The College Student, Art History, and the Museum

Abstract

Last year, in Britain, there was a Museum conference in Leicester concerned with the topic, “What are Museums For?” Mr. John Pope-Hennessy was asked to speak on “Specimens or People: Some Problems for Art Museums.” He began by saying: “The letter inviting me to give this talk was not very clearly typed, and when I opened it I read the subject as “Specimens of People.” It seemed an interesting idea, and when, half an hour later, I got into the underground to go up to Piccadilly, I started to look for specimens. And there, sure enough, they were—a young man with the bottom of his jeans pulled out into a kind of fringe, a plump girl in an orange mini-skirt and a sage colored rexine coat, a boy with hair as long and crimped and dirty as Dürer's in the Prado portrait and with the same reluctant beard, a shifty-looking older man whose side-burns covered half his cheeks. “Plenty of specimens,” I said to myself, “but where exactly does one draw the line?”

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Notes on contributors

James R. Johnson

James R. Johnson is Curator of Art History and Education at The Cleveland Museum of Art. This article is based on a talk given at Wheaton College last May at the Shippee Memorial Conference attended by members of the Twelve College Exchange, in order to explore ways of cooperation between their art departments and museums. The participating colleges were: Amherst, Bowdoin, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Trinity, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Wheaton, Williams. Following the talk, group discussions were held on its main points. (For an account of Cleveland's new Education Wing see page 310.)