Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by Rizzoli International Publications

a sketch of the life of Anne Hawley

isabella stewart gardner As I lay upon the couch with the fragrance of the frankincense stealing over me, the wake of the moon was a fit path by which my thoughts went straight to Cleopatra—and I forgot it was Christmas eve.

Alexander Wood

-Isabella Stewart Gardner, in Egypt, c. 1874–5, from the deck of her riverboat on the Nile

Isabella Stewart Gardner dancing with Randolph Appleton during a reception at her Beacon Street home, 1891. Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Isabella Stewart Gardner stood alone on the balcony in her new all-white music hall, savoring the moment just before her guests arrived for the opening night of her museum on January 1, 1903. Her choreography of the evening was carefully calculated to inspire awe in her guests, by unveiling the museum in stages, beginning with a concert in the music hall from which the galleries and courtyard were not visible. Curiosity about the structure that Mrs. Gardner had been constructing over the last three years was at a high pitch as she had kept everything secret, shaping a very plain building exterior that gave little clue to what was inside. The music hall, which no longer exists, was a discrete and separate part of the museum and her guests would not grasp the enormity of her achievement until after the concert when they would be invited into the courtyard. Mrs. Gardner was dressed luxuriously in a sweeping black velvet gown adorned with a string of pearls. On the top of her head, a pair of very large diamonds, affixed to gold springs, waved like antennae when she moved her head, throwing dazzling light in all directions. As the guests were ushered into the music hall, they ascended the horseshoe staircase of the elegant balcony to greet her and then descended on the other side to take their seats.1 Many of her life-long friends were there, including the art historian Charles Eliot Norton and his wife; the philosopher William James; and Edward S. Morse, the orientalist. William F. Apthorp, the music critic who also served as the essayist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, wrote the story about this special evening for the next day’s Boston Evening Traveller. At the age of sixty-three this was her crowning achievement. As she greeted friends, they must have spoken about her deceased husband, Jack Gardner, who had enthusiastically supported her fun-loving passions for travel, collecting art, and becoming a patron of artists. Together they had decided to make a museum to display their burgeoning collections and host their salon with its original concerts, lectures, and artists’ projects.

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Page 18, Top Left Page from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Egypt travel diary (1874–1875) with a watercolor of boats next to a cliff along the Nile. Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Page 18, Bottom Left Page from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Egypt travel diary (1874– 1875) with a watercolor of the “Dendoor Tropics.” Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Page 18, Top Right “We moored at Elephantine and reveled in one of the prettiest sights in the world—the land-locked river and the fleet of boats, all their flags flying.” Page from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Egypt travel diary (1874-1875). Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Above Page from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Japan travel album, 1883, depicting the Torii gate to the Enoshima Shrine. Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

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Above Portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner in London. James Abbott McNeil Whistler, The Little Note in Yellow and Gold, 1886. Chalk and pastel on cardboard, 10 5/8 x 5 1/2 in. (27 cm x 14 cm). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Right Anders Zorn, Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice, 1894. Oil on canvas, 35 13/16 x 26 in. (91 cm x 66 cm). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

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Johanes Vermeer, The Concert, c. 1665. Oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 25 1/2 in. (72.5 cm x 64.7 cm). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

collection which I shall be amply entitled to feel when it is in reality…” he wrote.36 “In said mind’s eye your gallery possesses a masterpiece by each of the world’s great masters, and I am plotting for you with a foresight worthy of the cause to posses you of these precious spoils.”37 Shortly after her purchase of the Rembrandt, Berenson notified her of the opportunity to buy Titian’s Europa, a painting commissioned by Philip II of Spain in 1562. “How I wish I might see you in your first raptures over her!” Berenson wrote.38 “Europa has not appeared,” she informed Berenson, several weeks later, “so the honeymoon delays; and I am gnawingly impatient.”39 Finally, on August 25, l896 she wrote: “She (Europa) has come!”40 The painting, featuring a gauzily clad, sensuous princess, lying on the back of a white bull (Zeus in disguise) swimming across a churning sea, is Titian is at his most powerful. Gardner describes her ecstasy in a letter to Berenson: “I am having a splendid time playing with Europa. She has adorers fairly on their old knees—men of course.”41 “I am back here tonight…after a two days’ orgy. The orgy was drinking

