To Borrow or Not to Borrow?

A vintage print of Eliot Furness Porter’s Pool in a Brook, Pond Brook, New Hampshire, October 4, 1953 is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas; the Princeton University Art Museum has a version of the photograph that was printed in 1984. Because the focus of the discussion in Nature's Nation centers around the content of the image rather than the materiality of the print, the curators chose to use the Princeton version rather than borrow the Amon Carter photograph.

On the other hand, George Bellows’s painting Cliff Dwellers in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was deemed essential to the exhibition’s discussion of urban ecology and environmental reform. Unlike the image by Porter, which as a photograph is a “multiple” and exists in numerous prints, the Bellows painting is unique. Its inclusion in Nature’s Nation thus necessitated its transportation to Princeton—in this case by air, one of the few works in the exhibition to travel in this way.