Gallery Guide | The Melancholy Museum

The Melancholy Museum:
A Mark Dion Project
SUSAN DACKERMAN
John and Jill Freidenrich Director, Cantor Arts Center
ALTHOUGH THE MUSEUM ESTABLISHED BY LELAND SR. AND JANE
Stanford in memory of their son, Leland Jr., is celebrating its 125th
anniversary this year, it has only been in active operation for a portion
of that time. In the wake of the fifteen-year-old’s tragic death, his
parents founded both Leland Stanford Junior University and the
Leland Stanford Junior Museum, the latter of which opened in 1894
and was expanded in 1900. When it was built, its grandeur and scale
were rivaled only by its East Coast contemporaries—the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Twelve years into its life, however, the
1906 San Francisco earthquake catastrophically toppled the majestic
museum, and much of its collection was lost to the collapse and the
looting that followed. Because Jane Stanford, the museum’s most vocal
advocate, died in 1905, when it reopened in 1909 only a quarter of the
former building was salvaged, and part of that space was given over to
classrooms, laboratories, and storage rather than display. In 1945 the
building closed for further renovations and did not reopen again until
1954. During this time a much-needed inventory of the art collection
was conducted, and much was determined to be lost.
During that half century of the museum’s closure and instability,
most other art museums across the nation were building their
collections and developing their educational missions. Thus, from the
1950s through the 1980s, Stanford’s museum curators and art history
faculty made up for lost time, heroically working to revitalize the
institution into a worthy center for exhibitions, research, and teaching.
But while lightning never strikes twice, earthquakes do, and in 1989
the Loma Prieta quake again critically damaged the building and its
collections. The museum’s first century of existence was steeped in
sorrow and destruction.
Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois (1852–1923),
Portrait of Leland Stanford Jr., 1884. Cantor Arts Center
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