layout summer 2002 - St. Mary's College of Maryland

y Jennifer Fossell O’Sullivan, editor
Art Photography by David Emerick
THE STORYof the
COLLECTION
HOW EVER DID A SMALL PUBLIC COLLEGE LIKE
ST. MARY’S END UP WITH more than 2,000
original works of art REPRESENTING THE
“The Tree” by Gerrit Hondius (oil on board, 1966)
LIKES OF Renoir, Warhol, Picasso, Dali, AND
COUNTLESS OTHER CELEBRATED ARTISTS? AS IT
TURNS OUT, THE ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION IS
ALMOST AS INTRIGUING AS THE ART ITSELF. It’s
a story filled with a cast of colorful
characters, PLENTY OF GUMPTION, AND
MORE THAN A LITTLE SERENDIPITY.
“Reclining Nude” by Auguste Renoir (etching, restrike)
“Asbury Park” by Jon Carsman (serigraph, 1976)

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL
the story of “the Collection,” as
it is commonly called, without
simultaneously telling the stories
of the many people who brought
it into existence. From donors, gallery
directors, and art professors to members
of the maintenance staff and those who
drove the College van, all have played
their role in bringing art to St. Mary’s.
Then, of course, there are the artists
themselves—figures both celebrated
and obscure—whose works grace
the walls of just about every building
on campus.
But, to begin at the
beginning, the seeds
of the Collection were
planted with Jonathan
Ingersoll’s arrival on
campus in 1970. Hired
as associate professor
of art by then-president
Renwick Jackson,
Ingersoll was charged
with developing a
gallery exhibition
program that would
celebrate art’s importance
within a liberal
arts tradition. In many
ways, the story of the Collection is
the story of Ingersoll himself. But, as
Norton Dodge—professor emeritus of
economics, former trustee, enthusiastic
art collector, and one of Ingersoll’s best
friends at St. Mary’s—explains, Ingersoll
was not exactly hired with the intention
of developing a permanent art collection.
“Ren had to have hired him, I think,
because he found that he was an
energetic, imaginative guy,” says
Dodge. “He had multiple talents, you
know. He could teach wind surfing
and sailing. He could teach drawing
and some art history and he could run
the gallery.”
Born in 1929, Ingersoll spent part
of his childhood in New Hampshire.
He never forgot those Yankee roots
and, during his years at St. Mary’s,
he delighted in baiting his southern
colleagues with claims of northern
“Portrait of Guillaume” by Paul Cézannne
(etching, restrike)
Because he had absolutely no storage space,
Ingersoll mounted each and every piece almost as
soon as he’d unpacked it. As Jackson notes in
The Golden Run, “[he] visualizes the whole
campus, each bare wall, each space, as a gallery.”
superiority. When everyone else was
bundled up against the cold and snow,
he insisted our weather was laughable
compared to a New York winter. In
fact, he went sockless on the most
blustery of days, as he did year-round.
Before arriving at St. Mary’s, Ingersoll
earned a B.S. in art education and, in
1965, an M.S. in secondary education
from Hofstra University on Long Island.
As a student there, he worked as an
assistant in the Emily Lowe Gallery.
The hands-on work included prepping
exhibit space, installing exhibitions,
and repairing objects from the gallery’s
collection. Though he was never formally
trained in museum work, these student
experiences offered invaluable practical
training in running a gallery and stewarding
a collection of art. Ingersoll
would draw on them again and again
during his career at St. Mary’s.
Ingersoll began to put his stamp
on the campus almost as soon as he’d
arrived. In The Golden Run, former
president Renwick Jackson observes
that “Jonathan Ingersoll . . . fills the
campus with paintings and other creations.
He transforms the former library
space in Anne Arundel Hall into a
gallery and fills it with exhibits.” From
1971-1977, he organized approximately
60 exhibits. A decade later, the newly
built Montgomery Hall opened, and
the gallery moved across campus to a
space on its second floor. In these early
days, before there was enough art to
fill this larger space,
Ingersoll’s good friend
Norton Dodge came to
the rescue by making
the College a four-year
loan of more than
300 works of Russian
nonconformist art and
other pieces. Over the
years, Dodge also gifted
many artworks to the
Collection.
Ingersoll could often
be found in the small
workshop at the back
of the new gallery,
engrossed in preparing recent acquisitions
for display and making repairs
to other pieces. Skilled in design and
good with his hands, Ingersoll was
adept at the intricate work of restoration.
He also made use of these talents
by teaching classes in jewelry-making
and weaving—a legacy, perhaps, from
years spent running a summer arts and
crafts camp in Maine.
