text:
WHA: Thank you very much.
INT: July 17th.
INT: Oh, I'm sorry, yes, today's July 17th, 2009.
WHA: Everybody's in [laughter]. Did you get TJ in over there? [laughter]
INT: Oh yes, and Thomas Jefferson is presiding [laughter]. Which is very appropriate.
WHA: Where's his computer relay?, hanging on his – I assume my computer works wireless. When they were hooking it up, they said, where we gonna put it, and I said, just hang it around his neck, he'll love it.
INT: That's great. We'll start off with: you were never a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: No, no.
INT: So how did you first come to be involved?
WHA: Well, I was trying to remember all of that, how I – my first introduction to the whole Dumbarton Oaks scene was through Walter Muir Whitehill, who was a great friend of the Blisses, and who wrote what was considered the official sponsored history of Dumbarton Oaks. Do you know it?
INT: No, to our knowledge, we've been told that there's never been an official –
WHA: Not true. Walter Muir Whitehill, who was - well, I knew him through Boston connections, and he was a great friend of some of the Adams connections, obviously up there, and he was the head of the Boston Athenaeum, and very much involved, he was on the board of the art museum in Boston and the Massachusetts historical society, he was involved in everything, and at a very early stage in my life somehow I became a part of – I would see the Whitehills in Boston, and so I knew about the Blisses really second-hand but fairly intimately in terms of what they were doing. But his book is a very key document.
INT: I would imagine so. I'm not even sure there's a –
WHA: And Walter died in the late seventies, I think, so this book would have been done, well obviously before Mildred Bliss died in sixty-nine, but anyway he was very much an intimate. Then when I came to the National Gallery, I'd been living in Princeton and I was working for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund briefly before I came to the National Gallery, and it may have been through some Princeton connection that we then – Mrs. Bliss, though she had just died, was very much a social and cultural presence in Georgetown, which meant basically Washington. And Tom Bayard – does his name ring a bell? You've come on to him. He taught at Trinity I think, after he left Dumbarton Oaks, and he was a kind of protégé of Mrs. Bliss, and after she'd moved out of the house, down on Q – we were on P just around the corner – and Tom was a friend of friends of ours in Princeton so there were all these, I suppose not professional, but just sort of these connections, and we became good friends of Tom's, so I suppose that was really the first behind-the-scenes introduction, because the staff was very, very small.
INT: What year was this?
WHA: Seventy. Mrs. Bliss had just died. We're told in Washington that they were referred to as the "Three Bs" – Mrs. Bliss, Mrs. Bacon – Virginia Bacon, Mrs. Robert Lowe Bacon – and Mrs. Beale, who lived in Decatur House, opposite the White House – still living privately in that house. Mrs. Bacon was living in I think what had been John Marshall's house on F Street, pretty extraordinary, they were all contemporary buildings with the White House, and then Mrs. Bliss was out in the country. But those were really the powerhouse figures, and this is social history that has nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks, but it's part of the texture. But we're into the transitional period of Dumbarton Oaks throughout the '70s. I think through Walter Muir Whitehill I became well acquainted with the Tylers, and it was Bill Tyler who asked me to be a senior fellow. And you know the Tyler connections to the Blisses.
INT: He was the godson, I believe.
WHA: Yes, and he was also the godson of Edith Wharton. And Edith Wharton was a great friend of Mrs. Bliss, and also Beatrix Farrand, and that's how Beatrix Farrand comes into the story, and I think that it was Royall Tyler, his father, that introduced the Blisses, I mean Mr. Bliss's mother, to Bliss's father.
INT: That was Royall Tyler?
WHA: She then became Mrs. Royall Tyler. [NB: It is unclear to whom he is referring.] So Bill – I always loved the fact that he was Edith Wharton's godson [laughter].
INT: And I think he was heir to all her papers and things.
WHA: He did, which he then negotiated – I think Yale has them now. I think that's right. I don't know, the Bliss papers, I suppose they're at Harvard?
INT: They were moved to Harvard. They originally were at Dumbarton Oaks, but Dumbarton Oaks didn't really seem to have the space or the resources.
WHA: And that's not – that kind of archival manuscript maintenance, it's just like at Monticello; we don't have any – other than a working library – we don't keep any manuscript material there. It all goes to the University of Virginia. Anything that has to be taken care of.
INT: We do have the material related to the building of Dumbarton Oaks and the gift –
WHA: You have all of that? But her plans, all of that is out in California.
INT: Oh, I didn't know that.
WHA: Well, she lived in California near the end of her life. So I know that a lot of the original garden plans, which have – all that's been documented, published, that's well-known. Well, anyway, that's the best of my recollection.
INT: Did you know Mrs. Paul Mellon as well?
WHA: Well, I did know her, and in fact when I was on the board there was discussion even then about the possibility of her giving her collection to Dumbarton Oaks, but it was clear that this was not going to happen in the 1970s, because her interests were clearly very special, and she did not want to have it being institutionalized under either Dumbarton Oaks or Harvard, and we still don't know where her collection is going to go – and maybe you do – or have not heard.
INT: I know that she's built a library.
WHA: She has, there, that's been a number of years ago. But it's not – it's fine for that but I can't imagine that being maintained in perpetuity. I suspect – I've heard rumors that there is another institution where maybe it would go, but I don't know any more than that. But she was never – was she actually ever on the board? I can't remember.
INT: I believe she was.
WHA: Her name was on it, but she – I think that she was never really active. It was with the idea I think that this would happen, but it was quite clear that this was not – that she was going in her own direction and so on.
INT: Yeah, we tried to speak with her –
WHA: No, I don't think it would make any sense now. She's 98. Her stepson is a good friend of mine – pardon me, her son by an earlier marriage – lives in Washington and is a good friend of mine, and I don't – people around Upperville never see her much. That would be not a productive avenue.
INT: Was Jack Thatcher still around the Washington scene in these years?
WHA: Oh, Jack was around, and he had just retired, I can't remember when.
INT: Sixty-nine.
WHA: He was very much a gentleman about town and knew everybody.
INT: It seems like there was a great deal of integration between the Dumbarton Oaks collection at that time, or at least the administration, and the Washington social scene.
WHA: Dumbarton Oaks was very much a Georgetown social scene. There were very few people who had any real intellectual interest in what Dumbarton Oaks was doing. It was something of a mystery. I mean, first of all, garden history – people didn't know what – that was such a new discipline or sub-discipline. Byzantine studies, that was totally off the books, and the pre-Columbian was also, really. That beautiful collection, that jewel collection – too bad you didn't get to speak to the architect.
INT: Philip Johnson. He passed away, I think.
WHA: Oh, yes.
INT: Did you know him?
WHA: I did, just briefly, when we lived in New York, but through other connections that had nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks.
INT: He did leave memoirs or something like that.
WHA: About Dumbarton Oaks? Oh, well then that's good.
INT: It's helpful.
WHA: And someone else that I knew who is still I think living is Louis Auchincloss, who's a novelist and lawyer who lives in New York, who's in his early 90s now.
INT: What was his connection to Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: Well, he was a good friend of them. He would have been a much younger friend, but he would have known the Harvard-Dumbarton Oaks scene, and I remember him talking to me about how Harvard had somehow – whether his law firm or somebody that he was involved with – when the Blisses were persuaded to give Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, and he was rather critical of that. And he felt that Harvard had pushed them into it and used the threat of the war, the possible "invasion" like the war of 1812 – they ought to have – that somehow Cambridge Massachusetts was going to be safer, to own the property would add more stability. This is what I recollect Louis telling me, whether there's any truth to it I have no idea. But that was inside gossip.
INT: Very helpful to have.
WHA: Mr. Kreeger was also on the board when I was on the board. Another name that you – he's long since gone, the businessman in Washington. Does his name –?
INT: I don't think we've heard anyone bring him up before.
WHA: Well, he was – they were great art collectors, and he was on the board of the corp., and he was involved in all kinds of positions around culturally, and I guess I knew him through being at the National Gallery and because of his collection. But Bill Tyler got him on the board because he was a Harvard graduate and could stand up to the pressure from Harvard, which – there was a sense of pressure, at least in that period; the rumor was that Harvard would be happy to close the whole thing down and take the all proceeds back to Cambridge.
INT: What was the gossip related to that? Because it seems so explicit in the Bliss will that that is not what they wanted.
WHA: They were very explicit about it, and Louis Auchincloss discussed that with me about that issue, but nevertheless –
INT: Harvard will be Harvard.
WHA: Everyone read Harvard's ambitions.
INT: Yes, I think they took material from the collection up to – was it the Fogg during this time?
WHA: Yes.
INT: And that was a very big thing.
WHA: Was that during the war, when they took it?
INT: They might have taken it during the war, and then I think again maybe in the early seventies?
WHA: They could have, I don't remember. And that was not a good idea, it made everyone very nervous. And then also the friction was over the way the money was redistributed. Harvard had its formula dealing with the Bliss bequest, the proceeds didn't come back to Dumbarton Oaks, they got a fixed percentage.
INT: Really? Where was the other money –?
WHA: It was overhead for Cambridge, as we understood it.
INT: Were these for the Dumbarton Oaks professorships?
WHA: Well, all the operating funds, Dumbarton's endowment went to Harvard, you see, they would distribute it, they earned 8% and Dumbarton Oaks got maybe 4% – I don't know that, I'm just saying, that was at least – and Kreeger, who was very much of a finance man on the board, was quite outspoken and critical if ever anyone from Harvard ever came down.
INT: Were there visits from Harvard?
WHA: Well, not very often. The dean of arts and science – he was a very powerful dean, I can't think of his name.
INT: Bok?
WHA: No, that's the president. Bok came I think once during my time, and when you think how many institutions Harvard has, the very idea that he might have even come once – but the dean who was very powerful, and I think he was dean of arts and sciences but I can't remember the names. But the problem at Dumbarton Oaks – Byzantines studies at Harvard, you obviously have a connection at Harvard, but the other two areas did not and do not, and that was always felt to be a weakness in the way the thing's structured, and that gave the Byzantinists – they were, you know, not equal among equals. But that's again part of the politics of the thing. But everyone understood all this.
INT: If we could go back for a second to your relationship to Mr. Whitehall.
WHA: Whitehill.
INT: Whitehill, excuse me. You mentioned he had talked to you a little bit about the Blisses, did he have any particular stories that you recall? We're very interested in –
WHA: Not that I can recall now. I might be able to if I reread his book, but I'm sure anything he told me in the kind of after-dinner, over-scotch conversation would have been in his book and so on. He loved the style of the Blisses in terms of the way they went about supporting music and the whole civilized, really European atmosphere that really prevailed, certainly in the seventies. There was nothing else in Washington that came near that, because of the scale of it, small, intimate. And the Sunday night concerts – you had to be invited, as if Mrs. Bliss was still presiding. So it was very much a – the rituals were all figured out, and certainly carried on, with Jack Thatcher in the wings criticizing if they weren't.
INT: He was also a godson, I think, of the Blisses. Or at the very least a friend.
WHA: Yeah, he probably was. I don't remember that. But there was very much this curatorial reverence and caretaking of the image of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks as the Blisses related to it. So you had ten years – Giles Constable, maybe his father, who taught at Harvard, in art history I believe, probably knew the Blisses, and there may have been something, a little nepotism there, I don't know. He surely must have talked about that.
INT: Yes. We didn't actually get to –
WHA: Do that one.
INT: Well, I wonder if you might talk a little bit more about the European feel. Was it – I assume you must have gotten to know some of the scholars there at the time.
WHA: Oh yes, I did. And there were always European scholars, and we did see them, made a point that they would meet at the National Gallery and there was an atmosphere. Whether that goes on now or not, I don't know.
INT: We haven't gotten the sense that there's as much interaction as you're talking about.
WHA: Interaction, no. At that period there was, on a very informal level.
INT: Who were the major players there as far as academics, as you recall
WHA: Oh, I can't remember now the names again. Betty MacDougal, of course, she was somewhat controversial as a director. She was not an easy person to get along with, and people had the impression that she really didn't want anybody coming in doing research other than the fellows. And that's fair enough to understand, that it was a limited facility and so on. There was a feeling she was not particularly friendly to scholars who were not – who had a legitimate reason – who were not [fellows]. That's just a rumor and an impression I had. I think Betty suffered from the fact that while she was an art history major, garden history itself was parvenu, and didn't have full credentials at Harvard, or certainly at the Fogg. You can understand that.
INT: Well, at that time Dumbarton Oaks was really the only center –
WHA: It was really the only center. There was – the scholarship going on – there was a good deal going on in England in garden history; it has its genesis I think really after the war. And lots of the fellows and people who came up and were influential read at some of the symposia at Dumbarton Oaks. They were all international figures but I think the English garden history crowd – they quite often were members of the symposia; you can read the lists and so on. The Byzantinists, not so much. Not in terms of such a specialized field of study, as you know. With garden history, people – even though they didn't understand what the discipline was about and how it worked in terms of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks – nevertheless people said, well, you know, I have a garden.
INT: Did you have much interaction with the collection at Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: Well, I've used it, yes. The study that I did on the French garden, I used [it] quite extensively, of course. At that point I had curated an exhibition on Jefferson at the National Gallery called "The Eye of Thomas Jefferson;" my catalog you may know.
INT: Seventy-six.
WHA: In working on Jefferson I did become very much involved in eighteenth-century garden history, because of his travels and interests, when he was in France. And it was actually through that rather narrow avenue that – and I realized at that point that there wasn't a useful small volume – not a picture book, but a serious book on the history of the French garden. Which has now been translated into French and two or three other – which is interesting, you know. The French consider that an area that they – would not recognize an American scholar. Actually the French edition of that, they did really quite a beautiful job of it.
INT: Do you remember, during that time when you were interacting with it, what the state of the collection was? As you probably know, there still is no museum space for the garden collection.
WHA: No. And there wasn't any – the museum part of the garden, it was a literary collection. It was works on paper. We never ever thought of it as objects or related to anything other than just seeing it all make perfect sense. Which is the way the Blisses began the collection – what they bought and so on.
INT: So at this point it was mainly the library. Because I know at least over the years they've managed to collect some of the prints and paintings that the Blisses originally had, of gardens.
WHA: Of gardens?
INT: Of botanical gardens.
WHA: Is that in the garden studies section?
INT: That's my understanding. But it sounds like this was not at the time.
WHA: Well, there were things around in the hallways, hanging on the walls, but not in any sense as a part of the study collection.
INT: And in the early sixties things were in the garden library?
WHA: Yes. I didn't know it until sixty-nine, seventy. I'd been there but I never used the collection at that time. I guess Betty MacDougal was there at that time. There was also Alan Fern's wife, do you know her? Alan Fern was head of the prints and photographs at the Library of Congress, and then he became director of not the Portrait Gallery, but what we now call the National Collection, the American Collection. His wife was Betty MacDougal's assistant; she's in Washington. She's somebody. She was very much in the working – I knew her very well, but I can't think of her first name now. Mrs. Alan Fern. I suppose he's living in Washington; I haven't seen him in years. But it was very, very intimate and small; there would never be another person or scholar or anybody. The fellows would be in their little cubicles and I got to know some of them.
INT: Who was there, do you recall?
WHA: I'm hard pressed for names. They'd always be in, working on very interesting subjects, I remember.
INT: In your conversations with one another, did they tend to be about garden history, or the literary aspects, or theoretical? What was the tone at that time in the seventies in terms of the field itself, as you recall?
WHA: Mostly they came out of literature as well as art history, or they came out of history; it is a subdivision of history. And garden history wasn't taught anyplace – what was his name, the head of the garden there; he's English?
INT: John Dixon Hunt.
WHA: John Dixon Hunt. He's very prolific in writing; have you talked to him?
INT: Spoke with him on Monday.
WHA: I remember him very well when he was there; I think later he catalogued Mrs. Mellon's collection, or did two volumes on that collection, which is available to you. But I think that was after he was at – he's at Pennsylvania I think now. He was a very conspicuous art historian, but he came out of literature. Interesting sort of background. My background is law.
INT: How did you get –?
WHA: Well, I don't know.
INT: We talked a little earlier about your time at the National Gallery. I wonder if you remember from that experience what the relationship was like between the National Gallery, specifically, and Dumbarton Oaks; you talked a little bit generally about the close interactions between the institutions.
WHA: Well, of course, John Walker – I was there briefly when he was just retiring. I came in with the idea that Carter would become the director and I was to pick up what Carter was doing, which I did, but that overlaps a bit. But certainly the Walkers were the connection with the Blisses, an intimate part of that circle. Those were the two major international cultural institutions in Washington – I mean in the humanities, or art, not the sciences, but I can't think of any – they were preeminent. No university had international stature in Washington during those years, true? And being both non-political institutions. Those were the two places European visitors would gravitate to, one or both, whatever. And certainly the Blisses were looked upon as major figures and made famous by the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the commissioning of Stravinsky. That was a big time. And far more sophisticated than Washingtonians on a day-to-day basis ever thought of themselves being. Washington then is no different than Washington now, I'm sure, just more people.
INT: It seems like there was a very practical relationship between the two institutions as well, because even when you did the Jefferson exhibit, Dumbarton Oaks I think lent books for that.
WHA: Yes, they loaned things. We had a close working – anything either would need, we were equals.
INT: So you got the sense that during that period Dumbarton Oaks was very generous in lending out the collection.
WHA: Oh, yes, absolutely.
INT: Because we've heard different things over different periods.
WHA: Well, it depends on what department they were. There was a special – we used to speak of our special relationship with Great Britain. There was a special relationship with Dumbarton Oaks. Both institutions were sort of latecomers; the National Gallery didn't open until 1940. The same time as the Blisses, isn't that true?
INT: Yes, the gift was in forty.
WHA: Were they living in Washington? He'd been in diplomatic service.
INT: They were living at Dumbarton Oaks briefly, but it was for really only about five years, I think, before the gift, and I think the museum and collection and center didn't really open until forty-six.
WHA: Forty-six? Well, they were putting up all those Renaissance ceilings. Is the ceiling still there?
INT: And it's been beautifully recently cleaned and renovated and reopened.
WHA: I've often wondered how much of that ceiling is original. I never saw a Renaissance ceiling in Italy that big. It's huge.
INT: But it is lovely.
WHA: It is lovely.
INT: One thing we've also touched on, but I think haven't talked about directly, is of course you got to know Giles Constable very well. He's known now I think as a bit of a controversial director.
WHA: Is he? I don't know what the controversy would be or what it was.
INT: There wasn't a sense of that immediately when you were there?
WHA: Well, Giles – I didn't know him that well. I don't think Giles was an easy person to know as a personality. He's a scholar. I think the Institute was a perfect place for him. I don't know that he was particularly comfortable with administration. That was an area I don't know anything about. That's just my outside/inside reading.
INT: He must have seemed a very different director than Bill Tyler.
WHA: Oh, yes, Bill was a preeminently new administration, the skills of diplomacy. Everything was protocolé, as Mrs. Tyler used to say. And again the foreign service was involved in all the diplomatic – and that played into the diplomatic scene, which should be mentioned, certainly in the seventies, when the diplomatic corps in Washington I think was much more conspicuous and ambassadors played much bigger roles than they do now, with electronics and all the things that have changed their lives and everybody else's. But then the diplomatic corps was very protocolé as who was senior, and they didn't change a lot, and the British ambassador was always – even though he wasn't number one in the pecking order – he was always very much number one on the social scene, and he was usually somebody new, because Washington was always a prime plum slot. But to give you the sense of that, the diplomatic corps really gave the scene around Washington an international feeling. Certainly we were aware of this at the National Gallery because the embassies – we were always being asked for this or that, not loans and so on but just to play some sort of a political role in who was coming to visit, heads of state or the Queen of England or whatever and so on. We had a very close regular relationship with the diplomatic corps. But just take, for instance, the senior diplomat, when we lived in Washington, was the Italian ambassador, and his name was Ambassador Ortona, and he'd been there longer than any other, he'd been through the war; his memory of Washington in terms of diplomacy was extraordinary. But those figures very much were part of the Dumbarton Oaks scene and they were people who knew what Dumbarton Oaks was and what its function was and so on. And that was very important. You usually found the European diplomatic corps in Washington was always of a very high caliber, so you can see how they fitted into the Blisses' idea of this European salon, which is really what it was. And the salon was Mrs. Bliss and Mrs. Bacon and Mrs. Beale, and they did run them; those houses were big enough, and certainly Mrs. Bacon was the only one still operating when we – and somehow we made her list so went there quite often so we got some sense of what must have been the same thing at the Blisses' – when they were actually living in the house – in terms of the way the dinner parties were given and the circle that brought them together. None of that exists anymore in Washington – nothing like that, as far as I know.
INT: We've read how one of the things that Mr. Bliss had promised Mrs. Bliss if she would come to Washington was that he would create this sense of a country estate in the city, and of course then the gardens are a tremendous part of that. And I wondered, as a specialist, just for our records, how do you see the gardens themselves at Dumbarton Oaks as they sit in terms of their importance as an American garden or the uniqueness or not and just to touch upon that.
WHA: They are very important, and Beatrix Farrand was very, very important in that whole period, one of the real stars, and the close relationship she had with her patron Mildred Bliss was very important. And she was encouraged to do things that were really extraordinary in terms of the way the whole layout was done and how they worked it out. It was a country estate and in fact the house obviously was a country estate when Georgetown was first founded. I don't know how large it was in the early – again Walter Muir Whitehill I think gives a good history. I was ex-official trustee of the National Trust when I was at the National Gallery, but then I was also on the board of Monticello, of which Walter had been on for long before I went on, and was very much involved in. He was one of the founders of the National Trust, so historic preservation was a part of this whole cultivated cultural scene that was led by people like that, and they all knew each other there, or seemed to. Does this give you any sense of the texture? And I really want to emphasize that the '70s were a transition in Washington culturally, politically, and certainly from Dumbarton Oaks' standpoint.
INT: So people were leaving Washington, or it was just a different generation?
WHA: Just a different [generation]. The atmosphere changes, the power center seemed to shift. Washington always changes. That's another whole big subject, we won't go there.
INT: Oh, well, I wonder – probably should have gotten to this a little bit earlier: just for our institutional history, you were a member I think both of the senior fellows committee for garden studies and for the advisory board, and I wonder if you might talk a little about the differences and maybe even the relationship between the two.
WHA: In my earlier comments I overlapped, I really wasn't making much of a chain. The garden program really was not too active as I remember. It was pretty much Betty's. She was running it that way; the conferences were her contribution. Speaking of the conferences, I mentioned – she was a very important senior fellow, a scholar – the archaeology/classicist Wilhelmina Jashemski, and she was the leading scholar on the gardens at Pompeii, of all things. She certainly is an international figure, recognized in her field. In fact Mary Beard, who's at Cambridge – who has a blog by the way.
INT: Yes, she does. I haven't met her, but she's come to our Cambridge a couple times.
WHA: Well, I've been in touch with her because I'm working on a book, which I managed to get a couple suggestions on, some ideas. She's been very generous and very funny. Her blog is called "A Don's Life;" she's a don, and she's a brilliant classicist and just gave the lectures at California – what are they called, the famous lectures, out there at Berkeley?
INT: Sather?
WHA: And those lectures are now online. You can hear her; it's really quite wonderful, there are three of them, they're marvelous, you can put them on your iPod. But Mary Beard, within the last few – I glance at her blog, and a lot of the time it's things I have no interest in, and she writes on a lot of things, not about the classics or anything else, but another thing. She'll really turn up some very interesting – in fact, I cite her in a footnote from her blog, which I thought she will enjoy. Her motto is "bloggo ergo sum". Anyway –
INT: She was never at –?
WHA: Oh no, but she did mention – I think Wilhelmina died or something came up – and she mentioned something in her blog because she knew everyone – and I was so delighted she did. I sent her an email, we've just been in touch basically by email.
INT: So she really was a figure from an international –
WHA: You mean Wilhemina? Yes, in fact, I helped her get this published; she had real trouble getting it published, you can imagine, and I'm sure it's wildly expensive now. But she had a technique; she was particularly interested in biological archaeology, and there was somebody at the Smithsonian that worked with her in terms of identifying plant material, spores, and seeds and all that, and this was really a pioneer work that goes beyond – not a part of Dumbarton Oaks, but nevertheless to me her connection with Dumbarton Oaks was extremely important.
INT: What was your fondest memory or the most exciting project that you were a part of in terms of your time?
WHA: Oh, I don't know about that. I think the music programs were great, which had nothing to do with anything else other than just the pleasure of it. The quality of the music program was so high.
INT: Was this the Friends of Music program?
WHA: It wasn't called Friends of Music then, it was Mrs. Bliss's musicale.
INT: We were told that there was a dress code for these, that if a fellow were to come underdressed –
WHA: Oh yes, absolutely. Oh, there's no dress code now. But there surely must be at the concert? No. Well, it was on my invitation in those days and everybody knew everybody else, and Virginia Bacon would be sitting on the front row and she would be asleep in the first five minutes after whatever they were playing, snoring.
INT: That still happens!
INT: But a lot of the Blisses' personal staff stayed on.
WHA: Were still around. I don't know that the butler was, but he might have been. Wait a minute: somebody used to bring us sherry at the end of board meetings.
INT: We spoke with Tony and Silvia.
WHA: And the gardener, the head gardener was there.
INT: Don Smith.
WHA: Is he still extant?
INT: Yes.
WHA: So you've talked to him.
INT: Well, he's up in Maine, and they're going to go up and speak with him.
WHA: I think that's extremely important. I would put him high, put him above Giles – no, not for the record!
INT: We spoke with his son, who of course grew up on the grounds in the gardener's cottage, and that was very helpful.
WHA: Yes, and that would be another point of view, another level, of course.
INT: And he was interviewed, I think in ninety-three, it must have been, about the time he retired, just because of course he was such a figure that someone wanted to get his thoughts together, but we would like to talk to him. We haven't heard though that he was Bliss staff.
WHA: Who, Don? He was not? I thought he was on the staff, but I don't know that. You know, again, could be just loosely referred to.
INT: We've heard of an Antonio who was there, who was I guess Mr. Thacher's butler. I don't know that he ever worked for the Blisses, though.
WHA: No. And I think that's probably the one I would have seen.
INT: Alfredo.
INT: Oh, yes, I'm sorry, Alfredo. And Mrs. Aston, who was there in the library. She was rumored to be Bliss staff originally.
WHA: No. She was only very unhappy. But unhappiness was not unusual at Dumbarton Oaks.
INT: We've heard she was a very stiff British enforcer of the dress code.
WHA: Oh yes, she was. But she would somehow unburden herself to me, for reasons I had no idea. Yes, of course. But I knew her; she was probably a neighbor, and I don't really know – she was in a funny way sort of misplaced there; she wasn't a scholar, and I wasn't sure what her role really was.
INT: Our understanding is that she was in charge of the Princeton Index in the library.
WHA: The Index? Yes, it was something like that probably. And there was always particularly friction –
INT: In the library?
WHA: In the library.
INT: We've heard it was sort of a tumultuous time there, and that the staff dwindled down in the library to the point that –
WHA: Oh yes, there was just maybe one person, and there was curatorial work to be done in the rare book collection and prints.
INT: There was a rare book collection at that time? Because we've heard conflicting things really about the formality of that.
WHA: Well, is it not there, the rare book room?
INT: Oh yes, now of course, but we've heard in those days – we talked to Henry and Eunice Maguire, Byzantine fellows at the time, and they would talk about pulling – this was a little bit later, when Irene Vaslef came to the library, when she was head librarian – but they talked a lot about the course of the library with the main house; they've talked about pulling these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books off the shelf and taking them I think either to Irene or to Seka Allen, who was also in the library, and that was the beginning of the rare books collection as we understood it, at least for Byzantine.
WHA: Oh, that's in the Byzantine.
INT: It must have been different for garden.
WHA: Oh yes, totally different. We never went there.
INT: How was the interaction between the programs?
WHA: Oh, absolutely none. Absolutely none. We never even knew where they were. You were talking about the sculpture being put in the garden or something – the thing that really stirred Georgetown up when I was involved there was the plan to build library facilities under the lawn, did you know about this?
INT: No.
WHA: Well this was a whole big –
INT: The North Vista? Yes.
WHA: Yes, and it was going to go – it meant removing one of the trees that had been there even going back before the Blisses, and it was going to be buried under that – what direction are we? North?
INT: Mm-hmm.
WHA: North. The North Vista. And people began to realize how much havoc was going to be wrought, digging this all up and supposedly putting it back. Hugh Jacobson, an architect and an old friend of mine in Princeton, was the architect for it. And I'm sure his plans – you want to talk to Hugh, because he ran into a real buzz saw over this, and he was a good friend of mine but I had grave reservations about the whole thing myself. I didn't feel it was going to go anywhere, so I wasn't carrying posters and picketing the place, but the feeling ran very, very high and it really had to do with the integrity of the grounds, just as simple as that. There would have been some irreparable changes if it had gone through.
INT: Were there any other major – you must have heard about the major projects going on at Dumbarton Oaks on the advisory board. Do you recall any other major projects or controversies or just discussions?
WHA: Oh, I can't think of anything. That one, of course, the extension, it had moved beyond the rumor stage, and the rumors were already pretty horrific around Georgetown, gossip and so on, as to what they were going to do. There were no published plans at the early stage, and I don't know if there ever were. And I think Giles – I think this comes under his – and it had to do with building facilities really for the Byzantinists, because the garden library wasn't growing all that fast. I don't even know now what the size of it is.
INT: I don't know now. I know that – we looked a little bit into the library in the early '70s in our research and it was something like two thousand volumes added in a year for the Byzantine collection and maybe three hundred for the garden.
WHA: Three hundred, yeah. Well, it also has to do with the level of scholarship and so on.
