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Museum of One's Own, continued
Growing up in Woodbridge, Connecticut, Judy and Laurence were childhood sweethearts and prom dates. They dated again at Penn, where Laurence was majoring in American civilization and Judy was studying art history and American civilization. Both went on to marry others and later divorced. Years later, while Laurence was making trips to Philadelphia from Boston in preparation for his 25th-year reunion—it was he who came up with the idea of the Ben on the Bench gift to the University—he contacted Judy, who was at the time living in the Philadelphia suburbs. They married in 1995, on exactly the 40th anniversary of their first date, which had been Judy’s 13th birthday party.
From the museum’s standpoint, it was certainly a successful pairing. “I’ve been a curator and I’ve done many traveling shows,” Judy says. “But this was a major undertaking, and fortunately Laurence’s experiences in architecture and in building and engineering and design are so incredible that it was a perfect match.”
Their partnership is also marked by a fair measure of mutual teasing. For Laurence’s 60th birthday party, Judy took pictures of paintings in the collection and scanned in photos of him. Laurence bought a bust by Hiram Powers, entitled America, for the museum’s entrance hall, because it reminds him of his wife. “I have always called Judy, ‘Judy America,’ because of what she’s done for American art.” Plus, he adds, pointing to the coiffure beneath the sculpture’s star-topped tiara, “Judy has crazy, curly hair like this.”
Judy began collecting American illustration art in the 1960s, putting an ad in the paper that led to her purchase of five black-and-white charcoal drawings by Howard Chandler Christy at a cost of $100 apiece. Today each piece would be worth $10,000, she estimates. At the time no one really considered them to be art, but Judy, who had come across textbook images while teaching courses in American studies, thought otherwise. Before too long, she found herself in the role of art dealer and started the American Illustrators Gallery.
Since those early days, Judy says, a deeper appreciation of illustrators as fine artists has developed. In the past, she says, “If you were paid to do something, it was not considered art, which was supposed to be totally unencumbered.” People also were judging most popular artists—unfairly—by small, flat reproductions in books or on magazine covers, Judy says. “They weren’t ever having the opportunity to look at the original paintings.”
Laurence, a retired professor of architecture and urban design who has taught at Harvard, MIT, and the Rhode Island School of Design, wanted to be an artist when he came to Penn. At his first football game, he happened to chat with a bow-tie-clad gentleman by the name of Louis Kahn Ar’24 Hon’71, who was sitting next to him. As his freshman year progressed—and he watched Kahn’s Alfred E. Richards Medical Research Laboratories go up across from his dorm—he began getting more interested in architecture. Later, while pursuing his master’s degree in architecture at Harvard, Laurence would return to Philadelphia to get Kahn to critique his thesis.
Figuring that “no one can design a memorial to Louis Kahn, but Louis Kahn,” Laurence plans to recreate an arch that his late mentor designed in India on a property next to Vernon Court. If the local arborists can be assuaged, the arch will be part of a memorial park honoring 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
From top : Southern view of the Treillage Loggia; Only Jules Verbeaux by Frank E. Schoonover, 1905.
July/August
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