Two art museum directors walk into a room.
Each is certain the other’s football team will lose.
So they utter the words that have won and lost many fortunes: You wanna bet?
For West Virginia University and Louisiana State University on Sept. 24, the stakes have been raised about as high as they can go.
Each art museum is offering the six-week loan of a prized work of art should the unthinkable happen at that Saturday’s football game between the schools. For LSU, that’s a 19th-century silver tea set fashioned in New Orleans. For WVU, it’s a Rockwell Kent oil painting that focuses on nothing less than coal’s place in America’s history and the foundation of the American Dream.
The banter has the civilized tones of the art world but its mood is as serious as that of opposing linebackers.
“We briefly considered sending six sugar bowls, representing the number of wins that LSU has had in that event, but decorum prevailed,” wrote Thomas Livesay, executive director of the LSU Museum of Art.
For Joyce Ice’s part, the director of The Art Museum of WVU tells him, “Just go ahead and bring that tea set along with the LSU team to present to WVU’s team captains at the end of the game.”
Both are dedicated fans of their teams, knowing in their hearts that it is a matter of when, not if, their team will win.
Yet, they also see an opportunity to highlight their collections in a region so culturally different from their own.
Home is where the art is
In 1947, WVU received one of 10 paintings commissioned by the Bituminous Coal Institute from a noted artist of the time, Rockwell Kent. Each painting was given to a university that was strongly intertwined with coal’s history.
The painting WVU received, “To Make Dream Homes Come True,” is a somewhat abstract portrayal of a god-like figure emerging from the hazy night sky. He holds a piece of coal that sheds light on a few homes which are placed on ground that is marked with the tracings of a future housing development.
The painting is meant to show “the might and power of coal” and portrays a clear vision of the way America’s neighborhoods would change and grow.
Ice said the painting points to the centrality of coal in the quest for that highest of American dreams, the owning of a home.
“It embodies these hopes for progress and the very optimistic spirit of post-World War II,” she said. “After the depression, after the war, the GIs come home—they’re working, they’re building families.”
The tea set that LSU will send when they lose, Ice says, is an antebellum five-piece tea set made of sterling or coin silver that was produced by Adolphe Himmel for importer Hyde & Goodrich, some time between 1855 and 1861. The service includes a coffeepot, teapot, sugar bowl, creamer and bowl.
LSU holds the largest public collection of New Orleans-made silverware, with pieces dating from the 1770s to the late 20th century.
“Since Louisiana has no silver mines, the raw material was made by recycling older, possibly damaged, silver pieces, often combined with silver coins from the New Orleans mint,” Livesay said.
Livesay said the tea set is among the finest pieces in the collection.
The art is serious, but the banter is all in good fun, most of the time.
“We hate to tease the patrons of The Art Museum of West Virginia University with the prospect of this loan, knowing full well that it is more likely to have an iceberg parked in the Mississippi River than to have the Tigers lose to the Mountaineers,” Livesay said.
Ice is now thinking of the New Orleans Saints’ chant in a different way: “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem ‘Eers? Who dat?”
Ice believes the tea set would look lovely at various spots on WVU’s campus, and Livesay would like an advance picture of the Rockwell Kent piece to contemplate where it should be hung.
“When we win.”
“When you lose.”
Place your bets.
The WVU-LSU game will air on Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. on ABC. The ESPN College Football GameDay show will broadcast from WVU’s campus from 9 a.m. to noon.
-WVU-
By Diana Mazzella
University Relations/News
dm/09/13/11
CONTACT: Joyce Ice, The Art Museum of WVU
304-293-6825, Joyce.Ice@mail.wvu.edu
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.