INT: As long as we're talking about the neighborhood, just very briefly, it's interesting because we've talked about, of course, the great ties between Washington social scene and Dumbarton Oaks at the time. But also the controversy really, and hopefully you can speak to this since you were living on P Street, between the immediate neighborhood and Dumbarton Oaks. We've heard things before, particularly about Elizabeth Taylor when she was living in the house on S street.
WHA: On S street?
INT: Senator Warner's house.
WHA: Oh, John Warner's house. But that didn't last very long, though. What was more dramatic was when Johnson appointed the neighbor to the Supreme Court – who am I talking about?, the lawyer in Washington. They lived right on R, just on the next block across the street from Dumbarton Oaks. Oh, famous lawyer, and he had to resign from the Supreme Court but there was some –
INT: Oh, he resigned – this isn't Bork, is it?
WHA: Oh no no, who never made it to the court. No, this is a famous lawyer. And the press was all up there because – and I remember going up to Dumbarton Oaks for something and the press was all around his house and a streaker came down our street because the press was all there. This was the 1970s.
INT: Oh yes, we've heard very many –
WHA: And Elizabeth Taylor, they were really basically I think out in Middleburg.
INT: Oh, really. I know she didn't like Dumbarton Oaks, you know, the gardeners being about and noisy in the morning.
WHA: Oh, that part I know nothing about; never heard anything about it. I can imagine.
INT: But were the neighbors sort of cantankerous with the center being so close?
WHA: I've never really heard anything. You know, being in Georgetown you usually heard those things. No, I think – Dumbarton Oaks kept up – obviously, because of the background of the place, they were very sensitive to its good neighbors' relationships. Giles can speak to that much better because he would get the letters and the telephone calls or whatever. It's too bad you didn't get to speak to Tom Bayard. He was very young, younger than I, and he was very, very like Bill Tyler; he was very, very protective of the Dumbarton Oaks mystique, or the Bliss mystique if you want to call it that, and I remember the first time I was up to see him, because we had mutual friends at Princeton, he said, do you want to see my office. I said, yes, where is it? He said, it's in Mildred Bliss's bedroom. Is that still used as an office?
INT: It is. It's no longer – I'm not entirely sure if Financial is up there –
WHA: Is Financial in the office now? In the bedroom? They haven't changed anything. This was very much looking like her bedroom.
INT: Really? Did you get the sense that it really was a house?
WHA: Oh yes, that part was. I was very interested in that part of it and how the Blisses expanded it, and all that's well-known, but I remember Tom taking me around, showing me all the expansion, the drawing room; they really did the whole – talk about a makeover. Big-time. When you see the original pictures of Dumbarton Oaks, that whole facade I think is new, on the south. I'm sure that's true. You can, if you know the original plans, figure out what they did, but all the grandeur really was brought in by the Bliss hallway and the staircase and all that.
INT: It's still very lovely.
WHA: It's beautiful, isn't it. What do those rooms get used for, the drawing room, anything much?
INT: There's the director of studies' office.
WHA: But the director's office is in that section, but I always thought that was a former utility room or something.
INT: I'm honestly not certain what some of those places used to do. I know when they renovated and they redid the museum and everything some of that must have changed. Because of course the building of the whole library changed everything.
WHA: It's amazing how dark it is. We're going to have to light a candle. Do you need a light?
INT: Oh, we're fine. I just want to make sure I haven't left anything out. You've done quite a good job of answering our questions without our asking them. I wonder if – we've asked a little about the beginning of garden studies, but has Dumbarton Oaks played an important role in the development and progression of it?
WHA: I think that's a very important question. Through its international program, through its fellows it certainly played a – in terms of giving scholars – a base. I never thought the collection was adequate as a real scholarly – when people would say to me, somebody would say, I'm going to apply to Dumbarton Oaks for a junior fellowship, I would say, have you looked at the collection first? Do you know whether it serves your purpose, or what other collections there are in greater Washington, if you look at the larger scene? But in terms of garden history, there was not a lot of energy behind building a larger collection. Excuse me just a moment. It's such an important question. I never thought that they pushed to really establish a base at Harvard. Betty went up there and taught and she was very unhappy, and I think she left after a year, was that right?
INT: I'm not really sure of the exact timing, but I've heard that.
WHA: After she had retired, or left Dumbarton Oaks. It should have been something they were taking a major leadership role, either at Harvard or someplace else, and as far as I know they played no role in the development, say, that John Dixon Hunt has done at the University of Pennsylvania. That's just larger because of his energy, but he's singular in the sense that there's not any others I can think of. Unlike the scene in England, where garden history has a much larger network and resources. Also garden history is built into the whole culture of Great Britain; it's part of their personality, and they see that. Gardening not only at every level, even at the academic; when you think of the great physical artifacts of gardens, the great Royal Gardens are in England, some of them, and it goes back three hundred years. So you can understand why – and we don't have anything like that, and there really isn't, in my opinion, an indigenous American garden style. Not that this had anything to do with Dumbarton Oaks but I'm just saying that we're no different from Byzantine studies. True?
INT: Absolutely.
WHA: But I never felt that Dumbarton Oaks took the leadership that it might have, professional leadership in terms of helping to build up any comparable academic programs. That may not be a factor.
INT: Do they exist now, or is this still a field that's developing?
WHA: I don't know; I'm out of touch with a lot of what's going on now. But just in looking over journals and things – I've given my own garden history library away, I don't have it here now; it was in another building here. It was a working library solely. I gave it to the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, because my family comes from there. I felt again there were no real resources for anyone interested in the subject in that part of the world. And there aren't. But I'm just saying Dumbarton Oaks never really saw its role, and there may be a lot of reasons, a lot of political reasons, academic reasons in terms of Harvard. But it seems to me they could have done more. The garden conferences, are they still going on?
INT: Yes.
WHA: I used to get the programs regularly, but I didn't attend them. I thought the subject matter had gotten somewhat off the track; just looking at it over-all, there wasn't enough interest for me, but that's just a personal point of view. The real quality of it, I don't know.
INT: Well, I think you've answered most of our questions. I wonder, unless there's anything that we've left out that you can think of –
WHA: No, I think your last question is one I haven't said enough, but I've just put in my two cents.
INT: I wonder if in closing if you might talk a little bit about what you see, especially from your position as a person in Georgetown in the earlier days of Dumbarton Oaks, what the Bliss and the Farrand legacies are for Dumbarton Oaks.
WHA: Well, the institution itself is obviously their great legacy and I don't know what one could say beyond that. I didn't know either the Blisses or Beatrix Farrand – at least her work is a physical document that is studied periodically, and worried over in terms of its conservation and so on, and that's alive in that sense, and there's a great deal of academic interest and so on quite apart from the public interest. I don't know if the Blisses are fading. I doubt if anybody other than – I think it's so important institutionally to do what you're doing, for a lot of reasons, though I don't know who or how it will be made available.
INT: It will be placed in the Archives.
WHA: In the Archives? But I've been on a number of boards and I've always felt that when board-members come on, they usually have so little historical perception of an institution, just because of the nature – by the time they go off the board it's too late, and with rotating boards and so on. So I think that having this institutional history is very important; how it's disseminated or how it can be boiled down and useful, I have no idea. It seems to me there ought to be something that could go into a kind of handbook for directors and staff and any board functionaries – seems to me that would be important. Doesn't have to be published but it certainly would be something that would be – because otherwise the Blisses are fading. I doubt the staff has any idea now. Is that true?
INT: For the most part. Dumbarton Oaks did found an Archives I guess in the eighties or around that time. So there has been some formal attempt to collect what they call "Blissiana."
WHA: Blissiana?
INT: Yes. I've just noticed, and we work a lot with the Archives, that directors of study will come down for each of the programs quite a bit and take folders. The most major players, I think. There's an attempt to look back, but whether everyone else at Dumbarton Oaks does, I don't know.
WHA: No, of course not. Beatrix Farrand is a major figure unto herself, obviously, and her collection should have been there. But nothing can be done about that. Maybe copies of all of her papers should be part of – it seems to me that would be just the normal, natural thing.
INT: Thank you so much, you've been very helpful.]]>
KP: I met David Keogh, a dentist, who urged me to come to Dumbarton Oaks as a volunteer. I was interviewed by Chris Blazina and it was an awesome place. This was around, let me think, I would say it was around 2001. And I was there for quite a while, and I'm still there and I love the place. I remembered the feeling of awe. That experience was like a rapture walking into that Music Room. I mean there's so much history hitting you in the face, and I saw the virginal, and I saw the harpsichord, and I knew that Kirkpatrick had played there and Wanda Landowska, who was at that time world famous as a harpsichordist. I personally didn't care for her playing – emboldened to say because it was so brittle. But Kirkpatrick was fabulous and I went to several concerts there. For me, the most overwhelming experience musically was when this person came into the hall for rehearsal with us. I was in a little chamber orchestra. We were all members of the National Symphony and Paul Callaway of the Washington Cathedral was going to conduct us. If I recall correctly, this singer, a soprano, was going to sing excerpts from The Magic Flute of Mozart. Now who can dislike Mozart? Anyway, this woman came into the room and standing next to the conductor said, "I want to apologize right off the bat for my voice. I've just come from Australia and my throat is dry and I'm sure I'm not going to be able to sing very well, but I ask for your patience with me." And she started to sing, and it was breathtaking. I found tears coming down my face. It was just overwhelming. It was so beautiful. Mozart of course, for me, is exquisite and this voice building it was so marvelous. I had played the Magic Flute several times with the Washington Opera Company. And so I was so smitten with it all, and I had some wonderful things to play on the bassoon. And it was just a thrilling experience. Who else?
AS: Of course, that turned out to be Joan Sutherland.
KP: Yeah, I think that's her name. She was extraordinary.
AS: What year was that?
KP: I'm not good at that. But I would guess its – why do you not have those programs available?
AS: I think they're in the Archives, although I couldn't – I work for the archivist, but I'm not intimately familiar with the Archives myself. I think that what we're trying to go back and collect now are impressions and what it was like to be there that weren't necessarily recorded on the program.
KP: I see. Well, you know, people ask me over the years, as they have other musicians, "Why do you need a conductor? I see you just looking at the music." And I said, when you drive a car, do you not see what's on the side? On the right, on the left, what's going on in back and what's going on in front? You see it all. You can't be a musician without peripheral vision. And so they get an idea of what I'm talking about. Anyway, I would be turning and be seeing these treasures in the Music Room. I'd come home just thrilled, and my wife would say, "Gee, you look like you could light up a room you're so excited." I'd tell her about –
AS: Did you play concerts after you were a docent or these were earlier?
KP: This was before. I became a docent around, let's see, this is 2009 – maybe 2002 or 2003. And I'm talking now about the mid-1960s, I think.
AS: Was this still when Mrs. Bliss was alive? Do you ever remember interacting with her?
KP: I think she was still alive.
AS: Because I know she was a great patron of the concerts.
KP: Yes she was. She hired Nadia Boulanger, who was the foremost pedagogic person to conduct, and it was only because – let me start over. Mrs. Bliss asked Igor Stravinsky to write a work to celebrate their anniversary – their 50th. And he decided to do that, and when it was finished she asked him to come over and conduct it. He was ill, so Nadia Boulanger conducted it. It was a symphony in E♭. I love Stravinsky. He was – there was a lot of devil in him. And he wrote the kind of piece – just joyful and wonderful and disjointed, as music often is. He went through phases. He was like a tailor. He would go through different styles. I loved the woodwind quartet. I loved the L'Histoire du soldat, which is very worth hearing. So many good things. But anyway, Leontyne Price sang there with us. Jennie Tourel, who might be known to you. She was famous, in any case. Ralph Kirkpatrick, yes, he was just a wonderful harpsichordist. And Alexander Schneider, who played violin in the Budapest String Quartet.
AS: These were all around the mid-1960s?
KP: Yes. Howard Mitchell who started out as the solo cellist in the National Symphony when it was a very young orchestra, and then became finally its conductor – that was after Kindler – Hans Kindler. And Mitchell was not a great conductor, but almost adequate. I wouldn't talk like this, except he's gone.
AS: He conducted at Dumbarton Oaks?
KP: Mitchell? Yeah. He also – just a little bit–but he also played a Hindemith cello concerto, which is a very fine work. He really stumbled over that. Paul Callaway was the conductor. And Paul Callaway was the chief musician at the Washington Cathedral – the National Cathedral. What else can I tell you?
AS: I wonder if you, having attended these concerts in the mid-1960s – that was a very different era, I think, of Dumbarton Oaks, than I've seen now. From what I understand, there were very much society events.
KP: It was indeed. I had to listen to rehearsals, in those days – yeah, it was very hoity-toity. Hoity-toity.
AS: So, you would be playing for the who's who of Georgetown and of Washington, DC.
KP: I suspect. Exactly
AS: I don't know if there are any particular – if you had any interaction with them –
KP: Well, there are people on the National Symphony Board who were very well heeled or they wouldn't have been on that board who came to those concerts. I was a fairly prominent member of that orchestra and – I mean when you walk on stage with something as big as a bassoon, and there's one right behind you that I turned into a floor lamp.
AS: That's neat.
KP: Isn't it nice?
AS: It must make you stand out, I guess.
KP: Yeah. In any case, I got to know some of these people. We were friendly. We had kind of a relationship over the years. And among them, there were some people that became very good friends.
AS: And they were all patrons of the Dumbarton Oaks concerts?
KP: Not all, but some.
AS: Speaking of the National Symphony Orchestra, you are, I think, the perfect person to ask about the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and the National Symphony. It sounds like you came to know of Dumbarton Oaks through the National Symphony. Is that fair?
KP: I think that's a reasonable assumption – playing those concerts. I spoke in hushed tones in that place and, yeah, I was amazed by it all.
AS: You said that the same people who were National Symphony musicians knew people at Dumbarton Oaks, or was there a formal relationship there?
KP: No. It was very casual and very singular.
AS: Did Dumbarton Oaks have a place in the Washington, D.C. music community that you know?
KP: No.
AS: It's an isolated place.
KP: Yeah. The attitude now has changed markedly. They want people to come in, which is a big change. My feeling when I came into the place to be a volunteer was, don't come and see us – we'll let a few people come through – let me see your nails and hair; you need a shave. I make fun, but it had that feeling.
AS: This was in the 1960s too?
KP: Yeah
AS: And do you remember a moment when that changed? A decade when that began to be different? Or was it not really until you came back to be a docent?
KP: I think it was more when I came back. The head of the docents had a lot to say about the attitude of the docents, how they felt about it. And Chris Blazina, who's been with the docent program with some time – very hard-working, dedicated person. And it's become very professional, even though it's voluntary. And she has a wonderful grasp of how to deal with kids and how to keep them interested and how to arouse their curiosity, and so on. And she's very good that way – and how to talk to adults about these things and ask them questions so that it heightens their curiosity about what they're looking at. And that's fun.
AS: Shall we talk a little bit about the docent program and your experiences of that? I wonder what you recall about the docent training process. You talked about your hiring a little bit, but the training experience?
KP: The training was very demanding. I think we met a couple times a week, maybe two or three times a week. And we had lectures with the heads of departments. They were learned in their field. The pre-Columbian people knew what they were talking about. They could discuss a piece and its history and its aesthetics and all that. It was very exciting. I was – in 1959 the National Symphony took a tour of all of Latin America starting in Mexico and going down the west coast into Panama, and then going through – let me think – what's next going south? Chile and we went to Peru and Argentina and we came out through Paraguay and Uruguay and then Brazil. It was fascinating and fabulous: three months – a tour of three months. I remember Fanny and I – my wife and I – discussing the ramifications of that three months away from my children and her. And I said, well Fanny, I'm going to buy us a house. We had a two-bedroom house and it was inadequate. And she bought us this house. And this is 1969.
AS: That was your first interaction with pre-Columbian –
KS: Yeah I went to fincas where I could dig and find pieces–I found a pipa–a little pipe. It was pre-Columbian. And other shards, pieces of pottery. And I went to all the museums. There was a gold museum – museo de oro – a gold museum and – there was a floor made of skulls, believe it or not. A lot of gold. It was exciting, to say the least. Anyway, I had that feeling of what a thrill of seeing the pieces for the first time. So when I came back, it wasn't long after that that those pieces at the National Gallery of Art arrived–In the basement, neglected. And that's what had Mr. Bliss order a museum wing just to take care of his collection.
AS: This is the exhibition at the National Gallery?
KP: No, it was at the National Gallery – a lot of wonderful pieces that Bliss owned but had no place to show. This was before the wing that now holds them.
AS: Right, the Johnson –
KP: Yeah, and that is so gorgeous – inside, outside, all that glass. Gorgeous. Anyway – what?
AS: Well, back to your experience as a docent. I get the feeling that there are a lot of interesting individuals and groups that come through Dumbarton Oaks. I wonder if there are any particularly memorable groups that you led on tours.
KP: Some of the groups were strictly garden people, and they wanted to know everything about the gardens and they were gardeners on a high level. And I didn't do any gardening work while I was playing Beethoven and Mozart, so I – and I felt at a loss, but I tried.
AS: There's a lot of garden clubs and things like that that come through.
KP: Oh yes. And people who love roses. I remember one group that I took through – and this is true what I tell you. It's true. I said, "Do you see this Ingrid Bergman rose?" That's what it's called. An Ingrid Bergman rose. And I said, "You know, when the National Symphony moved to its present site in the Kennedy Center – we were before that at Constitution Hall, which was a horrible place for music. It was just awful. And here we were in a new hall. And Antal Doráti was the conductor at the time had a press conference. And he spoke to a few members of the orchestra – I was pleased to be one of them – and to people from various cultural entities. And it was very gala and festive. And they had shrimp trays and lobster trays and any kind of drink you could think of. And I took advantage of all that largesse and I got a little tipsy. The room – the building, rather, was new to me at that time. My wife and I felt it was time to leave. We didn't want to overstay, and since the building was new to me, I wasn't sure where I could find an elevator to go to the parking garage. Finally, we found one. And the door opened on the elevator and I look at this woman–a beautiful woman, and I say to her, "Are you Ingrid Bergman?" And her head goes down and she says, "Yes." And I said, Ms. Bergman, may I kiss you? And she said, reluctantly, "Yes." And I kissed her on both cheeks and that was that."
AS: It was a lucky time to leave.
KP: So, that's my story of the Ingrid Bergman rose. But anyway, what can I say?
AS: So, you also did a lot of school groups coming through.
KP: Oh yes. With the children, some are very interested and some are not. It's so important not to be a naysayer, but to encourage curiosity. "What do you think this is?" "What do you do with that?" "What would you do if you had it?" It was a lot of fun.
AS: These are local area schools?
KP: Yes. Some from out of town. Hagerstown, Benson, Baltimore.
AS: I wonder – oh yes. You were involved with the docent program for about five years?
KP: About five or six years.
AS: In that time did you notice, were there any major initiatives or changes to the program?
KP: There have been changes in emphasis, I would say, and changes for the better. I tend to speak colloquially. I don't want to worry about trying to sound erudite and I want people to remember something. So, I made it a point not to overload visitors, but to pick out a few pieces and really let them become familiar with them. And always to say please come back. I think I was a decent person at communicating in a friendly way.
AS: By changes in emphasis, you mean changes in the style of –
KP: Yeah, it was much more formal. Now, with so much information on the wall for these pieces, we're more reduced to saying, "If you have any questions, I would be happy to try to answer them." Before, you could tell them the whole thing – the story about the piece. So, that's a big change – a big change. In the Byzantine wing, it's more possible to tell people things. It's a wonderful collection of Byzantine artifacts. Yeah, that's what I remember. I can't get specific about how things – you know, how things change sometimes; it's very gradual. I don't say, oh listen to this; we're going into another phase.
AS: Well, I think one thing that tends to change over the years is how – and you already touched on this – is how Dumbarton Oaks interacts and reaches out to the public – or not.
KP: Okay, I'm a volunteer, as is my wife, at the Phillips Art Gallery. We were there only a couple of times a month, and they would hand information about the other museums and art galleries in town. And if people asked where is the this or the that, we could give them a sheet of paper with that information. There was nothing about Dumbarton Oaks. And I asked Chris Blazina, "Why don't we tell people about Dumbarton Oaks? It's so unique." And she said, "Well, we're working on it." And I think they were talking about it.
AS: And I think it's – just now we're getting a brochure made up – changing as we speak.
KP: Right. Exactly. But now it's not surprising on a Sunday afternoon in nice weather to have hordes of people to come into the garden – and how deserted the galleries are.
AS: Beautiful. Did you ever attend any of the concerts in the gardens?
KP: No.
AS: Because I understand that they took place.
KP: Well, it's obscure. And that's why it's so important to look in the Archives to see if there's any information. It seated fifty people, is my understanding. And they could somehow cover the pool – either drain it or cover it – and I got the idea that they did string quartets there and they did theater. But I'm not sure. And I've heard different opinions.
AS: I wonder, while we're talking about concert locations, if you might talk about the acoustics in the Music Room, because that's an unusual setting, is it not?
KP: Yes, it is. They are not ideal. They are not terrible, C+. It's because the surfaces are so hard and it's not built for, really, for playing. I mean a string quartet wouldn't be that bad, but it's louder than it would be in a different kind of setting where there is absorbable material that can soften things. On the other hand, it's so exotic and wonderful. I should think a string quartet would be just thrilled to play.
AS: It's a beautiful and historical place to play – that's certainly for sure. I meant to ask you earlier if you – you've had a chance to watch the concerts in that room from the sixties to really recent years.
KP: I watched and played in the sixties and seventies.
AS: Yes. And, given that span of time, have you seen a change in the type of performer and program that Dumbarton Oaks puts on?
KP: Well a lot of it is chamber music, string quartets. There's one group, I think they are from France, and they played Baroque instruments and a copy of an early bassoon. I got tickled hearing, because it's a good thing that it became obsolete. And I could understand it. Those instruments were built to be performed at in a small room. In the 1600s, 1700s, audiences were all invited, and they were very few. They might have fifty people at most – would be an audience. So the instruments didn't have to be efficient in projecting sound. And so the violins played very quietly and the bassoons sounded like the tea was ready. But they played an instrument, it was a conically bored horn – I think it was an animal horn. It was called a cornetto. And it had a tiny little mouthpiece, I mean tiny. And I couldn't - with all my experience blowing into instruments - I couldn't understand how this man was producing all this wonderful playing. It was like a soprano trumpet. And you really had to be a knowledgeable musician to get what you wanted out of that. It was quite wonderful. The concerts, I think, all through these years have been varied in a nice way. Singers, less singers now, we haven't had a vocal kind of concert for a long time. And we did have some famous people as I have mentioned. But now it's mostly instrumental.
AS: Is there a tradition of these kinds of educational instrumentals? With a lot of historical instruments that you are talking about, that are rare instruments, is there a component to that?
KP: I'm not sure I understand what your question is.
AS: I guess you were talking about some rare or historical instruments –
KP: Oh you mean like the cornetto? I gave a paper to my colleagues there about those early instruments and explained the size of the concert hall and the makeup of the audience was such that instruments didn't have to do extraordinary things to be heard. And it was when Beethoven started becoming famous and when the public was welcome because it was now a means of making wealth. They were charged for entering the concert hall, so the more the merrier. And Beethoven wanted to be, you know, recognized. In Mozart's time, it was still small audiences. So, when Beethoven became popular, they had to change the harpsichord into a piano. The early pianoforte was kind of half way between piano and a harpsichord. And then it became a piano that had this projection that was quite magical and that was appropriate for a big a hall. I did play for over two thousand people.
AS: By comparison, Dumbarton Oaks would be a small venue.
KP: That's why they could play those ancient instruments.
AS: I think – make sure I haven't – I did mean to ask you – well no I think we –
KP: Let me go back to something. Strings on violins and cellos were gut strings, made of cat gut. When they had to have more volume out of them in these bigger halls, they switched to metallic, long strings and it made all the difference in the world. And that's what they had to do. The bassoon, the oboe, the flute – they all changed. Early flutes, fancy flutes, where made of, oh my goodness, there were gold flutes and so on. The materials had to keep up with the times.
AS: Do you see a fluctuation in concerts with historical instruments? You talked about the varied nature of the concerts, singers versus historical instruments, very different things. Were they changing who attended these things? Were they members of the musical community or the public?
KP: I, you know, I have to imagine. I don't have any first hand information, hard information, but it seems to me, when my wife and I go to a concert there, these people are well educated in general and somewhat sophisticated, concert-goers. Beyond that I can't say. I go if it's something that I really want to hear and not tired of having heard it over the years. And people like the concerts. They really like them.
AS: Have any of the concerts – or as a volunteer, did you interact with any of the Dumbarton Oaks Directors? Were any of them hands-on enough that –
KP: No, only the person in charge of the concerts.
AS: So, that would have been? Let's see –
KP: Valerie.
AS: Yeah.
KP: Very nice person. I don't know if she's still in that position.
AS: Still involved, I know.
KP: I think she did the contact work and maybe even selected the groups, proposed them. I don't know.
AS: Well, you've answered – you've anticipated some of my questions and answered them very completely. And, unless you have other things to add, I wonder if I may ask a sort of summary question of you. Is there anything I missed?
KP: I don't know how to summarize what I said.
AS: Oh no, I wouldn't have you do that. I wonder – In some ways you've had a unique position because the parts of Dumbarton Oaks in which you've been involved are unique really. I mean the Friends of Music Program and the docent program are some of the only things that Dumbarton Oaks does to really engage with the Washington community and community outside the scholarly one which resides here and is really the center of Dumbarton Oaks. Because you come to the institution from that perspective, I wonder if you have any idea how these programs have maybe changed Dumbarton Oaks or impacted the research centers there or how they could in the future?
KP: How they've impacted?
AS: Yes. I mean is there a communication between these types of events and the scholarly centers?
KP: I think the museum director is a very nice guy. I'd better not say any more. He's a very nice guy and it's a very refreshing change. I am not crazy about this introduction of putting pieces, historically different, in the mist of a collection. For instance now you can walk into the gardens and you seem something stuck in there, nothing to do with the garden at all. It's a piece of sculpture of some sort.
AS: You are talking about the modern art installation?
KP: Yes. I don't care for it.
AS: It's caused quite an uproar I understand among the visitors.
KP: Yeah. I don't understand it, and I'm not crazy about it. Beyond that, I just think the pieces there are what make it, and they are plenty good and they don't have to be enhanced by some kind of foreign intrusion, aesthetic intrusion that doesn't make sense. That's my view.
AS: And others share it, that's what we've heard. Well thank you for meeting with me today, I really appreciate it.
KP: Oh, it's a pleasure. I wish I could have been more loquacious.
AS: No, no, no, you were fine.]]>
EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.
AS: And Anne Steptoe.
JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?
EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?
JNC: Yes, I was.
EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.
JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?
JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen's home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!
JNSL: What did you dress up like?
JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn't particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.
AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?
JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early '70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.
EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?
JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.
AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?
JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the "Age of Spirituality" exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.
AS: How often did those occur?
JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.
JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?
JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.
JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?
JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!
EG: When was that?
JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in '92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, "I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off." And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, "Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?" And I said, "Yes." So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.
EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?
JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.
AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?
JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn't been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it's very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies
JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?
JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term "ivory tower," in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.
EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?
JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, "I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?," there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses' gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don't think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.
AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?
JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses'– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s' correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say "Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal," and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, "Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel," and she said, "Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what." And I said, "You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called "master chronology," that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?
JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.
EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?
JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, "The Collector's Microbe," where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this "home of the humanities," the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn't a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses' initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.
JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?
JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.
AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?
JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.
JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?
JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. The artist who did that sculpture was Francis Sedgwick. A cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter, and she still had it. So, after much convincing and effort, the daughter agreed to make a new mold from her sculpture from which our Pan was recast. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.
EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?
JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.
EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?
JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.
EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?
JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled "Collector's Microbe," which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection "singular," and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.
EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?
JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.
JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?
JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.
JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.
JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it's all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.
EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate 'til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?
JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners' court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?
EG: Academically.
JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm "in-house." I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.
AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?
JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.
EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?
JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.
JNSL: Thank you very much.
JNC: Thank you very much.
JNSL: It's been wonderful.]]>
ABF: We are Anna Bonnell-Freiden and Clem Wood, and we are here with Henry and Eunice Maguire to talk about their involvement at Dumbarton Oaks over the years at their house in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 3, 2008. So, we'd like to start by asking you about your impressions of the social and intellectual atmosphere at Dumbarton Oaks when you first arrived, in 1971.
HM: Eunice…
EM: Oh, I shouldn't really be the one to start because you were the one who was the Junior Fellow – but maybe if that means I have less to say, I should go ahead.
HM: Well, you did more socializing.
