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The house that de Cordova built

The DeCordova Museum owns more than 2,200 objects, everything from oil paintings to video sculpture.

Henry Clay Frick. J. P. Morgan. Isabella Stewart Gardner. Duncan Phillips. Albert Barnes. Julian de Cordova. Julian de Cordova? Nope, sorry. America is rife with cases of the acquisitive rich who amassed great caches of world-class masterpieces and parked them in stately settings, sometimes their homes, that eventually became public museums. Julian de Cordova, however, doesn't make the cut. Sure, the peripatetic businessman considered himself a collector, and, yes, his faux castle in Lincoln was eventually opened to the public. But not with his stuff in it.

All during the first half of the 20th century, he had dragged home from the four corners of the earth "everything that took my fancy," as he put it. He jammed it all into his house, which grew along with his collections, from an 1883 shingle-style "cottage" to a chateau with architecture as eclectic as its contents, complete with Norman towers, Moorish crenellations, and Gothic arches. He was especially proud of a "magic" mirror that flashed an image of a Buddha onto the ceiling.

"These objects formed a different class entirely than Mrs. Gardner's Titian or Vermeer oil paintings," wrote Herbert Levine, a Harvard student whose term paper on de Cordova was published by the museum in 1972 as its founder's official biography. "They were a showman's individualized travel souvenirs, corresponding to a child's collection of pennants from places visited."

And after de Cordova died, in 1945, they were, for the most part, sold off. He had left his estate to the Town of Lincoln, with the intention that it become a museum. And so, in 1950, it opened to the public - not as another unchanging memorial in the manner of the Gardner or Frick museums, but as a contemporary arts center, with a show by the Boston Printmakers group.

Julian de Cordova's crummy taste meant there was next to nothing among his tchotchkes that was museum-worthy, which left the DeCordova Museum free to invent itself - even to the point of streamlining its founding father's name, joining the "de" and "Cordova" in 1948 and capitalizing the D, to create a title the trustees thought more institutional. To this day, the legal name of the place is the DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park, in recognition of de Cordova's wife, Elizabeth Dana. In 1989, though, director Paul Master-Karnik changed the "common" name to the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, to emphasize what was happening on the grounds: an ever-changing array of world-class outdoor art.

As they celebrate their institution's 50th anniversary, the staff and supporters of the DeCordova revel in what they've made of the place, one of the biggest successes in the crowded and competitive New England museum scene.

That 1989 change of name is about as big an identity crisis as the museum has had in recent years. Under Master-Karnik, director since 1984, the DeCordova has made its mission clear. Indoors, it is to acquire and show work by contemporary American artists, primarily from New England. Outside, it is to display large-scale three-dimensional work by the finest US artists, no matter where they hail from, in the region's biggest sculpture park.

This clarity of purpose contrasts with, say, the public perception of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, which has a murkily defined mission it is currently trying to resolve through avenues including ambitious temporary public art programming and the prospect of a new waterfront building. Still, however fine they've been lately, many ICA shows could just as well turn up at any of half a dozen other area museums, from the behemoth Boston Museum of Fine Arts to the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. And since the ICA doesn't collect, it doesn't have an identity forged by its holdings.

The DeCordova does. By now, it owns more than 2,200 objects, everything from oil paintings to video sculpture. One habit of Julian de Cordova's that the museum has continued is expansion. A 1966 building campaign resulted in four low-lying, shingled bungalows that still house the museum school's studios. A 1994 campaign resulted in two more: one, another studio; the other, The Store @ DeCordova. The school is now the largest non-degree-granting studio art program in Massachusetts; the shop has few peers in New England.

Summer used to be sauna season inside the DeCordova. In 1996, air conditioning finally arrived - along with renovated galleries, an art library where de Cordova once had his conservatory, and wiring that allowed for major video art shows. Before, all the fuses would have blown.

The biggest expansion to date was the new wing the museum sprouted in 1998, by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, locally famous - or infamous - for the brutalist design for Boston's City Hall. That was in the 1960s. The architects have calmed down. Still, their DeCordova design, a three-story, 15,000-square-foot box punching its way out of the hillside, is as aggressive as Master-Karnik's plans for more major changes.

Julian de Cordova was born in New York in 1850, the son of a Jamaican merchant father and an English mother. He started working as a tea broker in Manhattan when he was 16, bypassing his father's wish that he obtain a university degree.