Left The last portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner. John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Gardner in White, 1922. Watercolor on paper, 16 15/16 x 12 5/8 in. (43 cm x 32 cm). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Below John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882. Oil on canvas, 91 5/16 x 137 in. (232 cm x 348 cm). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

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Page 46 Arches for sale through Mose dalla Torre, Venice, c. 1900. Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Above Four columns offered for sale at 6,000 lire by Francesco Dorigo, Venice, c. 1900. Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Left Window purchased through Franceso Dorgio, Venice, c. 1900. Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

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Left, Bottom View into Titan Room from Veronese Room, historic building. Sean Dungan Above Raphael Room, historic building. Sean Dungan

a sketch of the life of isabella stewart gardner

Left, Top Dutch Room, historic building. Sean Dungan

Defining the Gardner’s place in the history of architecture is a little tricky. It’s an outlier. But two forces, both of them endemic to the period, certainly helped shape the building. The first was a revolt against the Industrial Revolution, which led to what’s usually called the Arts and Crafts movement. The other was eclecticism: the lack of any consensus about what constituted good architecture. The Gardner certainly isn’t an example of Arts and Crafts architecture. But it does share the mindset of that movement. Arts and Crafts began in England, where it was inspired by the writer John Ruskin and led by William Morris, who was a poet, a socialist, a furniture designer, and much else. Morris and his colleagues believed that industrial manufacture was dehumanizing to factory workers, and that it cranked out repetitive products of poor quality. They tried to revive the handicrafts of the pre-industrial era. They were especially interested in articles of domestic use—furniture, wallpapers, lamps, rugs, hand-printed books, and of course houses. They believed in natural materials and vernacular architecture. They thought that anything made by hand was better, both socially and esthetically, than anything made by a machine. The movement spread to America and was just beginning to hit its stride, in Stickley chairs and early Frank Lloyd Wright houses, in the years when Sears and Gardner were designing the house they called Fenway Court, which eventually became the museum. The first American Arts and Crafts Exhibition opened in Boston in April 1897. It featured more than 1,000 objects made by 160 craftsmen, half of whom were women. I’d love to know if Mrs. Gardner attended. Her home on Beacon Street was four blocks away. What Fenway Court took from the Arts and Crafts movement, I’m suggesting, wasn’t a style or manner. It was rather a love for the crafts of earlier times, and an urge to know that a human hand and mind once shaped the object you’re looking at. The second force is easier to explain. From the battle in 1830 over whether the new Houses of Parliament in London should be Gothic or Classical, the nineteenth century was a slugfest of competing architectural styles. By Isabella Gardner’s time, in the late Victorian era, there was no one dominant style. Instead there were often playful or theatrical revivals of any and all historic styles. Architecture became a smorgasbord. It lacked much of a value system. It was more about form-making (one of the reasons it was soon challenged by the rise of modernism). It wasn’t a great era, but it must have given Gardner some of her amazing freedom, her unbuttoned attitude that she could do what she wanted, that anything goes. It was an attitude that would have been much harder for anyone, but especially a woman, to sustain a few decades earlier. The architecture of the Gardner Palace is indeed a smorgasbord. There’s a little of everything. What makes it an improbable masterwork is the power of Mrs. Gardner’s imagination. Everything is where it is because she wanted it there. You may not understand a particular juxtaposition and what she meant by it. But you can’t fail to see that every placement is the result of artistic intention. Gardner employs artifacts and architecture to construct what comes off in the end not at all as a hodgepodge, but rather as a single, whole, four-story work of art. I like to imagine that the Gardner’s air is occupied by a force field. It is invisible but you can often sense it. It insinuates itself into everything, it controls everything. It’s the presence, of course, of Mrs. Gardner’s imagination. Renzo Piano, the architect of the Gardner’s new wing, is the guy who had to figure out how you add to the amazing original. Before I say a few words about this architect, I should note that architecture is always a

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designing second the century museum’s Anne Hawley

