Fairfield University Readies Its New Museum of Art

Fairfield University is opening its new Bellarmine Museum on Monday and the event will establish it on the cultural map as a world-class center for studies of antiquity.

The stars of the Bellarmine Museum's inaugural exhibition are eight plaster casts of sculptures originally within the Acropolis in Athens, including five from the Parthenon, the ancient temple dedicated to the goddess Athena in the golden age of classical Greece in the 5th century B.C. They're gifts from the Acropolis Museum in Athens and represent an academic coup for Fairfield University, the culmination of years of careful cultivation of relationships between the two institutions.

The Museum will also provide a showcase for the university's existing impressive plaster cast collection of 72 works of art dating from the classical world through the Renaissance, the majority of them lent to the university on longterm loans or gifted from the Metropolitan Museum of Art from its historic cast collection.

The Met has also agreed to lend 20 Celtic and Medieval art objects from its Fifth Avenue collection and its Cloisters Museum to the Bellarmine, the largest loan of its kind in recent years.

"[The loan] raises the exciting prospect of future collaborations with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other world-class institutions," a visitors' brochure says.

The opening of the museum and appointment of its director, Jill Deupi, are major events in the life of the university.

The museum will occupy the basement of the Jesuit college's signature Bellarmine Hall. Built in 1921 by local  industrialist Walter B. Lashar, the baronial edifice, complete with gargoyles, reflects the grand style of Tudor homes he had toured in England. The Jesuits purchased the property in 1942, renaming it Bellarmine Hall (originally called Hearthstone Hall) in honor of Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), cardinal and patron saint of Fairfield University.

The museum's central gallery, the Frank and Clara Meditz Gallery, evoking an early Christian basilica in its layout, will feature art from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. Two smaller side galleries will display the university's growing collection of non-Western art alongside Greek and Roman antiquities. A selection of plaster casts will be displayed along the central corridor.

Deupi will have her office off the main corridor near a seminar classroom and work spaces.

Deupi brings to the job a breathtaking resume. A Mount Holyoke grad with majors in political science and French literature, the accomplished multilinguist also has a law degree from American University and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Virginia. On a fellowship, she wrote her dissertation on 18th century art and cultural politics. She's held positions at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. She's also the mother of two young daughters and the wife of an architect.

Deupi's vision is to create a museum that will serve as a laboratory for learning, attracting students and faculty from many disciplines, as well as artists from beyond the university.

While the museum will play to its strong suits - Greek and Roman antiquities and its Kress Foundation Collection of minor masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque period - it will aspire to span history by counterbalancing traditional Western art with examples of non-Western art.

"We hope to develop an encyclopedic teaching collection," Deupi said.

Thus, near the 7'6" statue of Roman Emperor Augustus (born in 63 B.C.) will be three custom-made showcases displaying masks from Africa,  pre-Columbrian ceramics from Mexico and Peru and a 19th century bronze Buddha from Cambodia.

The museum collection will provide a springboard for students and others to appreciate the "natural bridge" between the ancient Greek and Roman cultures and later developments in art, Deupi said, citing a Baroque painting in the collection in which, to her trained eye, the ancient influences palpably live on.

The eight new additions to the university's plaster cast collection resulted from the connections faculty member Katherine Schwab developed with colleagues in Greece. She helped arrange for experts in ancient Greek art to give guest lectures  at Fairfield University, where she has taught since 1988 and curates the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Plaster Cast Collection at Fairfield.

She delivered a wish list for 10 plaster casts to the Acroplois Museum and eight wishes were fulfilled. Some were made from 100-year-old plaster casts that had been made from the original marbles; one cast of a female head was made specially for Fairfield University.

"Each can be appreciated on many levels," she said. "Each represents sculptures that are well-known from a significant site. Students study them at scale with a true sense of their shape and size."

"They're also beautiful," she said, noting that over time the plaster casts will gain value as historical records of original pieces that may be lost or damaged by the elements.

Bellarmine's first formal exhibition officially opens on November 2 as "Gifts from Athens: New Plaster Casts from the Acropolis Museum." On April 18, the topic turns to Medieval Irish art.