Richard Brauer studied art history at the Institute of Design, Chicago’s breeding ground for modernists, and he specialized in 20th-century American art. But when Brauer joined the faculty at Valparaiso University in 1961, he became caretaker of a collection heavy with 19th-century landscapes and portraits influenced by the Hudson River school. It included painters like Frederick Edwin Church and Junius R. Sloan, whose son Percy, a Chicago public school teacher, had donated the collection to the Indiana university. “I didn’t know what to make of it at first,” Brauer recalls. “It was a struggle for me. I mean, there were an awful lot of cows in those pastures. But there was something genuine there. I could see these were strongly felt works of art.”
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With abstraction still dominating American art and the pop explosion right around the corner, Valparaiso’s collection couldn’t have been more out of step with the times. Brauer was charged with the task of upgrading it and broadening its scope, but he wasn’t given much to work with in the way of funds. “There was very little money,” he recalls. “We regularly bought in four figures. If I had no restrictions, I might have tried for what was hot. I might have said, ‘Let’s get a Motherwell or a Jackson Pollock.’ But what we got then we couldn’t buy now. They were affordable because they were not as sought after then.”
Now 70, Brauer has retired, but he still keeps an office in the museum. White-bearded and ruddy, he shows off the building–not just the galleries but the loading docks, the conservation rooms, and the basement with its 14-foot ceilings and state-of-the-art storage; the permanent collection is stored on sliding metal racks. “This is as good as it gets,” Brauer says. He points out a self-portrait by Junius Sloan, whose paintings formed the core of Valparaiso’s original collection. Though Brauer’s mission was to expand the collection beyond the Hudson River school, 37 years of tending to Sloan’s work has left him with a remarkably detailed knowledge of the artist’s life. “In the end, I think Junius was disappointed with himself as an artist,” Brauer explains. “I think he thought he was a failure. But the effort he made to be accurate, the level of detail, make him important. He’s given us these rare and important documents. What they are, really, is a record of the commonplace.”
