Newark Museum

Newark, New Jersey
The old saw about an institution's being the lengthened shadow of a single, strong individual is nowhere better exemplified than in Newark's John Cotton Dana. In 1979 they praised his memory with several shows illustrating his presence as well as theirs. Dana was a big-city librarian (Denver and Springfield, Massachusetts) with that breed's passion for luring everybody, I mean everybody, into the transactions of learning. That perhaps explains his zeal in touting "everyday art," what we would now refer to as a mix of industrial design and crafts.

He used to reiterate--at the top of his voice, loud enough, I suspect, so that the brass at New York's Met could not fail to hear him--that goodness in art had nothing to do with age, price, or rarity. To drive his point home, he staged shows with objects selling for under a dollar; this a decade before the Museum of Modern Art organized its industrial design department. He staged a German industrial design show before World War I and got into a nasty spat with the Met because they were too snooty to cosponsor!

He teased, shamed, and cajoled Newark's business community into supporting the museum he founded in 1909 as an expansion of library services. The department store Bambergers came up with money for the present splendid building on Washington Square in 1924. Its naturally lit central court is just right as an exhibition space, not too Louvrey large, but commodious enough to show things to an eye's advantage--like the six Joseph Stellas in a recent "Urban Scene" exhibition, a Baedeker for all the bridges the laureate of Brooklyn has painted. Its eighteenth- to twentieth-century Americana is first class, and it has notable African and Tibetan collections.

But Newark is by no means coasting on Dana's oars. Its latest additions are a "fool the finger" magic realist canvas of the museum's Victorian adjunct, the Ballantine House, by Adolf Konrad, a German-born, WPA-in-Newark-weaned painter, and George Segal's Toll Booth (1980).

It is typical of the spritz of the regime of current director Samuel C. Miller that he served in situ, swathed in Segal's wet industrial plaster, to become the ticket taker in the 3,000 pound, solid-bronze art deco toll booth which the Port of New York Authority gave the museum in 1977. (Greater love than this no director hath, than that he would give up his lunches to become a Segal!)

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981