EM: Well, we were both graduate students at that time, and I think even I – though I had not originally been an advisee of Professor Kitzinger's – was by that time. In fact, it was he who had first welcomed us to on our first visit, when we were still undergraduates; and Henry paid his first visit to America during the winter vacation of my senior year – and that turned out to be a very important visit, our visit to Dumbarton Oaks, and meeting him, and having his interest encourage us both in our directions. We were both interested in Byzantine art, but I was – no, we were also both interested in Western medieval art. And he encouraged both interests. So, I was, I think, still casting about, perhaps, either to narrow my thesis topic or to find a doable one for him, at the time you had your Junior Fellowship. So, it was a wonderful opportunity for me too, and I found all the staff and fellows very friendly and welcoming, and, of course, I was very excited to be given a seat in that fabulous library. The reading room was upstairs where, now, the Director of Studies office is and the outer office. It was all one big room with the long tables across; and I was lucky that I was given a seat near the window, so I had the sense of the garden being there. And I was sitting at the same table opposite Irina Andreescu, and behind me was Nancy Ševčenko, just to give you a sense of the atmosphere and the contemporaries. Also, the photographic resources…the photo collection, which was at that time under the care of Marlia Mundell – before she was married – and the other photo resources were very helpful to me because my work has always been quite visual; and I was looking for material which hadn't been published in the way in which I wished to approach it. So, that was very important, as were the museum collections, though I didn't know at the time that I would end up as a museum person. And there were many informal opportunities for stimulating conversations. The only disappointment was – and this maybe will come under one of your other questions, but – at that time, there was an official ban on inviting spouses to lunch in the Fellows Building. And, of course, a lot of the intellectual, informal intellectual conversation goes on – or used to – at those lunches, maybe even more than now, because I think people tended to go more all at the same time then, for lunch, because it was a smaller group. So, I did feel excluded in that sense and I felt that I was penalized for being a scholar, because scholars…scholarly colleagues were allowed to be invited, but if you happened to be a scholarly colleague and also a spouse, you couldn't; and I wasn't the only one who suffered in this way, among the various couples who were there over the years. The one who wasn't a spouse…I mean, the one who wasn't a Fellow, until that rule changed, couldn't mingle with colleagues in the Fellows Building; that was the only drawback, as far as the social and intellectual atmosphere goes.
HM: Although I would say that lunches were rather formal affairs and often were eaten in silence because the Junior Fellows were afraid to say anything because they would reveal their ignorance, and the senior faculty – and there were a fair number in those days – they often weren't on speaking terms with each other. So, they didn't speak either. So I'm not sure you missed an enormous amount, except for the food, which was quite good.
EM: Well, the other drawback for me, of course – and that was jumping ahead to your question about daily routine – that my time was really circumscribed by the challenge of finding affordable childcare, or childcare that was affordable to two graduate students. So, I remember that one Saturday, Irina Andreescu said, "I think it's outrageous that you can't come to lunch. I'm going to invite you and Gavin"; so, this was our son who turned two at the end of January that year. "And, because they might not approve of that, I'm going to do it on Saturday." So, I think…I don't remember whether lunch was served on Saturday, but I do remember we were the only people in the room. But she made a point of bringing me in to have lunch with her on Saturday to have lunch with her, with this tiny child on my lap.
HM: So, you asked about parties. There was one memorable…one party I remember that year was a Guy Fawkes party, which was organized by Charlotte Roueché, who was actually not officially a Fellow. She was somewhat in the same position as Eunice. She had a fellowship, I think, from Newnham, but she elected to spend it as D.O.; but since she wasn't officially a D.O. Fellow, she couldn't come to the lunches and this kind of thing. Anyway, she organized this Guy Fawkes party in the Fellows Building; and everyone was there, including Paul Lemerle, who was one of the senior visitors at that time. And I remember our son…he had some grandchildren, so he was very taken with our son, and our son was spreading marshmallows on his lapels. They were roasting marshmallows in the fire.
EM: Yes, and Lemerle was dressed very formally in a beautiful dark suit, and there were these sticky little fingers all over his suit [laughter].
CW: Where was this?
EM: In the Fellows Building, facing the fireplace. We actually roasted marshmallows and maybe even hotdogs in the fireplace.
HM: In those days, there were some interesting parties there. There was another party, which I think was on one of our later visits, when Seka Allen…I asked her for a recipe for a punch, and she came up with some sort of strawberry punch which she said was delicious, and it was, but it was actually very potent, and many people went away somewhat tipsy.
EM: What I remember was the Halloween party, when people came in costumes. And some of the Pre-Columbian Fellows wore, kind of, Day of the Dead masks; and it was wonderful to see them dancing in those, even with the mask of the back of the head, so the boots were pointing in the opposite way from what seemed to be the face. And I remember that the Magaws came as Justinian and Theodora and danced very elegantly in those costumes.
ABF: So did a lot of your social life revolve around the Fellows' Building at that time?
HM: Quite a lot of it, yes, because that was one place where you could have large gatherings, because the apartments that D.O. provided were very small. But, of course, we had a social life outside of Dumbarton Oaks as well. So, we knew some people in Washington
EM: But speaking of outside of Dumbarton Oaks, one thing I didn't mention that was amazing and, in those days, tremendously – a very useful privilege – was that they had runners to go to the Library of Congress to get books that were there but not at D.O. – which saved a lot of time. And later on, when the runners were stopped, they managed to get stacks privileges for us, so that we could go to the Library of Congress and find our own books. I think that lasted until the Library of Congress re-shelving system became so backlogged that it was impossible with a stack pass to find the books – which was too bad, but it was very – and I think, also, of course, it must continue with the Hellenic Center, the library. The cooperation between libraries was so facilitating. That was great.
ABF: Did you have a lot of contact with the Center for Hellenic Studies?
HM: No, not a great deal, no.
EM: I didn't, no. I think some people did who were dealing on philosophy topics, or something like that. But the art historians didn't, maybe because there weren't as many art history…
HM: The library is very not strong in art history, not nearly as strong as D.O., so we didn't really have much reason to D.O.
EM: The D.O. Byzantine library used to keep up with a very wide range of fields: lots of archaeological material, lots of ancient Greek and Roman, and lots of Western medieval, so it was very good for general research on Byzantine topics.
ABF: And so you often spent that year working in the library?
HM: Yes, essentially trying to finish my thesis. That's probably true of most Junior Fellows. You know, they arrive with an unfinished thesis and they struggle to get it done before the ax falls and they are ejected. I think that's a very typical experience. Usually, the first part of the year is more relaxed. I mean, I could tell when I was Director of Studies that there was a change in mood in the lunch room come about March. People would see the end of their fellowships and become much more serious.
ABF: So, in those first years, who were the scholars who had the greatest impact on you?
HM: Well, I mean, of course, my two supervisors – the supervisors of my thesis – had the greatest impact, though neither of them were at Dumbarton Oaks at the time; those would be Kitzinger and Ševčenko. But in later years, I came to know Alexander Kazhdan, and he had a very strong influence on my work; and perhaps also Robert Browning, in different ways. Kazhdan was very interested in social history, and obviously saints and saints' lives, and he also had a strong interest in Byzantine literature as literature, which in those days was somewhat unusual. Whereas, Browning was more of a philologist, but he was interested in Byzantine gardens, so I found a kindred spirit there; and he was also very, very kind in his advice. Even if you made horrible mistakes, he would point them out very kindly and set you straight, so I appreciated working with him.
ABF: And what was your thesis topic?
HM: The thesis topic…it was a slightly strange topic. It was about the ecphrases (which are descriptions of works of art) and specifically about one feature of them, which is that they often talk about the emotions of the figures in the scenes; and, in those days, sort of in the '60s, people didn't think of Byzantine painting as being emotional. It was connected with modernist painting and thought of as being abstract; and so, as a result, these ecphrases were thought of being essentially false, not giving a sort of correct impression of Byzantine painting. So, the thesis was partly, in a way, to exonerate the ecphrases and say that they did have something to say about what the Byzantines thought about painting and, secondly, to show that there was this strong emotional element in Byzantine art; and I focused on depictions of sorrow. And now, of course, this is absolutely perceived wisdom; I mean, people are very aware of this aspect of Byzantine art. But back then, you know when I told people the topic, they thought it was a sort of non-topic, because they didn't think there was such a thing as emotion in Byzantine art. Anyway, that was it.
ABF: But they believed in you.
HM: Well, eventually. Eventually, you know, I published it. Always with these things, you find that other people are working on the same lines. So, what you might imagine is a totally new and original direction that you are taking, you find that people at the same time in different places are doing the same thing. So, another scholar who worked on somewhat the same assumptions was Hans Belting, although in different ways. So, his work has been very influential. So, I think that yes now this is generally agreed that this is an important aspect of Byzantine painting.
ABF: Did you know Belting at D.O.?
HM: Belting – he came, yes.
EM: Yes, we met him there.
HM: Yes, we met him there on several occasions
EM: And there were other people too who were not officially posted or connected with DO over a period of time but who would come as readers or perhaps as speakers and stay for a few days; and one of those people who had a great influence on me, in encouraging me personally and helping me…giving me some courage with developing aspects of my work that were not simply visual, was Peter Brown, who was there for a whole semester reading everyday when he was teaching at Catholic University as a Mellon Professor – that was sometime before he was at Princeton. So, that was very helpful to me, because I was still working on my dissertation at that time, long-distance from my adviser. There were other people whose names you didn't mention, though all the ones you did mention were people who very much broadened my way of thinking and also gave personal encouragement, which is one of the wonderful things, I'm sure you would agree, about Dumbarton Oaks – people like Robert van Nice, who was there putting together the archival photographs and drawings, his amazing drawings of Hagia Sophia. His love for that one building really was inspiring; and I was working on a subject in architectural sculpture for my dissertation. And then I think I mentioned Megaw. Davis was another one of the great figures who was there off-and-on frequently; and John Meyendorff. And then, in the library, you mentioned Seka Allen. She was a bibliographer, as you probably know; but she did take a personal interest in everybody. She was a wonderful social pivot, really, because she knew – she and Irene Vaslef, the Byzantine librarian – knew what interests people had, more than we might discover by casual conversation among ourselves. And she would help – they both would help bring people together – as well as leading you to the right books, they would lead you to the right people to discuss some aspect that maybe you were just beginning to explore, which was another wonderful grace really, to have their attention to everyone. And ones' contemporaries – people slightly younger or slightly older – also had sometimes…quite by chance you would meet somebody in the stacks or you would see a book that somebody opposite you in the reading room was reading, and you would ask about it, and it would reinforce the direction you were just beginning to take or that you had been taking but you thought that no one in the field would approve of or encourage you to go in another way along a path that you were trying to follow. I remember conversations like that, for instance, with people like David Olster, who was working with antique texts when I was beginning to try to explore them in some unfamiliar directions – and Leslie MacCoull, when I was beginning to work with Coptic Egypt.
HM: I should mention that the second time I visited Dumbarton Oaks, when Ihor Ševčenko was still there; and he had been asked by Ernst Kitzinger if he could be the second superviser – reader – of my thesis; and he said, "Well, I'll have to examine this candidate first." So they flew me down from Cambridge to Dumbarton Oaks; and I met Ihor and Nancy for lunch. They gave me lunch in the building that is at the corner, where sort of S Street turns the corner – they had a house there. We had this long lunch, and he served two bottles of wine – I think we must have had the best part of one-and-a-half bottles of wine, between the three of us. So, at the end of this, he produced a couple of Byzantine epigrams and said, "Please translate these." Byzantine epigrams are not, you know, the easiest things to translate; but it just happened that I had already read these before. But I was able, in spite of my slightly inebriated state, to make sense of them.
EM: Maybe it helped.
HM: Maybe it helped, yes. So he said, "Okay, I'll take you on. I'll be your supervisor." So that was my exam [laughter].
CW: That's a great story; and was this when the library was still on the top floor of the Main House? You were working next to everyone?
HM: Yes, yes, yes. It was in those days it was before they even had air conditioning. So, yes, it was very hot up there in the summer. In fact, I think Dumbarton Oaks more or less sort of closed down in the summer. They didn't have summer fellowships. The faculty went off to the hills of Europe, and it was too hot to work.
EM: It was also very conducive to browsing because they had to extend the stacks underneath the eaves, so there were funny, kind of changes in level, which they carpeted over to make a little less hazardous. But, for me, it meant lots of places where I could sit, pull books off the shelf, spread them out, and see which ones I really wanted to take out and which ones I didn't. While I was doing that, I came across a number of very early, sometimes eighteenth- or nineteenth-century editions of books that I might or might not have heard of. And I started taking those down to Irene Vaslef, and that was the beginning of the rare book collection, which hadn't been separated from the other things at that time, as far as the Byzantine library went; and she asked me if I would continue to keep an eye out for things like that for her.
HM: It was very nice to be in the old library, sort of after hours, when it was more or less empty, and you could imagine yourself as a kind of French aristocrat in his chateau with all these books at your disposal, in strange places, in cupboards. It had a lot of character.
EM: I bet. There was that spooky closet behind the elevator, where some of the books were kept. When you went in there, you would hear the creaking of the elevator and somehow have the feeling that if somebody shut the door, you might never get out until someone else needed a book from there [laughter]
CW: So then after that year you went to Harvard right away?
HM: Actually, it was…Yes.
CW: Or was it after the second year?
HM: I had a year as a Fellow. Then I spent the year teaching at the University of Massachusetts and then to Harvard. And so then I had three years in teaching at Harvard and three years at Dumbarton Oaks.
CW: And were you…was that the first group of joint appointees?
HM: More or less, but there were joint appointees not only with Harvard but with other universities at more or less the same time. So, I think Rob Nelson, for example, had a joint appointment, I suppose, with Chicago, a little bit after mine. I'm not sure exactly what the chronology of them was, but there was a sort of a group of these joint appointments about the same time.
ABF: There was Michael McCormick as well.
HM: Yes, he was. I think maybe Ioli Kalavrezou had one as well, if I'm not mistaken.
CW: So, I guess you were at Harvard for the first three years, so that was really before the talk of moving Byzantine Studies there.
HM: Well, at Harvard there was really no talk of it. But as soon as I got to Dumbarton Oaks for the second three years, it was very much in the air. And it was a fairly tense time, actually, at Dumbarton Oaks, because the future was obviously very uncertain – especially that first semester or year, when, as you spoke of in your list of questions, the triumvirate was sort of taking over the duties of Director of Studies. That was a rather strange period.
EM: When was it that they lent highlights of the Dumbarton Oaks collection to the Fogg? I remember that we had a feeling that it was a kind of double-edged sword. Because, on one hand, it was very nice to see Byzantine things in Cambridge; but, on the other hand, we wondered, "Does that mean that they're thinking of moving the whole collection?" Because, if it does, it will mostly go underground, because, well, Harvard University Art Museums is now closed and planning an expansion, but they will always have to have a lot of wonderful things in storage because, unless they have everything out in study storage – in other words, storage rooms with everything visible to the public – there won't be room to display everything that they have; and clearly, a lot of the Byzantine things would go underground. And if that happened, then to some extent we saw that as emblematic as what would happen to Byzantine studies.
HM: Well, I think the main plan was to move the library and the fellowship program and, to be frank, the funds, up to Cambridge; and then to leave – obviously they couldn't move the gardens – and the gardens have their own endowment in any case, so they were going to leave them. And it seems they were seriously planning to do this, but then a number of alumni, powerful alumni, objected, so Harvard backed off. So it was people like Joseph Alsop, who kind of saved the – saved the intellectual aspect of Dumbarton Oaks for Washington
EM: Because he cared about Washington, as well as because he cared about Dumbarton Oaks
ABF: Who favored the move?
HM: I suppose, well – I think some of the professors at Harvard favored it because there would have been more money to spend there more broadly on the humanities, and it would have enriched the library at Harvard – and the books would all have been in one place. Because, it is true, that even today, there are gaps in the Widener Library that correspond to books that are at Dumbarton Oaks; so this is obviously irritating for Harvard professors. So – but I think it was mainly probably attractive to the administration because D.O. had a huge endowment (especially in those days it seemed very big), and it was being spent on what seemed like very esoteric subjects, and there was no teaching going on. So, I remember Bill Loerke, who was Director of Studies, you know, while this was all brewing up, had a visit from the Harvard – some people from Harvard, I don't know exactly who – he told me that they asked him what was going on at Dumbarton Oaks. He showed them all these books that had been published, shelves of them, and this made no impression on them at all – because, you know, what are sort of twenty feet of books compared to hundreds of students who could be supported with the same amount of money? So I think it was mainly the administration's scheme.
ABF: Was there talk among people at Dumbarton Oaks about the legacy of the Blisses, in so far as they had very specifically left the money for the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian programs?
HM: Yes, I mean, obviously that was one of the things people talked about. I think people were more worried about the future of Byzantine Studies; because, at that time, Dumbarton Oaks was – I don't want to go sort of into later questions – but it did at that time play a major role in the field because of its active fieldwork and the number of people who had been on the staff – Byzantinists who had been on staff at Dumbarton Oaks – and these joint appointments. So it was very important in promoting the field in America and abroad too. But, so, I think that was seen as being under threat; that, if they moved the endowment to Cambridge, then the money would have been spent just broadly on the humanities, so on Western medieval and on the Renaissance and history and all sorts of other fields as well. And the particular flavoring of Byzantium would have been lost. But, of course, it didn't turn out that way, so that was partly why, I think, we had this very strange situation of the three, sort of junior assistant professors playing the role of Director of Studies, which was strange, in a sense, because I was in charge of the publications; and so I was writing letters to senior scholars, you know, advising them on how they could improve their manuscripts, which probably didn't go down very well.
EM: How else was…I can't remember how else the responsibilities were divided up between John Duffy and…
HM: Irina Andreescu was in charge of fieldwork and John Duffy was in charge of the fellowship program.
EM: That's right.
ABF: And this is while you also had this joint appointment?
EM: Yes.
HM: This was, yes, when I'd moved down to Dumbarton Oaks. So, yes, I still had, officially, a joint appointment with Harvard, although I wasn't actually doing any teaching up there. I spent three years teaching at Harvard, and basically partly visited Dumbarton Oaks and then three years at Dumbarton Oaks.
ABF: And it was in those three years at Dumbarton Oaks when you began to pick up those responsibilities that had previously fallen upon the Director of Byzantine Studies?
HM: The Director of Byzantine Studies, yes. And then, at the end of the year, Giles Constable came as Director, and he assumed the responsibilities of Director of Studies himself. So, then we were sort of free to pursue our own research, so we had essentially two years of research fellowship – which was very nice.
ABF: So can you tell us more about that experience of working so closely with Irina Andreescu and John Duffy?
HM: Well, as far of the three of us were concerned, it went fairly smoothly. I actually, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with the publications. So, that worked fine. The uncomfortable part was the sort of political goings-on outside. For example, at the Byzantine Studies conference, we felt, I think, rather on the spot – people asking us questions: "What's going on, what's going to happen?" Which was really out of our hands. And, of course, people at Dumbarton Oaks were either nervous or angry or both, so.
ABF: And what were your responsibilities?
HM: Well, as I said, with the publications, it was mainly that I was in charge of the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. So, that would be, sort of, doing a first editing of manuscripts when they came in, finding readers for the manuscripts, sometimes suggesting ways that they could be clarified or improved, and, likewise, with the books.
EM: And putting pressure on authors who were taking a bit longer than expected.
HM: Yes, and on readers who were taking forever to read the manuscripts.
CW: And so then you were next directly involved with D.O., as a Senior Fellow in the '80s?
HM: Yes, yes, and that when was Angeliki Laiou was Director; and I think there was a feeling that they needed some kind of art history presence. So, what I basically did was to advise on matters of art history and read manuscripts or select books for the library and participate in seminars, and this kind of thing – and to some extent, to do some of my work
EM: That was when you were the Art History Adviser, you mean, which was different from when you were the Senior Fellow.
HM: Oh yes, that was when I was on the board of Senior Fellows, but that's a different…
CW: That was the Senior Research Associate?
HM: Well when I was at Dumbarton Oaks for that year, I was Senior Research Associate but I was also on the board of Senior Fellows, which means that we visited three times a year just for a day or two for meetings; but I wasn't in residence.
CW: Right, but you were for that year.
HM: For that year, yes.
CW: So you had been there at the end of the '70s, when the faculty…the permanent faculty, were disbanded?
HM: Well, I wouldn't say that they were exactly disbanded. They dwindled away. Under Giles Constable, they sort of dwindled. Then there was something of a revival under Laiou because she brought people in to work on various projects – but not with faculty status, but as research associates. So, the end of the faculty status, I suppose, would have been under Giles Constable; because, before his time, the Directors of Studies and many of the other people involved had the status of professors at Harvard University. And this, I think, actually was a fundamental change, especially as far as the Directors of Studies were concerned, because now the position of Director of Studies is a non-tenured position – it's for five years, which may be renewable. So, in effect, what that means is that you are not going to get anyone applying who already has tenure, unless they can make some sort of deal with their university to release them.
EM: And let them come back.
HM: And let them come back, which is what happened in my case, when I was Director of Studies – that I was able to get five years release from the University of Illinois; but it means that, for one thing, that person is unable to stay for more than five years, because no university is going to let you go for ten years, so. And, also, not all universities will do it; I mean, Harvard, for instance, won't let you go away for more than two years without losing your tenure. So effectively it means that now that candidates are restricted to people at the ends of their career – if they have five years left in their career, they spend it at Dumbarton Oaks – or younger scholars who maybe were unable to get tenure somewhere or are in some sort of unusual position where they don't have tenure; but it excludes, sort of people who are kind of in the most active portions of their career, who have tenure somewhere, unless they can make a sort of deal to leave short-term. So, it has very much weakened the position of Director of Studies, and it makes the Director of Studies much less active; because his position vis-à-vis – or her position vis-à-vis – the Director is much less strong than it would be if he or she had had tenure, so; but that was a major change.
EM: Had tenure at D.O., you mean?
HM: Well, at Harvard it would have been, effectively, because they had their tenure at Harvard, they were tenured professors. So, Kitzinger, for example, Loerke, were tenured Harvard professors.
ABF: Can you tell us about the publication of the Cypriot fieldwork that Alice Murray mentioned this to me at some point?
HM: Yes. Well, when I arrived as Director of Studies, I found all these unpublished projects, manly relating to fieldwork in Cyprus; and one of my, sort of, ambitions was to revive the fieldwork aspect of Dumbarton Oaks, and I thought this would be one way to do it. Because, one of the reasons that fieldwork had been abandoned was precisely because there was so much that hadn't been published, and so it was seen as sort of wasteful extravagance to do this fieldwork and not have it appear in print. So, that was my main motivation – and perhaps also because I'd visited many of these places in Cyprus and was interested in them. And it was mainly a matter of kind of fanning the embers of these various projects. I think the authors had become discouraged, and they received no encouragement from Dumbarton Oaks. It was just sort of finding ways to facilitate their taking up the projects again, finishing them; which sometimes meant bringing them physically to Dumbarton Oaks or sometimes it was just providing general encouragement and saying, "We really want to publish them." And, as you know, Alice-Mary has carried this on.
CW: So that was part of your agenda as Director?
HM: It was one part of it, yes. I think what I wanted to do as Director of Studies was to open the place up, because it had the reputation of being rather enclosed and elitist. So, I tried to bring more activity into the Byzantine area, which was also what Angeliki Laiou wanted to do – for the Byzantine Center to have a more active, as opposed to a passive role. So, the fieldwork was part of this; and I was able to institute one or two projects associated with fieldwork; for example, the materials analysis of Byzantine ceramics, where we had some of the ceramics at the Walters and at Dumbarton Oaks tested and then we had a small colloquium devoted to the subject. But I wasn't successful in starting any sort of major new fieldwork projects outside of the United States, and this was one of my regrets, I suppose. If I have one regret about my period as Director of Studies, is that we weren't able to sort of reestablish active fieldwork. All we did was we would give grants, small grants, to people. So, people would come to us and say they wanted to do X, and we would give them 5000 dollars; but we didn't initiate anything ourselves. And I think this is sort of a missed opportunity, considering what D.O. had done in the past. Actually, after I left Dumbarton Oaks, actually, I did do a project on the mosaics in Porec which was funded by the Kress and the University of Illinois; it's the kind of thing that I think should probably have been done by Dumbarton Oaks. But, that aside, there were various other ways that, umm, I tried to be more active. I introduced a museum fellowship. So, we would have someone come for a year and sort of plan a small exhibition. I think that was a valuable way to sort of bring together the Byzantine Studies Center and the collection and also to bring some variety into the collection, so it wasn't just a static display, but there was some change in the exhibitions in it. So, I think that was, on the whole, a success; and we tried to have colloquia and symposia that would interest, sort of, people in western medieval history and art, and even Renaissance and ancient. We tried to sort of integrate Byzantine topics into sort of a wider frame. For example, we had a colloquium on women's space in Byzantium and in the West. So, I suppose, efforts of that kind – also the fieldwork archives, I tried to get them properly looked after. And, I was even involved in sort of excavating Dumbarton Oaks itself. In the boiler room, we discovered these rolled up canvases which were the paintings of the frescos at the Kariye Camii – perhaps you've seen them. But they were exhibited, umm…
EM: At Columbia
HM: At Columbia, yes and then in Istanbul; but we found them sort of rolled up and shoved under the boilers. So we took them out, and then they were eventually restored at great expense and insured for thousands and thousands of dollars before they were sent off to Istanbul. But I think that Angeliki Laiou as Director – she was certainly able to kind of revivify the Byzantine area and make it more interesting and active than it had been before. I think it had slightly fallen into the doldrums before she arrived.
EM: Well, her encouraging you to set up both colloquia in areas that hadn't been explored before, such as the Byzantine gardens and her own intellectual interests extended the dialogues and the range of scholars who came, to some extent; because I don't remember very much before her on Byzantine economics as an aspect of cultural history or Byzantine law in relation also to the culture. And those were things that she continued to not only encourage herself with her own work but to bring scholars to present their work – that really opened up the fields for others who hadn't really thought about these areas, I think.
HM: Another thing we did was introduce the short-term graduate residencies. Now, as you may know, anyone who is working on their dissertation or general exams can apply to spend two weeks at Dumbarton Oaks, free of charge, to use the library. And that's been very popular.
EM: What about the summer fellowships? Did you start those?
HM: No, I think it was Giles who started that. After he'd air-conditioned the building, he started the summer fellowships, yes.
CW: The colloquium on Byzantine garden culture has been cited on several occasions as an example – perhaps the sole example – of interdisciplinary academic activity at D.O.; but it seems to have a positive enclave in there.
HM: Well, that was due to a number of factors coming together. One was Joachim who had a genuine interest in Byzantine culture and gardens. And the other factor, I suppose, is a sort of change in the nature of Byzantine archeology and art history; because, in the old days – in the days of empiricism – there was virtually nothing to say about Byzantine gardens, because none exist and none have been excavated. So, it was a sort of non-topic; but there are a lot of descriptions of real and imaginary gardens. So, once you move into the area of reception – etiology – there's quite a lot to say about Byzantine garden culture; and also you can make connections, then, with other fields of garden culture. So I think that helped make it possible.
EM: It was also under Joachim's directorship as Director of Studies for the Garden Center that Irene Vaslef proposed, successfully, that I do that inter-departmental exhibition, which I think was the first inter-departmental exhibition (though it was a library exhibition) called Roman Constantinople, with rare, illustrated books from the Garden Library and the Byzantine Library. And, then, in the process of working on that, I found and was able to display the Fossati prints of Hagia Sophia, which had been transferred for some reason, maybe because it was such a rare book. They were wonderful, large lithographs in full color of the interior of Hagia Sophia, published in, I can't remember what…was it the '60s or '70s of the nineteenth century? They had been transferred to the Garden Library and totally lost track of – there was no record that they existed anymore. The people researching in the Garden Library had no particular reason to be interested in them, and the Byzantinists didn't know they were there. So, I guess in a way, this was a kind of, in more ways than one, a groundbreaking collaboration, to mine the resources and bring them together. It was certainly very enjoyable, and well-received I think. One of the former Byzantine librarians at Dumbarton Oaks was then a librarian for the National Gallery, and she wanted to have the exhibition or another version of it there; and Irene got a grant for it, but somehow the three of us never had time to make that happen, unfortunately. But it shows you how Dumabrton Oaks collection – both book and other collections – and combined resources can really have an outreach; and Dumbarton Oaks has been able, while the collection was waiting for its new reinstallation, to lend things to exhibitions, as you know, in Georgia and here at The Walters, which I think had a great impact on not only Byzantinists but other people who saw them in those places, people who might not have visited Dumbarton Oaks to see the collections there. So, all that outreach is something that is still happening, I think, but started, sort of in the '80s or '90s – the '90s probably – so it's relatively recent. I can't remember what year that was. It must have been the early '90s.
CW: You've already – you've talked a little about Constable and Laiou, but do you have any other impressions of other Directors you've seen.
HM: Well, umm, when I was first arrived as Junior Fellow, Tyler was the Director, and he struck me very much as being a gentleman of the old school – very popular with the staff. Well, I remember, he gave a sort of interview with each of the Junior Fellows when they first arrived and he explained a little bit to me about the legacy of the Blisses. He said, "Well, they were wealthy, but not really very wealthy." It wasn't really very kind, but I think probably Dumbarton Oaks was beginning to feel the limits of its endowment; and there were, I think, some financial problems that were another reason, I should have mentioned, why Harvard may have wanted to move the operations north – you know, have them more closely supervised. But yes, he was a courtly gentleman. And then there was Giles Constable, who was really very controversial. And then Thomson, who – Robert Thomson, who kept a – steadied the ship and was a fiscal conservative Scotsman –
EM: – and a good listener, I think.
HM: And a good listener, yes, but he sort of calmed down under his tenure; and then Laiou, I said was active. And I see her tenure as a kind of second golden age almost for the Byzantine Center at Dumbarton Oaks. And that's really the extent of my personal experience with the directors of Dumbarton Oaks.
ABF: In summing up, if you could give us some general thoughts about how Dumabrton Oaks has changed, and how it's been important to you, and ultimately how you think it's changed the field, or responded to changes in the field.
