Martha Tedeschi recently wrapped up her eight-year tenure as the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums and will now enjoy retirement. In her final weeks at the museums, several supporters came forward to honor her impactful leadership with meaningful gifts of works of art.

These works—paintings, drawings, sculptures, and one book—all further strengthen the museums’ collections in myriad and important ways, creating further opportunities for research and display. Many of these works were briefly on view during a recent celebration that brought together colleagues, friends, donors, and supporters. One of the drawings is already on display in our galleries. Below, we share some highlights.

Two sculptures—Neon Cello (1989) and Bronze Shadow Cello (1983–89)—by mid-20th-century American artist Charlotte Moorman, and a collaborative work—Blue Cello (1983–2003)—made with her frequent artistic partner Nam June Paik, are among the promised gifts made in honor of the tenure of Martha Tedeschi. Moorman (1933–1991) was an accomplished concert cellist who redirected her career in the early 1960s, becoming a performance artist, conceptual artist, and champion of avant-garde music. These three works meaningfully expand the representation at Harvard of Moorman’s practice, specifically across media, and deepen the context for studying the experimental and collaborative methods of Paik (1932–2006), whose work is a key strength of the museums’ 20th-century collection. Along with Paik, Moorman was a part of the international artist collective Fluxus, of which Harvard’s holdings are among the most significant in North America.

These works, to be gifted by Harvard Business School alumnus Ken Hakuta (M.B.A. ’77), join another work by Moorman given to the museums by the Hakuta family last year, Syringe Cello (1989). It also builds on a previous landmark gift in 2016 of $1 million to establish the Hakuta Family Nam June Paik Curatorial Fellowship, along with nine works of art by Paik. Hakuta is the nephew of Paik, a leading figure in mid-20th-century art, a pioneer in video art, and a close collaborator of Moorman for almost three decades.

With Neon Cello, Moorman combines the form of a cello—a figural stand-in for herself—with neon tubing, a material often used by Paik; the pairing might be read as an ode to their artistic collaborations. Bronze Shadow Cello combines a flattened bronze shape in the form of a cello, anchored at a 90-degree angle to a white marble base. Blue Cello (shown above), from Moorman’s series of screenprints on paper, features a silhouette of a cello mounted to canvas. It has the distinction of being a work also credited to Paik: Paik added drawings in red paint to the canvas in 2003, after Moorman’s death. This will prompt discussions and new research on whether the work should be categorized as a posthumous collaboration or as an altered, co-authored artwork.

An illustrated book by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Sounds (Klänge), published in 1913, joins an impressive group of the artist’s works across media in the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection. Gifted by longtime supporter Merrill C. Berman (Harvard Class of 1960), the book will further contribute to Harvard’s role as a center for studying and exhibiting works by expressionist and Bauhaus artists. Sounds contains 56 woodcuts interspersed with 38 prose poems composed by Kandinsky, and it demonstrates the artist’s interest in the relationship between the spiritual and abstraction in art. Sounds completes the museum’s collection of early publications by the artist, joining On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst) and The Blue Rider [Almanac] (Der Blaue Reiter), both published in 1912. The book also joins a loose woodcut from Sounds, Two Riders against a Red Background (1911), allowing the opportunity to simultaneously display it alongside a different page of the book.

Enigma (2021), a drawing by Vermont-based artist Marcy Hermansader (b. 1951), is the first work by the artist to enter the Harvard Art Museums collections. Gifted by Ted Stebbins (Harvard J.D. 1964, Ph.D. 1971), curator of American art, emeritus, at the Harvard Art Museums, and Susan Stebbins, his wife, the drawing has been given in honor of Martha Tedeschi’s decades-long career as an esteemed curator of works on paper. Hermansader’s work alternates between personal experience and engagement with topics in the larger world, such as war, industrial accidents, and the experiences of people with disabilities. Enigma exemplifies the artist’s ongoing interest in themes of biology and the natural environment; the work includes the form of organs and other referents to the inner body that intertwine with a bending tree branch. To create the work, the artist utilized techniques that bring a sense of three-dimensionality to the two-dimensional medium. She achieves this by employing the tromp l’oeil device of a frame within the picture and tearing the paper in the lower right corner to reveal the multiple layers of the support.

Three paintings from the collection of Robert (Harvard Class of 1961) and Betsy Feinberg, which were among the group of more than 300 Japanese Edo (1615–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) period works the couple promised to the museums in 2013, have now been permanently added to the collections in honor of Tedeschi’s retirement.

A delicately painted pair of paintings by Imei Shūkei (1731–1808), Blossoming Plum under Sun and Moon (1798), follows the protocols of paired East Asian plum paintings by complementing each other in terms of composition, technique, and time of day. Whereas the right-hand scroll depicts white plum blossoms in a nocturnal setting under moonlight, the left-hand scroll renders snowbound blossoms in daytime under a red sun. The scrolls are accompanied by letters that record the commission in detail, providing a valuable resource for the study of early modern painting. Click the links above to read translations of the poems by Shūkei and fellow literary monk Rikunyo Dōjin that appear on the scrolls.

Broken Branches Drawn from Life (1835), by Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783–1856), presents 10 groupings of flowers accompanied by insects, birds, and a variety of auspicious combinations of plants and animals, which are revealed as the viewer unrolls the handscroll-format work. During the Song dynasty, “broken branches” of plum blossom (actual or painted) could be understood as symbolic messengers, conveying unwritten or unwritable sentiments between sympathetic souls separated by the loss of the Northern Song capital and the traumatic displacements that followed. The potential symbolic freight of the many different flowers depicted suggests that each grouping may carry its own decodable message. To view the images of the handscroll (which measures more than 22 feet long) and to read the translated inscription by Baiitsu’s friend Uragami Shunkin that appears at the beginning of the painting, please click the link in the title above.

Since 1999, Maida and George S. Abrams (Harvard A.B. ’54, LL.B. ’57) have gifted or promised to the museums nearly 600 Dutch, Flemish, and Netherlandish drawings that range from the 16th to the 19th century, making Harvard a major site for the appreciation, research, and study of these works on paper in North America. Two drawings have recently been gifted by George Abrams in tribute to Tedeschi’s retirement: Landscape (near Ouderkerk?) with a Fisherman, by Hendrick Barentsz. Avercamp (1585–1634), which depicts a charming and detailed scene of a fisherman and his family on the shore of a bustling lake, and Woman in Sixteenth-Century Costume, a lifelike rendering of a woman wearing an elaborate gown and hairstyle by Jan de Bisschop (1628–1671). This latter drawing was a promised gift that Abrams has now given in honor of Tedeschi’s father, John Tedeschi, a scholar of the Italian Renaissance and classmate of Abrams. The Bisschop drawing is currently on display in the exhibition Imagine Me and You: Dutch and Flemish Encounters with the Islamic World, 1450–1750 (through August 18, 2024).

A double-sided drawing by the enigmatic German Renaissance artist Hermann Weyer (1596–c. 1621) has been presented in honor of Martha Tedeschi as a promised gift of Christopher North (Harvard Class of 1992) and Sofia Filipa de Brito e Cunha-North. The early 17th-century work will be the first by the artist to enter the Harvard Art Museums collections. The recto drawing, Neptune on His Chariot, shows a spirited rendering of the ancient Mediterranean god on his shell-like chariot being pulled by two horses; and the verso drawing, Ottoman Riders, after a 1599 woodcut by Swiss artist Jost Amman (also in the museums’ collections), shows two Ottoman soldiers on horseback.

Jennifer Aubin is Assistant Director of Media Relations at the Harvard Art Museums.