Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 30, 2007|Volume 35, Number 23

Paul Mellon

Centennial celebration to honor Paul Mellon

Thirty years after it first opened, the Yale Center for British Art is spearheading a celebration of the centennial of the birth of its founder, Paul Mellon (1907-1999).

The tribute to Mellon, a 1929 graduate of Yale, includes exhibitions, lectures and special programs.

Mellon, one of the most eminent philanthropists of the 20th century, left a legacy to the University that includes most conspicuously the landmark Yale Center for British Art building by Louis I. Kahn and the Ezra Stiles and Samuel Morse residential colleges designed by Eero Saarinen. The long list of Mellon's benefactions to the University also includes collections of art and endowments for the British Art Center and the Yale University Art Gallery and collections of maps, rare books, manuscripts and private papers to the Beinecke and Sterling Memorial libraries.

In addition, Mellon endowed the masterships of Morse and Stiles colleges, the deanships of all 12 residential colleges and the William Clyde DeVane Professorship, which is awarded each year to a Yale faculty member to deliver a public lecture series. He funded many of Yale's interdisciplinary programs in the humanities, including Directed Studies, the humanities major and the Theater Studies Program.

Mellon established the Clare-Mellon Exchange program, modeled after the Rhodes Scholarship program, which each year enables one graduate of Yale College to attend Clare College at Cambridge University for two years and a graduate of Clare to study at Yale for the same period. Mellon, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Clare College after graduating from Yale, established the program in honor of his ties to Yale and the British school.

In the late 1940s Mellon also established the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, one of the country's most coveted awards for poetry in the country.

The following is a list of events at Yale to celebrate Paul Mellon's life and legacy.

British Art Center exhibit

The Yale Center for British Art will present a special exhibition showcasing Mellon's collection of British art, the largest outside the United Kingdom.

Titled "Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion for British Art," the exhibition will be on view April 18-July 29 at the center, located at 1080 Chapel St. A selection of approximately 150 masterpieces from the exhibition will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where they will be on view Oct. 20-Jan. 27. Further details about the exhibition will appear in the April 13 issue of the Yale Bulletin & Calendar.

Paul Mellon Lectures

"For an Excellent Purpose: Museums and Their Publics in Britain from 1850-1914" is the theme of the 2007 Paul Mellon Lectures, which begin this week.

The biennial lectures are organized by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in Londont.

This year's featured speaker will be Giles Waterfield, an independent curator and writer, director of the Royal Collection Studies organized by the Attingham Trust, associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a former trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund and former director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Other talks at the center

The Yale Center for British Art will also host the following talks, which will take place at 5:30 p.m. and are also free and open to the public:

* Duncan Robinson, one of the Yale museum's former directors who is now director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, will give a talk titled "Paul Mellon: The Galloping Anglophile," to mark the opening of the exhibition "Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion for British Art" on Tuesday, April 17;

* Jules D. Prown, the Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale and founding director of the British Art Center, will speak on "Light and Truth: Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art" on Wednesday, May 2; and

* William Reese, president of William Reese Company, an antiquarian book firm, will discuss Mellon as a collector of rare books and manuscripts on Wednesday, May 9.

In addition, there will be Art in Context talks by curators at the British Art Center at 12:30 p.m. on the following times and topics: Tuesday, April 24 -- "The Mapmaker's Art: Treasures from Paul Mellon's Collection," Elisabeth Fairman, curator of rare books and manuscripts; Tuesday, May 8 -- "'A Collector of Collections': Paul Mellon and British Drawings," Scott Wilcox, curator of prints and drawings; and Tuesday, May 15 -- "A Wonderful Range of Mind: Turner in the Mellon Collection," Gillian Forrester, associate curator of prints and drawings.

Film screenings

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is producing a 50-minute biographical film titled "Paul Mellon: In His Own Words," which will be shown at the Yale Center for British Art from the end of May through the end of July.

The film draws on archival footage of the Mellon family, including interviews, speeches and a variety of writings in which the philanthropist describes his passions, pursuits and such interests as family, art, collecting, horses and racing. The first screening will be at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 26. For information on subsequent screenings, visit the Yale Calendar of Events at www.yale.edu/calendar.

In addition, during New Haven's International Festival of Arts and Ideas (June 9-23), the British Art Center will offer an eight-part film series in honor of Mellon's great interest in and love of horse racing. Details on this series will be announced.

Beinecke Library exhibit

Selections from the Rochambeau Papers and Family Cartographic Archive, given to the library by Paul Mellon in 1992, will be featured in the exhibition "The Road to Yorktown," on view June 18-Aug. 31 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St.

The exhibition will feature maps and manuscripts from the archive of General Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, documenting the last campaign of the American Revolutionary War. Rochambeau commanded 6,000 French troops, helping George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette to defeat Cornwallis in the historic battle at Yorktown in 1781.

For further information, visit www.library.yale.edu/beinecke.

Sterling Library exhibit

The exhibit "Paul Mellon (1907-1999): Yale Student, Friend and Benefactor" is currently on view at the Sterling Memorial Library, 120 High St.

The exhibition, which continues through May 15, is drawn from Yale University Archives and focuses on Mellon's undergraduate years and his subsequent benefactions to the University. Among the items on display are selections from the alumnus' gifts to his alma mater, such as the papers of James Boswell and the Mellon Collection of Alchemy and the Occult.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Sterling Library will offer a program featuring Yale faculty and staff who worked with Mellon. For further information, visit www.library.yale.edu.

Yale Art Gallery exhibit

Artworks donated to Yale by Mellon will be among the items on view in the exhibition "Art for Yale: Acquisitions for a New Century," taking place Sept. 18-Jan. 13 at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. at York.

The exhibition will showcase more than 275 exceptional works of art donated to, promised to or purchased by the gallery as part of a special campaign to expand the collection -- an initiative that began in 1998 with Mellon's gift of "John Biglin in a Single Scull," the 1873 watercolor masterpiece by Thomas Eakins.

Mellon's support of the gallery continues even after his death, with recent gifts of art from his estate, including paintings by Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and a brown wax sculpture of a dancer by Edgar Degas, which will all be featured in "Art for Yale."

For further information, visit the gallery's website at http://artgallery.yale.edu.

Alumni programs

Mellon's contributions to the richness of Yale's collections will be among the topics at a program titled "The Visual Arts at Yale," organized by the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA) and scheduled to be held Friday-Sunday, April 20-22, at the Yale Center for British Art.

The AYA program will bring back to campus alumni from Yale's arts schools, as well as Yale College graduates with a personal or professional interest in the arts. Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art, will give an introductory talk on Mellon, his collecting of British art and the creation of the center. She will also provide an overview of the Mellon Centennial exhibition. On the morning of April 21, she will moderate a panel discussion titled "The Art of Institutional Collecting," which will include curator Susan B. Matheson of the Yale Art Gallery and Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art and former curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

As part of the program, curators from the British Art Center will lead tours and in-focus discussions.

Meyers and the curators will also present tours and lectures during the Yale College reunion on Saturdays, June 2 and 9.

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