The idea of forming a focused collection simply for the love of finding, owning and living with objects has long been aknowledged to be the most satisfying and spiritually rewarding approach to collecting. So began the Baker/ Pisano collection in the early 970s, when interest in early American modernism was not widespread. Informed scholarship was in its infancy, and there were few American art historians of note working in this area. There was a kind of wild free-for-all and casual ordering of American artists working in the opening decades of the 20th century in terms of their importance, although a number were acknowledged to be major talents. Of course many museums had holdings in this area, but there was less of a rigid hierarchy established in terms of which artists were to be canonized. In short, there was no clear-cut template for collecting art in this area.

Frederick Baker, “Living with Art”
Living with Art: Early American Modernism from the Baker-Pisano Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art”

When Ronald G. Pisano and D. Frederick Baker commenced their impassioned search to form the remarkable
collection of fine and decorative art objects that now comprise the Baker/Pisano Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art, they were pioneers. Armed with the determination to build a collection notable for the close interrelationships that resonate between its component parts, these intrepid connoisseurs were less concerned with building a collection of masterpieces by giants. The collection, which came to the Heckscher Museum of Art as a bequest this past year, is comprised of approximately 300 exceptional examples of fine and decorative art spanning the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. It begins with the work of William Merritt Chase, his colleagues and his students, and extends into the mid-twentieth century. A major component is a body of work reflecting the transition toward a modernist aesthetic characterized by shallow pictorial depth, abstracted form and the use of color as an expressive emotive tool. It is the modernist material which is featured in Living with Art: Early American Modernism from the Baker/Pisano Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art, an exhibition dedicated to the memory of Ronald G. Pisano, who passed away in December 2000.

Living with Art consists of 51 of Ron’s favorite modernist works, selected by his life partner, D. Frederick Baker, a
member of the Chairman’s Council of the Heckscher Museum of Art. Among the exceptional pieces included are Florine Stettheimer’s engaging portrait of Louis Bouché, an exquisite work by Charles Prendergast from his celestial period, a pair of golden bronze candelabrum by Paul Manship, and an elegant pastel by Joseph Stella. Other artists represented in the group include Charles Burchfield, Arthur B. Carles, Joseph Cornell, Arthur B. Davies, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Torr, and Marguerite Zorach. In the fall of 2002, the exhibition will be shown at Manhattan’s prestigious Hollis Taggart Galleries, which has generously underwritten and published the fully illustrated 128- page catalogue, which it contains essays by Fred Baker, prominent art historian Avis Berman, and Heckscher chief curator Anne Cohen DePietro, and tributes by William Agee, Richard Boyle, and Dr. William Gerdts.

Over a brilliant career, Ron Pisano became widely recognized as the preeminent scholar on the life and work of
William Merritt Chase and an acknowledged expert on the artists of Long Island. He curated exhibitions at museums throughout the country and abroad, and was loved and revered as a distinguished scholar, a graceful writer, and an eminently kind and good man. His life’s work, a catalogue raisonné of the work of Chase, was nearly complete when he died just before his 52nd birthday. Along with D. Frederick Baker, in the mid-1970s Ron had begun to donate works of art to the Heckscher, where his research as a summer intern had become became the basis of an earlier exhibition, The Students of William Merritt Chase. He subsequently catalogued the estate of Helen Torr, the artist-wife of Arthur Dove, wrote the American section of our collection catalogue, and continued to curate exhibitions for the Museum. Through their generosity, Ron Pisano and Fred Baker have left a legacy of profound importance to the Heckscher Museum of Art. We have named our permanent collection galleries the Baker/Pisano Galleries in acknowledgement of this most exceptional gift to the first museum in which Ron Pisano ever worked, in the community in which he was raised.

Exhibit no longer available