“It would be very easy for any professor to know what’s here and what’s not and to plan accordingly,” he says. “It’s not a last-minute thing.”

And History of Art and Architecture Professor Jeffrey F. Hamburg says that the Winthrop’s tour will not affect students or administrators too much.

“My feeling is share the wealth,” he says. “The Fogg doesn’t have the space to exhibit a fraction of their collection, so why shouldn’t they be abroad?”

The museums conceived the plans to tour pieces from the Winthrop collection back in 1997, according to Harvard University Art Museums Acting Director Marjorie B. Cohn. At the time, museum administrators had anticipated that much-needed renovations of the Fogg Art Museum would take place this year and limit exhibition space.

But improvements to the Fogg were placed on the back burner while Harvard focused its energy on the now-defunct plans for a new museum and other building projects. By the time renovation plans were postponed, Harvard had already confirmed exhibition times with both London’s National Gallery and Lyon’s Musee des Beaux-Arts.

The Harvard University Art Museums are considered a premiere research institution, in large part because of the work in the Winthrop collection.

Cohn says a professor from a Texas university sent her an angry letter after he traveled to Cambridge only to find that the pieces he sought had left Harvard for France. She sent him an apology letter and the published catalogue of the traveling collection.

And Cohn says the artwork’s absence is only temporary.

“The pieces have been here all along,” she says. “And they will be back. Students will have a chance to look at them.”

Globetrotting Artwork

After its run at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the collection will travel to the National Gallery in London in June and return to the United States for a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in October.

Wolohojian, who traveled to Lyon last weekend for the tour’s opening along with several other Harvard curators, says the collection was enthusiastically received and widely covered in the French press.

Wolohojian says he worked closely with curators in France, London and New York to choose the pieces sent on tour.

“There are so many ways the Winthrop intersects with each museum’s own holdings,” he says. “We worked to make exhibitions that were relevant to each museum.”

Although Harvard compiled the catalogue, museum officials were not involved in the arrangement and display of the collection in the Musee des Beaux-Arts.