The genesis of this book can be traced over many years as several of us at the Frick Collection strove to define the very rich topic of collecting sculpture in a way that could be embraced by both specialists and a curious general public. The myriad, not always interconnected, ways sculpture has been valued by collectors and the variety of contexts in which sculpture has been viewed presented us with an embarrassment of riches as we wrestled with the goal of being inclusive while recognizing the need to bring focus to an amorphous topic. A breakthrough came with a brainstorming session between Ian Wardropper, Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist, during which we shaped a symposium involving some of the finest scholars in the field. Organized by the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library, the symposium took place in May 2017.1 Initially, it was important to understand why collecting sculpture should be such a complex and challenging topic as compared to subjects the Center had addressed in earlier years, most of which had concentrated on collecting paintings of a particular period – the Italian Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age, for example – or by a particular artist, such as El Greco.2 The answer was twofold: first, the exceptional variety of media, scale, purpose and settings and secondly, the ambiguity of the reception sculpture had at different times and in different places, sometimes appreciated as fine art of the highest order, and in other contexts as merely a decorative accoutrement. The medium could indeed convey the message, as, for example, with small-scale sculptures in bronze, ivory, or porcelain, which might be displayed to furnish an interior or revered as high art. Such works were essential, even fetishized, components of the Kunstkammern of Princes for which competition among collectors could reach fever-pitch as each strove to outdo the other to obtain objects that demonstrated conspicuous virtuosity. Garden sculpture, though not unconnected to the smaller-scale sculpture, worked rather differently and provided unique opportunities to convey propagandistic objectives of absolute rulers, emulating as it often did the power that had long been attributed to antique statuary.
The fact that displays of sculpture – much of it being public in nature – often impacted the daily life of spectators other than collectors in a way that painting and other fine arts seldom did, obliged us to take into account collecting by and for a larger public. Therefore, the sculpture commissions and collections that were intended for public display became a necessary component of our book, whether the garden sculptures of monarchs, commemorative portrait sculptures, or the museum collections and displays that were developed during the nineteenth century. All of these issues, and more, are addressed by the authors who contributed to this volume.
Recognizing that a single volume could not do justice to collecting sculpture across all periods and traditions, we concluded that our focus would be confined to sculpture collections in Europe and the United States and that we would not introduce collections of ancient or non-western works. Having thus defined the geographic and chronological scope of the volume, our efforts turned to establishing an orderly approach to our subject, dividing the book into four sections – Sculpture in the Kunstkammer: Contexts, Formation, and Dispersal; Garden Sculptures as Collections; The Sculpture Gallery and Dedicated Spaces for Sculpture; and The Changing Place of Sculpture in the Public Museum. In doing so, we recognize that, if read individually, each chapter of the book will present the most up-to-date treatment of a single category of sculpture collecting; but, perhaps more significantly, if the essays are read together, or section by section, they bring clarity to this rich and varied topic, collectively asserting that the broad range of sculpture collecting cuts across a broad swath of socio-political-economic and cultural history. The introduction attempts to explore the variety and ambiguity of the issues, as well as the shifting aesthetic assumptions, underlying our interpretation of this diversity of collections.
As is always the case in bringing a publication of this kind to light, many individuals and organizations should be acknowledged and thanked. Above all, we are indebted to the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation for its generous support of both the symposium that gave rise to this book and the publication itself. We are also indebted to the Henry Moore Foundation for a generous grant towards the publication. Ian Wardropper’s insights were invaluable in setting us on a path to successfully organizing the presentations and later the chapters of our book, and the Assistant Directors of the Center for the History of Collecting, Esmée Quodbach and Samantha Deutch were indispensable co-organizers, providing both practical and intellectual support to the project. As we have moved towards publication, we have benefitted greatly from the support given by Liesbeth Hugenholtz and Christian Huemer and Brill’s series, “Studies in the History of Collecting and Art Markets.” Needless to say, we are especially grateful to each of our authors – Julius Bryant, Alan Darr, Anne-Lise Desmas, Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Andrew McClellan & Marietta Cambareri, Alex Potts, Betsy Rosasco, Alison Yarrington, and Michael Yonan – not only for the depth of their scholarship, but also for their patience with the sometimes tiresome editorial process, and we hope that they are as pleased with the results as we are. While we, as co-editors, were assembling these essays, we were saddened to hear of the death of James David Draper, for many years a curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and an art historian whose scholarship encompassed so many aspects of the history of sculpture and the sculpture collections discussed here. It is to Jim’s memory that this volume is dedicated.
Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist
An account of the symposium was published by Julius Bryant in the Newsletter of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association in the UK:
The Frick Center for the History of Collecting has published numerous volumes on topics of this kind, for example, Collecting Spanish Art: Spain’s Golden Age and America’s Gilded Age, and El Greco Comes to America: The Discovery of a Modern Old Master, both eds., Inge Reist and José Luis Colomer (New York and Madrid: The Frick Collection and Centro Europa de Estudios Hispanica and Center for Spain in America, 2012 and 2017, respectively) and five volumes of the series The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Collecting in America published by The Frick Collection, New York, and Pennsylvania University Press, University Park: Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals, ed. Esmée Quodbach (2014); A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America, ed. Inge Reist (2015); Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth Century Paintings Come To America, ed. Edgar Peters Bowron (2017); The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States, ed. Edward J. Sullivan (2018); America and the Art of Flanders, ed. Esmée Quodbach (2020).