Tagging Along With A Picasso Curator

Claire Howard, Curatorial Research Assistant

Picasso blogger Jaime Bramble give us a "day in the life" of one our own curators...

Have you ever wondered what it takes to pull off a major museum exhibition like Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris? Ever thought about what happens beyond the search for objects in far-flung lands, the schmoozing with art dealers, the opening night galas?

My recent chat with Claire Howard (pictured), curatorial research assistant here at the PMA, helped shed a lot of light on it all. Claire has worked under curator Michael Taylor on several exhibitions (Thomas Chimes: Adventures in 'Pataphysics, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, and Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés among them), with Picasso being the latest.

Catch as Catch Can
1913
Francis Picabia, French, 1879 - 1953

To help launch the exhibition, she told me, she first began searching through the Museum's database and going through old publications, working a fair bit with the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs department to discover more about Picasso's many works on paper. She worked with the Conservation department as well, who had to make sure that every object ultimately selected was in perfect exhibition shape.

One of the best aspects of the job, however, was sorting through the potential objects that could be included in the show's final checklist. That, and being around for the actual installation of those objects. "There's lots of legwork to be done," she says, "but the primary fun is dealing with the works of art."

Dances at the Spring
1912
Francis Picabia, French, 1879 - 1953

Speaking of the works of art, I asked about her favorite pieces on view in the Picasso show. She loves Francis Picabia's Dances at the Spring (left), and Catch as Catch Can (above), which you'll find in the striking Salon Cubism gallery - the one with the bold dark red walls, pictured below. These large paintings are arranged in the gallery as they were originally seen, in such a way that the viewer must look up to see them. This works especially well, says Claire, because these paintings were pushing toward abstraction in a way that a lot of the other Salon Cubists' paintings weren't yet. The effect just wouldn't be the same if they were eye-level with the viewer.

The Salon Cubism gallery

Now, you may be thinking, how does one get started in this business? For Claire, she began her career as a curatorial intern as an undergrad at Wellesley. There she honed her research skills while working with a collection of American prints. She also spent a summer in New York at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, focusing on Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design as well as a collection of American Sublime paintings. A particularly fun part of the job, she says, was cataloging the Wiener Werkstätte textile collection. When she moved back to Philly she worked as a guide at the Fabric Workshop and Museum before beginning at the PMA in February of 2006.

Half-Past Three (The Poet)
1911
Marc Chagall, French (born Russia), 1887 - 1985

With Picasso now up and with such a string of successful shows to their credit, I wondered what our friends in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department could possibly have in store for us next. Claire let me know that plans are underway for a 2011 Marc Chagall show, curated by Michael Taylor, that promises to be grand. Stay tuned! 

Photo of gallery by M. McClellan for GPTMC ; all other photos courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art