His mother had taken him to England when he was 3, and by the time he died, at age 95, he'd been around the world 15 times. His journeys lasted months, even years: There was a three-year stint in Shanghai in the 1870s, buying tea for export to America. Travel was his passion - and his schooling. He flirted with courses at Harvard in 1880, but by then he was already a successful businessman, married to Elizabeth Dana, daughter of a prominent Cambridge clan, and was in the process of buying a house on Commonwealth Avenue. De Cordova's world was international commerce, not academe.

He lost his fortune in the financial panic of 1886 but speedily remade it. In 1893, he bought the failing Union Glass Co. in Somerville and made it profitable again, producing wares from Art Nouveau bibelots to doorknobs. As he prospered, he became more pretentious; so did the shingle-style summer house he'd built on 22 acres in Lincoln. "Its turrets, aping the picturesque effects of a Norman chateau, clashed badly with the soft contours of the hilly landscape," wrote Levine. As for the interior, "Styles and periods were piled on top of one another with no semblance of harmony."

Lots of the wealthy of de Cordova's era lived in exotic fantasy palaces: Consider Isabella Gardner's Venetian palazzo on the Fenway. But few invented an ancestry to match. De Cordova did. With flimsy justification, he styled himself a count: "Julian de Cordova, Conde de Cabra, Marquis of Almodovar."

"We went on to Cordova where my ancestor was the principal actor in the history of Spain," he wrote about a trip to that country. He proclaimed himself heir to the Conde de Cabra, "the title said to have been conferred upon his ancestor by Ferdinand and Isabella when he reconquered the Alhambra for the Christians," Levine wrote in a tone that alternates between amusement and exasperation.

"Julian was a Sephardic Jew, which he kept secret," says Master-Karnik - "especially after he married into the Dana family." After inventing his noble heritage, "he hired a genealogist to prove this bogus ancestry," Master-Karnik says. "In his eyes, it made him the equal of the Danas." Pedigree "proven," he loaded his home with coats of arms: In the recent expansion and renovation, one was intentionally left on the exterior, on the side facing Flint's Pond. It's a stone shield edged with waving banners and topped by an urn; inside the shield is the relief figure of a king holding a sword and other emblems of his rank. Beneath is the motto "La Cabra ha Tomado, la Granada" - meaning that his ancestor had conquered Granada.

Early photographs of the house's interiors demonstrate a rampant horror vacui. Pictures are hung so densely that you can barely see the walls; no flat surface is left unadorned. There was a dedicated "Alhambra" room, modeled on the original, and an "Oriental" room. Photos of the de Cordova family at home show them swamped by their belongings, seated in an atmosphere of almost funereal gloom. Nor did de Cordova ignore the grounds, where he erected various follies, among them a teahouse in a shrieking shade of orange. Then there was his "Diamond Fountain," made of leftover doorknobs from Union Glass.

In the summers from 1938 to 1940, Julian de Cordova invited the public to revel in his riches two afternoons a week. A visiting reporter from the Globe was as snowed as Levine would later be skeptical, penning a breathless account of both owner and house. Gushing over "the proud castle of the Conde de Cabra," the unsigned article proclaims de Cordova "one of five grandees, by right of birth, who are privileged to keep their hats on their heads in the presence of the banished King of Spain." It describes him as a Renaissance man, but in the most meaningless language: "He has what a famous Boston Symphony pianist called 'the de Cordova touch.' "

"The walls of the gallery are covered with pictures by famous artists," the article goes on. Not exactly, says Master-Karnik, partly because "Julian wasn't prepared to pay big-time. Once, he wanted a particular painting in the Childs Gallery on Newbury Street. Arguing with Charlie Childs about the price, he said, 'I'd rather see this painting destroyed than stay here,' and threw it out the window. His driver and car were waiting to catch it. He absconded with the painting and told Charlie, 'I'll pay you what I want.'

"Julian was also always lugging things to the Museum of Fine Arts for authentication," Master-Karnik says. "They kept telling him he'd bought a copy or a fake - again."

In 1930, the "Conde" had decided to bequeath castle and contents to the Town of Lincoln. His wife had died, as had their only child. From the moment de Cordova drafted his will until his death, he and Lincoln bickered over every detail. In the mid-1930s, the town refused to pay the $100 annual rent on a safe-deposit box to hold the deeds to de Cordova's million-dollar bequest, and de Cordova announced that he was going to give it all to Radcliffe College instead.

But when he died, to Lincoln the place went. Sort of. "Julian left the museum and the endowment to different groups in the town, who fought," Master-Karnik says. That chapter ended in 1948, when the state's Supreme Judicial Court broke the will and separated the museum from the town, making it a not-for-profit entity and allowing the sale of de Cordova's collection.

