This is adapted from remarks I gave last year at the closing of an exhibit of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass angels.

On November 2, 1863, a man named David Wills wrote to President Abraham Lincoln with an invitation. He hoped that the President would come to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to attend the dedication of a cemetery there to honor the dead from a great battle that had occurred there the previous summer.  Famous orator and former Massachusetts senator Edward Everett was to be the keynote speaker for the day, but Wills asked if the President, as the chief executive of the nation, would give his official sanction to the cemetery with “a few appropriate remarks.”

Lincoln agreed, and his “few appropriate remarks” –which he was still tweaking at Wills’ house the night before he delivered them—became known as his Gettysburg Address:  one of the most famous speeches in American history.

As president, Lincoln knew that the tides of public opinion were not completely on his side.  His prosecution of the war had been controversial and there was a combination of moods working against what he believed the United States had to do.  He resolved to take this chance to explain to the American people—at least to those who had gathered in the hilly, wooded countryside of south-central Pennsylvania—why they had to stick with a cause they may not have understood, may not have cared much about, and may not have thought to be worth the effort.

“It is for us the living,” he said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work / which they who fought here / have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather, for us, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain….”

That sense of passing the torch, that sense of every generation having a fresh obligation to preserve something that came before it—something worthwhile for which previous people have sacrificed—is what makes me think of Abraham Lincoln in conjunction with art exhibits. It’s a difficult task to preserve something from the past, and often an even more difficult task to explain to a skeptical public why that preservation (and then, more, the exhibition, and then, even more, our attendance) is worthwhile.

Preservation—whether of a community’s ancient dedication to a noble cause, or of a piece of art—takes work. It entails a commitment. Indeed it takes many, and repeated, commitments, regularly made by people whose fathers and mothers may not have even been born when that which they are preserving was created. I’m writing a biography right now of a man named Henry Geldzahler, who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City back in the 1960s and 1970s. He once said that “for a work of art to survive…every twenty years a new commitment has to be made to it….  Unless something is loved by someone in each generation it’s going to disappear.” Lincoln would’ve understood this perfectly, because that’s what he was saying at Gettysburg.

Robert Rauschenberg, Lincoln, 1958