The first Fogg Art Museum opened in 1895 on the site where Canaday Hall now stands. A cramped grey building. Hunt Hall was designed for art history classes but was inadequate even for that. It had little storage space, a small lecture hall and a only a few offices for a faculty already outgrowing their new home.

Over the past century, the Fogg has frequently found itself needing to expand, and the pressure to do so has always come from within. Starting from the beginning, Harvard's curators and museum directors have searched out more advanced conservation techniques and stronger collections.

Today Harvard Art Museums--the Fogg, the Arthur M. Sackler and the Busch Reisinger is among the finest university museum systems in the world. Only the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford or the Fritz Williams at Cambridge can compare in overall quality of collections and teaching facilities, and both are much older than the Fogg.

Harvard's directors and curators have been innovators and pioneers ever since Charles Eliot Norton became America's first art historian in 1876. Teaching quickly became Harvard's forte under Edwin W. Forbes, who became Museum Director in 1909, and Paul J. Sachs, who joined him as assistant director in 1914. It was their idea to bring classes directly into the galleries, an unprecedented practice at the time. Together, they also originated what became known as the Fogg method of curatorial practice, which involved turning museums into experimental laboratories. When graduates began saturating the nation's top museum positions, everyone wanted to learn technique from Forbes and Sachs.

The two also initiated scientific research into chemical composition of materials, founding the Straus Conservation Center in 1928 with the help of a staff chemist. Their methods of teaching conservation became the model all, over the country and inspired later directors to found a program for the teaching of such techniques. Straus continues to be one of the most important such centers in America, garnering contracts from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and attention from abroad. The Center is currently undergoing renovation and expansion, including a full climate-control system.

In addition, the legacy of Forbes and Sachs has increased opportunities for curators to author exhibitions and a greater sense of intellectual autonomy regarding their peculiar interests. Unlike large public institutions such as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg is not dependent on returns at the door.

Additionally, the Fogg isn't controlled by a board of trustees who have partial ownership and therefore influence over what is displayed. Harvard's curators and director answer only to the President of Harvard University and a board of academic overseers who are generally delighted to see the curators take risks.

But while curatorial freedom is not constrained from above, says Curator of Prints Marjorie B. Cohn, museum responsibilities do prevent some scholars from conducting the work they would like to do.

While the Fogg has exhibited major Picassos (Guernica in 1941) and even some Impressionists, its curators have traditionally preferred to show things that don't get attention outside of New York. Among other things, Harvard's constituency has come to expect not only expensive loan exhibits from museums world-wide, but also 25 shows or more per year--something public museums simply cannot afford. This is the university museum's niche, observes Cohn, and it has a responsibility to show obscure exhibits.

In practice, this allows paintings or sculptures to be viewed in ways no conventional museum would attempt. Currently at the Sackler, Masterworks of East Asian Painting demonstrates one such type of unique execution by displaying seven centuries of painting developments together on the same walls. "We might juxtapose objects historically related over centuries and examine the connection," explains Curator of Paintings and Sculpture lvan Gaskell. "We're interested in the application of ideas to the object, in contingency, so that objects remain alive, so that they are deployed rather than simply existing."

This deployment of objects also gives Harvard greater authorship over the exhibits than one would normally find in public museums. Often this approach alienates the public, but that need not be the case with intelligent work, suggests Curator of Drawings William Robinson. On the contrary, the most perfect exhibit ever at the Fogg, he says, was a collection of landscapes by Dutch master Jacob van Ruisdael that was shown in 1982. "Director Seymour Slive successfully combined a major artist's unfamiliar, though brilliant, work with exemplary scholarship, and 2,500 people came on a single afternoon."

The Collections

Public perception of Harvard's museums focuses more on the scholars the program has produced, less on the collections held. The perception is somewhat understandable since most of Harvard's 150,000 objects are seldom displayed and then only for short periods. They are the prints and drawings, susceptible to light damage and therefore hidden away like family jewels in the Mongan Center on the ground floor of the Fogg. They constitute the bulk of the museums' collection and are the real treasures visitors must ask to see.

Many of those collections rank among the best in the America if not the world, and have given Harvard museums the status they currently enjoy. From Europe, the Fogg logs over 60,000 prints, including over 300 by Durer, 200 by Rembrandt and another 300 by Goya. Its watercolors by Blake are unrivaled outside England, while its drawings from Gericault and David are the most comprehensive collections outside France.

Once again, it was the generosity and vision of Forbes and Sachs that is largely responsible for the scope and depth of those collections. Forbes set the standard when he donated important Italian works in 1898 which later grew into the most important collection of its kind. Today, the Fogg continues to be especially strong in pre-Raphaelite and 19th century French paintings, featuring the largest holdings of Ingres and Moreau outside of France.

Other collections less reknowned than, say, Gericault paintings, also enjoy top billing around the world. Across the street at the Sackler lives the world's largest single collection of ancient Chinese jades as well as one of the most comprehensive Korean ceramics collections anywhere. Since the early '70s, when John Kenneth Galbraith first donated his Indian miniatures, Harvard has specialized in East Asian, Islamic and African art. Some of the strongest collections throughout Harvard's system are in Persian and Mughal Indian two-dimensionals, Japanese surimono prints and the Chinese and Korean jades and ceramics mentioned above. Much of this material also came to Harvard during the Forbes-Sachs years, including the initial Chinese and Korean pieces which grew into the world's largest collections of their kind.