G Profile: John Nolan

Birthplace: Toledo, Ohio, April 12, 1970
Family: wife, Anne; children J. Connor, 11;E. Sawyer, 4; Olivia, 3
Recent Venture: “The Historic Guide to Greenville,” published in 2008 (History Press, Charleston)
Favorite Destination: Bruges, Belgium
Favorite Museums:The Frick Collection (NYC), Uffizi (Florence, Italy), Guggenheim, Bilbao
Favorite Artist: Caravaggio

The art he works with every day may be Baroque, but John Nolan is quite the Renaissance man. Curator of the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery, a trained studio artist, art historian, scholar, author, local history expert and tour guide, and father of three, Nolan, thirty-eight, packs a lot of living under his staid exterior. With his quiet demeanor and a voice that never seems to go above a guarded timbre, John Nolan is caretaker, eternal student, and keyholder of one of the finest collections of religious art in the United State

It is when he is surrounded by these magnificent works—oil paintings, drawings and prints, biblical artifacts, stained glass windows, sculptures, textiles, furniture, and icons—in the maze of the museum’s galleries, peering up at their splendor, that he comes alive. As he approaches paintings he has studied in detail while taking a visitor through the museum, he becomes animated, directing his enthusiasm toward the dramatic Rubens, Tintorettos, Veroneses, Cranachs, Murillos, van Dycks, Dorés, and other works with which he is entrusted.

“Just the pathos that this is communicating, the flesh tones … laying the body out for us,” he says, standing close with arms raised to the Spanish Baroque “Entombment of Christ” by Jusepe de Ribera.

Walking through the galleries, each one more stunning than the last, the bespectacled Nolan points out subjects of his study in the six Italian Baroque halls and beyond. Here is a Botticelli “Madonna and Child with Angel” tondo (a round painting); there—”Madonna by the Lake” by Marco d’Oggiono, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s best students. The provenance of the painting has been traced back to Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine.

Moving in front of a Carlo Dolci “Madonna and Child,” he seems mesmerized. “Look at the way the basket is rendered, the velvet, the headdress,” indicating the realistic precision with which the artist has depicted a plush cushion, on which the baby stands, and an almost-tangible gossamer fabric woven into the Madonna’s hair.

“It always makes it more important when you can trace the story back,” Nolan points out, coming out of his reverie to survey other paintings in the room. “It ups the value monetarily, but also historically.”

A particularly dramatic period for art, Italian Baroque wasn’t a popular choice for collecting in the early- to mid-20th century, he explains. Bob Jones Jr., whom Nolan assisted for two years with the collection, was able to acquire an impressive number of works from that period that form the nucleus of the school’s collection.

These tidbits of information Nolan gleaned from the president himself, working under him for the last two years of his life. “I shadowed Dr. Jones Jr. as much as I could,” recalls the curator. “I wanted to learn everything about the collection before it couldn’t be passed down [anymore].”

After completing his master’s degree in 1992 at BJU in painting and drawing, with a minor in Italian art history, Nolan worked at the university press illustrating textbooks. With a particular affinity for Italian art, Nolan clearly admired the BJU collection and wrote his own proposal to be an assistant to Dr. Jones at the museum and sent it to him. He got the job, and watching the man at work afforded Nolan not only an in-depth look into the massive collection, but also an understanding of the way Jones went about collecting the art and dealt with people.

“I could be there with his tours and got a sense for his love of this collection … the rapport he had with people,” Nolan says of his mentor. Jones died in 1997, and it was then that Nolan became the museum’s first curator.

For a studio arts undergraduate from Toledo, Ohio, heading up one of the major collections of Italian Baroque art in the country, which happens to be in the South, was less of a circuitous route than one might think. With a teacher father and a mother who worked as a newspaper sales representative, Nolan was pegged a creative soul early in childhood. As a young child, he was copying cartoons by eye into his notebooks and was summarily placed in private art classes at age six. By the time he was in high school, he had won a contest at the Toledo Museum of Art.

“I came to a realization that things won’t come to me,” Nolan says evenly, recalling the rigorous application process. “I had to go out and get it.”
With the same drive, as a Bowling Green State University student, Nolan applied for a summer course in Florence, Italy. It would prove to be a turning point in his art education. Classes were never held in the classroom, for one. With history surrounding him at every turn, down every alley, and in every square, all expressed through the city’s art, Nolan’s interest began to shift from studio art to art history.

“Once you go to Italy, you’re under its spell,” Nolan enthuses, noting that visiting the duomi, museums, and cathedrals and absorbing their spirit “gave me an itch, and I’d do anything to do more of that.” Coming back to the states that summer and going to Williamsburg, Virginia, with his family was a bit of a disappointment, he chuckles, after walking on thousand-year-old cobblestones.

An eventful few years in college included committing himself to his faith after attending a Christian speaking engagement with his father. “I was having less in common with the people in my field,” Nolan says of his shift in faith. A search for graduate schools, aided by a friend at Nolan’s church who had attended Bob Jones, brought him to Greenville.

Ultimately, in his new position as curator—the Museum and Gallery’s first—Nolan has charged himself with mastering the collection and transforming the exhibitions into learning experiences for other scholars, students, and the community at large.