Because he had absolutely no storage
space, Ingersoll mounted each and
every piece almost as soon as he’d
unpacked it. As Jackson notes in The
Golden Run, “[he] visualizes the whole
campus, each bare wall, each space,
as a gallery.” Thanks to his New York
contacts and one-of-a-kind personality,
he had accumulated more than 100
original works of art representing 100
different artists by 1976. In the years
that followed, he would continue to
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ing art to St. Mary’s in prodigious
amounts. As Professor of Art Lisa
Scheer and Ingersoll’s colleague says,
he was the “inventor” of the Collection,
“the original gatherer, the one who
got a lot of the raw material together.”
But just how did this “wiry little
fellow with a bowtie” (to use Scheer’s
words) convince so many collectors
to part with so many treasures? “He
charmed them. He overpowered them.
He just wouldn’t leave them alone,”
says Scheer. “He was quite a character
and I think that made people remember
him and want to deal with him.” In
turn, Ingersoll offered donors something
valuable: he would take anything
and everything. It was a win-win
situation for both parties.
“Very few people have the kinds
of connections that Jonathan had,”
says Dodge. Of these, by far his most
important was Leonard Bocour, founder
and manufacturer of Bocour Artist
Colors, one of the first acrylic paints
on the market. A great friend of art
and artists, Bocour often supplied
impoverished painters with the raw
materials they needed to create their
works. Though they had no money,
they managed to compensate him with
another kind of capital—their paintings.
Over time, these transactions made
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Feb. 12, 1976
Dear Jonathan,
I must tell you what a great
pleasure it was seeing you
at the C.A.A. [the College
Art Association] Convention
in Chicago. My only regret is
that we didn’t have more time
to spend together.
If you are planning any trips
to New York, please come with a
station wagon as I am sure that
I will have some goodies for
you to take back with you.
Stay well. With warmest
greetings, I am,
Cordially yours,
Len
him the possessor of a staggeringly large
collection of mid-20th-century art.
How Jonathan Ingersoll came to
know Leonard Bocour is a mystery,
but the warmth and mutual respect
of their relationship is borne out by
scores of letters, not to mention the
many treasures that can be found
around campus. (Shown above is a
typical example of their exchange.)
The pair’s correspondence stretched
on over the years, well into the 1980s.
Above: “Portrait of Baudelaire
Profile” by Edouard Manet
(etching, restrike)
Left: “Mermaid” by Rene
Magritte (lithograph)
Dear Lenny,
I agree - our meeting was too
short. Hence our drinking was
too short. Thank you so much for
the invitations to collect some
goodies and it just so happens
that I do have a trip to New
York scheduled for 18-19 March.
Is this time convenient, for I
can probably alter it somewhat.
I hesitate to call for your
globe trotting is too extensive.
If I can manage it, I will make
the trip longer than a turnaround.
Go with Christopher as he has
some magical powers.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Ingersoll
Throughout that time, Leonard Bocour
and his wife Ruth donated more than
600 objects to St. Mary’s College,
representing such well known artists
as Robert Beauchamp, Raphael Soyer,
and Jack Levine.
How the artworks made the trip
from New York to St. Mary’s is another
curious story. Ingersoll made frequent
trips north—usually at least two a
semester—to collect his “goodies” from
Bocour and other donors. “I’m off to
New York,” Scheer remembers him
announcing regularly. Gail Wood,
academic fiscal administrator who
worked with Ingersoll from the mid-
1980s until his retirement, fondly
remembers helping to make his travel
arrangements. “He was very particular
about the places he would stay,” she
says. “I always had to make him a
reservation at the same place—the
Chelsea—and I did that for 20 years.
He said it was like a rag, but he loved
it because the woman who owned it
was used to him and his ways.” The
Chelsea Hotel, in fact, was a beloved
refuge and hang-out for poets, artists,
and other avant-garde types. Staying
there was like staying in the middle of
the New York art scene. Ingersoll, not
surprisingly, was right in his element.

While Ingersoll drove a battered
station wagon around St. Mary’s,
complete with a giant teddy bear
buckled into the front passenger seat,
he opted for the college van or panel
truck on his collecting trips. To ensure
that none of his loot was stolen during
these trips to New York, he would pick
some trustworthy-looking loiterer and
pay him to stand guard while he ferried
art from the buildings to the truck. His
return to campus was always greeted
with curiosity and anticipation. “I
loved to go down to the loading dock
while he was unpacking the truck so
I could see what he
had,” says Wood.
