Once at MIA: An encounter of crowns

Only one of these three is lacking a crown, if not credentials. He’s Dr. Oswald Goetz, a medieval expert from the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1949, he accompanied his museum’s carving of St. Margaret of Alexandria to the MIA for an unprecedented show of sculpture from around the world.

The MIA had hoped to duplicate its blockbuster success from the year before, “The Berlin Masterpieces,” which featured a hundred paintings rescued from the Nazis. It wasn’t going to happen. Patriotism had fueled that show. This 50-piece show was riding on scholarship. Americans weren’t even all that familiar with sculpture, which the MIA acknowledged in its own publicity.

“The masterpieces represent a much longer period of development,” the museum touted, comparing the two shows, “and come from such far-flung places as the plains of Northern China, the palace of Xerxes at Persepolis, ancient Greece, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, the Certosa of Pavia, pre-Columbian America, and modern Europe. They thus provide an extraordinary opportunity for becoming acquainted with an art that is little known and understood in this country.”

The museum felt obliged to explain: “Unfortunately, its unfamiliarity has obscured its purpose, which is—again like painting—simply to convey an idea or an image to the spectator.” What idea this regal sculpture conveyed to the fur-laden spectator is impossible to know, but the best image is certainly the two of them together.

Watch for more Once at MIA flashbacks every Monday at MIA Stories.