The Place of Art

With the opening of the Hood Museum of Art on the 26th of this month, Dartmouth makes another major commitment to the arts. It takes me back to June 1962 when I saw the campus for the first time in my adult life. My father's best friend, a late member of the Class of '43, drove me up from my old hometown of Gardner, Mass., shortly after my graduation from high school in Florida. He talked all the way up Rt. 10 about the College, thrilled that I was coming to the best school in America. Dartmouth Row shimmered white in the early morning sun, and there was a sort of muted bustle up and down Main Street. It was summer and there were but a handful of students in town in those days no fullblown summer term as there is now, no coeds, only townspeople conducting their business and a few tourists lolling about on their way to the mountains or upstate Vermont.

I can also remember a rather unsightly, dusty construction site between the Wilson Museum and the Hanover Inn where a very modern structure was going up on the site of what was once Bissell Hall. Its facade didn't seem to fit in, I thought, with the grandeur of the Row and Baker Library. Some five months later, the gangly structure, which snaked its way behind the Inn and Campion's and Tanzi's all the way down to Lebanon Street, was officially dedicated. It was, of course, the Hopkins Center. At the dedication ceremony and this one gave some depth to the meaning of that glitzy word gala Ernest Martin Hopkins '01, the man for whom the Center was named, said, "Personally, I do not think that the influence of this event can be appraised for many years."

To tell the truth, it didn't take many years for me to feel its influence. I was on a kind of collision course with art from the moment I walked into the building. I studied modern art there in a course we called "Darkness at Noon," sang for a term or two with the Glee Club in a rehearsal hall buried in the bowels of the Hop, wondered how in the world they ever got Gaston Lachaise's voluptuous "Standing Woman" mounted in the main foyer, and had the luxury one spring term to use the Studio Theatre (now the Warner Bentley Theater) for a dramatic adaptation several of my classmates and I did of The Spoon River Anthology. What was inescapable was a regular exposure to art. It was everywhere you went in the Hop. We had to pass the galleries on our way to get our mail or attend classes there, and there were always lively posters about, ballyhooing the latest string quartet, the Frost Play Competition, a movie series to take the frost off the edge of winter. Along the long north-south corridors were workshops where we could paint, sculpt, and do all sorts of woodworking. The place like a large toy chest held any number of delights.

Most of my classmates work for a living now, and I suspect that no matter what they do, the exposure we had to art and the arts at Dartmouth has made a difference for many of them. It certainly has for me. To have had a showcase such as the Hopkins Center - which was always more than a building is a luxury every Dartmouth class has had since it was dedicated in the fall of '62. And now, a splendid new structure brilliant in conception and execution opens its doors this month to a group of bright freshmen for whom it will always have been part of campus. And while it may be many years before its impact on their lives will be felt, the Hood Museum of Art will add yet another dimension to the Dartmouth experience; a dimension that the late Harvey P. Hood '18, to whom the College meant so much, would be very happy about, indeed.