Goya to Cage

Pomona Collects

Celebrating the continuing growth of the College’s permanent collection, this exhibition presented a selection of recent acquisitions by the Pomona College Museum of Art. In the past four years, the Museum has made three of the most important acquisitions in its history. In 1998, a superb first edition of Francisco de Goya’s La Tauromaquia was purchased, and in 2000, 17 preparatory drawings by José Clemente Orozco for his Prometheus mural in Frary Hall were acquired. In the spring of 2002, the Museum added to the collection the first graphic work produced by avant-garde composer and artist John Cage. The complex piece, entitled Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, was published in 1969. Cage, who attended Pomona College from 1929 to 1930, used his famous “chance operations” technique to create this seminal work which includes two lithographs along with a series of layered Plexiglas constructions imprinted with image and text fragments.

The artistic and conceptual range seen in these three major acquisitions is further broadened in other recently acquired works by such artists as Kim Abeles, Mowry Baden, Barbara Benish, Joe Goode, Don Normark, Ed Ruscha, Elizabeth Saveri, June Wayne, William Wegman, and William Wendt. The media represented were equally diverse, including painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, etching, and mixed-media construction.