Happy Birthday to US!
The USC Fisher Museum of Art turns 80 years old today
On November 14, 1939, the doors to the Fisher Gallery opened for the first time to the public, with that public being the students, staff and faculty of theUniversity, the local community, and art lovers worldwide who were visiting Los Angeles.
Eighty years later, the now-Fisher Museum of Art continues to serve that same audience, expanded today by the reach of our national and international loans and our website and social media audience who might never even step foot in L.A.
On this auspicious occasion, we would love to share with you some of our favorite photographs and publications from the last 80 years.
Elizabeth Holmes Fisher became a member of the USC Board of Trustees in 1936. She was the first woman to hold such a position at the University. Just a year later, she gave the gift that would fund the construction of the Fisher Gallery. The opening show of the Fisher Gallery, on view from November 14 through December 21st was an exhibition of portraits of historical Americans, including one of the famed Gilbert Stuart paintings of George Washington.
Though the Gallery opened with a loaned temporary exhibition, the rotating exhibition program was small at the start. The wealth of the gallery was to be the Elizabeth Holmes Fisher Collection, which is comprised of 19th century American Hudson River School and French Barbizon landscapes; 17th and 18th century British portraits; and Dutch and Flemish masterworks from the 16th through 18th centuries. The initial gift of artwork from 1939 continued to grow though 1951 for a total of 74 paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
Here Mrs. Fisher (center), USC President Von KleinSmid (second from right) and others stand in front of Jan van Goyen’s Coast of Dordrecht which Mrs. Fisher donated to the gallery in 1951.
The first director of the Fisher Gallery was a women named Winifred Poingdestre. We have not been able to uncover much information about her, only that she was the director from 1939 until retiring in 1957. One small window into her personality and work at the Fisher is the reports she created at the end of each year and sent to the President’s office. These documents (part of the Fisher Gallery Collection kept by USC Special Collections) tell an important story about the first two decades of the Gallery. These reports detail the exhibitions, conservation work, types and numbers of visitors, and what seemed to be the ever changing methods of lighting the space. (In her report in 1941, she noted that the new lighting system had been very well received but also required the replacement of 6–8 bulbs a week!) During the war years of 1941–1945, Ms. Poingdestre ends her reports with her feelings related to the question art safety and display during war time. In July of 1944 she wrote:
“Now that another year has passed we can be more than ever thankful that we have kept our collection on the walls of the Gallery instead of burying it underground. Throughout the country — at the Metropolitan, the Huntington and other places the great paintings are beginning to re-appear, and though of course at the outbreak of war their Directors were wise in not taking risks, events have proved that those risks were slight indeed. Our collection has remained on view to be an inspiration to those who visit it and a proof that in midst of a chaotic world a thing of beauty can never pass into nothingness.”
And now let’s look at some fun old photographs!
And more recently…
Staged Meaning/Meaning Staged, the spring 2019 exhibition honored our donors over the last 80 years — since Fisher’s founding at USC in 1939. Beginning with selections from our first major gift from Elizabeth Holmes Fisher, this show displayed works from our growing collections. Through the prism of landscapes, from the seventeenth-century into the present, we are examining visual and ideological shifts in pictorial meaning.
