Who Inspired Anna Crocker?

Anna B Crocker wasn't the first female curator at the Portland Art Museum. She is the successor to Henrietta Failing, daughter of founder Henry Failing. Crocker took Failing's position but she might remind one more of Julia Hoffman.
Lets start with Henrietta, who was the curator when the museum moved into its first location on 5th and Taylor, and out of the library where it had its beginning in 1892. Henrietta organized the first exhibition the Portland Art Museum ever had, it was a water color show. Failing went back and forth about whether she could include craft in the show because artist Frank Vincent Dumond, who was head of Lewis and Clark's art department and co-curator for the show, was adamantly opposed. He said there simply wasn't room and it would be absurd to mix the two up. Failing acquiesced, Dumond would have had a harder time if he'd been up against Julia Hoffman.
Craft as art was important to Julia Hoffman, who spent a great deal of time between the East and West coast art worlds. Hoffman urged Henrietta Failing to do a craft show in 1904, and shipped pieces from the Boston Society of Art and Craft exhibition, which she curated.
Hoffman who was always avid for her cause, wanted a two month workshop for Portland with one of the country's leading metal artist. When Henrietta Failing wired her that it wouldn't be possible for a number of reasons, Hoffman said "It will have to come if we want to keep pace with the rest of our country and it is too bad to have any delay."
Of course Hoffman got her way, in 1907 Mildred Watkins instructed a Summer School of Metalwork. That year, because of the inspiration of both the show Hoffman encouraged based on pieces borrowed from Portland Families and the Boston exhibition, and on the summer school of metal craft, the Art and Craft Society of Portland formed. To learn more see go read part of The Art and Craft Movement in the Pacific Northwest.
Anna Crocker followed Henrietta Failing as curator, but she seems to have had more of the Julia Hoffman fire inside her.
This is Julia Hoffman's self portrait. I cannot help but to think she must have been an inspiration to Anna B. Crocker.

Anna Crocker ~ An Homage and More Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is as much a signature piece for Marcel Duchamp as it is for Anna B. Crocker. Duchamp shocked the New York art world with it in early 1913 and Crocker did the same in November 1913 when she exhibited it at the Portland Art Museum. Almost like stop motion photography the nude traverses the painting leaving the viewer with a sense of how ephemeral time can be, an irreversible forward movement – unless of course you're John McCracken and time travel. Here's a piece of ekphrasis poetry in honor of the timeless nude. Following it is a Youtube video about Anna Crocker.

Nude Descending a Staircase by X. J. Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

Poem By Chad Sweeney, Fellow Duchamp Lover

The Sentence

The bones of Marcel Duchamp
laid end to end
reach all the way

to the bottom of this hill
where a little slab of concrete
bridges one

obscurity to another
and Mr. Duchamp seems pleased
the way I've places his jaw

in relation to the atlas
his wisdom teeth
commanding long sharp shadows

though it's noon
(the midnight of day)
and we've nowhere to go

and the oblique syntax of bones
repeats its inquiry
in the language of the world

This poem was published in the Best American Poetry 2008, chosen by guest editor Charles Wright. Chad Sweeney said "I wrote 'The Sentence' while staring at a bird marsh. I've always been intested in the communication between text and the plastic arts, and this image rippled mysteriously across the marsh- the bones of Marcel Duchamp stretched into a long sentence, as both lingual structure and sculpture, one of Duchamp's readymades pieced together from found objects. The drama takes place at noon, motionless noon crouched into negative capability, when the world is worlding, and forms pulse in a combination of protean grammar. Several months later I wrote about the bird marsh while staring at a junk yard."
If at first I thought I should draw a more complete correlation between this poem, and Anna Crocker, Sweeney tells me it doesn't need to be so. The Portland Art Museum has one of Duchamp's boxes, complete with miniature plastic and glass objects placed to signify his readymades. If ever you want to see one up close, while you stand under a Calder mobile, and read your Chad Sweeney.

Anna B. Crocker and Frank Lloyd Wright "Spot" Pietro Belluschi

Many visitors to the Portland Art Museum are astonished to hear that the main building was erected in 1932. The first comment they make is that it looks so modern. The second is the question "1932, how can that be? The country was knee deep in the Great Depression". It does seem that the stars were definitely aligned for the Portland Art Museum. Unemployment was high and new building in the city had come to an almost stand still. Fortunately for Portland and the museum, key patrons were still donating money to the museum. In 1930, the museum received a donation of $100,000 to be used towards a new facility. This would allow the Museum to have a permanent home. As generous as that donation was it would not have been sufficient without the forward thinking of Anna B. Crocker, the Curator and in effect director of the Museum.

The Museum approached A. E. Doyle with their proposal for a new building. After negotiations between the Doyle firm, the museum board and Anna Crocker, it was agreed that the the museum would pay no more than the $100,000 including architect's fees. Center to the proposal was Anna Crocker's well thought out guidelines for the museum. The interior space, lighting and comfort for the visitor were all to be considered before the design of the exterior. The exterior should be simple and approachable by the public.

