Dumbarton Oaks http://www.doaks.org These are the search results for the query, showing results 1 to 15. Eunice and Henry Maguire http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/eunice-and-henry-maguire Oral History Interview with Eunice and Henry Maguire, undertaken by Anna Bonnell-Freiden and Clem Wood at the Maguire home in Baltimore, Maryland on September 3, 2008. At Dumbarton Oaks, Henry Maguire was a Junior Fellow (1971–1972), a Senior Fellow (1986–1990 and 1991–1996 ex officio), Visiting Senior Research Associate (1989–1990), and Director of Studies (1991–1996) in the Byzantine Studies program. ABF: We are Anna Bonnell-Freiden and Clem Wood, and we are here with Henry and Eunice Maguire to talk about their involvement at Dumbarton Oaks over the years at their house in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 3, 2008. So, we’d like to start by asking you about your impressions of the social and intellectual atmosphere at Dumbarton Oaks when you first arrived, in 1971.

HM: Eunice…

EM: Oh, I shouldn’t really be the one to start because you were the one who was the Junior Fellow – but maybe if that means I have less to say, I should go ahead.

HM: Well, you did more socializing.

EM: Well, we were both graduate students at that time, and I think even I – though I had not originally been an advisee of Professor Kitzinger’s – was by that time. In fact, it was he who had first welcomed us to on our first visit, when we were still undergraduates; and Henry paid his first visit to America during the winter vacation of my senior year – and that turned out to be a very important visit, our visit to Dumbarton Oaks, and meeting him, and having his interest encourage us both in our directions. We were both interested in Byzantine art, but I was – no, we were also both interested in Western medieval art. And he encouraged both interests. So, I was, I think, still casting about, perhaps, either to narrow my thesis topic or to find a doable one for him, at the time you had your Junior Fellowship. So, it was a wonderful opportunity for me too, and I found all the staff and fellows very friendly and welcoming, and, of course, I was very excited to be given a seat in that fabulous library. The reading room was upstairs where, now, the Director of Studies office is and the outer office. It was all one big room with the long tables across; and I was lucky that I was given a seat near the window, so I had the sense of the garden being there. And I was sitting at the same table opposite Irina Andreescu, and behind me was Nancy Ševčenko, just to give you a sense of the atmosphere and the contemporaries. Also, the photographic resources…the photo collection, which was at that time under the care of Marlia Mundell – before she was married – and the other photo resources were very helpful to me because my work has always been quite visual; and I was looking for material which hadn’t been published in the way in which I wished to approach it. So, that was very important, as were the museum collections, though I didn’t know at the time that I would end up as a museum person. And there were many informal opportunities for stimulating conversations. The only disappointment was – and this maybe will come under one of your other questions, but – at that time, there was an official ban on inviting spouses to lunch in the Fellows Building. And, of course, a lot of the intellectual, informal intellectual conversation goes on – or used to – at those lunches, maybe even more than now, because I think people tended to go more all at the same time then, for lunch, because it was a smaller group. So, I did feel excluded in that sense and I felt that I was penalized for being a scholar, because scholars…scholarly colleagues were allowed to be invited, but if you happened to be a scholarly colleague and also a spouse, you couldn’t; and I wasn’t the only one who suffered in this way, among the various couples who were there over the years. The one who wasn’t a spouse…I mean, the one who wasn’t a Fellow, until that rule changed, couldn’t mingle with colleagues in the Fellows Building; that was the only drawback, as far as the social and intellectual atmosphere goes.

HM: Although I would say that lunches were rather formal affairs and often were eaten in silence because the Junior Fellows were afraid to say anything because they would reveal their ignorance, and the senior faculty – and there were a fair number in those days – they often weren’t on speaking terms with each other. So, they didn’t speak either. So I’m not sure you missed an enormous amount, except for the food, which was quite good.

EM: Well, the other drawback for me, of course – and that was jumping ahead to your question about daily routine – that my time was really circumscribed by the challenge of finding affordable childcare, or childcare that was affordable to two graduate students. So, I remember that one Saturday, Irina Andreescu said, “I think it’s outrageous that you can’t come to lunch. I’m going to invite you and Gavin”; so, this was our son who turned two at the end of January that year. “And, because they might not approve of that, I’m going to do it on Saturday.” So, I think…I don’t remember whether lunch was served on Saturday, but I do remember we were the only people in the room. But she made a point of bringing me in to have lunch with her on Saturday to have lunch with her, with this tiny child on my lap.

HM: So, you asked about parties. There was one memorable…one party I remember that year was a Guy Fawkes party, which was organized by Charlotte Roueché, who was actually not officially a Fellow. She was somewhat in the same position as Eunice. She had a fellowship, I think, from Newnham, but she elected to spend it as D.O.; but since she wasn’t officially a D.O. Fellow, she couldn’t come to the lunches and this kind of thing. Anyway, she organized this Guy Fawkes party in the Fellows Building; and everyone was there, including Paul Lemerle, who was one of the senior visitors at that time. And I remember our son…he had some grandchildren, so he was very taken with our son, and our son was spreading marshmallows on his lapels. They were roasting marshmallows in the fire.

EM: Yes, and Lemerle was dressed very formally in a beautiful dark suit, and there were these sticky little fingers all over his suit [laughter].

CW: Where was this?

EM: In the Fellows Building, facing the fireplace. We actually roasted marshmallows and maybe even hotdogs in the fireplace.

HM: In those days, there were some interesting parties there. There was another party, which I think was on one of our later visits, when Seka Allen…I asked her for a recipe for a punch, and she came up with some sort of strawberry punch which she said was delicious, and it was, but it was actually very potent, and many people went away somewhat tipsy.

EM: What I remember was the Halloween party, when people came in costumes. And some of the Pre-Columbian Fellows wore, kind of, Day of the Dead masks; and it was wonderful to see them dancing in those, even with the mask of the back of the head, so the boots were pointing in the opposite way from what seemed to be the face. And I remember that the Magaws came as Justinian and Theodora and danced very elegantly in those costumes.

ABF: So did a lot of your social life revolve around the Fellows’ Building at that time?

HM: Quite a lot of it, yes, because that was one place where you could have large gatherings, because the apartments that D.O. provided were very small. But, of course, we had a social life outside of Dumbarton Oaks as well. So, we knew some people in Washington

EM: But speaking of outside of Dumbarton Oaks, one thing I didn’t mention that was amazing and, in those days, tremendously – a very useful privilege – was that they had runners to go to the Library of Congress to get books that were there but not at D.O. – which saved a lot of time. And later on, when the runners were stopped, they managed to get stacks privileges for us, so that we could go to the Library of Congress and find our own books. I think that lasted until the Library of Congress re-shelving system became so backlogged that it was impossible with a stack pass to find the books – which was too bad, but it was very – and I think, also, of course, it must continue with the Hellenic Center, the library. The cooperation between libraries was so facilitating. That was great.

ABF: Did you have a lot of contact with the Center for Hellenic Studies?

HM: No, not a great deal, no.

EM: I didn’t, no. I think some people did who were dealing on philosophy topics, or something like that. But the art historians didn’t, maybe because there weren’t as many art history…

HM: The library is very not strong in art history, not nearly as strong as D.O., so we didn’t really have much reason to D.O.

EM: The D.O. Byzantine library used to keep up with a very wide range of fields: lots of archaeological material, lots of ancient Greek and Roman, and lots of Western medieval, so it was very good for general research on Byzantine topics.

ABF: And so you often spent that year working in the library?

HM: Yes, essentially trying to finish my thesis. That’s probably true of most Junior Fellows. You know, they arrive with an unfinished thesis and they struggle to get it done before the ax falls and they are ejected. I think that’s a very typical experience. Usually, the first part of the year is more relaxed. I mean, I could tell when I was Director of Studies that there was a change in mood in the lunch room come about March. People would see the end of their fellowships and become much more serious.

ABF: So, in those first years, who were the scholars who had the greatest impact on you?

HM: Well, I mean, of course, my two supervisors – the supervisors of my thesis – had the greatest impact, though neither of them were at Dumbarton Oaks at the time; those would be Kitzinger and Ševčenko. But in later years, I came to know Alexander Kazhdan, and he had a very strong influence on my work; and perhaps also Robert Browning, in different ways. Kazhdan was very interested in social history, and obviously saints and saints’ lives, and he also had a strong interest in Byzantine literature as literature, which in those days was somewhat unusual. Whereas, Browning was more of a philologist, but he was interested in Byzantine gardens, so I found a kindred spirit there; and he was also very, very kind in his advice. Even if you made horrible mistakes, he would point them out very kindly and set you straight, so I appreciated working with him.

ABF: And what was your thesis topic?

HM: The thesis topic…it was a slightly strange topic. It was about the ecphrases (which are descriptions of works of art) and specifically about one feature of them, which is that they often talk about the emotions of the figures in the scenes; and, in those days, sort of in the ‘60s, people didn’t think of Byzantine painting as being emotional. It was connected with modernist painting and thought of as being abstract; and so, as a result, these ecphrases were thought of being essentially false, not giving a sort of correct impression of Byzantine painting. So, the thesis was partly, in a way, to exonerate the ecphrases and say that they did have something to say about what the Byzantines thought about painting and, secondly, to show that there was this strong emotional element in Byzantine art; and I focused on depictions of sorrow. And now, of course, this is absolutely perceived wisdom; I mean, people are very aware of this aspect of Byzantine art. But back then, you know when I told people the topic, they thought it was a sort of non-topic, because they didn’t think there was such a thing as emotion in Byzantine art. Anyway, that was it.

ABF: But they believed in you.

HM: Well, eventually. Eventually, you know, I published it. Always with these things, you find that other people are working on the same lines. So, what you might imagine is a totally new and original direction that you are taking, you find that people at the same time in different places are doing the same thing.  So, another scholar who worked on somewhat the same assumptions was Hans Belting, although in different ways. So, his work has been very influential. So, I think that yes now this is generally agreed that this is an important aspect of Byzantine painting.

ABF: Did you know Belting at D.O.?

HM: Belting – he came, yes.

EM: Yes, we met him there.

HM: Yes, we met him there on several occasions

EM: And there were other people too who were not officially posted or connected with DO over a period of time but who would come as readers or perhaps as speakers and stay for a few days; and one of those people who had a great influence on me, in encouraging me personally and helping me…giving me some courage with developing aspects of my work that were not simply visual, was Peter Brown, who was there for a whole semester reading everyday when he was teaching at Catholic University as a Mellon Professor – that was sometime before he was at Princeton. So, that was very helpful to me, because I was still working on my dissertation at that time, long-distance from my adviser. There were other people whose names you didn’t mention, though all the ones you did mention were people who very much broadened my way of thinking and also gave personal encouragement, which is one of the wonderful things, I’m sure you would agree, about Dumbarton Oaks – people like Robert van Nice, who was there putting together the archival photographs and drawings, his amazing drawings of Hagia Sophia. His love for that one building really was inspiring; and I was working on a subject in architectural sculpture for my dissertation. And then I think I mentioned McGaw. Davis was another one of the great figures who was there off-and-on frequently; and John Meyendorff. And then, in the library, you mentioned Seka Allen. She was a bibliographer, as you probably know; but she did take a personal interest in everybody. She was a wonderful social pivot, really, because she knew – she and Irene Vaslef, the Byzantine librarian – knew what interests people had, more than we might discover by casual conversation among ourselves. And she would help – they both would help bring people together – as well as leading you to the right books, they would lead you to the right people to discuss some aspect that maybe you were just beginning to explore, which was another wonderful grace really, to have their attention to everyone. And ones’ contemporaries – people slightly younger or slightly older – also had sometimes…quite by chance you would meet somebody in the stacks or you would see a book that somebody opposite you in the reading room was reading, and you would ask about it, and it would reinforce the direction you were just beginning to take or that you had been taking but you thought that no one in the field would approve of or encourage you to go in another way along a path that you were trying to follow. I remember conversations like that, for instance, with people like David Olster, who was working with antique texts when I was beginning to try to explore them in some unfamiliar directions – and Leslie MacCoull, when I was beginning to work with Coptic Egypt.

HM: I should mention that the second time I visited Dumbarton Oaks, when Ihor Ševčenko was still there; and he had been asked by Ernst Kitzinger if he could be the second superviser – reader – of my thesis; and he said, “Well, I’ll have to examine this candidate first.” So they flew me down from Cambridge to Dumbarton Oaks; and I met Ihor and Nancy for lunch. They gave me lunch in the building that is at the corner, where sort of S Street turns the corner – they had a house there. We had this long lunch, and he served two bottles of wine – I think we must have had the best part of one-and-a-half bottles of wine, between the three of us. So, at the end of this, he produced a couple of Byzantine epigrams and said, “Please translate these.” Byzantine epigrams are not, you know, the easiest things to translate; but it just happened that I had already read these before. But I was able, in spite of my slightly inebriated state, to make sense of them.

EM: Maybe it helped.

HM: Maybe it helped, yes. So he said, “Okay, I’ll take you on. I’ll be your supervisor.” So that was my exam [laughter].

CW: That’s a great story; and was this when the library was still on the top floor of the Main House? You were working next to everyone?

HM: Yes, yes, yes. It was in those days it was before they even had air conditioning. So, yes, it was very hot up there in the summer. In fact, I think Dumbarton Oaks more or less sort of closed down in the summer. They didn’t have summer fellowships. The faculty went off to the hills of Europe, and it was too hot to work.

EM: It was also very conducive to browsing because they had to extend the stacks underneath the eaves, so there were funny, kind of changes in level, which they carpeted over to make a little less hazardous. But, for me, it meant lots of places where I could sit, pull books off the shelf, spread them out, and see which ones I really wanted to take out and which ones I didn’t. While I was doing that, I came across a number of very early, sometimes eighteenth- or nineteenth-century editions of books that I might or might not have heard of. And I started taking those down to Irene Vaslef, and that was the beginning of the rare book collection, which hadn’t been separated from the other things at that time, as far as the Byzantine library went; and she asked me if I would continue to keep an eye out for things like that for her.

HM: It was very nice to be in the old library, sort of after hours, when it was more or less empty, and you could imagine yourself as a kind of French aristocrat in his chateau with all these books at your disposal, in strange places, in cupboards. It had a lot of character.

EM: I bet. There was that spooky closet behind the elevator, where some of the books were kept. When you went in there, you would hear the creaking of the elevator and somehow have the feeling that if somebody shut the door, you might never get out until someone else needed a book from there [laughter]

CW: So then after that year you went to Harvard right away?

HM: Actually, it was…Yes.

CW: Or was it after the second year?

HM: I had a year as a Fellow. Then I spent the year teaching at the University of Massachusetts and then to Harvard. And so then I had three years in teaching at Harvard and three years at Dumbarton Oaks.

CW: And were you…was that the first group of joint appointees?

HM: More or less, but there were joint appointees not only with Harvard but with other universities at more or less the same time. So, I think Rob Nelson, for example, had a joint appointment, I suppose, with Chicago, a little bit after mine. I’m not sure exactly what the chronology of them was, but there was a sort of a group of these joint appointments about the same time.

ABF: There was Michael McCormick as well.

HM: Yes, he was. I think maybe Ioli Kalavrezou had one as well, if I’m not mistaken.

CW: So, I guess you were at Harvard for the first three years, so that was really before the talk of moving Byzantine Studies there.

HM: Well, at Harvard there was really no talk of it. But as soon as I got to Dumbarton Oaks for the second three years, it was very much in the air. And it was a fairly tense time, actually, at Dumbarton Oaks, because the future was obviously very uncertain – especially that first semester or year, when, as you spoke of in your list of questions, the triumvirate was sort of taking over the duties of Director of Studies. That was a rather strange period.

EM: When was it that they lent highlights of the Dumbarton Oaks collection to the Fogg? I remember that we had a feeling that it was a kind of double-edged sword. Because, on one hand, it was very nice to see Byzantine things in Cambridge; but, on the other hand, we wondered, “Does that mean that they’re thinking of moving the whole collection?” Because, if it does, it will mostly go underground, because, well, Harvard University Art Museums is now closed and planning an expansion, but they will always have to have a lot of wonderful things in storage because, unless they have everything out in study storage – in other words, storage rooms with everything visible to the public – there won’t be room to display everything that they have; and clearly, a lot of the Byzantine things would go underground. And if that happened, then to some extent we saw that as emblematic as what would happen to Byzantine studies.

HM: Well, I think the main plan was to move the library and the fellowship program and, to be frank, the funds, up to Cambridge; and then to leave – obviously they couldn’t move the gardens – and the gardens have their own endowment in any case, so they were going to leave them. And it seems they were seriously planning to do this, but then a number of alumni, powerful alumni, objected, so Harvard backed off. So it was people like Joseph Alsop, who kind of saved the – saved the intellectual aspect of Dumbarton Oaks for Washington

EM: Because he cared about Washington, as well as because he cared about Dumbarton Oaks

ABF: Who favored the move?

HM: I suppose, well – I think some of the professors at Harvard favored it because there would have been more money to spend there more broadly on the humanities, and it would have enriched the library at Harvard – and the books would all have been in one place. Because, it is true, that even today, there are gaps in the Widener Library that correspond to books that are at Dumbarton Oaks; so this is obviously irritating for Harvard professors. So – but I think it was mainly probably attractive to the administration because D.O. had a huge endowment (especially in those days it seemed very big), and it was being spent on what seemed like very esoteric subjects, and there was no teaching going on. So, I remember Bill Loerke, who was Director of Studies, you know, while this was all brewing up, had a visit from the Harvard – some people from Harvard, I don’t know exactly who – he told me that they asked him what was going on at Dumbarton Oaks. He showed them all these books that had been published, shelves of them, and this made no impression on them at all – because, you know, what are sort of twenty feet of books compared to hundreds of students who could be supported with the same amount of money? So I think it was mainly the administration’s scheme.

ABF: Was there talk among people at Dumbarton Oaks about the legacy of the Blisses, in so far as they had very specifically left the money for the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian programs?

HM: Yes, I mean, obviously that was one of the things people talked about. I think people were more worried about the future of Byzantine Studies; because, at that time, Dumbarton Oaks was – I don’t want to go sort of into later questions – but it did at that time play a major role in the field because of its active fieldwork and the number of people who had been on the staff – Byzantinists who had been on staff at Dumbarton Oaks – and these joint appointments. So it was very important in promoting the field in America and abroad too. But, so, I think that was seen as being under threat; that, if they moved the endowment to Cambridge, then the money would have been spent just broadly on the humanities, so on Western medieval and on the Renaissance and history and all sorts of other fields as well. And the particular flavoring of Byzantium would have been lost. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way, so that was partly why, I think, we had this very strange situation of the three, sort of junior assistant professors playing the role of Director of Studies, which was strange, in a sense, because I was in charge of the publications; and so I was writing letters to senior scholars, you know, advising them on how they could improve their manuscripts, which probably didn’t go down very well.

EM: How else was…I can’t remember how else the responsibilities were divided up between John Duffy and…

HM: Irina Andreescu was in charge of fieldwork and John Duffy was in charge of the fellowship program.

EM: That’s right.

ABF: And this is while you also had this joint appointment?

EM: Yes.

HM: This was, yes, when I’d moved down to Dumbarton Oaks. So, yes, I still had, officially, a joint appointment with Harvard, although I wasn’t actually doing any teaching up there. I spent three years teaching at Harvard, and basically partly visited Dumbarton Oaks and then three years at Dumbarton Oaks.

ABF: And it was in those three years at Dumbarton Oaks when you began to pick up those responsibilities that had previously fallen upon the Director of Byzantine Studies?

HM: The Director of Byzantine Studies, yes. And then, at the end of the year, Giles Constable came as Director, and he assumed the responsibilities of Director of Studies himself. So, then we were sort of free to pursue our own research, so we had essentially two years of research fellowship – which was very nice.

ABF: So can you tell us more about that experience of working so closely with Irina Andreescu and John Duffy?

HM: Well, as far of the three of us were concerned, it went fairly smoothly. I actually, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with the publications. So, that worked fine. The uncomfortable part was the sort of political goings-on outside. For example, at the Byzantine Studies conference, we felt, I think, rather on the spot – people asking us questions: “What’s going on, what’s going to happen?” Which was really out of our hands. And, of course, people at Dumbarton Oaks were either nervous or angry or both, so.

ABF: And what were your responsibilities?

HM: Well, as I said, with the publications, it was mainly that I was in charge of the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. So, that would be, sort of, doing a first editing of manuscripts when they came in, finding readers for the manuscripts, sometimes suggesting ways that they could be clarified or improved, and, likewise, with the books.

EM: And putting pressure on authors who were taking a bit longer than expected.

HM: Yes, and on readers who were taking forever to read the manuscripts.

CW: And so then you were next directly involved with D.O., as a Senior Fellow in the ‘80s?

HM: Yes, yes, and that when was Angeliki Laiou was Director; and I think there was a feeling that they needed some kind of art history presence. So, what I basically did was to advise on matters of art history and read manuscripts or select books for the library and participate in seminars, and this kind of thing – and to some extent, to do some of my work

EM: That was when you were the Art History Adviser, you mean, which was different from when you were the Senior Fellow.

HM: Oh yes, that was when I was on the board of Senior Fellows, but that’s a different…

CW: That was the Senior Research Associate?

HM: Well when I was at Dumbarton Oaks for that year, I was Senior Research Associate but I was also on the board of Senior Fellows, which means that we visited three times a year just for a day or two for meetings; but I wasn’t in residence.

CW: Right, but you were for that year.

HM: For that year, yes.

CW: So you had been there at the end of the ‘70s, when the faculty…the permanent faculty, were disbanded?

HM: Well, I wouldn’t say that they were exactly disbanded. They dwindled away. Under Giles Constable, they sort of dwindled. Then there was something of a revival under Laiou because she brought people in to work on various projects – but not with faculty status, but as research associates. So, the end of the faculty status, I suppose, would have been under Giles Constable; because, before his time, the Directors of Studies and many of the other people involved had the status of professors at Harvard University. And this, I think, actually was a fundamental change, especially as far as the Directors of Studies were concerned, because now the position of Director of Studies is a non-tenured position – it’s for five years, which may be renewable. So, in effect, what that means is that you are not going to get anyone applying who already has tenure, unless they can make some sort of deal with their university to release them.

EM: And let them come back.

HM: And let them come back, which is what happened in my case, when I was Director of Studies – that I was able to get five years release from the University of Illinois; but it means that, for one thing, that person is unable to stay for more than five years, because no university is going to let you go for ten years, so. And, also, not all universities will do it; I mean, Harvard, for instance, won’t let you go away for more than two years without losing your tenure. So effectively it means that now that candidates are restricted to people at the ends of their career – if they have five years left in their career, they spend it at Dumbarton Oaks – or younger scholars who maybe were unable to get tenure somewhere or are in some sort of unusual position where they don’t have tenure; but it excludes, sort of people who are kind of in the most active portions of their career, who have tenure somewhere, unless they can make a sort of deal to leave short-term. So, it has very much weakened the position of Director of Studies, and it makes the Director of Studies much less active; because his position vis-à-vis – or her position vis-à-vis – the Director is much less strong than it would be if he or she had had tenure, so; but that was a major change.

EM: Had tenure at D.O., you mean?

HM: Well, at Harvard it would have been, effectively, because they had their tenure at Harvard, they were tenured professors. So, Kitzinger, for example, Loerke, were tenured Harvard professors.

ABF: Can you tell us about the publication of the Cypriot fieldwork that Alice Murray mentioned this to me at some point?

HM: Yes. Well, when I arrived as Director of Studies, I found all these unpublished projects, manly relating to fieldwork in Cyprus; and one of my, sort of, ambitions was to revive the fieldwork aspect of Dumbarton Oaks, and I thought this would be one way to do it. Because, one of the reasons that fieldwork had been abandoned was precisely because there was so much that hadn’t been published, and so it was seen as sort of wasteful extravagance to do this fieldwork and not have it appear in print. So, that was my main motivation – and perhaps also because I’d visited many of these places in Cyprus and was interested in them.  And it was mainly a matter of kind of fanning the embers of these various projects. I think the authors had become discouraged, and they received no encouragement from Dumbarton Oaks. It was just sort of finding ways to facilitate their taking up the projects again, finishing them; which sometimes meant bringing them physically to Dumbarton Oaks or sometimes it was just providing general encouragement and saying, “We really want to publish them.” And, as you know, Alice-Mary has carried this on.

CW: So that was part of your agenda as Director?

HM: It was one part of it, yes. I think what I wanted to do as Director of Studies was to open the place up, because it had the reputation of being rather enclosed and elitist. So, I tried to bring more activity into the Byzantine area, which was also what Angeliki Laiou wanted to do – for the Byzantine Center to have a more active, as opposed to a passive role. So, the fieldwork was part of this; and I was able to institute one or two projects associated with fieldwork; for example, the materials analysis of Byzantine ceramics, where we had some of the ceramics at the Walters and at Dumbarton Oaks tested and then we had a small colloquium devoted to the subject. But I wasn’t successful in starting any sort of major new fieldwork projects outside of the United States, and this was one of my regrets, I suppose. If I have one regret about my period as Director of Studies, is that we weren’t able to sort of reestablish active fieldwork. All we did was we would give grants, small grants, to people. So, people would come to us and say they wanted to do X, and we would give them 5000 dollars; but we didn’t initiate anything ourselves. And I think this is sort of a missed opportunity, considering what D.O. had done in the past. Actually, after I left Dumbarton Oaks, actually, I did do a project on the mosaics in Porec which was funded by the Cress and the University of Illinois; it’s the kind of thing that I think should probably have been done by Dumbarton Oaks. But, that aside, there were various other ways that, umm, I tried to be more active. I introduced a museum fellowship. So, we would have someone come for a year and sort of plan a small exhibition. I think that was a valuable way to sort of bring together the Byzantine Studies Center and the collection and also to bring some variety into the collection, so it wasn’t just a static display, but there was some change in the exhibitions in it. So, I think that was, on the whole, a success; and we tried to have colloquia and symposia that would interest, sort of, people in western medieval history and art, and even Renaissance and ancient. We tried to sort of integrate Byzantine topics into sort of a wider frame. For example, we had a colloquium on women’s space in Byzantium and in the West. So, I suppose, efforts of that kind – also the fieldwork archives, I tried to get them properly looked after. And, I was even involved in sort of excavating Dumbarton Oaks itself. In the boiler room, we discovered these rolled up canvases which were the paintings of the frescos at the Kariye Camii – perhaps you’ve seen them. But they were exhibited, umm…

EM: At Columbia

HM: At Columbia, yes and then in Istanbul; but we found them sort of rolled up and shoved under the boilers. So we took them out, and then they were eventually restored at great expense and insured for thousands and thousands of dollars before they were sent off to Istanbul. But I think that Angeliki Laiou as Director – she was certainly able to kind of revivify the Byzantine area and make it more interesting and active than it had been before. I think it had slightly fallen into the doldrums before she arrived.

EM: Well, her encouraging you to set up both colloquia in areas that hadn’t been explored before, such as the Byzantine gardens and her own intellectual interests extended the dialogues and the range of scholars who came, to some extent; because I don’t remember very much before her on Byzantine economics as an aspect of cultural history or Byzantine law in relation also to the culture. And those were things that she continued to not only encourage herself with her own work but to bring scholars to present their work – that really opened up the fields for others who hadn’t really thought about these areas, I think.

HM: Another thing we did was introduce the short-term graduate residencies. Now, as you may know, anyone who is working on their dissertation or general exams can apply to spend two weeks at Dumbarton Oaks, free of charge, to use the library. And that’s been very popular.

EM: What about the summer fellowships? Did you start those?

HM: No, I think it was Giles who started that. After he’d air-conditioned the building, he started the summer fellowships, yes.

CW: The colloquium on Byzantine garden culture has been cited on several occasions as an example – perhaps the sole example – of interdisciplinary academic activity at D.O.; but it seems to have a positive enclave in there.

HM: Well, that was due to a number of factors coming together. One was Joachim who had a genuine interest in Byzantine culture and gardens. And the other factor, I suppose, is a sort of change in the nature of Byzantine archeology and art history; because, in the old days – in the days of empiricism – there was virtually nothing to say about Byzantine gardens, because none exist and none have been excavated. So, it was a sort of non-topic; but there are a lot of descriptions of real and imaginary gardens. So, once you move into the area of reception – etiology – there’s quite a lot to say about Byzantine garden culture; and also you can make connections, then, with other fields of garden culture. So I think that helped make it possible.

EM: It was also under Joachim’s directorship as Director of Studies for the Garden Center that Irene Vaslef proposed, successfully, that I do that inter-departmental exhibition, which I think was the first inter-departmental exhibition (though it was a library exhibition) called Roman Constantinople, with rare, illustrated books from the Garden Library and the Byzantine Library. And, then, in the process of working on that, I found and was able to display the Fossati prints of Hagia Sophia, which had been transferred for some reason, maybe because it was such a rare book. They were wonderful, large lithographs in full color of the interior of Hagia Sophia, published in, I can’t remember what…was it the ‘60s or ‘70s of the nineteenth century? They had been transferred to the Garden Library and totally lost track of – there was no record that they existed anymore. The people researching in the Garden Library had no particular reason to be interested in them, and the Byzantinists didn’t know they were there. So, I guess in a way, this was a kind of, in more ways than one, a groundbreaking collaboration, to mine the resources and bring them together. It was certainly very enjoyable, and well-received I think. One of the former Byzantine librarians at Dumbarton Oaks was then a librarian for the National Gallery, and she wanted to have the exhibition or another version of it there; and Irene got a grant for it, but somehow the three of us never had time to make that happen, unfortunately. But it shows you how Dumabrton Oaks collection – both book and other collections – and combined resources can really have an outreach; and Dumbarton Oaks has been able, while the collection was waiting for its new reinstallation, to lend things to exhibitions, as you know, in Georgia and here at The Walters, which I think had a great impact on not only Byzantinists but other people who saw them in those places, people who might not have visited Dumbarton Oaks to see the collections there. So, all that outreach is something that is still happening, I think, but started, sort of in the ‘80s or ‘90s – the ‘90s probably – so it’s relatively recent. I can’t remember what year that was. It must have been the early ‘90s.

CW: You’ve already – you’ve talked a little about Constable and Laiou, but do you have any other impressions of other Directors you’ve seen.

HM: Well, umm, when I was first arrived as Junior Fellow, Tyler was the Director, and he struck me very much as being a gentleman of the old school – very popular with the staff. Well, I remember, he gave a sort of interview with each of the Junior Fellows when they first arrived and he explained a little bit to me about the legacy of the Blisses. He said, “Well, they were wealthy, but not really very wealthy.” It wasn’t really very kind, but I think probably Dumbarton Oaks was beginning to feel the limits of its endowment; and there were, I think, some financial problems that were another reason, I should have mentioned, why Harvard may have wanted to move the operations north – you know, have them more closely supervised. But yes, he was a courtly gentleman. And then there was Giles Constable, who was really very controversial. And then Thomson, who – Robert Thomson, who kept a – steadied the ship and was a fiscal conservative Scotsman –

EM: – and a good listener, I think.

HM: And a good listener, yes, but he sort of calmed down under his tenure; and then Laiou, I said was active. And I see her tenure as a kind of second golden age almost for the Byzantine Center at Dumbarton Oaks. And that’s really the extent of my personal experience with the directors of Dumbarton Oaks.

ABF: In summing up, if you could give us some general thoughts about how Dumabrton Oaks has changed, and how it’s been important to you, and ultimately how you think it’s changed the field, or responded to changes in the field.

HM: Okay, well that’s a lot of questions [laughter]. So, first of all, how it has changed…I mean, in the old days, speaking of the Byzantine Center…was very much the dominant center at Dumbarton Oaks, and there were virtually no Fellows at all in Landscape Architecture or Pre-Columbian; and, on the other hand, in the ‘50s, I think there might have been up to eight permanent staff members in the Byzantine Center, many of whom would have been Harvard faculty. And over the years, there’s been something approaching parity between the three programs; and the staff of the Byzantine program has really dwindled to the Director of Studies, in effect – and, of course, there are also the people associated with the Museum and the Archives. So, it’s become much smaller. As far as the Library’s concerned, because of the sort of huge expansion in the number of books being published, the Library’s become much more focused. So, again, even when Eunice and I arrived there, as Eunice said, they were collecting book on western medieval art. Now, it’s very much focused on Byzantium. So, it’s become narrow in its focus. Finally, I would say that it’s become much more passive, as opposed to the early days, when it was much more active. So, there are no fieldwork programs, at the moment I think there are very few projects. It’s really a library, a place where people find fellowships, and a collection; but it’s not a sort of center that actively promotes the field. So, I would see those as the main changes over the course of time. As far as the relationships with Harvard are concerned, I would say they are much closer now then they were. I mean, it was founded as an independent project of a wealthy couple; but, over the years, its ties with Harvard have become closer and closer: there are the three Harvard professors who are in Cambridge, not at Dumbarton Oaks; I believe there are some fellowships that are earmarked for Harvard students; the library catalog is integrated with HOLLIS. So, it’s much more tightly bound to Harvard than it used to be. The Directors always come from Harvard. As far as its impact in the field is concerned, obviously it’s much smaller. It was, you know, very important, in the early days. Now, you know, except as a place to go and find books or to have a fellowship or to look at some very important pieces, it’s no more important than any number of other places where there are books and fellowships and some objects you could look it. So, it doesn’t have that special importance it used to have. One way in which it probably still can have a very positive impact in the field in America is through joint appointments; which have been a little bit controversial, because sometimes the joint appointments don’t work out. These are the appointments where they appoint a junior person, an Assistant Professor, at some university, and Dumbarton Oaks pays half of the salary for the first five or six years until that person gets tenure. And, in the past, this has been a very good way to persuade universities to take on Byzantinists, where otherwise, they might go for some other field. They haven’t always worked out, because the person doesn’t always get tenure; but, in those cases when it does work out (which may be about fifty percent of them), it’s obviously very important, because a large number of the people who now have tenured positions in Byzantine Studies started out on these joint appointments. So, that’s one way D.O. could continue to be every important in the field of Byzantine Studies here in America. Then as far as my own work is concerned, it’s really been fundamental, you know, because, at all stages, I’ve been able to benefit from the library and from meeting people there. It’s just a wonderful place for meeting other scholars and sort of getting ideas or exchanging ideas – especially, I would say, I’m afraid, more in the old days than now, when there were more people around, when it was more active, and there were more people to meet. But, you know, it’s still a beautiful place, and still, especially for those of us who live in this area, it’s a wonderful library to use.

EM: Well, there’s still an active program of informal talks, which I’m sure are important for those who can give them and attend them; and that was another thing that was new, I think, in the ‘90s – which was very good, I think. And, unfortunately, because, as you see, it takes up a fair chunk of your day just to get between Washington and Baltimore, even though they’re on the map very close, it hasn’t been possible for us to attend those since we’ve been in Baltimore. So, maybe that sense of intellectual exchange is more present still than we’ve been able to appreciate since we’ve been here.

HM: Could be, could be, yes; and they certainly still have the symposia and colloquia, which are –

EM: – very good

HM: Very good, yes. I don’t suppose it’s possible, really, for the old days to return, because it was dependent on the largesse, in the first place, of the Blisses; and when the Blisses were no longer alive, obviously that font of fonts dried up, and D.O. had to live strictly within its means.

CW: It seems to be doing well for itself.

ABF: Yeah, financially, I think it’s very stable, from what I understand.

HM: Well, I imagine with the sort of general decrease in the value of the Harvard endowment, Dumbarton Oaks has a prospect with that.

ABF: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

HM: No, just to thank you for coming and hearing our impressions of the past.

ABF: It was a pleasure.

CW: Yeah, thank you for having us. We’re happy to hear them.

EM: We hope before you go, you’ll tell us a little about yourselves.

ABF: Sure, we’ll turn this off.

]]> No publisher James N. Carder Byzantine Publications Byzantine Studies Mildred Barnes Bliss Archives Harvard University Symposium Senior Fellow Byzantine Fieldwork Robert Woods Bliss Collection Fellows Building Byzantine Collection Ernst Kitzinger Rare Book Collection Junior Fellow Colloquium Publications Archaeology Art History Byzantine Studies Reading Room Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives Oral History Project Exhibition 2013-06-12T19:51:51Z Page Susan Toby Evans http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/susan-toby-evans Susan Toby Evans declined an oral history interview but agreed to prepare answers to a scripted questionnaire. The following are her reminiscences which she began on February 26, 2012, based on the questionnaire. At Dumbarton Oaks, Susan Toby Evans was a Fellow (1995–1996) and a Summer Fellow (1997–1998) in the Pre-Columbian Studies Program. She was the editor and an author of the Dumbarton Oaks publication, Ancient Mexican Art at Dumbarton Oaks (2010) and the co-editor (with Joanne Pillsbury) of the Pre-Columbian Studies symposium volume, Palaces of the Ancient New World (2004). I tried to follow the questionnaire, but then as I reviewed my history with Dumbarton Oaks, I realized that Dumbarton Oaks has been almost as important in my development as a scholar as has Penn State (my PhD alma mater and long-term primary institutional affiliation) and that the relationship has been complicated. Over the years I’ve taken several different roles at Dumbarton Oaks, and these experiences opened up new opportunities – Dumbarton Oaks keeps sharing, with me and other scholars, a rich supply of ideas and information, and the bountiful harvest of advances in the field of pre-Columbian studies, for example, can immediately be seen in the D.O. publication list. Beyond that is a much wider effect of Dumbarton Oaks, the innumerable other books and papers and conferences inspired or improved by our days or months at Dumbarton Oaks. Scholars who build a relationship with Dumbarton Oaks are able to have careers rich in the pleasures of the life of the mind.

Today (February 26, 2012), I am getting ready to visit Dumbarton Oaks yet again, for a Study Day co-organized by the Pre-Columbian Studies program at D.O. and the Library of Congress, and focusing on Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, particularly as depicted in early Colonial period maps. Such maps were among my discoveries during my D.O. fellowship year (1995-1996), searching for Aztec palaces. In the old PC Rare Book room in the basement of the Main Building were wonderful high-quality facsimile editions of codices and early maps, there for the browsing.

I found the Mapa de Mexico de 1550, a view of Tenochtitlan/Mexico City full of genre figures and little buildings in native style, some houses marked with a pierced disk to signify that they were native palaces. I was well aware of this meaning of the pierced “preciousness” disk as the most valued objects in the entire Central Mexican world, but as I perused the map on that May evening, I had no idea that the real thing was locked in a safe in the next room. The two matched carved jadeite disks (PC.B.133a and b) were heavy with elegant beauty and ancient meaning. They are probably over 1,500 years old and represent related concepts of preciousness and rulership and even the count of a single day, or the perfect circle of a ripple in still water.

For me, these jade disks would hold a key to the puzzle of Teotihuacan’s history, and the importance of water worship (as shown in the Bliss Collection’s net-jaguar mural). All of these ideas would develop over the course of my editorship of the new catalogue of the Bliss Collection’s objects from Central Mexico, their first comprehensive treatment in over fifty years. I was able to show how the preciousness disk motif linked Bliss Collection objects pertaining to Teotihuacan, and I appreciate the present display of all these objects, with the disks adjacent to the great net-jaguar mural and painted ceramic vessels that repeat the motif.

All of this was far ahead of me as I began to count the Aztec palaces in the Mapa de Mexico – seeking patterns in the surviving locations of known city-state rulers. Meanwhile, I continue to explore the meaning of the preciousness disk, particularly as it expressed the sanctity of water imagery in the Teotihuacan and Aztec worlds. These matters range over my major research topics, such as “Aztecs” and also “hydrology” which merges into “monumental parks” which overlap with “palaces” (and so on). For all these ventures, Dumbarton Oaks has been a valued resource and generous patron, sowing opportunity and hoping that its scholars bring in a harvest of good work.

When I started using the Dumbarton Oaks library in 1981, my research interests were far removed from palaces and polished jades. My 1980 dissertation pertained to crop yields in the Teotihuacan Valley before European contact. In 1981, I moved to Washington to teach at Catholic University in D.C., and weekly visits to the D.O. library were an important part of life as a scholar. Over thirty years later, Dumbarton Oaks continues to be essential to me as a scholar and as a veteran member of its wide-ranging extended family.

Describing the people at Dumbarton Oaks as a “family” may seem trite to outsiders but it bears a lot of truth. From the first time I entered the Main Building I had a sense of being welcome to become a part of the life of an academic great house (including Levi-Strauss’s sense of the term). The people were convivial and relaxed and the building seemed a grand old mansion semi-converted to the needs of scholarship but strongly retaining its own identity as an elegant, lived-in home with a fascinating history. And the gardens were an education and inspiration.

In 1981, Elizabeth Boone had just begun her term as Director of Pre-Columbian Studies and I had just begun an assistant professorship in the Anthropology Department of Catholic University. The friendship Elizabeth and I developed then, when we were both new in our careers as pre-Columbianists, has been a great pleasure ever since.

In the early 1980s I was a long-distance weekly commuter between Washington and Pine Grove Mills, Pennsylvania (and my husband), and the Dumbarton Oaks community was essential to me. I learned the impressive range of the D.O. stacks and enjoyed the intellectual interchange at informal meetings, research presentations, and dinners at Elizabeth’s home. At several of these I got to know Gordon Willey, Bowditch Professor at Harvard and my own mentor’s mentor – a kind of revered academic lineage grandfather figure. My archaeological work was in the settlement pattern analysis tradition that he had pioneered and my mentor Bill Sanders had elaborated. Elizabeth used to serve Chartreuse after dinner because Gordon liked it, and I discovered that I liked it, too. Whenever I drink it, I recall Gordon and his great kindness to other scholars, particularly junior scholars. And I’m so glad he wasn’t partial to Fernet Branca or I wouldn’t have that occasion to salute his memory.

I began to attend the annual symposia, joined enthusiastically by my husband David Webster, Mayanist archaeologist and a professor of anthropology at Penn State. In those years I also got to know Betty Benson and Bridget Gazzo, who became my good friends and, at crucial times, key resources. Opportunities arose to participate in ongoing Dumbarton Oaks projects such as writing, with Janet Catherine Berlo, the introductory essay for her edited volume on Teotihuacan.

In the early 1980s my research focus was a rural Aztec period village (occupied ca. CE 1200 to 1603) in the Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico. With a National Science Foundation grant I had excavated a fair sample of Cihuatecpan (“Woman-Palace”) village, including a house three times the size of the next largest. This discovery moved my life in a new direction for unexpected reasons. I had met my goal of revealing the lives of the commoners, but also uncovered the only Aztec palace ever completely excavated in the Basin of Mexico. That big house was a small but clear example of the Aztec tecpan, “lord-place”.

It took me a while to figure out that the structure was a tecpan-palace, because no one had comprehensively studied the archaeology of Aztec palaces. These properties were coveted by the Spanish conquistadores and rebuilt in Spanish style, so very few archaeological remains have survived. But the sixteenth-century chroniclers gave good descriptions of palaces and courtly life, and I learned just how rich these ethnohistorical resources were when I began to research the topic at the Dumbarton Oaks library, with its impressive holdings of facsimile editions of codices, and the most recent Spanish and English editions of all important studies from Mexico and the U.S. My research monograph on Cihuatecpan (1988) owed much to what I was learning at Dumbarton Oaks, and I needed to focus on the palace.

Where better to delve the identity of the Aztec palace than in the buried treasure of the Pre-Columbian Library at Dumbarton Oaks? My fellowship year (1995–1996), devoted to learning about the Aztec palace, was an intellectual watershed, first because I learned so much from my uninterrupted time in the library and second because of the new directions my months at D.O. provided. It was also tremendously enriching to be living in Georgetown with access to Washington’s cultural resources, and meet wonderful people who would remain close colleagues and friends.

At a research presentation that fall I met Joanne Pillsbury and we immediately bonded as palace people. She was investigating what would be a radical innovation in Andean studies – identifying huge residential complexes as palaces. Palace-related issues absorbed our attention and we realized that no one had ever brought together basic descriptions of elite residential architecture in the key culture areas of the New World. It was a natural topic for a Dumbarton Oaks summer workshop and a symposium and edited volume, and those projects were developed and had satisfying success. Joanne and I remain trusted colleagues and good friends.

When I began my fellowship year, Jeff Quilter was beginning his term as Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. We had been trained in the same anthropologically-oriented tradition of modern U.S. archaeology, and understood each other as scholars, sharing many interests and the same kind of sense of humor. David and I enjoyed getting to know Jeff and his wife Sarah. Other Pre-Columbian fellows that year were Sue Bergh and Oswaldo Chinchilla, and we have kept in touch.

It was one of the first years that La Quercia was in use, and George Brock, one of the house staff at Dumbarton Oaks, was our resident concierge and local hero. La Quercia was newly refurbished and besides had George as a steward of the building, and so most things were in good working order. George also saw to it that our larger experience as resident fellows in Washington, D.C. was as memorable as the high quality of Dumbarton Oaks’s libraries.

Jeff Quilter has joked that I looked at every book in the D.O. Pre-Columbian library, and that is a flattering exaggeration. I didn’t look at works pertaining to South America unless I had a particular lead on a topic of interest. Otherwise, I trolled the indexes where possible, and came to use the presence of a useful comprehensive index as a strong measure of the author or editor’s scholarly competence. There was a set of about a dozen topics that I sought, reflecting palace-related subjects but also other ongoing interests. I worked my way through that library very systematically, and photocopied important works so that I could continue research after the fellowship year was over. (Recall that this was 1995–96, which might as well be the Upper Paleolithic in terms of research resources available “on line” -- the card catalogues occupied a lot of space in the Rare Book Room.) I skimmed thousands of books to find the information I needed and I was richly rewarded, even finding a previously unknown ethnohistorical reference to Cihuatecpan, the village I had excavated. A D.O. round table meeting in spring 1996 led to further Aztec palace research.

All through the winter of 1995–1996, those of us working in the basement of the Main House enjoyed the spectacle of sub-sub-basement exploration by teams of technicians installing a new telephone system. Renovation and exploration crews were constantly going through Pre-Columbian Studies in the basement, on their way down to the second or even third basement. Ken Johnson, as new guy, got the most challenging assignments at spelunking and his great attitude suggested that he had a strong future at D.O. We scholars, working long hours in the Main House, got to know the staff and their standard of excellence in maintaining and protecting the buildings and gardens. As Dumbarton Oaks became more technically sophisticated, Pete Haggerty and Jo Ann Murray joined the staff and became tech gurus for all of us who worked there.

When, later, I lived in the Fellows Building on and off for years, I had morning kitchen conversations in the Fellows Building with Lila Guillen and I remember Nora Escobar when she first worked there; I enjoy talking with her these days when she’s working the desk in the Library or Main Building. We who continue to stay in the Guest House appreciate Mario García’s work at maintaining it. Carlos Méndez and I have known each other for years, and I admire his recently unleashed party planning skills with regard to a recent Speakers Dinner. And Hector Paz’s range as a chef is admirable; he readily achieves food that has great flavor and is calorically affordable.

In the winter of 1995–1996, all of us at D.O. became aware that the Main Building was a very old and complicated building, and it was most challenged by the elements during the great snowstorm of January 1996, with attendant power outage in D.O. -- the city was paralyzed. When Dumbarton Oaks reopened, the city was still blanketed with snow, gradually restoring its grid of streets to working order, but upper east Georgetown was among the last to get dug out. The walk to and from La Quercia along R Street, very pleasant in nice weather, became magical in a sheath of white that lasted and lasted. Moreover, one felt perfectly safe walking home to La Quercia at night on R Street, unlikely to meet a mugger on the bright, beautiful, nearly impassable street.

Research into Aztec palaces led inevitably to research into Aztec monumental gardens (e.g. Chapultepec Park, first developed as a monumental garden in the 1420s, and Texcotzingo, possibly the world’s first botanical garden) and this led to informal conversations about garden design matters with John Dixon Hunt, Joaquim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Michel Conan. These conversations led to publications about monumental gardens, and participation in a Landscape Studies symposium and volume. These days I enjoy conversations with John Beardsley as we compare and contrast ancient and modern solutions to the challenge of the twenty-first century’s “new oil”: water.

The late 1990s brought continued contact with Dumbarton Oaks as Joanne Pillsbury and I prepared for our summer seminar and symposium on palaces of the New World. The summer seminar brought together Mesoamericanists (George Andrews, Enrique Gonzalez Licon, David Webster, and me) and Andeanists (Joanne, Bill Isbell). We were trying to hammer out the normative values of New World palaces and elite residences (types of plan, sizes, relation to community, etc.) because this basic comparison had never been done before and would create a solid baseline of types, a prerequisite for further interpretation. Moreover, it would help those of us who were participating in the upcoming symposium and preparing our summary statements. I began to think about how the Aztec palace related to those of Tula and West Mexico, how it related to those of Teotihuacan. We got along well and worked hard, and of course the sheer gorgeous luxury of Dumbarton Oaks in summer creates a strong sense of well-being.

We lunched in what can here correctly be called The Fellows Building. The dining room was in the same place then as now, and we used to have interesting conversations among seminar group and also with others we knew – Glenn Ruby, head of publications, or some of the Byzantinists or Landscape people. Ned Keenan was new as Director and would sometimes lunch with us. He was a great proponent of computerization of print media and education, and one lunch time he argued passionately against paper-borne information, promising to prove to us that no one ever used the old paper volumes in the basement compact stacks. We followed him back to the Main Building, through the foyer and down the winding stairs, while he continued to inveigh against paper books. The farthest compact stack pair was open, and when he got there, Keenan was non-plussed to find a serious-looking young woman sitting on the floor of the gap, clearly doing research. When he said “What are you *doing* here?!?” she looked completely dumbfounded, not without reason.

The summer seminaristas got along well, though Bill Isbell and I had a running disagreement about the importance of post-modernism to scholarship. One day the pre-Columbianist table gave rise to (drumroll) raised voices. It was basically Bill and I who raised our voices, and we determinedly parted on good terms after lunch – and just then Bill’s wife arrived for a weekend visit. Bill had in fact wooed his wife years before when he was a D.O. Fellow and she was Associate Director of Studies – Judy Siggins, noted scholar and one of my favorite people, was in the mood for a cup of coffee and some catch-up conversation with me, which was immensely fun and relaxing. It was a good example of how the D.O. people-network is so interwoven. I had first met Judy in the early 1980s – Elizabeth Boone introduced us, and the three of us enjoyed the occasional Fellows Building lunch, or dinner and a movie – and we had kept in contact at D.O. symposia and Society for American Archaeology meetings.

We of the seminar were living in La Quercia that summer (except, of course, for Joanne), and David and I had apartment 206 (or as the dangling number read, 209). In the rear, this apartment overlooks the alley and driveways and interesting backs of wonderful-looking Georgetown houses, and if I worked at the table by the window it was like the set of a benign “Rear Window.” Walking to the D.O. campus from La Quercia in that and other summers, I always slowed down along Montrose Park because they had a large planting of lavender around the fountain and the fragrance was so refreshing – I have since begun a long bed of lavender around the edge of the big farm pond on our property.

To float on our Pennsylvania pond in summer, watching the hawks and smelling the lavender, is a transcendently pleasant experience, and it shares space on life’s short list with being in or around the pool at Dumbarton Oaks. Whenever I was living at D.O., I was in the pool every day that conditions allowed. A lousy swimmer, I got myself a water-exercise flotation belt and did my half hours of laps without getting my face wet. My favorite time at the pool was seven AM and I always felt lucky if I had the space to myself because, while there were other places in the world that were as beautiful, the simple quiet experience of this place, in this garden, could not be surpassed.

And this attitude led to one of my least poised moments at Dumbarton Oaks. No, not that morning in late October when the gardeners walking through the pool area paused and asked if I needed help as I hauled my shivering self out after one lap (water temp, 59°). No, this was when Don Pumphrey, the famously laconic Head of Grounds, asked me a direct question for the first time in the years of our acquaintance: What did I like best about Dumbarton Oaks? “The pool!” I blurted out. Within nanoseconds I realized that to maintain a reputation as a serious scholar and caring human being I should have said “the library!” or “the collection!” or “the people!” But such is my gratitude to the shimmering space centered upon the D.O. pool that when considered from the perspective of a consistently rewarding experience, time in the pool was always a serenely mindful meditation.

Our palaces symposium in mid-October was a success – the papers were mostly strong and on topic, and Joanne and I appreciated the lively interchanges among our colleagues. In late October I turned my attention to plans for my Mesoamerican overview book – the 20 page outline was due at the publisher by the end of the month. The book would become Ancient Mexico and Central America: Archaeology and Culture History; the first edition won the Society for American Archaeology’s Book Award. The book was an outgrowth of my editorship of the encyclopedia Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America, and for both these projects the D.O. library was a great help, and so were the people encountered at Dumbarton Oaks – including D.O.’s greater community of scholars, others like me who had been made to feel welcome and made visiting Dumbarton Oaks a regular part of their schedule.

In late 1998, Joanne and I got to work pulling the symposium volume into shape. We looked ahead to an uncomplicated publication process, and had emphasized to our authors the need to move expeditiously. As sometimes happens, misunderstandings occurred between editors and one or two authors. Some papers unrelated to the larger topic were withdrawn, leaving a couple of major culture areas unmentioned. In consequence, essential features of elite residential architecture in these culture areas were reassigned to existing papers. And so my paper on Aztec palaces also presented the basics of palaces in Teotihuacan and Tula. The symposium volume is now in a paperback edition.

As Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, Jeff Quilter had inherited the ongoing project of publishing the first new edition of the catalogue of the Bliss Collection in nearly fifty years. The Andean volumes had been published under Elizabeth Boone’s directorship and the Olmec volume was nearly ready for the Publications Office.

As planned in the series, the “Central Mexico” volume would cover the Bliss Collection’s objects from the Central Highlands and adjacent regions. Several art historians had considered taking on editorship but then realized that their schedules didn’t permit them to come to Dumbarton Oaks for a fellowship term to lay the project’s groundwork, select co-authors, and address research issues pertaining to their own share of the write-ups and articles. Jeff knew that I had managed the production of the Mesoamerican encyclopedia manuscript, with hundreds of authors and my own organizational plan, so I could probably deal with the catalogue project and its half-dozen authors and topics. Plus, by then I knew every stage of the book production process and had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of my field and my colleagues. Jeff felt that these were all positive signs of an ability to bring the project to completion, and thus the catalogue series would continue on course.

Frankly, I was daunted (this turned out to be fully justified, as the years passed) and told Jeff that I wasn’t really an “objects person” but Jeff pointed out that my experience as a field archaeologist meant that I was of course an “objects” person. Technically, in the art historical sense, I was correct about not being an “objects person” at that time, but again, Dumbarton Oaks gave me a fabulous opportunity to grow as a scholar and I became a hybrid archaeologist-art historian objects person, using the resources of the library and the collection, the objects themselves, training myself to see in the objects the attributes essential to a proper art-historical description and analysis. Interactions with Betty and Elizabeth and Joanne were an immense help in this regard, and Jeff was also building a reputation as an archaeologist with a strong art-historical perspective.

