Making Museum Men: Paul J. Sachs and the Museum Course at Harvard, 1921-1948

FAIN: FT-60579-13

Andrew Lockwood McClellan
Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)

From 1921-1948, Paul Sachs offered a museum training program at Harvard that defined the organizational structure and values of an institution through which the American public came to know art. Conceived at a time of great museum expansion and public interest in the United States, the Museum Course channeled key philosophical debates about how art museums should function, and for whom. Blending theory and practice, Sachs offered integrated training in object connoisseurship and hands-on management that codified and institutionalized principles of leadership, curating, and museum display that are taken for granted today. Drawing on unpublished archival material and recent scholarship, "Making Museum Men" will be the first scholarly analysis of an innovative and influential program that shaped the development of the American art museum and aesthetic hierarchies in the decades before and after World War II.

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