HM: Okay, well that's a lot of questions [laughter]. So, first of all, how it has changed…I mean, in the old days, speaking of the Byzantine Center…was very much the dominant center at Dumbarton Oaks, and there were virtually no Fellows at all in Landscape Architecture or Pre-Columbian; and, on the other hand, in the '50s, I think there might have been up to eight permanent staff members in the Byzantine Center, many of whom would have been Harvard faculty. And over the years, there's been something approaching parity between the three programs; and the staff of the Byzantine program has really dwindled to the Director of Studies, in effect – and, of course, there are also the people associated with the Museum and the Archives. So, it's become much smaller. As far as the Library's concerned, because of the sort of huge expansion in the number of books being published, the Library's become much more focused. So, again, even when Eunice and I arrived there, as Eunice said, they were collecting book on western medieval art. Now, it's very much focused on Byzantium. So, it's become narrow in its focus. Finally, I would say that it's become much more passive, as opposed to the early days, when it was much more active. So, there are no fieldwork programs, at the moment I think there are very few projects. It's really a library, a place where people find fellowships, and a collection; but it's not a sort of center that actively promotes the field. So, I would see those as the main changes over the course of time. As far as the relationships with Harvard are concerned, I would say they are much closer now then they were. I mean, it was founded as an independent project of a wealthy couple; but, over the years, its ties with Harvard have become closer and closer: there are the three Harvard professors who are in Cambridge, not at Dumbarton Oaks; I believe there are some fellowships that are earmarked for Harvard students; the library catalog is integrated with HOLLIS. So, it's much more tightly bound to Harvard than it used to be. The Directors always come from Harvard. As far as its impact in the field is concerned, obviously it's much smaller. It was, you know, very important, in the early days. Now, you know, except as a place to go and find books or to have a fellowship or to look at some very important pieces, it's no more important than any number of other places where there are books and fellowships and some objects you could look it. So, it doesn't have that special importance it used to have. One way in which it probably still can have a very positive impact in the field in America is through joint appointments; which have been a little bit controversial, because sometimes the joint appointments don't work out. These are the appointments where they appoint a junior person, an Assistant Professor, at some university, and Dumbarton Oaks pays half of the salary for the first five or six years until that person gets tenure. And, in the past, this has been a very good way to persuade universities to take on Byzantinists, where otherwise, they might go for some other field. They haven't always worked out, because the person doesn't always get tenure; but, in those cases when it does work out (which may be about fifty percent of them), it's obviously very important, because a large number of the people who now have tenured positions in Byzantine Studies started out on these joint appointments. So, that's one way D.O. could continue to be every important in the field of Byzantine Studies here in America. Then as far as my own work is concerned, it's really been fundamental, you know, because, at all stages, I've been able to benefit from the library and from meeting people there. It's just a wonderful place for meeting other scholars and sort of getting ideas or exchanging ideas – especially, I would say, I'm afraid, more in the old days than now, when there were more people around, when it was more active, and there were more people to meet. But, you know, it's still a beautiful place, and still, especially for those of us who live in this area, it's a wonderful library to use.
EM: Well, there's still an active program of informal talks, which I'm sure are important for those who can give them and attend them; and that was another thing that was new, I think, in the '90s – which was very good, I think. And, unfortunately, because, as you see, it takes up a fair chunk of your day just to get between Washington and Baltimore, even though they're on the map very close, it hasn't been possible for us to attend those since we've been in Baltimore. So, maybe that sense of intellectual exchange is more present still than we've been able to appreciate since we've been here.
HM: Could be, could be, yes; and they certainly still have the symposia and colloquia, which are –
EM: – very good
HM: Very good, yes. I don't suppose it's possible, really, for the old days to return, because it was dependent on the largesse, in the first place, of the Blisses; and when the Blisses were no longer alive, obviously that font of fonts dried up, and D.O. had to live strictly within its means.
CW: It seems to be doing well for itself.
ABF: Yeah, financially, I think it's very stable, from what I understand.
HM: Well, I imagine with the sort of general decrease in the value of the Harvard endowment, Dumbarton Oaks has a prospect with that.
ABF: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
HM: No, just to thank you for coming and hearing our impressions of the past.
ABF: It was a pleasure.
CW: Yeah, thank you for having us. We're happy to hear them.
EM: We hope before you go, you'll tell us a little about yourselves.
ABF: Sure, we'll turn this off.]]>
BB: I was the assistant registrar at the National Gallery, and everything that came into the National Gallery or went out of it came through our office, so I saw all of those things. There had been a previous registrar, Charles Richards, some years before, who had been very interested in the pre-Columbian things and had worked with Mr. Bliss and his things. But largely the National Gallery was—still is—essentially a gallery of European and American painting, and they're not terribly interested in other things, although they certainly show them and give attention to them, and they recently opened those good sculpture galleries. But –
EB: How did Mr. Bliss come to have objects at the National Gallery?
BB: Mr. Bliss felt very strongly that his objects were art objects, and at that time there were – Cleveland had, the Cleveland Museum of Art had a few pre-Columbian objects in it. I think it was 1947 that the Bliss collection came to the National Gallery on loan. But there was no pre-Columbian collection in any art museum. The pre-Columbian things were all in ethnographic museums, natural history museums, but not art, and Mr. Bliss felt that they were art and should be shown in an art museum, and he talked to David Finley, the Director, and John Walker, the chief curator, and persuaded them that they would like to have his pre-Columbian objects on loan there. And indeed they were on loan there from 1947 until 1962, when Mr. Bliss died. So that's how they got there. Mr. Bliss was – I think sometimes probably things were sent in; I don't really remember all the details of that, but I do remember Mr. Bliss coming in, sometimes with a little object in his pocket, a piece of jade or something, and he would say, "I want you to see my latest temptation," or something like that. Or his chauffeur, a very nice man named Garrett, would come in with a basket or a box, or carrying some kind of package with another object to be seen, and these things were on deposit there. All these things were coming in after the 1947 installation of the collection, and they were beginning to pile up or – they weren't pileable – but they were multiplying in storage in the registrar's vault. And Lester Cook, who was a curator at the National Gallery, and I decided that we wanted to reinstall the collection, and we got the permission of John Walker and Mr. Bliss, and we had a great fun doing this. And there are some photographs, National Gallery photographs, of both installations, which can be compared. But the earlier installation had painted backgrounds. As I recall the general – the wall and the, most of the case backgrounds were of a sort of ecru color, but some of the case backgrounds were kind of brick red, and that was pretty good behind the gold. But we put in velvet and all sorts of textile-y things. We had a lot of fun with that. So we did use some of these things that Mr. Bliss had been bringing in.
EB: When did you do the reinstallation, Betty?
BB: I don't remember the exact year; it was in the late '50s.
EB: When did you – we're perhaps jumping ahead – but when did you come to the National Gallery, and if you could talk about that a little bit, because that was actually prior to your meeting Mr. Bliss, or –?
BB: Well, but I worked in other parts of the National Gallery and had not met him. I only knew him, really, when I was working in the registrar's office in the '50s. I occasionally saw him at a party somewhere; but I think that was after I knew him at the Gallery. I remember once meeting him at a cocktail party, and I guess I had a glass in my right hand – I don't know why I couldn't switch it around, but for some reason he extended his hand – and I had to give him my left hand, and I apologized for giving him my left hand, and he said, "Oh, that's very good: it's closer to your heart." He was a very elegant man, a very nice man. He was a good diplomat, I think. He was a tall man with very fine carriage, not really a handsome face, but a good face; and, a quiet man, but a very perceptive and humorous man. Often – and I think you've heard one story that he came in one day, and I took him into the registrar's vault for some reason, where his things were – it must have been when we were doing that installation, where we had an object truck with drawers in it, and in one of these we had taken out the Wari things. And there was a Wari hat under these piled cloth hats, and I had put in it that tiny Wari mosaic man which is, I think, less than an inch tall. And I think I had put it in the hat because it had no case of its own, and that was a good safe, soft place for it. But when Mr. Bliss came in there with me, I thought, "Boy, that doesn't look like very good curatorship, and so –" And Mr. Bliss looked at it and said, "He capsized." So he was quite delightful. He was very well groomed, very well tailored, and he stood well and he looked good. Those were the days when men wore white shirts and occasionally, if you were doing something very informal, you might wear a blue shirt, and Mr. Bliss came in one day and I thought, "He's got on a pink shirt!" And as I got closer to him I realized it wasn't a pink shirt; it was a shirt of very fine white and red stripes, so this was the sort of elegance.
EB: A striped shirt was more formal than a pink shirt.
BB: Well, somehow it looked – a pink shirt, it had a sort of other connotation, but when it was a red-and-white striped shirt, that was rather finer – in my mind, anyway.
EB: So, when he would bring the objects in, he would bring them himself? Would he set up an appointment, or would he just arrive, or –?
BB: No, he had a secretary, Mrs. Hassan, I think she was Catherine Hassan, whom I knew on the telephone for years, but I didn't meet her until after he died. But she would call and say, "Mr. Bliss would like to come and bring something in," and I would say, "Fine." So it was always set up.
EB: So, what was it like to work with him? You talked about some of your interactions, at the National Gallery, but are there others that are particularly memorable?
BB: There's one memorable one, which is really a very tiny thing, and yet it made an impression on me. We were in the storeroom one day, in the wrapping room, and Mr. Bliss was in there with me, and I was apparently wrapping up something for him, and he was standing there beside me, and we were talking, I think, and as I got to the point where I had to tie the string on, immediately Mr. Bliss' finger came down to hold this knot in the string. I mean, this is a very small thing, but there are an awful lot of people in the world who would not think to do that or not bother to do that, and that impressed me.
EB: I can certainly see why.
BB: But those are the kinds of relationships I had with him, and I –
EB: Did he talk to you at all about his love for pre-Columbian art or his particular interest in that?
BB: He made it obvious by his attitude toward the things he brought in. Now, what he brought in or what came in – I think some things were sent in by dealers. He didn't acquire all these – some of them went out again – but some of them were things he was considering.
EB: So, he would have them come in on approval?
BB: Yeah, yeah. Well, he thought about it, and yeah, so. But we didn't go into any long digressions about his attitude, and yet it was obvious from the way he handled objects and thought about them, and he has said this, of course, in print. He had a book done – it came out in 1957. It was a text by Samuel Lothrop and these extraordinary photographs by Nicholas Murray which have finger-painted backgrounds and other rather extravagant things, but there are wonderful photographs of the objects, so that – And he talks in that and in other places about his feeling that this was art and that these were fine objects. He was, I'm quite sure, the first person to collect from an aesthetic point of view. I was thinking about people who were collecting about the same time: George Hewitt Myers of the Textile Museum collected some fine objects, some of which Dumbarton Oaks later acquired, but those were things that just sort of appealed to him. He was seriously interested in textiles and probably mostly Oriental rugs. There was a man in Montreal named Cleveland Morgan, F. Cleveland Morgan, who gave some very good pre-Columbian objects to the Montreal museum, but there were just a few things, and he was not really seriously interested in that. And Heye, of course, was collecting – these were all collecting about the same time, and I can sort of imagine, you know, they were – which dealer would try to sell what to whom, and whether they were sort of rivals in these times – but Heye of course was interested in collected everything that was Indian. But Mr. Bliss wanted art objects. A little later Rockefeller came into this, but Bliss was earlier.
EB: So Rockefeller was later.
BB: Yeah.
EB: With the objects that came in, and some left again, do you have a sense of why those that left, left; does that tell you anything about the internal workings of his aesthetic, or his aesthetic sensibility?
BB: I have no – I don't remember, really, what stayed and what went, now, and I don't think it was always – I think probably there were one or two things that I thought, "Is he really going to buy that?" And he didn't. So there was that sort of thing. But I think sometimes it may have been that he simply wasn't that seriously interested, or something else, something other was offered, and –
EB: Can you talk to us about some of his advisors? Certainly Samuel Lothrop looms large, but I didn't know whether there were other advisors, or did you have a sense of –?
BB: The other most important one was Matthew Stirling at the Smithsonian. And of course Mr. Bliss was particularly fond of Olmec things. His first piece was Olmec, and he collected a lot of Olmec objects. And Stirling came in often and was very interested. I've been looking through things recently to sort of revive my past, and someone had written – maybe, I think in an obituary of Mr. Bliss – it was an archaeologist who wrote this – possibly Clifford Evans – that Mr. Bliss's main advisors were Lothrop and Stirling, two of the first rigorous American archaeologists. You know archeology, American archaeology was fairly new in those days, and Mr. Bliss got the best people to advise him, and I think that tells you something about him and his taste.
EB: Now Sam Lothrop was based here or in New York?
BB: No, Sam Lothrop was at Harvard.
EB: At Harvard. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
BB: Yeah, yeah.
EB: And of course Mr. Bliss was Harvard.
BB: Yes, yeah. And so Lothrop was influential, and I think we have to talk more about him I guess a little later, because although – well, I can say this now – he was on the advisory committee when the collection first came to Dumbarton Oaks, but he died shortly afterwards. But I think that he advised, after Mr. Bliss's death – I think Lothrop advised Jack Thacher about setting up the committee and other things like that – people to use.
EB: Great. We can come back to that. But let's talk about the collection at the National Gallery. Do you have a sense of what the reaction was on the part of the public or the National Gallery insiders to the collection? It was in the basement, I believe, is that correct?
BB: It was in that gallery space between where the restaurant under the dome is now and the central gallery, which was always the temporary exhibition space, the big long gallery. And so a lot of people went through that space, it was not just – we didn't really think of it as in the basement – there's a floor or two below that even – but it was in the lower floor just as you come in the Constitution Avenue door. And it stayed there for fifteen years, so the Gallery must have been reasonably happy with it, and I think that the public – it was, I think, a nice change of pace between looking at paintings and looking at paintings. And although the central gallery had other kinds of exhibitions too, but I think it seemed to be very successful there, and I think it surely did widen interest in pre-Columbian art, because a lot of people would go through without really seeing anything, but there were other people who would say, "Hey, that's pretty interesting," and it, I think –
EB: Was Mr. Bliss involved very much with the OAS? Because I think I remember the Inka tunic being first published, a fragment of it being published in the Américas magazine. Was this correct?
BB: I wasn't aware of any particular association. He had – he certainly was interested in Latin America: he had been Ambassador to Argentina, he had traveled in Mexico, and I dearly loved the pictures that James Carder has in his files here of Mr. Bliss on a Mexican trip, standing bare-chested beside his horse or—I don't know if it was a horse or a donkey he was riding, but – and he's traveling through Mexico, and of course since I've just described how I knew Mr. Bliss, I think this is a marvelous picture of him.
EB: I'll bet.
BB: But I mean he would have been interested certainly in what the OAS was doing and publishing, but I don't think he had any special "in" with them.
EB: When the collection was at the National Gallery, were there lectures or programs or anything developed there?
BB: I don't believe so; I don't recall anything. I don't think so.
EB: My other question was, and this is – I've just heard a story – probably false, that you and Julie Jones were both at the Gallery when the opportunity to work with Mr. Bliss became available, but also the Rockefeller collection was then being made public, and that one of you decided to come here, and one there. I just heard that story and I never knew that story.
BB: Well, some parts of that are right. Julie and I were at the Gallery at the same time, and we were friends there. I don't remember – I meant to call her and ask her about this, I don't remember exactly what her schedule was. But I left the National Gallery at the beginning, I think, of 1961, and went to New York, where I stayed for a year and a half, until I got – actually I was in Maine when I got the phone call from John Thacher, the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, asking me if I would come and set up the collection. And I really came down as a temporary job. I hadn't intended to stay at Dumbarton Oaks. And Julie at some point – and I can't remember how this coordinated – went to New York – and I don't remember whether she first went – she had become interested in the Bliss collection too; that converted both of us, for two people – I don't remember whether she was first at the Museum of Primitive Art and then started her doctorate at NYU, or the other way around, but I think – I don't really remember seeing her in New York at that time, so she probably came a little later. I had talked to her about taking over at Dumbarton Oaks when I left, because I had planned to leave, and she had agreed to that. And then I decided that Dumbarton Oaks was a very nice place to stay, and I stayed on. I had to call Julie and say, "Is that all right with you?" and all of this went through Jack Thacher too, of course, but – so that's that story.
EB: And then she went on to –
BB: Well, she was at the Museum of Primitive Art, and when that collection went to the Metropolitan, she went to the Metropolitan, yeah.
EB: So, when Mr. Bliss was thinking about bringing his collection to Dumbarton Oaks, were you in town at the time, or you were in New York?
BB: Oh, well I think it was always intended to come. He had given Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard. Dumbarton Oaks was their place, their heritage, and the pre-Columbian things would go with that, everything else came, went to Harvard, so –
EB: Do you have a sense of why he chose Philip Johnson to design the Pavilion, or what was the thinking there?
BB: I think the thinking there was John Thacher. Thacher knew Philip Johnson and admired him and was interested in what he was doing, and I think he said to the Blisses, "Look, here is somebody who could do something very interesting here" – something like that. I suspect that's the way it goes. I have no proof for that except that I think it's – it just looks like that.
EB: Because it's interesting to think that the Garden Library and the Johnson Pavilion were being created at the same time in two very different styles.
BB: Yes, yes. No, no, it is interesting, because the Garden Library of course is much more traditional Dumbarton Oaks architecture. And the Philip Johnson wing, I think, looks not quite so much like a modern building in that atmosphere, but like a sort of garden pavilion, and I think it worked in that way. And in fact I think Mrs. Bliss – I think – I can't remember what the early drawings looked like – but Mrs. Bliss contributed the idea of those little spaces where the plants are – I seem to talk about nothing but Mrs. Bliss' love for plants, but she did do that. I'm sure that was added; I once saw some of the earlier drawings, and she had added that bit. So, she took to the design.
EB: I had heard they had had a scale model, a half-size model, of one of the pavilions, actually on display in the Music Room for a while. Is that true?
BB: I never knew anything about that. It's possible, but I – well, it could be, because I don't remember exactly when that started. Mr. Bliss died – was it in the early, early in'62, he was – Yeah, I don't remember that. It's possible, but I find it a little hard to imagine it.
EB: So, but you did get the sense that Mr. and Mrs. Bliss had a fair amount of input into the Johnson building?
BB: Yeah, well she certainly had input into the actual architecture, and I think Mr. Bliss obviously approved the plan, and I'd like to say that I think the Blisses were both very firm-minded people about what they wanted. They were open to ideas, they were open to Thacher's ideas, they were open – and there's a lot of this mentioned in the new installation – they were open to Royall Tyler's ideas. Royall Tyler did introduce them to certain fields and certain things, but they weren't going to go into that just because Royall Tyler showed this to them. And I think one thing – and this may have something to do with Royall Tyler – the Blisses did choose, in their particular fields of Pre-Columbian and Byzantine, to go into two rather unusual and unoccupied fields, you know. They didn't start collecting Italian Renaissance painting or more conventional things. They collected fields that were less known, more open, and had much more room for scholarship, because I think they were thinking about that too.
EB: Going back to the Gallery itself, and then I want to talk – see if you could talk a little bit more about Mr. Thacher and Mr. Tyler – do you have a sense of other galleries that Mr. Bliss may have been particularly interested in or could have influenced the design, or is that just –?
BB: I just don't know, because I was actually away during that period, for one thing.
EB: So, Mr. Bliss actually died before the building was completed.
BB: Yes. He saw it begun, I think, but he did, yeah.
EB: But he wouldn't have seen the glass and he saw probably the –
BB: I don't know what he saw, but he would have seen a drawing.
EB: Do you have a sense, or can you characterize Mildred Bliss's impressions about the Johnson Pavilion, when it – her other responses to it at the time?
BB: When it opened, I think she was very much in favor of it, and as I say she did give Philip Johnson an idea for it, and she seemed to be sort of working with him, and I think she liked the idea.
EB: One of the things that struck me is that the pavilions always had – well, certainly plants in the planter's sections – but also orchids in the middle of the pavilions, often. Is that a decision that Mrs. Bliss made?
BB: No, no, no. We did that as part of the installation, and maybe we're approaching the installation now. There are lots of interesting things about that building, and one thing, I'm sure you've noticed, are the sound effects. And if you stand on one side and speak across, you sound loud to the person directly opposite to you. If you stand in the middle of the room, you come back at yourself, you scare yourself. Nobody else notices that. But we put things in the middle of the room really to keep people from having this experience of scaring themselves in there. And that's how the plants got in there. I think all the plants that were in there were in the middle of the room.
EB: Let me ask you a little bit more about Jack Thacher, the first director of Dumbarton Oaks. What was his role in establishing Dumbarton Oaks?
BB: I think in a quiet way he was quite important. He was a person who had ideas of his own, but he worked well with the Blisses. I think it was a good match. They had a lot in common; they respected each other – that is as far as I can tell. And I think he made a lot of things work. He was good at finding people to do things, and he had very good ideas of his own, which were compatible with theirs. And I can't tell you specific things – except, I think, Philip Johnson – but I think he had a great deal of influence and was a good creative means of putting their ideas in place.
EB: And so did he – so he was the one who called you and said, "Come and help us install and oversee this installation"? Did he also select the designer?
BB: They didn't have designers in those days. The National Gallery didn't have a designer in those days. When they hung a show, there was a guy, Fred Wreath, who was very good at hanging paintings, and he knew just how and where to hang them on the wall and in the space, and the curator of the show told him where to – what to put in the rooms, and that was how things – We didn't have designers. If I may back up slightly on this, when I first – well, we'll talk maybe about when I came down; before the building was finished I actually came to work for them – but when I first went into the building with Mr. Thatcher – as I called him then – and he took me around, and I said, "It's a beautiful building. How do you put anything in it?" And we agreed that we didn't want wooden cases; they would clash with the teak floors. We didn't want metal cases; they would clash with the metal that was already there. Ideally we would float the objects in space, and about that time I read a newspaper story about an architect who took all his kitchen fixtures and held them up with jets of air. And I thought, you know, that's what we might be doing, except of course one good power shortage, and we've lost everything. So, I think this put the idea in Jack's head, and he found that, he talked to people at the Smithsonian – this is one of his ways of doing things – and he found out that they had some people on their exhibition staff who were working with clear plastic. And so we – I was going to say, "we borrowed." I thought we were borrowing; I don't think he ever went back. James Mayo, Jim Mayo, who came out, who was a sculptor, really – he didn't get a chance to do much sculpture, but he was that and wanted to do that, and sort of made sculptural stands, I think — but for the installation I with consultation with Michael Coe – we haven't got him in yet, but he was an important part of deciding what we would put in and where – and Thacher, who was involved in this too, and Jim Mayo, who made the cases and often had ideas about them. I would tell him, "I want a case this size, because we're going to have these objects in this case," and then Thacher and I had some arguments about how high the cases should be, and Jack wanted them, you know, proper height for his viewing, and I said, "Now wait a minute, I mean that's fine for me, but there're little kids who are going to come in here and look at some of these things," so we tried to think of it in things that could be seen if they were at an upper level and things that were lower. It's interesting. I was thinking today looking at this new installation, where almost everything is shown vertically, that that solves a lot of that problem, I think, because most of our things were shown horizontally. But the four people involved in the installation were Thacher and Benson and Coe and Mayo, and that was it. Now Jim Mayo was getting some help, I think, from other Smithsonian people, and one of them was Astor Moore, who later came in here. I – Astor Moore was a familiar face who would occasionally appear with Jim, but I didn't really know him until he later came here as the cabinetmaker. One thing that Jim Mayo did very well was to glue those cases with glue that did not turn yellow. This we found out – there were two installations that Jim did not do. One was for the Kuna-Lacanha panel – whatever we're calling it now, the horizontal one – and we had somebody in New York who did lots of cases for museums in New York, and we got him to make that thing. His seams turned yellow; Jim's never did. Now Chris, who is here now, thinks it was Aston Moore who made that glue that didn't yellow, that Jim was using. I simply don't know that. I dealt entirely with Jim Mayo, and who developed that, I don't know.
EB: So plexi-cases were just coming in, or was it –? I always felt that Dumbarton Oaks was one of the first, if not the first.
BB: I think it was. And I don't know what the – I don't think the Smithsonian ever did anything seriously with that. They may have made some vitrines, maybe that kind of thing, but I don't think they were really into the other. The vitrine Plexiglas and the smaller mounting pieces you could buy by the whatever; the fatter ones had to be specially cast. Somebody mentioned the other day the name of that Plexiglas company, which is still apparently making Plexiglas in Rockville – I can't think of their name at the moment, but that was – Oh, the other case was the big Palenque sculpture that we were looking at, and that was in three pieces. And somebody had filled out those damaged profiles on the figures, and we decided we wanted them as they were, as they had been, and not with this stuff put on it, but it was very soluble stuff that had been put on. And I remember one day – and this did not happen often – that Jack Thacher got down on the floor, and the two of us were down on the – the pieces were flat on the floor on a piece of canvas –
EB: And this was in the Pavilion?
BB: In the Pavilion. And we had some water and cloths, and we were down there – this stuff came off very easily – we were down there like two kids playing in the sandboxes. But we got somebody else to make that, because that just was not possible to do that in the Plexiglas mounting. It had to be bolted together and it had to be on a stand that would hold it seriously, and so we ordered this – or talked to the people about – this stone thing with the metal frame on the back, and I began to think about weight. How much weight was that floor meant to carry? Because that thing – I've forgotten now what it was going to weigh, but it was heavy. So I called up Philip Johnson's office, and they sort of said, "Well, we don't know. Call our engineers." So I called the engineers, and they said that floor is designed to hold a hundred pounds per square inch, and I said, "Now wait a minute. I can go up there and stand on the ball of one foot, and that's more than a hundred pounds per square inch," and they said, "Well, yes, but that's live weight; this is dead weight." So, we had the thing made and we put it up there, and I must say that for a long time afterwards, every time I would go into what was then the Coin Room, where Alfred Bellinger had a desk right under that sculpture, and I would go and look at the ceiling above Alfred's head. But those were some of the installation things. Philip Johnson – or I think it was probably someone in his office – designed a mock-up of a case. It was a round case about five feet wide, I guess, to go in the center of a room, and it was put in that room of the gallery, and I walked in there and I thought, "Uh-oh. This is just like being on a merry-go-round. This frame will not work."
EB: Was it plexi, or –?
BB: I've forgotten. It was just something that they'd made as a mock-up. I think it was probably wood and something –
EB: – something else.
BB: Well, that was when I began to realize that that building is a square building. It's made of circles, but it's square, and it wants its squareness emphasized with anything you put in it. And this I kept saying to –
EB: So, that's why you have the Palenque panel at one end and the Teotihuacan mural at the other end, in many ways sort of squaring off those –
BB: Yeah, well, because – well, one reason we put those in those places is that I think it's sort of an attracting view. It draws your attention to have a big object at the end of your view and to go toward that, but those things should be that way anyway, and most of the cases – you can get away with the occasional diagonal case – but most of the cases we put flush with what would be the straight wall.
EB: So, Mr. Thacher found Jim Mayo.
BB: He found him. He found him, yeah.
EB: Now, I wanted to ask you about the opening, but you've mentioned Michael Coe several times, and he was so – I know we'll talk about him later regarding the program – but it might be important to talk about his influence and his advice now about the installation and the collection.
BB: Yeah. He of course was not here, but he came down a couple of times, and he and I together went over the pieces that we did very much want to show and then talked about what should go with what, and he of course knew much more about these things than I did. So, he was invaluable on that.
EB: How was he chosen? Or how did he come to be a major advisor?
BB: He was the advisor; that was his title. And he was appointed early on, and I assume – he had been a student of Gordon Willey's – and I assume that this was Jack Thacher and Lothrop probably asking Willey, maybe, something like that. I think that's how he came in. He was at Yale but he had been at Harvard.
EB: So, did he advise Mr. Bliss also toward the end?
BB: No, no, no. Mr. Bliss died before Mike came on the scene. I'm quite sure there was no association there.
EB: So, are there other decisions about the aesthetics of the installation that would be interesting to highlight?
BB: Well, we simply tried to make things look as good as possible and to think of them as handsome objects and to show them off to their best advantage. I was thinking about the order that we did that in, and people say, you know, "Why do you come in on Aztec?" And Miriam and Juan Antonio asked this when they were starting the installation. And our idea, I'm pretty sure, was that you've just come from Byzantium, and this was what was going on in the New World at the same time, so you were in a totally different part of the world, but in the same era. And so, what they've done now – which I think is neat – they've also got some Inka things, as well as Aztec, in that room. And then we put Teotihuacan next door, I think partly because that mural is a good drawing card into that room and partly because it relates to Aztec as an important Central Mexican culture. And then Olmec is still in that next room, which throws you a little bit chronologically, but the two new people didn't think of any better way to do that, I think.
EB: Well, the Mayan needs that far room.
BB: And well, that again was – putting the big sculpture at the end of the room was a way of drawing, I think. You've got to be drawn in by some big things, because there are an awful lot of little things in that collection, and that gets a little dull.
EB: Should we talk about the opening a little bit?
BB: Yeah.
EB: Do you want to take a break?
BB: We might as well go on, I guess.