It was during this time that I got to know Sue Boyd, then Curator of the Byzantine Collection, and I can thank Dumbarton Oaks for arranging yet another memorable friendship. We have since enjoyed socializing, and she and David and I went together on a tour of Egypt. When I met her, it was to borrow a book that the D.O. library didn’t have, but she did. The book was Fake and I needed to read it as part of a quick study about this chronic problem in the world of art history and art galleries. You would think that a field archaeologist would know about such things, but my specialty was Aztec rural sites, and no one would bother to fake those pot sherds. I read all I could about fakes and how they were detected, because it was possible that some objects in the Bliss Collection were more recently manufactured than previously supposed. There were many questions about the carved greenstone Figure in the Act of Childbirth (Tlazolteotl), now believed to be in the style of Aztec sculpture rather than from the Aztec period. The sibling piece, Rabbit, is also unlikely to have been made and finished five hundred years ago.

The carved jade disks were not at risk in this assessment. The material, type of sculpting and finishing all seem completely authentic. Down in the Rare Book Room of the Pre-Columbian Studies Library, I would don purple latex gloves to handle the jade disks, and I would wonder at their origin. I worked a lot in the Rare Book Room as the catalogue came together, and I remember the day in June 2002 that several things clicked, with the Bliss Collection’s jade disks and Teotihuacan mural (and Teo vessels) as material springboards for approaching multiple features of Teotihuacan and its culture: the iconography of the disk motif (in the Bliss Collection’s disks, the Teotihuacan mural and vessels – and all over Mesoamerica in the Classic period, always signifying Teotihuacan), the meaning of the mural’s water temple, springs and canals, the relationship of water to political power, the timing of the layout of the city’s grid of apartment compounds with the city’s drainage system, which then fed the nearby system of canal-gridded drained fields (“chinampas”) – highly productive agriculture in a challenging setting.

I thought back on the day twenty-five years before, in the town of San Juan Teotihuacan, that my mentor William Sanders took us grad students into the walled confines of the cathedral close, where a verdant pool evidenced one of the last of the old springs that once burbled out at the southwest edge of the ancient city. They watered a drained field area so fertile that a local population of tens of thousands could be supported. Bill explained that powerful factions always try to control water sources, and thus the Colonial period church moved quickly to build on this property and secure this valuable water source. They may have built over a native water temple, like the one on the Dumbarton Oaks mural. Water was the principle reason for the existence of Teotihuacan, and my research into the Bliss Collection objects brought together so many pieces – from iconography to crop yields – of the puzzle that is Teotihuacan.

Tracing these relationships at Teotihuacan and exploring this iconography has become an ongoing focus of my research and scholarly output, with the catalogue itself, of course being the first and primary presentation of my findings and interpretations. Working on the catalogue gave me space to review the existing literature on these matters, heightening the catalogue’s timeliness and relevance. The harvest from my association with Dumbarton Oaks continues with upcoming and recent articles, public lectures, book projects. I am currently writing a book about Teotihuacan’s rise and fall, from the perspective of access to water as a dominant feature development.

In a sense, the experience of being put in charge of the presentation of these objects by Dumbarton Oaks to the public prompted a new phase of my palace research, because these objects were surely the accoutrements of the elites and the output of elite workshops. To plan the catalogue and begin research, I was offered a one-term fellowship, but opted instead to take my research days twelve at a time – typically, a Monday morning to the next week’s Friday afternoon – over the course of the next few years. I believe that because of this “intermittent fellowship” (my term, not D.O.’s) I became the particular demon in the life of Marlene Chazan, Dumbarton Oaks’s able long-time financial officer, but it was not my intention to annoy -- my choice was dictated by other obligations and my own nature: I am basically a home-loving person who enjoyed the opportunity to spend significant and well-planned stretches of days at Dumbarton Oaks focusing on the catalogue project and living in the Fellows Building, particularly appreciating Room 7 for its morning light.

If the beauty and comprehensiveness of the completed catalogue volume indicate level of success, then all of us who worked on it deserve hearty congratulations. There were many challenges. The process of coordinating the production of the articles was complicated by communication problems among project participants. Furthermore, these were the years of major campus development and renovation of the Main Building, so the objects were put in storage. In addition, the D.O. Publications Office was hit by the sudden passing of its leader, Glenn Ruby, and it was several years before a steady course was restored.

Changes in the Publications Office leadership had an immediate and costly impact on the catalogue volume. As originally submitted in a format approved by Glenn, the articles varied considerably in length – because the objects varied considerably in interest and importance. Under the new policies of the reorganized Publications Office, however, I was instructed to standardize all articles to 2,000 words. I was dismayed with this directive, and so were my authors. I did my best to ameliorate hard feelings, but in conforming to this policy good will was lost along with extended treatments of some of the Bliss Collection’s greatest pieces (the mural, the dart thrower). In time, new Publication Office administration led by Kathy Sparkes revisited these policies and instituted a format that permitted in depth treatment of the most important objects. She and Sara Taylor saw that the volume made us all very proud.

Coincidentally, as I worked on completion of the catalogue and other projects, my husband, David Webster, was appointed as a Senior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies. David is one of the most knowledgeable and fair-minded people I know, with great common sense and dedication to duty, so he had excellent qualifications for the appointment. It was tremendously enjoyable for both of us to be a part of the festivities of each special meeting, and as David’s spouse I felt completely welcome to the memorable parties.

David will soon come to the end of his term as Senior Fellow, and my current publication projects will depend on continued access to the library, but are not Dumbarton Oaks products. Soon, though. I did so much research on the Net Jaguar and Mural – and jadeite disks – that I have everything ready to develop it into a nice contribution to D.O.’s Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies Series. And in 2013, David and I will be attending Steve Houston’s weekend workshop on Piedras Negras, at Dumbarton Oaks. I look forward to all of these opportunities to remain an active part of the Dumbarton Oaks community.

]]> No publisher James N. Carder Pre-Columbian Collection Fieldwork Summer Fellow Collection Fellow Oral History Project Aztec Symposium Fellows Archaeology Special Archives 2013-06-05T13:23:33Z Page Musja Kazhdan http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/musja-kazhdan Oral History Interview with Musja Kazhdan (accompanied by translator Misha Kazhdan, grandson of Alexander and Musja Kazhdan) undertaken by Alice-Mary Talbot at the home of Misha Kazhdan on April 18, 2010. Musja Kazhdan was the wife of Alexander Kazhdan, Senior Research Associate in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks between 1979 and 1997. Between 1983 and 1991, Alexander Kazhdan was the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). AMT: This is Alice-Mary Talbot on April 18, 2010. I am interviewing Musja Kazhdan, the widow of Alexander Kazhdan, at the home of her grandson, Misha Kazhdan. And Misha Kazhdan is going to translate for us. So, Musja, I’d like to begin by telling you how pleased I am that you have come to the United States for this visit and given us the opportunity to do this interview for the Oral History Archive at Dumbarton Oaks. It’s really a wonderful opportunity for us to find out more about the life of you and Alexander at Dumbarton Oaks. So why don’t I begin by asking you: what was your first contact with an American Byzantinist that you first really heard about Dumbarton Oaks?

MishaK: My father met – Dima [Dimitri (David) Kazhdan] met with [Ihor] Ševčenko in Boston, and they had agreed with Constable that Sanya [Alexander Kazhdan] could come to Dumbarton Oaks as a fellow for one year.

AMT: But wait, we were going to start at the beginning – with Ševčenko and Nancy in 1966.

MK: In the sixties, Ševčenko and Natasha [Nancy Patterson Ševčenko] were in Moscow, and after the Bolshoi Theater, Alexander had invited them and brought them to the house. At that point, Ševčenko asked Sanya if he would be interested in coming to work in Dumbarton Oaks – to America, to Dumbarton Oaks – and Sanya said, “No way. I work in Moscow. I am not leaving.”

AMT: All right. So then, tell me what happened next with Dima’s leaving for the United States, when he went to Harvard.

MishaK: Dima, in 1975, went to Harvard. And then in 1977 he began to push Alexander to go to the United States, but at this time – he couldn’t even think about it, and also because it was only a one-year fellowship, Alexander said, “No, on this condition I will not go,” and then Ševčenko said, “It can be several years.”

AMT: Okay, but you need to back up a little bit and tell why you changed your mind about coming to the United States.

MK: We changed our minds, because I was immediately уволенa [laid off] from my work where I worked for 28 years, and Alexander was told that he never would see his son – he will not permit it, even for a week, to leave Russia and his son never will be permitted to enter Russia. And then he decided –

AMT: And you told me that, although he was invited to speak at the Athens Congress [1976], that then he was –

MK: Yeah, yeah it was the Congress of Athens and he had the main report.

AMT: Oh, that, a principal, no, a main paper, they’re called. Yes.

MK: But he was not permitted to go. And even he was not permitted to go to some conference in a Russian town.

AMT: So obviously it was very, very difficult.

MK: Yeah.

AMT: So then, you – tell me, how were you in contact with Giles Constable? What was your method of communication?

MK: We were in contact with Giles when we were in Vienna – Giles came to Vienna, especially to have an interview with Alexander.

AMT: But this is after you left.

MK: Yeah. Before, never. First time was –

AMT: In Vienna.

MK: In Vienna. I was with him to go especially to Vienna.

AMT: But you had, when you left, you told the Russian authorities that you were going to Israel. Is that right?

MK: In Israel. But we sent everything – what was needed, all books which were permitted – we sent to the United States. But it was officially that we were going to meet up, to live with our son in Israel.

AMT: Israel. Because the first that I knew about your coming, because this was 1978, I think, and I was working part-time at Dumbarton Oaks, and I noticed in the mail room there were these piles of brown paper packages that got – every week there would be more of these piles of packages. And I said, “What is this?”

MK: We were not permitted to take one book that had some, even, sign, a note – plus, minus, nothing. So it was a group of young people, who were connected –

AMT: – who did all the erasing. And then I remember Alexander telling me that he would go to different post offices in Moscow so that he didn’t mail a great big box but just a few books in each package.

MK: Well, but also the problem was that Alexander said he can’t leave Russia without his –

AMT: Cards.

MK: Cards. Without, he can’t. But nobody would permit. So, Rex Rexheuser – you don’t know – a man from Germany; at this time, he, his wife, and two children spent a year in Russia. And they were very close to us – friends. And we helped them a lot in Russia. So, all precious things – and all these they took through embassy.

AMT: You’re doing very well in English! So you met Giles in Vienna, having said you were going to Israel. And then what happened?

MK: Then we went to Paris, and that was extremely complicated at that time, because we had no money. Sanya was lecturing in Paris, France.

AMT: In French?

MK: No. [Laughs]

AMT: In English?

MK: He asked: would it be good to lecture in bad French or in bad English? They said, “Of course, bad English.” [Laughter] So he had to prepare. But at this time we had no place to live. So we were living – one month or a month and a half – in Cité Universitaire.

AMT: Mhm, which is a student area.

MK: Right, because also it was very complicated: we were living in one floor and his mother in the attic, and stairs was outside. And we had to bring her food, because she couldn’t go down the stairs. But what was interesting: this agency for Jewish people also was in Paris, but it was very few Jewish emigrants so big as to United States. So the captain of this agency liked very much to speak with us and he said, “I can’t understand why your Constable always sends us notice or letters,” that “we can take good care of you. And they will pay you so much as, in France, [Russian; translator: “as a – not as janitor but as yard workers”]. But we didn’t believe, because we know some of you get sixteen thousand, and for us it was such a huge sum, you know, that we just told him, “You don’t understand.” So we waited three and a half months, because – before we could get a visa. But what was very interesting: before we left, Hélène Ahrweiler invited us for a dinner – and Paul Lemerle – and they had a whole list of what Alexander had to tell Constable – how to –

AMT: – how to negotiate. How to negotiate. So you had advisors.

MK: Because a lot, they say, is – doesn’t work well. So when we went, Sanya and I, to explain to Giles, but Giles said, “They make their rules in France, and we live in the United States, in our law.”

AMT: So you came in 1979.

MK: 1978, no maybe nine.

AMT: The reason I remember is because the first time I met you was Carnival, Mardi Gras, the day before Ash Wednesday – so we can look it up on a calendar and find out exactly – and Dumbarton Oaks was having a costume party, a Carnival party, with the Fellows. Everyone got dressed up in costumes, and Constable told me that you were arriving that day and he was going to bring you to the party and that I should meet you and help to welcome you and I often thought of what a strange way to be introduced to Dumbarton Oaks – with all of the Fellows in costume. So, it’s very vivid in my mind.

MK: But very soon, very soon, Alexander went to Judy Siggins and asked: would you pay his pension? Because he is not young, and he had to know. And they said, “No, you will have no pension. You are a Fellow.”

AMT: And Fellows don’t get pensions.

MK: No. And then Alexander went to Giles and said, “You know, I can’t work on this condition.” And then Giles said, “Okay, then we will [Russian; translator: “make him part of the staff”]. But then you had to pay for an apartment and a little bit higher –

AMT: So that’s when he was made the Senior Research Associate. He was given that title.

MK: Yeah. So this was a great shock.

AMT: I can understand that. And I know that when you first arrived you lived in several different apartments.

MK: Yeah. Well it was – full of cockroaches, and I was so unhappy.

AMT: This was the one on Wisconsin.

MK: On Wisconsin. I was sitting; could not talk to anyone, not – impossible to call anyone without the language. And the janitor: he, every day, came to my apartment because I had a lot of Cuban cigars.

AMT: Why?

MK: We brought them from Russia. And I gave him every day –

AMT: Oh, you gave him the cigars [laughs]. Okay. So he was your friend.

MK: And I was glad to see someone. But then Giles tells that I can go for the lunch in Dumbarton Oaks and this was easier.

AMT: And how did you start learning English? I mean, you knew some English.

MK: Well, because in Russia I had read a lot of –

AMT: You had read English, yeah. But to speak it –

MK: And I went – within a month, I was in some – it was some school, and they were teaching English to immigrants, but it was, for me, very strange, because every day he’d ask, “Are you happy today?” and I’d say, “No.” [Laughter] And it was really a waste when he asked me, “How are you today?”

AMT: He hoped you would be better.

MK: And I’d say, “No.”

AMT: And I remember that Alexander would watch television to help with his English, right?

MK: Every day at six o’clock, it was a wonderful – for him, not for me – a wonderful one-hour lesson, one woman about religion.

AMT: It was called Sunrise Semester, I think. It was a university course.

MK: Very good, very good.

AMT: Yeah, it was very, very high quality.

MK: Every day he was listening to this, and I remember that after maybe seven times, Tony Cutler, whose home we were, you know – He said, “You know, Alexander, your English is good but very amusing.” Because it was from books.

AMT: Yes. I had the same reaction, because I was always amazed that – well, both of you read a great deal of fiction. I was amazed at how much fiction you read. But some of it would be nineteenth century. And so Alexander would try out some new words that he had learned, which were a little old-fashioned. It was amusing. Let’s see. So, we started talking about some of the problems that you faced – the financial issues, the language issues. When did you get to move to your – the house on S Street?

MK: The house?

AMT: On S Street.

MK: First we had a small but really good apartment and there was an old – I don’t remember.

AMT: I think it was what’s called the West Cottage, on the end of the Fellows Building.

MK: Yeah. Before, it was some Catholic –

AMT: Father Dvornik. It was Father Dvornik’s, Francis Dvornik’s apartment.

MK: And so when we lived, Giles said we can use – it was wonderful. It was two bedrooms, small dining rooms, and really nice, you know, like, [Russian; translator: “office”].

AMT: And a big kitchen.

MK: Really big, really good kitchen.

AMT: Wonderful kitchen. Yes, yes I know that.

MK: Wonderful. But it was so dirty that I had to work from morning to night –

AMT: – to clean it, so – Because that was the first place where I went to dinner. You invited me to dinner. I think that Nikos Oikonomides, maybe, was the other guest. There were just four of us, I think. And I didn’t know the Russian system of, you know, eating as soon as you arrived and I was a few minutes late and I was very embarrassed when I realized that I was, you know, I had held – I was never late again, I think, to one of your dinners. So then you went to Wisconsin Avenue with the cockroaches, but then you came back to S Street, to your really cute – I loved your little house.

MK: No, no, we were there before. The garden head, who was living in this part of the house, when he left his work – Then Giles said, “If you want, we can – you can move here.”

AMT: That was a very cute little house.

MK: I adored this. And then we were on very good relations with Don Smith, and he gave us a key for the gardens and we could go. And our neighbor at this time was Judy.

AMT: Judy Siggins.

MK: Whose former husband –

AMT: Yes. So tell me what you can remember about when Alexander first came to Dumbarton Oaks.

MK: What was hard for him?

AMT: Yes.

MK: For Sania, the most hard was language. Very hard. Then, you know, oh, he was happy in direction – that he could do what he wanted.

AMT: He was free.

MK: It was not this pressure, that he had to only write something about economic, and so – But what was really strange for him: he missed, very much, his students, not to say friends and neighbors. But also for him it was very strange that many a new Fellow came for half a year or so to Dumbarton – and you know they were not interested to have something of knowledge from Alexander.

AMT: They didn’t come to visit him and talk.

MK: No, everyone thought they knew, themselves, what to do. For him it was strange, because in Russia it was especially in Medieval history and in the Byzantine School –

AMT: But at the research institute, I think a lot of the Fellows just came; they, as we say, did their own thing.

MK: Yeah. Even in France they had, I think, school, because it was Lemerle and then it was Medieval history, you know –

AMT: But gradually he did meet – Mike McCormick was there.

MK: Mike and you. You and Mike became the most close to us.

AMT: Well, because we were both there when you came.

MK: Ševčenko, with Ševčenko we all were there.

AMT: But he wasn’t living in Dumbarton Oaks.

MK: No, he just came often, and he was always living with us and for me extremely helpful was – maybe you remember Mary Lou Masey? She spoke well Russian, and she was very nice and even now I have two cookbooks from her: one for fish and one for meat – that she said, “It’s the best.” And I always use them.

AMT: Now what we all have noticed, of course, is that when Alexander came to the United States he did very much change the direction of his research and started, for example, reading saints’ lives, things which he had not been able to do in Russia.

MK: He was gradually very interested in cultural history. And so he began to work in this direction. He was also very close with Ann Epstein.

AMT: Yes, and they did a book together.

MK: Yes. One with Giles.

AMT: The first.

MK: The first. When this one ended, there was a really nice Englishman –

AMT: – Simon Franklin –

MK: – that’s the one with the Russian wife.

AMT: And he actually translated, I think, a lot of Alexander’s articles. Yes, those were all very important articles.

MK: And about the dictionary [Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium]: I don’t think that he had the idea or inspiration before.

AMT: Because this seems to be – I had understood that it was something he had actually thought about doing in Russia. But, Giles had an oral history and he said that he thought it was something which started here in this country, so you’re not sure?

MK: No, I never heard in Russia about the possibility, because it was so impossible

AMT: It was impossible. But there was an international congress – I don’t remember the date, now; maybe in the fifties, the 1950s – at which I think it was Paul Lemerle, who said what we need is this sort of book. And I think that, you know, Alexander heard that, but it was impossible for him to do it until he came to Dumbarton Oaks.

MK: It was really hard work not only because it was complicated, but because it was really strenuous. He was very demanding.

AMT: I know that very, very well and he –

MK: And some of them –

AMT: – got unhappy, were very unhappy, yes, because if he didn’t like something he rewrote it or said he didn’t like it, and it caused tensions.

MK: You know, speaking about this dictionary – and when we came, one woman from New York. She was really close to Maia. You remember, I hope, Maia.

AMT: Yes, of course.

MK: And she gave Alexander a book about Russia, and she asked him to review. But when Sanya sent it, she said, “No, in United States –”

AMT: – you can’t write a review like that.

MK: Therefore, it was complicated. But you know the person – but I don’t remember their name – he for several months came to Dumbarton and stayed in our house for maybe two-three days.

AMT: Was he American?

MK: Yeah, yeah. A really nice couple. And they still write me. They moved from that to –

AMT: Oh, I know who you mean: Charles Brand.

MK: Yeah.

AMT: Charles Brand and Mary. Yes, they moved to Boulder, Colorado.

MK: They were so nice. When he not yet retired but was not more in Dumbarton when they came to Washington they always invited me to some restaurant.

AMT: Yes, they were a lovely, lovely couple. And Charles wrote a lot for the dictionary.

MK: Mary.

AMT: Mary, yes.

MK: They had a beautiful garden.

AMT: So they moved out to be with their son – I think it’s a son – in Colorado.

MK: I almost went.

AMT: I know that the gardens meant a lot to you and Alexander. Tell me about your walks, not just in the gardens but the way he used to do these wonderful walks on Saturday mornings.

MK: For me it was extremely confusing, when children – you know, Misha always spent summer with us – two, sometimes two, sometimes one. And they had this religious education, and they came with these ritual strings. And I felt so ashamed because I never had seen this in Russia, and then some boy asked them not to go to the pool like this.

AMT: [to Misha] It was you?

MishaK: Me and my older brother.

AMT: But I remember you used to go mushrooming, picking mushrooms.

MK: Yeah, in Dumbarton every year there was one huge mushroom.

AMT: And you used to pick – quinces?

MK: I picked Chinese apples; I made jam. I made it from quince. And I made it from dogwood, it was only one special kind of dogwood.

AMT: And you used, what did you use that for? For vodka?

MK: They’re wonderful. In Russia, it’s the name of this, but not such a tree; it was kizil. And everyone said that could be dogwood only in the U.S.A.

AMT: But I also remember that you made vodka, different kinds of flavored vodka.

MK: Yeah, it was – even now, I do –

AMT: But sometimes with things from the garden.

MK: – of lemon peels.

AMT: But weren’t there some berries?

MK: No. At first, I was amazed at all this beauty. But it was very lonely. I felt like I was in some harem, you know, with this pool, with this beauty. But my sultan always worked! [Laughter]

AMT: Oh, that’s an interesting image, yes.

MK: And there was one, who was not like this. It was one very nice English man; even he only came for part-time, and he lived on Wisconsin in this building and had, one day, open door.

MishaK: Open house?

AMT: Open house?

MK: Open house, yeah, open house. And then – I think he was from England –

AMT: – Tony Bryer?

MK: I think so. Yeah. Very strange, very nice. He had a beautiful wife; she died.

AMT: Yes, that’s Bryer.

MK: And first we came to his house from France.

AMT: Oh. When you were waiting to go to the United States.

MK: It was complicated, but his brother was in foreign office and he had an exit.

AMT: A visa for you?

MK: Yeah. And they had a beautiful house with beautiful furniture, but it was so cold. And also they put some water – hot water bottles – in our beds. And one morning Alexander said, “You will go down – and I said, “What happens?” “You will come, you will see.” So I came down. He was in his [Russian; translator: “robe”], his whole big robe. And he was like this – nightcap. Like, you know, Dickens, I don’t know.

AMT: Yeah, he is a character.

MK: But in Dumbarton Oaks, we came and he told me, you know, that Mrs. Bliss and Mr. Bliss were buried in the garden, and he told me, that Mrs. Bliss – she was a beauty – was buried in sitting position; it was so strange. Why? Because, he said, she took to some Indian religion before she died.

AMT: Well that’s a new story.

MK: I was amazed, but he was so serious, and then I was working with Cutler and I said, “Tony, it’s so strange that Mrs. Bliss was buried sitting.” And he said, “Who said such nonsense?”

AMT: Now tell me about some of the other people that I know you and Alexander were close to, like Spiros Vryonis.

MK: Oh yeah, yeah.

AMT: Because he visited quite frequently while you were here.

MK: I like very much Vryonis. He was wonderful. And also – what’s his name – who’s from Athens, and he died.

AMT: Nikos Oikonomides.

MK: Nikos Oikonomides. And – maybe you know this story, I don’t know – it was a very strange woman from Greece.

AMT: Oh, I know, yeah. She was – she’s mentally ill.

MK: Very strange. And she came and brought me very good, nice sweets. And then Alexander said, you know, that she asked about a consultation. “But I don’t have time. So do you mind if I invite her for dinner.” And you know this.

AMT: No. So, what happened?

MK: So, she came, she spoke with Alexander, and then I looked: Alexander was furious. And she told, first of all, that Nikos was communist – was and now he is a communist – and Spiros, she was his lover, and she wrote his dissertation. And Sanya said, “Such nonsense! I never in my life – how you could write for Spiros? And I don’t want to see you ever in my house!

AMT: Yeah, I know about this woman, because she caused some problems later.

MK: And Sanya told me, “Never open the door –”

AMT: – to her.

MK: But I was really confused. She was drunk.

AMT: Well let’s close on a happier note about – because this is one of my nicest memories – is the wonderful dinner parties that you gave. They were just extraordinary. The food was so good; the conversation was so good. We just – everyone loved going to your house for dinner.

MK: And once I asked Tony: “Tony, why, when Fellows do something, you know, come together, they always invite you and never Sanya? And he said, “Because they are so glad to see me and not to see him. Because they are afraid.”

AMT: A number of them were scared, yes.

MK: Some, true.

AMT: But he always respected the young people, the students, who would stand up to him, who would argue with him. And if they were strong enough to say, “I don’t agree with you,” or “I have a different position,” you know, he liked that and then he would get engaged with them, I think.

MK: But he never wanted to drink or eat during the day in Dumbarton Oaks or – but I was inviting guests, both as in Russia and now in Israel. I have an open house.

AMT: Oh. That’s –

MK: And always people come and stay with us. And even in Israel.

AMT: It’s a great, great tradition. And you did make many, many friends here and in Moscow?

MK: We were very close with Paul Hollingsworth.

AMT: Yes. And he was so helpful after Alexander died with getting the famous cards shipped to Russia.

MK: Even in Russia, Paul met with several friends – he knew all my relatives. And he went to Ivangorod, to my niece, and he went to my cousin. But when he was expelled, everyone was scared.

AMT: I can believe it. Well, I think he’s very happy now to have a new post.

MK: I don’t like his wife; I don’t know why. But he’s really nice and very educated.

AMT: Yes. He’s a wonderful person. Well can you think of anything else that you’d like to talk about that I haven’t asked you?

MK: No. I have a very good memory about, you know – And Alexander was on very good terms with Giles and after Giles, it was who?

AMT: Robert Thomson. And then Angeliki.

MK: And then I remember it was, I think, Christmas and maybe the first year we were here, and Giles invited us to his house. And there was his mother and I wished for advice – it was not advice, but I took it like advice. She told me she lived in Boston, and when her grandson, John, came to visit her she always told him, “I give you money, but you invite me to some café or restaurant and behave like a gentleman.” And I did the same with Misha – Misha can tell you – I took his little ones and when they came, I said, “Misha, I pay but you –”

AMT: – take me out to dinner. I think that’s a very, very nice thing for a grandmother to do.

MK: Mrs. Dagron told me that when her granddaughter came to stay for Saturday, she put the table like for the most important event, and she made – plate and fork and everything – and she told her, “We are ladies, and we have to behave like ladies.”

AMT: So, she taught them good manners. Well, Musja, it’s been a great pleasure to have this conversation with you and we will transcribe it at Dumbarton Oaks, but maybe not until next summer, because we need an intern. But at some point we’ll send you a copy to read, so if you want to correct anything then you can do that.

]]> No publisher James N. Carder Byzantine Publications Byzantine Byzantine Studies Mildred Barnes Bliss Oral History Project Archives 2013-05-30T17:01:57Z Page Oleg Grabar http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/oleg-grabar Oral History interview with Oleg Grabar (1929–2011) , undertaken by Anna Bonnell-Freiden and Clem Wood at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, on August 21, 2008. At Dumbarton Oaks, Oleg Grabar was a member of the Board of Scholars for Byzantine Studies between 1972 and 1975 and a member of the Byzantine Senior Fellows between 1978 and 1983. He was the son of the Byzantinist André Grabar (1896–1990), who at Dumbarton Oaks was Visiting Scholar (spring 1947), Henri Foçillon Scholar (1948–1949), Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology (1949–1954), Visiting Scholar (spring 1957), member of the Board of Scholars for Byzantine Studies (1957–1965), and Honorary Associate (1965–1991). ABF: We are Anna Bonnell-Freiden and Clem Wood, and we are here in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Institute for Advanced Study with Oleg Grabar to discuss his involvement at Dumbarton Oaks, and it is the 21st of August, 2008. So, we’d like to begin by talking to you about your very first impressions of Dumbarton Oaks. Your father came to Dumbarton Oaks as a Byzantine visiting scholar in the ’40s and was very active throughout the ’50s and ’60s. We see that you were working toward your Certificat de Licence at the University of Paris. Did you come visit your father at Dumbarton Oaks?

OG: No, I came with him, because when he came in the fall ’48, he came for the whole year because they offered him the position of Director of Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He brought his wife and his two children. Nobody knew what to do with me. I was eighteen then. So, I was the proper age to go to a university. I didn’t know anything about American universities. I was given the choice between Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. The only thing that distinguished it to me was the color. I still remember the three colors as being three different colors. Why I went to Harvard I have no idea. But in any event, I went there and eventually graduated from there. My father decided not to stay permanently at Dumbarton Oaks because of complicated reasons, one of which was my mother – she didn’t know English well enough. And he had a good job in Paris and felt that there was something wrong with an institution that was so un-American and located in Washington. He felt totally alien to the American world, and so did my mother. It was nice to come and study for specific periods of time, but to run it, as was offered to him at some point, he felt was wrong. There were other reasons as well. That’s how I came and so my first week at Dumbarton Oaks was Christmas, ’48, because when we arrived in New York I went straight to Cambridge and my family went to Washington. It was an introduction to the feudal world of Dumbarton Oaks because at Christmas time, in those days, Mrs. Bliss always invited everybody at Dumbarton Oaks for a Christmas party. Everybody received a gift. She’d never known me but she knew my father had an eighteen-year-old son. I forgot what gift she gave me, but there was a little package for me under the Christmas tree. Everybody received something like this, and this was my first introduction to her. Again, afterwards my father was again at Dumbarton Oaks when I was a senior at Harvard, and I worked on my thesis partly at Dumbarton Oaks because they had the books I needed. I’d had some advice from Father Dvornik and others on the medieval subject I was developing. My first impression of Dumbarton Oaks was that nobody spoke English. It was essentially a European institution with wonderful European manners. One of the lovely memories I have of Dumbarton Oaks at that time – I can’t remember exactly what year it would have been – was my mother, the old Russian historian Vasiliev, and Otto Demus, a handsome Austrian Byzantinist, and, at the time, the Princeton Byzantinist, Bert Friend, holding arms together and going up and down the Music Room, which was where the Greco painting is now, and singing Viennese operettas in German – nobody would sing them in anything but German. Then they went out and entered again singing the end of the first act of Massenet’s Manon – and then three voices sort of going up. It was really wonderful to me. That was their world. Their world was the Paris opera, the Vienna opera, the Merry Widow, and so forth. America didn’t exist as a culture for them. Nice and wonderful though it was, it was a world totally of its own, where tea was very important, where to be seen at the swimming pool was very important, and so to them it was part of a nice little feudal world. The hierarchy was very clearly established. Everybody knew who was who, who had the right to do what and not to do what, and all the fellows, like properly infeodated vassals, lived in the Fellows Building which now is something else. I don’t know what it is now.

ABF: Guest House.

OG: Guest House, is it? Okay. In the Fellows Building some of the older professors lived in the apartments attached to that building. It was wonderful but pretty much out of the real world, which I think it always was and has remained like that. Its first impression was that of a feudal place, where French was the dominant language because Mrs. Bliss, as I would hear it, did not like anything German, and Russian was a second language. She was a great friend of Stravinsky. He composed a Dumbarton Oaks symphony for her. Vasiliev – who was a reasonable and broad scholar but not a great scholar but an absolutely adorable person with a nice little mustache and smiling face and sort of walking the way I walk now – that is an old man’s walk – as an eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old, to walk with an eighty year old was sort of new to me. I hadn’t encountered that. And telling stories – his stories were absolutely endless, whether it’s in St. Petersburg, Australia, or Wisconsin, wherever he’d been. Father Dvornik was of the same vintage, but not as attractive. And then there was Sirarpie Der Nersessian who had an extraordinary personal history. After all she was born in Constantinople. Her uncle was the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople. She escaped dramatically during or just after World War One and then went to Paris to study. All three belonged to a little world of its own. Sirarpie Der Nercessian lived in Dumbarton Oaks with her sister. They were both very remarkable because they were very short. In the dining room in the Fellows Building – I still remember because it struck me at that time – when Sirarpie sat at the head of a table, as she often did, her feet did not reach the floor. They were sort of dangling. But those were very close family friends. To me, Dumbarton Oaks was a wonderful estate in which you do whatever you want – you read books, beautiful books. It was set up not like libraries, but on shelves surrounded by genteel living – you had a Monet here, then you had Byzantine books, then you had a nice work of art – it was your private library and your private collection, which is now being transformed into a mechanized and organized way.

ABF: Did your father know any of the scholars at Dumbarton Oaks before he arrived there?

OG: Yes. He knew all the old ones. Vasiliev, Dvornik, Der Nercessian, probably Underwood and Kitzinger. No – I think he met Kitzinger at Dumbarton Oaks. Because then you had the old blokes – Vasiliev, Der Nerssesian, and my father who had been students together in the ’20s in Paris. So they had known each other for a long time. The new ones, the four professors at Dumbarton Oaks – I think there were four – they were Kitzinger, Underwood, Anastos and Downy. They were all supposed to be equal. Nobody knew exactly what to do with them, as the academic system was slowly taking over the feudal one. They had not participated in the exotic life of Europe after the First World War or of the ‘20s. Harvard had two Byzantinists at that time, but for reasons that I don’t know – Constable maybe would know better – the Harvard of that time was never brought to Dumbarton Oaks. Bobby Blake, for instance, who had been one of the big allied spies in the Caucasus during the First World War, who worked for the British, in Azerbaijan in 1919, never set foot in Dumbarton Oaks. That is something I don’t know – that part of the story. The Harvard establishment was not the Dumbarton Oaks establishment. Dumbarton Oaks was separate from Harvard and I think Harvard at that point didn’t know what to do with Dumbarton Oaks, and probably still doesn’t quite know what to do with it. The Princeton faculty was more visible there than the Harvard one. My father knew these four younger scholars, and he got particularly close to Kitzinger because they would often work on the same things, the same fields. In a way, I’m not sure that even this was very good for Kitzginer to have my father there because my father was about fifteen years older than he was. And he kind of a little bit made life difficult – I don’t mean technically but intellectually – for Kitzinger who was certainly the most intelligent, the most creative of these four professors. When he became Director of Studies, two of them – Downy and Anastos – left almost immediately. I think they were upset that they weren’t considered. Underwood – I forget when Underwood died – he died relatively young.

ABF: In ’69.

OG: But, he was so involved with Istanbul. He was constantly there. I have a wonderful memory of him because he found me my first hotel in Istanbul, which was the crummiest hotel I’ve ever been in my life. I shouldn’t say this, but he was very stingy in things like that.

ABF: So how was it for you, as a student of medieval history?

OG: I profited from being my father’s son, so that everything was open, everybody was very nice and sweet. For my work – at Princeton where I was a graduate student, then at Michigan or at Harvard where I was employed– their libraries were sufficient to me. I didn’t need Dumbarton Oaks. And I was never a Byzantinist, even though some people think I am, but I never was. So Dumbarton Oaks to me – let’s put it this way – Dumbarton Oaks to me was always a kind of second home. I always felt that I knew how to operate there. I got very distressed when they built the new shelves. I thought that the old Dumbarton Oaks would disappear. And I loved to go to the symposia. Every year we had a procession from Princeton where I was graduate student to go to Dumbarton Oaks for the symposium, where you kind of saw all the big shots you had heard about or read about. That was interesting and exciting. I think the symposium played a very important role up to whatever time it was when they changed the rules, when all the people who gave talks spent a semester at Dumbarton Oaks, so that the people preparing the symposium were all working together on the symposium. So, the symposium was not like now. People work wherever they are, then come the day before they give their talk, give their talk, and go away. This was a collective enterprise being prepared. But by the time I was involved in symposia, I guess in ’62, that wasn’t true anymore. I flew in from Ann Arbor the day before. So, as a collective operation, it was not as successful. These later symposia did not create as much excitement as the symposia of the ’50s, which were really, truly milestones – the one my father did in 1946, what Dvornik did, the first one Kitzinger did – they were really major intellectual creations. Since then it has become another meeting of professors to get their trips paid. Byzantine studies have been in trouble for the last twenty years. It’s not a field that is a growing – it has been taken over by all kinds of other forces than whatever is required of pure scholarship. The great thing about the central, western, and eastern European scholars of yore, as well as the first group of Americans who were there was that they were really only interested in scholarship. They had no other agenda. Now old national types have come, and Byzantine studies have tended to become a series of competing nationalisms, going from Greece to Ukraine or Russia. It is a series of national flags being waved, and that is very destructive. It is no longer what the old scholarship used to be. It is easy to say the old one was very nice and very good, because it was connected to empires, to big countries, and not to the small countries, which we are creating now one after the other. Have you heard of Southern Ossetia before last week? Now everybody’s excited about what Northern Ossetia and Southern Ossetia are going to do to each other. What I think is interesting about Ossetia, actually, is that the Ossetian language is the only Romanian language of its kind. It’s the only remaining Alan language that was known in the second century.

ABF: So, can you describe – speaking of the symposia – can you describe your experience at these early symposia?

OG: They were wonderful. I told you about the old symposia. I think they have changed quite a bit. The symposiums, first of all, never met on Sundays. That would have been immoral. Nobody went to church, but they did not do anything on Sunday. You rested. The old ones met on Thursday, Friday, Saturday morning and they always ended Saturday with a lunch at the Blisses’ private house, about several blocks down from the main building of Dumbarton Oaks. That was very important because not everyone was invited there. Speakers were invited, and a few selected guests. So, on Saturday morning after the last meeting, you could see the poor participants who had to go to the drugstore to have a hamburger on Wisconsin Avenue and the elect who walked down toward the Blisses’ house to have lunch at the Blisses’ house, which was always catered – waiters in white clothes – and where you met not only the Dumbarton Oaks crowd, but you also met some of the social people Mrs. Bliss was cultivating or who were cultivating her. It was a very social occasion, as were the dinners on Thursday and Friday – Friday dinner was at Dumbarton Oaks and comprised always the same menu, a magnificent single salmon, totally glazed. I’ve never seen a whole glazed salmon like this. White liveried, white-gloved characters were cutting it up to give you your portion with, I guess, some salad. I forget what was the menu on Thursdays. It must have been a meat menu, because those were days following the tradition of Thursday meat, Friday fish, Sunday sleep. Now I think that you buy your sandwiches or you buy your lunch box, which is kind of repulsive. The big thing about the symposium itself was also its ceremonial quality. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss used to arrive and sit in the back. And it was an event, like the arrival of the deacon or the bishop at a religious ceremony. They had their own chairs in the back. Mrs. Bliss would always listen very carefully, then ask the speaker to give her a copy of what he has said because she wanted to read it before she would comment on it. And she always read it and always commented on it. She always had something to say. I don’t think he ever did, and I think he slept through most of them. At the symposium itself, in the front row, were the big couches. I don’t know if they still have them at the symposium. Enormous couches where the very distinguished, elderly professors would sit. In my days it would have been Kantarovisz, Friend, Dvornik, Vasiliev – would sit there, I think sleep a little bit. They were too old to listen to talks. It was like a royal court. You have the top princes sit in front, then you have the variety of lower aristocrats behind, and then some poor little graduate students in the back. But the graduate students were future aristocrats, so they belonged there. What hardly belonged there was spouses. That didn’t exist. It wasn’t allowed. We never talked about things like that. Or companions – the word didn’t exist. But it was always very – you felt that you were actually into a ceremonial event. And that was part of its beauty, that even if it was a lousy paper – most of them were not, in those days – it was a liturgical ceremony to listen to it and to partake of the learning. You were supposed to understand whatever language was used by the speaker. If you had questions afterward – the questions were in most cases stupid. The questioners were not stupid, but nobody had anything intelligent to say because they had just heard a lecture, so they hadn’t had time to think of something intelligent to say – except the learned disputes between people, as with Weitzman and Morey, when they were present. But that’s a special case. That I think has changed quite a bit. Now it has become much more routinized, like older colloquial of academic life. It’s quite different. It doesn’t have that prestige of a religious act. Food was very important. The teas were served at the right moment, the coffees at the right moment, the dinners – and who went to what was very important.

ABF: Were there any particular moments at these symposia or papers or even just one symposium in particular –

OG: I remember mostly one symposium that my father directed, the one you mentioned –

ABF: The Emperor and the Palace.

OG: – The Emperor and the Palace, which was really remarkable. But, of course, he had gathered probably the most spectacular group of scholars available at that time. Just even seeing them – I was a graduate student then – those people whose books I had read or was reading, here they all were. They were living beings. And so that was one. I think the one that Sir Hamilton Gibb did in which I was involved in ’62 was also important because he brought almost for the first time the Near Eastern world into Byzantium instead of Byzantium always connected with Europe. Kitzinger led one on Sicily – that was many years later – which was also very interesting, because he had gathered an unusual group of people. If you look – and you probably have them all – the symposia still now have their liturgical function, that is, all the participants gather some place and get their picture taken with each other – the chairman must be sitting in the middle. The rest may be standing, but the chairman always sits. And if you look at those pictures, they’re very interesting to see as a sequence, because you can see how people age. Some age well, some age not so well. The other thing – nobody, I think, ever smiles. But I would check that, because I’m not sure –

ABF: They start smiling later. They smiled later, in the ‘80s.

OG: They all dressed with coat and tie, and probably dark suits and so forth because it is a liturgical act. It is a liturgical function to participate in a Dumbarton Oaks symposium, like serving at mass. It was a liturgical moment – even staying at the Fellows Building at some point. But, I think there were two apartments at the two ends which were real apartments. And my parents stayed there. And I came to visit for whatever reason and the lunches and dinners were prepared at the Fellows Building. Now you fix your own sandwiches or whatever it is. But there was a whole group of staff – black staff, from a sort of formal American servants class – were there to cook and do the bedding. And I remember when the change began to happen – I forget when it was my parents were there, and I came late. I must have gone out to dinner or the movies or whatever it is, and I came back late, and as I opened the door, I see an extremely distinguished scholar making love to a woman on the couch downstairs. Because you couldn’t do it in the rooms – I forgot now why – so they stayed down. It was a very odd thing. There were two small houses, to the right and to the left. And the one to the right was occupied at some point by Dvornik. And I got very irritated once when I was a graduate student because Kantarovich was here. Dvornik also was a great cook, both of them. And Kantarovich came to cook. And Kantarovich had asked me to help him prepare the chickens. He mixed some fancy I don’t know what. And I was supposed to inject it between the skin and the meat of the chicken. But I was not invited for the dinner. You see, the dinner was for big guys. I was allowed to help. I got accolades; he knew I was going to be a big guy at some point and I will eat the proper chicken. But at that point I had not acquired the right to eat the chicken that Kantarovich prepared. And similarly, much later, the person who occupied that building was called Kraeling. I don’t exactly know how many years Carl Kraeling was involved with Dumbarton Oaks. It was after he retired from Chicago. He went to Yale but spent a lot of time at Dumbarton Oaks. Carl Kraeling was a very American type. He was of German origin, very Lutheran – very strict Lutheran tradition – but very American in spirit. Carl spoke four languages. My mother said once that she had to go and ask him once for something – I’ve forgotten now what, some practical thing – and rang the doorbell, and he opened the door, and he was naked. So, he walked around naked in his house, which is, again, the kind of thing one didn’t do at Dumbarton Oaks in those days. The rooms upstairs were single rooms, and they shared the bathroom, which is no longer acceptable now. And I don’t know when they started buying or renting apartments. The result was – is – that people don’t connect with each other the way they did before. But that’s a price that one has to pay. Nearly all American institutions were based then on single people. So my memories of Dumbarton Oaks are mostly social. They are mostly social because my direct contact with it – until I became member of the board of scholars – but that again was part of the feudal system, because Giles Constable and I were classmates, we’d known each other since the ‘40s, and so there was a kind of automatic reliance on the people you knew to run whatever work was needed. On the whole that was good, but not always. But it was a completely different Dumbarton Oaks then. And as well as the board of scholars, we took care of masses of little details, which before were not handled by the scholars. They were handled by some assistant at Harvard or elsewhere. And that is one of the good but debatable things that Giles Constable did: he created an administration for Dumbarton Oaks instead of a tradition. You didn’t do things because Mrs. Bliss said it should be done that way. You did things because that’s the way you do things. That was the good side. There were some incidents with that too. I got into trouble with one of the members, with one of the fellows, whom I was interviewing because we all had to interview a certain number of fellows. And for some reason I can’t remember, she was known as a difficult person. And I remember both Ihor Ševčenko and Giles telling me, “Well, you’re so nice, you take her. We don’t want to deal with her.” And I said, “I suppose I can handle it.” And she absolutely beat me. There was nothing I could say to which she did not have already set answers. And I never felt so completely overwhelmed by an individual. I was supposed to be the powerful one that’s supposed to decide her fate, and she flattened me right there. I think she’s still alive. I haven’t seen her for many years. It became a different world when it became so much more Americanized and involved with graduate students and assistant professors, that is, with a very specific American problem, instead of being the haven to which the world’s scholars come. I suspect because there is no need for Dumbarton Oaks, from that point of view. There are many other places that have now good libraries, with Internet you can get everything anyway. So, congeniality and pleasure of being together, having breakfast together, lunch together, dinner together, and tea together – that has disappeared. The humanities do not have what here I see with mathematicians and physicists: collective work. That is, they don’t work collectively. We tend to work individually. Collective work is done in excavations, but that’s out of Dumbarton Oaks. And the other thing of the Dumbarton Oaks I knew a long time ago was it was involved in masses of activity outside. The Istanbul excavations, the Hagia Sophia, project, and then another one in Constantinople, and then excavations in Syria, but the big Hagia Sophia project was something – have you ever seen those books?

CW: No.

OG: Oh, you should see them because you probably would not know how to use that book. You need a whole table just to open the book to look at the pictures. But that was the extraordinary person, Van Nice, involved in the project. He was an architect. I think he went to Princeton. Many scholar-architects had done that. Underwood went to Princeton. And that’s an important side part of the relationship between Princeton’s adventures and architects, Dumbarton Oaks, the Near East, ARAMCO, the Arab petrol company, and the CIA. All of this was very closely interrelated. When I took a trip – when I was at the University of Michigan – with George Forsyth, who was on the Dumbarton Oaks board and who had been with us in Princeton – every embassy we stopped at had a Princeton graduate as a C.I.A. agent there, and they all knew each other. They all started as archaeologists and became O.S.S. during the war stage of the C.I.A. because it pays better than Wellesley, as in the case of one. This again is another world that’s gone. Now you have creepy individuals who went to military school. You don’t have any longer cultivated spies. But Dumbarton Oaks was very much involved in that. But it is interesting that Underwood was an agent there, and all the other Dumbarton Oaks activities were not done by the people that were at Dumbarton Oaks. Kitzinger was not involved; Downey was not; Dvornik was not. That was decided by Thacher, Jack Thacher. I knew Thacher quite well, but I knew him personally rather than academically. He would represent the kind of things my father was very much opposed to at Dumbarton Oaks, that is, the power of rich people, rich amateurs. To my father, Thacher was a great amateur – very cultivated and very sophisticated, but he was an amateur. He was not a priest. He did not belong to the priesthood of scholarship.

ABF: So, this was happening while you were on the board of scholars?

OG: No. I wasn’t on the board of scholars until the early ‘70s, and I would say that after the early ‘60s, for about ten years, I was hardly involved in Dumbarton Oaks. Then, in the ‘70s, after I came to Harvard, whenever Giles Constable became Director – he sort of got me back here. But I must admit, I was not as personally involved as I had been in early times. I didn’t know the people anymore; and, also, because I was also in a different field from most of the fields of the people at Dumbarton Oaks, I was not important to anybody at Dumbarton Oaks. I was important as an administrator, as a Harvard representative, but intellectually I was not important. But, anyway, it was no longer a hot intellectual center, where you talk to people about scholarly things. Like all these institutions, most of the people who were here were young assistant professors looking for jobs or people whose concern was not whether somebody discovered a new manuscript; their concern was, is the job in Vanderbilt better than the job in Oklahoma State? So, it was a completely different attitude, and much more mechanically involved. By 1990 I was already here, and I went to Harvard for a few meetings to find a successor to whoever it is who was – who was the director just before Ned Keenan? – it was Thomson –

ABF: Laiou.

OG: Laiou, it was for Laiou. Well, the Laiou appointment was a tricky one; because, first of all, Harvard professors were rarely appointed there and secondly, there was the Hellenization – a criticism made of Dumbarton Oaks, whether justified or not, that it was all taken over by the Greeks. But one could say that the early one was all taken over by Russians. Eventually, you will have the Serbs or the Bulgarians – there’s not enough of them – or the Romanians taking over; and that is the drama of Byzantine Studies. It has become national, instead of being global and since nobody goes to church anymore, there was no Orthodox streak. You could say that this was true in previous generations – that they became Byzantinists because they had learned to be orthodox. They were not believers, they did not go to church regularly, but they knew the services, they knew the religion, they knew the theology – Meyendorf and people like this; my father, who’s not religious at all, but knew every service. Weitzman went to every orthodox service he could lay his hands on. Kitzinger never did. They were no longer interested in Byzantium; they were interested in what happened to the antique world, the late antique world – that’s what Kitzinger did. It became a different world. The collection is still a Byzantine collection, but I wonder how many of the professors ever go there, to the collection. I mean, this is a separate, public thing and, in fact, I don’t think there are professors at Dumbarton Oaks anymore.

ABF: There aren’t. In your opinion, do you think that’s a good or a bad thing?

OG: I don’t know. I think, on the whole, it is a good thing. I can imagine having two or three ancient scholars – like Kazhdan was there; but usually, you do it because you can’t find him a job in regular universities. So , I’m not sure if that made sense at the time of war or with the Soviet regime; now, it is not necessary anymore. But that’s something you can argue about, whether it should be a kind of temporary place, where people stop early in their career in order to form themselves properly or whether it is a place to which you come for a year of rest and breathing within your normal career. I don’t know, I mean, I can argue it either way; and I can see people here who have exactly the same problem. Should it be a place to which people come with thoughts and to have peace of mind, or it a place where you go to magnify yourself to get a better job – which tends to be now that happens. So, half of our people at Dumbarton Oaks spend most of the time running out and giving lectures and showing off some place or other. And I’m not sure quite what it should be. I suppose that what an institution like Harvard has to decide – they have to set their policies for them, if they want to do that. It is no longer a great center for collective scholarship, except that it has a publication program, and the Dumbarton Oaks Papers are a very important thing. It is no longer because there are competitors for that; there are other places which do this. I don’t think the kind of scholarship that Ihor represents is something that is still of significance to most people. I mean, if you read any of the things that Ihor writes, it’s actually wonderful; but if you don’t know Greek, German, and Russian, it becomes very difficult to understand and appreciate.

CW: Do you remember anything about the rumors of Harvard wanting to move the operation of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard?

OG: Well, my thoughts on the possibility of transporting Byzantine Studies to Harvard? You’re going to be shocked if I even suggest this to Tom Lentz or anybody of that nature, but it would have been, probably, a good idea forty years ago. Now, there is no point in thinking about it. Harvard can’t handle its own collections in Cambridge, and to bring all this down suddenly. When I knew Dumbarton Oaks, it was all Byzantine – then suddenly appeared all the Pre-Columbian and then the Garden. Should all three of these continue on a more or less equal footing? I simply don’t know; but, then again, I don’t do the budget, so I don’t know where it is financially. I think it is strange bedfellows, I mean, these three things together; but maybe that is legitimate – I mean, if there is enough money, there is certainly enough space here to have all three of them. I want to go back to this question about the atmosphere of the place. Now the atmosphere of the place has changed because people are not in a monastery together. They are in a library together, whereas in the past it was like a monastery: you had breakfast together, you had lunch together, you had dinner, you spent all day together. Right now, you don’t have breakfast. You still have lunch, and I’m told it’s still very ceremonial: who is allowed to have lunch in the Fellows Building, who is not allowed. You have classes of visitors to the library, ones who are first-class visitors and second-class visitors. I don’t know whether it’s true, but in the past, it used to be a community working together, which I don’t think it is now. Maybe these kinds of worlds have simply disappeared, and there’s no point in trying to establish them. You’re not going to invent a Vasiliev, a Dvornik, or people of that nature – they just don’t exist. For instance, when Ihor tried very hard to get Hans Belting, who probably to the younger generation is the most brilliant Byzantinist or art historian or whatever you want – but he didn’t want to come to Washington. One reason is that he doesn’t feel at home in an American institution. And why should you bring somebody who’s not at home in that institution? It’s still easier to do here, at the Institute for Advanced Study – we still have quite a few people like that. Because here there is nothing around, you really live in your own secluded world with your lunches and dinners. And the world of Dumbarton Oaks can no longer be recreated. There was a mythology of Dumbarton Oaks, but it is really no longer clear to what objectives it responds. Is it a training place to prepare people for functions in American or other institutions. Usually, it has to be American institutions, because I don’t think you get yourself ready for a position in Italy by coming to Dumbarton Oaks. Or it is a place where you meet for seminars and symposia? These should be organized differently, that is, where people meet twice: once to organize something, and then they do work wherever they are, and then they meet again to expose the results of their work; or all kinds of other techniques or patterns that can be proposed. I don’t know, is there actually a board of trustees at Dumbarton Oaks now that is separate –?

CW: Yes.

OG: – that is separate from the Harvard one?

CW: No, I don’t think it’s – I think they are more or less the same.

OG: As the Harvard corporation, yeah. So to whom are they responsible? They are responsible to the Harvard president?

ABF: Probably

OG: See, one doesn’t even know who runs that place. It was alright as long as the people running it were the Blisses, Thacher, Thacher’s successor, Tyler, the former ambassador to The Netherlands. They were all American aristocrats, wealthy American aristocrats – they were superior to Harvard. They didn’t talk directly to Harvard and didn’t want Harvard to meddle with their little feudal entity. That’s fallen apart. Now everything is run by the actual rule of professors, which means the bureaucrats of an academic system; and they have it different – they are not wealthy for the most part (some exceptions you have there), and it’s a completely different world – and the academic world is a completely different world than it was thirty years ago.

ABF: When do you – what period do you pinpoint as the time when these changes began to take place?

OG: I think the ‘70s. This was when Giles Constable was Director.

ABF: This was when you were on the Board of Scholars?

