THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606140063
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 118 lines
IT'S BEEN nearly four decades since John Davis Hatch Jr. left the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences to continue his career as an art historian and design consultant. Few here may recall his name, but the impact of his tenure persists.
Hatch died May 30 in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89 and had recently returned from a tour of Italy's galleries and gardens. A memorial service was held Saturday in Lenox, Mass.
From 1950 to 1959, he was director of the institution now called The Chrysler Museum of Art. He did not preside over a slow decade. Newspaper stories and his own written accounts of that busy era describe how he built collections where few had existed.
Hatch, who was the museum's second full-time director, began its collections of European paintings, decorative arts and textiles. He also pulled together significant holdings in American drawings and prints and in pre-Columbian art.
Hatch initiated an art conservation program and installed the first environmental controls. He presided over the restoration of The Moses Myers House, now managed by the museum. He enlisted the area Junior League to create educational programs.
In short, John Hatch moved the museum into the modern age.
The most visible reminder of his legacy stands 226 inches high near the main Hague entrance to the museum. A major equestrian statue by Anna Hyatt Huntington, ``The Torchbearers'' has become something of a symbol for the museum.
From 1956 to 1958, when Hatch was writing frequent letters to Huntington, tactfully pressing for a gift of the major cast-aluminum sculpture, he apparently suggested to her that the piece might become an icon for the entire city.
``Dear Mr. Hatch,'' she wrote back. ``Thank you for your card of greeting and the thrilling sentence `Its setting is very happy and it may yet become the symbol of Norfolk!' I am sure your fine city is well on the road to becoming the Torch Bearer of Virginia.''
Huntington's grand gift was installed in 1957, when she was about 80. Clearly, from the letters in the museum's files, it was Hatch who smoothed the way for the acquisition. He praised her husband's poetry, raved about her work and gently complained that Norfolk had so little public sculpture.
On the latter point, he wrote: ``Personally, I think it is a great omission.''
This was no minor coup. Huntington (1876-1973) was a major American sculptor. These days, her many animal forms can be viewed in ideal natural settings at Brookgreen Gardens, just south of Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Hatch was in demand as a speaker. In the late 1950s, he lectured on his pet subjects - American drawings and early 19th century American artist John Vanderlyn - at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. And he served on the boards of local arts groups, including the Norfolk Symphony Orchestra (now Virginia Symphony).
Just before he left town, Hatch told a reporter he was leaving partly because the museum had ``a leadership problem.'' He was concerned that board members didn't realize what it took to run a museum. For instance, the annual budget for exhibitions had only grown to the woeful sum of $1,500.
He also complained that the museum's natural-history curator was actually being paid a night watchman's salary and that the museum had hired only half the number of guards required by national standards.
Besides all that, Hatch really hadn't meant to stay here. He came to Norfolk in late 1949 as a museum consultant and ended up being hired as director. Then, he thought he might stay five years, but remained a decade.
Even as he left, he dropped a precious package behind him - a collection of drawings. Years later, in 1979, Hatch's taste in drawings was legitimized when the National Gallery accepted a gift of 142 drawings from his collection, and it purchased 24 more.
Hatch was an extraordinary man who kept learning and stretching his entire life. In 1993, at age 86, he received a master's degree in classical studies from St. John's College in Santa Fe.
Sue Price was not an angst-filled creator or an egotist. She was an especially modest artist. But when she died in January at age 84, she left her gentle vision hanging on walls throughout the region.
A quiet, elegant woman, Price surely sold hundreds of paintings to area collectors during her 33 years as an exhibitor in the Virginia Beach Boardwalk Art Show, which continues today along the Oceanfront.
She was among the 300 artists in the first show in 1956. And she exhibited every year until 1988, about the time she and her husband, Harry Price, moved from Virginia Beach to Williamsburg.
For this year's Boardwalk Art Show, the $3,000 second-place award was named after Sue Price. The prize was funded by the board of trustees at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, organizers for the outdoor show.
Alice Walter of Virginia Beach, who helped set up the first Boardwalk Art Show, recalled that Price's paintings were always ``absolutely sensible. There wasn't any gimmick. Wasn't anything tricky or anything like that. And that was good. It was real painting.''
The two were friends. ``I thought Sue was a wonderful artist. She could have been famous, I think. But she wasn't the type. She wasn't the type who wanted too much publicity, I think.''
One of her three sons, Bruce Price of Virginia Beach, worries that she wasn't taken seriously, ``because she was a housewife, and married to a successful businessman.''
Bruce Price is an artist, writer and ad man. He described his mother's paintings as ``luminous Impressionism. A soft, mystical Impressionism. She was quite a colorist.''
She mostly painted portraits, still lifes and landscapes. Her seascapes were especially popular, he said. ``She stripped away almost everything. She could paint totally realistic portraits. And yet, when she'd do those seascapes, she'd strip away everything but the sky and the horizon and the water.''
Bruce and his mother exhibited together in a show called ``Price and Price'' at Norfolk Academy in 1988. One of her last gallery exhibits was a 1992 retrospective of her paintings at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts.
She had been a self-taught painter, her son said. ``Her work was pretty. It wasn't arty, in the sense of cerebral. And it wasn't highly accomplished, in the sense of having gone to art school.
``But it kind of emerged for me, in the end, how good she was. Mother, in her modest way, reached almost a great level.'' ILLUSTRATION: FILE PHOTO
Former director John Davis Hatch Jr. was instrumental in persuading
sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington to donate ``The Torchbearers'' to
the museum in 1957.
FILE PHOTO
Hatch helped shape what would become The Chrysler Museum of Art. by CNB