Freshman students are required to visit the Museum and Gallery, and other work from the collection—including secular works of portraiture, landscapes, and still lifes—decorate university common areas and hallways.

“There’s a fundamental belief at the university that we must include the liberal arts and the fine arts,” he muses. “… It helps students appreciate fine things of beauty, which reflect God.”

Nolan has created a litany of art lectures that are open to the public; within the collection itself, he has clustered teachers and their masters in certain galleries. He organizes academic symposiums, such as the forthcoming “Tommaso del Mazza” and the Florentine “Tradition in November,” in conjunction with the exhibition “Twilight of a Tradition.”

A seven-hundred-year-old painting from the Louvre is on loan to the Museum and Gallery for the exhibition. It is part of a triptych altarpiece by Italian Gothic painter Tommaso del Mazza. Already three of del Mazza’s works are in the museum’s permanent collection, but this is the first exhibition of its kind focusing on the artist’s work, and the first time a piece from the Louvre has been to Greenville.

Such “firsts,” along with his heavy dedication to the collection and eagerness to share the information, have earned praise from many of his colleagues in the field. (Nolan has curated no fewer than nine large exhibitions for the university.)

“What’s been amazing are the specialized exhibitions that John’s generated [and] that the origins come from the Bob Jones collection, “says Dr. Aaron DeGroft, director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary. “They’ve done some very important ones.”

“You become a big fan of your collection,” he says, “and of the Baroque in general; and I think you have to see these things every day to become a fan. His understanding of the collection has really evolved, and his own appreciation has grown immensely.”

DeGroft notes that Nolan’s background as a studio artist has only helped him to appreciate the artists’ choices of color and composition. “He’s very humble and modest,” DeGroft observes, having been a colleague for ten years, “and he’s an awfully nice fellow. His contribution to the knowledge of the collection has been really wonderful.”

Reaching out further to the community with the collection, Nolan has overseen the opening of the Museum and Gallery at Heritage Green in downtown Greenville, which will afford visitors a look into parts of the collection without having to venture onto campus. Selections from the primary collection of more than four hundred Old Master works will not only feature BJU’s famed sacred art, but also secular works, such as the upcoming portrait show. This move will open the collection further to the public.

“It seems [the collection] was a fairly well-guarded secret there in Greenville,” maintains Dr. Bill Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, who has known Nolan for sixteen years.

“Scholars always knew about it,” he says, “and it was particularly John’s emphasis in studying the works not only for their religious or spiritual value, but also for their contextual value and what they would teach us about the history of art and those artists.”

Not only interested in art history, but local history as well, Nolan wrote “The Historic Guide to Greenville,” published this year, and began his own tour company in 2006.

He recalls his “aha” moment in 2005, while downtown with his wife. “I noticed a couple walking down Main Street looking inquisitively up at buildings. I thought to myself, ‘I bet if they were offered a tour right now, they would take it,’” he reasoned. Since he had been enjoying giving tours of the Museum and Gallery for some ten years already, he thought that talent could transfer to downtown Greenville.

Initially he talked with Mayor Knox White and his assistant, Arlene Markley, about the idea. They seemed enthusiastic and offered their support. “So, I read everything I could and created two different walking tours of historic sites and places of interest downtown,” he explains. Nolan also does driving tours, bus tours, and trolley tours. They’re so popular that he’s regularly booked for senior and church groups, schools, reunions, Red Hat societies, and corporations like Erwin-Penland and International Center for the Upstate.
One would think all this activity leaves little time for a personal life, yet somehow Nolan manages, with wife Anne, to raise three children under the age of eleven, with another on the way—taking them to museums, walking around Falls Park and Riverplace, and just enjoying downtown.

Nolan met Anne his first day on the job at the university press. They clearly made a connection over the arts, including music and theater, and travel. With a master of fine arts in performance studies and voice, Anne Nolan teaches public speaking, voice and diction, stage movement, and oral communications at two institutions besides BJU.

Gregarious, talkative, and outgoing, Anne seems the polar opposite of her husband. “He’s calm by nature,” agrees Anne, pointing out, “He seems so unassuming when you first meet him, but he’s not afraid of stepping out on a limb and trying something new.”

When he approached her with the idea of the history tours, she was dubious. “I was thinking, it’s not Savannah or Charleston—it’s Greenville! But he would do his research and talk to people and come home and tell me all these fascinating stories. He’s not afraid of taking that kind of initiative,” she says.

The couple’s private art collection includes, a nineteenth-century engraving of the Madonna in prayer; John Nolan’s own realist paintings; a Mark Mulfinger lino cut; a collection of handmade tiles from Spain, England, and the Netherlands (seventeenth-century Delft tiles); and a sixteenth century pewter spoon from England and other antiquary.

Back at his desk in his subterranean office under the museum, Nolan reflects on the job that is such a large part of his life. “I love the research aspect—the discovery of new pieces of information to add to what we know about our work,” he says. “[The other part of my job that I love] would be then to tell it to other people—to give the tours, the lectures, to make it real and exciting for other people.”

“I hope [they] go away with a great appreciation for beauty, for creativity, and a sense of inspiration,” he reflects. “I’ve got these things that I’m in charge of, and I want to make them sing.”