First-timers, old friends visit Rose

As news of closure spreads, many are drawn to modern art collection

WALTHAM - With "Long Live the Rose!" and "Integrity for Sale" posters plastering the glass wall behind her, artist and educator Robin Dash marveled at the crowds filtering through the main gallery yesterday at the Rose Art Museum. Where normally a scattered few might be admiring the works in quiet contemplation, dozens of people milled about.

"Look at this!" said Dash, who works at the museum, drawing in a sudden breath.

The Rose, which typically draws a few dozen people on Saturday afternoons, had drawn hundreds. The news last week that the Brandeis University trustees had voted to sell the Rose's collection of 6,000 modern and contemporary works and shutter the museum attracted the crowds.

Many were old friends of the Rose - students, alumni, avid museum-goers - but many more were newcomers, some of whom had never heard of the museum before hearing about its closure.

"We just think it's a shame," said Vlad Selsky, a 34-year-old from Arlington who came with his wife and his 6-month-old son as well as his parents, who were visiting from Philadelphia. The couple had learned about the museum from news reports.

"One, we were surprised that it was 10 minutes from our house, and two, we were surprised that it's closing," he said. "We wanted to make sure we see it before anything does happen."

Confronting a financial crisis at the university, Brandeis trustees voted Monday to sell the collection, estimated at roughly $350 million, and close the museum. Amid a resulting outcry that included sharp rebukes from throughout the museum world and a protest that drew 200 students, Brandeis officials floated the possibility of keeping the art collection but closing the museum nonetheless, by summer.

By last evening, more than 4,100 people had signed an online petition to save the Rose. On Thursday night, a Brandeis student group, Art Attack, will lead a "funeral procession" across campus, encouraging museum supporters to dress in black and join them.

And during a gallery talk yesterday, Rose director Michael Rush issued a call to arms, urging people to contact the attorney general's office. "We need people with loud voices who care about art," said Rush. A sale to scattered private collectors, he said, would be "tainted with the blood of those who have the idea that this can be done easily - because it can't, and it won't be."

Yesterday at the Rose, down the cantilevered stairway over the reflecting pool, Hong Yin admired the art on the museum's lower floor, revisiting a place that she had frequented as a biophysics graduate student more than a decade ago. Back then, Yin said, she came to the museum to admire the art, and because the building, bathed in sunlight, offered a place for quiet reflection.

She had visited intermittently in the ensuing years, but last week's news drew her back immediately.

"It's really a shame," said Yin, an Arlington resident now in her 40s. "I think it really is a gem of the university."

Yesterday, Yin brought her 8-year-old daughter, Abigail, a first-time visitor, and one of the girl's friends. While Yin studied a recent photograph by Shannon Ebner, her daughter ran up to a giant Liechtenstein canvas - the iconic "Forget It! Forget Me!" - and studied the comic-book style dots of the Pop-Art classic. "Wow!" the girl said, eyes wide.

Across the hall, a Picasso oil of a reclining nude, from 1934, hung on one side of an exit; the other side held a newer mixed-media canvas by Bruce Conner that appeared to be adorned with a torn bathing cap stuffed with steel wool.

"I don't like that kind of work," said Jay McHale, a Salem State College English professor who had driven from the North Shore with friends Christopher and Carol Kent. "But I do obviously admire greatly the Picasso and the Lichtenstein."

They were first-time visitors. "I'm angry that they're selling the collection," said McHale, who is 68.

But here, anger gave way to contemplation and discussion. "I'm particularly interested in modern art, not the art in the late '60s," he said.

"How long do you think it stays modern?" Christopher Kent asked.

And then the water-meter salesman and the professor, friends for decades, had a spirited discussion about the meaning of "modern."

Kent thought they were living in modern times; McHale told him that the modern age had ended, giving way to contemporary, post-modern, and still newer periods.

"Isn't modern supposed to mean up to date?" Kent said.

"It's not the modern age," McHale said, as they bantered in circles. "We should have had this conversation in the car."

They debated good-naturedly, enjoying themselves in what, for the time being at least, remained a public place to encounter art.