But which architect at the Doyle firm should be selected? Pietro Belluschi, a young and yet untested architect, was Anna Crocker's choice. She knew him and his work from his days at the Portland Art Museum's School. Crocker approached C. F. Adams, the chairman of the building committee, and convinced him to back Belluschi as the choice. Without this support, the Doyle firm would have chosen Jamieson Parker, a more conservative architect and member of the museum's board. The overall design of the museum would have definitely been different, most likely leaning towards a Georgian exterior.

As it turned out even though the limited budget precluded the use of marble, colonnades, statues "and other monumental mausoleum accessories", the board members including Parker were insisting upon just that -- Georgian, what Belluschi thought of as dead tradition. Belluschi was caught between providing a traditional looking building and what Anna Crocker had made clear she wanted: "a welcoming, accessible, unpretentious, functional-looking building", also Belluschi's choice. Belluschi got his second "spot" from none other than Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright had just complected lectures at the University of Oregon so his name was in the news. Belluschi asked for and immediately received a letter from Wright that the museum would be "making a serious mistake" by insisting on a Georgian exterior. Belluschi proceeded to incorporate the minor changes Wright had suggested. Armed with the letter and amended proposal, Belluschi with Anna Crocker's support prevailed. The Portland Art Musuem has what Frank Lloyd Wright described as a sensible modern exterior that has moved gracefully into the 21st century.

Shown below are the floor plans for the museum as well as the Belluschi's preliminary drawing with Frank Lloyd Wright's comments. If you should like to read more about what transpired in the making of the Portland Art Museum, Meredith L. Clausen devotes about twenty pages to it in her book Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architiect.

Lofty Goals with Meager Resources

Anna Crocker's said "It's better to have more idea's than funds." She accomplished almost everything she set out to do on her limited budget, in the face of controversy, at a time when very few women worked out of the home. Quiet power, the kind that comes after patience, endurance and steady staying of the course. I think she would have read Fifty Two Pieces. Some of the conclusions I jump to, Anna Crocker, what would you have thought? I'm sure time was one of her many limited resources, but she was said to be religiously dedicated to the art. The museum was 22 years old when she started, she stayed for 27 years. Sometimes she painted her students, as seen here in Portrait of a young Girl:

Local artist Dorothy Yezerski worked for 29 years as the Director of Youth Programs, put into practice by Anna Crocker. Dorothy is an 87 year old Portland artist with a myspace page. That speaks to what Crocker felt about modernism, it was art's "new spirit" when she became curator a hundred years ago, and it's the new spirit today.
As for the garden club in the sculpture court, I like that idea, I'm not opposed, Come on Anna Crocker, smell the roses.

Anna B. Crocker ~ Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase

Anna Belle Crocker was responsible for many good things happening at the Portland Art Museum. From the time when her tenure began in 1909 until she retired in 1936, she worked relentlessly on behalf of the Museum. Crocker had the foresight to bring national touring exhibits to the museum. Portlanders were exposed to the new avant garde art from Europe shortly after the 1913 Armory Show rocked the art world when it opened in New York. Because of her efforts, the Portland Art Museum mounted an exhibition in late November, 1913 that had Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 as its centerpiece. At that November show, Portlanders were able to see original prints and reproductions of the art works of Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, some of the same artists that had been part of the infamous Armory Show. Crocker augmented Portland's exhibition with lectures by Frederic Torrey, the famous art historian and San Francisco gallery owner. Both Crocker and Torrey hoped to bridge these modernists with their artistic predecessors. That didn't completely work though. Both Portland newspapers ran less than favorable headlines. The Oregonian ran a classic for its critic's review: "'Picture' Resembles Wrecked Shingle Mill."

Portlanders did come and see this new art though. Rumor has it that businessmen would make daily visits to the museum to see Duchamp's scandalous piece of art. For those of you interested in curatorial decisions, Crocker hung Nude Descending a Staircase with a piece of blue cloth behind it. Some accounts say that the blue was dull, others remember it as turquoise. In either case, Crocker wanted the painting to stand out from the cream colored walls. For all of her forward thinking though she was quite proper in what she saw as the role of the museum and was said to be horrified when her successor had invited the local garden club to have their annual flower show in the sculpture garden just off the lobby of the museum. What would she think of the Portland Art Museum today? My take on Anna Crocker is that she probably would have not flinched at the Colescotts currently hanging just off the main lobby and that the weddings and other events would be just fine as long as they remained in the Grand Ballroom of the Mark Building. She was one beautiful, smart, strong woman. There are not enough adjectives to describe Anna Belle Crocker.

Anna B. Crocker

It is the 21st week on Fifty Two Pieces, my birthday week. I never knew what week of the year my birthday fell in, because I never counted the weeks as I do now. This will be my 31st birthday. The artist and woman who inspires me this week, and this year and hopefully throughout my thirties is Anna Crocker, former curator of the Portland Art Museum hired in 1909. She retired from curating and as the principal of the art school in 1936. She built community and education in Portland and she was obviously a skilled artist, this is her self portrait. Not to mention that she is lovely. Rock on Anna Crocker.