Arthur M. Sackler Museum

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Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum
Established	1985
Location	485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Director	Thomas W. Lentz
Website	harvardartmuseums.org

The Arthur M. Sackler Museum joins the Fogg Museum and the Busch-Reisinger Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums. Its postmodern building was designed by British architect James Stirling, generally regarded as the greatest British architect of the 20th century, and recipient of the Pritzker Prize in 1981 (the equivalent to the Nobel Prize for architecture). The most prominent of the four Stirling-designed buildings in the U.S., the Sackler opened to the public in October 1985. It is, curator John Rosenfield wrote in Harvard's celebratory publication on the museum, "a tribute to James Stirling's clarity of vision, to Arthur Sackler's generosity and loyalty, to Harvard University's commitment to the visual arts, and to Seymour Slive's fiery and single-minded devotion to the project."

Even before the Sackler's completion, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable observed that "The event causing the most stir in professional circles right now is the awarding of three prime American commission to the English architect James Stirling. Considered by many of his peers to be one of the few authentic creative geniuses of our time, Stirling has influenced so many practitioners in so many places that his style, or styles, are better known through the cribbing of others than through his own executed works.... What he will produce for Harvard's prestigious Fogg Museum...will be one of the more important surprises of the year."

In 2008, the 32 Quincy Street building that formerly housed the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger collections closed for a major renovation project to create a new museum building designed by architect Renzo Piano that will house all three museums in one facility.^[1] During the renovation, selected works from all three museums are on display at the Sackler. Concerns about the fate of Stirling's Sackler building (see Chronicle of Higher Education link below) have not been addressed by Piano or the Harvard Art Museums.

Collection

The Sackler holds world-renowned collections of archaic Chinese jades and Japanese surimono, as well as Chinese bronzes, ancient ceremonial weapons, and Buddhist cave-temple sculptures; Chinese and Korean ceramics; and Japanese woodblock prints, calligraphy, narrative paintings, and lacquer boxes.

The Sackler's collections of ancient and Byzantine art include notable works in all media from Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Near East. They are especially strong in the pottery of ancient Greece, and in small bronzes and coins from throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.

The museum also holds works on paper from Islamic lands and India, including paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and manuscript illustrations, with particular strength in Rajput art, as well as significant Islamic ceramics from the 8th through 19th century, including Samanid epigraphic wares, luster wares from Iraq, Iran, and Spain, and İznik Ottoman wares.

Many of the works in the Sackler Museum can be accessed as part of the Harvard Art Museums' online Collection Search, which features 250,000 works of art.

Gallery

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  Red-figure Bell Krater: Phlyax Scene; Greek, 4th century BC; Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum

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  Standing Saddled Horse with Clipped Mane, Cropped and Tied Tail, and Roman-Style Bridle Ornaments; Chinese, 2nd century; Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum

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  Bowl with Hadith Inscriptions; Persian, 9th-10th centuries; Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum

Architecture

"James Stirling has dealt in a very high kind of order and organisation in the design of the [Sackler Museum]: this is a dense, tight plan on a small restricted site that brilliantly solves administrative and gallery needs. The building is remarkable for the creative virtuosity with which its functions are accommodated while suggesting a monumentality that belies actual dimensions. Stirling was lucky to have as a client the director of the Fogg [Museum], Seymour Slive, who understood this achievement immediately. Professors John Coolidge and Neil Levine...complete a formidable triumvirate of sympathetic experts." Ada Louise Huxtable, "A Style Chrstallised"

The Sackler Museum, originally designed as an extension to the Fogg, elicited world-wide attention from the time of Harvard's commission of Stirling to design the building, following a selection process that evaluated more than 70 architects. As a measure of the excitement generated by the project, the University mounted an exhibition of the architects' preliminary design drawings in 1981, "James Stirling's Design to Expand the Fogg Museum," and issued a portfolio of Stirling's drawings to the press. The range of publications that discussed the project included Architecture and Urbanism, Art in America (S. McFadden), Casabella (Massimo Scolari), Lotus, the Architectural Review (Peter Buchanan, John Coolidge), The Boston Globe (Robert Campbell (journalist)), Time Magazine (Robert Hughes (critic)), The New Boston Review (Gary Wolf), Skyline (E. Constantine), Express (K. Michael Hays), and the GSD News from Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

After completion, the building's coverage was even greater, with general acknowledgment of the building's significance as a Stirling design and a Harvard undertaking. Aside from descriptions of the building's organization and exterior appearance, perhaps most noted was the way in which the inventive design accommodated its diverse program on a challenging site. Harvard published a 50-page book on the Sackler, with extensive color photos by Timothy Hursley, an interview with Stirling by Michael Dennis, a tribute to Arthur M. Sackler, and essays by Slive, Coolidge and Rosenfield.

John Coolidge appreciation

As evidence of the Sackler's success, John Coolidge, long-time director of the Fogg Museum, featured the building as a model of museum design in his publication, Patrons and Architects: Designing Art Museums in the Twentieth Century. Coolidge included the museum in his chapter on "When the Architect and the Professional Staff Collaborate"--which followed a chapter of negative examples of buildings to house works of art: "When the Architect Has His Way." He detailed the many ways that the Stirling/Wilford Sackler was, perhaps unexpectedly for some, responsive to the client's functional concerns. Coolidge concluded that "Stirling's brilliant parti has produced a building at once striking, convenient, and--above all--a sympathetic setting for works of art."

Recent attention

In 2010, design drawings for the Sackler Museum were included in Anthony Vidler's extensive catalog published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Yale University, "James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive." These original drawings appear in the exhibition that travels from the Yale Center for British Art to the Tate Britain in London, to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, from 2010 through 2012.

Vidler's summary of the "very different James Stirling" that emerges from his research provides an instructive overview of the architect with respect to the Sackler Museum: "This is a Stirling never wavering in the search for what he called the right balance between the 'context' and the 'associational' values of the architecture, between the rigorous analysis of the programme and its disaggregation and re-composition into volumetric elements; the insistence on achieving an architecture that can appeal not only to a limited circle of those 'in the know' but to the general population of users." (p. 17)

Bibliography

"A Style Crystallised," by Ada Louise Huxtable, and "1979-1984, Fogg Art Museum: New Building, Harvard University USA," in James Stirling, Architectural Design Profile, 1982.

James Stirling: Buildings and Projects, 1984.

The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Design by James Stirling Michael Wilford Associates, with introduction by Seymour Slive, essays by John Coolidge and John M. Rosenfield, and an Informal Discussion between James Stirling and Michael Dennis, 1985.

John Coolidge, Patrons and Architects: Designing Art Museums in the Twentieth Century, 1989.

"A Tribute to James Stirling," ANY 2, September/October 1993. Commemorative issue includes essays by Colin Rowe, Alan Colquhoun, Francesco Dal Co, Robert Maxwell and others.

James Stirling Michael Wilford and Associates: Buildings and Projects, 1975–1992, 1994.

Robert Maxwell, James Stirling Michael Wilford, 1998.

Anthony Vidler, James Frazier Stirling: Notes From the Archive, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2010.

See also

External links

• Harvard Art Museums website
• Arthur M. Sackler Museum website
• Harvard Art Museums Collection Search website
• Harvard University website
• James Stirling on the Pritzker Prize website [1]
• http://chronicle.com/blogs/buildings/harvard-u-begins-museum-renovations-with-no-plan-for-stirlings-sackler-building/5157

References