Harvard University, celebrated for its pre-eminent museums-the Fogg, the Busch­-Reisinger, and now the Sackler Museum-has also played a crucial role in educating many of the most influential critics, curators, teachers, collectors, and artists active today. Scholar­critic Rosalind Krauss, artist Robert Mother­well, Metropolitan Museum director Phillipe de Montebello, and National Gallery director J.Carter Brown are all Harvard alumni.

This book documents the history of the Har­vard Art Museums and recaptures the fascinat­ing characters-teachers, students, and ad­ministrators, including Edward Forbes, Paul Sachs, and Charles Eliot Norton-who molded the collection of nineteenth-and twentieth­century art at the university. They acquired modern classics, painstakingly chosen with an eye toward timelessness rather than avant­garde immediacy. The 130 works reproduced in this book thus represent what is likely to prove the most enduring art of the last one hundred years.

Here are works by such acknowledged Euro­pean greats as Monet, Pissarro, van Gogh, and Cezanne and by American masters like Charles Sheeler, John Marin, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith. The work of more contemporary artists abounds as well, with Philip Guston, Julian Schnabel, Enzo Cucchi, Robert Raus­chenberg, Frank Stella, Diane Arbus, Jane O'Neal, and others amply represented. Much of this important and powerful art has never been published before.

The formation of this unique wide-ranging collection and Harvard's vital influence as teacher of generations of art lovers are detailed in the lively text by the university's assistant director for curatorial affairs, Caroline A. Jones, and in accompanying essays by John Rosenfield, current acting director, and John Coolidge, former director, of the Harvard Art Museums.