Jan van der Marck, the director of the Dartmouth College Galleries and Collections from 1974 to 1980, passed away in his Michigan home on April 26 at the age of 80, according to his wife of 20 years, Shelia van der Marck.
"He was kind of like a wonderful force of nature you could never tell what was going to happen next, but it was usually pretty great," said George Shackelford '77, who worked with van der Marck as a student intern and employee of the Dartmouth Museum and Galleries.
Shackelford now serves as the chair of the art of Europe and the Solomon Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Jan van der Marck was known for "pushing the envelope" by supporting non-traditional artistic endeavours throughout his career, according to the Hood Museum of Art publication "Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art."
While at Dartmouth, van der Marck oversaw the installation of "X-Delta," a sculpture by Mark di Suvero currently located at the South entrance of the Hood Museum of Art, according to Shackelford. The sculpture was originally placed on the lawn in front of Sanborn Library.
Much of the campus responded negatively to the sculpture because of widespread skepticism about contemporary art and discontent regarding its "informal and unfinished" appearance, Shackelford said.
Campus reactions to the new statue included countless letters, articles in the school and local newspapers, t-shirts in support of the statue and even a spoof of the sculpture made from trash and installed on the Green, according to "Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth."
"This was a piece by an artist who is well-renowned as one of the great sculptors of the latter half of the 20th century, and there it was on the Dartmouth campus and a lot of people didn't get it," Shackelford said.
Van der Marck also oversaw the installation of "Thel," the 135-foot steel and grass sculpture located in front of the Sherman Fairchild Physical Sciences Center, beginning in 1975.
Van der Marck brought the collection "Fluxus: A Tribute to George Maciunas" to the College in 1978, according to "Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth." The collection features works honoring the Fluxus movement, a little-known art movement in New York and Europe in the early 1960s.
"He really was insistent on bringing the most up-to-date and cutting edge works of art up to Hanover, which, until that time, had been content to be a place where more regional contemporary art had been shown," Shackelford said.
Van der Marck also brought the "Kusama couch," a couch designed by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, to Dartmouth, according to associate director of the Hood Museum Katherine Hart. Hart described the couch as "one of the most significant pieces by that artist in a collection in the U.S."
In addition to his time at Dartmouth, van der Marck worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., helped to found the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ill., and directed the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami, Fla., now known as the Miami Art Museum, The New York Times reported.
Jan van der Marck resigned from his position as museum administrator at the Museum of Contemporary Art after inviting the then-relatively unknown Christo and Jeanne-Claude to wrap the museum in canvas, The New York Times reported.
"He saw things differently than regular people," Sheila van der Marck said. "He liked to go out on a limb, and he wasn't seeking controversy he was seeking the new and the unseen, and that was shattering to ordinary people."
As the director of the Miami Art Museum, van der Marck invited Christo and Jeanne-Claude to do another project called "Surrounded Islands" in 1983, in which the artists wrapped 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with pink polypropylene fabric, according to The New York Times.
Jan van der Marck developed relationships with artists and enjoyed finding and supporting new talent, Sheila van der Marck said.
"He socially made himself very available to artists," she said. "He wasn't a guy that only visited the rich people's scene in museum parties he went out to mix with the artists and find them."
Jan van der Marck also enjoyed drawing connections between pieces of art from different geographical regions, according to Sheila van der Marck.
"Some of the most significant pieces of art in our modern contemporary collection came during Jan's tenure, so there's just no doubt that his legacy had a very strong impact and we're very lucky to have had him here because he was very instrumental in building our collection," Hart said.
Van der Marck was born on Aug. 19, 1929 in the Netherlands. He authored eight books and was a rare book collector in addition to his museum work, according to his wife.
