🔒Little-known Yale furniture collection finds new home

Walking into the Leslie P. and George H. Hume American Furniture Study Center is like entering the final scene of Citizen Kane, where the camera slowly pans over a seemingly endless collection of objects stored in a vast, dark and mysterious warehouse.

Located at Yale’s West Campus in Orange (the former Bayer Pharmaceutical corporate complex) the Yale University Art Gallery’s Furniture Study is hardly a warehouse. Its more than 1,300 pieces of American furniture and clocks aren’t crated, but rather displayed in all of their glory, organized by type and chronology and presented in agreeable conditions in a comfortable environment.

Following a year-long move, the vast collection is now open to the public for Friday tours and by special appointment.

The Furniture Study (as it’s informally known) is an appealing addition to Yale’s phalynx of museums and collection centers that include the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, to name just the best-known and publicly promoted centers open to the public without charge.

There’s potential for greater public interest in the Furniture Study. While not everyone can relate to a Picasso or a Duchamp, a cool piece of furniture is something most anyone can understand, connect with and appreciate.

While not as formal a setting as a museum — the Furniture Study’s primary purpose is educational, with classroom sessions regularly held there — it’s just one more addition to New Haven’s art attractions that make the city an even more powerful draw for connoisseurs, students and the art-loving hoi polloi.

It also adds another star attraction to Yale’s West campus — made up of 17 buildings totaling 1.6 million square feet on 136 acres. Yale acquired the complex from Bayer Pharmaceutical in 2007, paying $109 million for the site and buildings, making it a kind of under-the-radar “Yale West.”

But it’s not as if the Furniture Study never existed or was completely out of sight when it was in downtown New Haven. It was? Oh, didn’t you know?

“It’s always been open to the public since it was founded in 1959,” explains Patricia Kane, the Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts.

For decades the collection — armoires, chairs, tables, desks, mirrors, cupboards, sideboards, desks, clocks, couches and wooden objects dating from the 17th century to the present day — was housed in the “zero ambiance” basement of 149 York Street. The proximity to Yale’s other museums and classes was ideal — but the building that housed it was not.

The old basement site had “lots of issues,” says Kane, including fluctuations in temperature and humidity, narrow aisles, inadequate exhibition space and the fact that the building had water leaks and was prone to flooding. The basement’s ceiling height — or rather lack of height — with pipes crisscrossing the ceiling, meant that many of the taller pieces could not be presented there and were further exiled into “dark storage.”

The administration realized the collection needed a better solution to the priceless collection but it couldn’t commit to a vast facility in downtown New Haven where real estate has been increasingly at a premium — and which Yale already had long-term plans for many of the finite number of prime extant exhibition locations.

A large selection of clocks are among the many items on display.

The decision was made to relocate the Furniture Study to the West Haven campus seven miles from downtown New Haven, where the pieces could finally be presented in a safe, open, accessible and hospitable space.

“They wanted to build out the arts component of the West Haven campus and it soon became clear that our future was there,” says Kane.

Instead of the former 12,000 square feet of space, the collection now has nearly 18,000 square feet, presented on two levels.

“Now there are soaring ceilings, state-of-the-art lighting, and temperature and humidity controls,” says John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts.

And who attends the weekly tours?

“Students, faculty and people who collect and people who just love these pieces,” Gordon explains. “The Study has always been that cross between a teaching space and an exhibition space, and we want to continue that and broaden that.

“You don’t need to know anything about furniture to take the tour and to come see and be amazed by it,” Gordon adds. “You just need to be curious and appreciative. Or if you’re someone who is interested in learning more about what is rococo style in furniture or what exactly is Chippendale, we can just focus on that, too.”

Open to the public?

But the larger question remains: How accessible does Yale want the center to be with at present just an hour or so a week for public tours?

“We put a lot of work into it, so we want it to be very successful,” says Gordon. “The goal of the study back to its founding in 1959 is giving visual access to the collection.”

An increase of public opportunity would probably first come with school groups, says Kane, especially with the addition of new educational components on display at the Furniture Study, such as exhibits featuring the different kinds of wood, tools, cutting, crafting and gilt techniques, to displays of different kinds of upholstery. One display even follows the many complex steps of the journey a piece of furniture navigates from tree to parlor.

“Curators talk in a certain language,” says Kane, “and we think everyone understands us, but many people don’t have a clue about what we’re talking about. But now we can show, for instance, what a mortise and tenon joint is or a what a particular type of wood is — and it all comes alive.”

Could the West Haven complex eventually grow to be a new destination for the arts?

“Critical density is important,” says Gordon.

Originally, the building was a way to lessen the pressure of storage space for Yale’s arts holdings downtown.

“We very quickly realized it could be much more,” says Gordon. “There’s always this ethical question about why a museum collects more than it can exhibit. If [art objects] only live their lives in darkness, what benefit are they doing? To create these study centers was a way of animating the collections and allowing people to see the collection in new ways.”

The ways of seeing the objects are different, too.

“When you’re in a museum you have things that are pre-selected for you,” explains Gordon. “When you’re in a study center you get to see comparisons across while range of materials.”

Also in the Collection Studies Center building at Yale West Campus is the 49,000-square-foot Margaret and Angus Wurtele Study Center, an open-access storage facility where 37,000 three-dimensional art objects — ceramic dishes, stone statuary, silver candlesticks, glass goblets — from Yale’s many collections and storage facilities are on view. It’s open for scholarly study by appointment.

There’s also the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH) — Yale’s world-class art conservation studio and research laboratories — and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History’s storage facility.

The potential is there to do much more there, says Gordon, “and we’re looking toward the future about what else can we do it there. We’re thinking collaboratively, too. But we’re probably talking about over the next decade. After all, the furniture study was five years of planning and execution. It’s all about the long view.”

He pauses, then smiles. “But if someone comes to us with a very big check, things could move much faster.”

The Furniture Study is open by appointment to individuals and groups of fewer than 18 people from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. Public tours take place Fridays beginning at 12:20 p.m. at the center at 900 West Campus Drive, West Haven where ample free parking is available. Or, visitors can take the free shuttle, known as the “Art Gallery Express,” from departs from outside the Yale University Art Gallery, 201 York St., at noon each Friday. Seating on the shuttle is limited, so early arrival is advised. All visitors gather at 12:20 p.m. in the lobby of 900 West Campus Drive to be escorted to the Hume Furniture Study. Late arrivals cannot be accommodated. Following the tour, the return shuttle departs 900 West Campus Drive at 1:30 p.m.