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The academic life is often imagined a lonely pursuit, full of exhaustive study and solitary rumination. The reality, as anyone who's spent much time on the Hilltop Campus might tell you, is that education is a cooperative venture and, moreover, that forging new educational opportunities takes negotiation, organization and the ability to create consensus. Just ask Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts and director of the Washington University Gallery of Art.
"I have found that, generally speaking, two or more minds are better than one mind," Weil said with a laugh. "Scientists work this way all the time, but humanists tend not to. Which is certainly a shame."
Apt sentiments from a man whose many duties also include chairing the University's Visual Arts and Design Center (VADC), a cooperative venture aiming to link the Gallery of Art, School of Art, School of Architecture, Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences and the Art and Art History Library through shared facilities and curricular programming.
As a first-year graduate student, Weil was initially overwhelmed by Schapiro's demanding schedule and briefly considered auditing the course. By way of compromise, Schapiro instead assigned Weil to write a close analysis of three miniatures from the famed "Vienna Genesis," a sixth-century manuscript in the collection of Columbia University. A week later Weil had selected four, all illustrations from the life of Joseph.
"Schapiro asked me what I had selected, and I told him, and he said: 'Mr. Weil, you have picked the most beautiful miniatures in the book,'" Weil recalled. "'But if you're going to work on the life of Joseph you need to read the following,' at which point he rattled off six books written in German. So he not only taught me about the history of art; he also taught me to read German."
Weil spent the next nine months researching what would become a 12-page paper, though as the year drew to a close he continued working on an exhaustive bibliography. Schapiro, Weil remembered, was unimpressed. "'Dear boy,' he told me, 'either you hand me the paper and I will know your bibliography or you hand me your bibliography and I will know the paper you would have written.' And of course, only from Meyer Schapiro would one believe a statement like that.
"It was one of the formative experiences of my life," Weil concluded. "The man trained me to have the discipline to study a new field and to do excellent work in the process."
Weil received a doctorate in 1968 and soon joined the art history faculty here. Over the next 30 years he would teach courses on Renaissance architecture, Northern Renaissance art, Mannerism, Italian Baroque art, Rembrandt van Rijn and 15th- through 17th-century art theory, among many others. He twice served as department chair, 1982-88 and 1995-99.
Weil's scholarship falls into four primary areas: Italian Baroque sculpture, 16th- and 17th-century garden and stage design, the Marvelous and connoisseurship. Over the years he has authored numerous articles and exhibition catalogues as well as a book on "The History and Decoration of the Ponte S. Angelo" (1974). Significantly, he has written several works in collaboration with other scholars, including articles with art historians Rudolph Primesberger and Margaretta Darnall and catalogues with curators Roger Ward of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; Barbara Butts, formerly of the Saint Louis Art Museum; and Thomas Rassieur, now of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Weil was named director of the Gallery of Art in 1998, but even before that he found ample opportunity to don the curator's cap, organizing exhibitions on "Baroque Theatre and Stage Design" (1983) and "Master Drawings From the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art" (1989). Other exhibitions on which he collaborated include "The Age of the Marvelous" (1991) for Dartmouth College and "Men, Women, and God: German Renaissance Prints From St. Louis Collections" (1997) for the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Throughout his career, Weil has continually sought opportunities to bring colleagues from other university areas into a dialogue with the visual arts. In the mid-1970s, for example, he and his wife, Phoebe, herself a renowned art conservator, were part of an interdisciplinary group, led by Robert M. Walker, Ph.D., the McDonnell Professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, that founded the Center for Archaeometry, an organization that would pioneer new methods for cleaning and restoring sculpture.
In the early 1980s Weil organized a campuswide Baroque festival that included an exhibition, a symposium and a production of Handel's opera "Orlando" featuring faculty and students from the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. A few years later, Weil helped organize a Japanese Festival that included a groundbreaking exhibition of early 20th-century Japanese oil painting titled "Paris in Japan."
"These are really typical, I've discovered, of the kinds of things I find myself doing," Weil said with a slight, bemused smile. "One of the advantages to working at a place like Washington University is that you get to work with fabulous people from a wide variety of disciplines."
These days, between teaching, directing the gallery and overseeing the development of the VADC, Weil is a man with precious little free time.
"'Gallery' is really a bit of a misnomer," Weil explained. "We are a fully accredited museum with a collection of more than 3,000 works of art and an additional 14,000 Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins."
The gallery's mission, as he sees it, is three-fold: to care for those works of art; to make them accessible to scholars and to the general public through exhibitions and programming; and to organize exhibitions of borrowed works of art that enlarge on the University collection.
To the latter end Weil, who is also a trustee of the Saint Louis Art Museum, is well served by strong ties to the local art community and to museum professionals nationwide. Recent gallery offerings have included exhibitions of African art and Japanese painting, both culled entirely from local collections, as well as a show of more than 20 busts by the great French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) from the Michael Hall Collection, New York.
"Mark is deeply committed to the arts in St. Louis," said Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. "His close ties to both the regional and the national arts community make him an outstanding ambassador for the visual arts at Washington University. I look forward to exciting developments in this area under Mark's leadership in the years to come."
If the gallery, with its exhibitions and attendant programming, is the most public face of the visual arts at the University, Weil has been busy behind the scenes as well. In 1995 he became a founding member of the VADC executive committee and last year was appointed its chair.
"Our other job is to put together a series of interdisciplinary programs -- both curricular programs and public events -- that will enhance the study of the visual arts at Washington University."
Yet despite the demands of heading two significant campus areas, Weil still finds time to work directly with students, both through internships -- the Gallery hires around 30 work/study students each year -- and in the classroom. Last year Weil instituted a series of seminars on connoisseurship to give students a hands-on understanding of the curator's role.
"Washington University possess all the resources necessary to becoming a national venue for the study of the visual arts -- strong academic programs, renowned faculty and one of the finest university art collections in the country," Weil concluded. "The most important role I play is simply to help make the University an important place for people to visit as they look to broaden their knowledge of the visual arts."
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