OG: Yeah; and I think that the important thing is that Giles Constable is somebody who understood that. Giles knew that. Now, whether his solutions were the right ones is another questions, but he understood that there was something different – that you cannot recreate the world of wonderful, sophisticated learning – and cooking. I mean the idea of a bunch of professors cooking for each other is very interesting because all the professors I mentioned who cooked for each other – Friend and Dvornik and Kantorowicz – were all bachelors – and the whole history, which I haven’t thought much about, about the intimacies of people at Dumbarton Oaks – the ones with families, the ones without families. See, Kitzinger was remarkable. He had three children, and one of them stayed in England I believe when he was at Dumbarton Oaks, but maybe two of them, I think, were little children – or only one. Anastos had a son nobody ever saw. Downey had a daughter, I think, who eventually became a professor at UCLA. Underwood had a daughter whom nobody ever saw – they were already grown-up children. They were no longer part of the community. I don’t remember them showing up at Mrs. Bliss’s Christmas party – but I may be wrong. In other words, there is an old myth at Dumbarton Oaks, which is cute to remember, and you can write nice little stories about it, but it has nothing to do with what Dumbarton Oaks could or should be. What it is, it is a fabulous library, and, I suppose, I’m sure it now has all the right equipment for computer work of one kind of another. It probably spends more money, just as we do now here, on all kinds of ways to improve the computerization of the place – and not on secretarial help or research assistants. Because, who needs a research assistant when everything’s on the internet? But, that’s true, you have to know how to use that thing, and half the time, it falls apart [laughter]. But, since Ned Keenan became director, I haven’t been much involved with Dumbarton Oaks. Until then, I was. Thomson I knew quite well. Angeliki Laiou – that’s different. She belongs to – because she represented a very different objective for Dumbarton Oaks than what Thomson had been.

ABF: What was that?

OG: Nationalism.

ABF: One thing, actually, that you said that I was a bit curious about. You talked about your father being a bit critical of rich amateurs, amateur scholars; but, isn’t that how you would also describe the Blisses?

OG: Oh, they were not scholars. They were not trained to scholarship.

ABF: Amateur collectors.

OG: Yeah, amateur collectors; oh, collectors are mostly amateurs. But I think there is something interesting in that there was always a paradox in my father’s opinion of the Blisses because he genuinely liked Mrs. Bliss; he was very fond in a social way of what she represented. She had a kind of charm and she understood intellectual theories – or maybe she acted as though she understood – that I don’t know, but she understood, and she made you feel good. But she never claimed to be a scholar. She was a collector, but I think he was the bigger collector, Mr. Bliss. He was the real collector, but she was a collector too. I mean, that was a completely different attitude – and I suspect my father always thought museums should collect, not people – this is a public activity, not a private activity (which doesn’t work). Was the DO faculty ever dissolved, or they just didn’t replace people?

ABF: Well, they – in the ’70s, basically, there ceased to be a permanent faculty at Dumbarton Oaks.

OG: Yes, well, who was the faculty? Ihor was there, then he moved to Harvard. Was there anybody else?

CW: Mango.

OG: Well, Mango, well, Mango – that was one of the mistakes. I mean, Mango was a great man, but it was a mistake for Ihor to have brought him because they are very close friends and kindred spirits. They are very old friends, but they are separate from everybody else who was there. And, therefore, you create a kind of – two bodies running everything, and both very critical of most people; and that was a mistake, that was the wrong kind of person to have. But then anyway I don’t know that anybody really thought whether Dumbarton Oaks should have a faculty or not? So these guys are gone, or one goes and the other – “we’ll take him to Harvard. Let’s not do anything. Let’s see how it runs.” Was it a thoughtful decision or just it’s easier to not have a faculty – because nobody ever knew. These became the years under Bill Loerke about whom the question had arisen whether he should be adhoc-ed by a Harvard committee or not; and I don’t remember the discussion and decisions that took place. There was already a question as to whether Bill Loerke was a member of the faculty at Harvard or not; and similarly, you ask here why they abolished the position of Director of Byzantine Studies. Now I don’t know why it was abolished. I think it was abolished when Giles became Director.

ABF: Mmm hmm.

OG: Yeah, because I think he thought he could do it. And then he reestablished it – or was it reestablished after him?

ABF: After.

OG: I would imagine so, because this is – I could see very well, Giles would feel, being a medievalist and a scholar and an academic, that he doesn’t need a Director of Studies. But the moment you get somebody who doesn’t get – but, again, Giles is a strong personality with strong connections, who belongs to the striped pants general staff of academia (very complicated system in academia, where you have those people who went through War College to general staff and people who did not go to general staff). And the German military always had striped pants, if you went to general staff school; and Giles, like I, belonged to general staff. We went to all the right places: the right institutions, the right degrees, at the right time, and so forth. If there are no studies, should there be a Director of Studies? I don’t know, I mean, this is something – there is one now?

ABF: Mmm hmm.

OG: Who is it now?

ABF: Alice-Mary Talbot.

OG: Oh, she’s still at DO?

ABF: Yeah, for another year.

OG: For another year. She is very good at it; but I’m not quite sure what the purpose of it is, unless there are indeed – or they have now Junior Fellows, Junior Fellows, that’s right. So they have younger people – so Summer Fellows, that’s right. They have all kinds of groups of people to take care of, so therefore it would make sense to have a Director of Studies. Do they still have concerts?

ABF: Yeah.

CW: Primarily in the winter, I think.

OG: Yeah, in winter, usually. But, this again – the concerts or even the symposia or the lectures were a big social event in Washington, and I remember for the symposium, for instance, automatically, the whole staff of the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery came to the symposium, regardless of the subject, because they had to be seen. Right now, they don’t even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, I’m close to both the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery; I’ve been very much involved with both of these. They don’t even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. They don’t even get invitations any more. Just as Dumbarton Oaks is not invited to their activities. Now, in the Bliss period, the Dumbarton Oaks affairs, whether its concerts or lectures, were a social event in Washington, and you played for a Washington public; and I think this is almost gone now. Maybe they’ll try to – well, it should be reestablished. In a way, this is the kind of thing people like my father thought was silly, but they enjoyed it. It was a real occasion for them to see a certain Washington establishment. This is not the political establishment. This is the establishment of the Georgetown rich, old aristocratic Georgetown families that would meet there for a concert or for a lecture – symposia, usually they didn’t stay very long, because symposia bored them. Also, the nature of publication has changed so much that, is there any use for most of these symposia? I mean, we have them all the time here in the sciences; but, again, the sciences work as a team. I mean, that’s quite different as a way of doing things. But, the other great thing is the social change. A cooking staff disappears when most Fellows started being married, and therefore living in apartments, and not coming – but this is a rather important issue: do you create a social collective, as the Soviets would have called it, or do you create a convenience store, to which you come for whatever you need and then you go home? We have a wonderful library here. The great thing about this library in Princeton is that there’s almost never anybody in it, because it’s so easily accessible that people come at 3 a.m. or whenever it is they can come and work here. But it is a luxury. It is a luxury because all these books, no one – nobody ever touches them. They’re there in case you want it; and here and there you suddenly want it. I think all these institutions of research have a problem. They, as I said, become, either, like the Getty, which just brings younger people and older people for six months to do their thing, that’s one way; or you’re creating something together. That’s what Dumbarton Oaks tried to do, and I don’t think it has been able to do it anymore; but I don’t think we have common questions anymore. But, that, I mean, may be the pessimism of old age. Now, what I suggest, if you don’t mind, we have a very simple lunch. We could do that.

ABF: Sure, thank you very much.

]]> No publisher James N. Carder Art History Mildred Barnes Bliss Byzantine Studies Food Dumbarton Oaks Research Library Fellows Building Oral History Project Archives Ernst Kitzinger 2013-01-23T20:10:00Z Page From the Archives: The Kohana San Book http://www.doaks.org/news/2013-news/from-the-archives-the-kohana-san-book Before her marriage to Robert Woods Bliss in 1908, Mildred Barnes Bliss was a nascent collector of rare books and prints. This book, Kohana San (front and back cover shown below), is preserved in the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and has Mildred Barnes’s bookmark from her country house in Sharon, Connecticut. Twenty-two silk-tied pages with woodblock illustrations on double-folded, mulberry wood-based crepe paper (chirimen) tell in English verse the story of a Geisha of Kobe (Kohana San or “Little Flower”). This is the first edition of the book, published in 1892 by Takejiro Hasegawa, Tokyo. The binding is in the traditional Japanese style known as fukuro-toji (“pouch binding”) where sheets of paper are printed with woodblocks on only one side and then folded in half with the printed side out. The folded sheets are stacked together, and the unit is tied along the spine with two double-hole bindings of silk threads. A colophon in Japanese on the first page gives publication data and identifies the woodblock printer as Komiyo Sojiro. Hasegawa’s books were usually printed in editions of 500.

]]> No publisher Lisa Wainwright House Collection Mildred Barnes Bliss Archives 2013-01-09T20:05:00Z News Item James N. Carder http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/james-n.-carder Oral History Interview with James N. Carder undertaken by Jean-Nicole Saint-Laurent, Elizabeth Gettinger, and Anne Steptoe in the Dumbarton Oaks Guest House on July 15, 2009. At Dumbarton Oaks, James Carder was a Byzantine Studies Junior Fellow (1974–1976) and the Manager of the House Collection (since 1992) and the Archivist (since 1999). JNSL: Today is Wednesday, July 15, 2009. My name is Jean-Nicole Saint-Laurent.

EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.

AS: And Anne Steptoe.

JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?

EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?

JNC: Yes, I was.

EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.

JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?

JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen’s home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!

JNSL: What did you dress up like?

JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn’t particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.

AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?

JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early ‘70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.

EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?

JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.

AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?

JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the “Age of Spirituality” exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.

AS: How often did those occur?

JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.

JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?

JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.

JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?

JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!

EG: When was that?

JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in ’92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, “I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off.” And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, “Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?” And I said, “Yes.” So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.

EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?

JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.

AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?

JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn’t been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it’s very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies

JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?

JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term “ivory tower,” in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.

EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?

JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, “I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?,” there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses’ gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don’t think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.

AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?

JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses’– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s’ correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say “Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal,” and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, “Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel,” and she said, “Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what.” And I said, “You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called “master chronology,” that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?

JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.

EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?

JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, “The Collector's Microbe,” where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected  Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this “home of the humanities,” the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn’t a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses’ initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.

JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?

JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.

AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?

JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.

JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?

JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. The artist who did that sculpture was Francis Sedgwick. A cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter, and she still had it. So, after much convincing and effort, the daughter agreed to make a new mold from her sculpture from which our Pan was recast. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.

EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?

JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.

EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?

JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.

EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?

JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled “Collector's Microbe,” which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection “singular,” and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.

EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?

JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.

JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?

JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.

JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.

JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it’s all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.

EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate ‘til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?

JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century  with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners’ court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?

EG: Academically.

JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm “in-house.” I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.

AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?

JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.

EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?

JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.

JNSL: Thank you very much.

JNC: Thank you very much.

JNSL: It's been wonderful.

]]> No publisher James N. Carder Main House Mildred Barnes Bliss Byzantine Studies Dumbarton Oaks Museum Museum Lovers' Lane Pool Gardener's Cottage Archives Fountain Terrace Byzantine Byzantine Gallery Pre-Columbian Studies Robert Woods Bliss Fellows Building Byzantine Collection Royall Tyler Ernst Kitzinger Bliss Gallery Music Room Junior Fellow Special Exhibition Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection Acquisition Art History Pre-Columbian Collection House Collection Oral History Project 2012-12-11T21:20:00Z Page Caroline Backlund http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/caroline-backlund Oral History Interview with Caroline Backlund undertaken by Anne Steptoe, Elizabeth Gettinger, and Jean-Nicole Saint-Laurent at the Dumbarton Oaks Guest House on July 14, 2009. At Dumbarton Oaks, Caroline Backlund was Assistant Librarian between 1968 and 1972 INT: I am Jean-Nicole Saint-Laurent and I’m here at the Dumbarton Oaks Guest House on July 14th, 2009 with Anne Steptoe and Elizabeth Gettinger to interview Caroline Backlund about her experiences at Dumbarton Oaks. Thank you very much for joining us.

CB: You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

INT: Can you tell us a little bit about your work as a librarian and how you came to work at Dumbarton Oaks?

CB: I was a late person to go into library work because I went overseas for three years during World War II, and before that I tutored children on a 200,000 acre cattle ranch in New Mexico because I wasn't old enough to be accepted overseas through the Red Cross. So, when I came back from the Red Cross, I got married to the New York Times correspondent in Chicago and we lived there for three years, and I took some additional courses at the University of Illinois, Chicago campus, in art history because I'd taken really little – I'd taken mostly English. I went to Smith College. I graduated in 1942 – the Dark Ages. Betty Friedan – did you ever hear of The Feminine Mystique? Did you ever hear about that? Well, she was in my class. So that was sort of the early days – still there were no jobs for women of any importance at that point. Anyway, so I was overseas, then when I came back I got married, and then my husband, after three years – he'd just been appointed to a big job in Washington, died of lung cancer. So then I went to New York to start over again, and I worked at LIFE magazine in the library there, in the archives in the great days – this was before television, mind you, so it was wonderful. So then I left, three editors at LIFE went over to American Heritage and founded the magazine and I'd had no library training but I became the head of the library and the photo archives. And so, I learned from my friend who was at the Metropolitan and at the New York Public Library and so I was there for ten years and then married again and had a child at 42 and I decided that maybe I should get a library degree. So while I was working full time and pregnant I got my library degree at Columbia and I had no sooner gotten it when my husband got a job working in the Cultural Affairs Department of the State Department. So, we came to Washington and rented this house down the street, and our son was then four years old and in nursery school up at Beauvoir, which is up at St. Albans school, and there was a reception for parents or something and I remember very well sitting on the lawn and there was Ihor Ševčenko, who you probably have heard a good deal about, a great, great scholar, but a rather off-beat man. I don't know how many wives he'd had by then, but he later had acquired at least two or three afterward, two anyway. Anyway, we were chatting because his daughter was in Nicholas’s class and he said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Well I don't do anything. I'm a librarian and I've got to start looking for a job.” And he said, “Oh, I'm at Dumbarton Oaks, we need a librarian. Come down for an interview.” This is the way things went in those days. Now, that was not very professional. However, I did go down. I really shouldn't have been hired because to be effective in this library you have to have knowledge of the languages and I have a great curiosity and I learned an enormous amount. I was here for five years and I went to all the lectures, I went to the symposiums. I took a wonderful trip to Europe, eastern Turkey, I'll tell you about later. I really worked hard, too. And I had French, but I really didn't have any of the other six or seven languages that I needed. I was trying hard to think what I did for those five years, which was a little bit of everything.

INT: What was it like working at Dumbarton Oaks at that time?

CB: This was still in the early days after World War II and, of course, Byzantine archaeology studies, travel had all stopped, so there was this marvelous opportunity, suddenly there was this great interest and, of course, many of the scholars that you know about had come from Europe and were – many of them were either at Harvard or Princeton or scattered around. And, of course, Byzantine studies really got their start at Princeton with the Byzantine Institute which was later combined with Dumbarton Oaks. But, so the years that I was here was, not many years afterward all these scholars either, like Ševčenko, went to Harvard or they went to Oxford or somewhere, but many of them died. And it was really an enormous heyday and there was money for grants and they were working on churches in Yugoslavia, in Greece, and certainly in Constantinople, and not yet in the Sinai, that came later. So, it was a very exciting time and I really don't know how, as they say, there was a fair collection, a good collection of books, but obviously it needed a great deal of work and there were people there doing things, like Mrs. Allen, you know she did the BZ Index, which is now – I guess, the kind of thing isn't needed any more, because it's all available online, I understand. I always wondered about the effectiveness of that, but that was her project, and she was an extraordinary woman. There were a lot of foreign-born people there and many of them had, sort of, different approaches, good approaches, but she was very intellectual, very proud, and I think she came from a very fine family that had seen better days in Yugoslavia. And she was quite demanding on the library because she kept requesting hundreds of books from the Library of Congress. Then there was the Index of Christian Art which, you know, I guess is at Princeton now, isn't it? You know what it is? It's an iconographic index of all the images prior to – well, through the Middle Ages, and of course Byzantium – so, if you wanted to look up a given saint or an image of anything, you presumably could find it, and there would be a card and there would be research information on it. Well, for scholars it was absolutely terrific. Now there's something – Iconoclass, you know about that? – which I know from the National Gallery of Art where I was later – it was marvelous, but anyway. That was sort of hidden away and impossible to get to and the card file was so difficult to use that you couldn’t use it yourself, there had to be a staff person to help you find the cards because it was complicated.

INT: This was run by Mrs. Aston?

CB: What?

INT: Mrs. Aston? She was in charge of this?

CB: Yes, Joan Aston. And, of course, she was a lovely person, she had absolutely no background in cataloging or scholarship. She wasn't even a scholar. I mean, she knew Classics, but – so, there were these various auxiliary things around that were demanding of the library but weren't really our responsibility. Now, I was looking at one of these programs that I had, this was from ‘71 and it listed three staff members besides Merlin and myself, and I think maybe they were, I don't know, one of them maybe retrieving books and the other was cataloging. Cataloging was always a problem because they could never get people with the proper language and most scholars who were skilled in that couldn't – didn't want to work as a librarian, they wanted to work as a scholar, but there were very few jobs, if any. So, it was always difficult to get people and I could never understand why they, in the very beginning, they didn't change their classification system to coincide with Harvard’s. And the issue kept coming up but it was before, of course, the age of computers, and it really would have been awkward and there wasn't enough push to do it, but it was always frustrating and scholars complained a lot about it because they'd be used to the classification numbers, say LC, which would have been wherever else they were. So, that was always a problem. As I say, I'm not absolutely sure what I did. I guess I just filled in for all kinds of things, and I did shelving and reference to the extent that I could and helped with processing new material that came in and out and, you know, not very elevating work for a professional librarian, but I really wasn't able to do it. And, of course, I may be wrong, and if you're talking to Merlin, he will explain it, but my impression was that he had studied with Ihor Ševčenko, I have a feeling it was at Columbia, but I could be wrong, but if not it was at Harvard, but I think it was at Columbia, and Ihor persuaded Merlin to come here to be the librarian. And whether he had a library background or not, I don't know. And, if I may say, it didn't seem to me that he did, but I could be wrong. But we didn't work closely together and he was, it was a rather loosely organized institution in those days. The Director, this was before Mr. Tyler came. Now, Mr. Tyler was, he was – Edith Wharton was his godmother, as was Mrs. Bliss I think, and he was married to, I think, a Belgian countess or something. Anyway, she had a chateau in Belgium. But he was a scholar and a gentleman and very strict. Well, the previous director when I was here was Mr. Thacher and he had been, I think he was a godson of Mrs. Bliss or something, he was a wealthy, single, middle-aged man and he lived right around the corner about the third house down on 31st Street on the right – one of those lovely houses. He was gay and there were a lot of gays around and there was a lot of gossip, so I'll just put it that way. So, I don't know, it seemed a strange place to me and, of course, I remember I'd take telephone calls about orders of wine, cases of wine, that were going to be delivered to certain staff members whom I shall not name. But I thought that was sort of unprofessional. Anyway, this – there didn't seem to be very tight control, and I know that Mr. Tyler tried a lot to improve it. And, of course, you know, in that beautiful house – and people have offices in it now – there was much more freedom than there is now, and, of course, however, we had tea down in the drawing room. And it was hard to, sort of, enforce it in a way, because it was a house not a museum, really. And they, in those days, they closed the gardens in the summer, and the pool was open to the staff so that was another – I mean, it was a different kind of place, and I was absolutely enthralled. I knew nothing about Byzantium until I came, and I learned so much. And I went to all the lectures and I went to the symposiums and struggled through things I didn't understand. And I made a lot of close friends with scholars and tried to help them to the extent that I could, but how good the library seemed to the scholars I don't know. They wouldn’t have said anything to me.

INT: In those days, the library was in the main house, right?

CB: This was up – the librarian’s office – when you're going up the head of the stairs, it's right straight ahead. It was Mrs. Bliss's bedroom, and in that corner that juts out – looks out over the garden – that L was the cataloger's and the storage and so forth. Of course, they were very short of storage space, shelf space, and, you know, a lot of the oversized books and the rare books were in the basement and it was difficult to get to them. I think it must have been somewhat of a challenge. On the other hand, it was such an extraordinary opportunity for people to come here that I think they may have forgiven some of that. But it didn't seem terribly professional to me, if I may say without criticizing anybody. Now, as for the acquisitions, of course, Seka Allen used to – she had Serb, Croatian, Russian, German, French – I don't know what else. But she would pick out a lot of the books herself and recommend them and those were usually accepted, and then, of course, the scholars would make recommendations and there were certain lists that the library would go through. How systematic this was, I never really could tell. But when Irene – and then I left, and then Irene – and Merlin left, and why, I don't know anything about that, maybe he just wanted to leave, I have no idea, but it didn't seem to me he was old enough, but he left. And when Irene came in – you will find her – you really must be sure to talk to her because there were quite a few changes. And again, she had this European background and I think they don't learn organization, they don't study organization the way we do here, it's more emphasis on scholarship, which, of course, is fabulous. And she has a Ph.D., and I have nothing but the greatest admiration for the way she acquired books. She read every single – in all languages – of the lists and backs of various Classical journals or archaeological journals or anything that came along, and she pored over them and really studied to be sure. So, there must have been a huge increase in the addition to the library when she was here. I'm sure that it became far, far more useful. Of course, there was also at that time a sort of a post-euphoria with publishing, our publishing, it was far more available suddenly, coming from both abroad and America. But it was not like that when I was here. It was sort of a sleepy place, and how systematic the acquisitions were, I don't know.

INT: Was there any sense of the mission for acquisitions or any sort of rubric?

CB: Well, I never saw any guidelines of any kind whatsoever. Now, the fact that they hired, let's see – Merlin had a Classical language background – I think that's what he studied – Latin and Greek or something, I'm not certain. He certainly wasn't a Byzantinist, and whether he had had a library degree, I really don't know. But, you see, when you have a library in an institution where there are no other libraries – now I know this from the National Gallery of Art which, of course, is a huge place and very, very professional. On the other hand, the people who run the National Gallery – the executives – do not know anything about library needs or administration. Now, if you were, say, at the University of Indiana, there are ten or twelve libraries, or fifteen, or thirty or whatever, so there's a huge group of professional people. So, if you you're hiring people, you have expertise from other departments – it could be a cataloging or acquisitions person or inter-library loan or whatever. But, if when you have a separate institution, I knew that when we had – when I went I was a little ragtag or rusty here because I really didn't think I belonged here. I saw in the paper that the National Gallery was going to open this big study center, which is in the East Building. And they were looking for a director of the study center and a chief librarian. Well, and they were going to greatly expand the library. Well, I rushed down the next day, practically, and it turned out that the man they were interviewing whom they had just hired, on the spot hired me. But of course you can't do that in the government. It took me weeks before, you know. But he had – let's say, I hope he had – the good judgment to hire me because he was a professional. But when he left to go to the Getty, the National Gallery did not go to the Library of Congress or the Portrait Gallery and say, “We'd like one of your top librarians to be on our advisory committee to help us pick a new person,” because it's a big, big job. They just did it themselves. The way they did it was unbelievably awful. I mean, people were not – well I'm not going into the details, but the end result turned out to be awful. So this is what happens even in a big institution or a small one because the people who are hired who are administrators cannot be expected to know the ins and outs of what's needed in libraries, which is a little arcane, maybe. And, you know, I think now with the computer the walls are, obviously, are breaking down in many cases. The people using computers now – scholars and the librarians – are far more on the same wavelength. At the National Gallery, for instance, the curators had their own files and they wouldn't share them with anybody because they said, “Well, we're working on them; they're not perfect,” but, of course, they're never going to be perfect. So, they kept to themselves and they, of course, turned their nose up, naturally, at the library, even people with Ph.D.s and so forth. Well now, you see, we're all on the same database and, because libraries have been able now, if they're indexing their archives and their rare books – things that were not readily accessible are now – well, people are in awe of what they can get. We don't have to elaborate on that, but it's just overwhelming. And so, here, it isn't surprising, there was obviously – Mr. Tyler certainly didn't know anything about libraries and they, to my knowledge, they didn't ask anyone to come from the Fogg to advise. There was always quite a bit of tension because Harvard kept wanting to take over, and they kept resisting here and, of course, there was a lot of duplication of material, but the advantage of a library like this is that a scholar, whether he's in archaeology, or music, or history, or coins, or maps, or whatever – it's all here within one period, and that's extraordinary. But how the personnel office hired people for the library, I don't know. I don't think I really should have been hired but I was. So...

INT: Was there talk of integrating some of the Dumbarton Oaks Library collection with Widener Library?

CB: No. Now, that was another thing. Of course, in fact, when Betty –

INT: Benson?

CB: Yes, who was wonderful at the Pre-Columbian library, and she came pretty much when I came or a little before – that was absolutely totally separate. It never occurred to anyone that a person could be over all of them, so they ran their library absolutely totally separate. In fact, I never even went into it, if you can believe that in all that time. Now the Garden Library also, of course, that had another history and Mrs. Bliss, of course, had wanted to have a complete history of early garden architecture and design and that was absolutely totally separate. And the scholars there often were away for a year and weren't there very long and we never even knew them or saw them. So, it was absolutely separate and there wasn't the facility to combine them if they had wanted to. There were terrible problems with space and they were, you know – the rare books downstairs – they said they were too close to where there might be a flood and there were all kinds of problems. So, that was never contemplated at that point. You know, it was all quite new, in fact, it was very new and it's interesting now so many of the scholars that were there – here – when I was here, now they're out at prestigious jobs around the country and in Europe and, of course, there were very few places where you could study Byzantine studies in the United States. And so this had a really important role, really important role, and their publications are extraordinary, a bedrock of the scholarship of Byzantium.

INT: Did you work particularly closely with any of the other professors you mentioned?

CB: Well, I was going to say, not terribly, because, first of all, you know, like Father Dvornik who was so wonderful, he was a Slavic expert and he was reading and working in languages that most people didn't know, and he was just in his own world. A lot of them were very much in their own world and Byzantine studies was so specialized and you couldn't really – you had to have majored in Latin and Greek in high school and then moved on. I don't know how you would have done that, but there were very few people who ever did that and Ševčenko's – I don't know which wife she was – but she was here – Nancy, Nancy Ševčenko. And she went to Brearley in New York, which is one of the best private day schools where they all had four years of Latin, and I think that Alice Mary may have gone there too, I'm not certain. But there were very few schools where Classical studies for four years were even available in the United States, so when people got all these degrees, you know, they were in another world because they were. But the languages are absolutely essential. If you didn't know the languages and a book was recommended, say in one of the French journals, you just take their word. Now, Irene wouldn't do that, and I would go to her office and it was piled – she looked at every single book that came in, at all the monographic series, there's so many of them, which Europe does so many of – they're individual series that come out. She pored over them and examined the bibliographies and she knew what was missing and lacking. What she found when she got here, I don't know.

INT: A lot of people have described to us the way that the library began as a very broad collection with a lot of Classical Greek and Roman works that aren’t Byzantine and eventually narrowed, did you find that when you were here?

CB: Well, you see, when you think how it began, it was the Blisses' library, and obviously, although they were highly, incredibly elegant, educated people – I'm sure, for instance – well certainly Arabic studies was outside, nobody studied, very few people studied Arabic. And certainly, I think, Slavic languages were not their forte, and also how much was forthcoming in those during the World Wars. You have to remember, during the World War II years probably nothing was done, and it took a while for it to get going again and there was a lot of animosity between these countries and these people who came. A lot of these scholars, they'd lost their homes and their reputations and their universities and, you know, collaboration was not something that just popped up, and I'm sort of talking off the top of my head, but this is what I think. It took a while, you see, for the collection to get richer. It took more knowledge that people in the library didn't have. It was maybe that there wasn't much being published. Now, I'm working right now as a volunteer in the Textile Museum, and they're in dire straits and let their director go – he'd been the Islamic curator at the Met, but he was an excellent scholar but not a good administrator. Well they're now downsizing, they've fired the librarian – she'd been there too long and was an old-fashioned librarian, of course. I volunteered there right after I left here, or after I left the Gallery and I couldn't stay there because I thought it was so unprofessional but there was no one on the staff that were textile scholars. They knew the library needed to be improved, but they didn't quite know how to go about it, and it's hard to fire a long time librarian or staff person – it isn't something you just do casually. Anyway, one of the things that they found and are finding, because they are now shelf-listing volume by volume, is that the collection had gotten diverse and the librarian was very strong on crafts, so she had a lot of how-to-do books. But, of course, they don't belong there at all, and there's an enormous amount of exchange now. How systematic the exchange program at Dumbarton Oaks is now – it is very probably very well organized if Irene did it – I don't know. But with scholarly libraries, exhibition catalogs and museum collection catalogs and scholarly monographs from museums are their major source because really scholarly material does not go into the average bookstore – most of them. So, it is very, very important that the librarian is up on this and that. Anyway, I'll finish in a minute, but this is now going on at the Textile Museum, and it's interesting because the staff is getting endless duplicates, and they would get things on exchange that had nothing to do with textiles. Well, just because it came from, say, the Hermitage you don't keep it if it has nothing on textiles. This is probably common – it's easier to keep things than to be tough about not keeping. Now, Dumbarton Oaks, you see, had such a regular routine, often it was late. There were terrible complaints about how long it took to get the annual reports out – and the various scholarly publications, that was another sore point. See, there were all these little, kind of, empires and the two ladies who were there, who ran it, nobody could touch them. There was a lot of tension, the scholars used to have a fit about that, I know. But anyway, at least when they came out – you see, I'm sure I never saw the list, I didn't have anything to do with that, and how well, if there was any coordination between the library and the exchange list, I'd be surprised. And, of course, they were expensive books. But actually it's very, very important that the library maintain a list of exchange that they know which institutions would be useful to them, and the Textile Museum is very, very strong in material from the most obscure places in Asia, for instance, or Bhutan, or Malaysia – heavens knows – that obviously are not going to see the light of day otherwise. So, that is something that when you're talking to Merlin, he may know all about this, but I never was even apprised of it. There was no sharing of information – I would say, not much.

INT: So there wasn't much interaction with the Dumbarton Oaks Library and other libraries in the area?

CB: Well, I'm just saying first with the publications department because, of course, to exchange you've got to send and get back and, of course, that involves budget but it isn't always that you can get everything you want, but there should be coordination on that part. As for cooperating with any libraries in the Washington area, it didn't exist, at least during my era. Now, again at the Textile Museum, this librarian never cooperated, never looked outside the window. Now, today of course, with online databases and everything, obviously this is all changing and libraries can be greatly enriched by access to other collections and shared information and so forth. So – but at the National Gallery, of course, they've got a huge staff, they have someone who does nothing but inter-library loans. He's a real character. He's been there now about 35 years, and he goes to the Library of Congress twice a week and people – scholars, you see, come from all over the world, so often they're doing, say, architecture in Japan. Well, of course, this has nothing to do with the National Gallery's collection. So, of course, we borrow it for them. So, if we can't get it at the Library of Congress – and they have incredible resources – we borrow it elsewhere. The European scholars come here – they cannot believe the efficiency of the American library system, because if you go to European libraries you'd be lucky to borrow a book or even get one off a shelf, right? While I was there we would loan books to South Africa, to Australia. Isn't it amazing – never once did we not get a book back. Now, of course, you see, a person can't do it, it has to be institution to institution. But I feel that – and here certainly – there are extraordinary resources in the various religious and university libraries here and the Library of Congress, and it's a huge, it's a big job to do this. But the library should, the scholars should be made aware that they – first of all, you've got to help them find the book, and a lot of scholars don't know much about library procedures – how you can find things in the National Union Catalog or whatever it is. The library has a responsibility to supply, to help the scholars find the books they need, whether they're here or not. And no library can have all the books, nor should they, and maybe they're rare or they're out of print in any event, so this is a very important aspect. I can't say that I was I aware that that was going on. Now, I could be wrong. I know that Seka Allen got loads of books. She knew how to work the system; she knew how to get people to wait on her, let's put it that way. But I mean to what extent it's used here, I really don't know. Now, I know everything has changed so, and has gotten so much more professional and, of course, now they have, they're on the same system with Harvard – is that right? – which is wonderful. Now, how the library works today, I don't know. I've been very active in the Art Library Society of North America – you can call a library from any place in the world and say you're a member and they get you something. So, I did know what's her name – who's the librarian here? She came – what's her name?

INT: Sheila Klos?

CB: Sheila. But I have never laid eyes on her since and neither has anyone else in our library group, she never comes to any of the professional meetings, and I've never seen her at any of the functions. I'm told she never comes to any of the functions. Now, she may systematically feel that isn't her job, and that may well be that it isn't her job. But, on the other hand, this is still a rather small place and getting to know scholars and some of them are shy about asking help. Anyway, I had one little tour after, a couple years ago, a symposium – I had a tour of the new building, and I went along after getting through security, which took me hours, and then had everything in front of me, and in the middle of the guide showing us around someone said “Is there a Mrs. Backlund here?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “You took the key to your locker.” I said, “Aren't I supposed to keep the key?” “No, you have to return the key.” It was just funny. In any event, Sheila wasn't around at all – I never even laid eyes on her. Her assistant was there, and I said, innocently, “Where is the reference area?” “Oh,” she said, “this is a post-doctoral center, we don't need a reference area.” Okay. I was very disappointed in the new building – I think it's cold and impersonal, and I can't imagine it not having an escalator. It's terrible to go – to just have that elevator to go down, and there should be photocopying machines on every floor. I don't know, maybe some of these things have changed, but it seemed terribly dark and unfriendly. I was very disappointed. I think the reading room is lovely looking now, but that was the only part I really liked, and I've heard other people share this view. But to what extent the librarian should be out and about is something else again. I have my own views on that, but, of course, at the National Gallery, I was head of reader services. I was there for twenty-five years after I left here – twenty-four years. And our job was to help and that was open to scholars and visiting senior people and an informed public but not high school students or anything. And we did an enormous amount of helping people find things, and some of the worst people in terms of understanding resources were the scholars at the gallery – they get their PhDs in Rembrandt or something and they would keep up on all the Rembrandt literature, but they knew nothing about these wonderful databases that were out there that they could be accessing. It was really kind of shocking. Gradually, you see so many of the scholars are coming along now – all are very sophisticated because they've been there. But in the beginning it was really – so they demand, you know – they know more than some of the scholars about how to find things. Well it's not easy to keep up with it.

INT: Did you get the sense when you were at the National Gallery that there was a lot of interaction between Dumbarton Oaks and the National Gallery, generally?

CB: I think Dumbarton Oaks has a reputation at being exclusive and snooty, and I think that's ridiculous, it shouldn't be. Now, in the first place – the number, even if you were more open about it – how many people are going to be asking for obscure Byzantine material, I mean really? So, on the other hand, there's a very good inter-library loan department there because, of course, they're very active. They have, you see, visiting scholars, about fourteen a year who were there, and they all have to be hired, they all have to be publishing or have some project, so many of them come, you see, with a vast need to do research. If there was something on Byzantium that they needed, I'm sure, they would call here and they would get good service, I'm sure of that. But it doesn't automatically come to mind. Occasionally I think, in fact, I've met a couple people who have come up here and been given privileges in the reading room or something, I don't know. I can't believe that it isn't done. It would be appalling if it weren't, because, after all, as we all know, in these scholarly libraries there are tons of books that don't get looked at year in and year out. You build them up because you want rarer things and they meet special needs, but they should – but is this library online, is it on the Internet?

INT: Yes, it's integrated with the Harvard catalog.

CB: It's part of the Harvard catalog? – well, they probably get requests now, you see, I would hope they do. That's one of the wonderful things, you see; you don't have to be friendly, you just have to have the internet. That's really marvelous, isn't it? I don't know how big a staff they have and I don't even know where they sit, they're back there in some remote place, but I have a friend in the building I live in who's the chief volunteer docent for the gardens and museum, so I hear about things from her, and well, what's going on in sort of a roundabout way. Of course, she doesn't know anything much about the library, which never seems to emerge to anybody. And I go to a lot of the receptions, and I never see a soul from the library, not a soul, so I don't know.

INT: Did you ever meet Mrs. Bliss? Was she here?

CB: Well, she came to tea twice before, when I first came, and she was very frail, and then she never came again. But it was fairly normal, I mean, it was a weird place because there were an awful lot of off-beat people in those days. The Byzantinists were much more off-beat than they are now. No one had even heard of Byzantium and it just had been a relaxed kind of place. So, it was nice to be here on the grounds. They were friendly, but you can't run a place like that anymore, and that's understandable. As for my own personal experience – I mean, it was the most marvelous thing that could have ever happened because I learned so much when I was here. It was just like a graduate or postgraduate course, and I kept reading and studying and listening to these lectures, you know, and it was all new to me and I went on one perfectly marvelous trip that one of the scholars who came from Birmingham in England – where there's quite a large Byzantine center in England – and he was here, he was working. One of his books is on the history of the Pontic Alps which is in Anatolia right along the far, far remote eastern Turkey border which is next to Armenia and Iraq, right out there and, well, just above Iraq and Iran. And I went on this Byzantine trip. I could tell you – I could spend a week telling you how marvelous it was, but it really was extraordinary. There were mostly Byzantinists who were on the trip. It was sponsored in England, so they were English mostly, and that made it even more interesting, and after that I went to the International Byzantine Symposium which they used to have every five years. This was in Bucharest, just a few years before the president was murdered, you know, with his wife and, in fact, I threw out an invitation I had from him to go to a reception. So, this got me interested in that part of the world. So then, when I came back I joined the Textile Museum. I've been on four trips with them. I've been to Turkey twice, Morocco, Tunisia, and then I went on this archaeological expedition. So, that's what it did for me, not what it did for Dumbarton Oaks, and of course I made great friends and my job was very different. Of course, when I would go to the National Gallery, and it's very structured in your position description and what you did. I don't remember ever having a position description, I don't think they had them in those days, I'm sure they didn't, but I don't know.

INT: How many other people worked in the library at the same time as you?

CB: Well, I thought, if you wanted to copy any of these. This, I found was '71-'72, this one was, I don't know, it was just an announcement of the staff, and you might like to Xerox this, because this was '68-'69 and at the back here it lists the staff, and I looked down here and I think there were three: there's Merlin's name and my name, and then I think three others, but they were just staff, so they could have been shelvers or something, I don't know, and then I had this one from '71-'72 and again it lists staff, so I think you might want it. And then I – oh here, this was a symposium, I've been almost every year, I hardly missed one, I must say, it's sometimes a little hard for me, the acoustics in that Music Room are awful and as someone said when they redid it, you know, renovations, they did nothing to improve the acoustics. It's almost – there's nothing they can do about it. I sit in the front row and, you know, often people are speaking with foreign accents, but you see a lot of the scholars. And I know one thing that Irene had said, that in the later years, the top scholars had already come here so then they were getting a different group of scholars, mainly from Eastern Europe, many from Greece, Turkey, other countries, and their backgrounds were post-World War II in countries that had suffered greatly and the whole level of scholarship was different. There was just a different kind of person, you understand what I mean? So these people needed a lot of help in finding material, whether the library is helpful about that or not I don't know, you see in a way it's sort of fortunate that they're stuck away, I mean, usually in the library, even in a big university library, there's an open place where someone sits and people are intimidated, even all these scholars, especially if they've come from another country and their English isn't all that good. That's what disappointed me about this library. Who designed it, I know they changed design about four times because of problems with the historical requirements, but it doesn't impress one as a very friendly place when you walk in, frankly, just the way it's designed, I can't imagine. I guess that gets back to the point of how much communication there is, I have no idea. This particular symposium was in '73. You can copy this if you'd like. These might be nice for the archives of the library if they aren't in there, they may be, and it's just that this is a symposium about Art, Letters, and Society in the Byzantine Provinces under the direction of Professor Ihor Ševčenko. A lot of these interest me, you see, I've been to a lot of these countries now and I would love to have access to reading these. I feel apprehensive of asking to use the library here, it is not friendly at all, and I'm not sure they'd even particularly want me to come. I don't know. I haven't done it because I don't wish to impose myself and cause them extra work and so forth. Well, and you see there's no sort of easy open place for visiting scholars, or say, someone who just comes for a few days, and they don't want to sit in the middle of the periodical room, there ought to be some kind of a center, in which someone could sit, say an assistant librarian, who would be private enough so that she can do her work, but also can be available. And then the visiting scholar for a day or two can ask because it's not easy to find things. I find now that I'm out of the library and I'm looking for things and I think, I can't imagine, I'm somewhat off put because I don't know the latest sources and I think that when I was at the National Gallery, and people asked me all kinds of questions, that I didn't really know the answers to, so I would take them to the different sources. And say we would be looking for a printmaker in say the 1600s and then I'd find that the book included everything but prints. See this is how you learn your craft, you learn it by helping people. The other day I was at Whole Foods grocery store – this was really last week. A woman shouted my name and came across, I swear I'd never laid eyes on her and she said, “I can't believe I've seen you. Don't you remember when I came and I was getting my doctorate and I didn't know any of the materials and you just opened up the resources to me?” So she said, “ I never forgot you!” You know, that makes you feel good. So, I know a lot of librarians are supposed to be shy and backward and maybe a lot of them are and they don't have this kind of attitude, but it made my job every day just thrilling, and I know that people now at the National Gallery at the reference desk, they knock themselves out for people and of course the fact that there's so many sources doesn't mean that they don't need help because people don't use them adequately. I mean, there's so much more to the resources than just finding one entry and they don't know about linkage and all those things. I think if I were back there now I'd go mad. Anyway...

INT: Shall we wrap up, then, I guess?

INT: Thank you.

CB: I don't know whether this is of any interest to you, this is just my Curriculum, it will save you from making any notes and so forth. Anyway…

INT: Well, we just have a few minutes left on our tape, so I wonder if you might, in closing, talk a little bit about whether there was a sense of the Blisses' legacy in the library?

CB: A sense of what?

INT: Mr. and Mrs. Bliss's legacy in the library, because they're known as great collectors of art objects, but they also – the library began as their library.

CB: Yes, but you see, Joan Aston who was a frail, lovely person, she was very English and she came over from England, I think, and she worked in the British Embassy and I think she was one of those lovely ladies that was hired, but she wasn't really a professional. She had Greek, but then she was a friend of Mr. Thacher's – met him at some embassy thing – and so they hired her. She really had no professional background, but she could translate and she was very good at what she did, but she was very fragile. Now, she was, at one point, in charge of all the objects in the museum, that isn't in her title, but, I was reading her obituary the other day. So that things need reupholstered or if the pictures weren't hung straight – of course there was no real painting, they didn't do any renovating of major things but minor – there were all these things that had to be done. She was in charge of that, so the library had no information about any objects in the house at all and where they were I don't know. Now, Mr. – what's his name? – the former director, Tyler, he was in the room that's now just on the way to the Orangery? I don't know what that room is now. What is it?

INT: It's the Study.

CB: Because during the symposium it was empty, we just walked through it, but that was his office, and of course there were books from floor to ceiling there. They were books we never accessed, and I think there were books in the room where we had tea at the end, the – what do you call it – the scholar's lounge or whatever?

INT: The Founders Room?

CB: Is that what it's called?

INT: I'm not sure.

CB: Well at the end, on the first floor, underneath the stairway that goes up, that long room in there, that's where we had tea and I don't know what it's used for now, maybe –

INT: I think it may actually have been divided into offices, as well.

CB: No it is not, it is one, it is not open. I was there during the conference. It was raining so we were eating in there. Well, there are bookcases in there too. And the two lounges opposite the front door which have little French furniture and sofas, have you been in those at all? They had books in them, but those were the Blisses' libraries – they hadn't been out of it terribly long, it had nothing to do with the library, we had nothing whatever to do with anything about archival information. Now, if it was there it's news to me. Now, Seka Allen, I mean, Irene Vaslef would certainly tell you that. When I go home, I have your telephone number but give it to me again. I will give you her telephone number and address and I'm sure she'd, she's a vigorous lady, as you'll see. There were quite a bit of prima donnas around, many of them were, not quite middle aged but not quite young, women from Europe who'd been forced to come to this country and obviously they were people of great education, maybe. They were quite demanding. They didn't come in the way the rest of us had – Americans – worked our way, so it was a special kind of place, and there certainly wasn't much coordination between any of the departments that I am aware of.

INT: Well, thank you for speaking with us today, this was really wonderful.

CB: Does any of this help you at all?

INT: Oh yeah, very helpful.

INT: Absolutely, yes.

CB: You see, I was only here for five years, and then it certainly became much, much better when Irene came, vastly. Now, what Merlin will have to say I can't imagine. I won't comment. But it was just a wonderful place to be.

]]> No publisher James N. Carder Rare Book Collection Byzantine Studies Dumbarton Oaks Research Library Oral History Project Archives 2012-12-05T19:55:00Z Page Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/ricardo-agurcia-fasquelle Oral History Interview with Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle undertaken by Alyce de Carteret at the Guest House, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, on January 11, 2011. At Dumbarton Oaks, Ricardo Agurcia was a Fellow (1996–1997) in the Pre-Columbian Studies Program, and he will return as a Fellow in the spring of 2013. AdC: It is January 11, 2011. I am Alyce de Carteret and I have the pleasure of interviewing Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle today, here in the Guest House at Dumbarton Oaks. Dr. Agurcia is currently the Vice President of the Copán Association and the Executive Director and was formerly a Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies here at Dumbarton Oaks. Thanks for joining us today.

RAF: My pleasure.

AdC: So just to begin, how did you first come to know about Dumbarton Oaks and what were your initial impressions of the institution?

RAF: I think my first coming to know of Dumbarton Oaks had to the do with the publication series and the books and obviously while I was being trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist they were a very valuable resource. And then of course, the grants program was being circulated and went around to the various universities, and that’s how I came to know of Dumbarton Oaks and what it was doing – its fellowships program in particular. And to tell you the truth it seemed like something that should exist but I didn’t believe would exist. It’s a just wonderful institution, just a wonderful institution.

AdC: Now were there any publications in particular that you thought were really excellent?

RAF: You know I would say that about – mostly I was focusing on the series on Pre-Columbian Studies, but I think every one of the publications was just of the finest quality. Not just in terms of the binding, the paper, the quality of the publication, but the subjects that were picked and the information that was out was tremendously valuable. I mean those that were published about Central Mexico or those that were coming out about the Maya. Just excellent publications, you know?

AdC: Now something I hear about those early publications was that they actually had the transcriptions of the entire meetings at the end of them. Was that something that you had in school as well and in reading those early publications?

RAF: Well, I was – it was more the focus works on themes like warfare, human sacrifice, and things like that and then the ones that got put out but later too about Maya deities and things like that, that were more the focused monographs rather than the reports of meetings, per se.

AdC: And what was the grant program that you mentioned?

RAF: The fellowships, basically.

AdC: Oh, the fellowships. And how did you come to hear about those fellowships and then become a Fellow?

RAF: It really was because we’d been working at Copán for quite a few years with both Bill Fash and Bob Sharer and both of them actually happened to be at that time on the board of Dumbarton Oaks and they actually encouraged me because it was a stage where we’d been dong a lot of excavation, so I had a lot of raw data and information in my hands but I hadn’t sat down to write anything. So, you know, where are you going to go to have the space and the time and the luxury of the bibliographic resources that you have here? It was definitely – there is no place in Honduras like that. I mean, I would have to go to Mexico or Boston or Philadelphia or Tulane, my alma mater, to have access to comparative data and information about similar things like the ones I’d been finding. So the idea of coming to Dumbarton Oaks was precisely that, was to be able to have some time, some space to evaluate, analyze and do comparative studies of the stuff I’d been excavating at Copán – specifically, the Rosalila temple, which I had discovered in 1989. So, it was, you know, time to get some of that stuff published and the best way to do it, you have to have a place, a time to do it, and the resources and all those were here.

AdC: So what would an average day look like as a Fellow here?

RAF: Oh you know, it was such a delight. It was – it’s like being a kid in a toy store, I think. Because you’d come in – and I’m kind of – compared to my other Fellows that were here at that time, I’m kind of an early riser, so I’d be one of the first ones in. But the mornings were tremendously productive. And really it was just having a ton of books out, looking at them, comparing them, and taking notes. And then another important facet, I brought a lot of information with me from field drawings and stuff from Copán, was making Xeroxes of stuff, and compiling files of comparative data. Specifically I was looking at the epigraphy and the iconography of Rosalila. And finding the images and then starting to compare those images with stuff coming from ceramics or coming from other buildings or coming from hieroglyphic texts and going on to say well, this image is a tie to that and that and the other and then compiling – I still have them, those are my folders that I use continually ever since then to evaluate the iconography of Rosalila.

AdC: And that was a major project you were working on?

RAF: That’s exactly a major project I was working on and I was able to – by the time I was done the article that came out of that is really, I think, to this day the best publication about Rosalila that there is. It was a wonderful opportunity.

AdC: And what was the social life like back then? Did you get to know any other Fellows?

RAF: Oh my goodness, I was incredibly privileged. There are the group of Maya scholars that were here, or Mesomerican scholars that were here at the same time I was – was just unbelievable. It was Dorie Reents-Budet who was here, it was Simon Martin and the other – it was Simon, Dorie and I’ll think of his name in a second. And Jeffrey Quilter was just starting at that time. And so the tertulias, I don’t know how you say tertulias in English, the chats, the sessions, the meetings that we had –

AdC: In English it is tertulias.

RAF: Tertulias? Yeah. I mean there was a Mexican restaurant around the corner. Not only would they start here, but they would end over there with a pitcher of margaritas. And if not there, there was a Starbucks not too far. And of course, we were all coffee freaks so we would – and I still have, you know, discussions and drawings on napkins from Dumbarton Oaks – I mean, from Starbucks – that we had of our discussions because Simon, of course, was an expert on epigraphy and he could – he brought that side. Dorie was an art historian and so – and I was a dirt archaeologist. We were all from – looking at the same stuff from different aspects and I would say that the – Adam Herring was the other scholar. And Adam just was coming out of Yale working with – was one of Mary Miller’s students. So, each one of us had a different way of looking at the same thing. And I mean we threw Rosalila out on the floor, on the cutting board, chopped it up, talked about it, what does it mean? What is all this about? And really, I’m a dirt archaeologist, I’m used to talking about potshards and stratigraphy and stuff like that. I knew nothing about iconography, and here I had this incredible resource of human beings around me as well as the library – that I could just go read article after article, book after book of stuff, so it was a tremendous formation point. And so the human interaction was as valuable. Mostly for me the morning was my own time, hitting the books, making copies, organizing files of information. And then lunch, of course, the talking, the chatting would take place and oftentimes after that we would go to have coffee at Starbucks then come back and hit the books some more. So it was just a priceless experience. Really and truly. It was a life changing experience for me and my career, without a doubt.

AdC: Was there much interaction between Pre-Columbian Fellows and those in Byzantine and in Landscape Studies when you were here or was it pretty separate?

RAF: You know, there was interaction and I remember especially too there was an Israeli archaeologist that was here in the Byzantine program and we had very good and productive conversations and exchanges with him and much less with Landscape. But there were exchanges. And the conferences every Friday – I think it was we met – and somebody was giving a talk on whatever stuff they were – I imagine they still do that here and, you know, some of those were terribly boring, if I may be completely frank. But some of them were just really delightful even if they came from other fields. You know it’s an opportunity to see – I’ve seen the world from other people’s point of view.  And it’s always an enriching experience, at least from my perspective. And the other thing that was also fantastic were the concerts. Those were to die for, I mean really. So in every one of them – the food was also just incredible. It was a delightful combination of all events. I wouldn’t say that the exchanges with Landscape Architecture and with the Byzantine Studies was terribly dynamic, but it was pleasant and it was enriching in its own form and fashion.

AdC: And you were, I believe this is correct, you were the first Fellow actually to come from a Latin American country. And it seems more recently that Dumbarton Oaks has been trying to reach out to scholars of Latin America and Central America. Was that a really formative experience being the first?

RAF: Well, I didn’t know I was the first until you mentioned it – I had no idea. I had assumed that there had been quite a few other scholars from either the Andes or Mesoamerica some place. So, that would be a surprise to me. But again, in terms of my own personal experience it was priceless because again, I was raised, born in Honduras, I lived there. I went back there as soon I got out of graduate school to work but our resources there are very, very poor. If I have to do research on a subject that has to do with my work in archaeology, if I don’t have the book in my personal library I will not find it anywhere else in Honduras. So, I mean, it’s what it’s in arms reach in my own home or my office that I have these resources. So coming to a place like this where just about everything or any article you can dream of is there, it’s a treasure. Like I said, it’s like a kid in a candy shop because all the stuff was there at arm’s reach, you could just walk over there, grab it and sit down and study it. You know, it’s fabulous.

AdC: So you’re currently here for the Copán workshop, and I was wondering if you could just explain a little bit about the purpose of the workshop and what Dumbarton Oaks’ role is in that?

RAF: The Copán Acropolis Archaeological Project was one of that genre of very large, big time, heavy duty archaeological projects. It involved some of the most powerful research institutions in the United States that work with the Maya. And it went on for a good twenty years practically or something close to that because there were lots of offshoots. The fact is that what started with the Copán Acropolis Project has to do with the work I’m continuing even to this day, so even if the project itself stopped because the financial resources came to an end, the work in it that we started back then continued and so did my colleagues, each one getting their own sources of financing. But again each one of us is physically in a separate, different location, a different place, and we have in common the Acropolis of Copán. And we worked in basically four different areas which were – Will Andrews and Tulane were on the south side of the Acropolis, in the area known as El Cementerio. On the upper part of the Acropolis, I was working. In the East Court Bob Sharer was working, and in the Hieroglyphic Stairway Bill Fash was working. So each one of us had kind of a separate area all relating to the Acropolis. And each one went about digging holes and finding stuff and at this meeting – this is the third or fourth one that we have, it’s basically all of us trying to bring all those threads and loose threads together and having a complete overview of the Acropolis at Copán from its inception, from its first building and constructions all the way to the last ones that we see. And we have all shared, you know – we had a very loose structure for working, which was delightful because each one of us had a lot of independence in how we’re working and how we went about our research. We are now at that stage where we need to get a global, overall view of the Acropolis and its evolution through time and that’s exactly what we are doing right now. The common thread to all of us is Rudy Larios who is here with us. Rudy is in charge of all the restoration, conservation work. He’s the only one that can actually work with all four of us and can tie the threads from one end to the other. So the big synthesis of the architectural history of the Acropolis is basically being operated by Rudy. And each one of use contributes with our individual sections of this massive earthwork that was the Acropolis. So we are exchanging information, reviewing the sequences being presented by Rudy – well you know, this is good, this doesn’t work, got this one, take that one away, how does stuff, how do my building phases relate to Bill Fash’s and to Bob Sharer’s building phases and the stuff that took place on the south end of the Acropolis. So that’s the technical side of the stuff, it’s comparing data and sharing data to get us all on the same page and view the history of the Acropolis as a team. And then the other side of it is the publication series of our work. It’s moving ahead and standardizing the volumes, the books and who is putting what in which chapter and where it’s going to be published, so we’re coordinating the whole publication process and again, sharing and trying to do the format of what we’re writing up, how we’re going to write it up, nomenclature, illustrations and all these things so that basically even though the publications will come out of three different institutions we will try to have a common ground for all of them and the way the publications are made. So these are the two principal areas we’ll be working in all week and it’s a ton of stuff we have to see, we have to look at. We share stuff like radiocarbon dates. We’ll be sharing with David Stuart the side of the epigraphy and the monuments and tying those monuments to the global vision of the Acropolis and its stratigraphy. It’s an exciting process and it’s already – even just what we’ve done today, it’s worth the whole trip.

AdC: And how did Dumbarton Oaks come to be the center for this project?

