Pacific Northwest Art: The Haseltine Collection

THE HASELTINE COLLECTION of Pacific Northwest Art is shown for the first time with peculiar appropriateness in the Museum of Art of the University of Oregon. This will become the collection's permanent home. It is the largest state-owned art museum in a region the art of which is featured by the collection. And it already houses as its foremost permanent collection a group of over three thousand objects speaking an art language akin to that spoken by works of the Pacific Northwest art: the Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art. Kinship of language is by no means accidental. The Pacific Northwest faces the Orient. It shares with the Orient a similar landscape and a similar climate. The fog-drenched coastline of fantastically varied formations and the hinterland of lush green valleys and densely forested uplands have joined in both cases to evoke a richly romantic art. One sees this art in the Chinese tomb statuettes of the Murray Warner Collection, instinct with rhythmic vitality which a nature inspired Taoism encouraged. One sees it in the hanging-scroll landscapes of China and Japan in the same collection, eloquently suggestive as they are of unseen forces by their great emptinesses against which the stroke of the brush stands out with concentrated force. One sees it in the dance masks and the totem poles of Northwest coastal tribes, carvings of subtly interfused forms and double and triple imagery. One sees it in the unexpected juxtapositions of fragmentary shapes in the sculptures, the prints, the paintings, of the Haseltine Collection, each laden with poetic associations and overtones of saturated color. Such a flavorful regional art prompted the Haseltine Col.lection's inception and it continues to motivate the collection's growth. It reflects in the works composing the collection a highly personal choice, one governed by the taste and feeling of the collector herself, Mrs. William A. Haseltine. Long-time resident of the region, Mrs. Haseltine has lived intimately with the region's art that she has been acquiring. She reacts strongly to its varied messages because she finds in it the moving visual expression of her own experience. Confident that visitors to the galleries where the works of her collection are on view will be able to some extent to share in that experience, we offer this catalogue to accompany it and call attention to its special significance as a catalogue which the collector herself compiled and wrote an autobiographical essay for.

internal publication:catalogue

Museum of Art, University of Oregon

Baldinger, Wallace S.

Pacific Northwest Art: The Haseltine Collection