The 1980s & 1990s
The 1980s proved to be one of the most active periods for major acquisitions in Museum history. The decade began with the appointment of a new Director, Jean Sutherland Boggs, formerly director of the National Gallery of Canada, and a major gift of photographs, including nearly 500 original prints from the Estate of Paul Strand. These works had been chosen with the artist for a retrospective the Museum had mounted in 1971. In 1980 Miss Boggs, a distinguished specialist in the work of Edgar Degas, was able to acquire a rare late painting by Degas, After the Bath (Woman Drying Herself), with funds from the Estate of George D. Widener.
In 1983, the Department of American Art was enriched by purchase and gift of the Cadwalader Collection, which includes a suite of five portraits by Charles Willson Peale, and paintings by Gilbert Stuart and Thomas Sully, among others, as well as a superb eighteenth-century card table by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph. In 1985, the department acquired the celebrated wood sculptures Comedy and Tragedy, 1808, carved by America's first native sculptor, William Rush, for the facade of one of Philadelphia's early theaters. Both acquisitions were made possible by major grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
In 1984, a collection of 2,478 European Old Master drawings was purchased from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with funds contributed by Muriel and Philip Berman and by exchange of several American paintings. This was followed by the 1985 purchase from the Academy of its historic collection of over 43,000 European Old Master and nineteenth-century prints, also made possible by the great generosity of the Bermans. This incomparable gift ensured that the Museum's print collection be counted amongst the most important in the United States, and has provided the resource for a sequence of ongoing exhibitions.
It is rare for a single gift to markedly transform a museum. The 1986 receipt of the Henry P. McIlhenny Collection, bequeathed to the Museum by the late Chairman of the Board in memory of his mother, was such an event. One of the finest private collections assembled in the United States during this century, the bequest included masterpieces of nineteenth-century French painting and drawing by such artists as Ingres, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as a broad range of decorative arts.
The period rooms also received new attention in the 1980s. A suite of eighteenth-century American rooms was reopened after new research and reinstallation, including a Pennsylvania German kitchen from Millbach in Lebanon County, and the elegant Rococo drawing room from the town house of Samuel Powel, mayor of Philadelphia during the Revolution, in which the Cadwalader Collection was installed after its acquisition. The Robert Adam drawing room from Lansdowne House, the most spectacular and best-preserved eighteenth-century English interior in any American museum, reopened with great fanfare in 1986, after the room's painted decoration of classical scenes and ornamental designs was cleaned, regilded, and restored to its original splendor.
The Museum also increased its commitment to pursuing major acquisitions of work by recent artists in the 1980s. These have included a large installation piece by Joseph Beuys, a sculpture and a monumental mixed-media painting by Anselm Kiefer, and a room-sized painting in ten parts by Cy Twombly, as well as individual works by Jonathan Borofsky, Francesco Clemente, Ellsworth Kelly, Eva Hesse, and Martin Puryear, among others.
The decade also saw several organizational changes in the Museum as it faced reduced government spending on the arts—at the same time that costs were ever-increasing. The first step in facing this challenge was the institution in 1982 of a permanent full-time salaried president, Robert Montgomery Scott, to have primary responsibility for fiscal matters. This allowed the new director Anne d'Harnoncourt, appointed simultaneously, to concentrate on the artistic and professional aspects of Museum life.
In 1986, the trustees endorsed the president's initiation of a $50 million capital campaign—the Landmark Renewal Fund—to double the endowment and to repair, renovate, and refurbish the 60-year-old Neoclassical building. And a 1989 court decision to allow the Museum to integrate groups of paintings from the John G. Johnson Collection—previously installed in a separate mandated suite of galleries–with the Museum's own holdings of European art had a profound effect on planning. This decision allowed the Museum, for the first time, to present the history of European art from 1100 to 1900 as an uninterrupted "walk through time", with a balance between works in all media. The campaign goal was raised by $10 million in order to completely renovate over 80 European galleries and period rooms, which occupy more than one-third of the building's permanent exhibition space. Suites of galleries were closed in sequence and reconfigured as necessary, repainted, and relit, taking advantage of natural light wherever possible. Campaign funds also allowed curators and conservators to study and treat hundreds of important objects, from Medieval stone capitals to nineteenth-century paintings, while educators experimented with new methods of interpreting the collections. By June 30, 1993, the $60 million campaign goal had been realized, and the first phase of the reinstallation project—the Medieval and Early Renaissance Galleries—opened with great celebration that fall.
The second phase, the Annenberg Galleries of European Art from 1850 to 1900, opened in the spring of 1994 to an equally enthusiastic reception. The final phase, incorporating European art from 1500 to 1850, opened in September, 1995, a triumphant conclusion to the most complex and ambitious project the Museum had ever undertaken.
The decade also began on an auspicious note for the collections. In 1990, the Museum was able to acquire a superb eighteenth-century Philadelphia secretary bookcase that had descended in the Willing and Cadwalader families, unmatched in importance in any public collection, as well as a spellbinding Mannerist masterpiece by the sixteenth-century Dutch artist Hendrick Goltzius, entitled Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Would Freeze. Both of these purchases were made possible by a major grant from the Annenberg Foundation (the Annenbergs had previously donated two rare and important Cézanne sketchbooks comprising over 120 drawings). Having been the first American museum to purchase a major painting by the African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner (who grew up in Philadelphia) in 1899, the Museum was delighted to acquire in 1993 the tender and eloquent portrait of the artist's mother as the partial gift of Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter, Tanner's grand-niece.
Robert Montgomery Scott, who guided the Museum’s successful capital campaign and joined Ms. d’Harnoncourt in stewarding the comprehensive reinstallation of the Museum’s European collections, retired in March, 1996. Mr. Scott’s enthusiastic involvement with the Museum spanned over forty years. Anne d’Harnoncourt, who first joined the Museum’s staff in 1967, was named curator of twentieth-century art in 1971 (following a position with the Art Institute of Chicago), and has served as Director of the Museum since 1982, assumed new responsibilities as the Museum’s Chief Executive Officer.
With the much-needed influx of increased endowment, the completion of the long-hoped-for refurbishment and reinstallation of the European collections, and the continued generosity of friends and supporters, the Museum celebrated its 125th anniversary in the year 2001 with renewed vigor.
