A RAUSCHENBERG WITH MIRO ON THE SIDE, PLEASE

A Miro or Warhol in your dorm room? It may sound ludicrous, but, along with the basics: an e-mail account, membership to the MAC and access to Widener Library, every Harvard student has this opportunity. And it doesn't cost that much. For between $20 and $40 a year, the Fogg Art Museum rents prints, etchings, and woodcuts to students to hang in their rooms.

Just imagine the conversation among the residents of Cabot E-21: Roommate 1: Dahling, just look at this superb Rauschenberg. Won't it look marvelous next to the new futon, over by the halogen lamp. Roommate 2: No, no, dear. You simply have no taste. It must have natural light. Roommate 3: That Rauschenberg is obviously from his late period, and isn't worth hanging. Now the contours in this Miro.... Nct only do you have the perfect excuse for such parlance, you impress friends and neighbors.

This rental progam set up by the Fogg is one way the Museum tries to reach out to students who may only have heard of the Fogg in connection with House formals.

One such student, Babak Fardin '96, has never been to the Fogg. "I don't know much about the arts, but I'd be totally interested in seeing the Picasso and Van Gogh works," Fardin says. "Not knowing the significance of the artwork impedes people from visiting the Fogg," the adds.

Renting art to students is only one program in a long tradition of attempts by the Museum to bring students into museum and art life. In the 1930s and 40s, the Museum offered a course in materials and techniques, in which the students used to paint directly on the walls of the Fogg in the tradition of true fresco, according to Marjorie B. Cohn, curator of prints. The brainchild of former museum director Edward Forbes, it was colloquially known as the "Eggs and Plaster" course. Today, you can poke around in closets and corners of the Fogg and still find these creative student originals on the walls.

These days, the Fogg can't afford to be quite as daring, and it has probably run out of wall space for student frescoes. But the rental program provides a modern option which brings students closer to original art. Every fall, a frenzy ensues in the Fogg's courtyard as undergraduates, graduates and faculty thumb through dolly carts, searching for the original print they want to look at for the next year, Cohn explains.

Students who have participated in the program are positive about it. Nabil Foster '94, a self-described art lover, says, "There really aren't many places in the world where you have [this kind] of resource available to you. It's a wonderful concept that any Harvard student can walk out of the Fogg with a piece of art."

Cohn encourages students to participate in the program, because she says she sees a big difference between appreciating an original and a reproduction. She says that the rental program will "get [students] used to living with original art. Everyone should love works in the original, not just in reproductions."

In addition to benefitting the students, the program provides an opportunity for the Museum to purchase new contemporary works. "We hope to ultimately graduate some [prints] into the permanent collection. A bargain today may someday become very valuable," says Cohn. So, ten or twenty years from now when you visit the Museum, something that hung in your dorm room may be on display to the public.

Begun in the 30s and 40s, the program did not become focused on contemporary art until 1972, when it obtained a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a private donor began a purchase fund. Today, the program supports itself by reinvesting profits earned from rental in insurance and new purchases. The works, which include pieces by many big-name artists, such as Warhol, Rauschenberg and Miro, as well as newer, more up-and-coming artists, are purchased by the Museum from the artists themselves, or from galleries or publishers.

So, dahling, shall we get a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh? They don't have them. We'll settle for a Warhol. It'll look perfect in the place of the passe Robert Doisneau.