Lisa Scheer was
along for a couple
of Ingersoll’s jaunts to
New York and calls
them “some of my
favorite experiences of
all time.” This was in
the early 1980s, when
Ingersoll was in the
process of collecting
plaster casts of great
classical sculpture
from the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
Popular in the nineteenth century, the
copies had fallen out of favor by the
early 1900s. By that time, J.P. Morgan
had headed up the museum and decided
that he would go after the originals. So,
by 1938 the casts were left to molder in
a damp storage space beneath a viaduct
in Brooklyn. The Metropolitan decided
that they should be given to institutions
that had a use for them, and Ingersoll
managed to score several on long-term
loan. Scheer recalls walking with
Ingersoll through “these huge, vaulted
storage spaces filled with plaster casts.”
“We got to pick what we wanted and
we went around putting little Xs on the
ones we liked. ‘That’s the Belvedere
Torso,’ we’d say. It was wild,” she recalls.
Today, most of the casts hold court in
the upper floor of Montgomery Hall.
The cast (a copy of the Parthenon’s
East Frieze) that decorates the north
“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” by
Francisco Goya (etching and aquatint, ca. 1797)
But just how did this “wiry little fellow with a
bowtie” (to use Scheer’s words) convince so many
collectors to part with so many treasures? “He
charmed them. He overpowered them. He just
wouldn’t leave them alone,” says Scheer.
entrance of Montgomery Hall is another
of Ingersoll’s legacies. He learned from a
newspaper ad that its original owner,
Princeton University, no longer wanted
it and was searching for someone to take
it off their hands—for free. Ingersoll
happily claimed the two-ton prize and
arranged for it to be carted to St. Mary’s
in 25 separate pieces, cleaned and
installed by the maintenance crew.
If Jonathan Ingersoll was a rogue
and a shark in his quest for more and
more art, Professor of Art History
Sandy Underwood, since retired, was
the cool-headed art historian who first
began to make sense of the burgeoning
collection. She arrived in St. Mary’s in
1972 with her husband John (who held
various administrative positions at the
College and was eventually named
executive vice president for administration).
In her first year, she divided
her time between her duties as an
instructor in art history and as resident
director for Queen Anne Hall. She
went on to become Professor of Art
History and assumed oversight of the
Teaching Collection following Ingersoll’s
retirement in 1994.
Again, serendipity is the common
thread that runs through the history
of the Collection. The right person
always seemed to step in at just the
right moment. It was Ingersoll, “a born
scrounger and hustler” (as described by
Helle Bering-Jensen in a 1991 article
from The Washington Times), who
brought hundreds of
works to campus, and
Underwood who began
to really sort through
this windfall. “Like all
good art historians,
Sandy wanted to
organize, record, codify,
and set up systems,”
says Scheer. Simply
having a bunch of art
hanging around campus
doesn’t constitute a
teaching collection,
Scheer points out.
The works must be
accompanied by publication records
and other supporting documents.
While Ingersoll had been orderly
enough within the close quarters of
his gallery workspace, he kept most of
the records in his head. Underwood
began to tackle the nitty-gritty work
of committing these records to paper,
ultimately enabling the Collection to
be used as a teaching resource.
Much of Underwood’s time, of
course, was taken up with teaching.
(Her “Introduction to Art History”
course has been called “legendary.”)
Art majors, of course, flocked to the
course but so, too, did non-majors.
“There were often several biology
majors napping in the back of the
room, as these classes were always
taught ‘in the dark,’” remembers art
major Mary Body ’79. “Sandy used to
joke about how great her classes were
17

Top Row: “Squash Blossoms” by Alexander Calder (lithograph), “From the Fables of Fontaine” by Marc
Chagall (etching) Middle Row: “Landscape” by Earl Hofmann (watercolor) Bottom Row: “Preparing for a
Wedding” by Ruth Gikow (acrylic on canvas), “Ta Bouche” by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (lithograph, restrike)
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for napping.” During her time at
St. Mary’s, Body took every class
Underwood offered. To this day, they
remain good friends.
Underwood was eager to see that
the works were distributed throughout
the campus. In conjunction with Casey
Page ’97, who was hired as gallery
director and collection manager in
1994, she began to distribute pieces
from the Collection around campus.
“If you go around, you’ll sort of see
little thoughts about what ended up
where,” says Lisa Scheer.