The collection having been disposed of at a New York auction house, the trustees hired John Quincy Adams, an architect of a modernist bent despite his historic name, to revamp the interiors. Modernism had already arrived in Lincoln in the form of the great Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, a refugee from Nazi Germany. In 1937, on another Lincoln hill not far from de Cordova's, Gropius built himself a gleaming white block of a house. His influence invaded the museum: Gallery photos from the 1950s show stark, neutral, white-walled spaces. De Cordova's fantasy land was gone.

So what was his legacy, besides the $1.3 million he left for the museum in trust? "He genuinely believed that exposure to art made you a better person, ethically and morally," Master-Karnik says. "He borrowed that idea from the 'Kensington Experiment' in London." The basic concept - that good design made for good people - eventually resulted in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. "That theory," says Master-Karnik, "drove the educational and populist aspects of the DeCordova from the start."

In 50 years, the DeCordova has had but four directors. The first, Frederick P. Walkey, was a 28-year-old graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts when he was hired in 1949 to run the soon-to-open museum. Walkey stayed for 30 years.

At the Museum School, he had trained as an artist. "I was incompetent," he says with characteristic candor. "But I had a good eye. I was the one who told the [DeCordova's] trustees they should focus on New England art. I knew more about art than they did."

The focus wasn't entirely on New England, though. Acting as both director and curator in the early years, Walkey brought to the Boston area artists whom the MFA still snubbed - like Jackson Pollock. He showed furniture, jewelry, and photography, as well as Matisse and Daumier; Venice Biennale prize winners, Near Eastern miniatures, and Bavarian glass, as well as artists living in the region, including Varujan Boghosian and Steven Trefonides. He showed work by students at the DeCordova's school, who studied in the building until those separate studios opened in 1966. The range of what Walkey exhibited was wide and wild; so was the range of what he acquired for the museum's collections.

Some shows during Walkey's reign sound wacky - but also prescient. In 1968, the DeCordova hosted a "Rugs and Motorcycles" exhibition: shaggy handmade rugs with abstract patterns on the walls and motorcycles, real ones, on the floor. Three decades later, New York's Guggenheim would make headlines - and create controversy - with a motorcycle show, a subject many deemed unworthy of its august space.

On the occasion of the DeCordova's 25th anniversary, Walkey wrote: "The title 'museum' was bequeathed to us in the [de Cordova] will. But from the very beginning we indicated that we would be more than just a museum. The DeCordova would become an art center supplementing an active exhibition program with classes, workshops, concerts and special events." Gropius lectured there; Dylan Thomas came to read his poetry. Photos and descriptions of some of these early activities are a hoot: earnest barefoot students practicing the Martha Graham brand of modern dance right in the galleries; events like the 1954 Festival of Sherwood Forest, for which Lincolnites dressed up like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, some arriving on horseback. The basic concept of the community arts center, though, not only stuck but provided a national model.

Toward the end of his tenure, Walkey acknowledges, "I got a little too independent." Master-Karnik's version is that "the museum had become Fred's living room. In the 1950s and '60s, he'd been great. By the '70s, he wasn't on top of new trends. He'd stayed too long. In 1979, the board encouraged him to resign." He did.

He was succeeded by two directors - Bill Bagnall and David Katzive - who came and went fast. The DeCordova was being led by an interim head when Master-Karnik, who'd been running the New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts in Summit, was hired in 1984.

"The right tracks were laid in the 1950s," Master-Karnik says. "But by the 1970s, they couldn't build the right trains."

Master-Karnik found the museum "in a disastrous state," he says. Julian de Cordova hadn't inventoried his collection. The museum professionals who came after him hadn't properly inventoried what they had acquired, either, Master-Karnik says. "I found art in the garage, next to the tractor. There were about 1,000 things in the collection when I came. Fred would take anything that walked in the door. Some of it was great. Some of it wasn't. In addition to the contemporary art, there were 19th-century Japanese prints and Ming Dynasty columns. I thought, 'What are we doing with this stuff?' So we dealt with the dreck and instituted a collections policy. We'd acquire modern and contemporary art, largely but not exclusively by New England artists."

