American art at Princeton.(Current and coming)

The collections of college and university art museums are sometimes motley assortments of works of art donated by alumni to their alma mater--uneven collections with glaring gaps. One exception is the collection of American works on paper at the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey. Founded in 1883, the museum has long made a consistent attempt to cull excellent quality watercolors, drawings, and pastels by the leading lights of American art from earliest times to the present. Given the fact that works on paper demonstrate better than any other medium the working methods of an artist, a collection such as this deeply benefits undergraduate and graduate students studying the history of art. While Princeton's holdings are well used in teaching situations, due to their fragile nature, they are not often on display. Happily, a selection of seventy-seven examples chosen from the more than thirteen hundred that comprise the collection are on view until January 9, 2005, in a special traveling exhibition entitled West to Wesselman: American Drawings and Watercolors in the Princeton University Art Museum. Future locations will be listed in Calendar.

The founding of Princeton's art museum coincided with the establishment of the university's department of art history and archaeology, which is believed to have been the first program of its kind in this country. Central to the development of the collection of American works was Frank Jewett Mather Jr., who came to Princeton to teach Renaissance art history in 1910, after being an art critic at the New York Post, where his beat included covering contemporary American art. In 1922 Mather assumed the reins of the museum following the retirement of its first director, Allan Marquand (a son of the great collector and founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Henry G. Marquand). Starting about 1933 Mather ...