His smile says he knows how this looks. All those years of studying, squinting at dusty texts, the asthma. And now the payoff: after his 1936 lecture on “oriental architecture” at the MIA, three lovely ladies seeking his attention.
Walter Agard was the lucky lecturer. He was a professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, adept at engaging the public in Pericles on programs like This I Believe, Edward R. Murrow’s 1950s radio series of essays from Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, and other luminaries—the ultimate middlebrow entertainment. “When I was 12 years old,” Agard’s essay began, “I often risked pneumonia looking out from a skylight in our attic at the stars….”
The ladies were Friends, as in the Friends of the Institute, founded in 1922 as a women’s auxiliary of the MIA. Their volunteers once ran the museum store and the visitor services desk. They were ubiquitous, and still are if you attend one of their frequently sold-out lectures from intriguing stars of the art world—people not unlike Agard. Yet their initial role as the women behind the men of the museum persisted for decades, as the caption of this photograph makes clear: it lists the women by their husband’s names unless unmarried. From left to right, Marion Cross, Mrs. John DeLaittre, and Mrs. Clifford A. Taney.
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