BB: The opening was scheduled for December of '63, I think. I hope I've got the dates right. And not very long before that, of course, Kennedy was assassinated, and they had planned a more, you know – an elegant dinner party, and I don't know what else, a much more elaborate opening for it. There's somebody else I should mention in this too – is Thomas Baird, who is somebody I had known at the National Gallery when he was a Fellow there, and Tom was an art historian, but he was basically – he was a novelist. But for a while he went to museums that needed a curator for some special time to another. He ended up teaching at Trinity in Hartford, but he was at Dumbarton Oaks about the time of the installation, and I know he was there at the time of the opening. He probably contributed some ideas to that installation too. I don't remember exactly when he came in, but I think of him at this moment because we sent out – invitations had been sent out for the big thing, which was being cancelled or reduced, and we had to send out a notice about this – and Tom, as a writer, was sort of in charge of writing this notice. And we all got into this big hassle over prepositions, which are always the most difficult part of any language, of course, you know, it was, "out of respect for," or – so I remember that he was present and involved at that time. So, there were still a lot of people. President Pusey came down from Harvard, and I walked through the galleries with him before the crowd came in. And I'm not sure what he made of it; it wasn't probably exactly to his primary taste, but he was always very good about what we wanted to do. And – I might as well throw this in now – that later, when we had the first conference, and Jack Thacher wrote an introduction, a preface to that Olmec conference volume, and he sort of as a courtesy sent it – his copy, his writing – to President Pusey, and Pusey wrote back and said, "That's fine, except I don't think you ought to call it the first in the series; you may never have another." And as you know, we've had a conference every year since then, and they have all sooner or later been published. But anyway – But that was the only thing he worried about. It was a festive opening, it was a good party, I think a little subdued because of the circumstances. But it was – another thing – I think about these things in terms of the new installation where they have new ultraviolet filtering walls, which make differences in the light, but I think we had decided to have curtains. I know we had to have curtains in there anyway, which we used when the sun was coming in too strongly, and we realized at that first opening, which was in the evening, that we also needed in there at night the curtains drawn, because if you walked toward those curved windows in that lighted room, you looked like yourself coming at yourself in a funhouse mirror. And so there are always these little practical considerations in that – but that was one thing we learned. Oh, another thing we did that night – and I think this was sort of too hard to keep up – we put spotlights outside to light up the things so –
EB: – in the woodland?
BB: In the woodland, on the trees and things, so that they would outweigh the reflections. And I think that worked pretty well, but the keeping up of the spotlights was too much for later evenings, when it's open for concert time and that sort of thing.
EB: There used to be bird cutouts in the woods.
BB: There was a problem with that glass corridor to the main building, because birds would try to fly through that glass, and they tried planting up around it, they tried – they were cutouts of hawks. They were trying to scare them, frighten them away from going through the glass. Yeah, that was a problem. Oh, there was another wildlife problem, and I meant to see what they're doing now. But the first day I was in my office, there are these deep window wells, and there was a bird – I think it was a mocking bird – who got down in there, and who could not fly straight enough, long enough to get out. So, I called for help, and the gardeners came and put a ladder down in there, and the mocking bird simply flew up to one rung of the ladder and then flew off into the sky. So, they put little ladders in there; they were probably there when you were there. There was another time when a raccoon got down in there.
EB: I remember those squirrel – I used to call them "squirrel ladders."
BB: No, they were put in really as bird ladders, but I guess the squirrels –
EB: Let's take a little break. Do you mind?
BB: Fine. Can we break, Joe?
EB: Joe, we're taking a break. [tape ends and then restarts]
EB: This is an interview with Elizabeth Benson, the second tape, May 13, 2008. I'm Elizabeth Boone. It's being recorded by Joe Mills, and we're in the Fellows Building of Dumbarton Oaks. Betty, we've talked about the first installation, we've talked about the opening. Certainly the collection did not remain static, but there were acquisitions and de-accessions – a few. So, I was wondering if you could talk about how you continued to acquire selectively and shaped the collection and what was your thinking about that.
BB: My basic rule of thinking was to ask myself, "Would Mr. Bliss like this piece?" Mr. Bliss had not acquired his objects with the idea of having an example of this thing and that thing and the other thing and all of the things that he should. He was interested in buying fine objects, usually of fine materials, finely worked. And this was the way he did things. So, I tried to keep that in mind. He had acquired very few ceramic pieces. And I began acquiring ceramics because this was the time when fine Maya ceramics were beginning to appear. There hadn't been very many up until that time. So, that was one thing that I did. But I acquired other pieces that I thought, "He would like this, he would have bought this." And again, we weren't trying to do a sort of well-rounded thing, necessarily. It was nice if a good piece came up from a culture that we didn't have well represented, and OK, that's fine – but that's more or less what we were doing.
EB: Someone described Mr. Bliss – and perhaps it was you – who described him as a "polished stone man" [BB laughs]. Maybe that was Gordon Willey and I can't remember.
BB: That's certainly true. He liked gold too. But polished stone – he was a polished stone man – that's very true, yes.
EB: Did he acquire any ceramics himself?
BB: A few, yeah. There's a Maya round polychrome bowl and there's that carved creamy-colored clay bowl – that's a round one too. There were a few that he had, but not many. We acquired most of them.
EB: How were your acquisitions funded?
BB: There was money – I've forgotten how much – in the budget for acquisitions. And sometimes that was fine. When we'd already spent some money and there was something that Mike and I thought was very good, and that we should have – he looked at everything that I got and we did this together. But if there wasn't any money, I'd go to Jack Thacher and say, "We want to acquire this," show him this piece, and he would go to Mrs. Bliss, I think – I never did that. I'd shown her a number of pieces that we wanted and she knew that I knew and so forth, but it was Thacher who made the arrangements for that. And there was one time – I think I only did this once – and I went to Thatcher and I said, "I want to buy this piece." And he said, "Talk to Sue Boyd, she just was going to get a piece and somebody else got it ahead of her," or something like that. It was near the end of the fiscal year. So I got Byzantine money for one piece.
EB: Did she want it back the next year?
BB: No, no, she was very good about it. We got on quite well. That was the only time I ever asked her for anything.
EB: So, Mrs. Bliss saw all the pieces that you acquired, or just a few?
BB: I think we showed her all of them probably, maybe it was more than just a few. We may not have showed her every single piece, but most pieces we did. She came over for tea almost every day, not absolutely, but usually. Tea was served every afternoon at Dumbarton Oaks in the good old days in the hall of the old house in the round part that looks out over the garden—in the hallway, the center of the hallway opposite the main front door. And she would very often come for tea and sit down at the tea table where the urn was. We poured our own tea but she was sitting there. And so sometimes when she was here for that reason we would show her something at that time. And she came in at other times too.
EB: You mentioned showing her a mask.
BB: Yes, this was towards the end of her life – in one of her last illnesses – and she was in Sibley Hospital, and the late Maya mosaic mask was something we very much wanted. And she would have to get it for us. So Jack Thacher and I put it in a box, a shoebox, or a picnic basket or something, carefully wrapped with cloth and tissue paper, and carried it over. Jack had a very good driver named Albert, and Albert drove us very smoothly over to Sibley Hospital. And we took this into her room, and she was lying in the bed, and we showed her the mask. And as we were showing her this thing which she approved of and bought, a nurse came in. The poor nurse had never seen anything like this. What were we doing to her patient? – showing her this very scary strange thing.
EB: And it had canine teeth?
BB: Yes, but I guess nurses have seen everything along the lines – so she recovered pretty quickly. But we got the piece.
EB: Who were the principal dealers with whom – or the principal sources – from whom you acquired the material? Are there any that dealt in particular kinds of things more than others?
BB: That's a good question. I'm not so sure about that. There were generally more Maya things around – at least, that were offered to us – I don't know. Mr. Bliss had got things from Earl Stendhal and then his son Al Stendhal – we got occasionally something from him. Mr. Bliss had also dealt with John Wise who died shortly after I arrived – but I think we did get something from Wise. I don't even remember from whom we got exactly all these things. But the dealers we dealt with mostly probably were Ed Merrin, Alphonse Jax, André Emmerich a little bit. Who else? We got a few things from John Stokes. That's about it that I think of at the moment. Oh, I have to tell an Ed Merrin story. Ed Merrin brought something down to show us one day. I think it was a Maya vase. And he brought with him his young son who is now the head of the Merrin Gallery. And the kid was then about – his head was just above my desk level. And they – Ed came and sat across the desk from me and put this vase out, and the kid was standing there, and he said, "That cost $100." And I said, "I'll take it." [laughs] And Ed – there was this momentary look of terror going across Ed Merrin's face, you know –
EB: – because he was going to charge you much more.
BB: Oh, he was going to charge me enormously much more.
EB: Did you get it for $100?
BB: No, I did not. No, I relaxed him fairly quickly. But it was a moment that – I told Ed that story not too long ago.
EB: So, there was the sense that you had the funds to acquire within reason?
BB: Yeah, we didn't have vast amounts but we could, if there was something.
EB: Were there any challenges – what were the major challenges to continuing to build a collection? I mean, were you in competition for works with other museums and individuals?
BB: Yeah, there of course were other people out there who were buying – many of them. I wasn't – once at an auction, I was bidding against somebody who was bidding for me – Glassell, that's the name of the Texas guy who built a big collection of mostly gold pieces. So, I was aware of him because he outbid me. But I think Rockefeller, of course, was collecting at that time, but I think he had his little world and we didn't – there was no obvious competition there. And there were a lot of other people, but I was very rarely aware of kind of "so-and-so had seen that" or "so-and-so is going to get it away from us."
EB: I am going to bring up the issue of cultural patrimony and how that affected collecting practices within Dumbarton Oaks and elsewhere. And maybe we could introduce a new – You are a member of a panel on the International Movement of National Art Treasures which was set up by the American Society of International Law in 1969–70. Can you tell us a little about this?
BB: Let me back up just slightly to your previous remark because that whole thing had not yet become a real issue when we were buying. Mr. Bliss always said that he never bought anything in the country of origin. And he did buy almost everything in New York, I think. He bought few things in Europe. But toward the end of the late '60s, it was beginning to be obvious that this was going to be an issue. So that committee – that panel – was set up to advise the State Department lawyers who were then working on the treaty with Mexico and the UNESCO Convention. And that panel was interesting. Cliff Evans was on that, and he was very adamant. Clemency Coggins came on towards the end. She was not there at the beginning. And of course, those – Cliff may have died during that time. But there were lots of different kinds of opinions on this, and it was interesting what came out of the panel. Ernest Feidler, who was the General Counsel, I think, for the National Gallery at that time, I think he's – no, or was he administrator – he was a lawyer, anyway. And he had previously had some experience with Chinese things, and somebody brought this thing that there should be certificates for everything that went out of a country. And Ernest Feidler said, "Look, they did that in China and all they did was create a large business in fake certificates." So, many things of this kind came up – and the fact is that a lot of this thing is so much a part of the national economy of those countries. The little guy finds it and he gets some money from the guy who handles this, who gets some money from the guy who sells it to the dealer and – so, it was a very complex thing but it was fascinating and very interesting. But I could see that our buying days were just about over so – but we got some good things.
EB: Did the committee of Harvard museums or the consortium of Harvard museums have any impact on this?
BB: I didn't exactly think of it that way, and I wasn't so aware of those. But what I did realize was that Harvard was sort of watching us and was not going to let us do much after these things came into effect. I thought of it more in terms of their archaeological digging licenses, which was understandable, and we didn't want to be lousing them up if they couldn't get their licenses because we were buying objects. But that came really in 1970 on. But I'm sure that – that was certainly a part of it and it was part of our thinking.
EB: What about de-accessions? Did you –?
BB: I did very little of that, I think. There was something – I don't remember what it was – but there was something that Earl Stendhal had sold Mr. Bliss, I think, shortly before Mr. Bliss died. And I can't remember – I don't remember what it was, whether –
EB: – mosaic mask with bad teeth –?
BB: Oh, there was that mosaic mask. Now, was that the Stendhal thing? That was one, yes.
EB: – bought by a woman some time ago and acquired later. I thought that was traded out for the little Maya mask, the mosaic mask.
BB: Well, there were a couple of things that we did trade out from it. I'm a little foggy on those. Because that Maya sculpture that is not very well carved – we've never shown it – it was downstairs. It can't even be called a stele – it's carved, it's stone with rather faint carving on it. But it was real, at least, and we got that in exchange for something that was not real – or whether it was not real or whether it had been overworked later or whatever – but there were not many things of that kind, probably maybe three.
EB: Because there used to be a little cupboard downstairs. Well, not a little cupboard, but a cupboard where things were stored and there were a couple of trays –
BB: – in your office?
EB: – in your office, your office. There were a couple of trays, and I always just called it the "fakes cupboard."
BB: Well, I guess they were questionable. What I remember that was – there were lots of jade beads and that kind of thing, which I think were perfectly good. But how do you install batches of jade beads? I think, you know, Mr. Bliss bought a big box of jade beads and took the best ones out for exhibition and the rest of them, I think, were OK. It was that kind of thing that was in there and there were some questionable objects, which I have happily forgotten.
EB: I have always found them fascinating, and even if they were fake, they were quite good – I mean, aesthetically.
BB: Yes.
EB: So, you didn't de-accession very much.
BB: Not very much, no, no.
EB: Let's talk a little about the kind of advice you got from Mike Coe on the collection. You worked really in collaboration – very closely with him. Is that correct?
BB: Yes. Well, Mike was a scholar in the field, which I was not at that point, really. I was beginning to be, I guess, but – Well, I called Mike fairly often about various things, and we worked together on all the accessions. We worked together on the installation – except that he was not here. He put in a good deal of information and then those of us who were here, did it, pretty much, without any more going on that. We worked together on the handbook that we put out at that time. And that was what we did in the early days.
EB: So, he would come down fairly often? Or –
BB: Well, it depended on what was going on and what the need was.
EB: It seems now you had what we would consider an extraordinary amount of freedom to kind of shape – and we'll talk about the program later – to shape the collection and to essentially do what you wanted –
BB: I did, yes.
EB: – within reason and with advice and this and that. It must have been quite thrilling.
BB: I did, I did. We'll talk about the Advisory Committee later, I guess, but I did use them for things that I was buying.
EB: So they advised – the Advisory Committee also advised on the purchases?
BB: Yes, because, Gordon Ekholm and Junius Bird at the Museum of Natural History in New York – they looked at things for all kinds of people. One covered Mexico and the other covered Peru. So, almost anything I bought, I would show to Gordon Ekholm, say, or I would call Gordon and say, "Have you see this thing that so-and-so has?" And he said, "Yes, I have and I think it's good." And I said, "OK." Or I would traipse up to New York with this. So, we used these people in that way because I wanted to have as much backing as possible. And they were the two best people, really.
EB: So, what a wonderful team! Mike Coe, Junius Bird, Gordon Ekholm, and you.
BB: Yes. Well, it worked pretty well.
EB: I think we're coming to an end of our discussion of the collection itself. Do you have any sense of where the collection stands in relation to other collections – private or public?
BB: It is smaller than a lot of collections, yet it's big enough to be shown as an entity and as a thing with various kinds of things in it. It is a particularly fine collection, I think. It's been collected from that point of view. And it has a kind of special character. It has most of the important kinds of things, but I think it's a very kind of beautiful introduction to pre-Columbian art for people who haven't seen it before – it's the finest thing to see first. And also if you know pre-Columbian art, it's a real treat, and it's quite special in that way.
BB: And in some ways the Johnson gallery shares the same kind of character – characteristics – as the collection.
EB: I was just sort of thinking this as you were saying that because I think that the building is certainly part of the experience. And all together, it reflects the Blisses' tastes and interests and ability to do the kind of thing that meant something to them and to other people.
BB: Thank you. Do you have any other thoughts you want to add?
EB: Not at the moment.
BB: It's a good way to end.
EB: Thank you very much.
BB: Thank you. Thank you, Joe. [tape ends and then restarts]
EB: This is an interview with Elizabeth Benson. My name is Elizabeth Boone. It's May 16, 2008. We're taping in the Fellows Building at Dumbarton Oaks. Betty, let's talk today, or begin talking, about the scholarly program in Pre-Columbian Studies. Was Mr. Bliss himself interested in establishing the scholarly program – or a scholarly program?
BB: Of course, I never talked about the Pre-Columbian scholarly program with Mr. Bliss, because he had died by the time I came to Dumbarton Oaks. But judging from the history of the Byzantine collection and center for studies, I think he would have been quite delighted – and also from his interest in pre-Columbian things. But I think he was rather proud of the fact that the Byzantine center here became Harvard's center for Byzantine studies and a very serious thing. And he was indeed interested in pre-Columbian studies, and I – still, I think I talked about this a little bit before – but I think he and Mrs. Bliss deliberately collected things that were open for scholarly research, that a great deal had not been done in, so they were rather new and wide-open fields.
EB: Can you characterize the field of pre-Columbian studies at the time that you started this program?
BB: It was a very small field at that time. I think I emphasized before Mr. Bliss's interest in pre-Columbian objects as art, and there were a few art historians who were still in training – in school, but up to that time, really, George Kubler was about the only art historian who was involved in pre-Columbian things. He was more involved in colonial, but he certainly had considerable interest in the pre-Columbian world. So, it was a field that was just beginning to come along, I think.
EB: How did the program begin? Was it a conference, a fellowship, or publications, or –
BB: I think I can say it began when I asked Mike Coe if he would give the first public lecture at Dumbarton Oaks, and he said, yes, he would, if I would publish it.
EB: Oh, really.
BB: So began the publishing program, and that was the first issue of Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology.
EB: And how soon was this after you came, or after the collection was installed?
BB: I think it was probably within the year. I don't remember the exact date.
EB: Do you – did you have a sense from the beginning, did you have a sense of a mission, or –?
BB: I guess at some level I did. I don't exactly think of it that way because things simply began to develop, and I got more and more interested and more involved. And there became more things that might be done, and I think I did – I certainly realized that this was something that was quite new then, and so, in that sense, yes.
EB: And maybe we should talk a little bit about the conferences. The first conference was the Dumbarton Oaks conference on the Olmec. How did the conferences begin?
BB: The conferences –
EB: Did you have a goal, and why?
BB: I didn't have a goal, but Mike Coe was working on the Olmec site at San Lorenzo, and Robert Heizer and California people, from the University of California, were working at La Venta, and these were two major Olmec sites. And also at that time, carbon-14 had just come into being, and there were still people at the time of that Olmec conference who thought that Olmec was later than Maya. And so it was exactly the right moment to have that conference, and I think that was the main reason – not to start a series of conferences, really, but just to catch that moment and talk about it.
EB: How big – could you characterize it for us as a conference? Because my sense is that it was very different from the kind of conferences that are held today.
BB: Yeah. I had the idea – of course, again, the field was much smaller than it is now – but I had the idea that all of the people in the audience – we had an invited audience – should know just about as much about the subject as the people who were giving the papers. And I built in long discussion periods, which we taped, and we published several of those. I think that was – it was a problem to get somebody to transcribe the tape – but we published the Olmec one, and we published, I think, several later ones, and some good material came out in those published discussion periods. But that was my idea in having the small meeting, and of course, as I say, the field was so much smaller then, it was easier to do than it would be now.
EB: So this was a small group of invited scholars.
BB: Right. They were all invited. I did that all along.
EB: Was there a sense that this, the first conference, would be the beginning of a series, or –?
BB: Well, this was interesting, because John Thacher, the director, wrote a preface for the Olmec volume, and he said in it, mentioned something about the first pre-Columbian conference at Dumbarton Oaks, and he sent a copy to Derek Bok, the President of Harvard, just to sort of let him know –
EB: It was Pusey.
BB: Oh, I'm sorry! I'm sorry. Dear! Nathan Pusey. I'm thinking ahead.
EB: Derek Bok was later – he was a professor at Harvard for so long.
BB: No, well he came into our picture later on, but it was Nathan Pusey at that time, and Thacher sent this preface to sort of let President Pusey know what was going on, and the only comment that Pusey had was that – did we really want to call it the first conference because we might not have another one. Well, as you know as well as I do, that every year since 1965 or 6, we have had a pre-Columbian conference, and they've all sooner or later been published.
EB: The second conference was on Chavin. Was there a reason that that was selected? Did you see that as a – in comparison with the Olmec?
BB: Yeah, it was a good comparison with the Olmec, because it was contemporary with the Olmec, in Peru, and also there was work going on at Chavin, which was revealing a lot of new information about Chavin. Richard Lumbreras [sic: Luís G. Lumbreras] was working there, and we invited him to speak. He didn't come – I think he had political reasons for not wanting to come – but Hernán Amat came, and that was more of a problem of getting papers for that conference than for others. But it worked well, I think. It was a good balance for Olmec and sort of a logical thing to do after Olmec, I think.
EB: It's interesting that the Chavin conference never had the impact on the field that the Olmec one – well, well I say that as a Mesoamericanist – but certainly the Olmec conference was so fundamental to the development of Olmec studies.
BB: Well I think it was, and it was in large part because of the timing. It was just a critical moment in those studies, and there's also something else about those meetings, in particular the Olmec one. We set that up, and I think the others too, for all day Saturday, and several people responded and said, "Yes, I would like to come, and if there's any time, I would like to talk about something I've been working on." So, Sunday morning became the volunteer paper session, and we taped those, as well as the discussion periods, and one thing – one paper in the Olmec Conference, I think, is probably one of the most significant papers, and that was Peter Furst's were-jaguar paper, which had a tremendous impact on a lot of people, so it was not only the importance of archaeology, but some of these slightly side issues. And that was something I liked to do, and the thing I was doing anyway, was to do not just straight archaeology, but to concentrate on things that would reveal something about the art, for one thing. But this could come from all sorts of sources, and it could come often from ethnography, so I liked to think about bringing in a many-faceted kind of work.
EB: I'm trying to remember the first – I think the first conference I ever attended was the Late Post-Classic Central Mexico one in '78, and I think there were still Sunday morning volunteer papers.
BB: Uh-huh. I think we did that straight through. At first it sort of happened – it happened by accident, but then we kind of planned it. And people knew about it and could come in, yeah.
EB: Did you have problems with people – because it was always invitational – did you have – how did you deal with the issue of people wanting to come and there not being room or their not having a sufficient scholarly background or interest, or –?
BB: There was very little problem with that. Once or twice people who wanted to come – and you know, you just have to handle that as it comes, but there wasn't very much of that. I should mention that these things did not always go perfectly smoothly. The Chavin conference – I invited a number of people – there were people who either didn't approve of each other professionally or had had some personal problems, and I thought, "Oh, my Lord, what have I gotten into? What's going to happen?" And I had a very pregnant assistant at that time and I said, "Penny, if these people start throwing things at each other, I'm going to put you in the middle." But I counted on the civilized environment of Dumbarton Oaks, and everybody behaved beautifully.
EB: Were the conferences always in the Music Room?
BB: The conferences were always in the Music Room. I think I mentioned – I guess there was one – because one year when the Byzantine books were being moved around because they were building new shelving for them. And they were in the Music Room, and what I remember is not so much the conferences, although I think we actually held those also in the Orangerie, in the Garden. And I had checked out there that there was indeed sufficient electricity coming in and there was heat and we would be all right there in October. And what I remember about this is that Junius Bird gave the public lecture just before the meeting the night before or the afternoon before, and it had to be night because it had to be dark for him to be in the Orangerie and show slides, and the bats came out in the ceiling of the Orangerie, and it was quite wonderful to have these bats flying around, and Junius loved it, and it was good.
EB: So did the first conference also have a public lecture at the beginning because it was the Saturday conference and then the Friday public lecture. I was wondering when that started.
BB: I think that started – I'm not absolutely sure it was the first conference, but we certainly did that quite regularly, at least after that.
EB: Now you had conferences in October, always in October, and was it for a particular reason, or –?
BB: It simply seemed to be a good time. For one thing, the Byzantine symposium was in May, and the Garden one was in the spring, and it seemed nicer to balance it out in the fall, and also the fall seemed to be a good time to get people in this field together. That seemed to work well. We started out having them the last weekend in October, and after we'd had a few of these, I realized that the gardeners by that time had already put all the plants in the Orangerie for the winter, and they had to get them out again so that we could have luncheon there, so I moved it up to the weekend before, and then they could just put the plants in once.
EB: Now one conference – the joint conference with the Textile Museum, the Junius Bird textile conference – was in May, and that was an extra.
BB: That was an extra, that was, yeah. Yes, that was not in the regular series.
EB: Was that held here?
BB: I think that was held in both places. I think part of it was here and part there.
EB: Did you have other smaller gatherings, round tables, or –? Actually, the conferences themselves were fairly small.
BB: The conferences themselves were fairly small. I didn't have any regular or irregular roundtable things. The one thing that I did do was after the first Palenque roundtable that Merle Greene Robertson organized in late '73 – that was a very exciting meeting, because Floyd Lounsbury was a Fellow here, and he and I went down there together. He had not really – he had just begun to look at the inscriptions on monuments. He'd been working with the codices, and down there he got together with Linda Schele, who was quite new in the field but had been working on these things, and Peter Mathews, a student of Dave Kelley's at Calgary – he was then an undergraduate at Calgary – and the three of them worked on this and got the first Palenque king list, which was –
EB: Here at Dumbarton Oaks?
BB: No, this was in Palenque, at Merle Greene Robertson's house. And that was a small meeting too. And so I was keyed up by that, and toward the end of the year, I had some extra money in the fund, in the fiscal year, and I decided that I would try to get together all the people who had worked on the Palenque inscriptions, and those people came, plus Dave Kelley, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who had done some very important work with inscriptions at other sites. She was really one of the first people to start working on this kind of thing. She was the first person. And that meeting did not go well at all. I hadn't structured it, and Tania sort of looked at this young whippersnapper, Linda Schele, across the table from her, and – that didn't go, and not much got said, and the next day I said to Floyd, "We've got to structure this" – Floyd Lounsbury was here. And so it was a little better Sunday morning. And then many people went home, and the others who hadn't booked early planes or were staying the night were sort of talking two by two or looking at books or something, and all of a sudden they were all down on the floor by a copy of Maudsley, and they got a new glyph, and each one of them knew or saw something that the others didn't. And I thought, "This is why I did this."
EB: So who were those people down on the floor?
BB: This was Dave Kelley and Floyd Lounsbury and Linda Schele and Peter Mathews. And I got them together several other times, and then they started getting themselves together. But those were the only mini-meetings I had.
EB: There were a series of meetings, weren't there?
BB: Yeah, I don't remember exactly how many times I got them, but whenever a moment seemed right, I would do this again. And Dave Kelley was in Europe on a sabbatical, and he flew back for the weekend for this meeting, and he walked in the door a few minutes later, and Linda said, "We've just decided that this glyph is such and such," and Dave said, "I want to know why each of you thinks that." They were won – this is why they worked together so wonderfully. They were absolutely open, and it was great. And I think it did help the field along.
EB: Because that really was the moment when the breakthroughs in Maya epigraphy began, wasn't it?
BB: Yes, it was just about then, yeah.
EB: And so Dumbarton Oaks – you were the catalyst for it.
BB: Well, they would have gotten somewhere anyway, because it was beginning, but I think these meetings did help, and we did get some new material and a little more impetus.
EB: So Floyd was a Fellow here. Was Linda ever a Fellow?
BB: Yes, yes.
EB: And Peter Mathews?
BB: Peter was never a Fellow, no, no.
EB: Maybe we should talk about the fellowship program. How did – since we talked about Floyd Lounsbury being a Fellow – how did this program begin? Or did it begin as a program?
BB: Well, I think we looked around, and I thought, "The Byzantines have Fellows and the Garden people have Fellows, and maybe we should have" – I didn't say Fellows, I think, at first, because I couldn't figure out where we could put one Fellow, in the space outside my office that later got enclosed, but that was open before we put a desk there.
EB: Oh, so it was that wide space, what I call the wide space in the hall.
BB: Yeah. It was a room-sized hall. And so when the Advisory Committee met that fall, we told them that we thought we would like to have a Fellow, and this – we didn't have anybody in mind; we hadn't done anything about this, and Gordon Ekholm got up and said, "Well, I don't mean to push this, but my son-in-law has just finished his doctorate, and he's working on Teotihuacan murals." And this was Arthur Miller, and he was our first Fellow. And that's how he got there.
EB: Is it? That's very interesting. I didn't know that.
BB: Yeah, so –
EB: But of course the topic was perfect for Dumbarton Oaks.
BB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
EB: And –
BB: Sometimes we – the next year – I'm not sure how those people came, and I think they had heard about it – and it was Kano, from Japan. I think he got here or found out about it because Seiichi Izumi had been here; he had been working at Kotosh, and he was here for the Chavin conference, so he knew about Dumbarton Oaks. And I think that Kano, Chiaki Kano, knew it from that way. And the other person was Jeff Wilkerson, and I'm not sure whether he inquired, or whether there was some special reason for him.
EB: Where was he trained? Was he Harvard?
BB: Wilkerson? He was Tulane.
EB: Oh, pardon me. For some reason I thought he was Harvard.
BB: I'm pretty sure he was Tulane. I can check that. And then the next year we invited Floyd Lounsbury. So sometimes –
EB: Oh I see. He came as a Visiting Scholar.
BB: He came as a Visiting Scholar.
EB: And Joyce Marcus was here as a Junior Fellow.
BB: Yes, she was just finishing her doctorate. And she came – I'm sure she found out about it through Gordon Willey. She was a student of Gordon's.
EB: Did you have a sense of the fellow – did you see the fellowships as being targeted to a particular, let's say, interest demographic, or specific areas of interest or disciplines?
BB: I wanted them to have something to do with the art, which could be almost anything, and otherwise I think we simply wanted good and interesting people who would produce some good work. And we hoped that some things they could do we would publish, and we did do that, occasionally, at least. They were often working on something bigger than we were doing. But we didn't have the specific thing in mind.
EB: How were the Fellows chosen, I mean, once the program was up and running?
BB: Well, for a while, it was – I think there were people who found out about it and applied. I don't think we did much in the way of any kind of public announcement, and sometimes it was an invitational thing. The year that – there was, Linda Schele – it doesn't show there, but she may not have had a fellowship – but she was here at one time when Floyd was here, but then she was back. She was here as a proper Fellow when Robert Rands was here because she was working on the Palenque. Well, she had been working with the excavation people at Palenque, and she did that book that we published on the contents of the storerooms at Palenque, and she may have been working on that when Rands was here, because he was working with the Palenque ceramics.
EB: So they were both here.
BB: They were both here at the same time. And that was an invitation thing.
EB: Now before that Rosemary Sharp at the time was a Bliss Fellow. I don't – does that mean anything?