RAF: Well, what can I say? It’s the perfect place for it. When I was here as a Fellow – it’s got the ingredients, it’s got the physical location, it’s got the resources in terms of library stuff and information and it’s just a common ground for all of us in Pre-Columbian Studies. So I really can’t think – well, the School of American Research was another possibility in Santa Fe, but in terms of think tanks and places where you can just take the time and have a beautiful setting to think, talk and discuss and come to important conclusions, there aren’t that many alternatives. And there is always that element of quality at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, it’s a class – I don’t know what you call it, but it is a very special center and it’s just top notch.

AdC: Speaking about Copán, a couple of years ago they held an off-site symposium in Antigua Guatemala and afterwards you were able to introduce some of the scholars present to Copán and take them all to the site. How would you describe what that experience was like, having Fellows from Dumbarton Oaks at the site of Copán?

RAF: Well, the truth is that Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks tend to be very carefully selected and I know that. So, you know you’re dealing with very educated, intelligent people even if they’re – it’s an archaeologist working in Peru and the substance matter that he’s working on will be different from what we have, he still has a whole world of important experiences. So, what the arrival of this group from Dumbarton Oaks to Copán was really a wonderful opportunity to share our work and all of us were in the field at that time still, which was – it was hotcakes just coming off the griddle, we were just right there in the middle of it and sharing with colleagues and with intelligent, educated people. It was a wonderful experience, it was very productive to us and you know when I hear Joanne talking about it and how enriching it was to them and to her as a group, because it was hands-on, we went places where very few people can go. A lot of the off-limit stuff in the research areas and the tunnels of the Acropolis, even at our own research center. It was a fantastic opportunity to share but also to learn from the commentaries of the scholars that were visiting.

AdC: Did you receive any interesting feedback from the scholars that you want to use?

RAF: Yes, we did. I mean in terms of methods, techniques, and stuff that would help us in our fieldwork and ideas too, it was just good ideas. We looked at this from this angle and stuff like that. It was very enriching too.

AdC: Were you able to attend any those off-site symposia at Antigua, outside the city or Lima?

RAF: No, I haven’t been to any of those.

AdC: But you’ve attended other Dumbarton Oaks symposia?

RAF: Yeah, but here. At Dumbarton Oaks.

AdC: In... yeah, at Dumbarton Oaks?

RAF: Yes.

AdC: Were there any of those symposia that you thought were particularly successful or unsuccessful? Or what was the experience like at these symposia?

RAF: I feel this way about many symposia. Many times there is too much information and too little time and it’s hard to digest and inform it – I mean absorb it – as you are there. But they’ve always picked, I think, themes that are very important to our field and it’s usually the selection of the scholars that are involved who are, again, of the highest quality. So, they tend to be very thoughtful publications and the – I think I probably enjoy reading the publications of them more than I do being present at the presentations themselves. But I’m also kind of fidgety, I don’t like sitting in one place too long.

AdC: So there wasn’t any symposia in particular that you thought was very stimulating

RAF: No, no.

AdC: Over the years that you have been involved in Dumbarton Oaks you’ve had the opportunity to interact with two different directors for Pre-Columbian Studies, Jeffrey Quilter and Joanne Pillsbury. I was wondering if you could comment on how each one impacted the program and how their styles differed. How you could characterize each one of their impacts?

RAF: Well, since I was here when Jeff was here I obviously had – it was for a whole academic year. I was really much more exposed to Jeff and his style of work and what can I say? It was so easygoing and thought provocative because he was working mostly on Lower Central America and again brought – which was an area that I was very interested in my early years too. It led to very enriching discussions. But Joanne comes from a different field really. But I wouldn’t say, I could be wrong, since I haven’t been here while Joanne’s been director and spent a lot of time. But I think they’re both growing in the same direction. I think overall they have a sense of the importance of Dumbarton Oaks because it’s not just a place for archaeologists and you get such a mixture – even the fact that you have the Byzantinists here, the landscape architects, it’s a place where people from different fields come and share stuff, not just your own little clique, your own little group of people who are looking at the same stuff the same way. I mean, my experience – I mean, Jeff is an archaeologist so he and I tend to talk more kind of shop there that we’re used to but all the other Fellows that were here – Simon at that stage was not even yet – he was coming out of design, and Dorie was coming out of just art history, had been doing it. So was Adam. So, it has been very enriching to have different perspectives on the same subject and I am sure that is something that continues under Joanne. Looking at the people that are here today working, it just seems very similar. And so I think if you’re going to come to Dumbarton Oaks you have to be willing to talk a language that isn’t just your own shop and what you’re used to doing everyday. You have to be open to exposure to other fields and other ways of looking even at the same data and I think that can only be productive and good.

AdC: Do you think while you were here Dumbarton Oaks was able to strike that balance between both archaeology and art history but also Mesoamerica and the Andes –

RAF: Yes.

AdC: – with the Byzantine scholars as well?

RAF: Yes, definitely. I mean definitely, it was the wonderful part of the experience of being here. And even with the Israeli archaeologist there was a lot of stuff we sat down to talk about, field methods and dating techniques, a whole bunch of other things that we could sit down and talk.

AdC: Did that experience change how you practiced archaeology after Dumbarton Oaks.

RAF: Yes and I have to say that the archaeology of Copán and the Acropolis project had a different approach from traditional archaeology to begin with because we were working with art historians from the inception, from the very beginning and we were working with epigraphers from the very beginning of the Copán Acropolis Project in 1989. And that was not the normal way of doing – I mean, I worked previously on other projects in Copán that were like hardcore archaeology, you know. You only talk to archaeologists basically. And that was not the case when – our project had a very substantial, I would say, essential preoccupation about conservation, and the care of the archaeological site and the archaeological resources, which again is not typical of that. And then the sharing with art historians, with epigraphers was really a very different approach to archaeology than what was traditional in the ‘70s and early ‘80s too. So, I’d say that that was important in my coming to Dumbarton Oaks and feeling more at ease and dealing with other scholars from these other fields, especially the art history and the epigraphy.

AdC: Because you’d already been exposed to it.

RAF: Yes, it was part of our game plan. It was part of our understanding that you can really learn a lot if you listen to people from these other fields. There were a lot my colleagues at that stage that felt that all the stuff that was in the epigraphy was just lies or stuff made up from the guys that won the wars. And perhaps that a lot of it was just fantasy and our projects certainly proved that most of it is not fantasy: it’s history and it’s documented well and accurately by the Maya.

AdC: And the project you were working on was about kingship and cosmology while you were here at Dumbarton Oaks?

RAF: That was a subject, basically it was focusing on the iconography of Rosalila and its architecture and it was very interesting because with Rosalila, as in many other aspects of our project, I was trying to find hardcore data, archaeological data that would help to verify or deny the stuff that’s on the epigraphic record but also a lot of stuff that’s coming from the iconography, the scenes of human sacrifice, of personal sacrifice and the functions of the buildings, these temples. If we’re seeing in the artwork all these rituals taking place then do we find archaeological data for it? And in the case of Rosalila it was very, very clear. I found, for example, the incense burners inside the most sacred part of the building with the charcoal still inside them. We found the stingray spines that were being used in the personal sacrifices, the knives that were used in human sacrifice. And so we were finding our hardcore archaeological data that would allow the interpretations being made in art history to appear more real or substantial and it had good archaeological data to say this is what was going on at that time. So, it was good.

AdC: While you were at Dumbarton Oaks did you get a chance to interact with the Senior Fellows at all? You mentioned that Robert Sharer was on the board at the time. Did you get introduced to any of the others?

RAF: Not really, no. Not that much. It was more really the Fellows that were here and the stuff we did and with Jeff. We just did a lot of sharing a lot of discussion that just went into late night many times but not with the Senior Fellows so much.

AdC: But Robert Sharer was influential during your time here?

RAF: Oh, yeah. And as was with Bill Fash, you know. And we’d been working together for many years already so really the exchanges with them had already been pretty extensive.

AdC: So, how would you describe the role of Dumbarton Oaks in the development of Pre-Columbian Studies over the past few years? What direction would you like to see Dumbarton Oaks take in the future?

RAF: I think Dumbarton Oaks has found a fantastic formula and a great niche. I think the contributions that it makes, nobody else is making in the field. Most of us are so busy out hustling trying to find funds to do archaeological research or so busy in the academic institutions we’re teaching, having to deal with students permanently and teaching itself – the class work stuff – there’s very little time to think and to read and to write and that’s what you get at Dumbarton Oaks. In not just with the best resources you could think of in terms of information but also in a setting that is just delightful and I think stimulating too. Even just little coincidences – the gardens, I mean you go out in those gardens and sit or just walk around and they are inspiring, they’re just beautiful and I think that – and that’s Landscape Architecture – but that beauty helps to establish that atmosphere that is conducive to good thought and work and in my case it was clearly something that changed my career, changed my life, even my outlook on my profession. The second I left, the first question on my mind was how can I come back? I really don’t think I would change anything because in my own personal experience it was already fabulous. It was already outstanding. It really changed my career and my life too.

AdC: Considering how much impact it has had on your life would you hope that Dumbarton Oaks will continue reaching out to Latin America to try to involve the scholars there and try to make their resources more accessible in those areas of the world?

RAF: Definitely. I think coming to Dumbarton Oaks is a privilege to any scholar. Those from the United States tend to have more of those very valuable resources in their research institutions, their universities. In Latin America it tends to be less so. There are of course some very important research centers throughout the region, in Lima or in Mexico even Guatemala City you have some outstanding resources, but the combination of the other elements involved, the discourse with these other people from other fields, the setting in Washington D.C. – because it’s not just about the physical installations at Dumbarton Oaks that are so beautiful, but it’s also that you’re in Georgetown, that the Smithsonian is right down the road, and stuff like that. So, it’s a wonderful experience because of that entire environment, and two, the other scholars just coming through. You do have some Fellows that have been here before and while you’re here they drop by, you sit down, you chat with them. It becomes a hub of intellectual exchange, not just with the people here but with all those people that come through, visit, etcetera. And everybody who’s in Washington that’s in our field, this is the place where they would drop by and say hello and that was also very – Norman Hammond, I remember, was one of those individuals who came by while we were here and again, very productive exchanges. We could throw stuff out, talk about it, and think better that way.

AdC: Did you meet any scholars here in particular besides those who were your fellow Fellows that you have gotten to know over the years? Or is it mainly the Fellows you were here with?

RAF: With the Fellows that I was here with we established a lifelong friendship. Those are people that are just very dear to my heart, period. And with all of them, we have gone on to do additional work together, be it in Copán or elsewhere with traveling exhibits, with publications. We established some very important personal relationships with the Fellows that were here while I was here and with other colleagues. I mean, somebody like Norman Hammond, I did not know him before I came and of course since then it has – we’ve been – more dialogue, more discourse with him. You know, he comes to Copán we have to take time to show and share and talk and have a meal. So overall it was an important crossroad, I think, in terms of having other scholars, come to get to know them but the closest ties were definitely with the Fellows that were here with me.

AdC: Well, I actually think that’s all of the questions I had written down for you. So, are there any other stories or memories you’d like to share or any other bits of information you want to share about Dumbarton Oaks before we finish the interview?

RAF: All I really and truly – how can I summarize this? Dumbarton Oaks is like a treasure, it’s just incredible to think that institutions like this exist and that they can contribute, in my personal case, so much and to the field so much. And it’s all done with the highest standards possible so it’s a privilege.

AdC: Well, thank you so much. This was a very interesting conversation and I wish you luck with the rest of the Copán workshop.

RAF: You know even just today it’s up to par already. Discussions have been very good.

AdC: Oh, I’m sure.

RAF: Very good.

AdC: Well, I’m glad to hear it.

RAF: Yeah, we have more to go.

AdC: Well, thank you so much.

RAF: Thank you.

]]> No publisher James N. Carder Art History Andean Pre-Columbian Studies Library Fellows Oral History Project Archives Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection Archaeology 2012-12-04T18:56:18Z Page Digital Humanities Luncheon http://www.doaks.org/news/news-archives/all-news-items-2012/digital-humanities-luncheon On Thursday 18 October, the digital humanities group welcomed Bob Horton, the Associate Deputy Director at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (based here in Washington DC). Bob described some of the challenges he faced at the Minnesota Historical Society regarding archiving and curation of archives, and how that experience shaped his current set of responsibilities. There was also discussion of the Digital Public Library of America and the ILMS’s commitment to helping see that off the ground. Bob mentioned Europeana as a forerunner, and noted the crucial importance of shared standards. The visit was of great interest to a number of Dumbarton Oaks staff involved in ongoing and future digital projects.

]]> No publisher Lisa Wainwright Archives Library Digital Humanities 2012-11-07T19:36:47Z News Item Jeffrey Quilter http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/jeffrey-quilter Oral History Interview with Jeffrey Quilter undertaken by Anne Bonnell-Freidin and Clem Wood at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University on August 13, 2008. At Dumbarton Oaks, Jeff Quilter was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies and Curator of the Pre-Columbian Collection between 1995 and 2005. ABF: We are Anna Bonnell-Freidin and Clem Wood, here on August 13th in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University with Professor Jeffrey Quilter to talk about his impressions and time at Dumbarton Oaks. So we’d like to begin by asking you how you first came to Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were of the scholarly and social atmosphere of the community.

JQ: I first came to Dumbarton Oaks – the very first time I came when I lived in Washington, D.C., in the late ’70s, and I came as a casual visitor. Of course, that’s very different than later when I came as a scholar attending the annual symposia, which I did for many years. And then in 1994 I applied for the directorship and was asked to come. So, I started being involved in spring 1995, when I accepted the job, and came to meet people and so forth. And Dumbarton Oaks is well-known by many people, especially scholars. It is interesting that in all three fields, it is common for scholars in each field to think that Dumbarton Oaks only does what they’re interested in. So, Byzantinists think that it’s only Byzantine Studies, pre-Columbianists think it’s only Pre-Columbian Studies, and many of the Garden folks think the same. I knew enough to know that wasn’t true even when I applied. And I knew it was a wonderful place in terms of its beauty and its historic presence, and I knew that the people who went there were bright and enthusiastic, and of course what impressed me was how bright and enthusiastic the staff was as well, and the community, not just of scholars, but the community of people who worked there. So, I was in seventh heaven. I came from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I’m a native New Yorker, but I had been teaching for fifteen years at Ripon College in Wisconsin. And even though there was no tenure, and it was a limited-tenure term as Director of Studies, it was a chance not to be missed, to be involved with that community. So, it was great, and it lived up to my expectations, if not exceeded them, in terms of the – it’s an interesting mix of a quiet, scholarly retreat in many ways and at the same time being a very dynamic place filled with people with interesting projects, interesting ideas, and very much engaged in their research.

CW: So how did you find the transition to not having students around as you had in the liberal arts college environment, being at Dumbarton Oaks?

JQ: Well, you do have students around. As Director of Studies, you have graduate students, of course. They’re not your graduate students; they are someone else’s. In a way that’s – there are advantages and disadvantages of that situation. I mostly found it advantageous. One can take an avuncular role, and I guess it’s in my nature to do so, so that you can be involved with their projects, you can counsel them on career choices or using the right computer equipment – though usually the younger people tell the older people about that – and be involved with them and have a nice long time – a year usually – to do that. And yet you don’t have – like an uncle, you know, you have the joy of interacting but not the weight of responsibility should they run afoul of their plans or projects. But most of them, of course, don’t. So, I found it fine. And after teaching for fifteen years in an undergraduate setting, that was plenty. And it was nice to have a change.

ABF: And what were the most important relationships for you?

JQ: Well, the relationships of course are different because – I guess it’s true for anybody in any position anywhere – you have different kinds of relationships with different people. So with the Junior Fellows in particular, which is the people to whom I was referring just now, you have that avuncular relationship. With the regular Fellows, who are usually peers or older scholars, distinguished scholars sometimes – one might argue whether they’re peers or not, I guess – the relationship can vary from somewhat formal to collegial to friends, depending. And I made a lot of friends, of course, there. So, that’s one set of relationships, the sort of scholarly relationships. The relationships with the staff are a different kind of relationship: more long-term, because the Fellows come and the Fellows go, but the staff basically stays the same over much longer periods of time. And so, there’re different kinds of dynamics going on. But I think everybody I met at Dumbarton Oaks was – whether they were Fellows there on short term or staff on long term – realized that they were privileged to be in this wonderful place, which had such great support and such great resources. So that it was a happy place, all in all, although, you know, there are always issues, as there is in any institution or any small community. Did that answer your question, or were you looking for something else?

ABF: I suppose that answers it, unless there are any specific relationships that –

JQ: Ah. Well, I found, of course, working with the Pre-Columbian staff was particularly important to me, and when I was at Dumbarton – and at least in my first years at Dumbarton Oak – the organizational structure was different, so that each Director of study basically had their own little fiefdom, if you will. And so Bridget Gazzo, for example, who was the librarian for Pre-Columbian, reported to me at the time, and I especially enjoyed working with Bridget. She’s a great person, very enthusiastic, very knowledgeable as well. And there was a woman named Carol Callaway who was the Assistant Curator at the time and who I was close to – unfortunately died my second year, which was rough on everyone. I enjoyed working particularly with Landscape Studies Directors. I was friendly with Alice-Mary and we had a great working relationship. I think that because Landscape and Pre-Columbian are the Junior Programs, though there was a kind of natural affinity there in some ways. And in particular I developed a very close friendship with Michel Conan, who was Director of Landscape Studies a few years after I arrived and stayed on after I left for a while – so, those in particular. I enjoyed working very much with Angeliki Laiou, the first Director who – we had a few rough spots, I guess, in understanding how each other worked, and that’s true for, I guess, everyone. But I think I was particularly engaged with those folks. Don Pumphrey’s another one, Hector in the kitchen, Carlos, house staff, were all just great folks.

CW: So it sounds as if you were very in touch with the other disciplines when you were there. And would you say that generally in your time there was a lot of contact between the three scholarly programs, or maybe you were referring more to kind of informal relationships?

JQ: Well, my understanding of Dumbarton Oaks and the relationships between the programs before I arrived is as historically based as yours, which is to say, I only know what people tell me, or what I’ve heard. There’s no sort of source to go to. And we all know the vagaries of history anyhow, in terms of trying to understand what happened in the past. It was my impression – and I think there was plenty of supporting evidence in all sorts of ways – that the three programs had been fairly separate entities in many ways, and to some degree there was a certain amount of tension between and jealousies between the different programs. Between the different – you know, the Byzantines got more Fellows than the other two programs. There were all sorts of little traditions that got developed. For example, I had a little fund that allowed me to have a party for local-area scholars once a year, at the beginning of the academic year, that neither of the other two programs had. It was just some mini-tradition that Pre-Columbian Studies got that the others didn’t get. And I eventually stopped having it, because it sort of became irrelevant at some point. They were fine, but the Fellows got to meet these people anyhow. And it became very clear that one of the – there were a few big issues. One, of course, is money and resources in terms of Fellows and how big a symposium you can have versus the other folks. And then there were issues on space. And everybody, everybody was crowded in terms of space, because books were stacked just everywhere. My attitude – I remember having a meeting with Angeliki at one point and saying something to the effect that, you know, Benjamin Franklin said during the Revolution that if we don’t hang together, surely we’ll all hang separately. And my attitude was that I found what the other programs did interesting. I didn’t find every Byzantine scholar interesting, of course. I didn’t find every Pre-Columbian scholar interesting. When I was about your ages, I took classes in medieval art history with Herb Kessler at Chicago when he was there very briefly. My background – my mother was English – I visited castles, I was very interested in the Middle Ages as a youth and I still have that interest. We do get Ph.D.s or Doctorates of Philosophy, we’re supposed to have a general, broad base from which we pursue our particular studies, and I thought having these three rather odd, peculiar programs all cheek by jowl was great. And that it offered opportunities for me personally to learn all these interesting things that were going on in these other fields. So, I hoped to find ways to bridge gaps and bridge these differences by reaching out to the other folks. Do you want to turn off the air conditioner? Let’s see, I think if I just crank it up hot enough. We are now in the twenty-first century, we have things called air conditioners. Is it getting warmer? It’ll actually go up. We’ll make it super hot.

ABF: 80, nice.

JQ: By the time it gets to 80 we won’t want to do this anymore, right?

ABF: So, would you say that you came in with a set of goals when you became Director of Studies?

JQ: Well, to tell you the truth, I was pretty overwhelmed at getting the job offer. I was delighted. I felt a great sense of responsibility to have the opportunity to do this because Dumbarton Oaks then, and I hope still now – you know, the publications that came out of Pre-Columbian Studies and the symposia that it held are not quite universally, but among the top-ranked scholars in the field, these are important events, these are important publications. It is a place of note, it is a leader, and what it does is significant, so to have the opportunity to play a leadership role in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, I felt was an extremely great honor and an extremely great responsibility. So that in terms of my having goals, especially to be truthful – now that I’m not there any more I can be totally truthful – I would say that I didn’t come in with clear goals of change. I wanted to continue the tradition that I saw established and appreciated, that Betty Benson and Elizabeth Boone had – the foundations that they had laid. I wanted to maintain them. I think also as a general principle that people who wind up in positions of leadership of institutions, of programs, of departments – and it’s true well beyond academics as well – they often want to do something new. They want to put their own stamp on things. But the hardest thing to learn to do is to leave well enough alone. You know, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And I wanted to be very cautious that I didn’t follow that path of trying to do something just for the sake of doing something when I thought that the program at D.O. worked very well. I thought it’s – obviously there were issues about, you know, “May I have more, please, sir?” There were opportunities to have more resources. One always likes to do more of the same, but not to radically change its character and move in some very different direction, when I thought that what was being done was the right thing to do in the first place. As I grew into the job, I did start to see things that I wanted to do because at the same time that you don’t want to change things for the sake of changing things, when you have the opportunity to mold something, to just let a ship go or a car go without any steering, without any direction to it, is also a waste of a valuable resource. So that maybe after my first, second year, I did start to develop some general trends that I wanted to follow. And those – I would say I had a philosophy that was as follows, which is that I wanted to maintain the general approach that Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks had, but to expand the franchise somewhat. And Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks as I understood it and still understand it is in a unique position in that it serves as a place where the ends of the spectrum – maybe not the extreme ends of the spectrum, but the ends of the spectrum of the field – can find common ground. You know, there is no such thing called Pre-Columbian Studies anywhere except at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, these things are pursued here in the Department of Anthropology, in the Peabody Museum, in the History of Art and Architecture program. But Pre-Columbian Studies as a field or a discipline or area, realm, arena of discussion or interaction, really only exists at Dumbarton Oaks. So, by the very framing of the discourse as Pre-Columbian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks created a place and a space where art historians and field archaeologists and those who work in early colonial period on documents and those who work in remote antiquity can all – not always all at the same time, but over the long haul, over years – have a place to meet, exchange views, and interact in ways that they often don’t get to do, or at least get to do as easily, elsewhere. So that to me was a very precious thing, and that was something that I wanted to maintain. What I wanted to do that was in a – not a different direction, but have a greater emphasis on, was the definition of what “Pre-Columbian” is. Because Pre-Columbian as defined in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when Robert Bliss was beginning to think along these lines, really referred to the so-called “high cultures” of the New World, which of course are from Central Mexico through Central America to the Central Andes, and with particular emphasis on the cultures of Mexico and Central America and the Central Andes. I thought that, you know, Robert Bliss was a visionary, but he was a man of his time, and his goal was to try and demonstrate to the world that the art of pre-Columbian America was as valid and as valuable and as interesting as art anywhere, and so in some sense emphasizing the so-called “high cultures” had a point to it. I thought that fifty years later it would be advantageous to at least offer opportunities to explore commonalities and similarities between the ancient peoples of the New World in areas outside of those main, so-called “high cultures.” You know, there’s lots and lots of similarities between the ancient peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and Central Mexico. There are lots and lots of things going on in the Amazon that were directly relevant to the culture of the Inkas and their predecessors. So, I wanted to try and expand the franchise a little bit, not simply because of the theoretical reasons that I’ve just laid out, but also to offer the opportunity for scholars who were doing research on topics that were very much in harmony with the kinds of approaches that D.O. traditionally took, to have a chance to come there. For example, there are many people working on iconography and symbolism of the Mississippian cultures or the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest who were rather alone and by themselves, especially even five or ten years ago –I think it’s changed a bit now – didn’t have many people to speak to within their own fields but could find interesting conversation partners by talking to a Mesoamericanist or talking to someone who works in Peru. So, I wanted to give those people opportunities too. And I thought it was good for Dumbarton Oaks. I thought that by opening up a little bit our field, we enrich ourselves. It’s like a blood transfusion: get a little new blood in. And I’d say the third thing I tried to do was to be much more involved and pro-active in involving Latin Americans because ninety-five percent of the territory – whether it’s high culture or middle or low culture –of the ancient New World is in Latin America today. And increasingly the scholarship that is being done in Latin America is equal or sometimes better than a lot of what’s happening in North America and in Europe, and I felt that it was just – on a totally – it’s the right thing to do. We need to engage with our Latin American colleagues more. And also, frankly, on a political, realpolitik basis, I felt that in the long term it was crucial for Dumbarton Oaks and for Harvard to increasingly engage ourselves with Latin American scholars because, you know, anthropology and the kinds of studies we do are the children of imperialism and colonialism. I mean, there’s no way to get around that. It’s a fact. And we can’t erase that history; that history has happened. But we can try and do better in involving our Latin American colleagues directly with what we do rather than incidentally. So those were three things I attempted to do, and I think I was fairly successful in some ways.

ABF: Going back to something you said earlier, you mentioned that you were interested in continuing the tradition that you inherited when you became Director, so what exactly, what do you see as being that tradition?

JQ: That tradition takes a number of forms. One is, as I said, having a meeting place for scholars who approach the subject matter somewhat differently. Anthropologists, anthropological archaeologists tend to approach their subject matter from a cultural or social perspective, and they’re looking at the objects in the Dumbarton Oaks galleries in the social context. Art historians traditionally tend to look at the object and look at it outwards. So having a chance for those people too find topics, for example, for symposia, for workshops, for roundtables, where you could have this kind of mix occur – to the benefit of both, hopefully – is one of the traditions. One of the other traditions is to have those kinds of meetings. Betty Benson you know – many of the important first steps or critical steps in the cracking of the Maya code, as I’m sure Mike Coe will tell you, and as he goes over in his book – you might take a look at his book before you talk to him, Breaking the Maya Code – many of those initial steps occurred at Dumbarton Oaks – occurred with Betty Benson literally getting on the floor with other scholars and going over glyphs and working through these issues of—working on those hieroglyphs to break the Maya code. I hope that we can make similar kinds of achievements, although even coming close to that kind of achievement would be significant. So, I’d say those are the two main axes I see. One is having meetings that get the right people together and that focus on issues that are either the time is right to have a synthesis of discussion or the work has sort of reached a point where it’s the right time to have a meeting. And then being able to identify those points, or to have a meeting that pushes the discussion to that point, is one thing. And then the other one is to focus on – we – Dumbarton Oaks – I still say “we” – Dumbarton Oaks tends to focus more on the art, symbolism, religion side of the discussion than the sort of bare stones and bones approaches. So, those are the traditions.

CW: And you think that you met your goals for the most part, you said?

JQ: Well, you know, one always – maybe in scholarship we’re sort of used to always being overly critical on ourselves as well as other people, though a lot of scholars seem to mostly say it for other people. I always think of, “Gee, there are a number of things, other projects, ideas I had that I wasn’t able to do because my time was up.” I think some of those things were certainly – some of the things we did I felt were certainly heading in the right direction. One example – and you mentioned publications. There hadn’t been a major Inka symposium at Dumbarton Oaks ever. We had that in 1997, I believe it was. We did it with the top scholars in the field. As a matter of fact, we took a group photograph, and there were four scholars – John Roe, John Morra, Maria Rostworowski, and Tom Zuidema – and two of those people, John Roe and John Morra, are no longer with us, so that will be a historic photograph. And one of the organizers, Craig Morris, who was a leading scholar also, unfortunately at a very young age, is no longer with us either. And we did that symposium not only on a crucial topic, a major topic, the Inka, but also we did it with the wonderful cooperation and support from the Peruvian Embassy. So, that was fulfilling sort of two goals at once, which was working with Latin Americans and having the opportunity to do a major topic. Another one that I’m particularly pleased with is I organized with John Hoopes a symposium on southern Central America and Colombia  -- “Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia” – and that symposium I think still stands for the record as having the greatest number of Latin American scholars participating that we’ve ever had before. So, that one I was very pleased with as well. And then last but not least, my last symposium was in Peru, done in conjunction with the La Católica University of Peru as well as the Rafael Larco Herrera Museum, and that was quite a feat to pull off. That was the first year that our facilities were closed because of the renovation, but it was a great opportunity to sort of take D.O. on the road and actually bring it to Latin America. So, that was a great chance again to do a major topic but working closely with Latin Americans.

CW: And then how did you find being the Curator and the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at the same time? Did you integrate – it seems as if the relationships between the collections and the studies programs varied depending on the personalities involved at the times, but did you feel as if you particularly integrated those parts of D.O., since you held those roles at the same time?

JQ: Well, a lot has changed in terms of the way in which these things are configured and thought of. When I got to D.O., I was told quite clearly that we had a Collection. We didn’t have a museum. The galleries were only open from 2 to 5 p.m. And what’s the difference between a collection and a museum, you may ask? The difference between a collection and a museum is that a museum is an institution which is designed to have objects, artifacts, programs, to be available to the public, with specific mandates to educate, inform, provide aesthetic experience, etc. A collection is exactly that: it’s a group of objects which is not necessarily organized on the basis of anything other than itself, if you will. And the idea of making clear that we’re talking about a collection rather than a museum is that the brief hours and the way in which the collection was presented was intended to provide something for the public to see, but to maintain an emphasis that we were primarily a research institution in support of scholarship, and that our sense of commitment to the public came secondary, frankly. And I think that’s great, you know. I think that’s perfectly fine. I think that there’s all sorts of museums in Washington, D.C., all sorts of museums in any major city, and I don’t think every collection or every set of artifacts or objects should necessarily have to try and be the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian’s supported by public monies and it is obliged to serve the American public who helps keep it running. But I think having places that are designed primarily for research, I thought that was a perfectly logical idea. I think one of the things that’s happened between now and then is that at one point suddenly the Collection started being called a museum without any thought, without any discussion, as to what all that meant, what the consequences of that meant, what the obligations – and you might say, “Well, it’s just a name.” But you know, we’re scholars, we’re academics. We make our business being particular about what you call things and how you refer to things and the consequences of doing that. And I think it’s – I’m not saying it’s wrong that D.O. now calls its collections museums, but I think it was unfortunate that this change took place without any deliberated and deliberate deliberations on that whole issue and what it meant and what the options were. It was kind of done rather haphazardly and slapdash, if you ask me. So, for much of my time, being a Curator and being Director of Studies was not a major problem. Now there was constant care and attention to and interactions with the Collection. There were plenty of scholars who came to look at the collections. Not every Fellow wants to look at the collections, but there are always scholars who are coming to look at them. We also had a large-scale project for a catalogue series, and one catalogue was published just as I came into office, that catalogue was being finished, that’s the Andean catalogue, which was done by Elizabeth Boone. One of my great burdens and trials at D.O. was the catalogue projects, because – and it would take more than your tape has time to fill. It’s a long story as to why the catalogue project has been so onerous and difficult in terms of its production; but we did manage to get one volume out, which is the Olmec volume, and that was a major triumph. Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of other volumes that should have come out that just never did, and I know there’s one that’s still being worked on, and I hope it comes out. So, I was fine with being Curator. I did have – in the old system, when the Assistant Curator reported directly to me – now you know Juan Antonio Murro, right?

CW: No.

JQ: You don’t. Well, Juan Antonio Murro is the Assistant Curator for Pre-Columbian. He reports to Gudrun. Well, I hired him because he at first reported to me. Before the reorganization, he reported to me. Prior to Juan Antonio, there was a woman named Loa Traxler, who you should also interview, by the way –

ABF: Yeah, we will.

JQ: – who reported to me and I hired. And prior to her there was this woman Carol Callaway, who I mentioned. And they – whether it was Carol, Loa, or Juan Antonio – they handled the day-to-day care and feeding, if you will, of the collection, so it was not a huge burden to me. I sort of made the executive decisions and so forth. It worked perfectly well. So it was no major problem.

ABF: Can you tell us a bit about the experience of putting together the Olmec catalogue?

JQ: Ah. Yes, I can tell you quite a bit about it; I can tell you – I told you – hours about it. Well, I guess this is for the record, so I’ll sit back and I’ll tell you. I think that the catalogue projects started before I came to D.O. It was initiated by Elizabeth Boone. My impression – I don’t know if this is a fact – my impression is that she convinced Angeliki that it was going to be a quick and dirty: “Oh, we’ll just publish some little books, you know, just little guides, user’s guides.” And while she said that, what really happened was is she went and she got some money, outside money, and produced this two-volume – show it to the camera, Jeff – and produced this elaborate, beautiful set of books on the Andean catalogue. And then she left. She left the job and she had a catalogue for southern Central America and Colombia set. She had a catalogue that’s supposed to be Maya and Olmec set to do, and she had a catalogue for Central Mexico supposedly lined up. And I got there and I said, “Well, I’m not going to publish a rinky-dink little handbook. I want to publish a catalogue that looks like this!” But the problem was that the budgeting and the timing for doing this were completely inappropriate. The budgeting, actually, was not a major problem, because Angeliki actually – when Angeliki saw these volumes, she got extremely upset. She actually said to me, she said, “I didn’t sign on to produce these big volumes. I agreed to a small publication.” And I said, “Well, I just got here. All I did was proof the color on the final proofs; that’s all. Everything else was done by Elizabeth.” So she said, “Well I –” And then she brought copies up here for the – what’s it called, the foundation, the people the Director reports to – the Fellows, Harvard Fellows, and they loved it. They just loved it: “Oh, this is wonderful, this is beautiful.” And so she came back and said, “Oh, it was great, a big success. They loved it.” So, I was given the go-ahead, basically, to continue publishing volumes in that format, but the problem was is that the scheduling was all messed up, and these things were supposed to be turned in at a much more rapid rate than was possible, which is another problem. At this point the problem lies not with anybody at Dumbarton Oaks – and this is of course a problem that is not just pertinent to these catalogues, but is a problem with all D.O. publications that I had to deal with, as well as any edited book I’ve ever had to deal with anywhere, which is that trying to get authors to produce the books or their chapters on time is extremely difficult. Because these scholars, most of whom are big names – very important, very busy – they say, “Yes, yes, yes” to ten different things, and then they only have time to do three. And if you happen to be number four on the list – you know, it doesn’t matter if there’s ten things that they said they’re going to do and you’re number four; if they can only do three, you know, I mean it’s as good as a mile: you might as well be number ten, because if the work doesn’t get done, the book doesn’t get published. So that’s the problem I faced with the catalogues. The main problem I faced had nothing to do with the directors of D.O. or anything at D.O.; it had to do with getting the authors to produce the materials on time. Their schedules were inappropriate, we extended them, they still didn’t come through, so we eventually had to cancel a few. That’s what happened. There’re chances that these things can be resurrected, perhaps, by Joanne, and I wish her a lot of luck. I mean, the one thing that I don’t miss from D.O. is – I mean, editing is a thankless job, basically. It’s an important job, and you can gain satisfaction from it, because this was an important symposium, this is going to be a landmark book, and you as an editor helped make it happen, but the amount of credit you get – you know, I believe it was Elizabeth Boone who said that editing books was like doing other people’s laundry. I think that’s absolutely right. It’s kind of a thankless job, even though everybody wants clean clothes. Although I’m still editing D.O. books here, you know. There’s still D.O. books that because I was involved with them, I’m still involved with this. I mean, it’s going to go on and on and on. I know Jan’s got the axe out, so supposedly I’m supposed to get these done fast. But that’s been a problem and it’s a headache.

CW: And you mentioned already being very aware of Robert Bliss’s legacy as a collector and of the role Betty Benson played in founding the collection, but how – I’m sure you were aware of that before coming in as director – but how did you encounter that inheritance in your role as Curator?

JQ: Well, there were many people there who still remember the Blisses. Sue Boyd knew the Blisses, Betty Benson knew the Blisses, so there the memory of them as the founding mother and father – still quite strong. Ask some of the guards and they’ll say they’ve seen them at night. If you want a really oral history, you should go ask Carlos about what they –

CW: Ghost stories?

JQ: Yeah, because there was lots of ghost stories. And of course Betty even now is still an active scholar in the field, and she came regularly to D.O. I always felt that, you know, it was my privilege to involve Betty as much as possible in the life of D.O., considering how important a figure she is in terms of her research as well as her importance in establishing the program. So, that certainly was the way I felt their presence, both in terms of conscious memory of – there were some folks who passed away while I was there too who also knew the Blisses. As well as the vision of having that beautiful Philip Johnson – you know, the Philip Johnson gallery has problems from a modern curatorial standard, but it’s still a magical place when all is said and done.

ABF: What are the problems as you see them?

JQ: Well, the main problem is light. Now, that’s been remedied, I believe, by the new glass that’s been installed. But Johnson wanted to have as much natural light and as much greenery as a backdrop to these pre-Columbian objects, and visually, it’s spectacular. The main problem is that most galleries, especially for things like showing textiles or for things that are subject to damage by sunlight, you can’t let all that light in. It’s like showing Rembrandt prints with a big searchlight on them or something. But that, I believe, has been remedied by the glass, or at least modified. The other problem it had, of course, is roofs. The roof leaked, which I suppose has also been fixed. Philip Johnson is famous – a lot of architects are famous – for beautiful buildings, but engineering – they’re disasters, like Fallingwater. So, the roof leaked a lot, and it was a big problem, but it’s still a wonderful building. And it is to be hoped that the leaking problem and the light problem have been at least ameliorated.

CW: I think Betty Benson told a story of going through the Gallery when it was being built and noticing that the acoustics were really bad, and Philip Johnson was there and he waved her off and said, “No, no, it’s fine, it’s fine; it’s not a problem.” And she said, “Well, yes, but you don’t have to give lectures in here.”

JQ: Yeah, you mean the echo problem?

CW: Right.

JQ: Which, of course, most school kids or even older people, when they come, that’s the first thing – the thing they remember is standing and getting that weird echo effect, you know, where your voice travels and so forth. But the other interesting thing about that is, as I remember, that Philip Johnson knew of that effect, and the original design for the Gallery – there’s actually a photo – there’re a couple of photos around of him, and they actually installed these for a while – you know, each one is circular, and they did put cylindrical display cases in the middle of each of those pods, so if you put a cylindrical – and they were sort of white, painted white on the bottom. If you put a cylinder in the middle of each one of those pods, it negates the effect of the echo because no one can stand there. But what happened was is that when they put these cylinders in each of the pods they realized there wasn’t enough display space. And, of course, knowing basic geometry, if you have a circle, you can put more in a circle by putting it around the outer circumference than the inner circumference. So, they got rid of these cylindrical display cases, and then mostly put objects – you know, there’re some exceptions – but mostly put objects around the circumference of each of the pods, therefore they could put more in. But suddenly the center of each pod was now open, and the result was the echo effect. These are the things you learn.

CW: Were there any major acquisitions for the Collection/Museum when you were there?

JQ: There were no major acquisitions, because these days people are highly sensitive to purchasing pre-Columbian objects from galleries. Even those with supposedly so-called “clean passports” have potential problems. I mean, look at the supposedly clean passport of the Machu Picchu collections at Yale and the troubles they had. And I was sorely tempted a few times – I was even told by Angeliki in particular that there was money available for purchases – and I was sorely tempted to propose that we buy something. But I decided that the better course of wisdom was not to do it because I didn’t want to get the institution and myself in hot water by buying something and then having the hounds of Hades loosened on us. And I will say that in particular that the archaeologists here at Harvard are highly sensitive to that, and since D.O. is a Harvard-affiliated organization I didn’t want to wind up in a situation in which I was doing something which would not meet with the approval of the archaeologists here. And as you will find out when you talk to Mike Coe – and you may have found out from Betty Benson or will find out when you talk to her – this issue of collectors, collecting, purchasing, the ridge between archaeology and art history are all very hot button issues that surround the Pre-Columbian studies program at D.O., are related to Betty, are related to Mike, related to Harvard’s relationship with D.O. over the years, and I just didn’t want to get involved in any of that. I thought better just not to buy anything and stay out of it than to put my neck in a noose. Now there were a few exceptions. There were a few gifts of collections of mostly local D.C. people who wanted to give D.O. collections, but most of those things were few in number. There were a couple significant objects but no really sort of Bliss-quality objects by and large. There were some of these gifts. The other thing that we did is when Carol Callaway died we got – there was money given in her name to Pre-Columbian Studies at D.O. We came to the Peabody, we asked to find a piece owned by the Peabody that had clear papers, that was old enough that there was no question that it was legally in the country and we paid for the money to restore that object and then study it, we took a radiocarbon date and restored it, brought it to D.O.  – it’s on a 99-year loan I believe to D.O. – and it’s got a plaque in – I don’t know if it’s in exhibit right now but it was given, well done in Carol’s memory. And it was very pleasing to me that Leonardo Lopez Lujan, who is a big name in Mexican archaeology, deliberately mentioned in an article he wrote the great example that Dumbarton Oaks did in doing this as opposed to, he said, that nasty museum in France that just opened which is dealing with antiquities and dealers and stuff. So, we came out smelling like a rose in doing that, and it was the right thing to do.

ABF: But were there any other serious repatriation issues that you had to deal with?

JQ: No. In actual fact I believe that the collection at Dumbarton Oaks all came in well before the UNESCO agreements. There may be a few things that might – I think they’re all legal. There might be a few things that, you know – there’s two dates. One, which is the ‘best practice,’ which is I think 1971, and then there’s a later date which is the absolute cutoff date. And some may have come in after the ‘best practice’ ’71 date, but generally they’re – actually, objects are quite clean – although, if you get in the law court you can argue six ways to Sunday that they are or they’re not, just like with the Yale collection. I mean, that is – depending on which lawyer you talk to, Yale has got an absolute title to the collection or it doesn’t and what we could – Dumbarton Oaks could wind up in the same kind of muddle if somebody wanted to make an issue of it. I think, frankly, that the fact that Dumbarton Oaks did reach out to Latin American scholars actively – and it’s not just me it’s Elizabeth Boone and Betty Benson as well – that we support scholarship in Latin America that we do these steps. I think, knock on wood, that the attitude is that whatever claims might or might not be made against an object or getting an object back here or there are not worth it, the good will and good working relationships that we’ve established and hope to maintain now. It reminds me, we had an exhibit here in the Peabody on Moche ceramics that I curated, and this distinguished Peruvian colleague Luis Jaime Castillo was here. He gave the opening address – so forth and so on – and we had a reception in the gallery and everything was going along fine. We were having a little wine and a little cheese. And I was there, Luis Jaime was there, I was here, and suddenly this woman comes up and says, ‘So Professor Castillo, is Peru planning to ask for all these back?’ And I went, “Uhhhhh.” And he said, “No, madam. We have plenty of our own, and better ones.”

ABF: From what you were saying it sounds like the position you were in as curator and the dealings you had with the Collection dovetailed very nicely with your academic roles and that you were able to enhance the general standing of the Collection by reaching out in a scholarly environment.

JQ: Absolutely. I mean, not every Fellow who comes to D.O. is specifically interested in the objects. They have their own research projects. It’d just be like, if you were – you’re both classicists – you know, if you went to some – there’s the Hellenic center. I mean, everything that they’ve got isn’t necessarily pertinent to your interests but you may be casually interested in it because you’re generally interested in your field. Same thing’s true at D.O. I mean, the people that come there – I’m sure it’s true in Byzantine, too – the collections may or may not to a greater or lesser degree influence or be of interest to them, per se. But Betty Benson always makes a big point of talking about how the program and the library would not be there if it weren’t for the collections. The collections are the foundations of everything because it was Robert Bliss’s collecting of those objects that led to everything else. That for no other reason is why they should be treasured, as well as that they’re spectacular objects. They’re – many of them are unique and so forth. But yeah, I think that for me having the curatorial and the Director of Studies role was great because it allowed for a certain kind of synergy to occur that may not have occurred otherwise.

ABF: Do you think that set a precedent?

JQ: For?

ABF: For more of that type of –

JQ: Well, it didn’t set much of a precedent because the reorganizations got rid of all that. It’s also true that even the Byzantines didn’t – see, that’s another example of the differences that existed because the Byzantines didn’t have this Director. The Byzantines had Alice-Mary as Director of Studies and Sue Boyd as Curator. They were two separate posts, though they work closely together.

CW: We should take a minute to change the tape.

JQ: Sure.

JQ: So where were we?

ABF: We were talking about the synergistic –

JQ: Synergy, ah, synergy baby. For me it was – I liked working with the collections, I liked being Director of Study. I liked it all. The only thing I didn’t like, and that was that – and this is actually quite a big point of mine – is that I didn’t have a lot of time for my own research. I got two weeks of research leave a year, plus vacation – and the vacation was generous. And I used to use my vacation for my research, which didn’t make my wife very happy, but I had to balance those things. And I think that that is unfortunate because I think that one of the ways D.O.  – and again I would submit that this is true not only for Pre-Columbian Studies but for the other programs too – one of the ways that the place remains a vital energetic lively relevant center is if the relevant Directors of Studies are active scholars and have plenty of time to do their own research. And two weeks a year doesn’t cut it. Furthermore, two weeks – now, of course, you may say – I mean, one of the arguments, one of the rationales I think for it is – well, you’re in the middle of this library, not every day is going to be a day filled with meetings and administrative responsibilities, so you do have time. And I was told by Angeliki that if you have time during the day to do a spot of your own research using the library or sitting at your desk by all means go ahead. We trust that you’ll take care of business in terms of making sure that all your responsibilities are attended to, that if you have some time you are free to devote it to your own research as you find the time whenever if occurs. That was fine and I did make some use of that. The problem is that by maintaining that approach and still keeping it only to two weeks a year you’re biasing the selection and even the likely applicants for future Directors of Study to people who are primarily book-oriented, library-oriented in terms of their research. And I think it’s healthy for Dumbarton Oaks in the long term that the Directors of Study should vary from being say art historians who are mostly library bound, or historians who are definitely library bound, to include field archaeologists who have to go out and dig. It’s a healthier environment for – it’s healthy for an institution to have that variation over the long term. And furthermore, I also think that it’s healthy for the institution if it and its people actively pursue research. That is to say, that the Directors of Studies are fully engaged scholars. I, in my darker hours at D.O., used to describe my job as that of a maître d’ in a very nice restaurant. You get to wear nice clothes, you get to work in a beautiful place, and you get to meet high-class guests and put them at the right table or maybe put them at a table next to a bathroom, but you don’t get to sit down much and eat yourself. And if the job winds up or becomes increasingly in that mode you’re not going to get good people who want to serve in that role. And the institution as a whole will suffer I think because the institution will lose the respect of other scholars who say, “Well so-and-so, you know, poor schmoe, he’s stuck there holding the door as we go out.” Now I think Joanne’s an excellent scholar. I think I was a pretty good one. I know Elizabeth Boone and Betty Benson were ones. But I think that this is something that has to be carefully considered in terms of the future of D.O. for the long term. And, I mean, I was guaranteed by word of mouth by Angeliki that I was supposed to get a year research leave between my two terms. I never got it because I was told that I was needed to help build the new library, to help be on committees, which I was. But maintain those kinds of commitments and maintain the kind of commitment that Directors of Study are active scholars and that their scholarship’s supported is something I think is very important. If I were Director of D.O., I would consider every other year closing the whole place down for the summer and letting the staff and scholars go off and do research. It could survive. Actually, they used to do that. Back in the ’50s and ’60s they did close for the summer. Or have a skeleton staff to take care of summer Fellows but let the Director of Study go off and if they want to dig or even if they’re doing art history, they want to go and look at sites for two months, let ’em go. I mean, you wouldn’t have to do it every year necessarily but I think having that kind of flexibility and having that kind of encouragement that you want the Directors of Studies to be active scholars and not simply administrators is critical, and I don’t think that was very well handled while I was there.

ABF: What are your thoughts on the new library?

JQ: Well, I had a lot to do with it. I was on a lot of committees that helped plan it and I don’t know what the new library’s like because I have visited it once, briefly, strolled through it. It was, I think it was my second – when did they have the big inauguration? Was that last October? I think so. It was like two or three months before that so I don’t know – how successful the library is depends upon how easy it is to use and how comfortable the scholars are in using it, and since I’ve not used it at all but sort of walked through it I can’t speak to it in that sense. I mean theoretically it’s a fine idea. I hear it’s very cold.

CW and ABF: True.

JQ: I think that the – I got a sense that things were moving to – I remember Ned Keenan saying the problem with D.O, now, which meant that when we were in the old system, was that the books are where the people should be and the people are where the books should be. That is to say, the books were all up on the upper floors of the main building in rooms that were getting plenty of sunlight and the people were down in the basement, a lot of them in the dark, and it should be the other way around, and that when the new library is built we’d fix that. And I thought that was right on. I think that the library should be there for the scholars. The scholars should not be intimidated or made to feel uncomfortable for the sake of the books. I don’t know why it’s so cold. If they’re keeping it cold for the books they should warm it up because the people are more important than the books. The books should figure out how to deal for themselves. Rare books I presume are in a rare book room, which is going to be differently controlled anyhow. But I don’t know these things except through hearsay, so I can’t say.

CW: You mentioned earlier that you were still working on some publications left over from D.O. years. Is that the main way you’ve been involved with D.O. still?

JQ: Mostly, yeah. I didn’t go to any – I have not been back to any pre-Columbian symposia for two reasons. One is – main reason was I wanted to give Joanne Pillsbury some space. I don’t think of myself as a big scary guy but having somebody looking over you, “Oh, there’s the previous Director of Studies. Are they going to think –?” One of the great things Elizabeth Boone did for me when I came is she left me alone. She didn’t come to D.O. for quite a long time. She just didn’t come. After a couple years she popped in once to use the library briefly, but she didn’t come to any meetings. And I presume that was done just to simply allow me to find my own path and to feel comfortable and so I’m just doing the same for Joanne. But maybe after this year I’ll – the second reason was that they’ve all heretofore been overseas and it just didn’t work out for me to be able to get away. And if you’re going to Guatemala for a conference, you want to spend three or four days looking around as well, and I just didn’t have the time. But I’ll go back eventually. I mean, I love D.O. It’s a part of me. I love D.O., I love the people there. I’ll be back. But I just wanted to give Joanne plenty of elbowroom to start with.

CW: Did D.O. play a role in any field work or did you have any oversight in that in your years?

JQ: Well, I mean, this is sort of picking up on what I was already saying. The interesting thing is I asked around, “Well, why doesn’t D.O. fund field work, why don’t we fund our own field work?” And what I was told was that back in the, I guess the late ‘50s, D.O. did fund a lot of fieldwork. It funded a huge amount of fieldwork in Byzantium-land.

ABF: Yeah, in Turkey. The Hagia Sophia and the Kariye Djami.

JQ: Exactly. And what I was told – and again this is all hearsay – but what I was told is what happened was that they didn’t keep good track of the books and that the money – no one was controlling the money and the money was going out the door and there was nothing to show for it and that the publications weren’t coming. I mean, what’s the product here? The product is some sort of publication. That wasn’t – supposedly there’s still a collection somewhere in Manchester or Birmingham – there’s a D.O. collection of pottery sherds from some Byzantine-sponsored excavation that’s still there waiting to be picked – maybe you could get that gig, a free trip to England. And that it just got so out of control that they said, “We’re just going to stop this altogether.”

ABF: There are some major publications on churches, but –

JQ: Right. No, I don’t think everything was a disaster – I think that – and again this is Byzantine, it’s not Pre-Columbian – but my understanding is that, yeah, there were some successful projects and publications that came out of it. But that there was enough chaos in terms of other things and the money was not being accounted for as well as it might have been that they just decided to cut it off at the knees, which is understandable. But I thought it was unfortunate that there was then this draconian policy of, well, we’re not going to fund any of this ourselves. They do give out these project grants for endangered sites or special projects that other people do, but again I think that – and again this is just my opinion – but I think that D.O. is in a vital place as a center to which other people come, other scholars come and do work and that’s good, it should always do that and should always be that, but I think it’s important that D.O. have its own research engine cranking as well. You don’t want to be just an empty vessel that is only filled up by other scholars. You want to have enough of an internal combustion, if you will, that you’re creating your own heat and hopefully light as well. And one way to do that is to have some projects. They have to be – you have to make sure you don’t go out of control and maybe pick the right ones and so forth, but I think that would be a good thing. And despite all my carping, D.O. actually did provide a small amount of money for my project, which I’m just winding up now, my initial project that I am doing in Peru excavating a colonial period church. So, I thank them very much. Thank you.

CW: And was there – what sort of transition was there between the directorships of Laiou and Keenan? Because you spent time –

JQ: Well, what do you mean by what –?

CW: Well, how did you – I guess, what was your experience of dealing with their different styles, or was there a smooth process, or D.O. as a whole –?

ABF: In transition –

JQ: Well, there were definitely differences. Angeliki’s philosophy as best I could understand it was frankly a kind of status quo. You’re pre-Columbian studies. You’re small, but don’t ask me for anything more than you’ve got. Be happy with what you’ve got. Yes, Byzantine’s bigger than you, too bad. Be happy with what you’ve got. And so long as that was understood I was pretty much free to do what I wanted to do in terms of working within Pre-Columbian Studies. That’s why I said to her one day, “Well, you know, we must all hang together or surely hang separately.” And she said, “Right. Yes. You’ve got it.” She wouldn’t say, “You’ve got it,” but – When Ned came, well, there was a transition period literally because he kept on coming up to Harvard. He was still teaching a class, he wasn’t really full-time at D.O. for a while and that was kind of frustrating because I think that – I know Jan is coming back too – but it seems to me that at least in those days D.O. really needed a full-time director. There was enough stuff that was happening. Maybe it’s not true now. Ned really kind of in the first few years – it was like, “Let’s rock and roll.” And the first few years with Ned were great because he was a much more open, engaged, dynamic person than Angeliki. Angeliki – I was, I think, three years there while she was Director – she came to lunch with the Fellows probably once. That was just her style. She wanted to have her own time. And I actually got along well with Angeliki, and she was great at parties. She gave great parties. When she was not in her focused mood she could be a lot of fun. But she was a scholar who wanted to maximize the amount of time doing scholarship. And there was a definite sense of hierarchy with Angeliki, but it was all clear and understood and once you understood the parameters in which we were working I think I got along fine with her. Ned was much more collegial, open, came to lunch every day for the first few years, met regularly with all three directors which was something that Angeliki didn’t do. We used to have directors meetings which would be the three Directors of Studies and Ned once a week, I think for the first few years. I said to Ned that I’d like to do a poster. Have you seen the pre-Columbian poster? I don’t know if they still sell it. It’s of the Wari mirror. Is the gift shop open again?

CW: It is open.

JQ: Well, they should be selling that poster because we’ve got stacks of them.

ABF: We’ll check it out.