Renzo Piano, sketch of east cloister, south, third proposal. An initial concept was to move the sarcaphagus and arch to a rail that would slide it back into the new addition, but could also move to its original location. This was later abandoned. Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa

When the trustees appointed me as the museum’s fourth director in September 1989, I found a museum whose legendary collection had been well cared for, and a devoted but inward-looking staff. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s famed will had been honored. It required that her arrangement of the collections remain exactly as she left them. But the spirit the museum had in her lifetime was gone. The museum felt like a tomb-like repository, not a lively center of art and culture able to entice the public. During Mrs. Gardner’s lifetime she had made the Gardner Museum an important cultural center in Boston by curating artists’ interactions with the collections: dance performances by Ruth St. Denis—a founder of the modern dance movement; painter John Singer Sargent’s use of the Gothic Room as his studio; the Japanese Festival mounted by Okakura Kakuzo, the great Japanese artist and curator. Later generations of artists and scholars were not part of the public life of the museum. “No one felt they could curate as she did”1 according to John Lowell Gardner, today’s museum chairman emeritus and great-grandnephew of Isabella, whose elegant bearing and eyes that sparkle when looking at works of art engender great affection. When I was hired sixty-five years after her death, the trustees were seeking change. In the United States an explosion of public attendance at museums was following blockbuster exhibitions, and education programs. Yet the Gardner was functioning as a nineteenth-century museum: passive and still. The trustees noted the tired look of the galleries and worried about the building’s unique preservation issues arising from Boston’s fluctuating seasonal climates. The museum’s conservators warned that the “wear and tear” from 150,000 annual visitors exposed the collections to damage. Over the years many essential functions had been crammed into the building: offices, classrooms, a café, a shop, and other needed public facilities. New generations of audiences were demanding something new, something daring. It was my belief that the answer was to be found in Mrs. Gardner’s legacy which at its roots celebrates imagination. She choreographed an experience for the visitor of moving through a dimly lit cloister toward an inner courtyard bathed in light, filled with antiquities, flowers, and the sounds of softly splashing water. Designed to impact the visitor as an epiphanic moment, it transports one to another place—a place for dreaming and contemplation.

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Above Sections, first proposal. The section above reveals Renzo Pianoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s concept of the piazza, the entrance to the palace, and the lobby; below, the section shows the roof, the underground music hall, underground parking, greenhouses, and the canal. Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa Right Study model of roof concept, first proposal. Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa

Longitudinal Section A-A

designing the museum’s second century

Longitudinal Section B-B

That’s your job.” Suddenly, Renzo threw the model into a wastebasket saying, “All great projects start with an explosion.” I was stunned as I watched the model disappear into the trash. However frustrated Renzo and his staff may have been with our response, later that day they began thinking with us again. We felt that critical elements had not been successfully addressed: how to connect the new building to the existing museum, where to place the music hall with its acoustical requirements and scale. Renzo helps his clients become adept at communicating their needs by extracting information for long hours—ten-hour days in the studio and then again at night over lovely dinners that he hosts. That night at his home in the Place des Vosges, he kept the conversation going while he, thinking all the time, made drawings all over the linen tablecloth to translate ideas into forms for us. In our discussions, we realized that we had not yet focused on defining the sense of place we wanted. We suggested other images such as the idea of Arcadia, implying as it did a greater connection to the landscape. We spoke of making the museum functions transparent to allow the visitor to see the museum at work: gardeners tending plants in the greenhouses, students learning in the classroom, artists interacting with staff. We discussed the epiphanic courtyard experience choreographed by Gardner and how the transition from the new building to the museum could assure that moment for the visitor. Renzo called several days after our visit knowing we were worried. How were we going to design a great building, I asked? “Don’t worry,” Renzo cautioned, “we never take a job and run away. This takes time.”

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the completed building second century

the completed building

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Above View of the historic building from stairway. Nic Lehoux Right Hofstadter Gallery, with an exhibition of the work of Victoria Morton. Nic Lehoux

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Left View of new building from Monk’s Garden. Nic Lehoux Above Pathway in the Monk’s Garden. Elizabeth Felicia Right View of historic building by Monk’s Garden. Nic Lehoux

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