BB: Well, I noticed in the list that Joanne gave me that several people had Bliss Fellow, and I had never heard that before. We had essentially Junior Fellows and Senior Fellows and Visiting Scholars, and it's fine to call them a Bliss Fellow, and maybe that's – I don't know when – that must have come in at a certain time, but that was new to me.
EB: So the Fellows were housed in what we used to call the Pre-Columbian basement? I mean, their offices were there.
BB: Yeah. I think once, at least once, we used a spare study in the Garden Library wing, when they had extra room. And then when Bob Van Nice, who had been in charge of the Santa Sofia project and had that big room in which they had been doing big drawings of Santa Sofia—he finished that project. We got that space eventually, which housed Fellows. I guess there was space for three Fellows in there in addition to the Library stacks. And we also got the room in the northeast corner on the other side of the Pre-Columbian Library, which the coin people had used before, so we put Fellows in there. So gradually we found room for them, but at the beginning, it was limited.
EB: You really had almost no space.
BB: That's true, yeah.
EB: You mentioned – and this is regressing a little bit; we're talking about space – you mentioned when you first arrived at Dumbarton Oaks some of the Byzantinists coming in to see you.
BB: Oh, I was amused, because I had just come into this office, our desk was on order – I think my desk was something like a door on sawhorses at that point – and I had just come into this strange world, and I looked up, and here were these three rather exotic-looking faces in the doorway. One was Romilly Jenkins, who was a Byzantine professor here and later was Director of Studies after Ernst Kitzinger, and one was a tall Danish man – I don't remember his name – and the other was a wonderful Welshman, who became a very good friend, who – his name was John St. Bodfan Gruffydd, and he had a – I think it was a Jaguar – sports car, which he used to leave open, so that people could look at it, because it was a treasure. He wore a Sherlock Holmes hat when he was driving in this thing, and he was a marvelous character, a delightful person – but there he was welcoming me. They were looking very curious about what was going on in that room.
EB: Where were the Fellows housed?
BB: The Fellows – there was an apartment house up the hill near the Russian Embassy that was where Dumbarton Oaks rented apartments for Fellows for many years. Yes, and even occasionally people would stay in this building, in the Fellows Building.
EB: So when Arthur Miller came, was he – were there apartments up there then, or –?
BB: I think he was up there then, yeah. Yeah.
EB: Did the Pre-Columbian Fellows give research reports or informal talks?
BB: No, there wasn't that. That hadn't started yet. I think it was Giles Constable who started that.
EB: And what was there – can you say something about the relationship to the fellowship program in Pre-Columbian vis-à-vis the other fellowship programs?
BB: By and large, they usually stay pretty much to themselves, in my experience. There've been a couple of examples. Richard Townsend, who was working on that Aztec garden site, got along very well with the Garden Fellows and liked to talk to them about this project, and that was a nice rapport. The most interesting person, I think, was Sabine MacCormack, who came here as a Byzantine Fellow – and I don't remember exactly what it was, whether it was Mission to the Slavs, but it was about the conversion to Christianity and how that was happening—and she came here and realized that a very similar thing was going on in the New World. And she started looking very carefully at the Andean sources on this. And she's written two books on conversion and Christianity, the relation between Christianity and the indigenous religions. She's published those since then on the New World. That was the only real crossover.
EB: It is interesting how Dumbarton Oaks becomes a – well, it provides an opportunity for people and issues to go in very interesting ways.
BB: Yes, yes.
EB: So, did all of the Fellows have lunch together or did they just go their own way or how did that work?
BB: Well –
EB: Because I know now lunch is such a big part of what Dumbarton Oaks is, and I don't know whether it always was –
BB: It probably –
EB: – or whether they did sherries or teas where the Fellows got together or not.
BB: I think that the lunch may be more of a real social occasion now than it was. That space is small in that dining room here, and you tended to go with your own people, but you also filled in at other tables. Somebody was saying the other day that there was more mixture when people ate here, because the space was small and the tables filled in. As long as Mrs. Bliss was alive, there was tea served. Did I mention this the other day?
EB: No. Well, you did, but let's talk about it.
BB: Yeah. In the Main House, in the center of the hall, in the, where the curved glass is opposite the old front door, there was a table, and in the afternoons at four o'clock, I think, there was a tea urn.
EB: Every afternoon?
BB: I think it was every afternoon during the week. And Mrs. Bliss would often come to that and have tea with the Fellows and people. And it was a good chatting time for people; that was a good social time. The swimming pool was a good social place. I think I knew more people from the Byzantine center from swimming with them than other ways.
EB: There used to be sherry served before lunch –
BB: There was sherry served –
EB: – or was that in the afternoons?
BB: Now I suddenly remember that there was sherry, but I've forgotten exactly when it was. Was it regular or was it special? I think it was sort of special occasion, wasn't it?
EB: I think it may have been a Thursday sherry hour.
BB: That's right, there was one day of the week, that's right. That was it, yes. Yeah.
EB: So did Mrs. Bliss interact very much with the Fellows?
BB: Not a whole lot, but she liked to meet them and talk to them a little bit and be nice with them.
EB: The Fellows program naturally leans into the Library. How did the Library begin?
BB: The Library began with Mr. Bliss. He had a library, a small one, but he had some good things in it. And it was in a building behind the house where the Blisses lived in their last years, a house at Q and 28th, and behind the house there was a garden, a small garden, with a wonderful – I think it was a beech tree in the middle of it – and the other side of it was probably, what, an old carriage house, that was Mr. Bliss's office. And the library was there. And he had – what did he have? – maybe 500 books, something like that. And it was a good start on a library.
EB: So did the library come here?
BB: The library came here.
EB: When the collection came here?
BB: Yes, yeah, yeah.
EB: So, the Fellows didn't go to Mrs. Bliss's house to consult books or anything?
BB: Well, this was only pre-Columbian in Mr. Bliss's library, and it came here before we had Fellows.
EB: Oh, I see, of course.
BB: So, yeah.
EB: And then how did you – clearly you built the Library – what were your goals? What kind of library were you trying to create?
BB: Well, I was trying to create a library that would be useful to people working in the more-worked-with and higher cultures in Latin America, and I was trying to fill in gaps in Mr. Bliss's library, which just for this kind of thing that would be good to have. And also, of course, things were beginning to come to be published, and to get the new material that was coming. So that was, those two things.
EB: Would you say you had the sort of financial support to acquire the way you wanted to?
BB: For books, yes, I think so, yeah, yeah. No, because I could – I don't remember now what the figure was, but I dreamed up a figure that I thought would be a good figure, and that was –
EB: Those were the good old days.
BB: Those were the good old days.
EB: Did you ever – were there ever plans to acquire manuscripts or unique materials, or was it always a –?
BB: Not really, no, no. We acquired useful books and objects.
EB: Now you talked about the publications and how the study series began as a publication of Mike Coe's lecture, but were the other studies, in the monograph series – Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology – how did that develop?
BB: Well, we had started the series, so we had to keep going with it, and we – there were some things. Well, the early papers I guess – George Kubler produced one – they were sometimes on things in the Collection or by people on the Advisory Committee. And then we just gradually, of course, widened, widened fairly quickly, with the people wanting to have us publish things.
EB: Now there's – in the studies series – there're several – there're many – fundamental publications.
BB: Yeah, yeah.
EB: And the conferences – the publications of the symposia volumes – or actually, you didn't call them "symposia," but the conference volumes?
BB: Yeah. No, when we were trying to name our series, Byzantium had a symposium. I think the Garden people had, I believe, a colloquium, so I decided that we should have something else, so we had conferences. And then of course having them, we should – we wanted to publish them.
EB: Let's talk a little bit about your – the advisors, the Advisory Committee. How did that first begin, and how were the members selected?
BB: I don't actually know, because they were in place when I arrived.
EB: Oh, they were. OK.
BB: But I think that Jack Thacher, the Director, probably talked mostly with Sam Lothrop, and probably with Gordon Willey, and the people at Harvard, to get their advice on how this should be done. The other centers had advisory committees.
EB: So, Gordon Willey was on the advisory body continually, was he not?
BB: Well, those first people – Lothrop died shortly after that, after he was appointed, after that was formed. The others simply stayed, and I had thought that they were just appointed without end, but I noticed in looking through some of those old D.O. books the other day, it says they were reappointed yearly, but they were – there was nobody else on that committee until Stephen Williams became – he went to the Peabody, and I think it was probably the moment he became Director of the Peabody that he became a member, or ex officio, of that committee.
EB: So, Joe Brew was on because he was Director of the Peabody?
BB: Yeah, and he was the Chairman, yeah.
EB: And Junius Bird was at Natural History?
BB: At Natural History, as was Gordon Ekholm.
EB: So, the only – well, Samuel Lothrop and George Kubler –
BB: Kubler was Yale.
EB: On the first committee?
BB: Yeah.
EB: Did they really give advice?
BB: Yeah. No, they really did. And I would – actually, our meetings were usually more or less a formality. And just – we would tell them what we had been doing and what we wanted to. But I called them for various reasons – I called Joe Brewer, Gordon Willey for something, for some tactical advice. And the two at the American Museum, Gordon Ekholm and Junius Bird, I would show them objects that I wanted to acquire, because they both looked at objects, and if I wanted to buy a Maya thing, I would call Gordon and say, "Have you seen this?" And often he would say, "Yes, I have, and I think it's very good, and I think you should try to get it," or he would say no, and I would take it up to New York and show it to him. Or the dealer would say, "Gordon has seen this."
EB: This is Gordon Ekholm.
BB: Yeah, yes. So I used both of the Natural History people in this way, and they were all useful in various ways.
EB: Did they choose the Fellows? Was there a formal review process?
BB: We began – we slowly worked into that. I think we essentially chose the Fellows – we being Mike Coe and Jack Thacher and me – chose the people we wanted. But I think before we did anything or let them know, we would go to the Advisory Committee and say, "These are the people we would like to have. Is this OK with you?"
EB: So, Jack Thacher was a critical voice in the developing fellowship program.
BB: Well, he was a great backer-upper. He didn't do anything about choosing the people, but if Mike and I thought this was good, he backed us. But then, I say, Gordon Ekholm suggested Arthur Miller. What was her name? There was one person who was a student of Gordon's, and I really didn't think that she was all that good, but Gordon wanted her, and so –
EB: Rosemary Sharp.
BB: Rosemary Sharp. So we did take her in, but that's – but by and large, we decided with their – we asked for their approval.
EB: And so Mike Coe had been – was – his title was advisor, and then you had an Advisory Committee, but he was a hands-on advisor? They were more –
BB: Yeah. I will say also, which I guess is obvious, that when we were thinking about somebody who'd applied, we would talk to that person's professor or to other people who knew the work of that person, so we got – and often it was somebody on the Advisory Committee.
EB: Was George Kubler helpful? I mean, I shouldn't put it that way. But I was thinking of the Advisory Committee – he was one of the few art historians.
BB: He was the only art historian on the committee. George had spoken interestingly and was interested in what we did and was helpful in some ways. He was not the sort of practical or how-to-do-it kind of person, and he was not useful in this sort of way.
EB: I can see that – I mean, I can see exactly, when you say that, I understand exactly what you mean.
BB: Yeah, that's right.
EB: There is an abstract quality –
BB: Yes, exactly, yes.
EB: Whereas Mike Coe has an abstract quality, but also a hands-on, practical –
BB: Yeah, yeah. Well, this was – as did the other members. Joe Brew was not really – he was in North American art, North American archaeology. And he was – but he was good for certain "should we do this kind of thing?" questions, and when it came to things that had to do with what one should do in a museum – on that Joe would be good for certain advice.
EB: In the early years – and this was just a perception of mine, and maybe it's that – the program seemed closer to Yale than to Harvard, because of the advice of Mike Coe. But I'm wondering, was there ever a move by Harvard to try to move the Pre-Columbian program up there at all?
BB: Yeah. Well, let me address the two parts of this, because I never felt any particular closeness – Yale was a nice and pleasant place, but I didn't see that it had anything to do with us – except for Mike particularly, George a little bit – but we were certainly much more aware of Harvard. There was a time when Steve Williams came to the Peabody and on this committee, and I have absolutely no provable knowledge of this – everything came secondhand – but apparently he did think that, you know, "Why was all this stuff down here? They could use that in the Peabody and wouldn't have to have all this expensive maintaining." I think he was just after the pre-Columbian things, not the whole thing, although that may possibly have been discussed – should things be moved to Cambridge. For one thing, I think speaking of why that couldn't be done, it'd be against the wishes of the donor. And that would be rather hard to do legally, and there would be a lot of legal and practical problems about any kind of thing like that, but – but apparently Steve Williams would talk to people in Cambridge about this, and the word would get down here one way or another – you know, fifth hand by that time – and so we would hear what he was planning to bring up at an Advisory Committee meeting. And then Mike and I – Mike and I usually had lunch with Gordon Willey before those meetings, and I guess we would get all this sort of arranged as to what the answers should be and how this should be handled. And so it never went anywhere. It may not have been very real in the beginning. There must have – there was some germ there, but it – but that was the only threat that I ever heard of.
EB: Reflecting back, and I guess this is sort of my final question, and there may be other things you want to bring out, but reflecting back on the beginning, and then, say, now, what is your view of the relation between the Pre-Columbian program at Dumbarton Oaks and the larger field of Pre-Columbian studies? I realize that's a big, opened-up question.
BB: That's a big one.
EB: And very interesting.
BB: Well, I feel that it's a part of that bigger thing. The field has grown so, and it's – at the beginning this was – it was important, because there wasn't a whole lot of similar kind of activity going on. A number of people had been digging in that – well, not a whole lot of people, but certain universities had been digging in these sites – but it was not – the whole field of study has become bigger, certainly in this country, and it's become more important to the countries in which it's taking place, for touristic, money reasons, if nothing else, and also, I think, for increased awareness of national identity and national pride. But I think that Dumbarton Oaks does have a kind of special attitude in the field, and I think it can make contributions in that way that aren't easily found in other places, which are maybe doing more excavation, possibly more publishing, but I think that the Dumbarton Oaks quality and the way they're doing things is special and is also a part of the bigger thing.
EB: Are there questions that weren't asked?
BB: Ah.
EB: Questions that you weren't asked.
BB: I can't think of any at the moment, no.
EB: Thank you very much.
BB: Thank you.
EB: The program remains extraordinarily important and special.
BB: Well, I'm just – I'm delighted that it's livelier all the time. You know, there are a great quantity of Fellows, and that it has a vigor and a life, and much of that is due to you and your continuing efforts in this, and thank you.
EB: Thank you very much. [Tape ends and then restarts.]
EB: Are you ready for us?
BB: Um-hum.
EB: OK. Matthew Stirling was one of Mr. Bliss's advisors, but he's not listed as being on the Advisory Committee. Could you talk about his importance for Dumbarton Oaks?
BB: Matthew Stirling had been at the Smithsonian. He had done important excavations – some of the earliest excavations – the earliest excavations – in the Olmec region. He was elderly at the time that the Collection was installed here. He did come to the Olmec conference, and he gave a paper at the Olmec conference. And in fact, there was film, I think, that we showed, that the Smithsonian had done of him. After the Olmec conference and after, I think, also, the following year, while they were still in that house, before he died, they would have a party for the people who were involved in the conference.
EB: Did they live in town?
BB: They lived in town. They lived in Cleveland Park, which is not terribly far away from here. And so that was a very nice way that they were participating in this. But I think Matthew Stirling would have been more important had he been younger and healthier. But he had been important in his day because Mr. Bliss, of course, loved Olmec. I mean, his first piece having been Olmec. And he always liked Olmec things.
EB: – and the first conference –
BB: Incidentally, I found some correspondence having to do with the Olmec exhibition at the National Gallery a few years ago in which somebody in Mexico was saying that I, who was on that committee for that show, had bought a lot of Olmec objects. And I didn't. It was Mr. Bliss who bought a lot of Olmec objects. I think I bought maybe two. But I was being chastised slightly for that. But Mr. Bliss' love was Olmec, parentheses there.
EB: Now support for archaeological projects: certainly the Byzantine program had been supporting archaeology for years; I don't know whether in Landscape Architecture they also had been supporting work. Was there a sense that Pre-Columbian should or should not move into this area?
BB: We had one venture into this area, and I think that some possible thing seemed too complicated to take on or inappropriate for us to take on. But we did back one project of Arthur Miller's, wanting to record the mural paintings at Tulum. He and I had both been in there with tour groups and seeing people with – there's one very narrow space behind or below the pyramid where there are paintings and where people were walking through and you could hardly help rubbing against these paintings as you passed through. Nobody was trying to do them any harm. So we both felt strongly that these should be recorded. And so we did set up a project, and Arthur got Felipe Dávalos, who was a very good artist and used to doing that kind of thing. And we recorded those paintings which at the moment are hanging in the installation – or some of them are.
EB: And if you go to Tulum now, there's nothing to be seen.
BB: I haven't been in there recently. Yeah, I can imagine that. And that's why we did it.
EB: So, that's one of those –
BB: That was a rescue operation or a –
EB: – one of those things was absolutely short on time. The program had an early focus on art history – or seems to have had – even though I know one of the first Fellows – Junior Fellows – Jeff Wilkerson is an archaeologist, and of course, Marcus is an archaeologist. But there was this sense that the program should focus on objects, as you say, or on images. But did you feel that there was a tension between a focus on art history or the art object versus anthropological archaeology or anthropology?
BB: There was a kind of basic enemy camp attitude between art historians and anthropologists. In some ways, I think a little more so now because they've learned to live together a little better. But at that time, these were two different worlds. But I used to feel that whatever we did, it should, hopefully, explain the art in some way. And there were all kinds of ways of doing this. It didn't have to be art history. And I always liked to get somebody – at least one person – into those conferences who came from a sort of different world, who was an ethnographer – one ethnographer – or somebody who was a little offbeat and would look at things from a slightly different way. And I liked to get a blend of attitudes. So I liked to mix them up. But you are right that there is – was – this kind of, well, "That's an art historian." And there are people with that attitude. But I think that the really bright and lively, intelligent people can see how things belong together and how it all adds up.
EB: It seems that perhaps the camps aren't enemy camps so much as they were at a bitter moment in the past.
BB: I think that's true. I think that the archaeologists got in there first. They had not been in there for a very long time but they were in there first and they were dirt archaeologists and they went on a dig. And suddenly these art historians came along interpreting things and talking about iconography. And I think that for some of them that was enlightening and that was interesting. And for others of them, it was all, "They're just art historians. They don't know anything. They don't know how dig." But it depends on the person.
EB: Thank you very much.
BB: Thank you.
EB: Any other –?
BB: Did that answer your question?
EB: That's great.]]>
Mr. Thacher got Mr. Patterson. Ruth Havey, as far as I know, was never paid by Harvard. She was Mrs. Bliss's. She worked at the same time as Mr. Patterson. They worked on the Pebble Garden and the Urn Terrace and when we built the Garden Library, they did all the landscaping around that. Those were new gifts, and Havey did those for Mrs. Bliss, and when Mrs. Bliss died, Havey was through. Patterson was the consultant. And then they made up a committee of landscape architects who were Harvard graduates. Rapuano, Zach, Perry Wheeler, and Patterson was the chairman of that.
McGuire came here when Tyler was the director, and she really got started when Betty MacDougall, who was the first curator of the garden library, retired. Diane came down on a sabbatical from Harvard for a year to run the garden library and also to be a consultant. All Diane did in Beatrix Farrand's Plant Book were the italics, the Plant Book itself, Farrand did that. Diane and Lois Fern organized it. It was indexed and put together, but Diane only did the italics and the forward.
I didn't have much contact with Mr. Bliss – not as much as Mrs. Bliss. I always felt that the garden was hers and the Pre-Columbian was his and the Byzantine was theirs and also the Garden Library. Mrs. Bliss, Mr. Kearney and Mr. Thacher all had birthdays within one week in September. I came here in July and I didn't meet Mrs. Bliss until late October or November. They would leave here right after the Byzantine symposium in May, they would go to New York and take the boat to Europe. The building superintendent was a man named Smallwood, and he introduced me to Mrs. Bliss at the foot of the steps to the Music Room. As far as first impressions – you've got to remember that I was brought up in Bar Harbor – and through the summer up there when I was a kid, the town was full with those types of people. Nine out of ten cars parked on the street were chauffeur driven. In fact, Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury – he had a place there, and the garages had chauffeurs' rooms and five or six. Chauffeurs would keep their limousines there, and they would wash their cars, and us kids used to hang out there and summertime when the circuses came. Morgenthau would give his chauffeur all this money, and he'd pile all us kids in this big old Lincoln Zephyr, and he'd take us to the circus. I remember that the native people, when people like Mrs. Bliss – not Mrs. Bliss – would come down the sidewalk, they'd step off and let them go by. It was even worse than that in the twenties. The Blisses had a place up there, across the harbor, a placed called Brownstone. After '52, a lot of that kind of thing stopped.
Every time I met Mrs. Bliss, after we got to know each other – at that time we had an old beagle dog that we brought back from Maine that we called Dusty – the first thing she'd say was, "How's Dusty and how is myself and how is Mrs. Smith and the children?'' – always the dogs first. She always had dogs. When the Blisses went to Maine, they had a great dane, that they would leave up there, and my aunt would take care of it for two or three winters. When I came, Mrs. Bliss had two schipperkes and Mr. Thacher had two schipperkes, Mr. Kearney had two. That's a little black dog. After that she had a little Himalayan terrier; it always had a bone. In the pet cemetery in Dumbarton Park, there are two or three horses buried there and some of the old pets, and in our pet cemetery down in back of the greenhouse, there are some of her dogs buried down there.
A couple of times a week the chauffeur would come up for the scented geraniums. We'd always supplied the Blisses with flowers and bring back what they didn't want. They'd come back sloppy wet – he'd just watered them, and they would use a handful in the finger bowls. Even today, we have that Dr. Livingstone and some of the lemon geraniums that we used back then. I just kept them, and we'd stick them out in the garden someplace. They at this time were living at 28th and Q, on the southeast corner. It was sold, and they had a big copper beech in the back yard, just like the one here, and the people who bought it sheared one whole side off and put in a swimming pool. The place where Mr. Bliss' office was, an outbuilding where the servants lived, is now a residence, and the area on the Q street side where the garage was for four cars, that is another residence and on the 28th street side, behind the house, where the garden was, there are three townhouses. There is nothing of the old Bliss garden, but in the front yard – there is a great big grandiflora magnolia and two or three clumps of soulangeana magnolias which were left there. In the back there was a little rose garden with boxwood, lots of camellias, and every year we would go down with the same shipment of bulbs, and we were putting bulbs on top of bulbs. We did that for her. She had one of the men here go down at night and work in her garden. She liked apple blossom pink and white, she liked the white gardenias and azaleas – no magenta, she didn't like magenta.
You have to remember that we were not open in the summertime. Come the first of July, we didn't have to fool with those borders. Sometimes at the end of July, when things slackened, we'd move the chrysanthemums in. Mr. Kearney told me that Mrs. Farrand told him mums won't work, but you can go ahead and try them. She was right, because they didn't bloom until October or into November, and by then they were getting hit with the frost. Now, mum culture, the way it is now, you can get mums to bloom in September. She liked the pink mum that Mr. Kearney tagged with the name of Dumbarton Oaks. That was the color that Mrs. Bliss didn't like but when Mr. Kearney called it Dumbarton Oaks, she said we could use it. They found a seedling of it down in the Fountain Terrace, in the bed to the right where you go through the gate. They kept it and Mr. Kearney just named it. The forsythia named Beatrix Farrand was not here. That didn't go in until after we redid the Ellipse. If you stand on the Ellipse and look over the forsythia, it's right in the middle. It's upright and a bigger yellow as against a weeping, which is a lot smaller and not quite as yellow and doesn't bloom as heavily as the upright. There is a hawthorn named for Mrs. Farrand, the forsythia and there is one other plant I've forgotten. She said that they had picked the thorniest hawthorn that they could find and named it after her. That was not her character, she was very strict and stern and just as straight as an arrow. In the summertime up in Reef Point you could count on her to come out about 10:00 or 10:30 every morning with her Harris tweed – she was quite an old lady at that time – shawl and a cane, and she'd go all through the whole garden. Reef Point, in Bar Harbor, was the summer home of her parents, and when they died, she married Max Farrand in 1942. She married real late, and then they developed the Reef Point garden. I think it still would have been going today, but they were maybe fifteen or twenty years ahead of their time.
I don't think Edith Wharton ever came here, not when I was here. She's the one that had that picture in the garden library, and down in the pit right now I have two or three pieces of honeysuckle that came out of Edith Wharton's garden. One of the Garden Fellows a couple of years ago, a Canadian fellow, he went to visit and he brought back these cuttings, and I have to find a place to put them. It's not the japonica, it's like the heckrotti, one of the taller ones. It's down in the back of the pit house. That japonica – I think that is the only thing that Mrs. Farrand made a mistake – that has only been in this country for a hundred years or so. It's all over everything, all over the country, almost as bad as kudzu. We have quite a few clumps of it down through the allee, huge clumps of it. But it made a good screen. The arch of the area leading to the Rose Garden, going up the goat steps – that walk has kind of a funny curve – has a row of honeysuckle that we have to keep pruned, it camouflages that curve.
One of the first things that I remember was the Blisses' fiftieth wedding anniversary in '58. That was a big to-do. It was all tented out there. It rained and it rained and it rained. There were 2,800 people. Mamie Eisenhower came. She bumped her head getting out of the car, I remember that. At that time there was a Captain Candy. There was a precinct on number 7 Volta Place – that was the Georgetown police precinct. Captain Candy came up here – a lot of these diplomats wouldn't wait with their limousines, they were coming up and dropping them off. Two of them cut across the grass. He went over and he just reamed them a good one. At that time it was all tented, and it was cut for them to come in. There were seven bars set up. Mr. Bliss was up here just before people were to arrive, down underneath the loggia at the swimming pool. There was a bar down there, and Mr. Bliss got behind the bar and he mixed myself, him, and Mr. Kearney a drink before the festivities.
Let me see what else happened. We had a Japanese dance type thing with drums on the North Vista. We had to build a stage and we built a big chicken wire background and we spent the day weaving grandiflora leaves in the chicken wire to make it solid. I remember we could do all that, but when it came time for the stage to be taken apart, we could not touch it. They brought the union stage hands from the National Theater to take it apart, but we had to lug it down and put it on the trailer.
And then, what else happened? Princess Margaret came to visit right after the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian were finished. She came up in a Rolls Royce. That is one of the very few times that I've seen the front doors leading to the Oval Room open. She wasn't a very big woman. She had a hairdo about like this, and one of the first things that she did was go into the Oval Room and change her shoes. She couldn't walk through the gardens with high heels.
I remember that we had a big staff party here one day. One evening after the garden closed, Mrs. Bliss came out, and at that time this guy and gal stayed in, they hid. And they came to the party, and they came up. At that time we had an assistant director named Charley Millard – that's when we started having Christmas parties. We'd never had Christmas parties, we'd had some problems with this kind of thing. Charley wasn't here then. This guy had to have milk. He had a forked stick that he'd put a bunch of grapes on it, and plucked it out there. They just made themselves at home, and we, of course, thought they were Charley's friends. Mrs. Bliss walked in here and walked over there and looked at all these people, and she pointed right at those two people, "They don't belong here." They went down and went in swimming. We finally got him cornered and ushered him out that gate over there and then we went back and got her and told her that you better get out of here, he's gone. They just went in and got peoples bathing suits and put them on.
I can't think of any other things. Oh yeah. I met Elizabeth Taylor in the garden, but she didn't have a little dog. When John Warner first met her, they came in here two or three times in public hours, and he introduced me to her right by that gate. Graham's husband lives right across the street from the cemetery. He's the one that blew his head off. Elizabeth Taylor, when she married John Warner – that house that is across from the Fellows Building. On each of the shutters – every window has shutters – she painted each shutter on each window a different color – the whole building, yellow, green, blue, black. And she stood out there and picked out the one she wanted, and then they painted the other ones. She didn't know what color to put up there. I don't remember now, but it was something similar to what's there now.
Diana. The model for that was the sculptor's wife, and he did it in clay down around the swimming pool. I'm just telling these things Mr. Kearney told me. First done in lead, Diana set down in Dumbarton Oaks park. They destroyed it, pushed it over and broke it up, and then it was brought up here. When first came it was down where the Perspective is. There is a little park that goes down on the left. There is a great big rock down there; it sat on that. Well, they destroyed it down there. They broke the animal off; they broke the horn off, and finally we took it out of there and put it in the basement of the greenhouse for about ten years, I guess. When Mr. Thomson was here, before Angeliki, we got that fixed. We finally found some people that would fix it. In fact, the stone people that did the Pebble Garden, they had a man who did some work with lead, and he fixed it. So, we put it over there where it still can be seen and the public can't get to it. So, it's been fine and we set up so it would be straight ahead. Mrs. Thompson looked at it, and she wanted turned to the side, which is better.
