The practice of art collection as a collaboration

In a clear case in Penn’s Arthur Ross Gallery is a plaster piece of cheesecake topped with enameled red cherries, a few scattered on the metal pie tin. It is a whimsical sculpture created by artist Claes Oldenberg in 1962 as a gift to collector Hubert Neumann. The story behind the confection is detailed on a wall label written by a Penn student, an aspect of a one-of-a-kind curatorial course made possible by a partnership with the Neumann family.

In The Art of Art Collecting, an interdisciplinary SNF Paideia Program class, students examined the extensive collection of modern and contemporary art that the Neumann family has developed over four generations.

The collaboration between the students and Neumann culminated in the exhibition, “After Modernism: Selections from the Neumann Collection,” on view at the Gallery through March 2. (The exhibition was extended through April 13.) The 56 modernist and contemporary artworks were selected from more than 3,000 objects the family has collected since 1948. A 57th, the 60-foot-long 2012 painting by Nina Chanel Abney, “I Dread to Think,” is on view at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

“I honestly think that we’ve made history here because we want to bring the University into the arts in ways that I think are needed in the art world,” said Hubert Neumann, 93, at the exhibition opening, attended by an estimated 250 people. “I think that the University has done something historic, and I’m just very fortunate to be part of this.”

The exhibition’s curator is one of two Penn faculty who created and taught the undergraduate course, Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, history of art professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, and inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery.

It was important to Shaw that the students see what creating an art collection can mean over multiple generations, “a commitment to emerging artists, a commitment to mid-career artists, a commitment to artists as friends, as collaborators, rather than art collecting simply being about consumption,” she says.

In the class, Neumann and his daughter Melissa Neumann invited students to see paintings and sculptures on site in their Manhattan homes. The class also met and interviewed artists, visited galleries, and spoke with the owners. In collaboration with the Neumanns, Shaw and the 14 students in the class selected artworks for the Gallery show. Students researched the objects, wrote the exhibition wall labels, and narrated the audio tour.

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The students also helped video and photograph and document the artworks in Hubert Neumann’s home to create a virtual reality model that makes it possible, by wearing a headset available in the Gallery, to visually walk through the house. The filming was led by Peter Decherney, professor of cinema and media studies.

Decherney is also director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute, and has taught several “laboratory style” courses that create virtual reality films with partners, including the Penn Museum, Penn Medicine, and this semester, radio station WXPN.

“The Neumanns have just been incredible partners, so open with their homes, their collection, their networks of artists, and the galleries that they’ve worked with,” Decherney says. “It's really been transformative to the students.”

‘Engage, educate, inspire’

The exhibition is the first curated by Shaw in her new role at the Gallery, and the first since major renovations to the space, noted Timothy Rommen, Penn’s inaugural Vice Provost for the Arts, at the opening. The works are presented “salon style,” stacked toward the ceiling, echoing how they are on view in the Neumann homes.

“It so clearly highlights the mission of the Gallery to engage, educate, and inspire,” Rommen said. “We have here an exhibition that saw faculty, students, and alumni convening for seminar conversations about art and art collecting, curation, and what art after modernism might ask of and offer to us all.”

Neumann, who graduated from the Wharton School in 1952, traveled to Penn to speak to the class, and talked with the students when they came to New York. “I’m very excited about what we are going to be able to do. I think the potential is enormous,” he says.

The collaboration is “just a starting point,” Neumann says. “Our family really feels a responsibility to share this with the world.”

Fourth-year Miette Gourlay, from New York City, is double-majoring in cinema and media studies, and health and societies in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I really loved that we grounded our understanding of this collection both in art history and in the story of the family,” Gourlay says. “We learned about the sequence of artists they collected, and then got to actually go to their homes and see those in person. I thought that was really great.”

Dylan Grossmann from Highland Park, Illinois, is a second-year art history major in the College also pursuing a minor in urban development and real estate in the Wharton School. She would like to work in a high-level auction house, and in art curation for museums or private collections. “The ability to be curating a show with some of the number-one artists in the world, contemporary and historical, is truly an amazing opportunity for an undergraduate student like myself,” says Grossmann, who researched a lithograph by Henri Matisse.

Research experience

For the past two years, Shaw and Decherney have been visiting the Neumanns to conduct research, recording interviews with the family and scanning and photographing their archives.

Shaw’s research is focused on Valmor, the cosmetics firm founded in the 1920s by Hubert Neumann’s parents, Morton and Rose. The products were sold door-to-door mostly by African American salespeople, who were also the main consumers. “For me this was a light bulb moment because I realized that this collection, which spans the 20th and 21st century, had been bought in some ways with Black money,” says Shaw, a leading scholar on African American art and history.

Shaw and Decherney decided to involve students in the research by creating this course. “They’ve been able to see the ways that faculty conduct research,” Shaw says, “a process of engaging with a series of questions, with objects, with individuals, with archives.”