Underwood retired in 2000. At
the end of the following academic
year, Page left the College to become
program director and curator of
exhibitions at Maryland Art Place in
Baltimore, the gallery of contemporary
art sponsored by the Maryland State
Arts Council. (Presently she teaches
art in the St. Mary’s County school
system.) The Collection entered a new
phase with the arrival of Susan Glasser,
hired as director of exhibitions and
collections in 2002. Having spent
nearly 13 years at the Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts and having served in
executive director positions at two
other museums, Glasser was the first
museum professional to be employed
full-time by the College. She was
drawn to the position, she says, because
the Collection was so remarkable for
a college of St. Mary’s size and merited
professional stewardship. “It’s the old
cliché,” Glasser says. “No one owns
art; we merely take care of it for future
generations.”
Because Glasser was able to devote
all of her time to the Collection and
Gallery, she was able to make huge
strides in sorting it out. Says Lisa
Scheer, “Susan was really able to
get complete and total control of
the information, of organizing the
Collection, and picking through
the works to understand what was
important.” Because pieces from the
Collection had been distributed around
campus, sometimes migrating from
office to office without any notification

to the Gallery, one of Glasser’s biggest
challenges was simply to locate and
account for every single piece. To assist
in this endeavor, she hired Catherine
Dunn (now interim director of exhibitions
and collections) in fall 2004.
Dunn—herself an artist—arguably
knows every nook and cranny of this
campus better than anyone else. After
all, she has spent countless days and
hours combing through hallways and
classrooms in a quest to document
every last piece of the Collection. On
occasion, she has even located a piece
miles away from campus—like the
dusty Paul Klee print
that was discovered on
loan behind the office
door of a local bank.
As Glasser began to
shore up the records
and make a complete
account of the art, she
also began to appreciate
the contours of the
Collection. In a twopage
overview of the
Collection from early
2005, she notes that
“The primary focus of
the Art Collection is
work that illuminates the story of 20thcentury
America and its art. . . . Also
included in the Art Collection are
works by artists who significantly influenced
20th-century American artists,
including August Rodin, Pablo Picasso,
Diego Rivera and Salvador Dali.”
Ironically, though, this well-defined
Collection came about through chance
as much as anything else. As Norton
Dodge explains, Jonathan Ingersoll
simply loved art—all art. He wasn’t
necessarily thinking in terms of
developing a specific kind of collection.
“He just did things and it happened,”
says Dodge. In 2004, a significant gift
from Gene Mako, including pieces by
Bartholomew Mako as well as Norman
Rockwell and the noted American
impressionists Theodore Robinson
and Robert Spencer, added even more
depth to the Collection. Over the
“Sun Maiden” (117/200) by Salvador Dali
(lithograph)
Over the years, many other donors have
added treasures to the Collection: paintings
by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque,
prints by Thomas Hart Benton, African sculpture,
and art from Asia and India.
years, many other donors have added
treasures to the Collection: paintings
by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque,
prints by Thomas Hart Benton,
African sculpture, and art from Asia
and India. Altogether, the Collection
includes 671 accessioned works and
more than 1,700 additional decorative
objects of lesser value.
When Glasser left St. Mary’s earlier
this year to accept a senior administrative
position with the North Carolina
Museum of Art, she left behind a
meticulously ordered Collection and
a clearly defined mission for future
collecting priorities. Looking back over
her years as gallery director, Glasser
says, “All of those ‘housekeeping’ tasks
were merely a prelude to what really
matters: having the Collection become
a valued and used resource for the
students and faculty at SMCM.” That
it certainly has, as faculty members
across the disciplines are increasingly
finding ways to incorporate the
Collection into their teaching. (For
more about this, see “Lessons from
the Masters” on page 22.)
What’s next for the Collection?
In the near future, objects in storage
will move from the cramped storage
area in Montgomery Hall to the
newly built art storage area in Calvert
Hall, a state-of-the-art facility that
will protect the artworks from moisture
and temperature fluctuations.
Accessioned objects that are currently
displayed around
campus will also move
to the Calvert storage
area. However, art will
remain a visible and
integral part of our
daily lives, as nonaccessioned
objects
will remain in place.
Eventually, there
are plans to re-hang
artworks, both accessioned
and non-accessioned,
around the
campus. This next
chapter in the story
of the Collection will no doubt focus
on new ways of interpreting it and
presenting it to the College and
southern Maryland communities.
In the end, the story of the
Collection is as much about people
as it is about art. All around campus,
paintings, prints, and sculpture invite
us to stop and consider them. Each
possesses a multi-layered history, a
tangle of relationships and experiences
that asks to be unraveled. They speak
of individuals—the artists, of course,
but also the donors, the colorful
characters who brought them here,
the many people who have cared for
and about them. The story of the
Collection spans past, present, and
future. It is shaped by the passions,
talents, and expertise of those who
have made their mark and awaits the
gifts of those yet to come. o
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