Of those thousand things in the collection when he came, Master-Karnik has deaccessioned nearly half - sometimes with gratifying financial results. A Franz Kline painting sold at Sotheby's in 1996 for $950,000: Kline may be a major modernist, but he doesn't fit into the DeCordova's main mission of collecting contemporary New England art. Even some works by artists not in Kline's league have fared well at auction. "I found a tiny watercolor by Maynard Dickson," a B-list landscape painter but one with a following, "in a closet here," Master-Karnik says. "We just sold it at Skinner's for $26,000."

Guidelines laid down by the Association of Art Museum Directors mandate that money made through deaccessioning be spent on buying more art, rather than, say, upgrading the plumbing. At the DeCordova, one result of selling off art has been the establishment of the Art Acquisition Fund, which currently yields about $50,000 a year - not a lot to go shopping in the overheated contemporary art market. The museum still relies primarily on donated work. And although it's far fussier than it used to be about the art it accepts, the collections during Master-Karnik's tenure have more than quadrupled.

Walkey disagrees with Master-Karnik's intensified focus on New England. "There isn't that much good art here," he says bluntly. "They'd do better to link up with the Guggenheim or some other museum and bring things here that otherwise wouldn't be seen in the Boston area. I focused on New England 70 to 80 percent of the time, and then brought in Henry Moore and Jackson Pollock. I didn't want it to be a parochial operation."

"Parochial" isn't the current image the DeCordova has in the art world, though. When curator Nick Capasso arrived a decade ago, "This was a small, decidedly regional museum in an inadequate facility," he says. "Now it's a contemporary art museum with a national presence." Capasso points to the growing number of DeCordova-organized shows that tour, giving essential nationwide exposure to New England artists who deserve it.

Even when a show doesn't tour, it can have a national impact. The DeCordova's great 1998 exhibition of the pioneering holography of Harriet Casdin-Silver "had too many penises for other museums to be interested in it," Capasso says, adding that the show was organized in the wake of the uproar over the touring exhibition of homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, which made museums temporarily timid.

Hologram installations of Casdin-Silver herself, a septuagenarian Boston artist, were also in the show. Her nude body sags, but her expression is triumphant. There is a mellow, Rembrandt-like quality to these works: The holographic medium makes the figures recede into the distance, and Casdin-Silver's humanistic style makes you want to follow. The show, which demonstrated conclusively that holography had graduated from gimmick to art, was also technically formidable to mount, an installation nightmare. That, and the frontal nudity, meant it never traveled. But it was widely reviewed and put Casdin-Silver on the map: She has since shown at important venues, including New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Content-wise, the Casdin-Silver show was something of an exception for the DeCordova. If there's a criticism of its programming to be made, it's that it has tended toward the middlebrow, and that often its shows have come without catalogs, which are an ephemeral exhibition's afterlife and crucial documentation of artists' careers. "We can't always do catalogs, because of the pace at which we work," Capasso explains. The curatorial staff of three mounts four major and as many as a dozen smaller shows every year; at big museums, with dozens of curators, a team might work on a single show for two years or more.

As for what's in the DeCordova shows, "We consider ourselves a family-oriented institution," says senior curator Rachel Rosenfield Lafo. Hence shows of artist-designed toys and children's books. The 1995 "Strokes of Genius: Mini Golf by Artists" was a wildly popular interactive game housed right in the museum, with each of the 18 holes designed by an artist. Last year's "The Sphere in Contemporary Sculpture" celebrated roundness - and included artist Danny O's gigantic installation of ordinary balls, hundreds of them, glued to a huge wall, about as child-riveting an exhibit as any museum has ever offered.

For its 50th, the DeCordova is growing up, launching a series of major shows, with major catalogs, that only a mature museum could mount. They will examine the history of art in Boston over the last half century. The first installment is "Photography in Boston: 1955-1985," opening on September 16. Photography is the fastest-growing area of the DeCordova collection and has been a strength of the region.

"A community's art life is defined by its art schools," Lafo says. "Their strengths become our strengths." The Massachusetts College of Art boasts one of the top half-dozen photography departments in the country, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts has graduated photographers who have gone on to international acclaim.

Ideas of what is suitable for the sought-after turf of the DeCordova's galleries have changed. Tucked into the corners of the galleries in the new building are kiosks with a sampling of what the shop sells - pottery, glass, and other high-level crafts. In bigger museums, the routing of viewers into a shop at the end of blockbuster shows has been controversial. The DeCordova has gone one step further, in showing what's for sale so close to the actual art being exhibited that your eye takes in both at once.