Shaw encouraged students to consider that they could become collectors themselves. “Our students should realize that collecting is an opportunity that they can all engage in at any price point,” Shaw says. “Art does not have to be expensive to be valuable to you.”

A history of collection

Morton and Rose Neumann started the art collection in the 1940s as they traveled through Europe after the end of World War II, and continued the rest of their lives. They chose works by modernist artists, forming personal relationships, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Man Ray, all represented by works in the Gallery exhibition.

Hubert Neumann helped expand the collection, forging relationships with dozens more artists, including Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, and Ashley Bickerton, whose works are also in the exhibition. Hubert’s daughter Melissa collects alongside him, helping to discover and support contemporary artists.

One of them is Penn alum Allison Zuckerman, who graduated with a fine arts degree in 2012. She says it is “an immense honor” that her 2017 painting, “Mary and Martha,” one of many that the Neumann family has purchased, is in the exhibition.

Zuckerman spoke with the students during their visit to Melissa Neumann’s home in November, taking them on a tour of her three artworks. “It’s about living with the work and believing in the artist's journey,” she said, “and that kind of support is extremely meaningful and essential to an artist being able to continue to make work.”

Art up close and personal

Hubert Neumann describes the way they live with the artworks as “very casual. I don’t want things to be too precious. I think that’s a bad idea; it tends to destroy the magic.” The students had full access to their homes, touring the artworks in every room.

“It was very overwhelming. I walked into his home and I didn’t know where to look,” says Juliette Silk, a third-year art history major, with minors in cinema studies and consumer psychology in the College. “But getting to have that whole day there, I really was able to absorb it.”

Silk was impressed to see the juxtaposition of works by young contemporary artists next to now-famous artists from a century earlier. “It’s layered and layered next to each other,” says Silk, who is from Scarsdale, New York.

At first Gourlay says she “was very nervous because I was surrounded by all of these really beautiful famous pieces of art,” and worried about getting close. But eventually she relaxed. “The most surprising, but also most wonderful part, of this whole experience was to realize people live daily lives with these really incredible pieces of art,” Gourlay says. “I just started to realize art did not need to be in a museum. I just felt like I could really see art in a different light.”

As a fine arts major in the College, fourth-year Joshua Baek from Los Angeles says it was a rare opportunity to view the artworks, many of which have never been displayed in public. “It’s really powerful to walk into someone’s home and to talk to them and see how living with art has impacted them,” Baek says. “It really humanizes and validates my experience as an artist.”

Speaking with contemporary artists like Zuckerman was a highlight of the experience, says Baek, an SNF Paideia Fellow who is researching “evolving perceptions and practices of art in the era of artificial intelligence.” A highlight was a class visit with Tom Sanford, whose 2009 work “Dead Michael Jackson” is in the exhibition. “The artists each harness the power of art differently and hearing how they viewed their own journeys was illuminating,” Baek says.

Creating a virtual tour

The students were involved at every stage of the professionally produced virtual reality model of Hubert Neumann’s home -- working with Ethan Berg, chief executive officer of design platform Agora World -- including filming, photographing, and adding metadata.

Silk took high-resolution pictures of the artworks that were incorporated along with virtual labels. “I felt like I was really looking at every crevice of it and seeing the line work and really getting a close-up experience,” she says.

Xiangyu Chen is a fourth-year from Grand Rapids, Michigan, studying mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and pursuing a master’s degree in robotics, as well as a minor in cinema and media studies. He worked with lidar 360 cameras to take scans of four rooms.

“It was great to see the application of some of these technologies and diversify my perspective on how the technology is used,” says Chen.

Gourlay also operated one of the virtual reality cameras. “I think this experience really helped me see how there are many different ways that you can include art in your life,” says Gourlay, who wants to be a documentary filmmaker. Her senior thesis is a film featuring cancer patients in remission. “I’ve really been focusing on ways they’ve used art to cope, and I got that directly from this course,” she says.

Shaw says the virtual reality experience has informed her practice as an art historian. “In the future, I really hope to incorporate these kinds of digital records that are immersive and interactive and give a really multidimensional experience of the artworks, but also their environments.”

From class to Gallery

The students were assigned two artworks to research for the course, one acquired in the 1950s or 1960s, and another in the past 20 years. They wrote the exhibition labels and the script that they read for the Gallery tour.

It was Chen who researched the cheesecake sculpture by Oldenburg, the artist who also created “Split Button” on Penn’s College Green. During the exhibition installation, using a fine brush to gently dust the cheesecake’s chunky cherries, Neumann told the story about a day he and his father visited Oldenburg in Manhattan.

“And after lunch we said, ‘Claes would love a fantastic big cheesecake.’ So we went to the deli and there was the last piece of cheesecake. And we said to please give us the pan, too,” Neumann says. “So we brought it up to Claes. And two weeks later he calls me and says, Hubert, I have something for you.”

It was, of course, the sculpture of the cheesecake. “Hubert puts it right next to his bed in his bedroom,” Chen says. “It was really cool to be able to do my research on an object that’s so significant, and to see it in the Gallery.”