Aspiring 19th-century artists flocked to the Louvre Museum to learn from the masters by copying their works.
Claude Monet took a different tack. In April 1867 he asked Louvre authorities to let him paint views from upper-level windows of new boulevards and public spaces that were transforming Paris under Napoleon III and his top city planner, Georges-Eugene Haussmann.
Monet’s window gambit resulted in three masterpieces of early French Impressionism. One of them, “The Garden of the Princess,’’ has been a mainstay of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, since it bought the work in 1948.
This fall, however, the Allen’s great Monet, which depicts a view looking southeast from the Louvre toward the Seine River and the distant dome of the Pantheon, has company. “The Garden of the Princess’’ is on view alongside the other two paintings from the spring of 1867, both on loan from museums in Europe.
The reunited trio forms the backbone of “Picturing Paris: Monet and the Modern City,’’ a sharply focused exhibition that sets the three paintings in the context of the art history and the culture of their time. The show includes more than 30 other works from the Allen’s collection by artists including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne. Among them is another Monet from the Allen collection, “Wisteria,’’ of 1919-20, in the artist’s nearly abstract late style.
Organized by Curator Marlise Brown, the show typifies the Allen’s top-quality performance as one of the best art museums in Ohio and one of the greatest academic art museums in America.
The exhibit also helps explain why Jon Seydl boomeranged back to Northeast Ohio in July as the Allen’s new director after serving in leadership roles at other museums, including as the curator of European painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 2007 to 2013.
“I'm proud that the team is doing such great work,’’ Seydl, 56, said during an interview at the Allen just before the Monet exhibit opened on Aug. 19. “Isn't it wonderful? I mean, they're definitely firing on all cylinders.’’
A sense of fun
Seydl grew up in Bethlehem, Pa., where his father was a steelworker. He went on to study art history at Yale and complete a PhD. in the field at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. He left Cleveland in 2013 to join the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts as its senior director of collections and programs and curator of European art. He then led the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2018 until this summer.
Approachable and insightful, Seydl brings serious academic chops to his work along with a down-to-earth sense of fun in his efforts to build museum audiences.
“I'm thrilled that he's taking over there,’’ said Andria Derstine, Seydl’s predecessor at the Allen, who joined the Cleveland Museum of Art as deputy director and chief curator last year. “He's in touch with pop culture and can conceive of exhibitions that speak to people in lots of different ways.’’
In 2013, Seydl was the lead organizer of the Cleveland museum’s exhibition on “The Last Days of Pompeii,’’ which had a hip, campy feel. It combined lurid Victorian-era history paintings with Andy Warhol prints and clips from schlocky Hollywood epics portraying the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.
In Worcester, Seydl oversaw “Meow,’’ an exhibition focusing on representations of cats in the museum’s collection. It included an artist-designed enclosure for shelter cats who could be adopted by museumgoers.
“Oh my god,’’ he said. “We had live cats at the museum. I mean, it was amazing.’’
The current shows at the Allen were planned before Seydl’s arrival. He didn’t want to speculate about where he might lead the museum next. He wants new ideas to come from his staff, the college and the surrounding community.
It would be “crazy,’’ he said, to dictate a direction right after starting in his new job.
“You want to hear what people have to say,’’ he said. “You want to start this conversation and just kind of see where it goes.’’
But he said that while the Allen will always serve the Oberlin College community, he wants to make it more inviting to a broader local and regional public and less of a hidden treasure.
“We are the museum for the City of Oberlin,’’ he said. “We are the museum for Lorain County.’’
Expansion needed
Seydl said it’s obvious that with a relatively small footprint of 13,000 square feet, the museum, located at 87 N. Main Street in Oberlin, needs to expand. The college has talked about that for years; the Allen’s strategic plan for 2023-2028 calls for developing architectural designs and a fundraising plan.
A visit to the museum shows why more space is needed. Hundreds of objects are on display at any one time, but they’re only a fraction of the 15,000 works in the collection.
Artworks spill from galleries into the museum’s soaring sculpture court and adjacent corridors. The Monet show, one of eight special exhibits on view this fall, packs nearly three-dozen objects into a single gallery.
The other seven shows tackle diverse topics including the Pattern and Decoration art movement of the 1970s and ‘80s; Japanese prints depicting the “Tale of Genji;’’ and images of women by female artists, including a powerful 2012 self-portrait by Cleveland native Mary Beth McKenzie, which the artist donated in 2022.
The museum’s permanent collection is widely admired for everything from European Old Master paintings to contemporary art collected under professor and curator Ellen Johnson (1910-1992). Johnson bequeathed to the college the 1949 Frank Lloyd house in which she had lived. Open houses are scheduled on upcoming Sundays, including Oct. 19, Nov. 2 and Nov. 9. (Adult tickets, $10, may be reserved on the college’s website).
The Allen museum has a full-time equivalent staff of 20, plus 25 students. There are five curators, including three who oversee the collection, and one each for academic programs and education.
Many educational programs, including lectures and tours related to the Monet show, are free, but require registration. The museum also has a long tradition of renting artworks to students from a limited collection of 400 objects for $5 per semester. Students camp out overnight in the museum’s courtyard to be first in line for the privilege.
Treasures within a treasure
The museum complex is an architectural treasure in its own right. Built in 1917, the museum’s original building was designed as an Italian renaissance-style palazzo by Zanesville native Cass Gilbert, architect of New York’s 1913 Woolworth Building and the 1905 state capitol of Minnesota in St. Paul. Gilbert designed Oberlin College’s master plan and three other buildings in addition to the museum: Finney and Fairfield chapels and the Cox Administration Building.
In 1977, the museum added a gallery wing designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, progenitors of the Postmodern movement in contemporary architecture. With its cheeky checkerboard façade, the addition playfully spoofs the elegant sobriety of Gilbert’s adjacent building. It’s a classic of its era.
During a spin through the galleries, Seydl called out favorite artworks such as Hendrick ter Brugghen’s 1625 masterpiece, “St. Sebastian Tended by Irene,’’ in which two third-century women gently tend the saint, who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows by Roman soldiers.
“He's such an incredible painter and there are so few paintings by him,’’ Seydl said of the ter Brugghen. “I can't believe it's here.”
A national first
In the central court, Seydl pointed out a recently acquired painting by an unknown American artist from the late 1820s that depicts two girls, one Black, one white, standing side by side. The work implies equality between the two subjects, despite the prevalence of Black chattel slavery at the time.
The label accompanying the work calls it the “earliest known interracial portrait in the history of American painting.’’ The museum considers it so important that it’s featuring it on a banner outside the museum’s main entry, opposite one celebrating the Monet show.
With an overall budget of $3.5 million a year, the Allen can’t buy a lot. When it does buy, it does so for strong educational reasons, Seydl said.
“Everything is intentional to either teach something that wasn't able to be taught before or that upends a narrative,’’ he said.
The double portrait is one such artwork, and one more example, along with the Monet exhibit and the other shows on view this fall, why Seydl is excited to be at the Allen.
“I love this place,’’ he said. “I'm so happy to be part of the ecosystem of the arts here in Northeast Ohio.’’
