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Newsletter
- Spring 1998
Feature Story
At
the Museum
Conservation
Update
 Thomas
Branchick, director and chief paintings conservator at the Williamstown
Art Conservation Center, agreed to come on-site to treat a number
of works of art in the collection this spring. Cheerfully acceding
to the museum's request to be the "conservator in a fishbowl"
as he terms it, he accomplished his work in the museum's Rodney
L. White Print Room under the watchful eye of students and other
museum visitors. Branchick also presented a gallery talk and demonstration
about painting conservation and related issues while here on campus.
The objects being treated included a group of 20th century paintings
by Louis Eilshemius, Carl Holty, David Fredenthal, Theodore Fried,
Abraham Walkowitz, and Donald Carrick. All of them were donated
to the museum by noted art collector Roy R. Neuberger whose gifts
will be featured in the exhibition on American modernism at the
museum this fall.
Plaster
Casts Back in Style
 Museum
research associate Diana Wolfe Larkin and curatorial assistant Adrienne
Sharpe '98 have been "excavating the past" in the museum's
own files this year. Together they are researching the history of
Mount Holyoke's plaster cast collection and creating new text labels
to help illuminate the examples that grace the art building's walls
and classrooms. Although plaster copies of ancient and Renaissance
works of art went out of fashion as teaching tools some time ago,
they are being pressed into service once again by faculty and students
and by museum docents who regularly incorporate them into their
special tours on daily life in the ancient world.
As Wolfe Larkin has written in one of her introductory texts:
"Mount Holyoke College was riding a trend when it began acquiring
replicas of works of art in the late nineteenth century. Many
liberal arts colleges assembled collections of plaster casts of
well-known statues and reliefs, and major urban museums such as
the Metropolitan in New York boasted vast galleries of reproductions.
By 1916, the College Art Association's annual meeting included
sessions on 'A College Museum of Originals,' and 'A College Museum
of Reproductions,' reflecting the hot issue in art education of
the day. But by the 1920s, the fad for plaster casts was waning,
and by the 1930s, it was over. The guiding force behind Mount
Holyoke's collection was Professor Louise Fitz-Randolph, who organized
a campaign to buy them for display in the Dwight Art Memorial,
which opened in 1902. Some of the correspondence regarding the
purchases survives in the museum's files, revealing the enormous
effort that went into selection of the replicas, most of which
were purchased in Europe."
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