Not Set in Amber—Moving a Career from the Academy to the Art Museum

Who would have guessed that a “California girl” who graduated high school in 1969, one fascinated by archaeology, Greek and Roman art, art history (especially the Renaissance), and contemporary Los Angeles art would end up happily employed in Washington, DC, at the National Gallery of Art, famous for its collections of Western post-ancient art?

In 1969 and the early 1970s Washington was a place one went to protest the war and the inequities of civil liberties. Despite the richness of East Coast museums, it was Europe that drew me: the ancient sites, the archaeological finds illuminating the classical and biblical worlds; and the great museums of the capitals. I entered university in 1969 as an art history major, resolved to understand the art of the past. It sounds both naïve and hubristic, but as I told my somewhat mystified parents, I wanted to be a professor and an expert on ancient and modern art (!), and to excavate or work in a museum as well as to teach. Now, looking back at my education and experiences, including the California chapters, one might see the predictors of my ultimate job in Washington. Los Angeles was a center for contemporary art. Almost daily, new archaeological discoveries were being made throughout the Mediterranean. UCLA and Berkeley and the Huntington Library housed superb libraries, where one could consult old books and a flood of scholarly publications. Moreover, I worked on an exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Art and was an intern at the Huntington. And during the period I was at university, the museum world was ignited with new museums and with the birth of the blockbuster exhibition. In the early 1970s, the newly built Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA) was one of the global venues for Tutankhamen and for the first of the Impressionists blockbusters. The J. Paul Getty Museum re-opened in a recreated Roman villa and began to fill with antiquities. Los Angeles was in the midst of an explosion of important contemporary art. Several permanent Los Angeles collections greatly intrigued me: at LACMA were displayed the William Randolph Hearst Collection classical marbles from venerable English collections and the Palevsky-Heeramaneck collections, rich in ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art; at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, an exceptional collection of eighteenth-century British art; and at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the antiquities especially. At the Huntington, I interned with Robert Wark, the British art specialist. This was the only available internship that offered experience with material culture instead of “art” (as in paintings and drawings). Dr. Wark proposed that I work on British eighteenth-century silver, and catalog a new acquisition: over 100 British cream jugs. These were “signed” and dated by makers’ marks, but required close examination, comparative research, and writing. It was from Dr. Wark that I learned to ask in this order: when and where was it made, what is its condition, and is it a good example? Tea drinking with cream gained popularity in Britain during the period of these jugs’ manufacture. This training was a germinal experience.

My professors at the University of California (BA, Riverside; MA and PhD, Santa Barbara) who made such an impact on my life might have had an inkling, too, about my future career. Four were particularly important for my future: Dericksen M. Brinkerhoff (Riverside; classical art scholar), Peter Meller (Riverside; Renaissance art and ancient literature), Fikret Yegül (Riverside; ancient art, especially Roman), and Mario Del Chiaro (Santa Barbara; ancient art, especially Etruscan), all of whom brought to the lecture halls and seminar rooms a broad experience of research, publishing, lecturing, travel, and direct knowledge of art through field work and/or research in museums. They also encouraged travel. Professor Del Chiaro, my Doktorvater, was especially keen on site visits, fieldwork, and travels to see as many museum collections and as much of the ancient world as possible.

The subject of my 1977 MA thesis at Santa Barbara was instigated by a summer in Athens, when I began to look at the visual repertoire of sixth...