In Memoriam

Elaine Dee, the former Curator of the Prints and Drawings Department (1968–1990) at the present Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, passed away on August 3, 2020, in Saint Louis, Missouri. Elaine was a talented curator and an amazing person. Although humble in her manner, she was hard working and strove to achieve the best in her superb writing and exhibitions. She was also a dedicated supervisor who always demanded excellent performance from those who worked for her. While an undergraduate at Oberlin College, she worked part-time as a Curatorial Assistant at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Her time at the Allen, recognized as one of the best academic art museums in the nation, prepared her for Harvard University’s graduate art history program based at the Fogg Art Museum.

Training under Agnes Mongan, the Fogg’s lauded Curator of Drawings, shaped Elaine’s love of French eighteenth-century drawings and prints. Upon receipt of her master’s degree at Harvard, Elaine joined the J. Pierpont Morgan Library’s Prints and Drawings Department as Assistant Curator to the renowned Keeper Felice Stempfle. Elaine’s mentoring under Felice set the level of her work ethic, which she applied to her daily tasks: organizing and installing drawings and prints exhibitions, cataloguing acquisitions, assisting in the care and conservation of the collections, organizing material for loans, and assisting visitors studying the collections. She also curated the exhibition Views of Florence and Tuscany by Giuseppe Zocchi, 1711–1767: Seventy-Seven Drawings from the Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library (1971), which had an accompanying catalogue. As a separate project, Elaine organized the traveling exhibition Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Drawings (1965), supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and with a catalogue published by the American Federation of Arts; it traveled to many institutions, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The Morgan Library’s great collection of French material supplied the foundation for her life-long interest in the architect/designer Gilles-Marie Oppenord and for her move in 1968 as Curator of Drawings and Prints to the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Design, where the collection contained important Oppenord holdings. Elaine assumed the position previously held by Richard P. Wunder, who joined the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts. When the Smithsonian took over the Cooper Union Museum in 1968, Elaine oversaw the complicated collections move from Cooper Union’s foundation building in New York City’s Cooper Square to the Andrew Carnegie Mansion at 2 East 91st Street. On the mansion’s fourth floor, Elaine maintained the study room that later, under the patronage of the great drawings benefactor Drue Heinz, became the Drue Heinz Study Center for Drawings & Prints. In 1987, when department members were still locating collection objects in a yet to be organized temporary storage space, one of the staff suddenly noticed a drawing resting on a stool under a piece of glassine. “What is this?” she cried out. To everyone’s surprise and delight, it turned out to be a forgotten design for a harpsichord cover by Oppenord!

In her almost 30 years at the museum, Elaine promoted the collection and produced important exhibitions and books, including: The Two Sicilies, Drawings from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (1970); Etchings by the Tiepolos: Domenico Tiepolo’s Collection of the Family Etchings (with George Knox, 1976); Idee und Anspruch der Architektur; Zeichnungen des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts aus dem Cooper- Hewitt Museum, New York (1979–80); Robert Adam & His Style: City Dwellings and Country Houses (1982); Versailles: The View from Sweden (with Guy Walton, 1988); Courts and Colonies: The William and Mary Style in Holland, England, and America (with Reinier Baarsen, Gervase Jackson-Stops, and Phillip M. Johnston, 1989); Design into Art: Drawings for Architecture and Ornament; The Lodewijk Houthakker Collection (with Peter Fuhring and others, 1989); and Japanese Woodblock Prints in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (with Thomas S. Michie, 1979).

Elaine published frequently, facilitating important attributions and scholarship on the expansive collection under her care. She also built the twentieth-century design collection, including the archive of the Ukrainian-born designer Simon Lissim, a painter, teacher, stage designer, and ceramicist partial to ornamenting his works with vines, flowers, birds, and other natural motifs. Promoting the department’s holdings was another feature of Elaine’s activity, as she invited school and university groups into the department to observe and learn from the collection.