JQ: Yeah. I said, “I’d like to do a poster.” He said, “Do a poster! Want to do a poster too? You do a poster!” So it was this great sense of excitement, anything’s possible, new programs, it was great. Things started to get – once – I was there for I guess that would be seven years out of Ned’s total – and once we really committed to the new library I think Ned carried a very heavy burden. It was a lot of work for him. He had to deal with architects, he started reorganizing things internally, and I think it was – I know it was a big stress on me. I was going to meetings. There were all sorts of committee meetings for all different aspects of the project, and I used to be annoyed that I didn’t feel I had enough time to do my own work, my own research. I was reaching the point at the height of the planning for the buildings where I felt I couldn’t even do the Pre-Columbian, I couldn’t even do the research, I couldn’t even do the administrative work for Pre-Columbian Studies. But that was getting out of my grasp because some days, two or three days in a row, I’d be going to meetings that were from nine to five or beyond, and still supposedly running this Pre-Columbian Studies program and trying to do some of my own scholarship. And of course I think it was ten times worse for Ned because he was at the center of it all. So, I think by the end, I mean he was partly tired and partly – and various issues came up that became touchy. I mean, I was annoyed that I didn’t get my research leave, some of the restructuring in terms of the organization of D.O. were things that I thought maybe deserved more thorough examination – that were done perhaps what I thought was a bit autocratically. For example, like I said before I thought that changing the collections to a museum might be the right thing to do, but it was done I thought without a real thorough discussion of what the implications of that were. One of the things that happened was Ned rationalized Dumbarton Oaks, and he rationalized it in the following way. When he got there under Angeliki and prior to Angeliki, Dumbarton Oaks was basically a mom-and-pop research organization. It was a research institute. Who was mom? Who was pop? Mildred and Bob. OK? And it was organized – if you wanted to draw an organizational chart of Dumbarton Oaks, you’d have the Director, which would be Angeliki or Ned, and then the next line down would be the Directors of Studies, and then – I mean you could draw the branches for Marlene in terms of finance and so forth and so on, but the core of it I would argue was that pyramid. Now each Director of Study was in charge of a librarian, and in Byzantine – well there were equivalents in Landscape too – and each in charge of basically some sort of curator in charge of collections, rare books for garden and objects for Byzantine and pre-Columbian. In rationalizing it, what happened was that instead of having three separate libraries basically we have one library. And the librarians no longer reported to the Directors of Studies – they now report to the head librarian, over there. And the curators no longer report to the Director of Studies, they report to the Director of the Museum, over there. So, now that’s how it’s been rationalized, on a model of function instead of program. I can understand why that was done, but I think this is very, very dangerous because it diminishes the authority and the role of the programs of this research and the scholarship and it elevates the functional roles. I mean, the second most powerful – outside of Marlene and whoever’s in charge of the grounds – and the garden’s a separate thing too, Gail’s great – but outside of the infrastructural functions and the financial ones, the second most powerful person of Dumbarton Oaks now is the head of the library. And that’s the way maybe most libraries are or most institutions in which the library – I mean, the main – we talked a lot about the collections but the real truth of the matter is that for the scholars who come there – Fellows and Junior Fellows and Visiting Scholars – the main reason they come, besides the food and the gardens and the pool in the summer, is the library. So it’s understandable why in a sense the rationalization leads to the Director of the library becoming the second most important person. But I worry that in that happening suddenly the whole raison d’être of the place has shifted and it’s shifted away from the study programs as being the core, before the study programs were the core of which that included the library and the collections, now it’s been fractionated in a way that I think could lead to trouble. So long as the current Director and future directors make sure that the centrality and importance of the Directors of Studies and the research that goes on there and the programs that go on there are maintained I guess it’ll be OK. But I think that’s a danger as a result of this rationalizing process. But I am not there anymore so I can’t worry too much.

CW: And I guess our, as I said, very broad final question which was asked of Betty Benson by Elizabeth Boone is how do you see the role – and you’ve touched upon this in many of your answers – but how do you see the role of D.O. in pre-Columbian studies? I think it’s very interesting what you were saying about bringing more Latin American scholars to D.O.

ABF: And also about D.O. being the only place where there really is pre-Columbian studies for everybody.

JQ: Well, I think that there’s – it’s hard to say for sure. I think D.O. still has that preeminent role. I think though – I think things have changed – I mean, a lot has changed in the landscape of scholarship in general, not just in the last ten or twelve years but in the last, say, twenty years. I mean, for example, twenty years ago everybody who was anybody waited for the next D.O. publication with baited breath. Of course, it was totally out of your field – you wouldn’t – but I think there’s a lot more being published. There’s a lot more pre-Columbian books being published by various – for example the Cotsen Institute at UCLA, very powerful, very well-endowed, very successful. It’s connected to a university directly – it’s at UCLA – so how it works it a bit different. Scholarly resources in general are more accessible thanks to the internet – not everything – but having those kinds of options to do bibliographic kinds of work or even primary documents didn’t exist even ten years ago. When I started at D.O., my secretary used to leave those pink “While You Were Out” slips all over my desk, and she’d still funnel calls to me, all this sort of stuff. I came to D.O. by the way with a second generation Macintosh laptop.

CW: About this big?

JQ: Yeah, and it was more powerful than the desktop Macintosh Classic that I was offered. You know what the difference was? Mine had 40 gigabytes, and theirs had 30 total memory. And they did upgrade in a year or two, but 40 gigabytes was considered huge. So, I think that D.O. is still a very important place for pre-Columbian studies. I still think it’s in the vanguard. I think it has to be careful – Pre-Columbian Studies has to be careful – because there is a lot more going on out there than there was. There’s a lot more research being done in Latin America and there are a lot more first-class scholars in Latin America than I would say there were in the previous generation. The quality of publications in Latin America is a lot better than it used to be. I mean, back in the ’70s in Peru and in the ’80s, partly due to the internal politics of Peru but partly just due to the lack of – I mean, you can publish a quality publication with a desktop and computer and printer these days in a way you couldn’t – it was mimeograph, mimeograph on paper that was like toilet paper back in – thirty years ago. So all the gray literature that’s available either on the internet or just by people doing these kinds of desktop publishing, it’s created very different kinds of landscape. So I think D.O. is still in a prime location, an important location, but it’s in a somewhat more crowded field. And it will have to be agile to maintain its position of leadership. But long may she wave.

ABF: Thank you very much.

JQ: Thank you. It’s been fun and illuminating. I hope I helped. Didn’t mean to say anything mean about anybody.

CW: Is there anything you were expecting to talk about?

ABF: Yeah, that we didn’t touch on?

JQ: No, I think you covered it pretty well.

ABF: If you have anything to add, let us know.

]]> No publisher Gabriela Santiago Pre-Columbian Collection Oral History Project Pre-Columbian Studies Archives 2012-08-08T12:35:00Z Page Elizabeth P. Benson http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/elizabeth-p.-benson Oral History Interview with Elizabeth P. Benson undertaken by Elizabeth Boone at the Guest House, Dumbarton Oaks on May 13 and 16, 2008. At Dumbarton Oaks, Betty Benson was Assistant Curator of the Pre-Columbian Collection (1963–1965), Curator of the Pre-Columbian Collection (1965–1979), and Director of Studies of the Center for Pre-Columbian Studies (1973–1978). EB: My name is Elizabeth Boone, this is Elizabeth Benson; we’re here in the Fellows Building at Dumbarton Oaks for this interview. It’s May 13, 2008. We’re being recorded, or Betty Benson is being recorded, by Joe Mills. So Betty, let’s get started talking about you and Mr. Bliss, and the National Gallery of Art, and how you came to know him, and what was that like?

BB: I was the assistant registrar at the National Gallery, and everything that came into the National Gallery or went out of it came through our office, so I saw all of those things. There had been a previous registrar, Charles Richards, some years before, who had been very interested in the pre-Columbian things and had worked with Mr. Bliss and his things. But largely the National Gallery was—still is—essentially a gallery of European and American painting, and they’re not terribly interested in other things, although they certainly show them and give attention to them, and they recently opened those good sculpture galleries. But –

EB: How did Mr. Bliss come to have objects at the National Gallery?

BB: Mr. Bliss felt very strongly that his objects were art objects, and at that time there were – Cleveland had, the Cleveland Museum of Art had a few pre-Columbian objects in it. I think it was 1947 that the Bliss collection came to the National Gallery on loan. But there was no pre-Columbian collection in any art museum. The pre-Columbian things were all in ethnographic museums, natural history museums, but not art, and Mr. Bliss felt that they were art and should be shown in an art museum, and he talked to David Finley, the Director, and John Walker, the chief curator, and persuaded them that they would like to have his pre-Columbian objects on loan there. And indeed they were on loan there from 1947 until 1962, when Mr. Bliss died. So that’s how they got there. Mr. Bliss was – I think sometimes probably things were sent in; I don’t really remember all the details of that, but I do remember Mr. Bliss coming in, sometimes with a little object in his pocket, a piece of jade or something, and he would say, “I want you to see my latest temptation,” or something like that. Or his chauffeur, a very nice man named Garrett, would come in with a basket or a box, or carrying some kind of package with another object to be seen, and these things were on deposit there. All these things were coming in after the 1947 installation of the collection, and they were beginning to pile up or – they weren’t pileable – but they were multiplying in storage in the registrar’s vault. And Lester Cook, who was a curator at the National Gallery, and I decided that we wanted to reinstall the collection, and we got the permission of John Walker and Mr. Bliss, and we had a great fun doing this. And there are some photographs, National Gallery photographs, of both installations, which can be compared. But the earlier installation had painted backgrounds. As I recall the general – the wall and the, most of the case backgrounds were of a sort of ecru color, but some of the case backgrounds were kind of brick red, and that was pretty good behind the gold. But we put in velvet and all sorts of textile-y things. We had a lot of fun with that. So we did use some of these things that Mr. Bliss had been bringing in.

EB: When did you do the reinstallation, Betty?

BB: I don’t remember the exact year; it was in the late ’50s.

EB: When did you – we’re perhaps jumping ahead – but when did you come to the National Gallery, and if you could talk about that a little bit, because that was actually prior to your meeting Mr. Bliss, or –?

BB: Well, but I worked in other parts of the National Gallery and had not met him. I only knew him, really, when I was working in the registrar’s office in the ’50s. I occasionally saw him at a party somewhere; but I think that was after I knew him at the Gallery. I remember once meeting him at a cocktail party, and I guess I had a glass in my right hand – I don’t know why I couldn’t switch it around, but for some reason he extended his hand – and I had to give him my left hand, and I apologized for giving him my left hand, and he said, “Oh, that’s very good: it’s closer to your heart.” He was a very elegant man, a very nice man. He was a good diplomat, I think. He was a tall man with very fine carriage, not really a handsome face, but a good face; and, a quiet man, but a very perceptive and humorous man. Often – and I think you’ve heard one story that he came in one day, and I took him into the registrar’s vault for some reason, where his things were – it must have been when we were doing that installation, where we had an object truck with drawers in it, and in one of these we had taken out the Wari things. And there was a Wari hat under these piled cloth hats, and I had put in it that tiny Wari mosaic man which is, I think, less than an inch tall. And I think I had put it in the hat because it had no case of its own, and that was a good safe, soft place for it. But when Mr. Bliss came in there with me, I thought, “Boy, that doesn’t look like very good curatorship, and so –” And Mr. Bliss looked at it and said, “He capsized.” So he was quite delightful. He was very well groomed, very well tailored, and he stood well and he looked good. Those were the days when men wore white shirts and occasionally, if you were doing something very informal, you might wear a blue shirt, and Mr. Bliss came in one day and I thought, “He’s got on a pink shirt!” And as I got closer to him I realized it wasn’t a pink shirt; it was a shirt of very fine white and red stripes, so this was the sort of elegance.

EB: A striped shirt was more formal than a pink shirt.

BB: Well, somehow it looked – a pink shirt, it had a sort of other connotation, but when it was a red-and-white striped shirt, that was rather finer – in my mind, anyway.

EB: So, when he would bring the objects in, he would bring them himself? Would he set up an appointment, or would he just arrive, or –?

BB: No, he had a secretary, Mrs. Hassan, I think she was Catherine Hassan, whom I knew on the telephone for years, but I didn’t meet her until after he died. But she would call and say, “Mr. Bliss would like to come and bring something in,” and I would say, “Fine.” So it was always set up.

EB: So, what was it like to work with him? You talked about some of your interactions, at the National Gallery, but are there others that are particularly memorable?

BB: There’s one memorable one, which is really a very tiny thing, and yet it made an impression on me. We were in the storeroom one day, in the wrapping room, and Mr. Bliss was in there with me, and I was apparently wrapping up something for him, and he was standing there beside me, and we were talking, I think, and as I got to the point where I had to tie the string on, immediately Mr. Bliss’ finger came down to hold this knot in the string. I mean, this is a very small thing, but there are an awful lot of people in the world who would not think to do that or not bother to do that, and that impressed me.

EB: I can certainly see why.

BB: But those are the kinds of relationships I had with him, and I –

EB: Did he talk to you at all about his love for pre-Columbian art or his particular interest in that?

BB: He made it obvious by his attitude toward the things he brought in. Now, what he brought in or what came in – I think some things were sent in by dealers. He didn’t acquire all these – some of them went out again – but some of them were things he was considering.

EB: So, he would have them come in on approval?
BB: Yeah, yeah. Well, he thought about it, and yeah, so. But we didn’t go into any long digressions about his attitude, and yet it was obvious from the way he handled objects and thought about them, and he has said this, of course, in print. He had a book done – it came out in 1957. It was a text by Samuel Lothrop and these extraordinary photographs by Nicholas Murray which have finger-painted backgrounds and other rather extravagant things, but there are wonderful photographs of the objects, so that – And he talks in that and in other places about his feeling that this was art and that these were fine objects. He was, I’m quite sure, the first person to collect from an aesthetic point of view. I was thinking about people who were collecting about the same time: George Hewitt Myers of the Textile Museum collected some fine objects, some of which Dumbarton Oaks later acquired, but those were things that just sort of appealed to him. He was seriously interested in textiles and probably mostly Oriental rugs. There was a man in Montreal named Cleveland Morgan, F. Cleveland Morgan, who gave some very good pre-Columbian objects to the Montreal museum, but there were just a few things, and he was not really seriously interested in that. And Heye, of course, was collecting – these were all collecting about the same time, and I can sort of imagine, you know, they were – which dealer would try to sell what to whom, and whether they were sort of rivals in these times – but Heye of course was interested in collected everything that was Indian. But Mr. Bliss wanted art objects. A little later Rockefeller came into this, but Bliss was earlier.

EB: So Rockefeller was later.

BB: Yeah.

EB: With the objects that came in, and some left again, do you have a sense of why those that left, left; does that tell you anything about the internal workings of his aesthetic, or his aesthetic sensibility?
BB: I have no – I don’t remember, really, what stayed and what went, now, and I don’t think it was always – I think probably there were one or two things that I thought, “Is he really going to buy that?” And he didn’t. So there was that sort of thing. But I think sometimes it may have been that he simply wasn’t that seriously interested, or something else, something other was offered, and –

EB: Can you talk to us about some of his advisors? Certainly Samuel Lothrop looms large, but I didn’t know whether there were other advisors, or did you have a sense of –?

BB: The other most important one was Matthew Stirling at the Smithsonian. And of course Mr. Bliss was particularly fond of Olmec things. His first piece was Olmec, and he collected a lot of Olmec objects. And Stirling came in often and was very interested. I’ve been looking through things recently to sort of revive my past, and someone had written – maybe, I think in an obituary of Mr. Bliss – it was an archaeologist who wrote this – possibly Clifford Evans – that Mr. Bliss’s main advisors were Lothrop and Stirling, two of the first rigorous American archaeologists. You know archeology, American archaeology was fairly new in those days, and Mr. Bliss got the best people to advise him, and I think that tells you something about him and his taste.

EB: Now Sam Lothrop was based here or in New York?

BB: No, Sam Lothrop was at Harvard.

EB: At Harvard. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

BB: Yeah, yeah.

EB: And of course Mr. Bliss was Harvard.

BB: Yes, yeah. And so Lothrop was influential, and I think we have to talk more about him I guess a little later, because although – well, I can say this now – he was on the advisory committee when the collection first came to Dumbarton Oaks, but he died shortly afterwards. But I think that he advised, after Mr. Bliss’s death – I think Lothrop advised Jack Thacher about setting up the committee and other things like that – people to use.

EB: Great. We can come back to that. But let’s talk about the collection at the National Gallery. Do you have a sense of what the reaction was on the part of the public or the National Gallery insiders to the collection? It was in the basement, I believe, is that correct?

BB: It was in that gallery space between where the restaurant under the dome is now and the central gallery, which was always the temporary exhibition space, the big long gallery. And so a lot of people went through that space, it was not just – we didn’t really think of it as in the basement – there’s a floor or two below that even – but it was in the lower floor just as you come in the Constitution Avenue door. And it stayed there for fifteen years, so the Gallery must have been reasonably happy with it, and I think that the public – it was, I think, a nice change of pace between looking at paintings and looking at paintings. And although the central gallery had other kinds of exhibitions too, but I think it seemed to be very successful there, and I think it surely did widen interest in pre-Columbian art, because a lot of people would go through without really seeing anything, but there were other people who would say, “Hey, that’s pretty interesting,” and it, I think –

EB: Was Mr. Bliss involved very much with the OAS? Because I think I remember the Inka tunic being first published, a fragment of it being published in the Américas magazine. Was this correct?

BB: I wasn’t aware of any particular association. He had – he certainly was interested in Latin America: he had been Ambassador to Argentina, he had traveled in Mexico, and I dearly loved the pictures that James Carder has in his files here of Mr. Bliss on a Mexican trip, standing bare-chested beside his horse or—I don’t know if it was a horse or a donkey he was riding, but – and he’s traveling through Mexico, and of course since I’ve just described how I knew Mr. Bliss, I think this is a marvelous picture of him.

EB: I’ll bet.

BB: But I mean he would have been interested certainly in what the OAS was doing and publishing, but I don’t think he had any special “in” with them.

EB: When the collection was at the National Gallery, were there lectures or programs or anything developed there?

BB: I don’t believe so; I don’t recall anything. I don’t think so.

EB: My other question was, and this is – I’ve just heard a story – probably false, that you and Julie Jones were both at the Gallery when the opportunity to work with Mr. Bliss became available, but also the Rockefeller collection was then being made public, and that one of you decided to come here, and one there. I just heard that story and I never knew that story.

BB: Well, some parts of that are right. Julie and I were at the Gallery at the same time, and we were friends there. I don’t remember – I meant to call her and ask her about this, I don’t remember exactly what her schedule was. But I left the National Gallery at the beginning, I think, of 1961, and went to New York, where I stayed for a year and a half, until I got – actually I was in Maine when I got the phone call from John Thacher, the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, asking me if I would come and set up the collection. And I really came down as a temporary job. I hadn’t intended to stay at Dumbarton Oaks. And Julie at some point – and I can’t remember how this coordinated – went to New York – and I don’t remember whether she first went – she had become interested in the Bliss collection too; that converted both of us, for two people – I don’t remember whether she was first at the Museum of Primitive Art and then started her doctorate at NYU, or the other way around, but I think – I don’t really remember seeing her in New York at that time, so she probably came a little later. I had talked to her about taking over at Dumbarton Oaks when I left, because I had planned to leave, and she had agreed to that. And then I decided that Dumbarton Oaks was a very nice place to stay, and I stayed on. I had to call Julie and say, “Is that all right with you?” and all of this went through Jack Thacher too, of course, but – so that’s that story.

EB: And then she went on to –

BB: Well, she was at the Museum of Primitive Art, and when that collection went to the Metropolitan, she went to the Metropolitan, yeah.

EB: So, when Mr. Bliss was thinking about bringing his collection to Dumbarton Oaks, were you in town at the time, or you were in New York?

BB: Oh, well I think it was always intended to come. He had given Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard. Dumbarton Oaks was their place, their heritage, and the pre-Columbian things would go with that, everything else came, went to Harvard, so –

EB: Do you have a sense of why he chose Philip Johnson to design the Pavilion, or what was the thinking there?

BB: I think the thinking there was John Thacher. Thacher knew Philip Johnson and admired him and was interested in what he was doing, and I think he said to the Blisses, “Look, here is somebody who could do something very interesting here” – something like that. I suspect that’s the way it goes. I have no proof for that except that I think it’s – it just looks like that.

EB: Because it’s interesting to think that the Garden Library and the Johnson Pavilion were being created at the same time in two very different styles.

BB: Yes, yes. No, no, it is interesting, because the Garden Library of course is much more traditional Dumbarton Oaks architecture. And the Philip Johnson wing, I think, looks not quite so much like a modern building in that atmosphere, but like a sort of garden pavilion, and I think it worked in that way. And in fact I think Mrs. Bliss – I think – I can’t remember what the early drawings looked like – but Mrs. Bliss contributed the idea of those little spaces where the plants are – I seem to talk about nothing but Mrs. Bliss’ love for plants, but she did do that. I’m sure that was added; I once saw some of the earlier drawings, and she had added that bit. So, she took to the design.

EB: I had heard they had had a scale model, a half-size model, of one of the pavilions, actually on display in the Music Room for a while. Is that true?

BB: I never knew anything about that. It’s possible, but I – well, it could be, because I don’t remember exactly when that started. Mr. Bliss died – was it in the early, early in’62, he was – Yeah, I don’t remember that. It’s possible, but I find it a little hard to imagine it.

EB: So, but you did get the sense that Mr. and Mrs. Bliss had a fair amount of input into the Johnson building?

BB: Yeah, well she certainly had input into the actual architecture, and I think Mr. Bliss obviously approved the plan, and I’d like to say that I think the Blisses were both very firm-minded people about what they wanted. They were open to ideas, they were open to Thacher’s ideas, they were open – and there’s a lot of this mentioned in the new installation – they were open to Royall Tyler’s ideas. Royall Tyler did introduce them to certain fields and certain things, but they weren’t going to go into that just because Royall Tyler showed this to them. And I think one thing – and this may have something to do with Royall Tyler – the Blisses did choose, in their particular fields of Pre-Columbian and Byzantine, to go into two rather unusual and unoccupied fields, you know. They didn’t start collecting Italian Renaissance painting or more conventional things. They collected fields that were less known, more open, and had much more room for scholarship, because I think they were thinking about that too.

EB: Going back to the Gallery itself, and then I want to talk – see if you could talk a little bit more about Mr. Thacher and Mr. Tyler – do you have a sense of other galleries that Mr. Bliss may have been particularly interested in or could have influenced the design, or is that just –?

BB: I just don’t know, because I was actually away during that period, for one thing.

EB: So, Mr. Bliss actually died before the building was completed.

BB: Yes. He saw it begun, I think, but he did, yeah.

EB: But he wouldn’t have seen the glass and he saw probably the –

BB: I don’t know what he saw, but he would have seen a drawing.

EB: Do you have a sense, or can you characterize Mildred Bliss’s impressions about the Johnson Pavilion, when it – her other responses to it at the time?

BB: When it opened, I think she was very much in favor of it, and as I say she did give Philip Johnson an idea for it, and she seemed to be sort of working with him, and I think she liked the idea.

EB: One of the things that struck me is that the pavilions always had – well, certainly plants in the planter’s sections – but also orchids in the middle of the pavilions, often. Is that a decision that Mrs. Bliss made?

BB: No, no, no. We did that as part of the installation, and maybe we’re approaching the installation now. There are lots of interesting things about that building, and one thing, I’m sure you’ve noticed, are the sound effects. And if you stand on one side and speak across, you sound loud to the person directly opposite to you. If you stand in the middle of the room, you come back at yourself, you scare yourself. Nobody else notices that. But we put things in the middle of the room really to keep people from having this experience of scaring themselves in there. And that’s how the plants got in there. I think all the plants that were in there were in the middle of the room.

EB: Let me ask you a little bit more about Jack Thacher, the first director of Dumbarton Oaks. What was his role in establishing Dumbarton Oaks?

BB: I think in a quiet way he was quite important. He was a person who had ideas of his own, but he worked well with the Blisses. I think it was a good match. They had a lot in common; they respected each other – that is as far as I can tell. And I think he made a lot of things work. He was good at finding people to do things, and he had very good ideas of his own, which were compatible with theirs. And I can’t tell you specific things – except, I think, Philip Johnson – but I think he had a great deal of influence and was a good creative means of putting their ideas in place.

EB: And so did he – so he was the one who called you and said, “Come and help us install and oversee this installation”? Did he also select the designer?

BB: They didn’t have designers in those days. The National Gallery didn’t have a designer in those days. When they hung a show, there was a guy, Fred Wreath, who was very good at hanging paintings, and he knew just how and where to hang them on the wall and in the space, and the curator of the show told him where to – what to put in the rooms, and that was how things – We didn’t have designers. If I may back up slightly on this, when I first – well, we’ll talk maybe about when I came down; before the building was finished I actually came to work for them – but when I first went into the building with Mr. Thatcher – as I called him then – and he took me around, and I said, “It’s a beautiful building. How do you put anything in it?” And we agreed that we didn’t want wooden cases; they would clash with the teak floors. We didn’t want metal cases; they would clash with the metal that was already there. Ideally we would float the objects in space, and about that time I read a newspaper story about an architect who took all his kitchen fixtures and held them up with jets of air. And I thought, you know, that’s what we might be doing, except of course one good power shortage, and we’ve lost everything. So, I think this put the idea in Jack’s head, and he found that, he talked to people at the Smithsonian – this is one of his ways of doing things – and he found out that they had some people on their exhibition staff who were working with clear plastic. And so we – I was going to say, “we borrowed.” I thought we were borrowing; I don’t think he ever went back. James Mayo, Jim Mayo, who came out, who was a sculptor, really – he didn’t get a chance to do much sculpture, but he was that and wanted to do that, and sort of made sculptural stands, I think — but for the installation I with consultation with Michael Coe – we haven’t got him in yet, but he was an important part of deciding what we would put in and where – and Thacher, who was involved in this too, and Jim Mayo, who made the cases and often had ideas about them. I would tell him, “I want a case this size, because we’re going to have these objects in this case,” and then Thacher and I had some arguments about how high the cases should be, and Jack wanted them, you know, proper height for his viewing, and I said, “Now wait a minute, I mean that’s fine for me, but there’re little kids who are going to come in here and look at some of these things,” so we tried to think of it in things that could be seen if they were at an upper level and things that were lower. It’s interesting. I was thinking today looking at this new installation, where almost everything is shown vertically, that that solves a lot of that problem, I think, because most of our things were shown horizontally. But the four people involved in the installation were Thacher and Benson and Coe and Mayo, and that was it. Now Jim Mayo was getting some help, I think, from other Smithsonian people, and one of them was Astor Moore, who later came in here. I – Astor Moore was a familiar face who would occasionally appear with Jim, but I didn’t really know him until he later came here as the cabinetmaker. One thing that Jim Mayo did very well was to glue those cases with glue that did not turn yellow. This we found out – there were two installations that Jim did not do. One was for the Kuna-Lacanha panel – whatever we’re calling it now, the horizontal one – and we had somebody in New York who did lots of cases for museums in New York, and we got him to make that thing. His seams turned yellow; Jim’s never did. Now Chris, who is here now, thinks it was Aston Moore who made that glue that didn’t yellow, that Jim was using. I simply don’t know that. I dealt entirely with Jim Mayo, and who developed that, I don’t know.

EB: So plexi-cases were just coming in, or was it –? I always felt that Dumbarton Oaks was one of the first, if not the first.

BB: I think it was. And I don’t know what the – I don’t think the Smithsonian ever did anything seriously with that. They may have made some vitrines, maybe that kind of thing, but I don’t think they were really into the other. The vitrine Plexiglas and the smaller mounting pieces you could buy by the whatever; the fatter ones had to be specially cast. Somebody mentioned the other day the name of that Plexiglas company, which is still apparently making Plexiglas in Rockville – I can’t think of their name at the moment, but that was – Oh, the other case was the big Palenque sculpture that we were looking at, and that was in three pieces. And somebody had filled out those damaged profiles on the figures, and we decided we wanted them as they were, as they had been, and not with this stuff put on it, but it was very soluble stuff that had been put on. And I remember one day – and this did not happen often – that Jack Thacher got down on the floor, and the two of us were down on the – the pieces were flat on the floor on a piece of canvas –

EB: And this was in the Pavilion?

BB: In the Pavilion. And we had some water and cloths, and we were down there – this stuff came off very easily – we were down there like two kids playing in the sandboxes. But we got somebody else to make that, because that just was not possible to do that in the Plexiglas mounting. It had to be bolted together and it had to be on a stand that would hold it seriously, and so we ordered this – or talked to the people about – this stone thing with the metal frame on the back, and I began to think about weight. How much weight was that floor meant to carry? Because that thing – I’ve forgotten now what it was going to weigh, but it was heavy. So I called up Philip Johnson’s office, and they sort of said, “Well, we don’t know. Call our engineers.” So I called the engineers, and they said that floor is designed to hold a hundred pounds per square inch, and I said, “Now wait a minute. I can go up there and stand on the ball of one foot, and that’s more than a hundred pounds per square inch,” and they said, “Well, yes, but that’s live weight; this is dead weight.” So, we had the thing made and we put it up there, and I must say that for a long time afterwards, every time I would go into what was then the Coin Room, where Alfred Bellinger had a desk right under that sculpture, and I would go and look at the ceiling above Alfred’s head. But those were some of the installation things. Philip Johnson – or I think it was probably someone in his office – designed a mock-up of a case. It was a round case about five feet wide, I guess, to go in the center of a room, and it was put in that room of the gallery, and I walked in there and I thought, “Uh-oh. This is just like being on a merry-go-round. This frame will not work.”

EB: Was it plexi, or –?

BB: I’ve forgotten. It was just something that they’d made as a mock-up. I think it was probably wood and something –

EB: – something else.

BB: Well, that was when I began to realize that that building is a square building. It’s made of circles, but it’s square, and it wants its squareness emphasized with anything you put in it. And this I kept saying to –

EB: So, that’s why you have the Palenque panel at one end and the Teotihuacan mural at the other end, in many ways sort of squaring off those –

BB: Yeah, well, because – well, one reason we put those in those places is that I think it’s sort of an attracting view. It draws your attention to have a big object at the end of your view and to go toward that, but those things should be that way anyway, and most of the cases – you can get away with the occasional diagonal case – but most of the cases we put flush with what would be the straight wall.

EB: So, Mr. Thacher found Jim Mayo.

BB: He found him. He found him, yeah.

EB: Now, I wanted to ask you about the opening, but you’ve mentioned Michael Coe several times, and he was so – I know we’ll talk about him later regarding the program – but it might be important to talk about his influence and his advice now about the installation and the collection.

BB: Yeah. He of course was not here, but he came down a couple of times, and he and I together went over the pieces that we did very much want to show and then talked about what should go with what, and he of course knew much more about these things than I did. So, he was invaluable on that.

EB: How was he chosen? Or how did he come to be a major advisor?

BB: He was the advisor; that was his title. And he was appointed early on, and I assume – he had been a student of Gordon Willey’s – and I assume that this was Jack Thacher and Lothrop probably asking Willey, maybe, something like that. I think that’s how he came in. He was at Yale but he had been at Harvard.

EB: So, did he advise Mr. Bliss also toward the end?

BB: No, no, no. Mr. Bliss died before Mike came on the scene. I’m quite sure there was no association there.

EB: So, are there other decisions about the aesthetics of the installation that would be interesting to highlight?

BB: Well, we simply tried to make things look as good as possible and to think of them as handsome objects and to show them off to their best advantage. I was thinking about the order that we did that in, and people say, you know, “Why do you come in on Aztec?” And Miriam and Juan Antonio asked this when they were starting the installation. And our idea, I’m pretty sure, was that you’ve just come from Byzantium, and this was what was going on in the New World at the same time, so you were in a totally different part of the world, but in the same era. And so, what they’ve done now – which I think is neat – they’ve also got some Inka things, as well as Aztec, in that room. And then we put Teotihuacan next door, I think partly because that mural is a good drawing card into that room and partly because it relates to Aztec as an important Central Mexican culture. And then Olmec is still in that next room, which throws you a little bit chronologically, but the two new people didn’t think of any better way to do that, I think.

EB: Well, the Mayan needs that far room.

BB: And well, that again was – putting the big sculpture at the end of the room was a way of drawing, I think. You’ve got to be drawn in by some big things, because there are an awful lot of little things in that collection, and that gets a little dull.

EB: Should we talk about the opening a little bit?

BB: Yeah.

EB: Do you want to take a break?

BB: We might as well go on, I guess.

EB: OK.

BB: The opening was scheduled for December of ’63, I think. I hope I’ve got the dates right. And not very long before that, of course, Kennedy was assassinated, and they had planned a more, you know – an elegant dinner party, and I don’t know what else, a much more elaborate opening for it. There’s somebody else I should mention in this too – is Thomas Baird, who is somebody I had known at the National Gallery when he was a Fellow there, and Tom was an art historian, but he was basically – he was a novelist. But for a while he went to museums that needed a curator for some special time to another. He ended up teaching at Trinity in Hartford, but he was at Dumbarton Oaks about the time of the installation, and I know he was there at the time of the opening. He probably contributed some ideas to that installation too. I don’t remember exactly when he came in, but I think of him at this moment because we sent out – invitations had been sent out for the big thing, which was being cancelled or reduced, and we had to send out a notice about this – and Tom, as a writer, was sort of in charge of writing this notice. And we all got into this big hassle over prepositions, which are always the most difficult part of any language, of course, you know, it was, “out of respect for,” or – so I remember that he was present and involved at that time. So, there were still a lot of people. President Pusey came down from Harvard, and I walked through the galleries with him before the crowd came in. And I’m not sure what he made of it; it wasn’t probably exactly to his primary taste, but he was always very good about what we wanted to do. And – I might as well throw this in now – that later, when we had the first conference, and Jack Thacher wrote an introduction, a preface to that Olmec conference volume, and he sort of as a courtesy sent it – his copy, his writing – to President Pusey, and Pusey wrote back and said, “That’s fine, except I don’t think you ought to call it the first in the series; you may never have another.” And as you know, we’ve had a conference every year since then, and they have all sooner or later been published. But anyway – But that was the only thing he worried about. It was a festive opening, it was a good party, I think a little subdued because of the circumstances. But it was – another thing – I think about these things in terms of the new installation where they have new ultraviolet filtering walls, which make differences in the light, but I think we had decided to have curtains. I know we had to have curtains in there anyway, which we used when the sun was coming in too strongly, and we realized at that first opening, which was in the evening, that we also needed in there at night the curtains drawn, because if you walked toward those curved windows in that lighted room, you looked like yourself coming at yourself in a funhouse mirror. And so there are always these little practical considerations in that – but that was one thing we learned. Oh, another thing we did that night – and I think this was sort of too hard to keep up – we put spotlights outside to light up the things so –

EB: – in the woodland?

BB: In the woodland, on the trees and things, so that they would outweigh the reflections. And I think that worked pretty well, but the keeping up of the spotlights was too much for later evenings, when it’s open for concert time and that sort of thing.

EB: There used to be bird cutouts in the woods.

BB: There was a problem with that glass corridor to the main building, because birds would try to fly through that glass, and they tried planting up around it, they tried – they were cutouts of hawks. They were trying to scare them, frighten them away from going through the glass. Yeah, that was a problem. Oh, there was another wildlife problem, and I meant to see what they’re doing now. But the first day I was in my office, there are these deep window wells, and there was a bird – I think it was a mocking bird – who got down in there, and who could not fly straight enough, long enough to get out. So, I called for help, and the gardeners came and put a ladder down in there, and the mocking bird simply flew up to one rung of the ladder and then flew off into the sky. So, they put little ladders in there; they were probably there when you were there. There was another time when a raccoon got down in there.

EB: I remember those squirrel – I used to call them “squirrel ladders.”

BB: No, they were put in really as bird ladders, but I guess the squirrels –

EB: Let’s take a little break. Do you mind?

BB: Fine. Can we break, Joe?

EB: Joe, we’re taking a break. [tape ends and then restarts]

EB: This is an interview with Elizabeth Benson, the second tape, May 13, 2008. I’m Elizabeth Boone. It’s being recorded by Joe Mills, and we’re in the Fellows Building of Dumbarton Oaks. Betty, we’ve talked about the first installation, we’ve talked about the opening. Certainly the collection did not remain static, but there were acquisitions and de-accessions – a few. So, I was wondering if you could talk about how you continued to acquire selectively and shaped the collection and what was your thinking about that.

BB: My basic rule of thinking was to ask myself, “Would Mr. Bliss like this piece?” Mr. Bliss had not acquired his objects with the idea of having an example of this thing and that thing and the other thing and all of the things that he should. He was interested in buying fine objects, usually of fine materials, finely worked. And this was the way he did things. So, I tried to keep that in mind. He had acquired very few ceramic pieces. And I began acquiring ceramics because this was the time when fine Maya ceramics were beginning to appear. There hadn’t been very many up until that time. So, that was one thing that I did. But I acquired other pieces that I thought, “He would like this, he would have bought this.” And again, we weren’t trying to do a sort of well-rounded thing, necessarily. It was nice if a good piece came up from a culture that we didn’t have well represented, and OK, that’s fine – but that’s more or less what we were doing.

EB: Someone described Mr. Bliss – and perhaps it was you – who described him as a “polished stone man” [BB laughs]. Maybe that was Gordon Willey and I can’t remember.

BB: That’s certainly true. He liked gold too. But polished stone – he was a polished stone man – that’s very true, yes.

EB: Did he acquire any ceramics himself?

BB: A few, yeah. There’s a Maya round polychrome bowl and there’s that carved creamy-colored clay bowl – that’s a round one too. There were a few that he had, but not many. We acquired most of them.

EB: How were your acquisitions funded?

BB: There was money – I’ve forgotten how much – in the budget for acquisitions. And sometimes that was fine. When we’d already spent some money and there was something that Mike and I thought was very good, and that we should have – he looked at everything that I got and we did this together. But if there wasn’t any money, I’d go to Jack Thacher and say, “We want to acquire this,” show him this piece, and he would go to Mrs. Bliss, I think – I never did that. I’d shown her a number of pieces that we wanted and she knew that I knew and so forth, but it was Thacher who made the arrangements for that. And there was one time – I think I only did this once – and I went to Thatcher and I said, “I want to buy this piece.” And he said, “Talk to Sue Boyd, she just was going to get a piece and somebody else got it ahead of her,” or something like that. It was near the end of the fiscal year. So I got Byzantine money for one piece.

EB: Did she want it back the next year?

BB: No, no, she was very good about it. We got on quite well. That was the only time I ever asked her for anything.

EB: So, Mrs. Bliss saw all the pieces that you acquired, or just a few?

BB: I think we showed her all of them probably, maybe it was more than just a few. We may not have showed her every single piece, but most pieces we did. She came over for tea almost every day, not absolutely, but usually. Tea was served every afternoon at Dumbarton Oaks in the good old days in the hall of the old house in the round part that looks out over the garden—in the hallway, the center of the hallway opposite the main front door. And she would very often come for tea and sit down at the tea table where the urn was. We poured our own tea but she was sitting there. And so sometimes when she was here for that reason we would show her something at that time. And she came in at other times too.

EB: You mentioned showing her a mask.

BB: Yes, this was towards the end of her life – in one of her last illnesses – and she was in Sibley Hospital, and the late Maya mosaic mask was something we very much wanted. And she would have to get it for us. So Jack Thacher and I put it in a box, a shoebox, or a picnic basket or something, carefully wrapped with cloth and tissue paper, and carried it over. Jack had a very good driver named Albert, and Albert drove us very smoothly over to Sibley Hospital. And we took this into her room, and she was lying in the bed, and we showed her the mask. And as we were showing her this thing which she approved of and bought, a nurse came in. The poor nurse had never seen anything like this. What were we doing to her patient? – showing her this very scary strange thing.

EB: And it had canine teeth?

BB: Yes, but I guess nurses have seen everything along the lines – so she recovered pretty quickly. But we got the piece.

EB: Who were the principal dealers with whom – or the principal sources – from whom you acquired the material? Are there any that dealt in particular kinds of things more than others?

BB: That’s a good question. I’m not so sure about that. There were generally more Maya things around – at least, that were offered to us – I don’t know. Mr. Bliss had got things from Earl Stendhal and then his son Al Stendhal – we got occasionally something from him. Mr. Bliss had also dealt with John Wise who died shortly after I arrived – but I think we did get something from Wise. I don’t even remember from whom we got exactly all these things. But the dealers we dealt with mostly probably were Ed Merrin, Alphonse Jax, André Emmerich a little bit. Who else? We got a few things from John Stokes. That’s about it that I think of at the moment. Oh, I have to tell an Ed Merrin story. Ed Merrin brought something down to show us one day. I think it was a Maya vase. And he brought with him his young son who is now the head of the Merrin Gallery. And the kid was then about – his head was just above my desk level. And they – Ed came and sat across the desk from me and put this vase out, and the kid was standing there, and he said, “That cost $100.” And I said, “I’ll take it.” [laughs] And Ed – there was this momentary look of terror going across Ed Merrin’s face, you know –

EB: – because he was going to charge you much more.

BB: Oh, he was going to charge me enormously much more.

EB: Did you get it for $100?

BB: No, I did not. No, I relaxed him fairly quickly. But it was a moment that – I told Ed that story not too long ago.

EB: So, there was the sense that you had the funds to acquire within reason?

BB: Yeah, we didn’t have vast amounts but we could, if there was something.

EB: Were there any challenges – what were the major challenges to continuing to build a collection? I mean, were you in competition for works with other museums and individuals?

BB: Yeah, there of course were other people out there who were buying – many of them. I wasn’t – once at an auction, I was bidding against somebody who was bidding for me – Glassell, that’s the name of the Texas guy who built a big collection of mostly gold pieces. So, I was aware of him because he outbid me. But I think Rockefeller, of course, was collecting at that time, but I think he had his little world and we didn’t – there was no obvious competition there. And there were a lot of other people, but I was very rarely aware of kind of “so-and-so had seen that” or “so-and-so is going to get it away from us.”

EB: I am going to bring up the issue of cultural patrimony and how that affected collecting practices within Dumbarton Oaks and elsewhere. And maybe we could introduce a new – You are a member of a panel on the International Movement of National Art Treasures which was set up by the American Society of International Law in 1969–70. Can you tell us a little about this?

BB: Let me back up just slightly to your previous remark because that whole thing had not yet become a real issue when we were buying. Mr. Bliss always said that he never bought anything in the country of origin. And he did buy almost everything in New York, I think. He bought few things in Europe. But toward the end of the late ’60s, it was beginning to be obvious that this was going to be an issue. So that committee – that panel – was set up to advise the State Department lawyers who were then working on the treaty with Mexico and the UNESCO Convention. And that panel was interesting. Cliff Evans was on that, and he was very adamant. Clemency Coggins came on towards the end. She was not there at the beginning. And of course, those – Cliff may have died during that time. But there were lots of different kinds of opinions on this, and it was interesting what came out of the panel. Ernest Feidler, who was the General Counsel, I think, for the National Gallery at that time, I think he’s – no, or was he administrator – he was a lawyer, anyway. And he had previously had some experience with Chinese things, and somebody brought this thing that there should be certificates for everything that went out of a country. And Ernest Feidler said, “Look, they did that in China and all they did was create a large business in fake certificates.” So, many things of this kind came up – and the fact is that a lot of this thing is so much a part of the national economy of those countries. The little guy finds it and he gets some money from the guy who handles this, who gets some money from the guy who sells it to the dealer and – so, it was a very complex thing but it was fascinating and very interesting. But I could see that our buying days were just about over so – but we got some good things.

EB: Did the committee of Harvard museums or the consortium of Harvard museums have any impact on this?

BB: I didn’t exactly think of it that way, and I wasn’t so aware of those. But what I did realize was that Harvard was sort of watching us and was not going to let us do much after these things came into effect. I thought of it more in terms of their archaeological digging licenses, which was understandable, and we didn’t want to be lousing them up if they couldn’t get their licenses because we were buying objects. But that came really in 1970 on. But I’m sure that – that was certainly a part of it and it was part of our thinking.

EB: What about de-accessions? Did you –?

BB: I did very little of that, I think. There was something – I don’t remember what it was – but there was something that Earl Stendhal had sold Mr. Bliss, I think, shortly before Mr. Bliss died. And I can’t remember – I don’t remember what it was, whether –

EB: – mosaic mask with bad teeth –?

BB: Oh, there was that mosaic mask. Now, was that the Stendhal thing? That was one, yes.

EB: – bought by a woman some time ago and acquired later. I thought that was traded out for the little Maya mask, the mosaic mask.

BB: Well, there were a couple of things that we did trade out from it. I’m a little foggy on those. Because that Maya sculpture that is not very well carved – we’ve never shown it – it was downstairs. It can’t even be called a stele – it’s carved, it’s stone with rather faint carving on it. But it was real, at least, and we got that in exchange for something that was not real – or whether it was not real or whether it had been overworked later or whatever – but there were not many things of that kind, probably maybe three.

EB: Because there used to be a little cupboard downstairs. Well, not a little cupboard, but a cupboard where things were stored and there were a couple of trays –

BB: – in your office?

 

EB: – in your office, your office. There were a couple of trays, and I always just called it the “fakes cupboard.”

BB: Well, I guess they were questionable. What I remember that was – there were lots of jade beads and that kind of thing, which I think were perfectly good. But how do you install batches of jade beads? I think, you know, Mr. Bliss bought a big box of jade beads and took the best ones out for exhibition and the rest of them, I think, were OK. It was that kind of thing that was in there and there were some questionable objects, which I have happily forgotten.

EB: I have always found them fascinating, and even if they were fake, they were quite good – I mean, aesthetically.

BB: Yes.

EB: So, you didn’t de-accession very much.

BB: Not very much, no, no.

EB: Let’s talk a little about the kind of advice you got from Mike Coe on the collection. You worked really in collaboration – very closely with him. Is that correct?

BB: Yes. Well, Mike was a scholar in the field, which I was not at that point, really. I was beginning to be, I guess, but – Well, I called Mike fairly often about various things, and we worked together on all the accessions. We worked together on the installation – except that he was not here. He put in a good deal of information and then those of us who were here, did it, pretty much, without any more going on that. We worked together on the handbook that we put out at that time. And that was what we did in the early days.

EB: So, he would come down fairly often? Or –

BB: Well, it depended on what was going on and what the need was.

EB: It seems now you had what we would consider an extraordinary amount of freedom to kind of shape – and we’ll talk about the program later – to shape the collection and to essentially do what you wanted –

BB: I did, yes.

EB: – within reason and with advice and this and that. It must have been quite thrilling.

BB: I did, I did. We’ll talk about the Advisory Committee later, I guess, but I did use them for things that I was buying.

EB: So they advised – the Advisory Committee also advised on the purchases?

BB: Yes, because, Gordon Ekholm and Junius Bird at the Museum of Natural History in New York – they looked at things for all kinds of people. One covered Mexico and the other covered Peru. So, almost anything I bought, I would show to Gordon Ekholm, say, or I would call Gordon and say, “Have you see this thing that so-and-so has?” And he said, “Yes, I have and I think it’s good.” And I said, “OK.” Or I would traipse up to New York with this. So, we used these people in that way because I wanted to have as much backing as possible. And they were the two best people, really.

EB: So, what a wonderful team! Mike Coe, Junius Bird, Gordon Ekholm, and you.

BB: Yes. Well, it worked pretty well.

EB: I think we’re coming to an end of our discussion of the collection itself. Do you have any sense of where the collection stands in relation to other collections – private or public?

BB: It is smaller than a lot of collections, yet it’s big enough to be shown as an entity and as a thing with various kinds of things in it. It is a particularly fine collection, I think. It’s been collected from that point of view. And it has a kind of special character. It has most of the important kinds of things, but I think it’s a very kind of beautiful introduction to pre-Columbian art for people who haven’t seen it before – it’s the finest thing to see first. And also if you know pre-Columbian art, it’s a real treat, and it’s quite special in that way.

BB: And in some ways the Johnson gallery shares the same kind of character – characteristics – as the collection.

EB: I was just sort of thinking this as you were saying that because I think that the building is certainly part of the experience. And all together, it reflects the Blisses’ tastes and interests and ability to do the kind of thing that meant something to them and to other people.

BB: Thank you. Do you have any other thoughts you want to add?

EB: Not at the moment.

BB: It’s a good way to end.

EB: Thank you very much.

BB: Thank you. Thank you, Joe. [tape ends and then restarts]

EB: This is an interview with Elizabeth Benson. My name is Elizabeth Boone. It’s May 16, 2008. We’re taping in the Fellows Building at Dumbarton Oaks. Betty, let’s talk today, or begin talking, about the scholarly program in Pre-Columbian Studies. Was Mr. Bliss himself interested in establishing the scholarly program – or a scholarly program?

BB: Of course, I never talked about the Pre-Columbian scholarly program with Mr. Bliss, because he had died by the time I came to Dumbarton Oaks. But judging from the history of the Byzantine collection and center for studies, I think he would have been quite delighted – and also from his interest in pre-Columbian things. But I think he was rather proud of the fact that the Byzantine center here became Harvard’s center for Byzantine studies and a very serious thing. And he was indeed interested in pre-Columbian studies, and I – still, I think I talked about this a little bit before – but I think he and Mrs. Bliss deliberately collected things that were open for scholarly research, that a great deal had not been done in, so they were rather new and wide-open fields.

EB: Can you characterize the field of pre-Columbian studies at the time that you started this program?
BB: It was a very small field at that time. I think I emphasized before Mr. Bliss’s interest in pre-Columbian objects as art, and there were a few art historians who were still in training – in school, but up to that time, really, George Kubler was about the only art historian who was involved in pre-Columbian things. He was more involved in colonial, but he certainly had considerable interest in the pre-Columbian world. So, it was a field that was just beginning to come along, I think.

EB: How did the program begin? Was it a conference, a fellowship, or publications, or –

BB: I think I can say it began when I asked Mike Coe if he would give the first public lecture at Dumbarton Oaks, and he said, yes, he would, if I would publish it.

EB: Oh, really.

BB: So began the publishing program, and that was the first issue of Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology.

EB: And how soon was this after you came, or after the collection was installed?

BB: I think it was probably within the year. I don’t remember the exact date.

EB: Do you – did you have a sense from the beginning, did you have a sense of a mission, or –?

BB: I guess at some level I did. I don’t exactly think of it that way because things simply began to develop, and I got more and more interested and more involved. And there became more things that might be done, and I think I did – I certainly realized that this was something that was quite new then, and so, in that sense, yes.

EB: And maybe we should talk a little bit about the conferences. The first conference was the Dumbarton Oaks conference on the Olmec. How did the conferences begin?

BB: The conferences –

EB: Did you have a goal, and why?

BB: I didn’t have a goal, but Mike Coe was working on the Olmec site at San Lorenzo, and Robert Heizer and California people, from the University of California, were working at La Venta, and these were two major Olmec sites. And also at that time, carbon-14 had just come into being, and there were still people at the time of that Olmec conference who thought that Olmec was later than Maya. And so it was exactly the right moment to have that conference, and I think that was the main reason – not to start a series of conferences, really, but just to catch that moment and talk about it.

EB: How big – could you characterize it for us as a conference? Because my sense is that it was very different from the kind of conferences that are held today.

BB: Yeah. I had the idea – of course, again, the field was much smaller than it is now – but I had the idea that all of the people in the audience – we had an invited audience – should know just about as much about the subject as the people who were giving the papers. And I built in long discussion periods, which we taped, and we published several of those. I think that was – it was a problem to get somebody to transcribe the tape – but we published the Olmec one, and we published, I think, several later ones, and some good material came out in those published discussion periods. But that was my idea in having the small meeting, and of course, as I say, the field was so much smaller then, it was easier to do than it would be now.

EB: So this was a small group of invited scholars.

BB: Right. They were all invited. I did that all along.

EB: Was there a sense that this, the first conference, would be the beginning of a series, or –?

BB: Well, this was interesting, because John Thacher, the director, wrote a preface for the Olmec volume, and he said in it, mentioned something about the first pre-Columbian conference at Dumbarton Oaks, and he sent a copy to Derek Bok, the President of Harvard, just to sort of let him know –

EB: It was Pusey.

BB: Oh, I’m sorry! I’m sorry. Dear! Nathan Pusey. I’m thinking ahead.

EB: Derek Bok was later – he was a professor at Harvard for so long.

BB: No, well he came into our picture later on, but it was Nathan Pusey at that time, and Thacher sent this preface to sort of let President Pusey know what was going on, and the only comment that Pusey had was that – did we really want to call it the first conference because we might not have another one. Well, as you know as well as I do, that every year since 1965 or 6, we have had a pre-Columbian conference, and they’ve all sooner or later been published.

EB: The second conference was on Chavin. Was there a reason that that was selected? Did you see that as a – in comparison with the Olmec?

BB: Yeah, it was a good comparison with the Olmec, because it was contemporary with the Olmec, in Peru, and also there was work going on at Chavin, which was revealing a lot of new information about Chavin. Richard Lumbreras [sic: Luís G. Lumbreras] was working there, and we invited him to speak. He didn’t come – I think he had political reasons for not wanting to come – but Hernán Amat came, and that was more of a problem of getting papers for that conference than for others. But it worked well, I think. It was a good balance for Olmec and sort of a logical thing to do after Olmec, I think.

EB: It’s interesting that the Chavin conference never had the impact on the field that the Olmec one – well, well I say that as a Mesoamericanist – but certainly the Olmec conference was so fundamental to the development of Olmec studies.

BB: Well I think it was, and it was in large part because of the timing. It was just a critical moment in those studies, and there’s also something else about those meetings, in particular the Olmec one. We set that up, and I think the others too, for all day Saturday, and several people responded and said, “Yes, I would like to come, and if there’s any time, I would like to talk about something I’ve been working on.” So, Sunday morning became the volunteer paper session, and we taped those, as well as the discussion periods, and one thing – one paper in the Olmec Conference, I think, is probably one of the most significant papers, and that was Peter Furst’s were-jaguar paper, which had a tremendous impact on a lot of people, so it was not only the importance of archaeology, but some of these slightly side issues. And that was something I liked to do, and the thing I was doing anyway, was to do not just straight archaeology, but to concentrate on things that would reveal something about the art, for one thing. But this could come from all sorts of sources, and it could come often from ethnography, so I liked to think about bringing in a many-faceted kind of work.

EB: I’m trying to remember the first – I think the first conference I ever attended was the Late Post-Classic Central Mexico one in ’78, and I think there were still Sunday morning volunteer papers.

BB: Uh-huh. I think we did that straight through. At first it sort of happened – it happened by accident, but then we kind of planned it. And people knew about it and could come in, yeah.

EB: Did you have problems with people – because it was always invitational – did you have – how did you deal with the issue of people wanting to come and there not being room or their not having a sufficient scholarly background or interest, or –?

BB: There was very little problem with that. Once or twice people who wanted to come – and you know, you just have to handle that as it comes, but there wasn’t very much of that. I should mention that these things did not always go perfectly smoothly. The Chavin conference – I invited a number of people – there were people who either didn’t approve of each other professionally or had had some personal problems, and I thought, “Oh, my Lord, what have I gotten into? What’s going to happen?” And I had a very pregnant assistant at that time and I said, “Penny, if these people start throwing things at each other, I’m going to put you in the middle.” But I counted on the civilized environment of Dumbarton Oaks, and everybody behaved beautifully.

