LOIS ORSWELL, DAVID SMITH, AND MODERN ART
ON VIEW AT HARVARD'S FOGG ART MUSEUM
SEPTEMBER 21, 2002-FEBRUARY 16, 2003

First Exhibition Since Collection was Donated to Fogg, Offers Insight into Pioneering Collector of Abstract Expressionism

Exhibition Showcases Works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Gaston Lachaise, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, David Smith

Cambridge, MA (January 28, 2002)-This fall Harvard's Fogg Art Museum will present a major exhibition examining the collection and life of Lois Orswell, a collector with a pioneering eye and a tenacious personality who was active from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art, scheduled for September 21, 2002 through February 16, 2003, will showcase approximately 180 works from Orswell's collection of more than 350 European and American modernist paintings, sculptures, and drawings, as well as classical Asian, and African sculptures.

The exhibition will feature works from the Lois Orswell Collection as a cohesive group for the first time. Orswell was a distinctive collector whose methods were unlike those of her contemporaries because she was a woman of moderate resources who lived in relative isolation from the New York art world. In spite of these impediments, she was able to build a collection of important works by artists ranging from the modernists to the abstract expressionists, including Georges Seurat, Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Arshile Gorky, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. After placing her collection on long-term, anonymous loan to the Fogg Art Museum around 1970, Orswell donated a number of these works over the next three decades, and bequeathed the remainder of the loaned works to the Fogg at her death in 1998.

Among the highlights of the exhibition is a major group of sculptures, paintings, drawings, photography, and mixed-media works by David Smith. The Fogg's holdings of works by David Smith constitute the most important collection of his work in any public institution. Lois Orswell gave the overwhelming majority of these Smith works to the Fogg. Orswell also assembled a major collection of works by Gaston Lachaise; of these, thirteen sculptures and twelve drawings will be presented in the exhibition.

Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art underscores the Harvard University Art Museums' ongoing commitment to researching and presenting modern and contemporary art. This initiative has been supported by recent exhibitions and gifts. Among the exhibitions have been Eat Art: Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Sonja Alhäuser; Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection; and Windshield: Richard Neutra's House for the John Nicolas Brown Family. The recent acquisitions have included Georges Braque's La Baie de l'Estaque (Bay of l'Estaque) and thirty contemporary American works given in honor of Neil and Angelica Rudenstine.

"Through her gift to the Fogg, Lois Orswell left a special legacy to the Harvard University Art Museums," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Lois referred to the works in her collection as her 'children,' and she was very pleased that they would continue to have a meaningful life with Harvard's students and scholars. Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art is a result of the research they have done, and it's also a celebration of Lois's life as an independent thinker and individual."

Orswell was a passionate collector who spent the middle years of her life acquiring European and American modern art through visits to New York and Boston. She lived a solitary life in the Connecticut countryside, and her contact with the art world was sustained by correspondence with art dealers and artists with whom she excitedly discussed acquiring new works. In correspondence with friends within the arts community, Orswell spoke of the works in her collection as "living creatures." In the early 1960s, Orswell's collecting interests shifted to Asian art, which she felt suited her financial limitations and resonated with her interest in environmental preservation and animal protection.

Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art is curated by Marjorie Cohn, the Carl Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints. Cohn had a close relationship with Orswell, or "L.O." as she called herself. Cohn's friendship with Orswell and the collector's longstanding history with the Fogg provide a platform for exploring the relationship between the collection and Orswell's life. The exhibition will be complemented by personal correspondence between Cohn and Orswell, and the wall texts will draw from the collectors' words about the artist or artwork referenced.

The exhibition will also encompass a catalogue with an essay written by Marjorie Cohn and the complete surviving correspondence between Orswell and David Smith, edited by Sarah Kianovsky, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the Fogg. Orswell was Smith's most important private patron and the only collector to whom he sold works directly. Orswell and Smith had a unique friendship, and they corresponded about art, the art world, and their lives for eight years before the artist's death in 1965. Their letters and cards, which include more than 110 items, as well as an extensive memoir that Orswell wrote about her relationship with Smith, will constitute an important addition to literature on the artist. The catalogue will also include excerpts of correspondence between Orswell and other artists represented in her collection, as well as letters to Cohn and to friends and dealers in the New York arts community. Public lectures are planned to complement the exhibition and catalogue.

Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art will be organized loosely by schools and periods; however, a smaller group of African, Asian, and ancient works will be integrated among the European and American works. A small section of the exhibition will be devoted to photographs and memorabilia, including books and letters that offer insight into Orswell as a collector.

About Lois Orswell
Lois Orswell once described herself as "Anglo colonial revolutionary Puritan religiously unaffiliated sexually unknown pro-choice for everything pro-aesthetics anti de-construction animal mad square musician financially trembling on the edge female having lots of fun." She also wrote to Cohn, "You know me-passionate and obstinate!"

Born on August 25, 1904, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Orswell was the only child of Jessamine and William Warren Orswell, of old New England stock. Her interest in collecting began through her love of literature. As a young woman, Orswell became a book collector, attracted to the aesthetics of printing and binding.

Orswell began collecting works of art in 1944, after her father died and she received a modest inheritance from his estate. In 1950 she purchased a large piece of land in rural northeastern Connecticut and built Bafflin, the home where she would live until her death in 1998.

Throughout her life, Orswell built a meaningful relationship with the Fogg Art Museum. She was motivated to become a patron by her memory of an early romantic attachment to a man who was a Harvard graduate. Orswell placed most of the works in her collection on long-term, anonymous loan to the Fogg in the period 1968-72 and then during her lifetime gave important groups of these works to the Museum. The Smiths were donated in 1974 and 1994, and the Lachaises in 1995. All remaining loans, including her Rodin and Brancusi sculptures and the Cézanne painting, came into the Museum's permanent collection at her death.

