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| YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW IN Return to general symposium page This past fall, Trust members attending the symposium, “Milwaukee’s Outstanding Collections,” experienced in a very real way the contrasts between Past and Present in that midwest capital. The collections that were essential to our study were genuinely outstanding.
The symposium was centered downtown in the landmark Pfister Hotel, which is a marble, brass, glitter and glow Edwardian testament to the best way to travel, circa 1900. Its walls are hung with a museum’s-worth of paintings, gathered by its builders and still treasured. They ornament the halls and public spaces with a lush selection of ripe still lifes, buxom beauties, and dreamy landscapes. Our primary focus was the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), whose astonishing new building is a flying leap into the future of museum design. Created by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, it juts into the waters of Lake Michigan, its white silhouette rising like a pair of wings; and it has engaged the attention of the people of the region in a manner impossible to a more modest building.
The MAM has been celebrated for its collections of 20th-century arts. But newly-designed exhibition galleries hold an impressive range of American decorative arts. Drawn from the museum’s holdings, and augmented by objects from the extraordinary Chipstone Foundation collections, the works on display range from the oriental delicacy of porcelain tea wares to the opulence of a Victorian sofa. Chipstone’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, Jonathan Prown, talked to us about the necessary re-thinking of the exhibition of our decorative arts.
All of us know that the advantage of visiting installations in the company of their designers and curators is one of the significant reasons to attend a Trust symposium. At MAM we had the opportunity of viewing those galleries with Prown, and with the museum’s Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, Eleanor Gadsden; and Sarah Fayen, the Charles F. Hummel Fellow at the Chipstone Foundation. The private collections we were privileged to visit contained extraordinary objects from the 17th and 18th centuries, in surroundings that carried us back into their past. Trust members often say that they appreciate not only the quality of objects they see, but the depth of discernment and study evident in some collections. “Overwhelming” was a word we heard repeatedly during our visits. On one of our jaunts we visited the 1889 Frederick Pabst House, built for the family of one of Milwaukee’s business barons. Its fortunate survival documents the work of local craftsmen and materials, and the progressive construction techniques of the end of the century. Not unlike Wright’s Wingspread, though The Master might not see it that way.
Our speakers led us from present to past and back again: from the Prairie School of architecture to the ethnic groups who settled Wisconsin’s wilderness. From the formation of the Chipstone Collection to its role in the new American Decorative Arts galleries of the art museum. Watching Sir Ivor Noel Hume discussing 2000 years of British ceramics in a white, state-of-the art auditorium that looks like a set from the Starship Enterprise may not be a mind-altering experience, but it comes close. Furniture was, understandably, the subject of several lectures. We learned from Cheryl Robertson about George Niedecken, the man behind the distinctive furniture in Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie homes. Niedecken, a designer whose shop was in Milwaukee, is now being given the credit he deserves for having introduced some of the forms and ornament associated with Wright. Robert Trent, whose past lectures have provided Trust members with so much information and understanding about furniture forms, spoke of some of the extraordinary objects of furniture in Milwaukee collections, enhancing the experience of our visits to both museum galleries and private homes. Sarah Fayen, on the staff of the Chipstone Foundation’s collections, turned the tables for us, helping us to comprehend the history and appearance of the 18th-century tilt-top table. Luke Beckerdite, well known to us all, found and exposed many of Chipstone’s fakes or altered furniture among things purchased years earlier. Sinclair Hitchings, Boston Library’s Keeper of Prints, explained for us the very special early prints in the Chipstone Collection. He kept us engrossed with tales of the images we were viewing. And collector Frederick Vogel, III, who knows the Milwaukee Museum’s furniture collection very well, spoke to us about its development.
The men and women who addressed us were as outstanding as the collections about which they spoke. Trust members’ sponsorship of individual lectures made it possible for the Trust’s planning committee to achieve the extraordinary quality for which it was striving. Thank you, to the generous sponsors who helped to advance the success of the symposium, “Milwaukee’s Outstanding Collections.” Those who were able to attend the Thursday and Sunday sessions that bracketed the core of the symposium spent the days in trips that swung between the two poles of Yesterday and Tomorrow. At Crab Tree Farm we revelled in a very special private collection. It is the country’s richest ensemble of rooms furnished according to the design principles of the Arts and Crafts movement and its English antecedents. The architects, designers and craftsmen of that period strove toward an ideal future they saw awaiting the world in the twentieth century. Now we look back on them, perhaps with nostalgia, as examples of aesthetic and social reforms that are part of our heritage.
Traveling further into the future of the past, we visited Wingspread, one of the buildings in which Frank Lloyd Wright applied his concepts of contemporary domestic design. We could see him conveying the principles we’d observed beginning to form among the rooms at Crab Tree Farm. We spent a golden autumn afternoon traveling through yesterday at Old World Wisconsin, where the fields and hills are populated by 19th century homesites of the immigrant groups who settled the region. We’d been introduced to the buildings and some of the objects in a lecture by Jacob Conrad in his earlier talk to the entire audience. He and Ellen Penwell, Curators of the heritage group’s collections, took us by small groups into homes to examine the lives of men and women of the particular vernacular groups who settled the region: Scandinavians, Germans, Poles, African Americans. Our memory is rich with images of rooms, buildings, fields and fences from a past being constructed for today’s viewers. Compounding our sense of time-travel, we shared our Wisconsin weekend
with members of Paul McCartney’s “Back in the U.S.A.”
tour. Returning from a field trip, our bus deposited us among a cluster
of people gathered in front of the building. The focus of their attention
was a massive white bus with scrolling ornamentation that carried
Sir Paul and members of his company, who were also guests at the Pfister.
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