Oral Histories

Interview of John Coolidge

Director of Fogg Art Museum. Professor of fine arts at Harvard University with a focus on modern art and architecture.
Subtitle:
The Modern Sensibility at the Fogg Art Museum
Series:
Art History - Oral Documentation Project
Topic:
Art
Biographical Note:
Director of Fogg Art Museum. Professor of fine arts at Harvard University with a focus on modern art and architecture.
Interviewer:
Smith, Richard Candida
Interviewee:
Coolidge, John
Persons Present:
Coolidge and Smith.
Place Conducted:
Coolidge's home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Supporting Documents:
Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research.
Interviewer Background and Preparation:
The interview was conducted by Richard Cándida Smith, Principal Editor, UCLA Oral History Program; B.A., Theater Arts, UCLA; M.A., Ph.D., United States History, UCLA.The interviewer prepared for the interview by reviewing Coolidge's articles and books. He examined publications and memoirs touching on the history of the Fogg Art Museum and the Harvard University Fine Arts Department. He consulted papers deposited at the Widener Library, Harvard University, and at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. He also examined records relating to the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in the Department of Special Collections at the Getty Center. Getty Center staff prepared a chronological listing of Harvard Fine Arts faculty, their courses, and their doctoral students. Another source of information for this interview were the proceedings of the 1988 Society of Architectural Historians symposium on architectural history in the United States.
Processing of Interview:
Vimala Jayanti, editor, edited the interview. She checked the verbatim transcript of the interview against the original tape recordings, edited for punctuation, paragraphing, and spelling, and verified proper names. Words and phrases inserted by the editor have been bracketed.Coolidge reviewed the transcript. He verified proper names and made a number of corrections and additions.Teresa Barnett, senior editor, prepared the table of contents, biographical summary, and interview history. The index was compiled by Janet Shiban, Gold Shield intern, 1992-1993, UCLA Oral History Program.
Length:
13.75 hrs.
Language:
English
Copyright:
Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library.
Series Statement:
The interviews in the series Art History - Oral Documentation Project are part of a cooperative venture between the Oral History Program and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, documents a generation of scholars who developed and elaborated paradigms of art history established in the late nineteenth century to forge a twentieth-century discipline.