Rediscovering a Treasure

The UC Davis Fine Arts Collection—a treasure trove of pieces by artists ranging from Dürer to Arneson—is just waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation.

By Susanne Rockwell

You could certainly say that UC Davis’ Fine Art Collection offers gems you wouldn’t expect from a West Coast public university that’s never had much of an art budget. Among the nearly 5,000 pieces are hidden treasures from artists with national and international fame—a Judy Chicago tapestry, an Andy Warhol soup can shopping bag, six Edward Weston black-and-white photos, a Christo lithograph, Franz Kline’s working drawings, a Van Dyke print and Dürer woodcuts.

But this collection also has a distinctive local character, says Nelson Gallery Director Bob Riley, pointing to the wealth of California Pop and Funk art, courtesy of UC Davis’ own pioneering art faculty and graduate students who launched those movements in the ’60s and kept them going for the last half-century. The collection is blessed with many pieces by Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, Roland Petersen, David Gilhooly, William T. Wiley, Bruce Nauman and Jay DeFeo.

As the newest “guardian” of this legacy of California Funk, Riley appreciates that an underlying artistic motivation is what he likes to call, with a grin, “provocative clowning, with the artists’ genius expressing itself through a good sense of humor and transgression.” In fact, Riley, who was hired in fall 2002, and his staff are having grand art-history adventures as they sift through the carefully stored works to rediscover what former gallery director Price Amerson and those before him tucked away in the Art Building basement for nearly half a century.

Riley, who came to campus with credentials that fill a seven-page résumé—including a dozen years as curator of media arts with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, plus another 10 years as director of new programs at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston—was brought on board to restore the Nelson’s national reputation and to start rebuilding the Fine Arts Collection. He picked up the baton from longtime director Amerson, who died four years ago after nearly three decades guiding the Nelson. Riley says he has been pleased with the collection that Amerson and his predecessors amassed, judging the art as both distinctive and rich.

In addition to strengthening the collection, the campus proposes to build an art museum to help feature it. This facility, to be situated kitty-corner to the Mondavi Center, would house the Fine Arts Collection; the Department of Environmental Design collection, including handsome world textiles; and about 125 contemporary art works from Native American Studies’ Carl N. Gorman Museum. The new museum would also present traveling art exhibitions now mounted at the Nelson, Design and Gorman museums.

Campus museum planners want to take these distinguished gallery programs out of their makeshift former classroom space and provide a professional facility to better educate students about the visual arts and design. This new museum—expected to be a 25,000-square-foot, $30 million facility—will also showcase an emerging campus emphasis on film.

“Our program will span the range from comfortable to provocative, with exhibitions that have intellectual and cultural substance,” promises art history professor Jeffrey Ruda, who chairs the committee working on an official program for the museum. Ruda believes a new high-profile museum on campus will eventually change UC Davis curricula as professors from many disciplines take advantage of high-quality art to help their students explore human beliefs and values.

Like the Mondavi Center, the museum with its three individual art programs is also expected to introduce UC Davis to a broader segment of the Northern California public, attracting art lovers and sparking art appreciation among school children.

Ruda sees the proposed campus museum complementing the Sacramento region’s existing major art facility, the Crocker Art Museum. “We are both educational institutions,” he points out. “The largest part of the Crocker’s outreach, including its exhibitions policy, is directed to a general-interest, regional public. The university’s mission of education, research and service means that we have to balance and, to some degree, integrate scholarly, student and general audiences.” Ruda expects that the campus’s art and design faculty “research”—the presentation of artistic and scholarly creativity—will range far beyond the existing collections on campus.

Plans are still too preliminary to know how the existing collections will be stored or displayed in the new museum, Ruda says, but he expects some of the Fine Arts Collection will be showcased at all times as part of the campus’s teaching mission.

From the beginning of UC Davis’ art program, when the College of Letters and Science was created, in fact, the aim has been to create and maintain a teaching collection for students. Professor Emeritus Seymour Howard, hired in 1958 as the second art historian on campus, remembers how the collection began.

“When I came, there were about a dozen original artists’ etchings, primarily for study by students in art history classes. These were kept in a cabinet next to more numerous color-plate reproductions of paintings by famous artists.” Howard remembers seeing art students working next to thumbtacked posters of Renaissance masters—and watching posters become flecked with paint.

“The Nelson Gallery was ultimately developed, in part, to show these and later works in a protected study environment, as well as for exhibitions of contemporary art,” Howard says.

During the next decade, Howard and another art history professor, the late Joseph Baird, took on a mission to expand the cupboard of etchings into a teaching collection for both the art practitioners and the students of art history. The two used their summer trips to Europe in the late ’50s to drop into art shops near the British Museum and the Louvre and spend their odd pence on master prints. Then they donated their findings—many costing a few dollars or less—to the collection.

At one point in the mid-1960s, Chancellor Emil Mrak gave Howard $900 to invest in the collection. “I went to San Francisco and selected about a dozen old-master drawings and a few small works of sculpture and painting from the 16th to the 19th centuries,” Howard says. These various original works by Renaissance and Early Modern masters—along with several early gifts to the department of ancient, Asian and Renaissance works—were the basis for the collection of works on paper that form the largest part of the holdings. The collection ranges from an 18th-century Pinelli graphic that Howard remembers picking up for $50 four decades ago to a Marcel Duchamp etching.

