Yale University

Class News

Meet our new honorary classmate, Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale Art Gallery

On July 11, 2013, by vote of the '64 Class Council, Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale Art Gallery, was named an honorary member of the Class of 1964. Here is a news article by way of introduction.


King of Art With the Midas Touch

The New York Times

December 9, 2012

Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, likes to say that when he took over in 1998, the collection — the oldest and one of the most important university art collections in the country — had grown so large that its landmark Louis Kahn building resembled an "old sock drawer." The museum could show only a small fraction of its holdings, and some works had been in storage so long that even the curators had never seen them. Beyond campus, few people knew that there was a world-class encyclopedic art museum in New Haven, of all places, just an hour and a half from New York.

The 1953 Kahn building was in dire need of rehab, and two adjacent buildings on Chapel Street that had previously housed the collection — the so-called Old Yale Art Gallery, a 1928 neo-Florentine Gothic building, and, next door, Street Hall, a Ruskinian Gothic structure from 1866 — were in even worse shape. Among the three buildings there were 280 years of deferred maintenance, Mr. Reynolds said.

Almost as soon as he arrived here Mr. Reynolds set out to transform his stretch of Chapel Street at the urging of Yale's president, Richard C. Levin. He planned a renovation of all three buildings that would restore the older ones, which had long since been put to other uses, to their original purpose as gallery space.

The Kahn makeover, by Duncan Hazard and Richard Olcott of Ennead Architects in New York, was finished in 2006. Work began on the two others in 2009, and the entire refurbished complex — a block-and-a-half-long stretch that is itself a museum of changing architectural styles — is scheduled to open officially on Wednesday, a few months after visitors began being admitted to the galleries as they were completed.

While all the work was going on, Mr. Reynolds and his staff were also busy acquiring yet more art, much of it reflecting a broader range of cultures than the core Yale collection, to fill additional space made possible by the renovations. There is a brand-new collection of Indo-Pacific art, for example, and a new curator, Ruth Barnes, hired away from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, to look after it.

The collections of African art and the art of the ancient Americas have also been expanded. Newly on display as well are lots of works from the old collection, like paintings by Corot, Degas, and Rothko, that there was never room to show before. The American decorative arts collection now includes a restored parlor from an 18th-century house in Gilead, Conn., that used to be just numbered boards in a Yale storage barn.

And there are a number of old-master works — including paintings by Titian, Fra Angelico, van Dyck, and Uccello — that had been wrongly attributed and consigned to the junk pile. Laurence Kanter, the museum's keen-eyed chief curator (lured from the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Mr. Reynolds) discovered them while cleaning out the basement before renovation.

The price tag for the renovation was $135 million, an immense sum in this economy, but Mr. Reynolds seems to have raised it effortlessly, along with additional funds for the art acquisitions. Mr. Reynolds is, or used to be, a sculptor and a designer of installations for institutions like M.I.T. and the University of Washington in Seattle, but lately he has mastered a rare and difficult form of performance art: raising money. He has caused hundreds of millions of dollars — sums that would be the envy even of the Met or the Getty — to pour into Yale's coffers. He makes money rain on the place.

Part of his secret may be that at a time when museum directors are increasingly bottom-line-focused types, or even former art dealers, who have less in common with artists or curators than with the high-rolling crowd that buys art as an investment, he doesn't look or act the part of the museum professional. He's a big, friendly, sandy-haired man who favors the official uniform of the aging preppy: khakis, navy blazer, striped oxford-cloth shirt.

One morning not long ago he opened the art gallery's Chapel Street door at exactly 10 o'clock and, beaming, waved inside a waiting class of New Haven schoolchildren, along with a group of grown-up art students from the suburbs. (The Yale Art Gallery charges no admission, and Mr. Reynolds means to keep it that way.) You could have mistaken him for one of those old alums with too much time on their hands who hang around campus looking for something to do.

But he is by all accounts an excellent administrator, and his curatorial staff, all with scholarly credentials that far outstrip his own, say they greatly respect his eye. That same morning his duties included conferring with Mr. Kanter and Suzanne Boorsch, the curator of prints, drawings and photographs, about a 16th-century van Leyden woodcut that the museum was thinking of buying.

Mr. Reynolds had noticed before anyone else that in the upper right corner the woodcut showed three birds that were missing in the version reproduced in a reference book. Since bits of wood sometimes got knocked off during printing, this might indicate that the print under consideration represented the work in an earlier state.

Mr. Reynolds, who turned 64 last spring, got into the museum business more or less by accident and made his reputation not by climbing the curatorial rungs at well-financed institutions but by working in the world of alternative art spaces. In the mid-'70s, while teaching art at San Francisco State University, he helped turn a former coffin factory into what became New Langton Arts, one of that city's earliest alternative arts spaces. He did much of the plumbing and drywall-hanging himself.

Kathy Halbreich, a former director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and now an associate director at the Museum of Modern Art, has known Mr. Reynolds for decades. She said recently that in the museum world "it's liberating to have someone who thinks like an artist," and added, "Jock speaks several languages. He's as apt to convince an artist to make a contribution as a rich alum."

"He's like a pied piper," Ms. Halbreich continued. "His ability to communicate so well involves his understanding of what it means to make a work of art. It comes from his own pleasures and struggles as an artist. People instinctively want to follow him."

The historian David McCullough, who is an art lover, a Yale alumnus and in recent years a friend of Mr. Reynolds, said recently: "Jock has squeezed more out of me than I would ever have thought possible. His attitude is: Come on in, the water's fine. Don't stand on the sidelines."

In 1983 Mr. Reynolds, without entirely giving up his own art practice, became executive director of the Washington Project for the Arts, an alternative art space in Washington. (It was a scary step: He was married with two children, and the new job meant giving up tenure.) When he got there he found that the center's finances were in much worse shape than advertised. But he raised the necessary money and also the profile of the organization. In 1989, when the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington at the last minute backed out of showing "The Perfect Moment," Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial exhibition of photographs, many of them homoerotic or violent, Mr. Reynolds stepped in and arranged space for the show.

Mr. Reynolds's first real institutional job was at Andover, the Massachusetts prep school he attended and whose old-school manners and wardrobe he has never entirely abandoned. In 1989 he became director of the school's Addison Gallery, a small museum of American art. When he arrived the place was a bit of a backwater, attracting fewer than 10,000 visitors a year. When he left, nine years later, attendance was 65,000 annually, and he had also increased the endowment by millions.

If Mr. Reynolds's secret were an obvious one, more institutions would copy it. It helps that, unlike some people in the business, he actually enjoys fund-raising and long ago got over any embarrassment at asking for large sums.

"You need to remember that the number you're asking for — whether it's a million or a million-five or 20 million — has nothing to do with you," he said, smiling. "You're giving them an opportunity. You need to think: What would give them pleasure? What would make them think they'd done something significant?"

But Mr. Reynolds's greatest secret may be that he has first dosed himself with his own Kool-Aid and sold himself on his own message. Walking around Yale galleries he sometimes shakes his head in wonder at all their riches and takes evident pleasure in sharing them. He hung the collection of modern and contemporary art himself.

"He's believable because he's a believer," Ms. Halbreich said. "The joy he gets from art is palpable."

John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum, said: "These are not techniques, you know that right away. He's not faking it. He's really well prepared. It's very hard to say no to Jock because you feel he deserves it. You want to make him happy." He laughed and added, "He's used this on me many times."