Changing Prospects:
The View from Mount Holyoke
3 September
- 8 December 2002
David
John Gue
View
from Mount
Holyoke
|
The summit of Mt. Holyoke has long
attracted visitors, including artists and writers, in search
of edification and enjoyment. The second most popular tourist
destination in the 19th century, the mountain gained status
as a national icon.
To accommodate the tourists,
Northampton businessmen arranged to cut a road to the summit. In 1821 a simple
log cabin was constructed where visitors found shelter and refreshments in
addition to the spectacular view. In 1851, the original cabin was replaced
by a small hotel with a dining room, six apartments for overnight guests,
and an observatory equipped with a telescope.
A few years later, an
inclined railway carried visitors from the carriage road to what had become
known as the Prospect House.
The combination of wilderness
and cultivated landscape was the most noted feature of the panorama afforded
by Mt. Holyoke. The wilderness symbolized the raw power of the unspoiled continent.
The orderly fields bore witness to the possibilities for people to coexist
with nature. Countless painted, drawn, and printed representations of the
views of and from Mt. Holyoke emphasize this contrast between the wild and
the orderly. No representation is more famous than the 1836 painting by Thomas
Cole known today as The Oxbow, the centerpiece of this exhibition.
The story of Mt. Holyoke
as an icon, a destination, and a subject for artists and writers continued
into and through the 20th century. A 1921 illustrated publication included
in the exhibition describes the mountain as providing "the Grandest Cultivated
View in the World." Literary figures who have written about the mountain
in recent decades include Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Mary Jo Salter
(Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College).
Contemporary painters and photographers still use the site regularly as a
subject.
There has been a strong
connection between the mountain and Mount Holyoke College, virtually since
the year after Thomas Cole executed his famous painting. The college opened
in 1837 as a result of efforts by the fiercely determined educator Mary Lyon.
She was adamant that the school not be named after herself, or indeed after
any individual; rather she wanted the name of her school for women tied to
something enduring, eternal. The exhibition documents the impact of Mt. Holyoke
on the social life and curriculum of the College.
The installation of
approximately 100 objects conveys the story of Mt. Holyoke as a travel destination
and an inspiration for artists and writers for almost two centuries. An illustrated
catalogue, published by Cornell University Press, provides a more expansive
narrative about how the mountain became such a well-known icon and how its
image proliferated and was disseminated nationwide.
Photographs
from the Collection
21
September - 8 December 2002
Sally Mann
Yard Eggs
|
Since
1931, when Friendsof Art was founded to support special exhibitions
at Mount Holyoke, the Art Museum has mounted more than forty
shows devoted solely to photography. These have ranged from
thematic investigations to presentations of the work of both
living artists and pioneering figures like Julia Margaret Cameron.
Two pioneering projects include Images of Italy: Photography
in the 19th Century (1980), the first American foray into
this previously uninvestigated field, and Summit, Vittorio
Sella, Mountaineer and Photographer, The Years 1879-1909
(2000). In 1999, Still Time provided an opportunity for
a campus-wide examination of Sally Mann's controversial family
pictures and the issues of artistic censorship. Following that
exhibition, the museum acquired an extraordinary photograph
by Mann, thanks to the generosity of Barbara Johnson Parnass
(class of 1948).
Although photographs
have played a significant role in the museum's exhibition planning
from the early days, collecting them has been another matter.
Like many educational institutions, Mount Holyoke garnered a
major stock of images for its art department beginning in the
19th century - some of them vintage images of archaeological
monuments - from which students learned about the history of
art. It was not until the 1980s, however, that the art museum
mounted an initiative to actively collect photographs as works
of art. Since then, nearly 800 photographic images—ranging
from albumen prints to Iris prints—have been acquired
through gifts and judicious purchases.
Many alumnae and friends
have responded to this challenge, presenting images by Berenice Abbott, Alfred
Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, Robert MacPherson, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine,
Ansel Adams, AndrŽ Kertesz, Antonio Beato, Barbara Morgan, Eadweard Muybridge,
Aaron Siskind, Yousuf Karsh, and others. And in recent years, the museum has
purchased important works by Cindy Sherman, Ed Burtynsky, Carl Chiarenza,
Evelyn Hofer, Annie Leibovitz, Jan Groover, Jerome Leibling, Kenneth Snelson,
Rawlston Crawford, and O. Winston Link.
A very significant expansion
of the photography holdings has come with the extended loan of more than 125
prints from Norma Marin, daughter-in-law of the noted American artist John
Marin. These photographs are part of a larger promised bequest of more than
170 modern American works of art that will be shared by the art museums of
Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley. Stellar examples of modern photography
are in the Marin holdings, including works by Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan,
and Minor White, as well as a fascinating series of portraits of John Marin
himself by Arnold Newman, Charles Sheeler, Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz,
and Paul Strand.
A selection of the museum's
photographs is on view in the newly refurbished Rodney L. White Print Room
in the fall of 2002.