Mr. Coles used to come with a straw hat and a lime green Thunderbird. He never drank anything but water. During the war, where we have the orchid house now, they had grates like this in here, and then went all around the room like these do. During the war they took all but the ones near the door and put them in a scrap yard, and they also took all of the heat pipes out, except the one that goes over to the greenhouse; there wasn't any heating there. Mr. Coles used it as a cutting room, cutting finials. He didn't do the ones on the way farther end of the North Vista, but there are two or three up by the gate; he did those. And there's a couple more up next to the house, he did those since I've been here. The pineapples down in the Ellipse, he did those, and a number of others. I think he did the lead basket as you go through the gate from the black oak into the beech terrace. He was 87 when he died. He got out and washed his Thunderbird – he lived over on Pennsylvania Avenue in southeast with his daughter – he went out and washed the car, came in, and sat down and died. He and his brother did most of the lettering on the Lincoln Memorial. He was a little tiny man, very nice, and when my son was little enough so Joan could let him out of the house, he'd come up to the greenhouse by himself. When he got up there, he'd run right up there and sit on a box and watch Mr. Coles by the hour. Mr. Coles bought him a little wheelbarrow and a little red wagon – the young and the old. The week that he died, one of the men who worked on the garden passed. Heck we went to three funerals that week. He'd make the clay models, and Mrs. Bliss would make the changes, and he would do those. Mrs. Farrand designed those earlier, but you can bet that Mrs. Bliss was making the changes. Do it this way and get it done. She'd say, "That's exactly what we don't want; let's do this way," and do it again. I don't know how Mrs. Farrand and Mrs. Bliss got along, they called them the garden twins, and when Mrs. Farrand said she wanted that bottle over there and fifteen other people said no, she'd go right along and pretty soon that bottle would be over there. This is why it took so long and making all of those changes and not being together. Farrand and Bliss would talk about this and Farrand would sketch it and send the sketches over and Bliss would change them and they would send them back and forth. She was a talented woman in her own right. My father told me that a lot of the tradesmen in Maine and a lot of the gardeners of the estates that Mrs. Farrand did up there – she'd come in with three or four bushel baskets of labels. Everything would be all in beds labeled before you'd do anything, and then she'd make the changes. She'd always come with bundles of labels. You have got to remember the plants that they had. All the people like Mrs. Stewart always had plenty of money.
I don't think there were fifty gardeners. I know that when they were building the Music Room, Mr. Kearney told me that there were seventy-five people working here, but that was everything. I don't really know what the average gardening staff for Mrs. Bliss, because they had three or four working in the greenhouse; there were gate tenders and that sort of thing, but the most that we've had here is fourteen since I've been here.
The greenhouse was put up in the twenties. We never had orchids in the orchid house until they put the heat back in there. We always had orchids, but at that time the orchids were on this end of the east wing in that one room, and I think it was when Tom Baird was assistant director here. He was interested in orchids and plants. I think it was '63 that we put heat back in there and then we moved the orchids over and we bought some orchids and Mr. Baird bought some for Dumbarton Oaks. He liked gardens.
Where the peonies are now, that was just open. Many years ago there was a greenhouse there with lots of cold frames, and that's where they grew all the annuals, perennials, and vegetables. When Harvard took over, they did away with that and they did away with the tennis court and they did away with the herb garden where the Arbor Terrace is. There were two more greenhouses down in back of the one that we have now, they tore those down. And down in the woods where we keep our orchids outdoors, there was a huge greenhouse down there and that was all torn down.
The part where my office is, that and the room up above were added on. When Mr. Thacher came here he lived in the Farrand suite in the house. When Mrs. Farrand came here, there was always a suite of rooms for her in the Main House – that is when it was privately owned. And when Thacher came, he lived in there and that building down there was the servants quarters and down underneath where the three doors are was a garage for electric cars. They had one little room down there for charging the batteries. And then when Thacher remodeled that, he added on where my office is and that whole thing, all the way up. He moved the kitchen from that side of the building to this side. The first thing that he did was to take the kitchen from the back and put it up on the front. Before that, where the gardeners' lunch room and locker room are, is where the carpenter's shop was. There is a little closet now where we keep barbed wire, that was a little toilet for the garden help.
We tried to have concerts at the Lovers Lane pool when Constable was director here in the early eighties. We ran a cable all the way down there to keep the harp tuner warm. Mr. Kearney told me that when the Blisses were here, they had a stage that covered the whole upper end. When we decided to have the concerts with Giles here, there was just a little fight-foot by four-foot thing over to one side, and both times that they did it, ten minutes into the performance, the heavens opened up. They canceled the first one and they canceled the next one and they ended up having a little concert out in the North Vista.
There were electric light plugs all down through there, and you could hook into a tree and run the electric shears and everything, until it started blowing so many fuses because it was so old. We disconnected them. They had a huge Japanese lantern that they used to hang down there.
We opened the bids last week [to redo the pool]. We invited five people to bid, and four bid on it – some very low, some very high, and two right in the middle.
When we were doing the Pebble Garden, it took them three years. The first year was spent on doing nothing but drawing plans to get the layout, and the next year when they got all that going, we had a lot of stones piled up. All the stones came – same size – hundred pound sacks of one size and one color. We had three trailer truck loads. We stored them over in the parking lot, and then we'd bring them over here. We had them piled along the wall. Mrs. Bliss saw them after the rain, before we put them down, and she saw the color of the stones after the rain, and then we put them down. Originally that fountain was supposed to set way back there against the wall. You can lay out all the sketches and plans that you want, but you have to remember only a tenth of them were actually executed.
I wish I had known I was coming here. When I had worked at Reef Point I enjoyed myself and learned a lot, but if I had known I was going to come to a place like this – I was young then – I would have paid more attention. I was college age and only came down here for two years just to get some experience and here I am. My most important contribution of forty years was the ability to stay and keep it the way it is, and maybe being around all those estates up there when I was a kid and seeing how well that they were kept. Of course, the climate is different here – that gave me a little more outlook on a place like this. Of course, being here with Matthew for twenty-one years, and some of the stories that he told me about this place. The wisteria came up in the Pebble Garden and came over and was going into the swimming pool, and he started to clean this place up before I came. And following him – he liked to do the same things that I liked to do – keep it neat and clean. He actually left here for three years. He got so damn mad at old man Geisler who was superintendent. Mrs. Bliss begged the hell out of him for three years to come back. He finally came back here, and I don't think that you will ever find it in the records, certainly not Dumbarton Oaks records.
When I am gone from here, maybe the third week in October, I'll wonder what the mums look like, and in the winter I will wonder if the snow drops are going to bloom just before Christmas, or just after, or if the jasmine's going to come in on the tenth of January – just little things – and how the old oak is doing and if it is still here. If you walk through the gardens every day, any change, you notice it right off.
This garden is not a summer garden, never has been. Everybody thinks so because we're open in summer. The mixture of the evergreens when you look out the window – you can come out in the winter, there are enough evergreens so that is nice in winter – I mean, something for all seasons.
My favorites – like delphiniums, that I can't grow here. I was up in Maine when my father-in-law died. When I pulled into my brother-in-law's driveway, he had a clump of delphiniums that big in solid full bloom. There were two photographers, I don't know who they were, taking all kinds of pictures and of a big hollyhock that he had there. This time he hasn't done much gardening at all, he's down in Harbor Island.
I think a mixture of perennials – this is something I will have to get adjusted to again. Here we have three seasons, we have spring, summer, and fall, and up there you have summer and maybe a little bit in the fall. Maybe after all the seasons I've had here, I want a short season.
Mrs. Bliss had a parasol as a signature item. She had very fair skin, her hair was red when I knew her. That picture in the garden library that was painted, her hair looked like that. I don't think she weighed over a hundred pounds, a very tiny woman. Somewhere in the archives down there, there is an eight or sixteen millimeter movie of the garden taken in 1928 in black and white and a color one taken in '31 or '32. And in the color one, Mrs. Bliss is in the pool swimming, with a big hat on. They show her swimming the length of the pool, they don't show her coming out of the water.
Mr. Bliss was very diplomatic. He was never as friendly as she was. I saw a lot more of her. He was a dapper Dan type of fellow. He had all of his hair. It wasn't even gray, a kind of silver, very well dressed. There is a picture in the Founders Room when he was younger. The Pre-Columbian wasn't even finished when he died. They would take him by ambulance for chemotherapy treatment, and then they would come by here before they would go. It had to be before he'd go because he didn't feel well after. They would shut down the whole job. The Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian were built at the same time. Both of those jobs were going; it was a mess out there. They'd shut the whole job down and put him in a wheelchair and take him all over. Everybody would just quit for over an hour or an hour and a half, and we'd bring him out, haul him up and down the steps.
I think the Rose Garden was a favorite spot for them. There is a little story. Mr. Kearney says Mrs. Bliss would ask Mr. Bliss, "Bobby, do you think that we will fit in there?"
We were supposed to have a preview showing of the buildings right after that in November or right after that. This was in '62; it was practically finished then. It was scheduled to have a reception type of thing in early December, they just canceled it. He never saw it finished, he died in April '62. In fact, Mr. Thacher, the director, came out and told us that Kennedy had been shot. We were cleaning up the leaves over by the Pre-Columbian. Philip Johnson was here but I never met him personally. He was here every day to look at the building.
I don't really remember what Mrs. Bliss died of; she would have been 91, something like that. She broke her hip down in Barbados a few years before she died. God, it seemed it was like six months before she was out here climbing ladders. She would come in about two or three in the afternoon and say "good morning." You could come up here eight o'clock at night and she would be running around here. I don't remember her being carried down to watch the Pebble Garden; they used to take a chair down. When she had limited ability, she'd stand on the balcony here, and, let's see, parasol this way; she'd hold the parasol, look and point and like I said, she would use the parasol to keep the sun off.
In '85, we took all the limestone that was broken in the Pebble Garden and we took all the pebbles that had come out and they were all put back. It took a couple of years, '85 or '86.
The corks are all in there from the symposiums. Go down there sometime, where the elevations drop down, you'll see them. What it is, in the winter time, we take those out so the water won't set there. Silvio, come symposium time, will save all those wine bottle and champagne corks. By the time they have been in there all season, you can't pull them out. We'd break them off and punch them out through. Think of the things that happen when an O-ring goes bad, a little tiny O-ring, same idea. They can spend all the money they want, but a ten cent O-ring, that sets the whole thing up.
When Mrs. Bliss came back after being away, it would take just about a week to be acclimated. But Mrs. Farrand, she would go to California in the winter, when she came to Reef Point, when she arrived, she'd get out of the car and walk around the whole garden. Particularly over behind the garage, I forget what was planted there, what was planted there that fall before she left. As soon as she got out of the car in the spring, she'd go over there to see how that was. She would go over the whole place.
Mrs. Bliss would take the boat out of New York. They would take their own paper cups, pencils, toilet paper, everything. And Murray, the butler, forgot to pack one bag that had two of Mr. Bliss's shoes; he had two left shoes, and he had to send the two right shoes to Barbados. He used to go over to Mrs. Billing's, who had honey – she had lots of hives – and she would ship some of that honey down to them in Barbados. They rented down there. They would go right after the symposium. In the beginning, Mrs. Bliss was tied up with the American Field Service and in the first part of June or the end of May, all of the exchange students that had been in this country, came back to Washington before they went home. She would always have a tea for them, right here in the Orangery.
In July when I first came here, you could go down to Hogates or anywhere out to dinner. There would be maybe four hundred guys and maybe two guys with their wives; all the wives and kids had left town. I had an uncle who lived over on 19th and R street. I'd go over there and spend the evening and walk home from there and listen to TV programs all the way home.
The statues in the Pebble Garden came from the Meridian house and Mrs. Chanler, who was daughter of Mrs. Laughlin who owned Meridian house, gave those to Mrs. Bliss. I think her mother was a great friend of Mrs. Bliss. I don't think Merriweather Post was a friend. I don't know what the story was, maybe Mrs. Post was a little bit younger. Mrs. Castle – was she a sister in law, she was some kind of relation – she was a friend.
The Blisses had moved out of here twelve years before I came. When I first came most of the cars were chauffeur-driven, and ladies wore the same type of dress to the concerts and that sort of thing.
The tiles on the tool sheds were Italian hand-made tiles, and they were not flat. They look like it, but they have a little bit of a curve. The tool houses were built back in the twenties. The only thing that I know was Portuguese were the tiles on the mosaic by the swimming pool.
Jimmy de Benedetto, a little Italian man, did the rocaille with his hands, a stick, and a little lathe.
I think the docents' tours is one of the best programs we've ever started. You'll never believe how many tours I gave to garden clubs and things like that. You felt like you had to do it and, oh my gosh, it got more and more. I might give your garden club one this time and you belong to one and two more, and then "I can't do it," and then "you gave David one this one and that one." I think I learned a lot from the Pre-Columbian and Byzantine end from people I listened to just going on the docents' tours. I think that it opened the whole place up to the general public. I think the tour thing is good because you're giving tours to people that we wouldn't ordinarily get.]]>
The history of Pre-Columbian collecting is a social and aesthetic history—of ideas, people and organizations, and objects. This richly illustrated volume examines these histories by considering the collection and display of Pre-Columbian objects in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Some of the thirteen essays locate the collecting process within its broader cultural setting in order to explain how and why such collections were formed, while others consider how collections have served as documents of culture within the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, and as objects of fine art or aesthetic statements within the art and art historical worlds. Nearly all contemplate how such collections have been used as active signifiers of political, economic, and cultural power. The thirteen essays were originally presented at a symposium commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Pre-Columbian Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. They continue to be groundbreaking contributions to the histories of collecting and Pre-Columbian art.]]>
INT: I'm Anne Steptoe.
INT: I'm Elizabeth Gettinger.
INT: We have the honor today to interview Helen Evans and Angela Hero. We are here in New York City at the Metropolitan Art Museum. Good afternoon to both of you.
AH: Good afternoon.
HE: Good afternoon.
INT: Now we can get going. So, Dr. Hero, can you tell us something about your work in editing monastic documents at Dumbarton Oaks?
AH: Well, Professor Constable thought that the entire range of monasticism, both eastern and western, could not be studied properly until sources for eastern monasticism were made available, collected and made available. And he assigned that project to John Philip Thomas, whom he had known from Harvard. John was at that time on a joint appointment at Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. He was putting the final touches on his dissertation at Harvard, which was published a couple of years after that—I think it was the early eighties—and very, very well received. It was an excellent study of private religious foundations in Byzantium, so it was related, you see. And he became – he took over the project. And I was appointed—this was all started in '81—I was appointed philological editor for the Greek, because when we got a grant from the Foundation for the Humanities, they said that they wanted also a Greek editor, since these were translations. And we got together a group of translators. It was a problem, because these documents were written in various registers of the Greek language, ranging from the classicizing Hochsprache to the vernacular. And there weren't many scholars, many Byzantinists, who wanted to take on such a task. It was very difficult, because there were—to give you an idea—in the so-called inventories, the brevia, there were words that were not found in any dictionaries, so the two of us worked together – it was a very harmonious collaboration between John and me. We were very lucky finally in getting together a group of international scholars that – some of them were from England, others from Belgium, from Italy. And there's also a – very satisfactory, really. It was a very fine work, my favorite. I mean, it's there in five volumes; you can see it. It was published in 2000, the year 2000. It's the index. This is the part that I value very much, because it was, it is research-friendly. You see, if I – can you bring down volume five, please? That whole volume is the index.
INT: Wow.
AH: Yes so it gives you an idea. If you look under "monks", you have so many entries. [Flipping through the book]
HE: Do you use this in your research at all?
INT: I work in Syriac sources more and I didn't – I know what a tremendous contribution this has been to the field. I work more in the earlier period.
HE: What period are you working in?
INT: Late Antique.
HE: Up to about the seventh century, or –?
INT: Up to about the seventh century.
HE: I'm working on an exhibition on the transition from Byzantium to Islam. We should discuss that at some point.
AH: I'll read it to you so you get an idea. For instance, you start: "Monks, appointment of, assignment to fix duties, attempted assassination of, care of aged, conspiring to flee, contract workers, definition of, dietary concessions for, documents offered by, expulsion of, esthete of the community, electoral college, foundation of." You know, you have, on monks you have how many pages, yes? Monks continued, monks, you have four to five pages. But it followed the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in the format – what it means is that we wanted to produce something that was research-friendly. Now, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium is unique. I mean, Alice-Mary Talbot, who was the executive editor – of course the idea was Kazhdan's, Alexander Kazhdan. There you have a dictionary, an encyclopedia practically of Byzantine life in all its aspects: politics, not just as before, you know, the great, important events, people who took part in these events, patriarchs, kings, emperors; but you have also: sports, food, clothing, footwear. The entry on women in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, it's cross-referenced to Eve, the Virgin Mary, birth of women, girls, you know, education of, marriage, fertility, divorce, concubinage, prostitution, empresses, nuns, so it is – these are extraordinary reference books, standard reference books. That's all I can tell you.
INT: This was a long labor of love for you, these volumes. You worked twenty years and I understand that there were some difficulties at times.
AH: Well, there was, because, as I said, the grant ran out of money, and John and I carried on, on our own expenses. And of course he, fortunately, was – of course we are talking now twenty-five, thirty years ago – he was a master of the computer. He was a computer whiz. And the word processing – he turned in a manuscript over 5,000 pages in '96 to Dumbarton Oaks. And that was all done, you know. I couldn't help there, because my first computer I bought in 1990. And still I use it because it has an excellent Greek font. My Macintosh, the one there, has access to the Internet. I google, now. But I still miss my nice Greek font. In this Macintosh that I have, the Greek font leaves a lot to be desired, especially the accents, the iota subscript – forget it. It's a mess.
INT: Well, while we're on the subject of publications, you were also involved in the Dumbarton Oaks Holy Women of Byzantium series.
AH: Well, I am on the advisory committee on hagiography, yes.
INT: And contributed the life of St. Theoktiste of Lesbos –
AH: Yes, but my dissertation, which was published by Dumbarton Oaks, was – at that time, Alice-Mary and I were doing correspondence, you see, where I did fifty-nine letters of Gregory Akindynos, who was condemned as a heretic, because he was involved in the Hesychast controversy. And then I edited – to give you an idea of my background, it was Professor Ševčenko who introduced me to the study of manuscripts and suggested that I do – both Alice-Mary and myself; we were his students – that we focus on unpublished sources of the fourteenth century. So, she did Patriarch Athanasius; I did Akindynos, and then I edited and translated the only surviving correspondence by a Byzantine woman, the letters of Irene Choumnaina Palaiologina and out of that the correspondence of her spiritual advisor, Theoleptos of Philadelphia.
INT: You were working on sources on the history of women –
AH: They're all fourteenth century.
INT: -- before a lot of people were doing that, really. You were at the beginning of that.
AH: Yes, we were. It was the beginning of the study – you know, gender studies and all that. But, and then of course, you know, in Byzantine Hagiography and Theoktiste of Philadelphia, er, Theoktiste of Lesbos.
INT: When did you first come to visit Dumbarton Oaks? When was that, and what were your first impressions of the place?
AH: Well, originally I was very impressed, because I felt that it was an ideal place for scholarly research. At that time, I think in '66, Mrs. Bliss was still alive.
INT: She was still there.
AH: And during the symposia they had a beautiful buffet, as you know, and the table set out with the best china and silver, and it was something to see. And of course the gardens – the symposia were always during the spring and outdoors. And the opportunity offered of interacting with other scholars – I met some of the world's top Byzantinists there: Robert Browning, oh so many – Romilly Jenkins, Trypanis, Laourdas, Vryonis, Sir Steven Runciman, so many, Anastos from California – my friends, yeah; and Alice-Mary, with whom I feel like, you know, like a sibling, like sisters. We were very close and we still continue to be. But our mentor is sick.
INT: Doing better, though, I understand.
AH: And Meyendorff passed away fourteen years ago.
INT: Can you talk about Father Meyendorff, what he was like, since we don't have the opportunity to interview him?
AH: No, no, he died in '92 and he died – it was so sudden, because I had seen him at Dumbarton Oaks two months before he passed away. He was a real man of God. Bickerman, my other teacher at Columbia—he was of course a classicist—said once that Meyendorff was the last intelligent man to believe in God, which shocked me, of course, because I was still very innocent and very not used to that kind of talk. He said to me, "Are you with Meyendorff?" I said, "Yes." Ha! Last intelligent – I couldn't believe it. Yes, Father Meyendorff was a true believer. He was a pioneer, an intelligent man, despite what Bickerman said, and very erudite, a very learned man. And easy, kind to work with – you know, very congenial, very – I found him. He was exceptionally good to his students. And he had a lot to give. It's a shame that he died. He was in his – sixty-two years old when he died. He died of pancreatic cancer. And fortunately he didn't suffer. As I said, I'd seen him two months before his death. I couldn't believe it when I opened up the New York Times and saw the obituary – because he had then retired from Fordham and had gone to the Institute for Advanced Study.
INT: Right, Princeton.
AH: Yeah, Princeton. They had built a house that summer and everything. He died, and she had to sell the house, Mrs. Meyendorff.
HE: Did he just not know he was ill at all until it was just the very end?
AH: No, no, no, no. All of a sudden he died in Canada. He used to spend the summers there, at a retreat.
INT: Do you remember, as a student, hearing about Dumbarton Oaks from him or did you get a sense – he was quite a giant at Dumbarton Oaks. Did you get a sense of his opinions on the place as a place of study for scholars?
AH: You mean from Father Meyendorff?
INT: Yes.
AH: Oh yes. Well, he thought he was – I think they considered him for director, but he didn't want to accept that job, because he was at St. Vladimir's. He was very active at St. Vladimir's with Schmemann, Father Schmemann.
INT: They made Byzantine theology accessible, I think, to the West in a way that few have replicated. They opened that world up to a lot of people in the West – English-speaking.
AH: Yes, yes. Schmemann's son is a journalist. He's, I think, one of the senior editors – not editors; what do you call them? Correspondents – he was a correspondent for the Times and the head of the Times bureau in, I think, in Moscow for a while. But he went back, you know, to Russia and visited the estates of the family, because these were princely families in Russia – the Meyendorffs, yeah. Meyendorff didn't use the title himself, but it was a princely – again, they were titled people, going all the way back to the first German pope in Rome, before the schism, before 1054. There was a Bavarian pope, a Meyen –
HE: A Meyendorff.
AH: They were Germans, yeah.
HE: And you tell me he came with –
AH: And they went from Germany with Catherine the Great. They married into an Orthodox family in Russia. And that's why he was no longer a Catholic; he was a Russian, he was an Orthodox. But, I asked him – before, of course, the reform of communism, he visited Russia – and I asked him if he went to see their property there, their estates. And he said, "No, my home in St. Petersburg is in the museum." The estates – but Schmemann's son went there and wrote a book. I think it's Echoes from a Native Land – something like that. I don't – I'm not sure, but it's something – yes, Echoes. It's brilliant. And Schmemann's wife was related to another of those, you know, white Russian families, the Trubetskoys, Franz Trubetskoy, so she was the headmistress at Chapin, I think, or Brearley, one of those schools for years. She taught French and Russian, because you see Meyendorff and Schmemann were, of course, refugees from the revolution and they settled in Paris, so they both had doctorates from the Sorbonne. And they were bilingual – more than that.
INT: Multilingual.
INT: It seems that an entire generation of scholars at Dumbarton Oaks had a similar story – Kazhdan.
AH: Kazhdan, yes.
INT: It must have had a very European feel in those first years.
AH: It did. But then after a while, they started, you know, one by one – well, you're the future! [Laughter] It's up to you, now.
INT: Well, I wonder, along the lines of these early years and even later – and you've attended so many Dumbarton Oaks symposia – there must have been some quite memorable experiences among those; I understand there were quite heated debates.
AH: Mm, no. Of course, Professor Ševčenko was always asking a series of questions, you know, but –
INT: How was he as a teacher? How was it having him as your mentor?
AH: Well, I owe everything to him. I'll tell you why: because I went there not knowing what my strengths were, what I wanted to do, my strengths and my weaknesses. And he said to me, "You know the Greek language. You like the written word, don't you?" I said yes. "Well," he said, "continue that." He gave me, when I went to his seminar – he opened up Patrologia Graeca and gave me a passage to translate and I did. He said, "You've seen that before." "No, sir."
HE: It's not my bedside reading.
AH: I said, "I've studied the classics, which I admire, but I never studied the fathers of the church. He said, "Hm. Well. Alright," he says. "You'll be my student. You can take my courses." And I remember: there was another woman, who was – she was also from Europe. And he said to her that she had to take the test. And she said, "Over my dead body." She says, "I have a degree." And he said, "Then, you're not my student." Well, he could be – I'll tell you. I mean, Meyendorff was, by nature, a very gentle, very mild person. The other one – you've known Ševčenko, haven't you? But, I'll say something else for Ševčenko. Ševčenko would go to bat for his students. Yes. He was there for us all the time. And knowing how demanding he was, we worked hard. You couldn't produce for Ševčenko something that was substandard; he'd throw it in your face! Sure. So, I – he was – for me, he was the guiding light. Afterwards, I wanted to continue with him but he left Columbia and went to Dumbarton Oaks, as acting director, interim director. And he told me to go to Meyendorff, because Father Meyendorff had come to Columbia as a visiting professor for a year. And when I told him that I wanted to continue for a doctorate, he said, "You have to come to Fordham. I'm leaving. I can't accept a position here, and I'm offered something at Fordham." And that's it. That's the story of my life, girls. I've got to go now, because –
HE: -- because you think you're going to get rained on.
AH: So, of course, I was going to – I didn't know if you had interviewed Alice-Mary.
INT: We're planning to.
INT: In August.
AH: Yes. And I was going to suggest that you go to her, because she is Dumbarton Oaks. She's been there from '65 all the way to last, this past year.
HE: This year.
AH: She retired. And we are now – in fact, I'm writing an article for her Festschrift. So, she is phenomenal, as far as I'm concerned, because not only is she a superb scholar, but she's also an excellent administrator. I envy this, as far as administration goes. I can't, I hate it, I dread it – administration. Don't give me such duties, no, in my white tower there, ivory tower.
INT: You were quite involved with the Byzantine Center here at Queens.
AH: Well, yes, I was there, yes, but not in the administration, yeah. Right. And it was a small center. We started it with, you know, Professor Psomiadis, who was the founder of the center, and I helped him out. It's – I cannot dismiss – I'll tell you why: because I cannot fire anybody. [Laughter] I can't! I would die before I had to fire somebody, before I tell somebody, because I can't use you anymore. I have a cleaning lady and the poor thing now is getting older, and I do more work than she does. [Laughter] My sons tell me, "This is absurd." I can't, I can't tell anybody, "I don't need you anymore." I can't. But Alice-Mary is fantastic. And then, like Helen – they can juggle, as I said, fifty different projects, here, there. I hate traveling – that's another thing.
HE: She still goes to Greece.
AH: Not anymore. And I can't travel because I've got problems with my back and sitting is not good for me. So, if you'll excuse me – I'm eighty-three years old.
INT: Thank you.
INT: Thank you, that's amazing.
HE: Do you want me to get somebody to get you out to a taxi?
INT: I can walk you out.
HE: Do you need to do your introduction or do we just keep going?
INT: I think we can just keep going.
INT: This is part two and now we will be speaking with Helen Evans at the Metropolitan Art Museum. We're so honored to talk with you today. Thank you so much. So, we understand that you were a summer fellow in 1981. Was that how you first came to work at Dumbarton Oaks, or were you involved earlier than that?
HE: No, it's not how I first came and – I can't remember. I remember being at the symposium that was the first symposium that Robert Thomson from Harvard attended. And I spoke at the symposium "East of Byzantium," and I had not even, really, picked Byzantine studies as my dissertation topic at that time, and so it was a paper I had given for Tom Matthews, and he was one of the co-higher-ups of the symposium. And I remember giving the paper and being so stunned that I was giving it, and my mother had just almost died, so I'd come from the hospital to the conference, and I'd re-written the paper in the hospital so that I hadn't – the research wasn't good enough. I had no access to the books to do anything about it. And I was so nervous that when I finished speaking – and people were very, very positive about it – I essentially tore off the platform and had not unclipped the mic. So, I remember that, mercifully, somebody gasped, I stopped, and the mic cord was as tight as it could have gotten. One more step and I could have discovered whether I fell down or the platform turned over. [Laughter] So that's one of my first great memories of Dumbarton Oaks. But then in '81, as I began my dissertation, I had a fellowship. I started graduate school to do Japanese art history. I think I'm the only Byzantinist that went on the Silk Road backwards, from your point of view. We had lived in Tokyo for several years, when my husband set up a merger venture there. And I began studying at Sophia University, the Jesuit school in Tokyo, and then ended up studying Hagia Sophia, so it was a reverse. And when the man I went to the Institute of Fine Arts to study with retired, himself –
INT: Was that Krakow? [?]
HE: No, I went to study with Alexander Soper, who was the Pelican History of Arts author of art and architecture of China and art and architecture of Japan and was a grand old man. It led me to tell everybody who asked me for advice on dissertations to be sure that your advisor is either tenured, or you have time to finish before they come up for tenure and is young enough not to retire before you finish, which used to infuriate Tom Matthews as a set of basic advice, but it was highly relevant to my life. Soper was a wonderful person to study with. I just had no intelligence that would lead me to have figured out how old he was. I knew he was old, but I didn't know that he would retire, himself. And Tom Matthews, whom – I'd taken every course that Tom had taught at the Institute. I arrived just before, er, just after he did – then let me become a Byzantinist. So I, overnight, left Japan and went to the other end of the Silk Road. And I had published my talk in the Dumbarton Oaks "East of Byzantium" series. It was on an Armenian topic. And the Byzantine topic, Greek topic I thought would be a dissertation topic I couldn't get the permissions I would need to do it. Tom told me that if I would answer a question for him on a book he was working on, then it would be a perfect topic for me, because the manuscript I was studying would be in the States and I would be able to cope with two children and the husband I had—have, too, now. So, I suddenly became an Armenologist and went and took courses in Armenian and have backed up the Silk Road ever since then. So, I have the advantage of – or disadvantage, depending on your point of view of my scholarship – of having skipped classical Greece – took one course. I think the advantage is that I studied Al Gandhara a good deal in college with Soper and it makes you ask two questions that I don't think you always think to ask when you come out of the great western classical tradition. And so one of them is, "Did the motif travel?" but the second question is, "Did the meaning travel?" And we assume a transmission of meaning that I don't think we should always assume, and that's been a part of what I've always thought that you had to prove was how – even when the image is as simple as a Christian symbol, does the community that continues to use it receive it in the way the community that produced it thinks of it. And it may be a subtle difference, or it may be a very big one. For Gandhara it was usually very big. If you go to the Afghan gold show that we have on right now – if you haven't seen it – there's a wonderful necklace that has a cameo, and it's a classical god—I think its Mercury—but it's one of the classical gods and its hung sideways. Clearly the man who had to put it in the necklace did not care that he had a male figure. He could not have missed the head and the feet, so it's not like, "I don't know it's a human being." It just meant nothing to him. To him, it meant, "I've got an exotic rock from the other end of the earth that proves how powerful and wealthy I am." And then in the catalogue, of course, they do it upright so you have no idea that it's a total other meaning to whoever in the world owned it in the vast past.
