Mesum Get Grant To Catalog Costume

Published: March 23, 2005

The Brooklyn Museum announced yesterday that it would receive nearly $4 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to catalog and photograph its rich collection of American and European costumes and accessories, most of which have been out of public view for more than a decade.

Over the last year the fate of the collection - widely considered one of the five best in the world - has been in question as the museum has explored whether to keep it or enter into a partnership with another institution, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Fashion Institute of Technology, that could better afford the enormous expense of conserving and displaying the 70,000 pieces.

Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, said the final home of the collection remained "an open question" that would not be answered until the inventory （详细目录，总量）of the collection is completed, three and a half years from now.

"If we keep it, we'd only keep it under the circumstances of being able to do all the things essential to conserving and showing this collection the way it should be," he said, adding, "We don't want to keep this collection locked away for another 15 years."

Formed in 1903, the collection was built in part through donations from the closets/壁橱of the grand ladies of Brooklyn and Manhattan. As it grew, a number of noted American designers, including Charles James, gave their own archives to the museum, and it acquired pieces dating as far back as the 16th century. The collection includes many outstanding examples of work by legendary/传说中的 designers like James, Charles Frederick Worth, Elsa Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Norman Norrell, Christian Dior and Paul Poiret. It also has considerable holdings /所有物，财产of 18th-century accessories.

As late as the early 1970's, many of the pieces were shown in a costume theater area in the Brooklyn Museum where they were displayed on mannequins/服装模特 that moved along conveyor belts.

But the collection has been largely out of sight/在看不见的地方 since budget cuts forced the museum to make the costume department a part of the decorative arts department in 1991. And some critics of the museum complain that parts of it have been seriously neglected. In 1999, during an exhibition by the artist Mariko Mori, boxes of costumes were moved into a temporary storage area on the museum's fourth floor, where air conditioners leaked /漏气onto them, damaging dresses, including some by Balenciaga, a person familiar with the collection said.

As the museum was completing a $63 million renovation /革新last year, it began exploring the possibility of sending the collection elsewhere because of the high cost of caring for and storing the pieces, many of them fragile. Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, and Harold Koda, the curator/馆长，监护人 of its Costume Institute, went to Brooklyn to make a proposal to obtain the collection. At the same time, Mr. Lehman was talking with officials at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which has had a long association with the Brooklyn collection and has used pieces from it for teaching purposes.

For both the Met and the Fashion Institute, the Brooklyn collection is attractive because it would complement and deepen their own holdings, especially in the area of 19th- and early 20th-century designers.

Mr. Lehman said there were many reasons that the Brooklyn Museum was considering donating the collection. "There are huge space issues that are involved here," he said. "There are huge conservation issues here and also climate-control issues." But he insisted that the museum would retain a measure of control over the collection even if it ended up being housed and displayed in Manhattan.

"It's not like we would give the collection to someone and say: 'Here. We're forgetting about this. We don't want it any longer,' " he said. "Brooklyn's connection with this collection is not going to be severed, no matter where it is."

During the cataloging project, the dresses and other pieces will be moved from their cramped /狭促的storage spread throughout the museum to a climate-controlled space in Brooklyn. For the first time in the collection's history, a detailed record of all its pieces will be created, with a digital image of each dress, purse, scarf/围巾, shoe, hat, earring /耳环and brooch/胸针. Four thousand of the most important pieces will be photographed at high resolution /决心and at some point made available for viewing online by scholars, the Mellon Foundation said.

"It's a long overdue step," said Patricia Mears, who was in charge of the collection from 1991 to 2003 as assistant curator in the department of decorative arts and now works as a freelance /自由作家consultant. "And it's the first good step toward putting this world-class collection into its proper context."