Art: Debate About a Delight

To a small but intensely loyal group of art connoisseurs, there are few greater delights, in such a compact package, than the collection of design and fine art which has been maintained for six decades by the Museum for the Arts of Decoration at Manhattan’s Cooper Union. Some consider it equaled elsewhere in the world only by London’s Victoria and Albert and Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Now this museum is closed to the public—and suddenly it is the center of a controversy that is stirring the art world far beyond the galleries of Manhattan.

There is no argument over the merits of the museum’s collection. It grew out of a trust set up by Philanthropist Peter Cooper and approved by the New York State legislature in 1859 for an institution that would not only advance “science, art, philosophy, and letters,” but would also form various collections, including “artistic models, books, drawings, pictures and statues.” In time, the decorative arts collection grew to 80,000 items, ranging from a 2,300-year-old mitten from China to the world’s best collection of medieval fabrics. It has Persian calligraphy, English silver, tapestries, ceramics, furniture, wallpaper, works in glass, enamel and wood. Its library may be unsurpassed in the U.S., and its collection of drawings and prints is superb. Its Winslow Homers alone—more than 300 works —are probably worth an amount that would be well over $1,000,000.

A Day in a Year. The controversy is about the museum’s future. Arthur A. Houghton Jr., president of Steuben Glass and chairman of the Cooper Union trustees, points out that only 13,000 people came to the museum all last year (little more than an average day’s attendance at the popular Metropolitan Museum). This divides into staff and maintenance costs of almost $10 per visitor. Houghton contends that the Cooper Union budget will soon not be able to handle such costs, which grow each year, while the attendance does not. “The question,” he says, “is whether we are doing the right thing in maintaining a museum with such stagnant attendance. Is there any way we can take these big collections and put them in other institutions where they would be seen by millions rather than by thousands? The last thing we would want to see done would be to take these sub-collections and see them scattered.”

To get the answer to such questions, the trustees have called in the Metropolitan Museum curators to study “the possibilities of relocating the collections.” At the same time, the board abruptly closed the museum to all but scholars and professionals, who can see it only by appointment.

On the theory that the value of a collection is greater, because of its focus and unity, than the sum of its parts, the possibility of breaking up the museum concerns many U.S. collectors, donors, curators, art dealers, critics, and officials of industries concerned with design. Forming a Committee to Save the Cooper Union Museum, they last month retained Lawyer Albert Edelman, a senior partner in U.S. Senator Jacob Javits’ law firm, to lodge a protest with Houghton. The committee contends that all it got in reply was a curt brush-off. Says President Charles van Ravenswaay of the American Association of Museums, one of hundreds who have written the committee to register dismay: “If someone had written to tell me that the Statue of Liberty and Mount Vernon were being discontinued, I wouldn’t have been more shocked.”

A Way to Preserve? The trustees’ action, claims the committee, is in conflict with the intent of Peter Cooper and the enabling charter granted by the legislature. It might also violate the wills of donors, the committee argues. Unofficially, committee members also worry about whether the Met, of which Houghton is a trustee, will use parts of the collection to fill gaps in its own. And they ask why, if the museum is in such bad financial shape, the trustees had not launched a fund drive to save it. And why had the board closed the museum without advising the Cooper Union staff or the museum’s advisory council in advance of a news release?

Longtime Donor Henry F. du Pont, 83, the E. I. du Pont de Nemours executive who was named last week president of the protest committee, was troubled but positive: “The blow fell without warning. The trustees haven’t treated us very well, keeping everything so secretive, but we are still ready to help them find the solution. We must preserve the collection.”