INT: So, it was through Tom Matthews that you came to know Dumbarton Oaks.
HE: Through Tom Matthews – Tom Matthews encouraging his students to go to Dumbarton Oaks symposia. I went to graduate school, like Angela did, later than you all are. I had returned to – I had come to New York – I grew up in Tennessee – from having studied in Tokyo, and the person I studied with, Julia Meech, had written the letters that got me into the Institute of Fine Arts as an Asian student. And I had been interested in medieval art in college, and so I took all the medieval courses that were of interest to me and that was everything Tom taught, so I had all of Tom's courses, I had all of Soper's courses, and I had, like, three other courses by the time I was taking my orals, but I turned in a qualifying paper for Tom and a qualifying paper for Soper and used Japanese answers for some of the issues that I took my orals on – on Byzantine for Tom – a year and a half later. It was several years before I felt like I really knew Byzantium.
INT: Have you worked at all – or perhaps you could comment on the importance of the collection, Byzantine Collection, at Dumbarton Oaks as you see it as a scholar of art history, of Byzantine art history, and also from your point of view here in New York, vis-à-vis the collection here of the Metropolitan – and the relationship.
HE: My predecessor Margaret Frazer was actually at one point offered the job as the head of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks. And I think that the Met and Dumbarton Oaks in varying ways have not precisely collaborated or cooperated, but also have been respectful of each other's collections. They're the two great collections in this country. I was charged when I was hired here to make the Met's collection better than Dumbarton Oaks – you know, that was fully said to me. And whether you think I've done it or not, that is what I have been certainly trying to ensure – that we were as comprehensive and as important. I think that what the Dumbarton Oaks collection did in – for many decades – was to offer a place where, in this country, you could see a collection brought together and identified as Byzantine. When I renamed our collections – and now my title is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine art, I changed the focus of what this museum did. And our collection is built on the 1880s theory that the great northern tradition took a little bit from the Mediterranean Christianity and infused it with the noble people of the north to create Gothic art. And the early installation of the Museum, actually up until 2000, was origins of European art. And what we had done with the installation here in 2000, which Dumbarton Oaks already had, was to see it as the art of the Byzantine world, which as one of its aspects influences European art, but does not exist only for having influenced European art. So that it is a change that was very important here and with the exhibitions I did. And I think it is relevant, in that Anastasia Tourta, who just retired as the director of the museum in Thessaloniki, said it was the first collection in a major museum that used the word Byzantine. So Dumbarton Oaks was always this beacon that understood Byzantine, but what we added was Byzantine in a larger context, because of the breadth of our collections. The summer I was at D.O., I – which would have been when I should have spent all my time looking at the collection – I never meant to be a museum curator, so it wasn't the way I particularly thought of my life. I actually spent the summer working at the Freer, because the manuscript I was doing my dissertation on was at the Freer, so it was really in their store rooms, looking at all of their Christian objects because they let me look at them all, and they have this amazing collection of Christian material that never goes on display that I remember as more influential on me than actually the D.O. collection.
INT: Do you remember from that time – I think you were also working with a piece at the Walters; am I right about that? Maybe that's wrong in the record. During your summer fellowship?
HE: I went to visit the Walters that summer. I spent some time – I was looking at the Armenian manuscripts at the Walters, maybe that's what it was, if you have notes. I was supposed to do my dissertation on a manuscript in the Freer that had not been fully studied and was filled with illuminations. It was, in theory, by the artist Toros Roslin and was therefore connected to the one by Roslin that is signed that's at the Walters. And in the end, I turned in a dissertation that discussed the western influence on Armenian illumination in the kingdom of Cilicia, which was pretty much every image that Sirarpie der Nersessian had said was a native Armenian tradition. It was a very traumatic dissertation, to disagree with a woman that was as wonderful as she was when I met her and who was canonized in the Armenian community. And some people still don't speak to me because of it; some people do. But at the time I turned it in, my first and second reader had not expected that dissertation, so it was not the dissertation that was supposed to be fast and dirty that I was sent out to do, where I was supposed to agree with her. But I think that has to be it, because I'd go up to the Walters and look at those manuscripts and then I would spend most of my time during the week in the Freer, going through the actual manuscript and then spend half the day at Dumbarton Oaks. And to me what was wonderful about Dumbarton Oaks was that I went in early in the morning and I left about ten or eleven at night and I had my children in camp and my husband in New York and I just read and looked at books all day. I had relatively little interaction with the people there. I was there the summer that the Fellows Building was closed down for something they were doing to it so we did not have the fellows' lunch where we all talked together. And I stayed at night to use the library.
INT: So you were probably in the Wisconsin Avenue apartments.
HE: Yes. I was there the summer Prince Charles got married. This is the way I can remember it. And the Washington newspaper, afternoon paper, was going bankrupt. And they devoted the entire summer to wonderfully snarky articles on the wedding, which I would pick up the paper on the way up the hill, read all these kind of Vanity Fair articles on the wedding and then the next morning go back to Dumbarton Oaks and return to Byzantium. And when they got married – there were several Greeks there the summer I was there and they invited me – they rented a television and we all went and looked at the wedding, and they devoted the whole discussion to how the English had learned from the Greek wedding not to have flowers because that was what drove King Constantine off the throne. And any effort to say, "Well, actually we think it's an incredibly expensive wedding in which flowers would have looked busy on TV," was met with "No, no. They knew." And I learned of everybody who was unacceptable to the Greeks at the wedding, starting with King Constantine. So that was the other thing I learned that summer: I learned more about Greek politics and Prince Charles' wedding – and really remarkably useful and lovely access to the library.
INT: Could you get a chance from your time at D.O. to get a sense of the, I guess – an active relationship between institutions like the Freer, with which you were working closely, and Dumbarton Oaks?
HE: At the time I was there, the relationship was close to zero – largely from Dumbarton Oaks, then. I was welcomed extremely well at the Freer but not because of Dumbarton Oaks. And I made some use of the Library of Congress, where there may have been a little bit more of a connection than I ever perceived, but Dumbarton Oaks viewed itself as a self-enclosed entity. And the only thing I really remember is somebody unacceptable went swimming in the swimming pool and so there were large notes that you – it didn't matter if you were on the board of trustees of Harvard – you were not allowed to swim in the swimming pool. I remember looking at that and thinking, that's just really weird. But I don't even know who it was that insisted that they should be allowed to swim in the D.O. pool.
INT: Was Giles Constable the director?
HE: Constable was the director and it either was the first summer that they had summer fellows or one of the first summers. I did not know that, but later I learned. So I, of course, appreciated very much the fact that he had opened it up in the summer. It was clear that summer that not all the staff was fond of the fact, but I didn't know what they were un-fond of. I just – you could tell from their tone of voice. I think that it depends on where you stand. I came to Dumbarton Oaks late. I have no firsthand knowledge of when Mrs. Bliss had footmen seating people. The fanciest symposium I went to – we were in the Orangery, and the tables did have white tablecloths; maybe the food was served. What happened was that it was a weird moment in time where using red clay flowerpots was very chic for serving chocolate mousse, which would look like dirt and you'd stick some flowers in the middle of it and that was – those were the centerpieces on the table and my table of course was the young nobodies in the back – no matter what our age was. And so we didn't realize that the waiters would serve us the mousse. And I do still remember the look of disgust on the waiter's face when he got to us, having served like three other tables, and realized we had served ourselves our dessert. That's the closest I ever was to the high Bliss years. There was, the summer I was there, a young man, who Giles had allowed to go through the Bliss archives, and his mother had been there before him and he put up a little exhibition on the Blisses and I remember that to me it was just interesting, and to an older generation at D.O. it was horrific. Mr. Bliss made very bad grades at Harvard, so I remember this guy saying to me, "But I found one where he didn't have any Fs and that was very hard." It was all Cs and Ds. But there they were – I think maybe even on the label. But someone was telling me that when you were there in Mrs. Bliss' years you took her for a walk, told her what you wanted money for, and if she liked it, she'd pull the money out of a little purse between her breasts. So, then of course she dies and somebody writes—probably Ševčenko—and says "I want x money for next year," and Harvard writes back, "Fill in the forms." And these are people that have told amusing anecdotes to Mrs. Bliss; they haven't filled in, "I'm going to spend $50 for transportation and $10 for food." So I know there was a great deal of tension in the transition, and that Constable was one of the people that got the pressure of the transition. But for me he was always an extremely helpful person that was someone that I saw. I don't remember particularly talking to anybody my summer there; I remember reading books.
INT: Have you been involved in symposia or colloquia or any of the conferences since your time as a summer fellow?
HE: I've gone to a number of the symposia. I have not been to the symposia for the last four years because I've been the editor – oh no, the head of the editorial board of the Art Bulletin, which unfortunately has its major annual meeting the same weekend as Dumbarton Oaks. So I have been fulfilling that thing and missing each and every one of the Dumbarton Oaks symposia as a result. I have used a number of people involved with Dumbarton Oaks in the writing of the catalogues for my two shows. I didn't actually go to Dumbarton Oaks to do any major amount of research of my own. There are very few books, if any, at Dumbarton Oaks that are not in New York City – just a little bit more irritating how many different physical places you may have to go to to get them, but the getting of them is just as possible.
INT: You've also written on pieces from the D.O. collection for, I think, for catalogues here and in other aspects of your position here. Unless again, I'm –
HE: You may be right. Maybe for "Glory of Byzantium", although I don't know. For "Glory of Byzantium," I was very intent that I would prove that American scholars were on par with Byzantinists in other countries, because if you look at the arc of Byzantine exhibitions, the ones in the generations right before it had been very much Byzantine art in France by French, Byzantine art in England by English. And it seemed reasonable to, in a way, prove that America had come of age in scholars. And I thought very hard at that time against having entries for catalogues written by scholars from other countries or from lending institutions, not that I won every one of them, but overall I won that I should get people who were involved in the object rather than the institution for authors. And then for "Byzantium: Faith and Power," where actually Europe is ahead of American scholarship in looking at the late Byzantine, post-Byzantine period – or was at that time – we went in the other direction and drew on a much more international body of authors. I think Gudrun Bühl is an excellent head for the collection at Dumbarton Oaks, in part because she's able to stand back from the pattern of Dumbarton Oaks and look at it from a perspective that comes out of, in part, the Bode Museum, which is so important in its collection because all the German scholars that were writing on Byzantine and early Christian art were looking at the Bode collection to define that for them. In a way, to me, if you look at collections, what you need to extend to is who's using them. And that's what, in a way, makes the Byzantine collection at Dumbarton Oaks important – is the variety of scholars who, whether they looked at any individual object by the hour or walked past them and to a degree defined themselves by them. I don't know if you've looked at the collections here at the Met, but if you go to the Cloisters, everything's big. Mr. Rockefeller bought a collection of a sculptor and it's what that sculptor bought that drives that collection. Mr. Morgan, which is the core of our collection downtown, liked little things. So, if you take their big things and our little things, you've got some chance of knowing what people had in the Middle Ages. But one looks like nobody had any furniture and there are large stones, and we look like all they had was tchotchkas and no place to put a roof over them. It has nothing to do with the taste of the time; it's the taste of the collector right around 1900, because they were both built up then. Now, Julie Jones is very interested in the pre-Columbian collection, for the fact that it's, in her mind, accumulated largely in terms of aesthetics. And the Byzantine collection is increasingly interesting in the degree to which it ignored religion. The Blisses were not that interested in things that were Orthodoxy. Icons come in after them, and there's a whole body of literature, of which I now have two shelves, of research on – beginning of the twentieth century – you begin to get the argument that modern art will be based on Byzantine art, that they both avoid looking at realism. And to a certain extent the Blisses fit into that – that you are looking at something or an aesthetic that doesn't care about the religious meaning. And now we're in a period where we're going back to a focus on the religious meaning.
INT: They did have scholarly advisors, though, I think.
HE: Oh no, they had very, very good ones, and there was that one exhibition that was done in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia, on the Blisses' collectors – no, and she broke off an engagement with Tyler –
INT: Royall Tyler.
HE: They had very, very good advisors, but they turned down works that they thought were too religious. There's a lovely work in the V&A that they did not buy. They were not collecting orthodoxy. Then you can get into the argument—Rob Nelson enjoys it—whether they were collecting Royall Tyler's taste or not. I think it's actually and ultimately fairly irrelevant. They built up this collection and then supported the scholars. They could have just had this collection in their home and not brought in the scholars to research it. What puts their collection into a larger framework is all the Bliss scholars that came through – you now – if they had just seen it as Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post collection. Have you been to Hillwood? Have any of you been to Hillwood? Oh, you have to go to Hillwood. It's in Washington, D.C., and you have to make an appointment ahead, but Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, Mr. Davis, bought a lot of things in Russia. Stalin was selling them, and Davis was the American ambassador to Russia. And so you have this house that makes Dumbarton Oaks look like a small, tiny little servants' quarters, splaying across the hill, filled with things that are being studied more now, but if she had put the amount of money into paying for scholars to come out of Russia in those times of trouble and be around Hillwood and look at her pieces as the Blisses did to theirs, we would have a different understanding of Hillwood. It's really the Blisses' great gift that they understood the need to have things studied and to get them looked at from – what we may now go back and look at differently; but we go back and look at Syriac studies differently than 1900, when there's several translations I like to quote. What else can I tell you that is any use?
INT: I wonder if you might comment on – one of the great contributions of your exhibits that you've done here at the Met was really to open up Byzantine art to just a tremendous amount of people, I think, who never thought about it. And just the amount of people who visited – it's wonderful – the exhibits that you had. And Dumbarton Oaks still, despite the choices of its Byzantine art collection, doesn't – there's still a tremendous amount of people who don't know about it. We don't get the visitors, I don't think.
HE: Keenan did not want visitors. Keenan told me he did not want visitors. I think that what the Met offers the opportunity to do – and it's doing it right now with a show called "Pen and Parchment" – is to look at things from a new point of view. I study – I come from the periphery. I come out of Japan through Armenia to Constantinople. I think that the important thing about Byzantium to do in this generation was to knock down the idea that there was a unicum Byzantium that had only great art; it was only Constantinople. Everything else was bad to the margins. But in Europe every single town had a different style. If every town in Europe has a different style, then there are lots of different centers of wealth in the larger Byzantine sphere, and they need to be looked at with a certain amount of interest, at least in what they're trying to say – so, how they receive Byzantium, how they turn it around, how they define themselves in relationship to it. And that's what I tried to do in the Byzantine show and to show that this is an empire that for many, many centuries sets a standard for people, even if they don't know what it looks like. They know it exists. So in "The Glory of Byzantium" we used a lot of quotations, because I also wanted people to know that they could read and write. And one of my favorite – the people coming to the Met don't necessarily know that – in fact that's why they don't go to Dumbarton Oaks. My least amusing memory of "The Glory of Byzantium" was standing halfway through the show in a gallery of ivories, in which every single image had Christ – maybe a baby, maybe a dead man – every image had Christ – and listening to some man turn to his wife and say, "Who are these Byzantines—did they live before or after Christ?" I have no idea who he was. I thought, I'm just not going to be able to say politely: everything in this room has Christ on it. But that's the audience. For all I know that man has a Nobel Prize. But he certainly was well dressed and sophisticated. I sought in the show at the lowest level to have – in both shows but certainly in the first one – to have people walk through the galleries and, if they read no label, to say, "I don't know who those people were, where they were, but they certainly did interesting things. I should go back and read a label." And then at the highest level to say, "I've always been interested in this issue, and she's brought together the works that allow me to come to some conclusions." So I wanted an Alice-Mary Talbot to gain what she could, but also to make people realize it's really a great empire. In the second show a Russian scholar writing on an icon I borrowed – where I only borrowed it so that I could say that the style of the Palaiologan period continues on in Russia until past the end of the empire – her entry on it was that in the fifteenth century in Russia there's a cult that believes that the world is going to end in the 1490s and it's how they count the dates of the apocalypse. And months after the show was over I realized that they were right: the world ended at the date they said because it's almost exactly the same year that the Portuguese break the eastern Mediterranean's monopoly on the spice routes and that there will – it doesn't matter who's going to rule the eastern Mediterranean or Russia. No one will ever have a monopoly as they have had throughout all of history until that date. So, fire and brimstone didn't occur, but a seismic shift in world power. And by the time we have academic institutions in the model that we think of, the eastern Mediterranean has already become relatively dead. Sinai—and I spent a lot of time studying it—looks like it's at the other end of the earth. That's our favorite opening sentence: Sinai at the other end of the earth. Well, Sinai's actually right dead center on the most important trade route until the Portuguese find another route. It's a balance that shifts, and we don't even think about it because once we are doing academic scholarship, it's already shifted so far we have trouble recreating it. So, I think what the shows here have done to a degree is to open it up again. And not everyone is happy with it. But I was quite appalled when I studied Byzantine history at Columbia with Nina Garcoian that I was the only person in the classes that was not from the Byzantine world, that every other student would say they were studying it because of their contact—through a grandparent or a great grandparent—with some aspect, whether it was Russia or Syria. And I think it's – that Byzantium is too important to – what Suger thought at the abbey of St. Denis he built to compete with the church of Hagia Sophia. He didn't build to compete with another church. He writes that he wants to know that his liturgical objects are as great as those the crusaders have seen. But my favorite quote before you end up is Harold the Bluetooth – do you know this wonderful –?, great fun – we borrowed for "The Glory of Byzantium" several objects from Scandinavia, and I wanted to show that the Varangian Guard were Scandinavians, that there was this northern route to Constantinople that we tend to forget, that exists by the ninth century, if not earlier. So first I go to Denmark to borrow, and the director of the Danish National Museum takes me into a special room, tells me it's the office of the first director of the museum, and we have this long conversation in which I cannot figure out what's happening, but I know I'm supposed to be incredibly appreciative that I'm there. And it turns out, which I don't actually learn until the show opens, that in borrowing the Dagmar cross, which to me was a small, cloisonné enamel cross hanging in a case with several other things in the Danish National Museum, I had borrowed the liberty bell of Denmark, and that he has actually had to have a meeting of all of his staff to justify sending it to the show. It is Dagmar, who may or may not have ever owned it because it may have belonged to her sister-in-law or her mother-in-law, became a symbol of Danish nationalism from Germany in, like, the seventeenth century. She was buried next to her sister-in-law and mother-in-law in a church from which the tombs were removed and moved to a fancier burial church for the kings. And the women's jewelry was commingled, so we don't actually know which woman was wearing it. Her mother-in-law was from Kiev, and it led on one hand to a reappraisal of the cross from those who had wanted it to be from Thessaloniki, because it makes no sense for it to be from Thessaloniki. On the other hand, it made the Danes quite pleased to lend it. And I got this quote where Harold the Bluetooth, as he is raising money to go invade England, brings out all of his riches that he's gotten from being a guard, a mercenary in the Varangian Guard, and shows it compared to the man who's just been pillaging the British isles. And Harold has more loot. So Harold leads the next invasion of the British isles, which might have been a great success except that it's the same year that William the Conqueror invades, so Harold ends up quite dead and Harold's army ends up dead, but you have this saga in which Harold of the Blue – and therefore one expects dead – tooth is talking about having served in Constantinople, and I find that whole question of how you go north and what you go through quite fascinating.
INT: Fascinating.
INT: That story reminds me to ask about the different pieces and the story of getting things for exhibitions. In your experience for these exhibits or just in general, what is the accessibility of the D.O. collection, from the point of view of a curator at another institution? – for exhibitions and so forth?
HE: Well, I would preface it with saying that my borrowing was before Gudrun. Dumbarton Oaks liked to be exceptionally difficult, and it's noteworthy for the degree to which it's exceptionally difficult. I borrowed for both of my exhibitions the works that mattered to me from Dumbarton Oaks, and I found my relations with Sue Boyd and Stephen Zwirn to be, on one level, very comfortable and on another level – Sue Boyd, in particular, felt, I think quite accurately, that she was not respected – and one way to try to forge respect was to be difficult – loans – and so it was a circular pattern. Gudrun lent probably less than the Royal Academy would like to have borrowed, but since the Royal Academy asked me for four pieces, and I don't think I sent five, because we opened our new galleries at the same time they opened. The problem for Dumbarton Oaks and its collection – the problem for me and my collection – is, if you're getting ready to do a show, we are both fairly well published and so you pick up a book and you say, "Well, now, I'd like two thirds of their collection and that will solve all my loans." And you just can't borrow the entire Dumbarton Oaks collection and still have it seen at D.O. I think D.O.'s problem, which will be highly related to the attitude of the current director and Margaret Mullett and Gudrun, is – and maybe Georgetown's neighbors – how much it wishes to do an aggressive outreach and try to get people to come. And historically it has not sought to do that. And under Keenan it actively sought not to do that.
INT: I know it's been burned a little bit in the past with things getting stolen or lost. We hadn't heard too many details about that, but we heard some talk of that. I don't know if that's a very old story or –
HE: Nobody kept records like we keep now. The first thing that happened to me when I came here was a very nice woman asked for the return of an object, I returned it to her, and she said, "That's not what it looked like." Mercifully, the woman took photographs herself of the piece when it had been installed in the gallery, so that we could point out to her that it, in fact, did look just like the piece when it was on display in the gallery. But our letter – first of all it was on nice lady stationery: thank you very much for the loan of your boxwood cross with the lapis lazuli pieces attached to it – which were blue glass. We sent a letter that was essentially, "You're wearing purple, so it could have been a ball gown or a cotton smock." We now – Dumbarton Oaks, I'm sure, now also – anything that comes in this building is photographed in every conceivable way. But it wasn't what you used to do. And I don't know how much documentation the Blisses kept of their purchases. They have to have done better than Mr. Walters, who burned all of his documentation, so there is no documentation for anything the Walters owned before the day Mr. Walters opened it in the museum. We've changed tremendously both how objects have to be kept in a building, how they have to be recorded. I don't know what D.O. does but I assume they do something like what the Met does and our registrars office, once a year, comes into every department's area and pulls a card out and says, "Show me that object," and you're supposed to be able to do it within five minutes, so that every work catalogued in this department, all 10,000, we're supposed to know where they are at every section. And for the things that are mainstream, you normally do. It's when they pull out something really weird that you've been hiding in a corner for forever, because you kind of don't want it. So one time I watched the arms and armor people freaking out because they'd pulled out a card for a large wrought iron gate, and it took a great deal of trouble to figure out where over the years that gate had been moved over and over to get it out of the way. It was found. We had it, but it wasn't in five minutes. So, I never know whether things are actually lost – that you used to be more comfortable, in Mrs. Bliss' time I'm sure, with giving something, so you might have a record, but Mrs. Bliss might have given it to someone. Or maybe not. But the packing it up, moving it around – none of that is acceptable and hasn't been acceptable for several decades by museum standards. But you went from being a large house, which people inhabited with objects in it, to being an institutional museum. And I suspect that the transition was awkward in the same way that it was awkward for people who expected to go ask Mrs. Bliss for money and suddenly had to fill out forms. Well I assume those same people had felt comfortable, as all the curators in the Hermitage used to feel comfortable, in taking the work they were studying to their office to study it. I've never seen anything in the Hermitage that was not on display that wasn't sitting in somebody's drawer, often for a long time, because they had to blow the dust off it to show it to me. Now that they've had this woman who was stealing things and then dropped dead on them before there was any chance to hide her thefts, they have all sorts of new rules. But, essentially they assumed that their curators were honorable people. I'm sure Dumbarton Oaks and the Met have always assumed that people are honorable. Now we have lots more security, and I do not bring things to my office to study them as I'm writing up purchase papers or considering where to put them, but Margaret would have. And the Museum would have thought it was reasonable for Margaret to have done it.
INT: Well, shall we wrap things up, maybe?
INT: Sure, I guess. Maybe, just generally, what do you see as the role that Dumbarton Oaks plays in Byzantine Studies, as someone from another institution, another city, and how do you see that role changing in the future?
HE: Well, I think that Dumbarton Oaks was for a very long time the only game in town and that that gave it the ability not to have to reconsider its role. And the Byzantine Studies Conference – I don't know the whole warzones—but the Byzantine Studies Conference started as a war with Dumbarton Oaks, so if you have not interviewed somebody about that you should find somebody that knows its warzones. I came in after the Byzantine Studies Conference was so well established, I was stunned to discover there was actually a war. What's happened now, which I think is for everybody's good, is – you asked Angela about the program at Queens; Rob Nelson is building a strong program at Yale; Ioli's program at Harvard, I think, is a little different because it's tied to Dumbarton Oaks. We now have every year at least one, and in some years four, fellows that are doing Byzantine studies at the Met. Often they're people that in another year do it at Dumbarton Oaks, so that it's not like we do and you don't take or vice versa, but there's a greater diversity of places where you can go consider it. And I think that is making Dumbarton Oaks think about what it wants to be. Obviously there's a greater pressure to have all three parts of Dumbarton Oaks more coequal, and for the Byzantinists, of course, that is not something that we ever recognized as appropriate. Now, for me and probably for you, we came in late enough that it doesn't seem such a shock. But I assume when the will was read and it was recognized that they had left their money equally to all three parts, that that was a shock, that the generation who were there for the reading of the will had expected two thirds to Byzantine studies and to divide the rest to the other two. Pre-Columbian studies have been doing some incredibly impressive things, so it's – I think back then there was a huge shock when garden studies went from formal garden design to social history. So, all those things, I think, move the institution forward and that one part of the institution will continue to do the very necessary translations that – it's easy to fail to appreciate the amount that Angela's text lets you look up aspects, for an art historian or for any other type of scholar, that were utterly inaccessible before and that all of those need to be made accessible and Alice-Mary is doing more translations in retirement. I don't know whether Dumbarton Oaks will ever want to be extremely accessible. Keenan believed that his neighbors in Georgetown who were mad at D.O. for many reasons did not want lots of children coming through D.O. And it was in fact the pre-Columbianists that – who I talked to – that were the most upset, because there is no other good collection of that material in Washington as an alternative. I am hoping that the exhibitions we have done here not only have paid off in more Byzantine exhibitions—certainly Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy told me he did Robin Cormack's show because we got such good attendance here – but that it will also make people look at the larger geographical sphere that you can include within the – sphere of influence isn't quite right – but you can easily go from Slavic studies and Russia and the Balkans to Ethiopia and look at that material, I think, with a new interest. And Syriac studies, I think, is an important aspect of that. If Syria could just get off the terrorist list, my show would be so much happier. I have plans for an exhibition, and I clearly now am going to have to get real and drop the Syrian pieces and go for photographs. So, if you can get the U.S. government to drop Syria from the terrorist list, that would be my favorite choice at the moment. Syria's willing to lend; it's the U.S. government's rule that is the problem. The other thing that I – either just because anybody who's really angry doesn't talk to me or because it's actually changed – is there seems to be a greater willingness, except among some Greeks, to think of the Byzantine sphere in a broader circle. Now there are a certain number of Greeks that don't speak to me so I do know about them, because they tell me so. But I think Dumbarton Oaks had a Coptic symposium a few years ago, which was a first for them. I think that none of this is brand new, but I think we're moving toward a more elastic definition. And Constable may very well have been the beginning of that. He was the director who didn't come from the inner circle.
INT: Well thank you very much –
HE: Thank you.
INT: – for your time.]]>
Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss were consummate collectors and patrons. After purchasing Dumbarton Oaks in 1920, they significantly redesigned the house and its interiors, built important new structures, added over fifty acres of planned gardens, hosted important musical evenings and intellectual discussions in their Music Room, and acquired a world-class art collection and library. The illustrated essays in this volume reveal how the Blisses' wide-ranging interests in art, music, gardens, architecture, and interior design resulted in the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Their collections of Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare garden books and drawings are examined by Robert Nelson, Julie Jones, and Therese O'Malley, respectively. James Carder provides the Blisses' biography and discusses their patronage of various architects, including Philip Johnson, and the interior designer Armand Albert Rateau. The Blisses' collaboration with Beatrix Farrand on the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens is recounted by Robin Karson, and their commission of Igor Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and its premiere by Nadia Boulanger is examined by Jeanice Brooks. The volume demonstrates that every aspect of the Blisses' collecting and patronage had a place in the creation of what they came to call their "home of the humanities."]]>
Committed to the dissemination of knowledge about Pre-Columbian art, Bliss collaborated widely to publish and exhibit his pieces. The National Gallery of Art hosted an exhibition of Bliss objects from 1947 to 1962. In 1963, wishing to display his collection in perpetuity, Bliss donated it to Dumbarton Oaks for installation in the museum's new Pre-Columbian wing, designed by Philip Johnson.
In 2013, Dumbarton Oaks celebrates 50 years of Pre-Columbian art in the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Select artworks on loan from international and American museums join the permanent collection: a gilded Mixtec atlatl, a painted Maya figurine, ancient glyphs, and delicate Andean mosaics all highlight recent research and create new connections and contrasts between objects and cultures. After five decades, the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art continues to incite scholarly inquiry, reveal ancient craftsmanship, and delight the eye of the viewer.]]>