the Bruce is the Susan E. Lynch executive director Dr. Peter Sutton, whose title is named after the donor who supported the hiring of a leading director. After successful stints at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and others, the Bruce managed to hire the esteemed Dr. Sutton. With Sutton’s intelligence, a dedicated board (currently chaired by Nathaniel Day and Tamara Holliday), and Greenwich’s rich art collections, the tiny Bruce launched itself into a place of respect in the rarefied art world. An Honorary Board of Trustees comprised of Greenwich residents, including Alexandra and Steven Cohen, Ambassador John Loeb, Jennifer and David Stockman, and others, proved helpful in culling loans of masterpieces from local residents. Many of the Bruce Museum’s top exhibitions come from its own backyard. “For a town of 60,000 inhabitants, Greenwich has the highest concentration of private collectors of any town on the planet,” Sutton says. Polo player and local collector Peter Brant lent a colorful Keith Haring painting. Olga Hirschorn lent all of the art from her famous “Mouse House.” The exhibition of spectacular Dutch old-master paintings from the collection of Suzanne and the late Norman Hascoe was of a caliber that rivals major museums. The most important paintings by David Hockney were lent from another local residence for temporary exhibition. The works read like a who’s who of art history, where Rembrandts, Duchamps,
QT0610_BruceRev.indd 100
and Brancusis are on display from Greenwich homes. The list of local loans of art to the Bruce is long, impressive, and often anonymous. After all, it’s a town that values privacy and understated elegance. The Cohens gave the Bruce Faun and Bacchante, a superb painting by nineteenth-century master William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The painting can be used to teach students about classical subjects in art history, like the nineteenth-century Salon System and its eventual path to the most influential movement in art history, French Impressionism. Gifts like this are vital to the Bruce’s educational mission, and the museum hopes more locals will donate art. While the Bruce’s facts and figures validate its extraordinary accomplishments, the mission remains education. The Bruce has mastered the positive, cultural, and educational influence that art has on its students. Thousands of grade-school children are taught about cultural heritage there annually. At the Bruce, it doesn’t matter if they’re children from rich This page, clockwise from top left: a nineteenth-century painting by Francis A. Silva; co-chairs of the museum Nat Day, left, and Tamara Holliday; Carmiña Roth, far left, Tiffany Burnette, Keri Stroemer, and Linda Jenkins enjoy the recent opening of “Exotic Encounters: Art, Travel, and Modernity in the Collection of the Bruce Museum”; Peter Sutton, Bruce Museum executive director and CEO. Opposite page, left: a sculpture by Frederick William MacMonnies; another view of the Bruce Museum.
6/17/10 9:53 PM