt "Anonymous Gift" was more pretentious, as it would get people talking. With all of her benefactions, which included through a private foundation grants totaling over $500,000 for construction of the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, she declined every opportunity for publicity. When she made this significant financial contribution, and it was suggested that a museum space might be named for her, she replied, "As for that room, do not DARE. I think it is disgusting. All those long names draped all over. Imagine lovers saying: 'meet me under the Ficus pendula in the May Jane Smith Jones memorial gallery for the study of Psychosomatic and Pseudo sculpture.' We are simply Bafflin Foundation and no personal names need be used. Just have lots of fun with it for it was given Con amore. Lois Orswell, probably the world's most happy female at the moment. We are doing things."

Mrs. Orswell did many things over her long life, and at the end she was entirely devoted to her work, both personal and philanthropic, with animals, plants, and the earth. She gave funds and effort to environmental causes, and through the Bafflin Foundation she established wildlife sanctuaries, supported humane societies, and even funded a survey of ecological damage after the Gulf War. Always there was the fear it was not enough: "This is...the most gorgeous spring ever and one is so overcome with its beauty the thought slips in: can it be the END of the world going out in a blaze of beauty just to show us what we have destroyed." Her personal credo was clear: "I revolt at the explanation that we have the RIGHT to do anything we wish. I do not believe ANYone has the RIGHT to make ugliness or leave it behind them." Once, after a long day working in her garden, which in itself was an entire landscape, she could only drop a note: "I am too tired to write...But we achieved -- I think -- BEAUTY which is everything."

Beauty was everything to Mrs. Orswell, and although she committed herself entirely to the natural world, she never lost her passion for art, the collection she has formed, and the welfare of museums. Living in the country, she felt her isolation from art strongly, and she was always grateful for every report from the Fogg: "Thanks so much for taking the trouble to write and to tell me all these things which are manna to the starving wayy outt here....." Now, after her death, her gifts over forty-five years and her ultimate bequest, totaling more than 300 works of art to the Harvard University Art Museums, have ensured that Lois Orswell's passion for the beauty found in man's creations, as well as nature's, will survive and be understood.

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The Harvard University Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea Ewen at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please call (617) 495-4544. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.

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The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and to all on Saturday mornings and all day on Wednesdays. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June; Wednesdays only in July and August. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.