Art for viewers’ sake
On a recent afternoon, three Harvard conservators perched on ladders and scaffolding to apply final touches to an artistic treasure that has been largely unseen for decades. Soon that will change. When the renovated and expanded Harvard Art Museums reopen this fall, the evocative 10- by 5-foot fresco will be displayed for all to see in a first-floor gallery. “To have the opportunity to tell the story of what is fresco — and this moment in art history, and this social statement — because we have a work like this … was important to us as a teaching museum,” said Mary Schneider Enriquez, Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, about the efforts to ensure that the piece secured a visible spot in the museum’s permanent collection. The work was created in 1933 by Harvard graduate and realist painter Lewis Rubenstein and his collaborator, Italian-born artist Rico Lebrun, as a teaching tool...