EB: Were the conferences always in the Music Room?

BB: The conferences were always in the Music Room. I think I mentioned – I guess there was one – because one year when the Byzantine books were being moved around because they were building new shelving for them. And they were in the Music Room, and what I remember is not so much the conferences, although I think we actually held those also in the Orangerie, in the Garden. And I had checked out there that there was indeed sufficient electricity coming in and there was heat and we would be all right there in October. And what I remember about this is that Junius Bird gave the public lecture just before the meeting the night before or the afternoon before, and it had to be night because it had to be dark for him to be in the Orangerie and show slides, and the bats came out in the ceiling of the Orangerie, and it was quite wonderful to have these bats flying around, and Junius loved it, and it was good.

EB: So did the first conference also have a public lecture at the beginning because it was the Saturday conference and then the Friday public lecture. I was wondering when that started.

BB: I think that started – I’m not absolutely sure it was the first conference, but we certainly did that quite regularly, at least after that.

EB: Now you had conferences in October, always in October, and was it for a particular reason, or –?

BB: It simply seemed to be a good time. For one thing, the Byzantine symposium was in May, and the Garden one was in the spring, and it seemed nicer to balance it out in the fall, and also the fall seemed to be a good time to get people in this field together. That seemed to work well. We started out having them the last weekend in October, and after we’d had a few of these, I realized that the gardeners by that time had already put all the plants in the Orangerie for the winter, and they had to get them out again so that we could have luncheon there, so I moved it up to the weekend before, and then they could just put the plants in once.

EB: Now one conference – the joint conference with the Textile Museum, the Junius Bird textile conference – was in May, and that was an extra.

BB: That was an extra, that was, yeah. Yes, that was not in the regular series.

EB: Was that held here?

BB: I think that was held in both places. I think part of it was here and part there.

EB: Did you have other smaller gatherings, round tables, or –? Actually, the conferences themselves were fairly small.

BB: The conferences themselves were fairly small. I didn’t have any regular or irregular roundtable things. The one thing that I did do was after the first Palenque roundtable that Merle Greene Robertson organized in late ’73 – that was a very exciting meeting, because Floyd Lounsbury was a Fellow here, and he and I went down there together. He had not really – he had just begun to look at the inscriptions on monuments. He’d been working with the codices, and down there he got together with Linda Schele, who was quite new in the field but had been working on these things, and Peter Mathews, a student of Dave Kelley’s at Calgary – he was then an undergraduate at Calgary – and the three of them worked on this and got the first Palenque king list, which was –

EB: Here at Dumbarton Oaks?

BB: No, this was in Palenque, at Merle Greene Robertson’s house. And that was a small meeting too. And so I was keyed up by that, and toward the end of the year, I had some extra money in the fund, in the fiscal year, and I decided that I would try to get together all the people who had worked on the Palenque inscriptions, and those people came, plus Dave Kelley, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who had done some very important work with inscriptions at other sites. She was really one of the first people to start working on this kind of thing. She was the first person. And that meeting did not go well at all. I hadn’t structured it, and Tania sort of looked at this young whippersnapper, Linda Schele, across the table from her, and – that didn’t go, and not much got said, and the next day I said to Floyd, “We’ve got to structure this” – Floyd Lounsbury was here. And so it was a little better Sunday morning. And then many people went home, and the others who hadn’t booked early planes or were staying the night were sort of talking two by two or looking at books or something, and all of a sudden they were all down on the floor by a copy of Maudsley, and they got a new glyph, and each one of them knew or saw something that the others didn’t. And I thought, “This is why I did this.”

EB: So who were those people down on the floor?

BB: This was Dave Kelley and Floyd Lounsbury and Linda Schele and Peter Mathews. And I got them together several other times, and then they started getting themselves together. But those were the only mini-meetings I had.

EB: There were a series of meetings, weren’t there?

BB: Yeah, I don’t remember exactly how many times I got them, but whenever a moment seemed right, I would do this again. And Dave Kelley was in Europe on a sabbatical, and he flew back for the weekend for this meeting, and he walked in the door a few minutes later, and Linda said, “We’ve just decided that this glyph is such and such,” and Dave said, “I want to know why each of you thinks that.” They were won – this is why they worked together so wonderfully. They were absolutely open, and it was great. And I think it did help the field along.

EB: Because that really was the moment when the breakthroughs in Maya epigraphy began, wasn’t it?

BB: Yes, it was just about then, yeah.

EB: And so Dumbarton Oaks – you were the catalyst for it.

BB: Well, they would have gotten somewhere anyway, because it was beginning, but I think these meetings did help, and we did get some new material and a little more impetus.

EB: So Floyd was a Fellow here. Was Linda ever a Fellow?

BB: Yes, yes.

EB: And Peter Mathews?

BB: Peter was never a Fellow, no, no.

EB: Maybe we should talk about the fellowship program. How did – since we talked about Floyd Lounsbury being a Fellow – how did this program begin? Or did it begin as a program?

BB: Well, I think we looked around, and I thought, “The Byzantines have Fellows and the Garden people have Fellows, and maybe we should have” – I didn’t say Fellows, I think, at first, because I couldn’t figure out where we could put one Fellow, in the space outside my office that later got enclosed, but that was open before we put a desk there.

EB: Oh, so it was that wide space, what I call the wide space in the hall.

BB: Yeah. It was a room-sized hall. And so when the Advisory Committee met that fall, we told them that we thought we would like to have a Fellow, and this – we didn’t have anybody in mind; we hadn’t done anything about this, and Gordon Ekholm got up and said, “Well, I don’t mean to push this, but my son-in-law has just finished his doctorate, and he’s working on Teotihuacan murals.” And this was Arthur Miller, and he was our first Fellow. And that’s how he got there.

EB: Is it? That’s very interesting. I didn’t know that.

BB: Yeah, so –

EB: But of course the topic was perfect for Dumbarton Oaks.

BB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

EB: And –

BB: Sometimes we – the next year – I’m not sure how those people came, and I think they had heard about it – and it was Kano, from Japan. I think he got here or found out about it because Seiichi Izumi had been here; he had been working at Kotosh, and he was here for the Chavin conference, so he knew about Dumbarton Oaks. And I think that Kano, Chiaki Kano, knew it from that way. And the other person was Jeff Wilkerson, and I’m not sure whether he inquired, or whether there was some special reason for him.

EB: Where was he trained? Was he Harvard?

BB: Wilkerson? He was Tulane.

EB: Oh, pardon me. For some reason I thought he was Harvard.

BB: I’m pretty sure he was Tulane. I can check that. And then the next year we invited Floyd Lounsbury. So sometimes –

EB: Oh I see. He came as a Visiting Scholar.

BB: He came as a Visiting Scholar.

EB: And Joyce Marcus was here as a Junior Fellow.

BB: Yes, she was just finishing her doctorate. And she came – I’m sure she found out about it through Gordon Willey. She was a student of Gordon’s.

EB: Did you have a sense of the fellow – did you see the fellowships as being targeted to a particular, let’s say, interest demographic, or specific areas of interest or disciplines?

BB: I wanted them to have something to do with the art, which could be almost anything, and otherwise I think we simply wanted good and interesting people who would produce some good work. And we hoped that some things they could do we would publish, and we did do that, occasionally, at least. They were often working on something bigger than we were doing. But we didn’t have the specific thing in mind.

EB: How were the Fellows chosen, I mean, once the program was up and running?

BB: Well, for a while, it was – I think there were people who found out about it and applied. I don’t think we did much in the way of any kind of public announcement, and sometimes it was an invitational thing. The year that – there was, Linda Schele – it doesn’t show there, but she may not have had a fellowship – but she was here at one time when Floyd was here, but then she was back. She was here as a proper Fellow when Robert Rands was here because she was working on the Palenque. Well, she had been working with the excavation people at Palenque, and she did that book that we published on the contents of the storerooms at Palenque, and she may have been working on that when Rands was here, because he was working with the Palenque ceramics.

EB: So they were both here.

BB: They were both here at the same time. And that was an invitation thing.

EB: Now before that Rosemary Sharp at the time was a Bliss Fellow. I don’t – does that mean anything?

BB: Well, I noticed in the list that Joanne gave me that several people had Bliss Fellow, and I had never heard that before. We had essentially Junior Fellows and Senior Fellows and Visiting Scholars, and it’s fine to call them a Bliss Fellow, and maybe that’s – I don’t know when – that must have come in at a certain time, but that was new to me.

EB: So the Fellows were housed in what we used to call the Pre-Columbian basement? I mean, their offices were there.

BB: Yeah. I think once, at least once, we used a spare study in the Garden Library wing, when they had extra room. And then when Bob Van Nice, who had been in charge of the Santa Sofia project and had that big room in which they had been doing big drawings of Santa Sofia—he finished that project. We got that space eventually, which housed Fellows. I guess there was space for three Fellows in there in addition to the Library stacks. And we also got the room in the northeast corner on the other side of the Pre-Columbian Library, which the coin people had used before, so we put Fellows in there. So gradually we found room for them, but at the beginning, it was limited.

EB: You really had almost no space.

BB: That’s true, yeah.

EB: You mentioned – and this is regressing a little bit; we’re talking about space – you mentioned when you first arrived at Dumbarton Oaks some of the Byzantinists coming in to see you.

BB: Oh, I was amused, because I had just come into this office, our desk was on order – I think my desk was something like a door on sawhorses at that point – and I had just come into this strange world, and I looked up, and here were these three rather exotic-looking faces in the doorway. One was Romilly Jenkins, who was a Byzantine professor here and later was Director of Studies after Ernst Kitzinger, and one was a tall Danish man – I don’t remember his name – and the other was a wonderful Welshman, who became a very good friend, who – his name was John St. Bodfan Gruffydd, and he had a – I think it was a Jaguar – sports car, which he used to leave open, so that people could look at it, because it was a treasure. He wore a Sherlock Holmes hat when he was driving in this thing, and he was a marvelous character, a delightful person – but there he was welcoming me. They were looking very curious about what was going on in that room.

EB: Where were the Fellows housed?

BB: The Fellows – there was an apartment house up the hill near the Russian Embassy that was where Dumbarton Oaks rented apartments for Fellows for many years. Yes, and even occasionally people would stay in this building, in the Fellows Building.

EB: So when Arthur Miller came, was he – were there apartments up there then, or –?

BB: I think he was up there then, yeah. Yeah.

EB: Did the Pre-Columbian Fellows give research reports or informal talks?

BB: No, there wasn’t that. That hadn’t started yet. I think it was Giles Constable who started that.

EB: And what was there – can you say something about the relationship to the fellowship program in Pre-Columbian vis-à-vis the other fellowship programs?
BB: By and large, they usually stay pretty much to themselves, in my experience. There’ve been a couple of examples. Richard Townsend, who was working on that Aztec garden site, got along very well with the Garden Fellows and liked to talk to them about this project, and that was a nice rapport. The most interesting person, I think, was Sabine MacCormack, who came here as a Byzantine Fellow – and I don’t remember exactly what it was, whether it was Mission to the Slavs, but it was about the conversion to Christianity and how that was happening—and she came here and realized that a very similar thing was going on in the New World. And she started looking very carefully at the Andean sources on this. And she’s written two books on conversion and Christianity, the relation between Christianity and the indigenous religions. She’s published those since then on the New World. That was the only real crossover.

EB: It is interesting how Dumbarton Oaks becomes a – well, it provides an opportunity for people and issues to go in very interesting ways.

BB: Yes, yes.

EB: So, did all of the Fellows have lunch together or did they just go their own way or how did that work?

BB: Well –

EB: Because I know now lunch is such a big part of what Dumbarton Oaks is, and I don’t know whether it always was –

BB: It probably –

EB: – or whether they did sherries or teas where the Fellows got together or not.

BB: I think that the lunch may be more of a real social occasion now than it was. That space is small in that dining room here, and you tended to go with your own people, but you also filled in at other tables. Somebody was saying the other day that there was more mixture when people ate here, because the space was small and the tables filled in. As long as Mrs. Bliss was alive, there was tea served. Did I mention this the other day?

EB: No. Well, you did, but let’s talk about it.

BB: Yeah. In the Main House, in the center of the hall, in the, where the curved glass is opposite the old front door, there was a table, and in the afternoons at four o’clock, I think, there was a tea urn.

EB: Every afternoon?

BB: I think it was every afternoon during the week. And Mrs. Bliss would often come to that and have tea with the Fellows and people. And it was a good chatting time for people; that was a good social time. The swimming pool was a good social place. I think I knew more people from the Byzantine center from swimming with them than other ways.

EB: There used to be sherry served before lunch –

BB: There was sherry served –

EB: – or was that in the afternoons?

BB: Now I suddenly remember that there was sherry, but I’ve forgotten exactly when it was. Was it regular or was it special? I think it was sort of special occasion, wasn’t it?

EB: I think it may have been a Thursday sherry hour.

BB: That’s right, there was one day of the week, that’s right. That was it, yes. Yeah.

EB: So did Mrs. Bliss interact very much with the Fellows?

BB: Not a whole lot, but she liked to meet them and talk to them a little bit and be nice with them.

EB: The Fellows program naturally leans into the Library. How did the Library begin?

BB: The Library began with Mr. Bliss. He had a library, a small one, but he had some good things in it. And it was in a building behind the house where the Blisses lived in their last years, a house at Q and 28th, and behind the house there was a garden, a small garden, with a wonderful – I think it was a beech tree in the middle of it – and the other side of it was probably, what, an old carriage house, that was Mr. Bliss’s office. And the library was there. And he had – what did he have? – maybe 500 books, something like that. And it was a good start on a library.

EB: So did the library come here?

BB: The library came here.

EB: When the collection came here?

BB: Yes, yeah, yeah.

EB: So, the Fellows didn’t go to Mrs. Bliss’s house to consult books or anything?

BB: Well, this was only pre-Columbian in Mr. Bliss’s library, and it came here before we had Fellows.

EB: Oh, I see, of course.

BB: So, yeah.

EB: And then how did you – clearly you built the Library – what were your goals? What kind of library were you trying to create?

BB: Well, I was trying to create a library that would be useful to people working in the more-worked-with and higher cultures in Latin America, and I was trying to fill in gaps in Mr. Bliss’s library, which just for this kind of thing that would be good to have. And also, of course, things were beginning to come to be published, and to get the new material that was coming. So that was, those two things.

EB: Would you say you had the sort of financial support to acquire the way you wanted to?

BB: For books, yes, I think so, yeah, yeah. No, because I could – I don’t remember now what the figure was, but I dreamed up a figure that I thought would be a good figure, and that was –

EB: Those were the good old days.

BB: Those were the good old days.

EB: Did you ever – were there ever plans to acquire manuscripts or unique materials, or was it always a –?

BB: Not really, no, no. We acquired useful books and objects.

EB: Now you talked about the publications and how the study series began as a publication of Mike Coe’s lecture, but were the other studies, in the monograph series – Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology – how did that develop?

BB: Well, we had started the series, so we had to keep going with it, and we – there were some things. Well, the early papers I guess – George Kubler produced one – they were sometimes on things in the Collection or by people on the Advisory Committee. And then we just gradually, of course, widened, widened fairly quickly, with the people wanting to have us publish things.

EB: Now there’s – in the studies series – there’re several – there’re many – fundamental publications.

BB: Yeah, yeah.

EB: And the conferences – the publications of the symposia volumes – or actually, you didn’t call them “symposia,” but the conference volumes?

BB: Yeah. No, when we were trying to name our series, Byzantium had a symposium. I think the Garden people had, I believe, a colloquium, so I decided that we should have something else, so we had conferences. And then of course having them, we should – we wanted to publish them.

EB: Let’s talk a little bit about your – the advisors, the Advisory Committee. How did that first begin, and how were the members selected?

BB: I don’t actually know, because they were in place when I arrived.

EB: Oh, they were. OK.

BB: But I think that Jack Thacher, the Director, probably talked mostly with Sam Lothrop, and probably with Gordon Willey, and the people at Harvard, to get their advice on how this should be done. The other centers had advisory committees.

EB: So, Gordon Willey was on the advisory body continually, was he not?

BB: Well, those first people – Lothrop died shortly after that, after he was appointed, after that was formed. The others simply stayed, and I had thought that they were just appointed without end, but I noticed in looking through some of those old D.O. books the other day, it says they were reappointed yearly, but they were – there was nobody else on that committee until Stephen Williams became – he went to the Peabody, and I think it was probably the moment he became Director of the Peabody that he became a member, or ex officio, of that committee.

EB: So, Joe Brew was on because he was Director of the Peabody?

BB: Yeah, and he was the Chairman, yeah.

EB: And Junius Bird was at Natural History?

BB: At Natural History, as was Gordon Ekholm.

EB: So, the only – well, Samuel Lothrop and George Kubler –

BB: Kubler was Yale.

EB: On the first committee?

BB: Yeah.

EB: Did they really give advice?

BB: Yeah. No, they really did. And I would – actually, our meetings were usually more or less a formality. And just – we would tell them what we had been doing and what we wanted to. But I called them for various reasons – I called Joe Brewer, Gordon Willey for something, for some tactical advice. And the two at the American Museum, Gordon Ekholm and Junius Bird, I would show them objects that I wanted to acquire, because they both looked at objects, and if I wanted to buy a Maya thing, I would call Gordon and say, “Have you seen this?” And often he would say, “Yes, I have, and I think it’s very good, and I think you should try to get it,” or he would say no, and I would take it up to New York and show it to him. Or the dealer would say, “Gordon has seen this.”

EB: This is Gordon Ekholm.

BB: Yeah, yes. So I used both of the Natural History people in this way, and they were all useful in various ways.

EB: Did they choose the Fellows? Was there a formal review process?

BB: We began – we slowly worked into that. I think we essentially chose the Fellows – we being Mike Coe and Jack Thacher and me – chose the people we wanted. But I think before we did anything or let them know, we would go to the Advisory Committee and say, “These are the people we would like to have. Is this OK with you?”

EB: So, Jack Thacher was a critical voice in the developing fellowship program.

BB: Well, he was a great backer-upper. He didn’t do anything about choosing the people, but if Mike and I thought this was good, he backed us. But then, I say, Gordon Ekholm suggested Arthur Miller. What was her name? There was one person who was a student of Gordon’s, and I really didn’t think that she was all that good, but Gordon wanted her, and so –

EB: Rosemary Sharp.

BB: Rosemary Sharp. So we did take her in, but that’s – but by and large, we decided with their – we asked for their approval.

EB: And so Mike Coe had been – was – his title was advisor, and then you had an Advisory Committee, but he was a hands-on advisor? They were more –

BB: Yeah. I will say also, which I guess is obvious, that when we were thinking about somebody who’d applied, we would talk to that person’s professor or to other people who knew the work of that person, so we got – and often it was somebody on the Advisory Committee.

EB: Was George Kubler helpful? I mean, I shouldn’t put it that way. But I was thinking of the Advisory Committee – he was one of the few art historians.

BB: He was the only art historian on the committee. George had spoken interestingly and was interested in what we did and was helpful in some ways. He was not the sort of practical or how-to-do-it kind of person, and he was not useful in this sort of way.

EB: I can see that – I mean, I can see exactly, when you say that, I understand exactly what you mean.

BB: Yeah, that’s right.

EB: There is an abstract quality –

BB: Yes, exactly, yes.

EB: Whereas Mike Coe has an abstract quality, but also a hands-on, practical –

BB: Yeah, yeah. Well, this was – as did the other members. Joe Brew was not really – he was in North American art, North American archaeology. And he was – but he was good for certain “should we do this kind of thing?” questions, and when it came to things that had to do with what one should do in a museum – on that Joe would be good for certain advice.

EB: In the early years – and this was just a perception of mine, and maybe it’s that – the program seemed closer to Yale than to Harvard, because of the advice of Mike Coe. But I’m wondering, was there ever a move by Harvard to try to move the Pre-Columbian program up there at all?

BB: Yeah. Well, let me address the two parts of this, because I never felt any particular closeness – Yale was a nice and pleasant place, but I didn’t see that it had anything to do with us – except for Mike particularly, George a little bit – but we were certainly much more aware of Harvard. There was a time when Steve Williams came to the Peabody and on this committee, and I have absolutely no provable knowledge of this – everything came secondhand – but apparently he did think that, you know, “Why was all this stuff down here? They could use that in the Peabody and wouldn’t have to have all this expensive maintaining.” I think he was just after the pre-Columbian things, not the whole thing, although that may possibly have been discussed – should things be moved to Cambridge. For one thing, I think speaking of why that couldn’t be done, it’d be against the wishes of the donor. And that would be rather hard to do legally, and there would be a lot of legal and practical problems about any kind of thing like that, but – but apparently Steve Williams would talk to people in Cambridge about this, and the word would get down here one way or another – you know, fifth hand by that time – and so we would hear what he was planning to bring up at an Advisory Committee meeting. And then Mike and I – Mike and I usually had lunch with Gordon Willey before those meetings, and I guess we would get all this sort of arranged as to what the answers should be and how this should be handled. And so it never went anywhere. It may not have been very real in the beginning. There must have – there was some germ there, but it – but that was the only threat that I ever heard of.

EB: Reflecting back, and I guess this is sort of my final question, and there may be other things you want to bring out, but reflecting back on the beginning, and then, say, now, what is your view of the relation between the Pre-Columbian program at Dumbarton Oaks and the larger field of Pre-Columbian studies? I realize that’s a big, opened-up question.

BB: That’s a big one.

EB: And very interesting.

BB: Well, I feel that it’s a part of that bigger thing. The field has grown so, and it’s – at the beginning this was – it was important, because there wasn’t a whole lot of similar kind of activity going on. A number of people had been digging in that – well, not a whole lot of people, but certain universities had been digging in these sites – but it was not – the whole field of study has become bigger, certainly in this country, and it’s become more important to the countries in which it’s taking place, for touristic, money reasons, if nothing else, and also, I think, for increased awareness of national identity and national pride. But I think that Dumbarton Oaks does have a kind of special attitude in the field, and I think it can make contributions in that way that aren’t easily found in other places, which are maybe doing more excavation, possibly more publishing, but I think that the Dumbarton Oaks quality and the way they’re doing things is special and is also a part of the bigger thing.

EB: Are there questions that weren’t asked?

BB: Ah.

EB: Questions that you weren’t asked.

BB: I can’t think of any at the moment, no.

EB: Thank you very much.

BB: Thank you.

EB: The program remains extraordinarily important and special.

BB: Well, I’m just – I’m delighted that it’s livelier all the time. You know, there are a great quantity of Fellows, and that it has a vigor and a life, and much of that is due to you and your continuing efforts in this, and thank you.

EB: Thank you very much. [Tape ends and then restarts.]

BB: OK?

EB: Are you ready for us?

BB: Um-hum.

EB: OK. Matthew Stirling was one of Mr. Bliss’s advisors, but he’s not listed as being on the Advisory Committee. Could you talk about his importance for Dumbarton Oaks?

BB: Matthew Stirling had been at the Smithsonian. He had done important excavations – some of the earliest excavations – the earliest excavations – in the Olmec region. He was elderly at the time that the Collection was installed here. He did come to the Olmec conference, and he gave a paper at the Olmec conference. And in fact, there was film, I think, that we showed, that the Smithsonian had done of him. After the Olmec conference and after, I think, also, the following year, while they were still in that house, before he died, they would have a party for the people who were involved in the conference.

EB: Did they live in town?

BB: They lived in town. They lived in Cleveland Park, which is not terribly far away from here. And so that was a very nice way that they were participating in this. But I think Matthew Stirling would have been more important had he been younger and healthier. But he had been important in his day because Mr. Bliss, of course, loved Olmec. I mean, his first piece having been Olmec. And he always liked Olmec things.

EB: – and the first conference –

BB: Incidentally, I found some correspondence having to do with the Olmec exhibition at the National Gallery a few years ago in which somebody in Mexico was saying that I, who was on that committee for that show, had bought a lot of Olmec objects. And I didn’t. It was Mr. Bliss who bought a lot of Olmec objects. I think I bought maybe two. But I was being chastised slightly for that. But Mr. Bliss’ love was Olmec, parentheses there.

EB: Now support for archaeological projects: certainly the Byzantine program had been supporting archaeology for years; I don’t know whether in Landscape Architecture they also had been supporting work. Was there a sense that Pre-Columbian should or should not move into this area?

BB: We had one venture into this area, and I think that some possible thing seemed too complicated to take on or inappropriate for us to take on. But we did back one project of Arthur Miller’s, wanting to record the mural paintings at Tulum. He and I had both been in there with tour groups and seeing people with – there’s one very narrow space behind or below the pyramid where there are paintings and where people were walking through and you could hardly help rubbing against these paintings as you passed through. Nobody was trying to do them any harm. So we both felt strongly that these should be recorded. And so we did set up a project, and Arthur got Felipe Dávalos, who was a very good artist and used to doing that kind of thing. And we recorded those paintings which at the moment are hanging in the installation – or some of them are.

EB: And if you go to Tulum now, there’s nothing to be seen.

BB: I haven’t been in there recently. Yeah, I can imagine that. And that’s why we did it.

EB: So, that’s one of those –

BB: That was a rescue operation or a –

EB: – one of those things was absolutely short on time. The program had an early focus on art history – or seems to have had – even though I know one of the first Fellows – Junior Fellows – Jeff Wilkerson is an archaeologist, and of course, Marcus is an archaeologist. But there was this sense that the program should focus on objects, as you say, or on images. But did you feel that there was a tension between a focus on art history or the art object versus anthropological archaeology or anthropology?

BB: There was a kind of basic enemy camp attitude between art historians and anthropologists. In some ways, I think a little more so now because they’ve learned to live together a little better. But at that time, these were two different worlds. But I used to feel that whatever we did, it should, hopefully, explain the art in some way. And there were all kinds of ways of doing this. It didn’t have to be art history. And I always liked to get somebody – at least one person – into those conferences who came from a sort of different world, who was an ethnographer – one ethnographer – or somebody who was a little offbeat and would look at things from a slightly different way. And I liked to get a blend of attitudes. So I liked to mix them up. But you are right that there is – was – this kind of, well, “That’s an art historian.” And there are people with that attitude. But I think that the really bright and lively, intelligent people can see how things belong together and how it all adds up.

EB: It seems that perhaps the camps aren’t enemy camps so much as they were at a bitter moment in the past.

BB: I think that’s true. I think that the archaeologists got in there first. They had not been in there for a very long time but they were in there first and they were dirt archaeologists and they went on a dig. And suddenly these art historians came along interpreting things and talking about iconography. And I think that for some of them that was enlightening and that was interesting. And for others of them, it was all, “They’re just art historians. They don’t know anything. They don’t know how dig.” But it depends on the person.

EB: Thank you very much.

BB: Thank you.

EB: Any other –?

BB: Did that answer your question?

EB: That’s great.

]]> No publisher Gabriela Santiago Pre-Columbian Collection Pre-Columbian Studies Pre-Columbian Wing Robert Woods Bliss Oral History Project Archives Pre-Columbian Pavilion 2012-08-07T18:50:00Z Page Robert S. Nelson http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/robert-s.-nelson Oral History Interview with Robert S. Nelson undertaken by Anne Steptoe at his office at Yale University on July 21, 2009. At Dumbarton Oaks, Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow (1975–1976 and 1976–1977) and a Fellow (1981–1982) in the Byzantine Studies Program, and he has been a Senior Fellow in Byzantine Studies since 2003, serving as chair since 2008. AS: My name is Anne Steptoe, the date is July 21st, 2009, and today I have the pleasure of interviewing Professor Robert Nelson at his office at Yale University about his relationship with D.O. over the years. And to get started, your first fellowship was in 1975, but, if I’m correct, that was not your first interaction with Dumbarton Oaks, right?

RN: Right. I was a Robert Woods Bliss Fellow for two years. I don’t remember the dates exactly, but maybe 1971-’72 and ’72-’73.

AS: That seems right to me.

RN: OK. And I had just applied for the fellowship. My professor told me that I had no chance of getting it, because I wasn’t a Harvard student and in his experience it always went to a Harvard student. It never went to a graduate student at another university. But I guess, for whatever reason – Harvard didn’t have a student that year or they were desperate and so they selected me. And it saved my life. It was an extraordinary fellowship. It paid a very nice stipend and it paid my tuition and it paid my tuition at any university I wanted to go to. And I was studying in New York – my Ph.D. is from New York University – but it meant I could go take courses at Columbia at will. I could go to Princeton if I wanted to take a course at Princeton. I mean, they paid the tuition wherever I went, whereas any NYU fellowship would only have been for NYU. And also I went to Hunter College, the City University of New York, with it, so it was really a great fellowship. And after one year, my professor suggested I should apply to have it renewed. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible. So, I contacted Dumbarton Oaks and the Director of Studies, William Loerke, communicated with me somehow. This is in the days before email or anything like that and so I suppose it was by mail or phone call or something – no cell phones, a very weird time. And he said, “Well, why don’t you just come down and visit, so we can get to know you a little better?” And so, I took the train from New York down to Washington, and it was wonderful. And they were going to put me up for a day or two in the Fellows Building. I thought this was just the grandest vacation ever, and it was so kind that they wanted to meet me and that they were going to show me around Dumbarton Oaks. I thought it was just wonderfully gracious, and I walked into the Director of Studies’ office and he said, “Professor Mango will see you first and so then I walk in, then he takes me to Professor Mango’s office and then begins either a thirty minute or hour-long, intense interview, which I had no inkling of – which maybe is the best preparation for an intense interview – I don’t know, you know. But, I was – whoa! And then he – who knows how long it was; my mind was just racing – and then he finishes and says, “Well, let me take you to Professor Ševčenko’s office, which was next-door. And so he ushers me into Ihor Ševčenko’s office, and again this elaborate interview about my work and my studies and what I wanted to do, et cetera. And then he told me about his work and that was very memorable. He told me about an article he was writing that later came out that was really one of his best articles, and he said, “Well, I just have something up here on the shelf,” and he pointed up there and alluded to some of the findings of this article. And later on, several years later, I read it and was just overwhelmed and so impressed that I knew of the article before it was published. And then I went back to Professor Loerke for the third interview. And after that I think I had lunch, and I was just completely exhausted and maybe took the train back that night, I don’t know. The rest is a blur in my memory, but those three interviews were quite significant, and I got to chat with Professor Mango about how he viewed studying Byzantium and how he thought about it. I was going about it somewhat differently, but then I wanted to study Byzantium and Islam, which I did for a while but I’ve sort of moved away from that path. And he said, well, he’d taken that path – he’d taken Byzantium and the Slavs, but he could see how it would be very useful to study Byzantium and Islam. And it was a very heavy experience, and I mean, it was a very positive one, because they renewed me. It was a great day! So, I got more money for the next year. I was even happier. So, that was a decisive moment, I think, in my education – that Dumbarton Oaks fellowship.

AS: It must have made graduate studies a little less stressful.

RN: Yes, it was very much so, in that – what I didn’t say is that before I got the Dumbarton Oaks fellowship, I didn’t have any fellowship at all, so I had no stipend and I was working part-time and I was married and my wife was working. We were eking out a very meager existence. And New York City is a very expensive place, and to be a starving graduate student is very hard there. I mean, it’s hard to be a graduate student at any place, but I think New York City has its particular difficulties versus, say, being a student at Cambridge or here at Yale, or someplace else, where you’re kind of in a sort of cocoon of a university. New York University didn’t offer that sort of cocoon, so that’s why the Dumbarton Oaks fellowship was great.

AS: And then did you return to D.O. before your fellowship or was your next visit for the fellowship?

RN: I believe the next visit was for the fellowship, yeah.

AS: And that was ’75?

RN: ’75-’77, yeah. I was a Junior Fellow.

AS: OK. Finishing up your dissertation?

RN: Right. I spent a year in Europe, going to libraries. I had a dissertation on manuscript illumination, Byzantine manuscript illumination, and so, I visited libraries, starting in Istanbul and then to Greece for several months. And then from there to Rome for about six months and working at other Italian libraries and either before or after that I was in Paris and London. And those were the major places for Greek manuscript holdings. So, I had a long year of work and then I got to Dumbarton Oaks and another year of research and a year of writing. So, it was great.

AS: What was the intellectual life like at D.O. at that time?

RN: Very stimulating. You know, everybody – well, not everybody; you’re doing the oral history. You’re listening to people’s memories. I think there’s certainly a tendency among people to speak about the past as a golden age and to romanticize and talk about all the positives and to gloss over the negatives. And of course the whole phenomenon of human memory and how it selects certain details – that you could just tell from the account I gave of the fellowship – and omits hundreds of others is very interesting and one that I study. But now I’m being studied, so I should keep going and provide direct evidence. It was a very lively intellectual world, because there were more Fellows and there were eight Junior Fellows in Byzantine and more in Pre-Columbian and Garden Studies – I can’t remember the number, versus now. I’m a Senior Fellow, so I know what’s going on. You know, there are perhaps three or four Junior Fellows. There were eight Fellows and they had two-year fellowships, versus now, when there are maybe three or four Junior Fellows in Byzantine studies and they have a one-year fellowship. So, there was a larger community and my sense is there was a larger intellectual community at Dumbarton Oaks, because there were more historians and scholars on staff. And so, that made it very lively. One of the features that I remember as being formative and had a big impact on me was this program that William Loerke, the Director of Studies, instituted, to give us a larger, greater intellectual life – the Junior Fellows, that is. He would invite down some famous scholar, who would come for a couple of days. And we would have this intense seminar with that person and that would go on for – I can’t remember. That would go on for several hours. Maybe it was morning, afternoon. We talked – it was just us, the Junior Fellows, so not more senior scholars, so it was just basically graduate students, so the senior scholars were, I think, probably more forthcoming about their work and their career than they would have been if they were speaking to a colleague or something like that. So, it was really a student-teacher situation there and therefore very useful. So, I can remember Goitein, Professor Goitein, a very famous historian – economic historian of Islam, Jews in the Mediterranean, a great historian of the Cairo Geniza, this extraordinary find for economic history in Cairo and the Mediterranean from the tenth to twelfth century. He came and told us many, many things about the Geniza and told us about his life and his career. He was then, I believe – he had a longer-term appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study. I don’t believe he was a – he was not a permanent member, I think, but he had a kind of longer-term – And he had a, you know – being a Jewish scholar of a certain age – had a complicated life. And this is surely a wonder. And now we have great resources at Princeton and I just remember saying how we should be very thankful that we have all these books and all these resources, when many places in the world don’t have this. And then I remember another scholar that came was Jaroslav Pelikan. He made a great impact on me, as well. He was a professor here at Yale and I had nothing to do with Yale at that moment, hadn’t even been to New Haven, so knew nothing about it. So, he was a professor here and then engaged in writing this history of Christianity, which I believe was five volumes, four or five volumes that the University of Chicago published. And he talked a lot about that and he talked about his education and his sort of life history and, you know, later on I followed his work and he began as a Lutheran. They spoke very fondly to us and he worked – I believe he wrote a book on Luther and perhaps St. Augustine, before he began this big project. His first volume, I believe, in a series was on eastern Christianity, first or second volume, and perhaps the second volume in a series. And that’s what he was really working on then. He talked to us about eastern Christianity and with great fondness. Even though it wasn’t his religious tradition, he was very interested in it, you know, and we were interested in it, too. It wasn’t our religious tradition, most of us – there were a few Orthodox present, but – And later on I had – a young man came up to my office while I was teaching at the University of Chicago maybe seven or eight years ago. And he was a sophomore undergraduate. [to AS] What year are you?

AS: I just graduated.

RN: OK. You were once a sophomore.

AS: Yes. I was once a sophomore.

RN: So, a sophomore, well, a young man walks in as a sophomore and he says, “I’d like to take your graduate seminar.” And I said, “Well, that’s probably a reach. You’re going to have to really convince me your background is up for this.” So, he talked to me and he had a very significant background. And I might have let him in, but I made it very clear that it was a serious, great deal of work. He eventually didn’t take the course, but his father was a professor at the Russian Orthodox seminary St. Vladimir’s, north of New York City. And he’s the one that filled in a little detail for Jaroslav Pelikan’s life. Somehow I was telling him I’d been working with Pelikan’s books, his history of Orthodox Christianity, and he said, “Oh, I know him. My father is his spiritual advisor.” And Professor Pelikan was in the process of converting to Orthodoxy. And by studying with this professor at St. Vladimir’s, having religious counseling – He knew a great deal about the subject, but it was a matter of, you know, his spiritual life. Anyway, so that allowed me to complete his history. So, Dumbarton Oaks was, I think, a very lively intellectual world. The other thing that Professor Loerke let us do: a group of us decided we wanted to learn Russian. And I think there were about four or five, you know. It’s one of these great ideas you have, sitting around at night or something, you know: “Let’s study Russian! Let’s get together and study Russian.” You know. The reality, of course, you know, but there was a staff member, who knew Russian. She was a staff member of the sort that doesn’t hopefully exist anymore, called a secretary. So, secretaries were all female and they were great, overqualified women who, because of sexual discrimination then, couldn’t get other kinds of jobs. And she sat all day, typing. Dreadful. I hope they’re trying to move past that. Mary Lou Masey was in there, a very nice lady, and somehow she knew Russian – I don’t know what her background was. And she was interested in basically getting relief from the TV and the typing all day. Who wouldn’t? And, you know, there were these - now I could see her as a teacher. You know, we were bright graduate students and motivated, you know, and it was a small class, like three or four people, like this would be an ideal teaching situation. So, the director of studies allowed Ms. Masey to take time off from her typing duties and give us Russian classes. I think we met twice a week, maybe three times a week. We had homework and all these sorts of realities, which – after all, a few people dropped out is what I’m trying to say. I mean, they really thought it would be great to study Russian, but as you know, with any new language you have to do homework and you have to work. And we also had dissertations to write and there was pressure there, but we stuck with it. And I believe it was a year; perhaps it was even two years of Russian that we did. I think it was two years and I can remember some of my classmates. The Magdalinos were there: Paul Magdalino and Ruth Macrides Magdalino were there. Let’s see – I believe they were Fellows, perhaps, my first year, or maybe both years. I can’t remember now. And they were there and Warren Treadgold, who is a professor at St. Louis University. He was there. And I think James Carder was there in the group.

AS: Yes, he was.

RN: Did he say?

AS: We interviewed him last week, but I’m pretty sure he was ’71 or ’72. He was somewhere in there.

RN: Yeah, he was a Fellow the same time I was. Oh yeah, I definitely know that. But I think he was in the Russian class. I can’t quite remember. Yes, I’m pretty sure he was, because we had this wonderful practice of, after lunch—you know Dumbarton Oaks gives a wonderful lunch, which – once you’re a starving graduate student, you’re sort of always a starving graduate student. We had enough to live on at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, but we all – lunch was free and we all tended to make that the main meal of the day, because we could save money on supper. And so, we all just packed it in at lunch and went back for seconds. And the result was, after lunch, we were just kind of, ugh. And we’d go walk in the gardens after lunch and that would revive us a little bit, so we could do some work in the afternoon. And we hit upon this strategy that when we walked in the garden we would speak Russian to each other, which we did for twenty or thirty minutes, so I can still remember a bit of the vocabulary about things that you might encounter in the garden, which is not, perhaps, fundamental to the Russian language, you know. And I also remember walking down from 2702 Wisconsin Avenue, where the Fellows stayed, an apartment building up Wisconsin Avenue about, I’d say, a mile from Dumbarton Oaks. I’d often walk down with Ruth and Paul and we would try to speak Russian then, too, while walking down the street, et cetera, so it was fun. It was interesting. I don’t think any of us ever became great Russian scholars, but we kind of all could probably still struggle through some Russian. So –

AS: You talked a little bit about visiting scholars and their impact, but you were at Dumbarton Oaks in sort of the last years of the great sort of European scholars who were at D.O. for quite a long time. I wonder: did any of them have a great impact on you?

RN: Well, Nicolas Oikonomides was a great influence, as well. He had an appointment in Montreal and had some kind of association with Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, I was a Junior Fellow so I never was quite sure as to what formal relationships people had and what their employment contract said – it’s none of my business. But, he usually would come to spend the summers there and I believe he was working on the seals project. And he would bring his family and I liked his wife very much. She was a scholar of – is; is she still alive? – of what’s called beylik, Turkish history, the small Turkish principalities in Asia minor in the period before they coalesced into the great Ottoman Empire. So, she knew some difficult Turkish and also knew Greek, and so was a sort of Turkish Byzantinist. And he was a wonderful polymath, Byzantinist, economic historian, diplomatic historian, and above all could read, from my point of view, very difficult inscriptions. So, you could show him something in manuscripts that none of us could figure out what in the world – we just couldn’t figure out what the letters were, much less read the Greek, you know. And he would just read it straight away. It was most impressive, most impressive. It was extremely useful to have someone like that around. And he would come with his or her mother and she would watch the children. She spoke only Greek, I remember. And the children would come to the pool and we’d play with their children and they, I’m sure, have gone on – I asked Oikonomides once about it – I think one’s a Japanese expert some place. They’ve gone on to great things in the world, but yes, I remember him very fondly. And later he did me a big favor. He nominated me for a position at Dumbarton Oaks. He told me later on. And so I was very grateful to him. He was a really good mentor for younger scholars. He paid attention to their work and was very kind and solicitous. When I came back to Dumbarton Oaks as a Fellow, ’81-’82, there was the great émigré scholar, Alexander Kazhdan, who was the life of the party.

AS: He was not there in the ’70s?

RN: He was not there yet. I don’t know when he started. I believe he came a little bit after that. You know he was part of these Soviet Jews who were allowed out of the Soviet Union. And that was a certain time. I could go to my computer and we could Google it and figure out what year it was. So, I was there ’75-’77. My guess is late ’70s, probably late ’70s. The Russians allowed a certain number of these Jewish intellectuals to leave. And his son had been allowed to leave. His son, I think, was a famous mathematician at Harvard, became a Harvard math professor.

AS: Yes, he did go to Harvard. We spoke to Professor McCormick last summer and he gave us quite a few details on that. My understanding is that he and Musja are now in Jerusalem, both of them.

RN: Both of them. OK.

AS: I think there was some controversy with – my understanding is that it was his son who was converting to Judaism. And that was the impetus behind all of them being –

RN: OK. That I didn’t know. I just got there in ’81-’82 and got to know him. And he was absolutely wonderful. Great parties.

AS: Strong personality.

RN: Great parties. I will never, as long as I live, forget the New Year’s Eve party at the Kazhdan’s place. Never.

AS: This was at their house on the corner of 32nd?

RN: Yeah. The house on the corner. And I was getting married and got married in February, six weeks after that or something. And my wife-to-be had come down and visited. And the Kazhdans had invited us to this New Year’s Eve party. And my sister, who lives in Richmond, had also invited us for New Year’s Eve and I wanted to accept both invitations, but this was kind of complicated. So, I did. And we drove to Richmond, which is, like, an hour, hour and a half, two hours. We spent some time there and then we drove back to Washington. And of course they fed us. You don’t go any place without – so we stayed for dinner. And then we got back to the Kazhdan’s and arrived at nine or ten. And they said something about how it would be a late supper. And so we were thinking we’ll just have a little bit to eat. So, we sit down and the food starts coming. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Russian New Year’s Eve party. Be prepared. And so I think, maybe – let’s say we’re sitting down to eat at about ten. And at three o’clock in the morning, everybody was still at the table and courses were still arriving! It was unbelievable. Of course, I made a terrible mistake by cleaning my plate, eating all that was served at various times. And, of course, between each course there are vodka toasts. It was just too much. At three o’clock in the morning – I don’t think I’ve ever done this at a dinner party – I just – everybody was there; apparently it went on until, I don’t know, seven or eight in the morning, or something. And I just said, “I’m sorry. I just can’t stay anymore.” So, we got up and left. I hope we didn’t drive. But I mean, it was – I got back home and – it was quite something.

AS: Now was this the – there was one infamous Kazhdan party where I believe it ended in Alexander going skinny dipping at about six or seven in the morning.

RN: It could have been the same night for all I know. I just couldn’t go. Really. I just can’t drink that much. Anyway, the Russians are better at this. Also, they know how to pace themselves. That’s the key. If you knew the secret to the party, you would pace yourself. Yeah, he was wonderful.

AS: So, it sounds like even – well, of course, this was later, but it sounds like even during the junior fellowship there was a vibrant social life, as well.

RN: There was a vibrant social life. There was, I think – William Loerke was very, well – in some ways you could say – well, many criticized his director of studies period seriously and there were lots of problems and lots of issues. And he wasn’t a significant scholar and never had been and never would be. And that, I think, made him a bit of a – made things difficult, because these sorts of places – I mean, you graduated from Harvard; that’s one of these sorts of places. There’s a great deal of competition; there’s a lot of rivalry amongst people and you’ve seen it among your classmates, you know, and they’re all great achievers and they’re working very hard, et cetera. Somebody who’s in a high position and hasn’t achieved a great deal is oftentimes not viewed very positively by his or her colleagues. And there’s a feeling of something unjust and this person has gotten something that other people would have deserved better, whatever. So, there was definitely that impression. He, however, was not really being selected to be the world’s greatest scholar but to be a capable administrator and he was a good administrator. I’m not sure many people had the capability to make those distinctions, though. That’s not something that kind of older faculty would understand. And so, he was a capable administrator and he was always reaching out to the other institutions around Dumbarton Oaks and trying to bring people in to lunch and things like that and to help break down the isolation. Dumbarton Oaks was a very isolated place. That’s the way it was built. It was built as a private paradise by the Blisses – I mean, a sort of villa within the city. And, you know, once this turned into an institution, it also had problems like that, too. So, he was reaching out to the National Gallery and various other places. I think that helped the social life and there were, I’m sure, the same number of junior Fellow parties as there are now. I mean, that’s a kind of constant, don’t you think? I mean, I don’t know – I can’t – I’m not a Junior Fellow there.

AS: It seems to differ, from what we’ve heard this summer, from class to class.

RN: Oh, really?

AS: Yeah. Just with the personalities of Junior Fellows. Some tend to be more group-oriented and others are very much, very into their dissertations and library work.

RN: Well, when I was there as a Junior Fellow, we had this one man – I’m sorry; I can only remember how I always referred to him. He was a Polish papyrologist. I liked the alliteration. So, he studied papyri, documents, Egyptian documents. Zbigniew was his first name and I don’t remember his last name. And he loved to drink Polish vodka. He loved to have parties at the swimming pool and he was sort of stocky, had a big moustache – I mean, he was just the bon vivant Slavic type and he was great. And there were lots of other people. I mean, there were the Fellows and some of them were there with their families; some were without their families. And the people with families went home to their families in the evening and the people like Zbigniew, who was there alone, you know – he sort of hung out with the Junior Fellows. So, I think it was a good group. I think there are a lot of friends – I’m still friends with all of those people, all of the Junior Fellows, with one possible exception. And that’s my friend – I still think of him as a friend – Warren Treadgold, who later had lots of disagreements with Dumbarton Oaks and basically refused to set foot in the place again and stopped speaking to his old friends, which is very painful to me, but I still think of Warren as a friend even if he doesn’t see it that way. And I, you know, I hope some day we’ll be able to put this all in the past. But, he was a Harvard undergrad and Harvard Ph.D. and had a lot of difficulties with Dumbarton Oaks and its directors over the years. But I don’t feel like going into that for oral history.

AS: Well, speaking of Harvard, I guess it was during these years when you were a Junior Fellow that there was a lot of talk about moving Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard.

RN: Right.

AS: I don’t know if any of that ever trickled down to the Junior Fellows.

RN: Well, it definitely did. It trickled down. How accurately and how, you know – the Junior Fellows were quite involved with this, because William Loerke shared a certain amount of this with us, which I can see, from my present perspective, was a sign of how great the crisis was, because your professors at Harvard don’t share with you, as an undergraduate, you know, details, tenure crises, things like that. I mean, it’s just utterly confidential, but the fact that he would share some of these negotiations, I think, with the junior faculty was a sign of great institutional crisis, just as when you at Harvard had your controversy about your president, I mean, I could read the New York Times and see that a lot of the confidentiality was breaking down. That’s a sign of a real crisis. So, it was and we formed a Dumbarton Oaks alumni association then, whose purpose was really to lobby on behalf of the alumni for Dumbarton Oaks. And Loerke was – the crisis came, as I understand – again, I have only hearsay evidence; I’m not primary – with his attempt to make Oikonomides a permanent professor at Dumbarton Oaks. And that was rejected by Harvard and they decided there would not be any more resident faculty at Dumbarton Oaks, which forevermore changed the intellectual life at Dumbarton Oaks. For good or for bad, it changed it profoundly, lessened it. And it means that it’s now rather more of a foundation that administers money and gives money for other people’s projects and no longer is a research institution itself, primarily. That’s a Harvard decision, that’s an executive decision of how they wanted to run their particular institute. And now since I’m a senior faculty, I can understand that these decisions had to be made, but it wasn’t received well in Dumbarton Oaks.

AS: I wouldn’t imagine so.

RN: By nobody. Not a person there, because there was a great tradition of these famous professors. Ševčenko and Mango were the ones that I had interviewed with, two of the greatest Byzantinists of the 20th century. They’re both alive and not as active now; I guess they’re in their eighties. But, they were remarkably brilliant. Both of them were just some of the most brilliant – I would say they were some of the most brilliant intellectuals I’ve ever read in my career and they were professors there. Spectacular. So, it had the kind of tenor more of an institute of advanced study than a foundation that gave out money for grants. And – [Recording stops, then starts again.]

AS: OK, we’re rolling again and I think we were discussing the hearsay relating to the possible closure of Dumbarton Oaks and return of the collections to Harvard.

RN: Right. Well, now that I’m working on this project about the history of Dumbarton Oaks and the Bliss-Tyler correspondence, actually a much earlier history about that, which reminds me, before we get – I want to talk about William Royall Tyler and what I remember about him when I was there as a Junior Fellow. But let’s stay on this question of the future of Dumbarton Oaks. It was – the plan was greeted very poorly by – the Junior Fellows were – we all felt much aggrieved by this and we felt – we all identified with the institution and we felt that this was a real threat to the institution. Now, whether this was right or wrong, I don’t know, but I’m sort of giving you a witness’s evidence here. I don’t believe there were any of the Junior Fellows who felt differently. And the Byzantinists in the area that had positions at local universities were terribly upset at this, because their whole career had been based on having access to the library at Dumbarton Oaks. There was nothing in Washington remotely comparable, so they would have lost their scholarly careers and you can see how they would be very upset, so that was really – a lot of time was spent on this and as a graduate student, it was déjà vu all over again, because all of us in my generation had been through similar protests like that for the Vietnam War on our college campuses. And all this was quite mild compared to things that happened during the ’60s. You know, I had been through periods like that in the ’60s, myself. So, I think there was a kind of willingness to go to the barricades instantly in part because of our experiences during the ’60s and the protests during the Vietnam War. And in effect, compared to your generation, my generation’s different. We were all radicalized by that to some degree. There’s not a person that wasn’t affected and I’d say at least 80 or 90 percent of college students participated in some way in demonstrations against authorities. It was simply – and some people, that’s all they did, in the spring of their college years, is go to rallies all the time. I don’t know about doing any studying; I got into a good graduate school. I mean, I was studying, you know, but I was also going to rallies. So, this seemed kind of similar and it was a period when people of a certain generation were revolting against the system, you know, take it to the man, all sorts of things, all sorts of expressions were used – in this case, quite inappropriate. And those expressions of defiance and rebellion then were by people who felt very much as if they were not part of the system and so they felt entitled or certainly justified in revolting or crashing the system, literally, in terms of the riots that happened in the 1960s. As an historian and something of a social historian, I have to say that that class of people, Junior Fellows, were very much part of the system. We were from elite schools and we had a fellowship at an elite institution. We were not exactly disadvantaged youths in the ghetto or something. But there was a sense of rebellion that went on during that. And Giles Constable, I believe, if I have the history right, became director the next year. And I believe the first year he was director –

AS: ’77 was his first year.

RN: Yeah, so that was my second year as a Junior Fellow. And he came and, like all new directors, began making changes initially, because that’s the smart way to do things. The President of the United States is pushing very hard on his legislative initiative right now, because if you don’t do it at the beginning it won’t happen. So, he was doing that, making changes that fundamentally took the institution in a different course. Right or wrong, that’s what happened. It was the curtailing, the elimination of the fieldwork program, which affected art history and archaeology profoundly. That was going on. I think for myself personally living through that change is, until this moment, part of my interest in doing this history of Dumbarton Oaks, because I’d like to know the past before that time and to sort of fill in the blanks. You know, I had very much a sense that the world was changing, but I didn’t really know what the world was that was changing. I didn’t know; I had only a vague sense. Now, I know a lot, because I’ve read a lot of letters. I know a lot about the aspirations and what Dumbarton Oaks was paying for and the great projects they did. And so, it had an impact, an intellectual impact on me during that period.

AS: And I wonder, while we’re on the subject of Constable and directors, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about William Tyler, as the previous director. Did you have much interaction with him as a Junior Fellow?

RN: Not very much. So, he was director for one year there and that’s the tragedy. I had very little. Now it’s a tragedy. He was aloof. He came to lunch fitfully. Lunch was the place where people would communicate with each other. And perhaps three, four, five, six times during the year, I happened to walk back to the main building with him after lunch. That was practically the only time one could really talk to him, besides receptions. And the lunch was in something we called the Fellows Building, which is now the Guest House, or whatever they call it.

AS: Right, yes, the Guest House.

RN: So, that’s where we ate lunch and the walk from there to the main house was a bit longer than the walk from where people eat lunch now. And now they go in different directions, but everybody walked back to the main house. And so, occasionally I walked with him and my teacher, Hugo Buchthal, had been a Fellow there and he told me I should really try to talk to Tyler, because he was a very, very interesting man and had wonderful experiences. And so, I tried, but I couldn’t get much out of him. I asked him once what he’d be doing in the summer and he said, “Oh, I’ll be going to our place in France.” And, “Oh, you have a place in France?” “Oh yes, we have a place in Burgundy.” That was the conversation. Now, of course, I know – I’ve Googled it, I’ve seen the place on the Internet. I know how much it costs to rent for a week. Do you?

AS: No, but I can only imagine. I mean, he –

RN: It’s something like $9000 a week, or maybe it’s $9000 a month. In any case, I don’t have the $9000 for whatever period of time. It’s quite a chateau. And I know the history of it and how much his father paid for it and when he bought it and all these sorts of things. But so, I really – that’s my great disappointment, that I didn’t get to know him more. I think he felt, I sensed he felt he was not a scholar and couldn’t really interact. You know, that was a time when the world was not interested in the history of institutions. It was not interested in historiography. Dumbarton Oaks in many ways was aggressively erasing its past and that sense of the institution continued until a few years ago. The fact that we’re having this interview now means that desire to erase the past is past. The fact that the current director is supporting this project to publish the Tyler-Bliss correspondence is a sign that that’s passed. I can give you a variety of evidence that Dumbarton Oaks was definitely not interested in the history of its past before this time. And I wasn’t interested in that material also, when I was a Junior Fellow. But now I see it as an extraordinarily interesting set of individuals and circumstances that created this unique institution. So, that’s my great regret: that somehow I didn’t figure out as a young person how to successfully interact with this older, shy, very formal, former-diplomat, rather more European than American – there was a real kind of cultural difference. And I think – and I don’t know what else was – I can now imagine other things that were going on in his mind, because I read letters that he wrote as a young man. And all of that, maybe, we’ll put in our book and I don’t know – it’s not something I’ve really worked out in my mind right now, but I’m giving you the direct evidence. So, that’s my great regret: that I didn’t get to know him more.

