Yale art museums bolster the city's cultural scene

British Art Center

"That sounds lovely. But do we really have to do this over the phone?" Patrick McCaughey, director of the Yale Center for British Art (BAC), asks. So the next day, I veer past the lobby's modern sculptures, enter McCaughey's office, and encounter a bow-tied British man who's ecstatic over a chance to rave about his museum. "We're very concerned about [making] undergraduates aware that the BAC is here," he exclaims. "Students don't have to give up the whole of their life. Just 10 minutes."

He reiterates his love for the finest collection of British art outside of London. "What happens at Yale is people tend to live very pressured lives. We're part of the less driven part of Yale, from which students can derive a deeply pleasurable sense of intellectual and cultural discovery." He thinks this visceral experience should, ideally, complement more structured encounters with his gallery's art. "We would like to have residential college nights. Tour, go backstage, meet the people."

That said, he proceeds to give me a tour. First, the permanent collection's paintings, which are organized thematically. "It's far more communicable. You don't need to know a huge amount about art history," says McCaughey. He gesticulates wildly, pointing out the texture of the clouds in a John Constable study, the perfect anatomy of George Stubbs' horses.

The whole time, we're walking through Louis Kahn's airy modernist building, "his masterwork." No paint anywhere, just linen, skylights, concrete, and wood. Some tourists visit for the BAC's architecture alone.

We move downstairs to the archives of drawings, prints, photos, and rare books, all open to the public. "There's hardly a museum in the world where you can see everything which is hidden," he says, and shows me how to inspect a Gainsborough sketch, or any one of 20,000 others. "Nobody starting now could afford this collection, even if you rescued Mr. [Bill] Gates from a terrible disaster at sea." "So," I ask him, "how does the BAC compare to other U.S. museums?"

"In British art? We kill 'em!"

Yale Univeristy Art Gallery

I confess that my first-ever visit to the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) occurred at the end of sophomore year. I confess that I expected it to be just a dingy building with maybe a few works of art donated by alums. I confess that I was wrong.

The collections of the oldest college-affiliated art museum in the whole Western Hemisphere are astounding. During my visit, I worked my way down from the Renaissance and Baroque Madonnas on the third floor to the ancient art on the ground floor, in the company of a family friend and alum who continues to be a loyal gallery member. She sprinkled stories of the gallery's history as we viewed the works of such artists as Seurat and Dali—including the story of John Trumbull, whose donation of over 100 history paintings and portraits established the gallery, and Benjamin Silliman, Class of 1796, the gallery's first curator.

The gallery also includes the foremost collections of American colonial furniture, Near and Far Eastern textiles and ceramics, and Greek and Etruscan vases. Great artists such as Van Gogh and Homer are on permanent display, with special exhibits that currently include Ancients and Moderns: Tradition and Transformation in the Arts of Asia, II and Art for Yale: Defining Moments. Most collections come from bequests and alumni gifts, and purchases are often made with alumni money. The works displayed represent a small portion of what the gallery owns: President Richard Levin, GRD '74, and Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, get their pick of works not on display to hang in their houses.

To make more Yalies aware of these offerings, the gallery has set up a corps of student guides who are trained to give tours geared towards an audience of their peers. Currently, gallery guides offer tours to undergraduates through the residential college system.

The YUAG has the perfect ambience for students to entertain parents for a day or spend a rainy Friday afternoon strolling the floors. Just don't wait two years to take advantage of it.

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