Concerning the study and cataloguing of Italian drawings, Elaine had the support and expertise of her loyal friend, architectural photographer and art historian Phyllis Dearborn Massar (1916–2011). Phyllis’s and Elaine’s curiosity and interest in all things Italian drew them to different parts of Italy every spring. Elaine did the driving and Phyllis organized the sites and the planning. In 1966, after the momentous flood in Florence, Elaine traveled there with many others to work on conserving the water-soaked books and drawings. In addition to her travel and her work with Phyllis, Elaine enjoyed the friendship of Mrs. Christian Aall, who was always happy to support the purchase of Dutch, English, and French architectural or landscape material. Two of the last gifts, which she and her husband donated, were a pair of English watercolor landscapes featuring exotic pagodas (1992-57-1/2). These loyal donors dedicated these gifts to Elaine in honor of her retirement.

In her mid-career, Elaine dove into the museum’s unparalleled collection of American nineteenth-century drawings and prints. Starting in 1904, the museum, under pressure from Cooper Union’s teachers and its board, had begun acquiring donations of archives of nineteenth-century American painters, the most significant of these were the archives of Winslow Homer donated from 1912 through 1918 by Homer’s brother Charles Savage Homer Jr., and that of Frederic Edwin Church gifted to the museum by his son Louis Palmer Church in 1917. Both of these donations came through the assistance of Museum Council board member Charles W. Gould and his artist protégé Eliot Candee Clark, who served as the liaison with Church’s son. Clark visited Olana, Church’s home in Hudson, New York, on multiple occasions, selecting the drawings and oil sketches and arranging their shipment to New York.

The museum’s curator and later director Calvin Sutliff Hathaway (1907–1974) wrote the earliest publication on the Homer drawings in the museum’s Chronicle (“Drawings by Winslow Homer in the Museum’s Collections,” vol. 1, no. 2, April 1936) prior to his service in Europe as one of the Monuments Men (September 1943–May 1946). Elaine published and exhibited the Homer collection in Winslow Homer, 1836–1910: A Selection from the Cooper-Hewitt Collection (1972), which remains today the “go to” Homer reference book in the department. Her research on the Church material bore fruit working with Americanist Theodore E. Stebbins on his landmark project Close Observation: Selected Oil Sketches by Frederic Church (1976). Her investigations in the American collections continued in the 1980s with Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Drawings in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (1982) and To Embrace the Universe: Drawings by Frederic Edwin Church (1984). Elaine had a close relationship with print collector and Smithsonian board member Arthur Ross, whose named gallery at the University of Pennsylvania held her final Church exhibition, Frederic E. Church: Under Changing Skies; Oil Sketches and Drawings from the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution (1992). 

After retiring from Cooper Hewitt in 1990, Elaine published her decades-long research on Oppenord in Master Drawings (“Ornament Thoughts: Gilles-Marie Oppenord,” vol. 28, no. 3, Autumn 1990, 332–37). She also organized a final exhibition at her neighborhood Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, Hans Weingaertner: A Retrospective (1993). Finally, she and her husband Joe were able to enjoy their dream house in Truro, Massachusetts, overlooking Cape Cod Bay. In addition to gardening, Elaine used her super organizational skills to benefit both the Truro Public Library and the Truro Historical Society Museum and Archives. She was respected and beloved by all her colleagues at these institutions. As one associate wrote, “Elaine was such a valuable member of the Truro Historical Society and with all of her curatorial experience she helped move our museum into the 21st century. She was a pleasure to work with and a joy to have as a friend.” 

Elaine married the highly regarded art historian William H. Gerdts in 1952, though the marriage ended in divorce after ten years. In 1963, she married the talented artist Leo Joseph Dee, who predeceased her in 2004. She is survived by her son Jeffrey Evans Dee from her first marriage, his wife Susan Dean Dee, her grandchildren Joanna Dee Das and James Dee, and her great-grandchildren Keerthan and Jaya Das. Elaine was admired by many of her friends and colleagues in the Print Council who remember her fondly, along with her many department interns and museum staff.

The author is grateful to the following for their helpful and generous assistance: Jeffrey Evans Dee, Elaine’s devoted son; colleagues: Caitlin Condell, Associate Curator and Head, Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design Department, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Angela Hall, Human Resources, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator, The Morgan Library & Museum.