AS: He was still very much connected, though, to the Washington social scene. That’s the sense I’ve gotten. I don’t know. I know the earlier days of Dumbarton Oaks very much trickled down to the experience for Fellows. I don’t know if it carried over into this period of time or not.

RN: Well, he was a retired ambassador. And I got a sense from him that retired ambassadors were systematically invited to embassy receptions and there are a lot of embassies and there have got to be a lot of receptions. Now, I’ve read a lot about the life of diplomats and I know that that is one of the principal places where diplomats do business, so you really, if you’re a diplomat, you need to go to those receptions. And there’s a lot of networking that takes place there and it’s rather fundamental to the job. But he was retired and he found all of that quite onerous, he said. And so, he tried to go to as few of those as possible. But he definitely had a ceremonial life there in Washington and, you know, he was a retired American ambassador in the headquarters of the State Department. You can see there were quite a number of contacts that he surely had. He was working on this correspondence to some degree and he was also working on the Liszt papers, as I recall. He told me that. He somehow, or Dumbarton Oaks had, or somebody had letters of Franz Liszt. Actually, I haven’t confirmed that later. I don’t know where those are or what that was about, but that’s what he told me he was working on. That’s all I know.

AS: I wonder – a bit of a change of topic, but during the same period – what your interaction was with the D.O. collection, or if there was one.

RN: Sure, there was a collection. The same art that’s there now was there then. I would say there was no interaction with the collection. I’m trying – I’m racking my brain for any interaction. I think that’s something that’s changed now. The collection is much more accessible, I believe. My guess is it was probably more a heritage of the patrons and the whole attitude, the whole gestalt around the objects as being private was perhaps continued on. And so, that was the collection and we were there to use the books and work on our materials. I never felt encouraged to look at the objects and there was never any museum visit for Fellows, even though there were four or five or six art historical Junior Fellows. I would say that was a missed opportunity. We should have had much more interaction with the curator and the staff about the collection. We would have learned a lot. But, that didn’t happen.

AS: And speaking of interactions, did you have any interactions with the pre-Columbian center or the Garden and Landscape center?

RN: I did. I liked the Fellows. One of my two years there, there was a wonderful Pre-Columbian Fellow, Linda Schele, a professor at the University of Texas. She was great. She was the den mother of the Junior Fellows. I mean, she was this wonderful sort of charismatic, extroverted, outgoing lady, somewhat heavyset, wore these long – we called them muumuus or something. Long, kind of flowing dresses. This was a long time ago. But it was very ’60s, sort of hippie-like fashion: long hair and these long, flowing dresses. And she was just so exuberant. Her parties were wonderful and she was so excited about everybody’s work. And I really, I loved that. I found that so interesting. And I was very impressed with everything I learned, that I picked up about the pre-Columbian world. Spanish, actually, was my first foreign language, so I never felt – it never seemed terribly foreign, what they were doing. I grew up in southern Texas, near the Mexican border, so it was just – Mexico doesn’t seem foreign to me, in a way. And what they were doing didn’t seem foreign, although I don’t have a Ph.D. in pre-Columbian studies. Later on, when I remarried, my second wife’s father did a lot of business in Mexico and collected pre-Columbian art and even gave me a few pieces, so I feel like something was born there; an appreciation for pre-Columbian studies happened there at Dumbarton Oaks and that’s because of the Fellows that I knew. And similarly, for landscape, there was a person, – I’m sorry; I can’t remember his name. Mr. Moran, maybe? – an Americanist working on American landscape architecture, and other people coming in interested in Beatrix Farrand, who was the great designer of the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks and also many other gardens. And later on I remembered – those memories were important to me, because I became very interested in the gardens; I became very interested in American landscape architecture in the ’20s and ’30s, because it’s relevant to the Blisses and the Tyler-Bliss project. So, there was also, one year, there was a landscape architecture professor, Miller, Miss Miller, Professor Miller. I can’t remember her first name. She taught at Boston College or Boston University. She was a Renaissance scholar. She was very lively and I’ve always been interested in Italy and Italian art and working on the Italian Renaissance. And so, I very much enjoyed her. So, I liked all of the centers. The music – I liked the music. I like the whole thing that Dumbarton Oaks does. I’m really quite – I buy the whole program. I think it’s a great program.

AS: Were Fellows active in the Friends of Music concerts, going to concerts and things like that?

RN: Well, I was. Music is real important to my life and I went to every one. There were some great ones. There was a marvelous concert in one of my years there. Maybe it was when I was a Fellow. I was a Fellow ’81-’82. It was the earliest music that Mozart composed, like Opus 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, you know? Mozart was very prolific. So, we listened to things he composed at seven, eight, ten, eleven, fifteen and they played these for – they’re not played; these things aren’t performed. And the performers talked about them and that was really interesting. And there was – a quartet came; ah, people’s names. A quartet came and – or it was a quintet – and one of the violinists was very famous: Schneider? I can’t remember the man’s name. Anyway, he was a friend of my professor. Hugo Buchthal was married to Serkin’s wife [sic: sister], the then very famous pianist. And she – her whole family was musical and they were part of a kind of musical dynasty in Austria, in Vienna, and so whenever I’d go visit my professor, most of the conversation would be about music and, you know, really performers and opera singers and things like that, all of whom were their friends and they socialized with them. Anyway this violinist was – I remember him: very famous and recorded often, but he played dreadfully. He was rather old and he was just basically faking it, I mean, lots of missed notes, and I said something to Hugo Buchthal about this and he said, “Oh, well, you know, this happens later on.” I just do remember he was dreadful. I was just kind of wondering, “How’d that happen?” and “Why did he get on the series?” But mainly they had younger performers; obviously, younger performers are cheaper. But, they also have – they did something wonderful and experimental, like the earliest Mozart music. And they can play with a great verve, and I think really there I learned to appreciate chamber music, because that’s chamber. That’s music in a hall. That’s in a setting. And there aren’t too many other places where you get to hear chamber music. There are universities and concert halls that try to make small venues for it, but it’s not in a home and people are sitting in banks of seats and all that sort of stuff. That was a rare privilege.

AS: Now, these concerts were taking place in the Music Room, or in the gardens?

RN: The Music Room. So, we had this conference for the re-opening of the library, dedicated to the Blisses; we were very interested in trying to have re-stagings of those famous compositions that the Blisses commissioned and that was a great experience a few years ago.

AS: We should move on to your years as a Fellow in the ’80s a little more directly, but before we do, just as sort of a summary question about the Junior Fellow period, a lot of people have described these years as a tough time to be in academia more generally and some have talked about how that filtered down to, especially to Junior Fellows, as people who are just getting their feet wet, with a lot of people having to leave the field and, you know, a lot of frustration. I wonder: is that something you perceived in your time there?

RN: Yeah, that would be an aspect of at least this particular person you’re interviewing, emphasizing the positive, not discussing with you the negative. So, I’m making it into a golden age, but there was enormous anxiety. It frankly was the kiss of death to go into job interviews saying I was at Dumbarton Oaks. I was so proud of getting the Dumbarton Oaks fellowship. Some letter comes on fancy Harvard stationery and it says in very pretentious, pompous language – I probably have a copy somewhere. “The Board of Overseers begs to inform...” Something like that. “That you’ve been...” All this. I just thought this was unbelievable. And so, I was so, so proud of being a Junior Fellow. And so, I started applying for jobs using Dumbarton Oaks stationery. I thought this was very impressive. It was a disaster, because Byzantinists were perceived to be – especially coming out of Dumbarton Oaks – narrow – only interested in scholarship, unable to teach anything else outside the Byzantine field, by definition a poor teacher, and something that universities wouldn’t want. So, it was a real problem. And that aspect of the profession sticks with me to this day. I never allow one of my graduate students in Byzantine art to leave with a Ph.D. unless they have a broader education than just Byzantine. They cannot restrict themselves to studying Byzantine, because I want them to be qualified for different kinds of jobs. And so, that’s something I took from that period. There was one person who was hanging on at Dumbarton Oaks and I can’t remember his name. He was a Junior Fellow and had a – excuse me; that’s my phone. Let me just look and see who it is. Can you turn it off? Let me – [Recording stops, then starts again.]

RN: – in the University of Michigan, who had been a Junior Fellow, had many years of Arabic, and had to leave the field, because there were simply no jobs for anybody in Islamic history. The study of Islam was even worse than studying Byzantine studies, which is quite a remarkable thing now, since the whole world is terribly interested in Islamic studies. There were friends of mine that in a way were in the process of leaving the field. It was very difficult. The year I got my job, I’ll give you the statistics. There were a hundred people applying for jobs in medieval art and if you had a Byzantine specialty you were at a disadvantage. A hundred people applying – this is according to college statistics – and there were two jobs. Two. I got one of them. I got the best one. I got a job as assistant professor at the University of Chicago and that made all the difference in my career. I stayed there for twenty-seven years and then I came to Yale, so my career was very simple. It was terrible. There were very, very well qualified people that didn’t get the Chicago job and had to go into other fields. I think the person that comes to mind: my friend Gary Vikan is director of the Walters Art Museum. He was some years ahead of me and had a Dumbarton Oaks staff appointment for several years; a very, very good scholar, very wonderful person, very good scholar, and has been a great museum director. I mean, he’s a talented human being and has done very well there, but it’s a real loss to the profession that Gary didn’t take an academic job and that didn’t work out for him. And there were others. It was indeed a very difficult time and I – that was the anxiety. That was the – for many people a kind of depression that hung over us. So, we were there amongst the beautiful flowers and the glorious libraries and great intellectual traditions of Dumbarton Oaks and at the same time we didn’t know if we’d be even in the field the next year, so it was a hard time. No doubt about it. And I don’t think – in retrospect, Dumbarton Oaks could have done more to deal with that, but they didn’t see that as their problem or maybe they themselves were in denial, you know, that there was a problem. I don’t know. Later on, institutions grappled with this surplus of academics and Harvard cut its entering classes and, you know, this happened to many places. It was an outgrowth of the great expansion of academia in the ’60s into the early ’70s, spurred on by the stimulus of federal money and burgeoning economic times and many – a larger percentage of Americans going to college and demand, et cetera. And all of a sudden with the economic turmoil with the later ’70s, that collapsed. Some version is going to go on now, but it will be better controlled and more contained than it was then. It was a kind of depression in academia. I got my job at the University of Chicago; I shared this one statistic with you. I got paid $11,000 in 1977, a year. And I calculated my hourly rate. I was working about a hundred hours a week to start, because that’s the way assistant professors do it. I was making some incredibly small amount. I was making less than minimum wage. And it was also a period of great inflation, which was a big problem for everybody in the country. And I sort of extrapolated my salary and the rate of inflation and I saw that within three or four years I would be under the poverty, I would be at the poverty level of America. It was that bad. It was really, it was a lot of – universities were really struggling. Yale, I know, suffered a great deal. [Recording stops, then starts again.]

AS: Now we’re rolling again.

RN: OK. So, I’m sure Harvard also went through similar constrictions. Endowments went down a great deal. There were a lot of significant losses in endowments. I think Yale lost a great deal of their endowment back then and I don’t know what happened to Harvard, but it was a very difficult time in academia and so that’s the large – now I can see; if you take the long view, that’s the larger context for our anxiety then. But, it was palpable. Yeah.

AS: Well, this was not the case when you returned in ’81, or less so, I guess.

RN: Well, I was an assistant professor and by then I had advanced to professor; my career had gone well. And my colleagues liked me at Chicago and so I was there ’81-’82 and I’d already had a book published before I got there, which was good – a short book, but it was a book. And I was working on various other projects and I was getting married. It was a good time, a lot better. It was really kind of, in the personal aspect, which perhaps I will mention here – in the first year of my junior fellowship, my first wife died, so I had a great sort of personal tragedy. William Loerke was very kind and solicitous about that, I must say. He was very helpful. And then the second time I was at Dumbarton Oaks, I got married. So, I mean, you know, it’s sort of a very concrete contrast there. And I got tenure in the fall of ’82. That’s the year after I was at Dumbarton Oaks. So, things were looking pretty good then. So, it was a much better time. Kazhdan had come to Dumbarton Oaks and he had, compared to the – which was Giles Constables’ brilliant idea, absolutely brilliant – and so in my second year as a Junior Fellow, there was a lot of grumbling about Giles Constable, but by the time he made this brilliant appointment, everybody was, “Well, what a great,” et cetera. Things change. He was the same man, of course. But, this was all from the lower echelon point of view. And so, that was a very good and successful year, I think. I got a lot of work done and it worked well.

AS: It would have been different, your different perspective as, being in different places in your career – were there visible changes at Dumbarton Oaks between your two – I mean, you’d been gone almost five years, I guess, between the two. Or did it seem like the same place?

RN: It seemed the same. It seemed the same. I had trouble working there the second time. There was a reading room where the Junior Fellows had desks, in part of the Blisses’ house, of course, and it had these gorgeous wood floors, which were from probably the Blisses. When they were there they had beautiful oriental carpets down, et cetera et cetera. Now, there were just bare wood floors and they were extremely noisy, because of people walking around all the time. And the reading room was wood-paneled. It was an exceedingly bright, sonically, room. It’s the sort of environment that restauranteurs make so that people won’t linger long over their dinners. And it was very hard to study. And I don’t deal very well with noise. Some people like – my son’s in college and he likes to go to coffee shops and work. I couldn’t. I have to have perfect silence. We’re completely different. And so, I found it hard to work. And it became even worse when I came back as an assistant professor, because I was used to having an office and quiet spaces and so I remember having earplugs in all day, trying to work, and things like that. So, that’s my impression of the environment. Constable, bless his heart, heard the complaints and put a carpet down in the hall. And that cut down the noise. First, there was great grumbling about how they’re going to change at Dumbarton Oaks, but he really did cut down the noise of people’s shoes, you know. And we used to – some of the women wore high heels and they made a – this is a different age. That even made more noise and we’d really grumble about that. And some people would even suggest they might not wear high heels at Dumbarton Oaks, you know, but they couldn’t do that, for the head librarian liked to wear high heels. We didn’t feel like we could say anything to her about it. So, I think that’s about the only difference that I can think of. Not a profound one.

AS: Well, speaking of the library, how was your interaction with – it would be Irene Vaslef at this point – or any of the librarians?

RN: Oh, I liked Irene. I liked her a great deal and that second time when I came back, she had a son who was a medical doctor and I think he’d taken a residency in Chicago, so we had a lot of Chicago conversations about her son, et cetera. And I always liked Irene a great deal. I was very fond of her; I thought she was an excellent librarian. I worked hard to help them get books and to give them suggestions and took very seriously that responsibility of Fellows, to try to help them get books they didn’t know about. I kind of took that attitude, which I picked up as a junior Fellow as well – we were encouraged to do that and when I got to Chicago, all the time I was there, I was constantly on the librarians to get books and things. I still do it at Yale. Whenever I see something we don’t have, I shoot off an email. Fortunately at Yale we have plenty of money for books, so they buy everything. At Chicago it was more difficult. Dumbarton Oaks also bought everything, so that was great.

AS: So, it was a very active relationship between librarians and Fellows.

RN: Yeah. Definitely.

AS: And they were very accommodating.

RN: Very accommodating. They would do anything to help us. It was a real, personal – they would take a personal interest in your work and they would go to all kinds of heroics to help you get things. There was a man, a wonderful retired man; he’d had some sort of military career, and his job was to go the Library of Congress to get books for us. He was very talkative, a very garrulous man and you had to be a little bit careful about starting conversations, or you wouldn’t get any work done, because he would tell you great – all the heroic actions he’d done to find this book at the Library of Congress and I’m sure finding something in the Library of Congress can be very difficult on some days, but that was his mission, to get these obscure books for us in the Library of Congress, and perhaps they’re still doing that. I don’t know, but it’s probably more anonymous, interlibrary loan, or something now. But then they had their own courier; he would go every day. He was wonderful.

AS: Now, were you still living on Wisconsin Avenue during this fellowship?

RN: Yes, that was the time we still lived there. That was in a way a nice place to live. The apartments were small. As a Junior Fellow, I had a neighbor I got to know, who is still a friend, and she had a one-bedroom; I had a studio as a Junior Fellow. And she had a job in the White House and I got to know her and her boyfriend and then husband. And she invited me down to the White House one day, when the President was away. And this was the Ford administration; she was Republican. And I took along a couple of other Fellows, foreign Fellows, because I thought this would be a good experience for them. I took along Anthony Bryer, famous Byzantine historian at Birmingham, and – oh, dear. I forgot his name, but he couldn’t get a job and he went back to Australia and did something on, sort of, educational administration. Perhaps I’ll remember his name. He worked on early Byzantium. So, we went down there and went to see my friend in the executive office building. She had a grand office and Bryer, who’s just a wild man, looked at her office and on her desk there was some stationery, very classy, even classier than Harvard stationery. It just says, “The White House, Washington, D.C.” You don’t need a zip code; you don’t need anything! That’s it, very simple. And he looked at it and said, “Oh, that’s beautiful. I think I’ll take some of that.” And she said, “No, you won’t. That’s against federal regulation.” So, he reached for it and she reached for it, too. And I thought they were going to get into a tug-of-war there and I said, “Bryer, let go of it.” I don’t think he quite understood the import. And we walked around and we saw – she took us up to the Oval Office and we walked around and saw all sorts of things. It was really cool. So, that’s one of the things I got out of 2702 Wisconsin Avenue, was meeting the then Sarah Massengale, who was on the Domestic Council of President Ford. So, that’s cool.

AS: Very much so.

RN: Yeah.

AS: Now, my chronology – this is something I think you might be able to help with – is a bit messed up in these years. I know joint appointments were a new thing in these years or perhaps a little bit earlier, but one of our other interviewees mentioned that you had held one of the joint appointments?

RN: No. I never had a joint appointment.

AS: OK.

RN: That’s never –

AS: Another one of the oral history –

RN: Yeah. Well, it’s somebody’s memory. I never had a joint appointment. I got a straight job at the University of Chicago at the conclusion of my second year as a Junior Fellow. I had a very fortunate career. I didn’t have to be an adjunct some place; I didn’t have to take a temporary job. When I was there, John Duffy was an adjunct and he taught at the University of Maryland before he went to Harvard as a professor. I got to know John well, a great guy, wonderful philologist. And when I was there as a Fellow, ’81-’82, Mike McCormick was the joint Fellow, a joint appointment with Hopkins. And I think – I’m not sure. There were some others, but I’m a little unsure of the chronology there. But Mike, he was great there. I got to know him in my second period, ’81-’82. He was great; still is. Outgoing and very excited about his work all the time, a wonderful, sort of infectious, positive sense of enthusiasm about the field. I remember one day – I can remember the subject, but we were walking to lunch and we got into a serious intellectual debate. I can’t remember what it was about, but it was like, “Oh no, you can’t say that.” “Oh yes, I can.” Et cetera, you know. I mean, we just couldn’t let it go. We walked in and we kept going at it right there. And I remember Giles Constable was there and we were kind of oblivious that we were speaking loud and people were looking at us and somebody said, “Quiet down. The director’s here.” And he turned and said, “No, no, I want to hear it. I want to see how they work this out.” And so, we actually kept the debate going. I forget. I don’t remember – I think it had to do with medieval history in France and it had to do with a French historian that I had been reading, about the middle ages. And it had to do with the book – sorry, I can’t remember the details, but it had to do a lot with oral memory and oral traditions – interesting to think about that in this present context. And about the truth and falsity of orally received traditions and things like that and historians could work with them or not work with them, et cetera. It was a great discussion.

AS: It seems like a typical D.O. experience.

RN: It was. That was lovely, yeah.

AS: I wonder: I don’t have too many more questions today. You may have other things to say about the Senior Fellow period, or, excuse me, the fellowship period in the early ’80s, but I didn’t know if you wanted – we’ve talked quite a bit in passing about Constable and his administration and I didn’t know if you wanted to touch upon that more specifically.

RN: Well, it’s hard for me to put it in context. Since I was a Junior Fellow and then an assistant professor, it’s very hard for me to see the larger context of what he was trying to do. I’m trying to be positive, but I think it was – I must say I think it was a tragic mistake to allow the fieldwork archaeology program to expire. I really do think that’s the major mistake he made and it has forever changed the character of the institution. And it’s something that now we can’t get back and it has had deleterious effect on academia in America. We have few scholars in America who have archaeological experience. That makes us inferior to the intellectual traditions of various European countries: the English are much better as a – there’s an English community of Byznatinists much more experienced with archaeology. Same for the Germans, et cetera, obviously the Greeks. It’s a major problem in America. And that extinguishing of the Dumbarton Oaks fieldwork caught us – really closed out our national archaeological experience. And it’s not been replaced. Maybe it was already dead and maybe what he did was simply pull the plug on a dead patient. And there’s some evidence for that, I could say. He wrote an article about this in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, his controversial decision, and actually did a little historiographic work in archives. It’s perhaps the first time that an historian began to look for archive information that was in there at Dumbarton Oaks. And he went into the fieldwork, tradition of fieldwork, and there’s something there that in the change of the Byzantine Institute of America and the death of Thomas Whittemore – I’ve written about this in a book and so I’ve done a lot of work on this, but in a period then in the ’50s and early ’60s, they allowed the patron network to expire and there was a large patron network in America that was paying for this American archaeology and that was allowed to fritter away. Dumbarton Oaks took over the Byzantine Institute of America’s archaeological programs and I can only surmise from a distance now that the world must have thought, well, “Rich Harvard, rich endowment, Dumbarton Oaks is taking over and there’s no reason for us to give any money to this anymore.” That was the supposition. For whatever reason, that happened and later on Dumbarton Oaks changed its policies, put its money elsewhere or maybe didn’t have any money. I think actually Dumbarton Oaks was affected by the same financial problems in the ’70s that everybody else was. I don’t know. I don’t know the statistics. I haven’t seen the letters. And there was no way to, sort of, re-establish this patron network that would pay for that. But, it’s affected American art and archaeology of Byzantium to this day and as a scholar I’m frustrated by it. I keep trying to work in different ways to support that and lately have been successful, so I’m not an archaeologist, but I think archaeology is very important for history and art history and lots of other fields. Although, I think Constable brought a real professionalization to Dumbarton Oaks for the first time and he was and is a historian of Monasticism. And he said to me one day, “The problem is, Rob,” he said. “Dumbarton Oaks is like a saint that has collected a whole series of followers around the saint or monasteries. It’s grown up, et cetera, and has survived on the charismatic will and the charisma of the great saint. But eventually the saint dies. So, then what are they going to do? Is the whole thing going to fritter away, or if it’s not then a structure has to be built and constructed around it.” And so, the way he did it was to construct a structure, an administrative structure. It meant spending more money on administrators, which we scholars never thought was a good idea at the end of the day, but perhaps was the way to change it from this institution presided over by the very wealthy patrons to something that would be a permanent academic institution. So, he began that process of professionalization at Dumbarton Oaks and even though he made decisions – I suppose he was part of the decision to no longer have any tenured professors – decisions that I don’t think really helped the character of the institution, he did in some ways make sure that it’s a going institution to this day. So, that’s what a good director does, I now know. And so, I’m rather more positive about his contributions than I certainly would have been then. Yeah. Maybe I’m just older.

AS: I think that’s a common thing that we’ve been hearing, so I don’t think you’re alone in that sentiment. Is there anything else in that fellowship period that I’ve left out, or should we talk about the Senior Fellows?

RN: Sure. Now we get closer to the present.

AS: Yes – with quite a bit of a fast-forward.

RN: So, I’ve been a Senior Fellow for six to seven years.

AS: Since 2003, I think.

RN: OK, thanks. When I wrote my book – this is an aside; I’m getting to it – when I wrote my book on Hagia Sophia and kind of the history of Byzantine studies, I had decided to end it in 1950 or early ’50s, when Whittemore, Thomas Whittemore, the head of the Byzantine Institute of America, died. I think he died in ’53. And that was very safe, because everybody I was writing about was dead and of course I could get access to archives and materials. Now we talk about the period from 2003 to the present. There’s a lot that I don’t want to say, that I can’t say, so I would say myself as an historical source becomes more limited. I’m saying all this for the record, but it would be obvious if anybody were reading this. Well, I’ve been there for two directors – Angeliki Laiou and now Jan Ziolkowski – and different administrations, both Harvard professors, both continuing, in a way, the tradition that Constable inaugurated of a senior, accomplished scholar running Dumbarton Oaks, which would seem, if you walked into the place now, what any research institution would have, but remember Constable was the first. And there are many advantages. The professors come from Harvard. They know the Harvard culture. Let’s see: I guess I wasn’t – was Angeliki?

AS: I think her tenure ended in 1998, so it would have been Keenan.

RN: Keenan. I guess she was just such a powerful member of the Senior Fellows that I think of her as still the director, even though Professor Keenan was the director. Sorry [laughs].

AS: No, no.

RN: She is quite a powerful person. I also had a lot to do with her while she was director, in part because she offered me a job there, and so we had many interactions about that in the early ’90s, which I didn’t take. I stayed in Chicago. But so, she was very important and Ned was very important, because all of these people brought real competency and real knowledge about Harvard as an institution, which is very useful for Dumbarton Oaks, because it is a Harvard institution and it needs to function in a capable way within other Harvard contexts. And the problem before, with this retired American ambassador, who I now know had been a Harvard graduate student – perhaps you know this. William Royall Tyler had been a Harvard graduate student in fine arts and failed his orals, the Ph.D. exams, and left graduate school. So, he was a failed academic at Harvard, which will come out when we publish the correspondence. But, anyways, that’s a very different person, as a director, from a senior, important scholar at Harvard coming down to be director, as what we had all of the previous times. [Recording stops, then starts again.]

AS: OK. We were just talking a little bit about the Senior Fellows committee and I won’t keep you too much longer, so I wonder if you just might talk about some of the – as you mentioned, I know that this is sort of recent stuff and not the stuff of oral history quite yet – but if there are any major, especially towards the earlier part of your term as a Senior Fellow, major issues or projects that were particularly memorable or enjoyable –

RN: Well, it was very enjoyable to watch the growth of the institution and the new building, the building projects that Ned put into effect. I particularly loved his taking me around the project and pointing out different aspects, because he took such a pride of ownership in the whole thing, as if it were his house that was being built, which is good. This is good. You want the person superintending it to really look for every detail and so that was quite interesting. Also to witness from a distance the effects on the institution of, let’s say, his forced merger of the different units so they all shared the same library. All the books are now merged together in a single system, so you don’t have the wonderful personalized assistants and the genuine scholars involved in the library that were once there, but this would be an example of what Constable would have called the need to move to a professional structure for Dumbarton Oaks, I mean, a continuation of that, which I’m sure on any given day is correct. I remember Loerke telling me one time that the cost of cataloging at Dumbarton Oaks – you know they had their own cataloging system – the cost of cataloging a book was four or five times more than if they used the Library of Congress system, which every other person, every other library in the country, even including money-rich Harvard and Yale, were switching to. Yale still has some old books that haven’t been switched over, but there’s no rational library in America that is not using the Library of Congress system now, because the Library of Congress catalogs the books and you don’t have to pay people to do that. Well, Dumbarton Oaks had to pay people. So, it’s inevitable what has happened and probably will help the institution in the long term, because there will be more intellectual sharing, because they all share the common library in a way. I mean, it probably will be good. So, one of the very nice things about being a Senior Fellow is that we break for lunch in the director’s home and it’s always a very lovely lunch and the conversation changes depending upon the Fellows that are there. The last couple years, John Haldon from Princeton, an historian, has joined us. John has great stories. He’s got many great humorous stories and that’s enlivened it a lot. I particularly enjoyed Ned’s wife, Elizabeth [sic: Judith], and one memorable lunch, I was talking about my son, who was studying political science there at Georgetown and really interested in getting some sort of internship on the hill and she said, “Well, maybe I can help.” And anyway, she helped him get an internship with the then junior senator from Illinois, now the President of the United States. So, that was really a good lunch. I really thought that was a good one. My family has stayed in Chicago until tomorrow, when they’ll all move here with the moving van, so he was still a resident of Illinois, so he could be an intern in the senator’s office. So, that was quite an interesting experience and I enjoyed talking about her times in Africa. I collect African art a little bit and she had lots of wonderful pieces. And now, of course, Jan’s wife is very interesting to chat with. Do you know?

AS: I haven’t met her yet.

RN: She is wonderful to talk to. She’s a chemist who – she’s a forensic chemist and works in crime labs, of course, and has an infinity of interesting stories, some of which she can share with us and only a few of which can be discussed at dinner, you know, but that’s also very interesting. So, I particularly enjoy the lunches and that’s – otherwise, we work very hard as Senior Fellows. We read many applications. What we all do, you know, it’s volunteer work for us. Harvard pays our expenses to go down there, but, you know, there’s no other compensation, so it’s really a kind of volunteer effort and it’s a great deal of work. And we work very hard and we have serious meetings and – but we have a nice lunch. So, I like the lunch.

AS: Well, I don’t have anything else about the Senior Fellows experience, but I’m sort of jumping around in time, but if you don’t mind, you’ve been involved in a number of symposia over the years –

RN: Sure.

AS: – even acting as symposiarch, I think. And I wondered if you might talk about the Dumbarton Oaks symposia and the role that it plays in Byzantine studies or any memorable symposia that you’ve been involved in.

RN: Well, the ones that had the greatest impact were the ones I encountered when I was young, as a graduate student, or as a Junior Fellow, or as an assistant professor. I’ll never forget the first one I went to. It was a colloquium and it was about Byzantine manuscripts – illumination, palaeography, intellectual history – and it was published as a book called Byzantine Books and Bookmen, which is the title of the colloquium run by Mango and Ševčenko. And there was a question-and-answer period and at one point somebody said, “Well, where did you come up with this word ‘bookmen’?” And, you know, one could have said “bibliophile”, one could have said “book collector” or something. What is this word, “bookmen”, which is a kind of marginally acceptable English word, you know? And one of them, one of the pair – they were quite a pair, in a way. They were yin and yang; they were quite something and both utterly brilliant. And one of them said, “Well, we were talking one day about this and – what language were we speaking? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, were speaking Russian then. And then we decided that, well, it really takes a word like that,” – there probably is a word like that in Russian; I don’t know, but there are similar Russian words. Russians use the word спортсмен. That’s how you say it in Russian, “sportsmen”. So anyway, the concept came from Russian. And as a beginning graduate student, I just couldn’t believe that they couldn’t remember what language they were speaking in and that they were speaking in Russian when they were doing all this. And that was a great one. Professor Irigoin from the Collège de France was there and there were a number of wonderful scholars. Yes, the Dumbarton Oaks symposia: very, very important, I think, for beginning scholars to come and see the older scholars and be a part of something very powerful intellectually. And it still functions that way. The quality of the symposia varies. I think there’s been a – [Recording stops, then starts again.]

AS: There we go. OK, we’re back on.

RN: So, we were talking about symposia and I was about to make a criticism. The criticism would be that the symposia – to some extent, the topics are yesterday’s news. They get topics that are not always cutting-edge and they operate more as a kind of consensus statement on a problem, as opposed to something more experimental, something more challenging. In a way they’re a bit like major art exhibitions in major museums, which are seldom path-breaking. They pull together material – I’m talking a Metropolitan Museum exhibition or something like that. But, that’s the nature of the beast, I’ll say, and there are very good things that Dumbarton Oaks is doing. They’ve put together these colloquia, which are on a smaller scale, and they’re more experimental, often bringing younger scholars and so I think they’ve got a good system of the kind of major, blockbuster exhibition – that’s the symposium – and then the smaller, challenging exhibition in a side gallery – and that’s the colloquia. So, I think that system is working well. Otherwise, I think Dumbarton Oaks is a lively, changing institution. It’s not an artifact of the past. It’s growing and changing and hopefully will remain a credit to Harvard indefinitely.

AS: I certainly hope so. Well, I just wondered if we might expand on that a little bit in talking about the role of Dumbarton Oaks in Byzantine studies in the future. You’ve touched on it a little – I mean, you’re sorry about the fieldwork disappearing and the changing nature of the symposia. But are there areas in which Dumbarton Oaks could play a different role than they do now in the field, in the future?

RN: Definitely. They certainly could play a different role. They certainly could play a role that would have greater impact. Whether they will, it’s hard to predict the future. I’ll be a Senior Fellow for a couple more years, so I’ll have some possibility of changing things. I could name the Internet as changing the whole world. And if Dumbarton Oaks were aggressively to embrace the Internet, it could transcend its fundamental party, that is it’s a small institution on a beautiful estate in Washington, D.C., a long ways from Cambridge, a long ways from any other kinds of institutions. It could be the network, it could be the node, it could be the center of quite an extraordinary kind of intellectual world that could be brought through Dumbarton Oaks, in part because it has all of these Fellows, so many Fellows now in so many different places and so many institutions, well placed, et cetera. If Dumbarton Oaks were to aggressively embrace that and see themselves fundamentally in an outreach mode of really wanting to contribute powerfully to Byzantine studies and not to hold on to a certain territory, a certain past, a certain collection, a certain physical space, but if they were to become virtual, they could begin by reassuming control of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and turning that into a major element, a major Internet vehicle for Byzantine studies, which I have been pushing as a Senior Fellow for years and years and years. And it hasn’t happened yet, but I’m around for two more years, so I’ll keep pushing. And they could do many more things. That would take initiative. That would take a different, perhaps a different kind of direction they want to go for. So, that’s what they could do. That would be some of the possibilities at Dumbarton Oaks. But, that might not be what they want to do. And, you know, I will do my best to urge my view, to create my vision of the future, but we’ll see what happens.

AS: Well, I think you more than answered the questions I came with and I wonder if in summary you might, especially considering the book that you’re working on right now, you might talk a little bit about what you see as the Bliss legacy to Byzantine studies and to Dumbarton Oaks.

RN: Well, the great legacy is Dumbarton Oaks, is the art collection, is the library, and is this large bequest of money, which was – I don’t know the details, but I’m sure it was well managed, like the rest of Harvard’s endowment and is now a significant endowment. Again, I don’t know the details. I know how much they gave initially, et cetera, because I’ve seen all those records back in the ’30s and ’40s. I actually like studying the past, because I don’t have to get into confidential problems. And they transformed America. They made a very beautiful institution and they made profound, they had a profound effect on three different fields in America. It’s a perfect example of selective, successful philanthropy. Successful philanthropy is philanthropy that is targeted to a narrow, realizable objective. It’s not like shooting with a shotgun, where all the little pellets go out and scatter-shot. It’s precisely targeted, like laser surgery or something. And so, they took these three little fields, three obscure little fields, one would say, from the larger – Byzantine studies, pre-Columbian studies, gardens – and have made a serious impact on all three. Byzantine studies I know the best. Most scholars that have jobs in Byzantine studies in America have passed through Dumbarton Oaks, where most is 90%, 95%, maybe – well, it couldn’t be 100, but I don’t know a tenured professor in Byzantine studies in America who hasn’t had an engagement with Dumbarton Oaks. And I know few major scholars in the world that haven’t been Fellows there. It’s just like everybody. Publications, very important, the art collecting, very important, so it’s – the world before Dumbarton Oaks I’m aware of, because I’m reading these letters and I have a good sense of it: amazing. And I think in a way the Blisses were right to base it in Washington and I think Harvard’s ultimate decision to keep it there was right. If it had been absorbed at Harvard, it might not have had the same impact. Washington is a non-trivial place in the world. And the fact that Byzantine studies are in Washington, D.C., I mean. this makes a difference, you know? If Dumbarton Oaks was in – well, now I’m going to impugn wherever I say – Topeka, Kansas – sorry – it would not have had the same impact, in a way. But being in Washington, being in Georgetown, many, many people have been to Dumbarton Oaks, you know, that are not scholars, et cetera. This is great. So, we thank the Blisses. We should raise a glass.

AS: Well, I do, certainly. Is there anything else I’ve forgotten?

RN: This is fine. OK.

AS: Thanks for sitting down.

]]> No publisher Erik Frederickson Oral History Project Archives Byzantine 2012-08-02T14:50:00Z Page Calogero M. Santoro http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/calogero-m.-santoro Oral History Interview with Calogero M. Santoro undertaken by Lorena Lama at the Guest House at Dumbarton Oaks on August 12, 2011. At Dumbarton Oaks, Calogero Santoro was a Fellow in the Pre-Columbian Studies Program in 2009-2010. LL: My name is Lorena Lama; it is August 12, 2011. I am here at the Guest House at Dumbarton Oaks with Calogero Santoro. He was a former Pre-Columbian Studies Fellow here. And, thank you for joining us.

CS: Thank you Lorena.

LL: So, to start of how did you first hear about Dumbarton Oaks?

CS: Well the first I hear through the books, especially because the Dumbarton Oaks has published and delivered a wonderful collection of books based on different topics on pre-Columbian and other topics of the kind of specialization that the center is devoted to. This includes most of the Collection related with the Maya area and some related with the South American archeology, especially the Andean archeology. At one point, because we always had a need to have books in our library, I wrote a letter to the former President, to the former Director probably ten or fifteen years ago asking for an exchange to get their books from here and in exchange we would send our Journal which is Chungara. After several – more than one letter of exchange, finally we get the agreement. We selected certain books because they said we cannot send the whole collection because there are too many books. You have to select the ones that you needed. So we did that, and we send them the whole collection of Chungara, which was already in the library. So that was the first main approach to Dumbarton Oaks. Then I visited here, Washington, in 1990 when I was trying to find a place in the United States to pursue for my Ph.D. studies. And I was in Pittsburg looking for the possibilities there with the Heinz Fellowship, that I finally get it in 1991. So, I took the opportunity to visit – actually took the opportunity to visit Dumbarton Oaks because especially came here because my friend Dan Sandweiss who was a Fellow in those days, he invited me. So I spent one or two days in La Quercia that already existed in those days. Jeffrey Quilter that was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies in those days, he introduced me to other possibilities to be, to apply for a fellowship here. He was the first one that formally talked to me about that. But in those days for me to think of a fellowship, it was really hard. It was really hard and it was far away because my main goal in those days was to get my Ph.D., which I did in Pittsburg in 1995. Then I went back to Chile in 1996. So, since then I’ve been looking for opportunities to come back to the United States to do research because one of the big differences that we have in our countries is that we have good institutions, but libraries and spaces of the kind that Dumbarton Oaks offers to researchers – these wonderful spaces and a wonderful opportunity. I think it was about three or four years ago that I again know about these fellowships through Verónica Williams who was applying to be a Fellow here. I said to her, “Well, I will write a letter of recommendation for you so next year I will do the same, and you will write a letter for me.” So, both of us got the fellowship. In between I knew that Joanne Pillsbury was the new Director of the program. It happened that I met her when she was a Fellow here in, actually, 1990 too. So the world it tends to be smaller when you start to look at all the connections that are created when you move throughout your life. So now in Washington and especially in Dumbarton Oaks, I feel that I am home, you know, because I know my way around. I know people. I arrived last week and I feel so happy and so emotional because all the people recognize me. So, I said to them, “Well, you here, you salute me with happiness and friendly while in my University they say, ‘Finally you are going, you are leaving.’” So, it was a different feeling you know. So, that was the way that I have learned about this institution, and I feel so glad and so fortunate to have had the opportunity to be in this environment and to have had the opportunity to be in this environment to work on the topics and the research that I’m working with.

LL: So, what year did you do your fellowship?

CS: It was 2009–2010. It was just one year ago.

LL: And what was that experience like? What did you do everyday and –?

CS: Well, you know I used to say that as soon as I get breakfast at La Quercia I get free – free of doing nothing, you know. It was like this, you know, I’m going to think about it. That’s what’s the nice thing about being here, you know, the opportunity to think. That is a not happening for nothing, you know, because we don’t have appointments, we don’t have meetings, we don’t have to give lecture, we don’t have to – So, the only thing we have to do is just to do research. But research – an important part is thinking – thinking of other people’s thought, thinking of other people’s ideas, thinking of other people’s data, and how you can fit your ideas, your hypothesis, your data, your experience in the world that you are reading, that you are imagining, that you are thinking. It’s a wonderful opportunity to have the freedom to think and not limited – not limited in time, not limited in space, surrounded by a wonderful landscape and environment humanistically and naturalistic too.

LL: So you don’t have to follow a set schedule, you just went to the library when you needed to –?

CS: Yeah, well, I regularly came everyday – at around nine o’ clock, I was sitting in the library. At twelve sharp I was sitting in the refectory, and then we went back to the library and then about six or seven, at the most, I went home. At one point my wife showed up too – she’s an archeologist too – she’s Daniela Valenzuela. She started to eat early at night, which is a good practice that you have in this country. In our country we tend to go very late with our dinners. But here is a good practice to have dinner early at night so you have sort of the rest of a late night that you can do other things. You can go out for walking or you can do readings or whatever. You have sort of an extra part of the day, you know, for other things besides eating like we normally do in our country, you know. So, we got this routine, and it worked perfect for us. And during the weekends, I rarely went to the library. I preferred to enjoy the possibilities that this city offers. I think this is one of the few cities in this country that offers so many free things, you know. The museums, a lot of spectacles, musical, and then you have all these seasonal activities related with all the changes in the environment, because we have the fall, then we have winter, then we have the spring. And all these seasons come with different landscapes that you can enjoy just walking outside or by going to some activities that are outside too. So, we combine both this very intellectual activity in the library and the outside world offered by Washington.

LL: Did Dumbarton Oaks host any events during your fellowship that you attended?

CS: Well, a lot of them. First, we have this Pre-Columbian symposium, then there was a roundtable about the Maya, and besides that other activities, symposium or workshop related with the other programs. The Music Room was offering these concerts that we had the opportunity to attend the concert if there were empty spaces. And in our case, one or two times we didn’t have the opportunity to go, but most of the time that we put our names, we got a free space for concerts. They were superb concerts, all of them were superb, very fine, and the Music Room also itself is just a monument. It’s incredible and all. That was another value added to this Dumbarton Oaks opportunity. And besides there was this Pre-Columbian Archeological Society of Washington that they – I think that’s the name – so they also have lectures, and they invite some of the Pre-Columbian scholars to give a lecture there. I give a lecture there too and I give a lecture in the Chilean Embassy too. So, I tried to follow Joanne Pillsbury’s suggestion, see: “Don’t fill your agenda with a lot of activities because that will ruin your time, you know, at the library.” And I think we managed to do that, you know. I can say that I didn’t attend much activities so if I look at the eight months or nine months that we were here, most of the time was at the library activities.

LL: And prior to your fellowship, did you ever attend any of the symposia?

CS: No, no. I knew about them because I read some of the results. And, actually, this, I would like to be in one of the symposia because normally, you know, in our field it is hard to find – to attend symposium or workshops that are just concentrated in one particular topic. And everyone talk about the same major topic, but from different perspectives, and I think that produces a tremendous earthquake in your mind. You have the opportunity to see different trajectories in research, different ways of concluding or making explanations for the same phenomena or things like that. So, I think it’s a good thing that Dumbarton Oaks organizes these symposiums. I know these mega-congresses that tend to be – probably they are more visible in the world system, but in terms of impact, academic or intellectual impact, I think the symposia it has a better – the products are better. And also normally the symposia are producing a book or something. It’s a double effect.

LL: Going back to social life, during your fellowship were you able to interact with the Byzantinists or the Garden and Landscape Fellows?

CS: Yeah, you know that – at two levels. La Quercia created a good environment for communication and for interaction, so there we have interaction mostly by having dinner together, by having some wine. You know, we organized this dinner so everybody brought their own ethnic food. We did that several times. We did also a lot of activities outside. We went with other Fellows to eat outside. But also intellectually what we did is a reading group, and it was related with the people that were doing their Ph.D. So I decided to be in that group, despite the fact that I was not writing a dissertation. I want to know how people – young people in this country or from outside of the country – they are doing their dissertations – how they are managing all the problems. Because I belong to – I am a faculty member of a Ph.D. program in Chile. So, looking and hearing their experience, I think it was another way to understand the process of being a student in a Ph.D. program. So, and in that reading group, there were people from Landscape, Byzantine and form Pre-Columbian. And we were very strict – I think we get together every two or three weeks – everybody has to read the chapters. We were very – not nasty – but we were very strict, very sharp in our comments. Because that was the point just to make the other person see: “Well, this chapter, it doesn’t make sense. There are sections that should not be in this section because this section is related with this and this and this topics according to your definition at the beginning, you know.” So most people, I think, were pretty happy – they thought that this time that we spend once in a while was worth it.

LL: Sounds like it was.

CS: Yeah.

LL: OK. And would people interact during lunches?

CS: Yeah. We interacted a lot during lunches. But at lunchtime we see always that each program was eating by themselves. There were a few people that were moving around. What I got from those days that the Pre-Columbian table was always the most noisy – people most of the time were laughing and making jokes and so on and so on. While on the other side the Byzantine—you look at people, and you would say, “You talk so calm, we got the impression from outside that you are praying or something like that.” They were having a good time too you know, but when we said that you could see the different personalities behind these programs, you see. Which is incredible how topics in some way or another makes your personality or your personally is so attached with your topic that there is sort of a dynamic relationship between what you do and the way that you behave. So, the Pre-Columbian was sort of the happy table you know the noisy table, but the hardworking table too.

LL: What were your impressions of the institution, how it’s organized?

CS: Just for this trip you know I was, I get a letter from Emily Gulick, and she said –  and Lee, the guy that is in charge of your check.

LL: Jonathan Lee.

CS: Jonathan Lee. Please send me some papers, my passport, blah blah blah blah blah. Send this in advance – your check will be here, we will start to deposit your check. And all that goes so smoothly. I send it, and I don’t have to be concerned about that the paperwork will be working, and that I am here I would not get an excuse: “Sorry, but something was in between that your check is not ready.” When any institution is working with that fine-tuning in the organization, I think it’s a great institution. You come from there, everything on top it’s a breather. It has a good breathing. Everything goes well you know. But when all these little things at the base doesn’t work and you see that each part of the organization are not connecting each other – so normally you have an organization that is loosing time, the workers they don’t feel that they are doing well, you know, because there is no good connection between them and that affects also the people that are receiving your service. I think this is a good example you know. So, I was telling my secretary there this is the difference between our university and this institution, you see. Here I send the paper and the check will be there. They said the check will be there in fifteen days, and the check will be there and it was here, you know, when I arrived. There, well it’s different. They are different kinds of institutions. But I think in that way you don’t have to be concerned about that, you have to be concerned about the reason why you come here. You came here to study not to be concerned about your paperwork, you know – about that. That I think I would say it’s an example of the how this organization operates. It might be possible that, like many organizations around the world, that it has some problems because it’s a human organization. But from the outside you don’t notice.

LL: And what would you say is D.O.’s greatest contribution to Pre-Columbian Studies?

CS: Well, I would say that in this moment, there is no other institution that is doing – I would say in the United States, and probably I’m right when I say in the United States, and in the whole Latin American and in Europe. So, I would say that this is the only one big institution, prestigious institution in the world that is creating a tremendous network because you have scholars coming in, with different levels – you know people just getting started in their career, postdoctoral, people at the end of their career. All these levels are coming together to sit together working together. But then you have the books, then you have the symposium, then you have the library you see. You receive a lot of books from – Dumbarton Oaks buys and receives books from these three different programs, in particular from the Pre-Columbian program so you are certain that here you will find one of the best collections for Pre-Columbian Studies too. So, if you have all these parts, I think this is a tremendous institution. And we have to be glad that this institution is still alive and in good shape beside all the problems that is in the outside world, you know, with the economy falling down not only in this country but in the outside world. So, we have to thank – I don’t know who – but again, glad to be part of this.

LL: Dumbarton Oaks and the Pre-Columbian Studies program focuses a lot on sort of Mesoamerican studies and Andean Studies, and I believe that you are doing Chilean archeology. So, how do you think that sort of D.O. – or what do you think D.O. can do to bring those sort of lesser-known fields such as Chilean archeology to D.O.?

CS: I talked about this topic with the Director, with Joanne too. And I said what you should do – what you could do is that instead of bringing people over for certain events, move outside of Washington, move them all to different countries. And it doesn’t have to be something that D.O. has to fund 100 percent. So, in that way you create alliances, you know, with countries and being in Washington, here are all the embassies, all the countries in Latin America, you know. So, it’s around the corner, all the connections are around the corner. And I’m pretty sure that the ambassador and the cultural attaché would be happy to organize activities were Dumbarton Oaks would be involved with their particular country. I would look in the CVs of the embassy here and it would be great for our country, but it would be great also for Dumbarton Oaks because it would move their network too, physically, to the rest of the continent. We talked about this. I think it’s difficult because all institutions have their own procedures. It’s one way to move the organization. Again, it’s a suggestion, and it’s my impression because it’s another way of sort of to promote this institution because in our country people tend to be afraid to apply to these great institutions because you say, “Well, will they consider my application? What about if they say no to me?” But if you are there, if Joanne is there and explaining what is going on, I think you would also – it will give Dumbarton Oaks – and it would be the people over there – to get Fellows that probably – the best Fellows, good Fellows – but they don’t make the connection you know. And probably being there physically – that would create a different scenario for people that have been thinking, that never have thought of the possibility of come over and so on.

LL: It would be great to have more Latin American scholars here. It would be wonderful. And you are here now as a reader. What do you think the difference is between a fellowship year and your time as a reader?

CS: Well, people have been asking me about the privileges, if I feel sort of down if I have – You know for me the most important thing is to get access to the library, and I have said all institutions have regulations, security. And so if you are invited to an institution and you accept that invitation, you have to follow the rules of that institution. I learned that from my mother. My mother was a very strict and firm woman. I learned that every time I went to her house I have to follow her rules, all the problems disappear because I sit here, you sit there, because your legs – if you start looking at all the – you loose why you want to be here. I want to be here because I want to use the library. And the library – there is not question that I can use the library. I haven’t lost my privilege to use the library. It is not a big, big difference. The privileges that you have as a Fellow, I don’t think they are qualitatively different from being a reader. There are little things you know. For instance, the other day I couldn’t apply to have a document scanned through the library because – But, there are ways to go around with that. It’s not a “big deal,” as you say here. No, I don’t see any important difference, besides – One difference is to be living here near in La Quercia – this is not an intellectual or academic difference, it’s sort of a domestic difference. I think Washington, D.C., as many capitals in the world, you know, it’s hard to find a place – in Buenos Aires it’s the same – in Paris it’s the same – in Santiago de Chile is the same. It’s not the problem of Washington – it’s just being in the capital, and this is the capital of the world, the capital of most important country in the world. You have to expect that to find a place to live. In my case I have to thank Reiko and Carlos for having me in their place you know.

LL: What’s the next question? Sorry. How do you think that the field of Pre-Columbian studies has changed over the years, and, maybe, how has D.O. been involved in that – it has played a major role?

CS: This is my impression, but maybe I’m wrong. I think that the world of archeology and anthropology have been going through a change throughout, getting more and more science involved in the discussion, in analyzing data or producing new data. I was reading, for instance, in a – it was here in this museum in Washington, in the American – no the National – the American History Museum, the one in the Mall. They have this spot from the Pueblo Indians, and by doing this chemical analysis they realized that spot contained chocolate in the past. And those spots have been sitting in those collections probably for hundreds of years – I don’t know how many. But I don’t see that kind of thing happening in D.O. I would say that’s a big difference. But again, science it doesn’t mean that you have to follow all of the possibilities – that’s the good thing with science that one line of activities related with putting a lot of science into archeological remains. But also there is the world of thinking – the world of ideas – that will be relying on this data. So, Dumbarton Oaks doesn’t need to produce that data, doesn’t have to have the labs to produce or to create that data, but you can have the people coming over here with this data in their hands to produce their paper, to produce their book, or whatever. So, that’s, I will say, the sort of the separation, the division between what is going on in the inside of Dumbarton Oaks and what is going on now in the outside world, in the archeological world.

LL: And speaking of the Collection, what is your impression of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection? Do you think –? I’m not sure if it’s liked, used enough or –

CS: For me, I didn’t have – I didn’t use, and I didn’t apply for the Collection. And that was one of the reasons because before I didn’t apply, because I thought I have to be involved with the use of the Collection. All of the sudden, I think it was Joanne that said, “No, no, the Collection is one thing, and if you don’t need the Collection it doesn’t mean that you cannot apply and you cannot be a Fellow here.” And, I think that’s a very important piece of information. I think people think that Dumbarton Oaks is “the Collection”, you see. It is not “the Collection.” It’s just a group of nice pieces of art that are on display. And again, there are people that have the imagination, have trajectory, have the formation to extract knowledge from that. And I think that’s another good thing of this. We have the same thing in Santiago in the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino – the collection coming from all over Mesoamerica and the Andes. And they are nice pieces of different cultures and different times. They don’t have that possibility, for people to go and study their collection. Most of the good stuff is on display, but they haven’t created a program to study that collection. And I think that makes a big difference with Dumbarton Oaks. So, the Collection is not just for admiring, but if you want to study you are welcomed to do it. I think that has important value too.

LL: What direction would you like to see Dumbarton Oaks or its role in Pre-Columbian Studies take in the future?  Maybe how it could expand or –

CS: Well, I will say, again, you always, like I said before, I would like to see more people from my country coming over, from other countries in Central America, from the country of Mexico. More young Fellows coming, I don’t know if, let’s say, grad students from Latin America have been coming to Dumbarton Oaks; probably there are few of them that have had the opportunity to come over. I think Dumbarton Oaks should put some effort in the young generation because this field of this sort of exotic topic in science, especially during the economic crisis, tends to be put aside. Young people say, “Well you know, would it be good to take the risk and to go into this field?” And I think an experience here – it may trigger people, it may put people to say, “Well, I was in doubts, but now I’m sure I want be in this career.” I think probably that would be – to open more space to create other kinds of fellowships for young Fellows to come over to have the experience to be here to see other Fellows, to be in a sort of round table discussing certain topics. That’s my suggestion, you know, my impression.

LL: Very good. Those are actually all the questions that I have, but are there any other stories that you want to tell about Dumbarton Oaks or anything that you want to add?

CS: Well, everybody has been asking to talk about the Dean and Deluca story. Because as soon as we got here – when you get to a new city you ask for information about how to get around and so on. So, one day they said, you know Dean and Deluca is giving away a hundred and thousand of bottles of wine because there was a problem with the refrigerator in the basement. So, a bunch of us went there and it was a case of twelve bottles of wine for twelve dollars, you know. And the prices of the bottles of wine was between – the cheapest one was about fifty dollars up to two hundred fifty dollars the bottle. So, we get crazy, everybody get crazy to get the opportunity at Dean and Deluca – this very fine store in this neighborhood. So, we went there, and so we have a nice quota of wine for our gatherings at La Quercia. So, we started to have gatherings and meetings and food opportunities with different kinds of wines at La Quercia almost every week. And they lasted. I think, in my case I bought two cases, twenty-four bottles. And I think I managed to keep them even until Christmas or New Year’s Eve time because we enjoy drinking wine but we didn’t have a sort of bacanales. Another good experience was to be here by Halloween – I think it was a very interesting cultural and social and cultural experience because I was in Halloween when I was in Pittsburg first and when I was in Ithaca when my daughters were young girls. So, I enjoyed and I knew about the Halloween through them. But in this case I saw – I participated as an adult with the whole city involved in Halloween, which was amazing. You don’t see much of this kind of going out – you know the whole city going crazy, especially Adams Morgan. So, I think that was an interesting way how the city transform for one or two nights, people get really mad. Actually they dress themselves. Everybody was dressing, walking on the streets and so on. And it was cold. It was not summer. It was really cold. It was snowy. So, there are many different short stories like that. And also, I took a lot of pictures. I became famous because I was recording every single minute of what was going on here. It’s probably one point in my life I will make sort of an album of photos of Dumbarton Oaks at the beginning of the twentieth century – no the twenty-first century.

