The Clark Art Institute, a treasure trove of Western art, opened in the scenic Berkshire Mountains in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1955. The site was chosen partly because of the museum’s ties to Williams College on the part of founders Sterling and Francine Clark, but also, in the wake of World War II, so that the collection would be outside the blast zone of a potential nuclear attack on New York City (where the founders lived and also considered setting up shop). It expanded in 1973, again in 2008, and yet again in 2014, with a 44,000-square-foot expansion by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Tadao Ando.
Now, the Clark will expand once more, with notable speed and significance, when it opens a new wing in 2028 to house a major new gift now on display at the museum. The exhibition, “An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection,” offers the first public look at what the museum is billing as one of the most significant private collections of European art formed in North America in the 21st century. The show is curated by recently appointed museum director Esther Bell along with Lara Yeager-Crasselt, the new Tavitian-endowed curator, who is seven months into the job. (For the record, I studied at the Williams College art history graduate program, which is housed at the Clark, in the late 1900s.)
Tavitian, born in Bulgaria of Armenian descent, came to the US as a Cold War refugee and earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and a PhD in nuclear physics as a scholarship student at Columbia University, in New York. He went on to be one of the first employees of software development company Syncsort (now doing business as Precisely) and served as CEO from 1975 to 2008. He served on the Clark’s board from 2006–2012 and lent to exhibitions there, as well as serving on the board of New York’s Frick Collection. Sotheby’s New York sold selections of his Old Master paintings, sculpture and English furniture last year for $21 million, nearly doubling the low estimate on the collection.
Jan van Eyck and workshop, Madonna and Child at the Fountain (1439).
Jan van Eyck
The gift features masters such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Jacques Louis David, Jan van Eyck, Jacopo da Pontormo, Peter Paul Rubens, and Elisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, and numbers 132 paintings, 130 sculptures, 39 drawings, and 30 decorative arts objects. The gift represents more than a 3 percent increase in the size of the museum’s holdings, which currently number in the region of 10,000 objects. The entire gift will go on display when the new wing opens, and the majority of the paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts will remain on continuous view; more fragile works on paper will be presented periodically and made available for study purposes.
The gift also includes a $45 million donation to endow Yeager-Crasselt’s position and to fund a wing named for the donor, which will be designed by Annabelle Selldorf, an in-demand architect among arts institutions. Selldorf is very familiar with the Massachusetts museum, having worked on a 2014 renovation of the museum’s galleries and a 2016 makeover of the public spaces in a study center.
Installation view, “An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection,” at the Clark Art Institute.
The works in the gift, which focuses on masters of Western art and to some degree on portraiture, range from a Van Eyck Madonna to portraits by David and Rubens, a Vigée Le Brun self-portrait, a Jean-Honoré Fragonard painting of a subject with a love letter, and an elaborately decorated harp. Lovers of Dutch masters will swoon for landscapes by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Meindert Hobbema. The gift nearly doubles the Clark’s holdings of sculpture, and includes highlights like a pair of bronze sculptures of rearing horses by Fernandino Tacca.
Ferdinando Tacca, Rearing Horse (Tail Up), early 17th century, left, and Rearing Horse (Tail Down), early 17th century, right.
The show is full of remarkable works, like a pair of terracotta relief portraits by Andrea della Robbia, a Jacopo do Pontormo painting on the unconventional support of a piece of terracotta tile, a Giulio Romano painting of Alexander the Great, no fewer than three paintings on copper by Joachim Wtewael (joining a knockout by him already in the collection), a Giovanni Francesco Susini bronze of David with the head of Goliath, three Hubert Robert landscapes, a large group of portraits of unknown sitters by Louis Léopold Boilly, and a large group of plaster caricatures by Jean-Pierre Dantan. The last two groups are shown opposite one another in long enfilades in the show’s final gallery, so it ends with a bang.
Installation view, “An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection,” at the Clark Art Institute, showing, left, a large group of plaster caricatures by Jean-Pierre Dantan, and, right, portraits of unknown sitters by Louis Léopold Boilly.
The show also includes striking examples by lesser-known artists, as well as pieces by unknown makers, such as a self-portrait by Wallerant Vaillant, a portrait of a young man with a Lira da Braccia by an unknown hand, and a wild marble and pietra dura carved panel with a dragon and a coat of arms, also by an unknown maker.
Bell and Lara Yeager-Crasselt spoke with ARTnews during a visit to the exhibition and, later, a phone call, discussing the transformative scale of the gift, how the exhibition highlights the new stories the Clark can tell through the donation, and how one could even begin to think about the value of such a body of work.
