From Period Rooms to Public Trust: The Authority Debate and Art Museum Leadership in America

A recent lecture series at the Harvard University Art Museums titled “Art Museums and the Public Trust” marked the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard's famed Museum Course. A graduate seminar begun in 1921 by the Fogg Art Museum's associate director, Paul J. Sachs, the Museum Course became the primary training ground for art museum leadership in the first half of the twentieth century. The 2001 commemorative lecture series was intended to foster a healthy debate on the place of the art museum in Anglo‐American culture. Instead, the speakers, veteran directors of America's and England's most prestigious art museums, invariably returned to one concern: authority—theirs and that of the art museum itself in contemporary society. Authority was at the heart of the Museum Course decades earlier, tellingly explored in annual debates around two significant topics. The first debate involved the pros and cons of including period rooms in American museums. In the second, students argued about whether America's established art institutions should collect the work of living artists. Questions of how museums should respond to the interests of audiences and communities, their responsibility to contemporary artists, and the meaning of a public trust trouble America's museum leadership now as then. This article explores the common ground between the Museum Course debates of the 1930s and Harvard's recent commemorative “debates” by America's contemporary museum leaders and comments on its significance for today's museums.