LL: Well thank you.

CS: Thank you too.

LL. It was really wonderful.

]]> No publisher Gabriela Santiago Oral History Project Pre-Columbian Studies Archives 2012-08-01T18:26:40Z Page David Webster http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/david-webster Oral History interview with David Webster undertaken by Alyce de Carteret at the Guest House at Dumbarton Oaks on October 14, 2011. At Dumbarton Oaks, David Webster was a Summer Fellow in 1994 and in 1998, and a Senior Fellow in the Pre-Columbian Studies Program between 2006 and 2012. AC: Good morning, today is Saturday October 14th, 2011, and I’m Alyce de Carteret. I have the great pleasure of interviewing David Webster, currently a professor of Anthropology at Penn State University and a Senior Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies here at Dumbarton Oaks. Thank you so much for joining me.

DW: Thank you.

AC: Just to begin, how did you first come to know about Dumbarton Oaks and what were your initial impressions of the institution?

DW: Well of course I knew from the late sixties about its publications, but then my wife Susan Evans, who taught in the early eighties at Catholic University, became a good friend of Elizabeth Boone. And, when Elizabeth Boone was head of Pre-Columbian, of course my wife formed a strong connection with Dumbarton Oaks and eventually became a Fellow herself. So that was my entrée.

AC: What led you to apply for your first fellowship here?

DW: You know, I don’t remember. I think on both of the fellowships that I had – both of which were Summer Fellowships – I think I was invited both times. I don’t think I ever applied sort of out of the blue.

AC: What was that experience like being a Fellow here? What were the day-to-day activities?

DW: Well, in those days of course it was in the old set of facilities. And it was extremely pleasurable. And what you really fail to get most of the time as a scholar in your professional life is just time out when you can do what you want and time out when you can do what you want in the context of other people who have similar interests. So, the day-to-day routine was pretty much get up, come to work, sit in your little cubicle if that’s what you had, and presumably work on your project. Although, of course when you are surrounded by all the great stuff at Dumbarton Oaks, you often browse around and begin working on other things.

AC: What were those – I mean, tell me about the library and working with the library. I’ve heard from others –

DW: You mean the old one?

AC: Yeah, the old one. And going in and getting distracted by the –

DW: I liked the old one because the old one had a kind of chaotic, informal, basement weirdness. And you would wonder around these hallways, many of the hallways were filled with bookcases and so on. So, you could not find anything quite as easily as you could here. And of course there were no computers. You had to find things by hand, using a card catalog. But eventually you got very used to it. So, when they eventually built the new library, I had to learn all over again how to deal with the – you know – where things were. But I like the kind of informal, a bit shabby aura of the old library, the sort of underground warren of rooms. It was fun.

AC: Have you gotten to work much with the new library?

DW: Yes, yes.

AC: How would you compare the experiences of working with each?

DW: Well, of course in many respects, it’s much better because you can find things easily – you can store things more easily. It’s more apparent just intuitively where things are. In those days of course the Pre-Columbian volumes where all by themselves; now they are interleafed with the other Byzantine stuff. But the new library has many infrastructural advantages, but it’s not as cozy, let’s put it that way.

AC: And what projects where you working on while you were here?

DW: The first one was the project on palaces in the new world, which Susan and Joanne were in charge of. And the second one was on Maya architecture, which was the brainchild of Stephen Houston and Takeshi Inomata. Those were both sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s.

AC: And did you actually finish those projects while you were here?

DW: We did. We did. They have all been published. I’m trying to think of how many symposium volumes – my work is in those two symposium volumes but one or two others as well because sometimes – although I don’t know that this works today – but sometimes, in the past, you would get roped into presenting a paper or contributing a paper even if you weren’t formally part of the project. But I think that – I think those days are gone. I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore.

AC: While you were here was there much interaction with the Junior Fellows and the Senior Fellows as you were a Fellow?

DW: Well, remember in the summer – I was a Summer Fellow – so, it wouldn’t happen as often because you didn’t have the normal Fellows around, and also we didn’t have what we have today, these other short arrangements for summer Fellows or for Fellows during other times of the year. So no, I think it was pretty much the people in our projects.

AC: Was there not really much interaction with the other areas of study as well, Byzantine studies or –?

DW: Well, not so much with Byzantine. I’ve always been a bit bemused by Byzantinists and what they study. It’s an extremely specialized topic. No, I wouldn’t say, with one or two – except at lunch, occasionally at lunch of course we sit with people from Byzantine Studies or Landscape Studies or whatever, and then we interacted. They were in those days and probably still are rather different worlds. I think the natural linkage within those three programs is Pre-Columbian and Landscape not Pre-Columbian and Byzantine. Although in the symposium we’re having right now of course we have a Byzantinist who’s a contributor.

AC: Right. And, has that influenced your work at all, having Landscape Studies here? I mean has that directed your work in any way?

DW: Well, it hasn’t directed mine, but certainly my wife’s, who has always maintained strong connections with Dumbarton Oaks and whose interests are heavily in Landscape. It’s been a big boon to her. In fact, she’s even now trying to get off the ground a project which would involve landscape archeology and Pre-Columbian. So, we’ll see where that goes. It is kind of a natural thing. And one of my former students was here last summer – Tim Murtha was a Summer Fellow. And he actually teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn State. So that was a natural for him.

AC: Fellows that were here as Fellows at the same time as you – do you still keep in touch with them?

DW: Oh, absolutely. Well, Maya archeology, which is what I do, is a small world. So of course you keep in close touch. The palace project had myself, actually my wife was part of that, of course, Karl Taube, and a number of others who got along very well. And then Steve Houston’s architecture project Takeshi Inomata and a whole series of other Mayanists including one of my former Ph.D.s herself, Nan Gonlin. And so, we all, you know, you spend a lot of time together. I see these people all the time. And many of them are very active at Dumbarton Oaks in the sense that they come here to meetings; they send their students here; they themselves write Fellowship applications.

AC: Great. So, we were just talking about some of the symposia. What’s the experience like actually attending a Dumbarton Oaks symposium as compared to other conferences?

DW: Well, it’s a kind of symposium, which is rather different because it has so many different sorts of attendees. In a normal symposium it’s pretty much professionals. In these, of course, you get people from not only several different sub-disciplines or whatever, but you get all the people who are enthusiastic outsiders – I don’t want to call them amateurs, you know, but people that don’t have a specific connection with the profession as we do, but who are here anyway.  And you get to notice who they are because they’re kind of – I don’t want to call them groupies – but they are Dumbarton Oaks regulars. And one of the problems we now have is that we’ve become more popular than ever but the accommodations in the Music Room have shrunk. The fire marshal or somebody has said, well, you shouldn’t have more than 125 people in there, which means that you could not accommodate the late comers, the interlopers, and so on as well, which always made things kind of fun. You never knew who would show up. Now it’s a little bit more regimented for infrastructural reasons. The fun part is you never know who will come and who will ask what kind of question. Archeologists themselves tend to be pretty predictable, but when you have art historians or landscape people or the general public in there, then it gets to be a lot of fun. It’s also a big social gathering. People that I would ordinarily see very briefly each year, I get to see here, and I get to see them in contexts when there’s free time. So you can sit with them at lunch or talk to them during the breaks or go out to dinner in the evening. That’s a very good thing. We don’t have enough of that in our profession.

AC: Do you have any stories or examples of how that diverse mix of attendees can be fun?

DW: Well, I’m not sure I have any stories that I can tell, but you get to know the backgrounds of these people and you get to know the cast of characters. Sometimes when a paper is given with certain kinds of claims or assertions or data, you can kind of tell what response there’s going to be from which person. Whether it’s going to be – well, there are two kinds of things that people usually do when they stand up and are given that microphone. One is they ask a question, which is what they are supposed to do. The second thing is they give a lecture, which is what they are not supposed to do. So, five minutes after they are given the microphone they are still talking. But often that’s because they are part of a sub group that wants to make its views known and doesn’t quite agree with what’s on the screen or what’s been said. So, those kinds of interactions are sort of fun. Although I remember one – I’ll tell you one funny story. About five, six years ago we had a – and I can tell this because my colleague has died – we had a symposium on Mesoamerican writing in Northern Yucatán. My colleague Bill Sanders was there, who was a very distinctive looking man and sort of an institution around here.  Although he would never pay to get into Dumbarton Oaks, he would always sneak in and crash the party – right. But every year he was there, and every year at a certain point you knew Bill was going to get up and maybe ask a question, but more likely deliver one of these little lectures. So, I was sitting in the back room – the back of the room – and Ned Keenan who was then Director was sitting right next to me. So we were watching the paper, and I noticed that my colleague Sanders who was in another corner of the room was getting increasingly agitated. What this meant was – since I’d known him for thirty years –he didn’t agree with anything that was being said, and he was going to have his say in a minute. And Keenan saw this too. And then Sanders raises his hand, and he’s starting to get up. And Keenan says, “Do you know who that white haired gentleman is?” I said, “Not only do I know who he is, but I can tell you exactly what he’s going to say.” So I whisper this in Keenan’s ear. And sure enough, Bill – just like he was scripted – went of on this predictable tangent. But it was very interesting.

AC: Could you comment on Bill Sanders at all? Since now he’s not with us.

DW: Well, he was – he was never a Dumbarton Oaks regular. Except, I mean, he never participated – I don’t remember him ever participating in a Dumbarton Oaks symposium. It could be that I’m wrong, and that maybe in one of those early ones on the Olmec or whatever he did. I don’t remember in any of the later ones that he participated. But, he always liked to come, in part for reasons that I can’t say on camera [laughs]. He was one of those people who, although he never really registered, just showed up. He was allowed to do that because he was such an eminent person. Joanne or Elizabeth or whoever would mash their teeth because, of course, there weren’t enough chairs, and Bill would suddenly show up and what not. They really liked him so they let him do this. He was a real live wire and had opinions about everything and was not reticent about saying them out loud and at some length. Sometimes this gets very irritating if it’s done the wrong way by the wrong individual. But in his case everybody seemed to take it very well. He would deliver these little mini lectures and so on, and sometimes they were very much to the point. So, he was a very good influence and always a striking character with this big white beard. And he was a very forceful person.

AC: So, we were just talking about the diverse mix in terms of past experiences about the symposia. But the symposia also vary in diversity in terms of art history topics, archeology topics –

DW: – and people from different countries.

AC: Yeah, absolutely, Andean, Mesoamerican – do you think the most successful symposia are the ones that kind of have these broad areas or the most focused ones like Mesoamerican writing?

DW: No I think – well, it’s interesting to have both kinds, but you have to have the broad comparative ones because too often we forget how divergent our fields become even though we think we are doing the same thing. And a good example is the palace volume. When we did that palace conference and the resulting publication was Palaces of the New World. Well, we discovered that the participants from the South American – from the Central Andean area – bristled at the very use of the term “palace.” In other words, you sought in vain, looking at all the publications that came out of Andean archeology, apparently, at the time, for the word “palace.” Now Mesoamericanists had been using this for years – sometimes well and sometimes badly – but nonetheless in a kind of common sense way that suggests that there are big impressive facilities were important people live. That’s kind of a cross-cultural universal, right? So, why the people who studied the Andes should have been so shy of it never kind of made sense to me. And now – what ten years later – if you look at what Andean scholars write of course palaces appear all over the place. There was a kind of effort, which I think cut through the sort of turf – the turf in the sense of how we use concepts – and brought everybody together. And it did so very fruitfully. I think the reason that the Andeaninsts didn’t want to talk about palaces was that they couldn’t think of a Quechua or Aymara word that actually meant exactly what the English word means, whatever that is. But that’s not reason for ignoring concepts that can be unifying.

AC: Were there any symposia or publications that you found particularly successful in that regard?

DW: You mean in the sense of making these kinds of synthetic overviews?

AC: Or in other instances.

DW: Well, I think this recent one that just came out – the one on sort of writing and graphic systems or recording systems in the new world – I forget the name of it – I think that was a very interesting conference. Early on when there were symposia – very early on when there were symposia in the sixties – what they used to do is they would have the symposia and then later they would have a room full of the participants and they would do exactly what you are doing here. They would record everything, except there wouldn’t be just two people. There would be of course a whole room full. So there would be maybe one, a moderator. And that moderator would throw out a question and then suddenly, you know, Morton Fried or Bill Sanders or Kent Flannery – whoever was there – would chime in. And then they’d go back and forth. And somehow they managed to edit these down into a manageable script that you could publish. Although I think it probably – knowing the people involved – it would have been heavily edited because they would have talked over one another, hands on the table, and laughed and done unseemly things, knowing their temperaments. But nonetheless, that’s a very interesting way of accompanying a set of papers, with a set of debate-like comments. We’ve actually thought that we should do more of that. It’s kind of a difficult thing to arrange, you know. It’s hard to imagine how you would get everybody to agree to have their unwashed comments finally published in a book.

AC: Yeah, I was under the impression that they actually recorded the questions people asked after people had presented their papers at the symposia in the fall. I didn’t know that they actually got them in a room after the –

DW: Well, as I remember some of the published ones were repartee, yeah. I could be remembering incorrectly, but that’s the way it reads, going back and forth. So there are these little exchanges between people. And those are very revealing. One thing that is essential to all human – in fact you could say this is why – I think this is why language started in the first place – is gossip. And so you can debate whether early language was selectively advantaged because of tool use or hunting success or whatever. I think it’s basically gossip. I think as social creatures we sit around and exchange information about the other people we know and the things that they’re supposed to be doing or not doing or why they are good or bad or why we should like them or not. And when you think of what people do in cell phones and texting, about ninety percent of it is exactly what I just said. I think. I don’t do it myself. But when I hear people talking, it’s all gossip, good or bad. Well, that’s another thing that happens at Dumbarton Oaks because you get together – whether it’s a – if it’s a symposium or it’s just a bunch of people, you know, who are here for six weeks or nine weeks or whatever else – and you exchange information, and one of the most important things is that it be done across generations because what young scholars fail to understand is that – and I can’t speak for Landscape or the Byzantinists – I suspect they’re the same way – what they don’t understand that in our profession, Pre-Columbian – especially, at least in Mesoamerica, which is what I’m in – much of what goes on has very deep roots which are not usually or even necessarily at all rational and scholarly. Much that goes on has to do with old prejudices and animosities and food fights and so on. And one of the hardest things to say to a younger scholar is, “Well you shouldn’t really cite person ‘X’ the way you are doing because if you send your proposal to person ‘Y’ I know what’s going to happen.” And they’re baffled because it seems perfectly sensible to them. So, one thing you do when you are dealing with people who are a lot younger and who are just getting into the business is that you try to impart a lot of gossip about personalities and past events and who gets along with whom and who can’t stand the other person and the reasons why. This is the unwritten lore of our discipline, and one of the ways in which it’s handled now is certain publications do what you are doing here in a more lengthy way. For example, in Ancient Mesoamerica sometimes there are published debriefings of people who are seventy-five, eighty, ninety years old. Steve Houston did one of these with Ed Shook. So, if you’re the last person standing, you’re eighty-five, and you’re being debriefed on your life – I think they probably did it with Ian Graham, they should have done it with Sanders but he died too soon – that’s when you get all this great insight into the way everything has developed. And some of it’s not – some of it is useful for the informalities of the way things have developed. There should be much more of that. Everybody should be – somebody ought to do this with Mike Coe, who I know very well and who is what, eighty-six, eighty-five.

AC: We’ve had an interview with him.

DW: Has he? Exce – No No, but I meant just in general, and not just an hour – you know, maybe several hours over several days. Because I’ve been endlessly in various contacts with Mike Coe, most recently in South East Asia, and what a raconteur, I mean, that guy has really good stories. Somebody ought to get these down before it’s to late.

AC: Do you have any examples of times in which these animosities or tensions between people have actually gotten in the way of symposia?

DW: Well, I suspect that sometimes when earlier generations of Senior Fellows were behind closed doors debating what symposium to accept or not or which people should be involved, especially on that level: “No, I don’t think so and so is very good,” or “I think this, my persons should –” On that level I think it probably is fairly common. But, you know, I can’t think of any blatant examples that I could talk about where these – I don’t even want to call them animosities because although they are personal animosities sometimes, they’re often just caused by the fact that people stake out – people’s careers are based upon having staked out certain kinds of territories for themselves, all right? – intellectually, territorially, culturally. And they get known for having taken certain positions and made certain kinds of interpretations. And inevitably someone falls out with them and has a different slant on things, and the way to take that if you are sensible is, of course nobody is ever going to agree with you and you’re never always right. But sometimes there are certain people who have certain temperaments that don’t allow opposition, and then they just get more intransigent, more dug-in. But on the other hand that creates a lot of fun because you can almost anticipate the bubbling up of invective and repartee – sort of minor loss of temper. All of that is fun to watch. After all, we’re primates in these social situations, and if it was everybody sitting there worshipping everybody who’s speaking the content of the symposia, it would really be dull. But I can think of a – I won’t say who it is – but yesterday I can think of one example of a paper which had a tone which was utterly predictable to me. I don’t think most of the people in that room – if they were just general interest parties – would have picked up on this. But if you know the people involved in these long-term research projects and what not, I could tell exactly who certain comments as said and eventually as written are aimed at and why things are said that way. I don’t want to name names under the circumstances.

AC: I guess one last question for the symposium topic: Have you – did you get the chance to go to the offsite symposia in Mexico City or –?

DW: I went to the Antigua one. I think those are really valuable. I think one of the big things that Dumbarton Oaks does is involve all these Latin American scholars and places, and of course when you are on those symposia you get to go on little trips and what not, and I just – yeah – they’re a lot of fun, and I know they’re costly and I know that they are sometimes hard to arrange, but if we are really going to be a general pre-Columbian program, then you’ve got to have certain of these functions in other places and I think the local archeologists and the local public that gets to come to these things probably finds them very interesting.

AC: Great. All right. Let’s get to your tenure as a Senior Fellow. How did that actually come about? How did you get selected to be a Senior Fellow?

DW: Joanne asked me. That is how I got to be a Senior Fellow. Well, what happens when a Senior Fellow leaves – which I’m about to do, because six years is your tenure – what happens when a Senior Fellow leaves is a slot becomes open, and the slot usually is one that is sort of identifiable. I’m the senior Mayanist, so my slot will be open and they’ll have to get someone like me in some sense. So, they’ve already raised the issue of names. We were all encouraged to submit names of someone who could in some sense fulfill the role that I have had, and I’ve been thinking of who such people might be. But I don’t know how that list of names is eventually digested by the powers that be at Dumbarton Oaks. Obviously, the head of the program has to suggest somebody and Jan has to OK it, but that’s an opaque process to me.

AC: What are your responsibilities as a Senior Fellow here? And can you describe the atmosphere of the actual meetings themselves?

DW: Oh the meetings go surprisingly well.  All the Senior Fellow panel meetings that I’ve attended have had various agendas. Sometimes it’s just listening to reports and then asking questions about initiatives in terms of publications or whatever else might be on the table. Often there are more important decisions to be made. And frankly, I’ve been surprised at how well everybody gets along and how democratically certain kinds of fundamental decisions are.  I suppose the most important things we do are, first of all read all these applications of which we do roughly, I’d say, sixty a year for various kinds of fellowships. And then we can only, obviously, give about eight or ten of them out, depending upon the kinds of fellowships and so on. And so we sit in a room and we discuss their merits and we have all these little ranking systems and then we have these voting conventions and we have a very complicated but effective voting system when we wind up – what normally happens is that we wind up with three or four people who are really well suited to our program and we all say, “Yeah, give them money.” And then we get sort of a residual bunch, maybe another eight or ten, and we can’t give all of them money and positions. So we have this rather interesting voting process which Ned Keenan first introduced us to. It works very effectively. It really cuts out bias. I think decisions are made quickly and efficiently and fairly. Everybody really gets along very well. That’s a big thing because you get – I think there are what seven Senior Fellows in Pre-Columbian – you get six, seven people in a room and one or two don’t like one another or don’t get a long or, I mean it makes things very difficult. But as long as I’ve been here, it’s worked extremely well.

AC: When you select Senior Fellows are you picking – or when you select Fellows and the Junior Fellows – are you picking people individually or do you try to form a cohesive group that will work really well together?

DW: Well, that’s always a consideration, but on the other hand you would never – if somebody applied and wrote a very good proposal, but was known to be less than wonderful, less than well socialized – let’s put it that way because remember a lot of these people have been around for a long time and they have reputations, it’s not so much true with the young people – well, you would never, no you would never say, “We can’t have person ‘X’ because they just won’t get along in the little social group.” However, if you wrote a marginal proposal and it was a kind of a toss up – well your ability to interact with people effectively might be a consideration. After all, you are really designing these little groups of people who even if they don’t have a common project, they are all going to be a together for months at a time. And hopefully they all kind of get along and form a cohesive group and exchange information and find each other’s topics interesting. I suspect that often times – especially for the people here as Fellows – they must form social relations which last for a lifetime, a professional lifetime.

AC: Does the Senior Fellows Committee have any particular goals – while you’ve been a part of it – that they’ve tried to advance, or is it mostly case by case in terms of fellowships and symposia topics?

DW: A lot of it has to do with publications. And we have a little sub-committee that’s the publications sub-committee. And as Joanne said the other day, yesterday – or it might have been Jan – this has been a particularly rich year for publications – year or so for publications. There’s all kind of stuff out. And that’s one particular thing to do, we have to decide not only on specific publications, which might be how is the, you know, why was the symposium that was given ten years ago still unpublished? Because this has happened and Joanne has taken the reigns firmly and eliminated that problem, but when I first came this was still a big deal, there were these volumes hanging over from years before. And also there have even been symposia that were not published – people just proved to be so feckless in getting things together that they just weren’t published. And then every time you have a roundtable and every time you have one of these smaller colloquia where a bunch of people come together to talk around the table for a day, inevitably, they get very excited and they want theirs to be published by Dumbarton Oaks too. And of course since those are not necessarily well thought-out gatherings with a structure of speakers and so on – I mean a lot of it’s half-baked and you just have to say, well probably not. We have to sit around and think about publication strategies and what kinds of specific volumes should be published under what venues and so on. And that’s an important thing and I think some good things are in the works right now.

AC: Are there any memorable sessions from your time in the Senior Fellows committee that stick out?

DW: Memorable sessions is what sense, just contentious or –?

AC: In any sense, whatever happens to be memorable.

DW: No, they tend to be – that is, what tends to be memorable or not are the actual symposia. We almost always have our meeting – except for the one where we choose who’s going to have fellowships – we always have our fall meeting at the time of the symposium. And so there are more or less memorable symposia, but I’ve never really known any of our meetings to be unusual. They all seem to work very smoothly. We often set side time on Friday –I mean in January, when we have to do all this work – we often set aside time on Friday and time Saturday morning to get through all this work. But for years we’ve done it all on Friday. So, that’s how efficient it seems to go. If you – and that’s why if you have a bunch of Senior Fellows who’s tenures are staggered, that’s the best thing because one person coming in isn’t going to upset that tradition of getting things done probably. But if you had a whole turnover, I think it would be a bit of a –

AC: So, it is two years?

DW: When you are asked – when you get to be a Senior Fellow you have a three year stint and then they can renew you if they want to for three more. And sometimes you’re not renewed after the three years, but usually you get to serve six. So, there’s an automatic kind of uncertainty in how long people are going to be there. And then of course you have the unfortunate things like death and what not. So every once in a while a new personality shows up or they draft an old personality to come back in and fill an unexpected gap. But there’s a lot of continuity and people who are on that committee generally know one another very well and are able to cooperate. And that is where, by the way, you would have to be very careful. I can think of six very prominent Mesoamericanists who, if I were the devil, I’d get them together and make the Senior-Fellows-Committee-from-hell because it would – there would be blood on the floor. But that never happens with us. So, I’m sure that when Joanne and Jan and whoever makes these decisions – in the backs of their minds there are these issues of who can be trusted and who doesn’t have a lot of enemies that we should fling together. You know this kind of thing.

AC: You were on the Senior Fellows Committee with Virginia Fields, and I was wondering if you could just comment a little bit about her role at Dumbarton Oaks.

DW: She seemed to be –sShe was an art historian so of course I was less familiar with her work than I was with the work of some other people. She was always certainly very sensible, and very well informed and extremely soft spoken. She would just sit there and then when it came her turn to speak she would have something very useful to say. And she knew a lot of people and she had a lot of insights into what was going on in her field. When she thought – even though she was kind of soft spoken, I don’t want to say diffident person – but when she wanted to defend person ‘X’ as opposed to person ‘Y’ in terms of whether they should get a fellowship or not, she was – could be very forceful. What I also miss is her dog Paul because Paul would always come into the room and sit under the desk and we’d all feed Paul little bits and pieces of donuts or something. So, I’m sort of concerned with, what happened to Paul? Where’s Paul gone? I don’t know. It was a big shock for Virginia to unexpectedly die.

AC: Moving on to the Directors of Pre-Columbian Studies, you have Jeff Quilter and Joanne Pillsbury – how have their different styles, perhaps, of direction – how do they differ or how they have impacted the program.

WB: Well Elizabeth Boone was probably the person – after Betty Benson – was probably the person who really laid the foundations for this, as we know it now. And then she was followed by Jeff, remind me was that Jeff after she left? Was that Jeff briefly?

AC: Yes.

WB: Jeff was in there for, you know, what six seven years. Jeff – who I’ve known for a long time – has a very different kind of personality from Elizabeth and I’m sure had a very different kind of administrative style. But see I was just – in those days – I was pretty much a visitor here, and I used the library a lot and so on, and so I wasn’t involved in the decision-making. By the time I got to be a Senior Fellow of course it was Joanne. Joanne is a very impressive administrator and not – she has a way about her of dealing with things that on the surface doesn’t put anybody off. She’s nothing if not endlessly gracious, but she’s nothing if not extraordinarily tough too. So, there’s a person who really has kind of livened things up and make things go faster. Because as a – if you are a head of a program like that you’ve got to ride people and be able to offend people and say, “If you don’t have your symposium volume papers by time X, you’re going to be out, your volume is out.” She’s able to do that. She tightened things up, I think.

AC: Do you think her being an Andean art historian has made any difference in her style? Compared to maybe Elizabeth Boone as a Mesoamericanist? Or do you think she’s been able to keep things separate?

WB: Well, I think being – I think one of the advantages that Joanne and Elizabeth had over Jeff is that they both were art historians. Even though archeology is a major concern of course at Dumbarton Oaks symposia, given the origins of Dumbarton Oaks there really is a heavy kind of emphasis on things and images and objects and so on. People who have that kind of – who are trained to deal with the images, the glyphs, the objects have a certain advantage over people who are straight-up archeologists, like Jeff, because they have a way of talking to the community of people who come to Dumbarton Oaks and who might be recruited into Dumbarton Oaks in a more multi-dimensional way. And indeed, if you read through the sixty proposals that we get every year, you almost never – you don’t get very many that are straight archeology. You get a few, but most of them have something to do with monuments or spatial layouts that have some sort of landscape significance, or something like that. Almost nobody says I want to dig a test pit and check the chronology of the ceramic sequence. I mean, technically at Dumbarton Oaks we should be accepting anything, but of course you have an advantage if you have a sort of object related idea.

AC: Do you think in your time on the Senior Fellows Committee have you been able to strike a fair balance between archeology and art history or the different regions?

DW: Yeah, and it is a bit of a concern because ideally what you should do is take all of the sixty odd proposals and say well we’re just going to give money to the eight best, or whatever number it is. But what if the eight best all one year were Andean? Well, I mean that’s never happened, but if one – some sub-discipline was overloaded that way then of course when people see who were chosen then they begin to get the wrong idea about the selection process. Well, there’s no point in applying because the Andeanist always get the great posts. And you have to make sure that the archeologists that do the basic kind of archeology don’t get squeezed out at the expense of people saving monuments and so on and so forth. It could happen if you just ranked all those proposals only in terms of their scholarly merit and how well they expressed it – could happen that you could have an overload in one place or the other. And I’m sure that if you looked back over the last ten of fifteen years you’d see a little bit of that, but it always corrects itself.  But it’s something that – I mean it’s small population dynamics. You can never tell when you’re going to get a whole bunch of good proposals that are from one sub-discipline or the other.

AC: I just have some final questions before we end. How do you think the field of Pre-Columbian Studies has changed at Dumbarton Oaks over the years?

DW: You mean what people –?

AC: How is it? How’s it grown or how has the study of Pre-Columbian been affected by Dumbarton Oaks?

DW: Well, of course, Dumbarton Oaks started out as an institution where collections and continued collecting was still going on, but then, of course, that became impossible or at least difficult. And so now what Dumbarton Oaks has changed into is a more of a repository for all kinds of – well like the Chris Donnan archive that’s going to be present shortly – it’s become a repository for all these different sorts of collections. They’re not pots and sculpture anymore, they’re these sets of documents and archives that people can come here and study. And so you can say the more – I suppose – the more museum like aspect of it is somewhat diminished as it almost has to be at the expense of all this more scholarly stuff that’s developing. But Dumbarton Oaks will still be, of course, a place that has a set of wonderful objects that people will always come here to study. And the nice thing about Dumbarton Oaks too is it has increasingly understood that people come to Washington, where they can go and use the Textile Museum or the Smithsonian or any of these other institutions as well – the Library of Congress – that supplement what we’ve got here. Of course, when you read these proposals, the one thing that you have to say at the end of every proposal is why you have to do this at Dumbarton Oaks. And people make up all kinds of proper reasons. And sometimes they are really sensible. I live in a country, you know Slovakia, and there is no library there that has anything that is Pre-Columbian. Well sure, OK. But a lot of the people who come here, come here from institutions where they could easily get all this stuff, especially now, online. And the real reason people want to come here for the most part in my experience, reading between the lines is: “Get me out of this rat race. I’ve got all this neat stuff I want to do, this project I want to develop. I just want nine uninterrupted weeks or nine uninterrupted months of doing scholarship as I naively thought when I was twenty I’d be able to do it.” And people who have never been at Dumbarton Oaks and don’t necessarily think of it as this place where they can do what I just said – my colleagues will say to me, “God, you know I’m just picked apart from all these administrations, and all these demands for teaching, and all this stuff, if I only had a few months to just sit and write and think.” And that’s what we don’t get anymore. And so I supposed that this is one of the – it’s an institution which has retained a certain style and grace which are two qualities that are sorely lacking in the world as we traipse along here, and provides the kind of opportunity that many people had fifty years ago, sixty years ago, but which is almost gone now. And that’s one reason why you’ve got to be careful of a place like this. You’ve got to make sure that it keeps going because it’s almost unique. I’m sure that there are certain museums and so on – you know CASVA does something like this – but that kind of opportunity for people just for reflection and peace-and-quiet and a little stimulation by talking to similarly-minded people – that’s very rare.

AC: I think that’s a great –

DW: It’s like a monastic experience in many respects.

AC: Well, unless you have any comments or any memories to add I think that’s a great place to –

DW: Well, I just think there ought to be a new program where all the Senior Fellows who end their six years ought to be kept on permanently as retired sages and given little places – a little clubhouse room where we can all come and sit and hang out. I don’t think however my suggestion will be followed, but nevertheless I look forward to coming back to Dumbarton Oaks frequently.

AC: Thank you so much for your time.

DW: Well, thank you for the interview.

]]> No publisher Gabriela Santiago Oral History Project Pre-Columbian Studies Archives 2012-07-30T13:55:00Z Page Mark Laird http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/mark-laird Oral History Phone Interview with Mark Laird undertaken by Veronica Koven-Matasy on August 30, 2010. At Dumbarton Oaks, Mark Laird was a Fellow and Summer Fellow in 1988–1989, a Fellow in 1994–1995, and since 2008, a member of the Senior Fellows in the Garden and Landscape Studies Program. VKM: Hello, my name is Veronica Koven-Matasy. It is August 30, 2010, and I am at the Main House of Dumbarton Oaks to conduct a phone interview with Professor Mark Laird about his time at Dumbarton Oaks. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. According to our records, you first held a fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in 1988, is that correct?

ML: That is correct, indeed.

VKM: So how did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?

ML: Well, obviously I went through the usual course of applying for the fellowship, and how did I think of doing that? Well, I suppose that it was already well known in the U.K. that Dumbarton Oaks was unique, I think, in offering a residential Fellowship specifically in the area of what we called just Garden History back then. And so I took my chances, and I suppose the one thing that had made me more alert to the possibility was that I'd met with John Dixon Hunt back in about 1982 – I guess it was, when I was thinking about postgraduate study, and although I didn't end up doing a Ph.D. with him, I was in touch with him and had written for his Journal of Garden History. And it so happened that he had just taken up the new appointment of Director of Garden and Landscape Studies, and so that particular conjunction was fortunate, and I benefited greatly from it.

VKM: What were your initial impressions of Dumbarton Oaks?

ML: Well, you can imagine, coming from London in early September, just about as the autumn was beginning to be on the horizon, and arriving in Washington, D.C. and Georgetown and hearing the birds singing, I was overwhelmed by the sense of Southernness, of the opulence and graciousness of the institution and its gardens. And then, it was very, very impressive; probably less impressive was the apartment, which had been allocated to me and my prospective wife, because I was just about to get married. And although we had actually a very, very happy year there, and it became our little home, it was not exactly what I'd pictured, and there was something of a difference between the graciousness of the institution and the less than gracious nature of the apartment – as I say, we came to make it home and so on. By contrast, when we came back for the second Fellowship, La Quercia had just been purchased, it was the first year, and that was an absolutely lovely place to live and I think actually met the expectations that I would have had, so I have to congratulate Dumbarton Oaks on making that acquisition, which I think was a very good one.

VKM: I think they're remodeling it soon because now it is considered no longer sufficient to be acceptable –

ML: Well, with all these things, obviously, it's all relative, and there are updates and technological improvements and so on, and I guess that has been experienced at the institution over the years that I've known it, with obviously the library being one of the major changes to have occurred – to bring that to an appropriate level.

VKM: So, were there any particularly memorable projects that you worked on?

ML: Yes, certainly. I could actually just add one point on the impression of the institution, and that is that at that stage you still felt, I think, a connection to the Blisses and the way they had left this, it was not just an institution, but you felt the sense that this was their home, and in particular the Rare Books Library, where I spent a lot of my time that third fellowship, was very much as I imagine it had been left by Mrs. Bliss. So, it wasn't just a library of rare books, but it was a very gorgeous room with an exquisite collection of paintings, furnishings, and the desk where I sat alone was just a wonderful piece of furniture, and of course, as I said, things have to change, and it was appropriate that, first of all, the library system was improved, there was greater security brought in, which was certainly appropriate, but at that particular point it was still possible to feel the connection to the original place, of the home. And then you had asked me about projects. Probably the most notable was that John Dixon Hunt was organizing the symposium for the Spring of 1989 to be a survey of the state of Garden and Landscape Studies, and of course that was a very exciting moment – even had a sense of a potential as the discipline was changing from that which had been dominated under the tenureship of Betty MacDougall – been dominated more by art historical studies. And here we were having a gathering of people who were bringing archaeological methods, and who were bringing also methods derived from sociology and anthropology, Michel Conan amongst them. So that when I looked at the list of contributors – and I was lucky enough to be one – I see not merely a number of senior figures like Wilhelmina Jashemski or Bill Kelso, but also these rising stars who would have an enormous influence on the discipline. Tom Williamson is there, Therese O'Malley, Jim Wescoat, Stephen Daniels, Robin Osborne, and Geza Hajos – on a personal note – became a very close colleague of mine and I did much work for him in Vienna in subsequent years. So, that was probably the most significant of the projects I became involved in, but adjunct to that was getting to know Therese O'Malley at CASVA at the National Gallery, and she was beginning work on what would emerge as her major work, her magnum opus, as it were, which has only just been published this past year, and she invited me to be an adviser on that, and it was through her that I came to travel down to Charleston for a colloquium in March of 1989, and at the end of the interview I can tell you a story which comes of that – out of that, which is more on the personal side.

VKM: You mentioned Wilhelmina Jashemski was at this, I guess, working on this project, did you get to meet her?

ML: Well, yes in the sense that she was obviously one of the speakers, I couldn't say I got to know her personally very well, but I became aware of her work in a way that would not have been true prior to her symposium. And, indeed, I still use her significant work on Pompeii when I teach at Harvard. It was also, of course, during this year that one of the Fellows was Nicholas Purcell from St. John's College, Oxford, who had worked with Jashemski, and he's remained a lifelong friend and colleague. So I think on the personal level, Dumbarton Oaks is very, very significant in setting up for me various connections, networks. It wasn't just that it provided that wonderful space and environment to do my own work in.

VKM: At some points in the past, there's been tension between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks over control of some issues, but very often financial ones. Did you ever get a sense of the prevailing feeling toward Harvard while you were there?

ML: I don't think so because, of course, I was a Fellow not an employee. And although it happened that subsequently I became a member of the faculty at Harvard at the Graduate School of Design – and I'm now aware of the relationship or not between the two institutions – at the time as a Fellow I don't think that impinged at all. It really was not something over which I had any awareness or felt any sense of tension or controversy. Of course, now that John Beardsley – who is my colleague from the Graduate School of Design – is Director of Garden and Landscape Studies the opportunity for a closer liaison between the two institutions is positive.

VKM: Do you think they're taking advantage of that?

ML: I think, indeed. I mean, I've taken upon some of it in the role of a Senior Fellow where, through Jan and through John, it's been possible, for instance, to invite one of the Fellows of a given year to come up and speak to my students. My colleague Gary Hilderbrand was running a studio which was about the Mall landscape proposals and that was a project organized in conjunction with the University of Virginia Landscape and Architecture, and John was able to have them for a very interesting workshop, so I think those opportunities are there and it's the first step towards a closer relationship, which seems to me quite proper.

VKM: You mentioned that you got to know a lot of people and did some networking while you were at Dumbarton Oaks. Do you think that that was intentionally encouraged by the institution or just something that happened, you had all those scholars here –?

ML: Well, obviously, some of it was adventitious, it depended who was there and whom you happened to run across. What was true was that when you sat down to lunch in the Fellows Building at the time you mixed amongst other scholars from the other disciplines, and so whether it was just a level of private socialization, you got to know the people who were working in Byzantine Studies and Pre-Columbian Studies. And from that first fellowship we still have a very close friend, Smiljka Gabelic, who was a Fellow in Byzantine Studies, so that was extremely enriching and it was encouraged by the institution and by the Director through the fact that you attended all the presentations by all the Fellows, so you got to know their work and you got to know them individually.

VKM: You think that while you were there that was a successful attempt? We'd had, you know, varying reports on the interaction between departments at different points in time.

ML: Well, yes, I think it does depend on the moment because certainly John Beardsley last year was very successful in bringing the three disciplines together through the artistic installation that you organized which required the cooperation of the Byzantine Studies and Pre-Columbian Studies. Certainly at the institutional level that must have helped promote better mixing, better harmony. Whether that worked amongst the level of the Fellows, that I couldn't comment on, but on both occasions, I would say we got to know informally if not formally the other Fellows in the other disciplines, and the fact that we were living in the same building, whether it was Sherry Hall up Wisconsin the first time, or at La Quercia the second time, that obviously encouraged getting together. And then, for instance, in the case of the second time, there was the birth of a child.

VKM: Her mother is living at the Guest House with me, actually.

ML: Is that right?

VKM: Yeah, yeah.

ML: Well, yeah, that's right – so that, obviously – those things – that the Fellows brought family members with them, whether it was a spouse or children, all of those, I think, encouraged a sense that you were not just at an institution but that this had a sort of a familial aspect which was a continuation of the original nature of Dumbarton Oaks as a family home, and I would encourage further efforts to perpetuate that.

VKM: While you were here, did you ever attend the concerts by the Friends of Music Program?

ML: Yes, I think we went to every single one, and again that was something that made life feel very good, and it made it feel very intimate, and it made it very hard leaving Dumbarton Oaks. In fact, when we were down this past May for the symposium and we met with some of the Fellows of this past year, we could feel from them a certain pain on leaving the place after a year and so all those things, I think, encouraged a sense of a certain intimacy. But what I can say is that I didn't attend, on either occasion, the symposia organized by Byzantine Studies or Pre-Columbian Studies, but I made completely an exception to the rule.

VKM: While you were here, you said you were using the Rare Book Room a lot. I just don't know, was that the same as the Garden Library at the time or –?

ML: Well, the Rare Book Room – I don't know, back in, I guess, only eighteen months ago it still is the same room as it was where Linda sits. I assume she still has a desk in there. That was where I spent probably ninety percent of the first Fellowship. The second time round, because I was not using those resources so much and I was actually working on finishing the manuscript of my book, I was more confined to my office – in fact was more like a hermit who rarely came out. Whereas on the first occasion I can recall, for instance, sitting in the Garden Library. And it I think Christopher Hogwood from Britain – the conductor of the early music ensemble – he was there researching a manuscript. And the sense of it as an extraordinary place with extraordinary collections was that much more evident. I would imagine now that the library has moved to a separate building, a new building, that feeling of being closely tied to the original collections of the Blisses that probably something has got lost there.

VKM: Were there any resources that you remember being useful or –?

ML: Well, resources within D.O. or outside?

VKM: Well, either, I guess, but mainly within D.O., the other collections or the, I don't know what they have in the way of Garden Museum, but –

ML: Well, the garden itself offers a resource, which is, at a subliminal level as well as a place to consider the discipline. Obviously having lived through a full season from the fall through to the summer the first time, using the swimming pool amongst other things, and so on, it was an extraordinarily invigorating environment in which to work. That you could spend four hours in the library then you would go out and you would visit with the birds, particularly during the second Fellowship, there were several feral cats that were living in the gardens that Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn eventually adopted and took with him back to his home in Hanover, but there are all kinds of little interactions there at the biological level that for me were extremely enriching. But in terms of other resources, I would say those were really outside Dumbarton Oaks and notable would be of course CASVA and the opportunity to use their library and have discussions with Therese O'Malley and her colleagues or go to presentations there.

VKM: Have you been back to use the new library since they built it?

ML: I haven't actually used it in the sense of study there. On my appointment as Senior Fellow, I was given a very, very thorough tour of it and I was extremely impressed by the modernity, by the technological sophistication of it. It seems terrific, and I think in the circumstances, given that it required a very considerable intervention you know to a site, which has a heritage status, the eventual outcome was really quite brilliantly done. The building fits very well in its landscape and I know from my colleagues that they look out into the woods and hear the birds, so that sort of connection to the landscape outside your window is still maintained, but I haven't had the benefit of being able to use it as a study place.

VKM: While you've been at Dumbarton Oaks there have been several different Directors of Studies in Garden and Landscape, John Dixon Hunt, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, and John Beardsley. Have you have the chance to have much interaction with any of them?

ML: Well obviously with – if I start back to front – John Beardsley, of course, I know very well because he is my colleague at the Graduate School of Design. And I was very honored to be invited to be a Senior Fellow during the first year that he was in tenure. So, I am very much aware of the innovative way that he is steering Garden and Landscape Studies. I think he and Jan have brought a very good atmosphere to the institution. Beyond that obviously, I don't know it in the same way being a Fellow. The first time round – John Dixon Hunt – I've already conveyed something of the excitement of what he was bringing which was paralleled by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, who was bringing a new approach through his studies in ideology and with a sociological political method. The volumes that have come out of his time, Nature and Ideology in particular, have stood the test of time, and I use it repeatedly, and both of them have become very close colleagues. John Dixon Hunt ended up publishing my book when I finally got it out after the second fellowship. And Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn – I've recently been working with him on a new publication due out this year. In between whiles, of course I kept contact through Michel Conan, particularly in two respects. One was that he invited me to give a lecture after my book The Flowering of the Landscape Garden came out – so this would be about 2000–2001 – and as a result of that I was able to incorporate that lecture material into the volume that he published on Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters. Second he invited me to review the volume on horticulture and botany which I think is a really splendid volume, so each in turn I has brought a very, very distinctive approach to the discipline, extending the scope of it, not merely bringing in allied disciplines, but also expanding the range of studies across the globe so that the applications now for the coming year for example have transformed what would have been the more limited range applications back in 1988–89.

VKM: Both 1988 and 2008 were transition years between Directors of Study. At the time was that changeover prominent, or did they just go smoothly one to the other?

ML: Well, obviously it's hard to comment because although I had known the work of Betty MacDougall and so on, and as I said, I knew the work that Michel Conan was doing – my knowledge of the institution was very much the imprint that both Hunt and John Beardsley have put on their tenure, so I couldn't really talk about transitions. I don't think I have enough knowledge of that piece to have a relevant comment.

VKM: So, you have been a member of the Board of Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies for two years now – what do you consider to be the major responsibilities of the board?

ML: Well, obviously, literally there are certain responsibilities to help in the selection of the applicants for fellowships each year, providing support to the Director on the question of the topics of the symposium, and I would say at a broader level there is a responsibility which I feel very personally, which is to ensure the sort of collective memory of the institution the way it was run, the way it has changed. Having had the experience of being a Fellow twice over and having maintained very close contacts through the Conan years, there's much that I feel that I can contribute at the level of knowing the nature of the transformations of the discipline, much about the personnel at Dumbarton Oaks, the gardens themselves, and many of the experts. There are things that could be forgotten – little aspects which are in fact of great significance.

VKM: Do they make an effort to have people who have been Fellows before on the board of Senior Fellows, do you know?

ML: Well, in fact, that inevitably happens, and I would encourage it because I think it's precisely that sense of continuity and collective memory that is important amongst the current Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies. I may be the only one who certainly was a Fellow twice, and possibly I may be the only one who has been a Fellow, so that appears as rather important.

VKM: Have you had any involvement in the Contemporary Landscape Design Collection?

ML: No, I can answer that quite simply.

VKM: Do you know if it's still going on, because the references to it sort of went away after a while in the files?

ML: I don't know about that. One has to assume that John would have enormous interest in it because of the particular interests of his own, but it's not something I can comment on.

VKM: What was your reaction to the reinstatement of the Summer Garden Internships?

ML: Well, I didn't know. One aspect – when we're talking about stuff like collective memory – one aspect I didn't know a lot about – I think I was speaking to my colleague at the Graduate School of Design, Michael Van Valkenburgh, who possibly was one of the last of the old interns – and all I can say is that it seems to me a very good initiative. It certainly is providing an opportunity for research on the gardens as well as an opportunity for eight young students, eight young about-to-be-practitioners to gain a sense of history and of methodology. So, that seems to me actually entirely in keeping with what I would understand to be the legacy of Mrs. Bliss, that she left the gardens, the collections, and a sense of an emerging field, those things need to be held together, I think, effectively. And there could be a danger that without the internships of having the garden really as a separate entity. I personally have had good contact with Gail over the two seasons that I've been a Senior Fellow, and I think she's also demonstrating a great interest in the research aspect of the garden because it seems to me it parallels the collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian disciplines. The gardens should not be forgotten as a collection in its own way.

VKM: When the board was discussing bringing it back, did they mention why the program had been allowed to lapse in the first place?

ML: Nope, I don't recall hearing – as I say, that's one aspect of this history I am not particularly versed in, but it struck me as a very positive initiative and so I guess I didn't probe further.

VKM: I guess continuing on that theme a little bit. In some of the other interviews, people have discussed the division in Garden and Landscape Studies between academics and practitioners as a problem in the field in general and at Dumbarton Oaks in particular. What are you thoughts on how Dumbarton Oaks has addressed that divide?

ML: Well, I can answer that at a personal level, which is that because I'm both a practitioner and an academic I don't see a problem of a divide there. It would actually seem to me wise to ensure that amongst the Senior Fellows and indeed amongst the Fellows that an effort is made to ensure the representation of those who are both academics and professionals or practitioners is sustained because I believe that goes back to the original vision of Mrs. Bliss, who saw it as both a study center and as a place which is emblematic of the best of design, of practice, of horticulture. And because of the particular interests I have in horticultural history alongside Garden and Landscape Studies, I'm always keen when I see an application come in from somebody who is not merely a practitioner but somebody who understands processes of landscape from a horticultural or an organic point of view – that sort of point of view – that application is given careful consideration for those reasons.

VKM: Are there any other systemic issues in this field that you would consider significant?

ML: I think that's probably too broad a question to be able to answer, when one's looking at the makeup of Senior Fellows, and I have to say that the present makeup of our group seems to me very extremely well considered. It is important that practitioners are represented, also that the different traditions across the world are represented, that we have somebody representing Asia, broadly – that's been a tradition – that those aspects are kept in balance.

VKM: What do you think have been some of the major changes in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks since you first came here?

ML: Well, I guess it would build on that point which has to do with geographical spread, at the time that I applied for the first Fellowship, my guess would be that the applications were coming mainly from Europe and from North America and the tradition of, for instance, looking at Renaissance studies and ancient Rome, antiquity, were very much grounded in the European world. Whereas now the applications are coming in from China, from Japan, from Australia, from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Turkey, and it's made the applications that much more competitive to the point where it is often a source of great regret that we are not able to offer more fellowships because the caliber of the applicants is really quite superb. Of course, beyond that, it's the expansion of the discipline, so that the influences of sociology and anthropology, in particular through Michel Conan, have dramatically changed the direction and complexion of Landscape Studies.

VKM: During your time at Dumbarton Oaks, have there been any important collaborations that you're aware of with other institutions in Garden and Landscape Studies?

ML: That's hard to answer. Obviously, I personally have had collaborations, which have come about through Dumbarton Oaks. I'd already mentioned Therese O'Malley of CASVA and her keywords project, but I could equally mention Amy Meyers who was a Fellow just a couple of years before me, whom I got to know through Dumbarton Oaks, and the collaborations I have done with her – first of all at the Huntington and now at Yale at the British Art Center, most recently on an exhibition there about Mrs. Delany – these are some of the personal collaborations that have come out of that network.

VKM: Does the program itself seek out collaborative projects with – I don't know – with CASVA or with –?

ML: Well, I think Michel Conan, I think, was incredibly resourceful in terms of working with the Smithsonian, with working with institutions in Europe. I think one of them was done with the Huntington. Some of that was probably rising out of the imperative of the redesign of the library and so on, and the difficulty of holding a colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks. But I think that's very important, to be looking for those opportunities because in this sense Dumbarton Oaks still holds a unique position world-wide in terms of a center of excellence in Garden and Landscape Studies – there's really nowhere to compare with it, but there are many other great institutions that offer the opportunity for collaboration, including obviously those at Harvard. So that when I think about if the place as an institution within the discipline, I think of the fact that in the U.K. the efforts to get garden and landscape studies set up for research – and whether it was at the University of York or the Architectural Association – those efforts led to very, very good training programs while they lasted. They no longer exist, but they never became centers for studies, offering fellowships – so then that's why Dumbarton Oaks continues to get applications from high caliber people from around the world.

VKM: Do you have any memories about Dumbarton Oaks that you'd like to share?

ML: Well, I mean, obviously, for me and my wife at a personal level, it's the first place that we lived at as a newly married couple, so it was a honeymoon here and it means that we come back to it with particular resonance for us. But I could tell you the story, which came out of the connection through Therese O'Malley and the conference that was organized at Charleston, South Carolina in March of 1989. She invited me to attend that and indeed to be the keynote speaker, and as a result of that we thought, well, here's an opportunity to explore the South and to go as far as Savannah, Georgia. And when we realized we would be there for a couple of days, I contacted a friend of mine who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford when I was an undergraduate, Matt Schaffer, and I said, “Matt, can you put us in touch with someone who knows about the gardens of Savannah?” And he said, “Well, our realtor would be the person to start with.” And through the realtor we got an invitation to visit a woman, Louisa Farrand Wood, who turned out to be the niece of Beatrix Farrand, and when we arrived at her house, on the wall right opposite the door was a portrait of Beatrix Farrand. And I said to her, Louisa Farrand Wood, who by then was just over eighty, I said, “Well, that's extraordinary, I've never seen this before.” And she said, “Well I'm just trying to decide what to do about it.” And she said, “Well I could either give it to those people out in California who have the Farrand Papers, or I was thinking about Dumbarton Oaks.” And so inevitably when I came back to Dumbarton Oaks I spoke to John Dixon Hunt, and I said, “Well it might not be a bad idea to invite Louisa Farrand Wood up to Dumbarton Oaks.” And as result of that, the portrait, which is in a beautiful oval frame, came to Dumbarton Oaks, and in fact, I was asking Gail about it, because I'd not see it hanging where it used to hang in the Garden Library entrance hall. So that was one thing, but there was a second thing that came from that particular visit southward. Louisa gave us a copy of her book and also a cutting of a honeysuckle, which is the yellow form of the American honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens. And I brought it back to Don Smith, the gardener, and at first he said, “Well, we don't need another honeysuckle,” but when I explained the connection he said, “Yeah, we'll find a place.” And that and its sister plants still are in the garden, they're in the terrace below the rose garden, I always forget what it's called, the Fountain Terrace just on the way through to the Arbor Terrace, either side of the gate there. And so that and the interview which I did for Don, with Don Smith, commissioned by John Dixon Hunt, are actually quite important elements in the history of the garden and the connection to Mrs. Bliss, Beatrix Farrand, the making of the garden, and so on. That tape of the interview which I conducted with Don Smith, I understand with Gail is from her, and that probably promptly should go into the Archives.

VKM: Yeah, definitely, I will tell James to ask her about that.

ML: Yeah, and you can ask also about the painting, because, as I say, when I was last there I didn't see it anywhere.

VKM: I will. Actually, can I ask about the story about Joachim and the cats? He brought them back to Germany with them?

ML: Yes, that's right. One is still alive, the other no longer, unfortunately. And when we saw him this past May he had some very nice photographs of the one that's surviving, I forgot the name. I have it all in my computer somewhere. But we had a great interest in feral cats, which was actually reinforced when we returned to Toronto after the second fellowship. We came back to find that the woman who had been living in our apartment in Toronto had been feeding cats on the street, and that we suddenly had outside our house the responsibility to look after these semi-wild cats. We've been feeding them ever since, so you could say that comes out of the Dumbarton Oaks story.

VKM: Is there anything else that I've left out that you would like to add?

ML: I don't think so, and obviously as far as that story goes, you could ask both – Linda knows a lot about the story of the feral cats, and the man himself could obviously fill you in.

VKM: All right, thank you very much.

ML: You're very welcome, and I will send two copies of the signed form to James by tomorrow.

VKM: Okay, thanks I will tell him to look out for that.

]]> No publisher Gabriela Santiago Oral History Project Garden and Landscape Studies Archives 2012-07-27T14:10:00Z Page