The collection is also distinctive for the large-canvas paintings and other artworks donated by each UC Davis Master of Fine Arts student as a department requirement until 1990, according to Jemima Harr, the new Nelson Art Gallery registrar/collection manager. That year, lack of space prompted a shift in policy—now only a selection of the best of the student works is saved.

Harr, formerly with the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara and the San Francisco Airport Museums, has been spending the past nine months documenting items in the collection by photographing and logging them into a database. She and postgraduate researcher Perian Sully, a 2003 studio art graduate from UC Davis, spent the summer unboxing ceramics and sculptures and pulling out paintings and drawings from storage in the Art Building basement. Early on they discovered four 17th-century Flemish tapestries, a gift from Mrs. Herbert Fleishhacker that spent many years hanging in Shields Library before being rolled up and relegated to storage. The two unearthed scores of Latin American religious figurines and Native American baskets, also purchased in the 1960s, that had been featured in Nelson Gallery offices for many years. And they cataloged a considerable number of high-quality 6th–19th century Indian,Thai and Chinese sculptures and paintings, the result of 15 years of donations from Bay Area philanthropist and collector Edward Nagel. A number of these works were featured in Nelson exhibitions in 1997 and 2002.

Amerson, who spent 27 years as Nelson director and the Fine Arts Collection’s developer, is credited by Riley and Ruda with an inspired creativity and doggedness. Between 1972, when he was hired, and his death in 1999, Amerson was constantly encouraging important donations to the collection that emphasize major 20th-century American artists, including a wealth of work from
UC Davis professors like Arneson, Thiebaud and Johnson. Amerson also interviewed artists on film in the 1980s, and a sizable number of those videos are in the collection.

According to Ruda, the Fine Arts Collection is particularly valuable for its materials that demonstrate how mid- and late-20th century artists thought about and prepared for their creations. The collection includes preparatory work for many pieces that now reside in major museums or private collections.

“For example, the Thiebaud working drawings are tremendous for teaching,” Ruda says. “He shows how he was working out ideas for paintings. He also gave us his training drawings and figure studies, showing us how he exercised his eye and hand. You can see that Wayne never stops practicing to keep himself at a top performance level.”

UC Davis also has examples of the preliminary drawings by American Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline. “In the years after World War II, Kline had no money,” Ruda says. “So he took pages from old phone books and sketched 300 drawings that he kept in a pile in a corner of his studio. Over the years, he would sift through them for ideas. We have several of those, donated by Wayne Thiebaud.”

That UC Davis’ Fine Arts Collection has been almost totally dependent on donations has been an inspiration for some art department faculty members.

Art history professor Dianne MacLeod decided to take the initiative in the late ’80s after seeing an exhibit by feminist artist Judy Chicago, whose The Dinner Party and other projects celebrate the female body and its sexuality. MacLeod wrote to Chicago’s foundation, Through the Flower, on the chance that it would donate a work to UC Davis. The gambit paid off. A tapestry, The Crowning Needlepoint (1) from The Birth Project, 1981–1986, depicting a woman in her vaginal glory, now hangs in the Nelson Gallery office.

Gina Werfel, lured from the University of Connecticut in 2001 to create a dynamic new art department, says she has high hopes for expanding a tradition at UC Davis—endowments. “It is one of our big challenges,” she says.

Already the Nelson has two endowments, one for collection conservation and the other for general programs. New plans call for an endowment fund that would allow for strategic new art acquisitions that would fill gaps toward a more representational collection. Yet another endowment would strengthen the Nelson Gallery operations by allowing art installations at other campus locations.

Bob Riley, the man now responsible for the Nelson and the Fine Arts Collection, views expanding the collection and improving the vitality of the Nelson as missions that can be accomplished. But he believes it will take a united effort from UC Davis’ art community and its supporters. “We already have absolute treasures in this collection of fascinating works, but it is time to start growing the collection again.”

Susanne Rockwell. ’74, M.A. ’96, writes about the arts, humanities and cultural studies for the campus.

About the artworks:
Images from the Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection (from top): Bartolomeo Pinelli, Receiving the Sword, n.d., graphite on paper, acquisition, 1975.264.19D; Ralph Johnson, Of Irish Ways, 1985–86, watercolor and graphite on paper, gift of the artist, 1988.056.20PG; Judy Chicago, The Crowning Needlepoint (1) from The Birth Project, 1981–1985, DMC floss on 18-mesh canvas over a painting by Judy Chicago, gift of Through the Flower Corp., 1989.006.20T; Albrecht Dürer, The Holy Family with the Three Hares, c. 1495, woodcut on paper, acquisition, 1975.178.16P; Roland Petersen, Picnic Scene with One Parasol, 1967, oil on canvas, gift of the artist, 1980.029.20PG; Anton Van Dyck, Lucas Vorsterman, n.d., etching with drypoint on paper, acquisition, 1971.075.17P; Dan Connally, untitled (detail), 1981, oil on canvas, gift of anonymous donor, 1984.043.20PG.