Given the scope and scale of the collection, tell me about the process of selecting the 331 works that would come to the Clark. Did that selection come out of conversations with Tavitian?
Esther Bell: The conversations went on for many, many months, and were the result of scrupulous study and repeated visits to his two exquisite properties, in Manhattan and Stockbridge. He invited the Clark to make a selection of what, in an ideal world, would come here. It was any curator or director’s dream to go through the collection with the goal of determining what would make sense here at the Clark, what would fit in, and what would be an added boon to the collection. It was a long and very thoughtful process with the complete support of Aso Tavitian and his foundation.
Speaking of what would fit in and what would add, how did you look to complement the existing collection? Were there any existing gaps that the gift filled, or is it more a matter of strengthening the museum’s holdings?
Esther Bell: Sculpture is a big aspect of the gift. It more than doubles the presence of sculpture in the permanent collection. Also, thinking about Jacques Louis David, the Clark acquired his portrait of the Comte de Turenne in 1999. In Aso’s collection there were three David paintings, so now we can be a significant repository. Then there’s Jean-Antoine Watteau. It’s very hard to find paintings of his in good condition, and there are barriers in terms of price or the speed at which they appear on the market. Aso had one.
I know museums don’t typically talk about the dollar value of gifts, but could you even gesture at a range?
Esther Bell: We don’t comment on value but I would say it’s extraordinary, as you can surmise as you walk through and spend time with the collection. He was friends with so many curators and dealers and professors and had such a finger on the pulse of the art market. He was competing neck-and-neck against the great museums in this country. There are several works now here at the Clark that I saw as a curator [Bell served as the Clark’s deputy director and chief curator before moving to the corner office] and thought, “I would love to figure out how to bring that here.”
Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self Portrait in Studio Costume (c. 1800).
Tavitian started collecting only when he was 64 years old and died at 80. That’s an incredible pace. How was he collecting? Was he buying from private dealers, at auction, via other avenues?
Lara Yeager-Crasselt: A little bit of all of the above. There were certain dealers and advisors that he worked with very closely. He was buying a lot privately, but he was also buying at auction. He was incredibly decisive, and when he decided that he wanted something, that he loved something, he went for it, and he usually got it.
He was incredibly knowledgeable. He was deeply engrossed in the world in which he was collecting, but he also had advisors. He consulted curators, art historians, and academics. He built a team of people around him that helped him help to inform what he was doing, and that he wanted to have dialogue with.
Would we know the names of any of the dealers or others that he was working with in particular?
Lara Yeager-Crasselt: There’s Etienne Bréton, a French dealer who was also an art historian and scholar he was very close with, who was responsible for many of the works that came out of private collections and had not been known to scholars, or had been lost and re-emerged. He played a key role in that. The late David Bull, who was a conservator, played a large role in how Aso was collecting and consulted with him. David’s conservator’s eye was critical for the quality of the collection. But when you go through the research files on various objects, you’ll see correspondence with the top curators and scholars and specialists on all of these artists.
Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Young Man (c. 1613-1615).
Present company excepted of course, museums tend to throw around the word “transformative” when announcing major gifts. Can you put this gift in context in terms of the development of the museums’s collection?
Lara Yeager-Crasselt: Early modern art, or European art between 1500 to 1800, has been a relatively smaller part of the Clark’s collection. The strength of the collection has always been primarily 19th-century French art. Sterling Clark started with the Old Masters and then moved into the 19th century, and that became the driving force of his collecting. There are some major paintings in the early modern category, like the Piero della Francesca, but it’s been a relatively small number. The Tavitian gift is transformative in number, it’s transformative in quality, and it’s transformative in the range of artists and even of certain genres of painting. Now the Clark becomes a major place for the study of early modern European art in a way that it couldn’t be without this collection.
Tavitian was a Cold War refugee who went on to run a very successful business and establish a charitable foundation. At a moment when refugees are being turned away and the most high-profile software magnates aren’t exactly known for patronizing the arts or for any kind of philanthopy, do you have any hope that this gift could inspire the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world to change course?
Lara Yeager-Crasselt: I never had the chance to meet Aso myself, but he was an incredibly kind, generous, thoughtful man who was a humanist. I think that he should be a model of of what is possible. He had a very challenging early life and came to the United States as an immigrant, like so many did, and became incredibly successful. The Tavitian Foundation is still thriving and bringing young Armenian students and professionals to the US. So his legacy lives on, and I see that as being very hopeful and reaffirming about humanity.
“An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection” is on view at the Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown, Massachusetts, through February 21, 2027.
