Dürer, Rembrandt, Whistler, Rubens and Goya are there. Manet, Munch, Cassatt and Picasso are too, alongside DeKooning, Johns and Dine.
All of these masters are represented in the Davison Art Center’s (DAC) current exhibition, “A Passion for Prints: The Davison Legacy,” now through May 22. The show celebrates George W. Davison’s strength as a collector and the print collection he founded, now recognized as one of the two or three leading collections at an American university.
“George W. Davison was the nexus in forming the collection,” said Dan Zolli ’07, who curated the exhibition with Jesse Feiman ’05. “The collection contains so many monuments in the history of printmaking.”
More than 40 of the collection’s most exciting prints are on view, dating from roughly 1450 to 1940. Etchings, engravings, lithographs and Japanese woodcuts offer a glimpse at the collection’s celebrated masterpieces and rarities.
“This show does several things: it brings out the most rare, beautiful prints in the collection— Dürer, Rembrandt—and it indicates how the collection has grown under various curators,” said Clare Rogan, Curator of the DAC. “You see each stage of its evolution.”
Davison was not interested in amassing a huge collection. Instead, he concentrated on acquiring individual prints of very high historical and artistic value. His skill and passion as a collector was evident to Zolli.
“Having an interest in the collection, [I surveyed] the prints and saw that a lot of acquisitions took place between the dates of 1938 and 1952, and the role that Davison played in establishing the collection became obvious,” Zolli said. “I went to Jesse and said maybe we could put together a show. We approached [Former DAC Curator Ellen D’Oench] and started work on it.”
Zolli and Feiman completed the show under the direction of Rogan, who was recently appointed as the fifth curator of the DAC.
“It’s a good time to have a retrospective of the collection with the changing of the guard going on,” Zolli said.
“There is five hundred-plus years of printmaking history openly accessible to students at [the DAC], and we wanted to make that come through in the show,” Feiman said.
Davison was one of sixty-nine members of Wesleyan’s “glorious class of 1892,” which at that time was the largest matriculating class in the University’s history. He went on to be President of the Central Hanover Bank & Trust, a director of many corporations and a successful investor. He was elected to the Wesleyan Board of Trustees in 1912 and served until his death in 1953, a record 41-year term.
In 1907, Davison and his wife Harriet began collecting prints, which they occasionally exhibited in a modest gallery at Olin Library. When it could no longer support their rapidly growing collection, they provided the finances to purchase and renovate the severely dilapidated Richard Alsop IV House, the pink building on High Street that is now known as the Davison Art Center.
Davison’s personal tastes come through in the body of work presented.
“You get a sense of certain things he liked and you get a sense of his own interest as a collector,” Rogan said. “He certainly wasn’t a fan of the avant-garde.”
“He was mostly interested in the old masters,” Feiman said. “This was the trend at the time. Americans were attempting to co-opt European traditions to feel as relevant culturally.”
Davison’s interest in prints focused on the artist’s skill. A devoted critic of the quality of inking and printing in a piece, his discriminating eye can be appreciated in Goltzius’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and Rembrandt’s “Three Crosses,” both notable for their high quality.
“He wouldn’t just look for a Dürer print, he would look for the best [printing] of a Dürer print,” Rogan said.
Davison’s collecting legacy lives on at Wesleyan through “A Passion for Prints,” which offers a glimpse of the collection’s future as well. On view for the first time is the collection’s most recent acquisition, Tara Donovan’s 2004 work “Untitled.”
“We’ve probably seen just about every print in the collection, or at least the vast majority,” Zolli said.
“When you see these prints and his collecting strategy, then you understand the man behind the name,” Feiman said.
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