"L.O. was a fascinating woman, and she assembled an extraordinary collection," said Marjorie Cohn. "In all matters related to her life and her collection, she made her decisions with the heart. She attributed artistic genius to magic, to an unknown and unknowable power, gauged specifically by an artist's capacity to transform materials. It is a great joy to now celebrate her pioneering role, and the zeal with which she pursued building a collection of importance."

About the Lois Orswell Collection
Orswell purchased her first work of art in March of 1944 from Curt Valentin, who would become her mentor, at the Buchholz Gallery in New York. Her first acquisition was Landing Boat (1929), a gouache by Paul Klee. During the first of two major collecting periods that lasted from 1944 to 1953, she bought works by Klee, Henry Moore, Georges Braque, Max Beckmann, and Alexander Calder.

During this period, Orswell's decisive criteria for selecting works centered upon the emotional and spiritual content of the works rather than their subject. The works she acquired were often brightly colored and freely painted: Klee's Landing Boat (1929) and Botanical High Culture (1938), Moore's Ideas for Sculpture (1949), and Roger de La Fresnaye's The Card Players (1918), which were all watercolors and gouaches; and Beckmann's The Actors (1941-42) and Karl Knath's Lilacs (1943), both oils. By the early 1950s, the collection contained a significant body of first-generation cubist works. All of the cubist works that Orswell purchased in the later 1940s and early '50s shared their subject matter with the earlier still lifes and figure pieces that she favored. These works included the neutral-toned Picasso painting Still Life with Inkwell (1911-12), in addition to works by Cézanne, Seurat, Braque, and Gris. Orswell also showed her developing independence of vision by buying two Franz Kline drawings from the artist's first New York exhibition in 1950.

Orswell placed her collection on loan to the Fogg in 1953 and resumed collecting at an accelerated pace in 1955. She was convinced of the value of new American painting, and by 1957 had acquired at least three major canvases of Kline's, and an abstract painting and a drawing by Philip Guston. By 1958, she owned three Willem de Kooning paintings-two abstract compositions and a large oil sketch of a woman-and three drawings. Orswell also began buying drawings by Arshile Gorky and acquired paintings by Earl Kerkam and drawings by Alberto Giacometti.

At the time that Orswell began to acquire works by members of the New York School, there were still relatively few buyers for their work. However, she was never interested in them in terms of school or style, only as individual artists. (She rejected the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman.) Orswell, like many of the abstract expressionist artists themselves, was at this point willing to make the claim publicly and privately that (some) works of art were alive in the most literal sense. Orswell recognized that a work of art was alive by a specific physical manifestation, which she characterized as "vibrations."

At the end of the 1950s, Orswell began building her collection of works by David Smith, one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. She felt passionately that his work had to be considered as a unit, and this belief made her collection of Smiths' work, and its inclusion of painting and drawing as well as sculpture, exceptional. Her collection of Smith's work would come to encompass such major sculptures as Detroit Queen (1957), Doorway on Wheels (1960), 5 1/2 (1956), and Books and Apple (1957), as well as the painting Red Heart (1959). Orswell also built a very strong group of works by the French-born American sculptor Gaston Lachaise during this period. By the time she had stopped collecting European and American art, she owned sixty-two works by Smith and forty-four by Lachaise.

By 1963 Bafflin was full and Orswell's bank account was empty. She bought one last sculpture by David Smith (Doorway on Wheels) and then turned away from European and American art to Asian textiles, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and furniture.

The majority of Orswell's collection was placed on loan to the Fogg by 1972, and in 1998 she asked the Fogg to take all of her Asian art into the Museum's care. She retained works by Cézanne, Picasso, and Brancusi until her death. She was delighted by the fact that her collection would be actively used and enjoyed by students within the Harvard community.

About the Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums are among the world’s leading arts institutions, with the Arthur M. Sackler, Busch-Reisinger, and Fogg art museums, the Straus Center for Conservation, the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, and the U.S. headquarters for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, an excavation project in western Turkey. The 150,000 objects in the art museums’ collections range in date from ancient times to the present and come from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Each museum also has an active program of special exhibitions that promotes new scholarship in its areas of focus.

The Harvard University Art Museums are distinguished by the range and depth of their collections, their groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of their staff. As an integral part of the Harvard community, the three Art Museums serve as a resource for all students, adding a special dimension to their areas of study. The public is welcome to experience the collections and exhibitions as well as to enjoy lectures, symposia, and other programs.

For more than a century, the Harvard University Art Museums have been the nation’s premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars and are renowned for their role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.

Location and Hours
The Fogg Art Museum and the Busch-Reisinger Museum are located at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum is located next door at 485 Broadway. Each Museum is a short walk from the Harvard Square MBTA station.

Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., and the Museums are closed on national holidays. Admission is $5; $4 for seniors; $3 for students; and free for those under 18 years of age. The Museums are free to everyone all day on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, 10 a.m. until noon. The Harvard University Art Museums receive support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

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For more information on this appointment or the Harvard University Art Museums, please contact:

Matthew Barone
Harvard University Art Museums
tel 617-495-2397; fax 617-496-9762
mbarone@fas.harvard.edu

or

Kim Gilbert/Allison Derusha
Resnicow Schroeder Associates
tel 212-671-5157; fax 212-595-8354
kgilbert@resnicowschroeder.com
aderusha@resnicowschroeder.com