Master-Karnik defends the kiosks. "There's a problem with our store not being inside the museum," he says. "So we put some things from the store flat in front of the public's face." On the other hand, because the store is in a separate building, "a lot of people who don't want to pay the $6 museum admission visit the sculpture park and the store and never come inside." The DeCordova's annual attendance, including sculpture park visitors, is 150,000 and growing.

The Store @ DeCordova has been so successful since manager David Duddy arrived to set it up, six years ago, that it's now being expanded - and fast. Its space will be doubled just in time for holiday shopping.

The Town of Lincoln and the DeCordova Museum are in some ways an odd couple. The town is one of the wealthiest in the state; the DeCordova is determined to be as nonexclusive as possible. Lincoln may be just 16 miles from Boston, but Lincolnites still like to think of their town as farm country. Arming themselves against the encroachment of technology on the landscape, they have banned cell towers - so the museum staff's cell phones often don't work. In winter, it's not unusual for visitors to arrive on cross-country skis. Because Lincoln is a "dry" town, the Cafe @ DeCordova can't serve even a glass of wine.

Master-Karnik has worked hard to cultivate the museum's relationship with the town, to the point of canceling a popular outdoor concert series because some residents objected to the noise. "We finessed that productively," he says. The expansion of the building has also meant that bands at museum functions now play indoors, not out, further cutting down the noise factor.

What Master-Karnik wants in return is the town's blessing for his overhaul of the sculpture park. He plans to redesign the grounds and nearly double the number of sculptures, from the current 80 to 150. "We're going to have 35 acres of art, where you move almost imperceptibly from outdoors to inside," he says. The rooftop sculpture garden and sculpture terrace constructed within the past few years already create that indoor-outdoor fluidity. "The grounds should get progressively wilder as you get away from the building," he says, adding that the revamped park will include a "zoo" with fantastical animal sculptures designed by artists.

Master-Karnik says he has no idea yet how much the expanded and overhauled park will cost. Millions, it seems safe to say. Which is why the museum is considering charging admission to this outdoor attraction that has always been free. He's sensitive to local politics here, too. "In Lincoln," he says, "you can't put up an admission booth on Sandy Pond Road and have cars backed up."

The larger park is, in Master-Karnik's mind, utterly essential to the DeCordova's ongoing health. "When you complete a major building campaign, you'd better be well into planning the next one. The adrenalin's there. You can't let it sink. I believe the sheer volume of art in Boston will double in the next 10 years," Master-Karnik says, "with the big expansions at the MFA, the ICA, and Harvard. It's an ever more competitive environment."

The stream of New England art that the DeCordova represents is flowing into a larger sea. That phenomenon is epitomized by George Fifield, the DeCordova's curator of media arts - the only new-media curator in a major New England museum, he says. Fifield is in charge of making the DeCordova a leader in areas including video installation and Internet art. The artist who is his special responsibility among the 10 in this summer's DeCordova Annual - a yearly look at what a select group of New England artists are up to - is Remo Campopiano.

Under the Volcano is Campopiano's contribution to the show. Behind the barrier of a miniature moat filled with water, Campopiano built a table-sized "city" out of printed circuit boards and computer parts. Embedded in the city are video cameras, and in the center, at the May opening of the show, was a big cone of sand. On May 13, opening day, Campopiano unleashed 1,000 California harvester ants on the cone. They're busy dismantling it, redistributing the sand until it buries the city.

"All this is on the Internet," says Fifield. "The ants are living this contemporary life, totally exposed, totally anonymous, as we all are on the Net." And the ants are bringing the work of a New England artist to the whole world.

A museum presenting ants on the Internet is a museum whose constituency needs some hand-holding. Claire Loughheed, the DeCordova's director of education since last October, is in charge of making what the museum does intelligible to the general public. Like other museums, the DeCordova is putting increased emphasis on education. Loughheed says that in the DeCordova's case, it's playing catch-up. "Not much happened inside the museum in terms of education before I came," she says. About 3,000 people take classes in the DeCordova's studios each year. "But our classes have never come into the museum. As of this fall, they all will. Looking at art is an essential part of creating it. It's what museums have been doing internationally. We're just getting up to speed."

Master-Karnik wants not just to be up to speed but to set the pace. For all the DeCordova Museum's veering from its founder's original plan, though, and for all its divesting itself of the "Conde's" collections, a few vestiges of its eccentric past linger. One is Master-Karnik's ceremonial farewell to departing trustees. Whenever a museum trustee retires, the director presents him or her with a handsomely boxed doorknob - a glass knob from Julian de Cordova's dismantled Diamond Fountain.