May 8, 1934

“Picasso, Matisse In Unusual Vassar Art Week Exhibition,” said The Miscellany News, as some 50 works of modernist art by 18 artists and a series of lectures in a week of brilliant art events stirred college enthusiasm. Works by DeChirico, Dali, Derain, Dufy, Ernst, Klee, Luçat, Matisse, Miro, Picasso, Rouault, and Tchelitchew, along with 30 pieces of American sculpture were featured in the annual art week. A major lender of the paintings was the eminent maritime lawyer T. Catesby Jones who, with his second wife, had begun collecting works—chiefly of the School of Paris—in the early 1920s.

The lectures included in Art Week were by: A.E. Austin Jr., director of the Hartford Museum, who spoke on “Contemporary Painting”; French painter and tapestry artist Jean Lurçat, who spoke on “Peinture Françaises Contemporaires”; William Lescaze, Swiss-born American architect, who spoke on “Contemporary American Architecture”; Edward M.M. Warburg, art patron and founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, whose topic was “Lachaise and Sculpture Today”; and Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder and editor of the literary journal Hound and Horn and a principal sponsor of the new School of American Ballet, who spoke on the “Historical Background of the Ballet”.

In 1943, Catesby Jones, whose first wife, Olga Hasbrouck ’05, died in 1913, gave to the college in her memory the Olga Hasbrouck Collection, a selection of Chinese porcelain from the Han, Tang and Sung dynasties. Writing in 1943 about her and about the Celadon and Temmokus ceramics in the Hasbrouck Collection:“Olga Hasbrouck, although she died before reaching the age of thirty years, left a vivid memory to many friends. Her wit and humor endeared her to her classmates, and her striking appearance left an impression not easily forgotten. She was endowed with a mass fo magnificent auburn hair, which she set off by wearing greens, the Celadon shades preferred—a color suggested both by her hair and the date of her birth [March 17, 1884]…. What has now been collected and given to Vassar College in her name does represent her spirit. Subtle in both form and color, restrained, yet full of wisdom.”

The Miscellany News, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center archives