An art institute in the Berkshires - Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1997 by Michael Conforti

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is a special place. Visitors consider it one of the most appealing museums anywhere - an accessible former private collection that enchants through the coherence and popularity of the works on display. While a fifth of them were acquired after the deaths of Robert Sterling and Francine Clark, the institute's Founders [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], the character of their vision remains in the nineteenth-century French paintings, a selective group of old masters, important seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English silver, as well as prints and drawings that enhance the understanding and scope of the other works on view.

The institute's galleries embrace an intimacy and sense of domestic refinement that enhance the character of the collection, allowing visitors the freedom to wander without getting lost, and to concentrate without becoming tired. A museum of human proportions, the institute is a place where visitors can enjoy their favorite impressionists while strolling through a miniature marble temple at the end of a residential street in a small college town adjacent to thousands of acres of woods and fields.

The traditional elegance of the permanent galleries complements the rigor of the scholarly programs at the institute. Probably more than any other independent museum in the country, the institute focuses a large percentage of its resources on research and academic activities. This takes the form of an increasing number of visiting scholars, an expansive series of lectures and symposiums, and an art history library, that is not only one of the ten largest in the country but also still accessible to the general public [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED]. A graduate program in the history of art, co-organized with nearby Williams College, is centered at the institute, as is the Getty Trust's Bibliography of the History of Art and the Williamstown Art Conservation Center [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED]. A partnership with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA) in nearby North Adams supports training for young curators in contemporary art.

The institute's diverse mission may at first seem to stem from an unusual combination of goals and alliances, especially when considering its relatively small size. Excluding guards, the staff numbers some fifty, and annual attendance is about two hundred thousand. This mission has developed from Robert Sterling Clark's decision, taken around 1950, to establish the collection assembled by himself and his wife in the academic village of Williamstown. After the deaths of Sterling and Francine Clark in 1956 and 1960, respectively, the museum's trustees recognized the potential for art education on an advanced level in Williamstown and aimed to strengthen the academic profile of the institute. They determined that academic programs, rather than the expansive growth of the collection, would be the principal purpose of the institution the Clarks had established. John Pope-Hennessey and Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann were among the first Clark professors at Williams College in the early 1960s, and they recommended to the institute's earliest board of trustees that most of the museum's future income be devoted to expanding the collection. While works such as the altarpiece by Ugolino da Siena (p. 507, [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED]), recommended by Pope-Hennessey, have entered the collection periodically and regularly, aggressive building of the art collection has never been the institute's primary focus.

This seems to follow from Sterling Clark's view that his artistic legacy should be designated an "institute" rather than a "museum," albeit one that memorialized the special aesthetic quality of the collection the Clarks formed. The institute can certainly be considered a memorial. The founders are burled under a terrace fronting the entrance - an oddly public gesture for collectors known to have had a particular hatred for press and publicity of any kind.

Like many collectors before him, notably Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), whose New York City house museum Sterling Clark so admired, Clark felt that paintings and objects looked best in rooms in which the scale, natural light, and architectural detail echoed that of domestic spaces. It is partly for this reason that shortly after World War II he changed his 1945 will, which had bequeathed his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in favor of establishing a house museum in his East Seventy-first Street residence in New York City. There he intended to present the best sculpture, silver, paintings, and drawings from that house, from his farm in Upperville, Virginia, from his Paris house on the rue Cimerosa, and from the storage space he kept at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York City. According to that will, the house museum was to have been for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a public gallery...encouraging and developing the study of fine arts and advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects.