Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art
at the Fogg Art Museum
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
September 21, 2002–February 16, 2003

Whatever you do this month, get yourself to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There you will find a perfect exhibition from a heretofore anonymous art collector named Lois Orswell (1904–1998). In life unknown to nearly everyone in the art world, Orswell assembled one of the most sensitive private collections of modern art. At her house in rural Connecticut, she carried on an intense friendship of correspondence and mutual support with David Smith, and quietly donated her collection to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, without fanfare, into the hands of curators like Marjorie B. Cohn, who now presides over the current exhibition of her bequest.

In mounting a show of this kind—an exhibition of a collection—a curator must confront not only the provenance of the art but to varying degrees the provenance of the collector. More often than not, the collector fades to the background, mentioned in the exhibition titles but little elsewhere. The splendid “Thaw Collection: Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, Acquisitions Since 1994,” on view at the Morgan Library in New York last fall, is one case in point: here the intelligence of the collection spoke silently of the intelligence of the collector.

In “Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art,” however, Marjorie Cohn has placed Orswell center stage. Her collection extends from Arshile Gorky, Auguste Rodin, Max Beckmann (his Actors [1941–1942] is remarkable), Jacques Lipchitz, Eduardo Paolozzi, and others in her early years of aquisition to important items of African, Asiatic, and ancient art later on, to one of the more important collections of Gaston Lachaise in the United States, to the most personal collection of David Smith anywhere (Terpsichore and Euterpe [1947]; Fish [1950–1951]; Detroit Queen [1957]; Doorway on Wheels [1960]; numerous paintings, photographs, and studies). Assembled from the 1940s to the 1960s, her inventory grew to over 340 items, all donated to the Fogg, with 140 works now on display.

Yet it is the provenance of Orswell herself that equally attracts. Marjorie Cohn, who developed a friendship with Orswell late in Orswell’s life, has infused the show with the personality of this spirited, tenacious individual. (The show’s working title was, I note, “Passionate and Obstinate.”)

This show has everything going for it. The exhibition catalogue includes a long essay by Cohn that in its inquiry into the soul of a collector approaches high literature. The editor Sarah B. Kianovsky also includes the complete correspondence between Orswell and Smith, sixty-six letters now in the Fogg archives. Example:  

Dear LO— On the bronze—if you want it outside—I’m lacquering the new wooden base about 20 times. Now—if it was on a base in the garden how high should it be—I guess about 24-30 inches—will proportion its height in relationship to sculpture—what do you think—where should it go—relationship bushes etc—

Regards David S

And Orswell’s response:

Thanks. Not quite sure—it should be low—but if in among plants—a little higher than on terrace—I had thought of those incinerator blocks. Hope you have ideas.

Excited—L.O.

If Orswell’s isolation from the art world in the 1960s was notable, her distance from the theory-crazed establishment of the 1970s only became more marked. This, from a letter to Marjorie Cohn:

I suppose you know that the renowned Rosalind Krauss has been made Columbia’s Prof. of ART HISTORY. WHOOOFFF. We might see if the Disney company could run your department.

Orswell’s gift to the Fogg was almost sidelined, in fact, by what Cohn calls her “lifelong venomous memory of a visit in about 1966 from Rosalind Krauss, at that time a student [at Harvard]. [T]he Museum was lucky not to have lost them.” “Do they want us ALL to look and sound like Roaslind K?” wrote Orswell to Cohn. “I wonder if any one predicted that feminism would join up with that nonsense. But then I never like the ones like Steinem anyway.” (Orswell was, among other things, a subscriber to The New Criterion. According to Cohn, she often “passed along copies to me, with underlining and marginal exclamation points.”)

The art collection of Lois Orswell is united by a shared spirit of life, discovery, and humor (just note the buxom Lachaises). Orswell often called her collection “her children.” At the Fogg, we may consider ourselves fortunate that Orswell’s family will continue to live under one roof.

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