Method and Madness at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2010 Method and madness at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum Gretchen Stein Rhodes Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Rhodes, Gretchen Stein, "Method and madness at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum" (2010). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2464. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2464 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. METHOD AND MADNESS AT THE ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in The Department of Communication Studies By Gretchen Stein Rhodes B.A., Louisiana State University, 1993 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1999 May 2010 DEDICATION To my father. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend many thanks and heartfelt appreciation to my dissertation committee from whose efforts and insights I have greatly benefitted. To Michael Bowman, thank you for introducing me to the Nudds and for teaching me that it was perfectly okay to tell the same story over and over again. To Joshua Gunn, thank you for being a wonderful friend and teacher and for always encouraging me. To John Protevi, thank you for challenging me to think beyond that which is habitual. To Frederick Ortner, thank you for stepping in and agreeing to go along with this madness. And especially to my advisor, friend, mentor, and inspiration Ruth Bowman, without whom this would not have been possible, thank you for snow. A million thanks go out to my friends who have supported and encouraged me through these oh so many years. To Mindy, for keeping me there and never letting go. To Gary, for teaching me that family meant more than what I had taken for granted. To Danielle, for not just talking about community but living it. To Melanie, whose crafty homemade ways never cease to inspire me. To Lisa, who sent me down this path, thank you for always leading me in the wrong direction. Thank you also to Andy, Becky, Ben, Dan, David Pye, David Terry, Jacque, Jason, Jim, Justin, Marisa, Roger, Shaun, Tracy, and Trish for your friendship and support. I would like to thank my mother, Simone Landry Stein, whose presence is embedded in this dissertation and who inspires me with her fearlessness. I also want to thank my brother Johann and sister Kirsten for their creativity. Both of you understand the art of living and make living an art. Lastly, to my husband Lewis, thank you for meandering through this world with me. Have you heard the one about the two penguins on an iceberg? iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ………………………………………………………...…………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………….………………..……...iii ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………….…………..……….....v CHAPTER ONE “BUT I DIGRESS…” ……………………………………………...……………1 TWO “MAY I TAKE YOUR COAT?” ……….……………………....……………..42 THREE “THIS IS NOT WHAT I THOUGHT IT WAS.” ……………….…...……….61 FOUR “WHICH WAY TO LOST AND FOUND?” …………………………….…...98 FIVE “THANK YOU. PLEASE COME AGAIN.” ………………………………132 WORKS CITED …………………………………………………...…………...……………..150 VITA ……………………………………………………………………………..…………....159 iv ABSTRACT The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, Massachusetts is unique in history and design. Originating as a privately held collection, the Gardner Museum reflects its namesake‟s eccentricities and stands in stark contrast to the backdrop of contemporary Boston. Although much has been written about the individual masterpieces held within the Gardner collection and there are numerous biographies of “Mrs. Jack,” as Gardner was sometimes called, little work has been done to investigate the museum in light of contemporary research in museology and the practices of collecting and display. Understanding collecting and curating as modes of knowledge production, this study seeks to discover the types of knowledge produced by and within the Gardner Museum. Because the museum highlights forms of knowledge other than that associated with textual criticism, I focus on the affective and historical material transfers at work in museum practice. As such, this study offers an opportunity to explore the nature of a performance-based method or orientation to scholarship. I both make use of and question “performative writing” as a mode of presentation, so that what emerges is an understanding of a method that, like the Gardner Museum, seeks to discover ways of knowing beyond (but not in lieu of) processes of representation and signification. In a sense then, performance methodology becomes both an object of study and my method. In bringing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into relationship with the disciplinary problem of performative writing, I have conceived of my research and writing practices as processes of collecting and curating. v CHAPTER ONE “BUT I DIGRESS…” The tiny tesserae of an opus vermulatum, meaning “wormlike,” mosaic snake along rounded paths. Jagged triangles are interspersed with trapezoids and rhombuses and other quadrilateral configurations. Eggshell and ecru wash against ribbons of black and blue. The trails of gradation in color and contour collaborate to form the image of the head of Medusa. This second century Roman mosaic lies at the spatial and architectural heart of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Sixteen foot square, the mosaic pavement is laid into the ground at the intersection of pathways that cut across a sunken garden. This area of the museum is referred to as the “Court” or “Courtyard” in the various museum guidebooks and pamphlets. It is the centerpiece of a building seemingly turned inside out. The brick exterior walls of the museum building are like a plain brown wrapper that offer no clues as to the contents within. The interior courtyard of the Gardner is an explosion of nature. The roof is made entirely of glass allowing a flood of sunlight into the space. The walls surrounding the courtyard are built to imitate the architecture of the exterior walls of a Renaissance era Venetian palazzo. Each of the three upper floors is wrapped with windows, allowing the sunlight to spill into the museum rooms and enabling visitors to look down into the courtyard from multiple vantage points. The salmon pink paint treatment on the walls produces the effect of stucco, which was accomplished only after Gardner herself showed the painters how to do it. “To achieve the atmospheric coloring of the stucco, Isabella Gardner, in her sixties, intervened with the painters, and demonstrated with a brush and buckets of paint the rough brushwork she wanted” (Goldfarb 43). The courtyard gardens are planted with flowering plants and small trees. Ivy covers the ground in the areas between the paths surrounding the Medusa mosaic. The head of the Gorgon 1 is crowned with serpents, which, so the story goes, made her so frightening a creature that anyone who looked upon her turned to stone immediately. As though in testament to the power of such stories, the garden surrounding the Medusa mosaic is populated with ancient Greek and Roman stone statues. The figures of unnamed peplophoros women and recognizable characters of legend such as Persephone, Artemis, and Odysseus are arranged to face the center of the courtyard and appear to have been frozen here by the chthonic monster. Chthonic is one of many Greek words for “earth,” referring not to the surface of the planet, but to its interiors and depths. It evokes at once the abundance and regeneration of life and the deterioration of organic matter and death. Mythographer Robert Graves links the chthonic figure to the process of doing historical scholarship. He sees the Gorgon as a symbol for an attitude or pose that collapses constructs of time, enfolding together the pull of the past and the drive toward the future. The work of the historian follows the evidentiary trail of the past, in material traces and remnants as well as documents, including the work of other historians. However, Graves also makes room for intuition and the imaginary, recognizing within scholarship the tendency of thought towards that which cannot be proven, but is a necessary part of invention and creativity (Wilk 96). In a special issue of Art Bulletin titled, “The Problematics of Collecting and Display,” art historian Donald Preziosi makes similar claims for the practices of museology. Rooted in a modernist ideology of “representational adequacy,” museum displays often are believed to represent some extra-museological past, to function as documentary and evidentiary artifacts. Preziosi argues, however, that as practices of composition and narrative, exhibitions “establish an ambivalent figuration of the past and the future” (Preziosi 13-14). Museums are sites for 2 bodying forth imagined histories. They highlight the performance of memory as an active reconstructing and piecing together of experience. The continual churning of analepsis and prolepsis was a common theme of Renaissance art and literature, an era of great interest to Gardner in collecting objects to be

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