The Speed of Mail

We recently received a printed mailer from the United States Postal Service (USPS) touting its devotion to exceptional service and warning of the December 18 deadline for holiday mailing. The online USPS Postal Facts states their mandate “to bind the nation together”.

Our mail service does indeed have a long history beginning in 1775 with its establishment by the Second Continental Congress with Benjamin Franklin as postmaster general. In 1787 the U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to establish Post Offices and Post Roads, and the Post Office Act of 1792 made the postal services an official part of the Federal Government. I remember that my father driving on the Boston Post road a mail route from New York City to Boston. It evolved into a major highway system now with names like Route 1.

The Pony Express was established in 1860 and started in St. Joseph, Missouri and could reach Sacramento, California, covering nearly 2,000 miles using a relay system of riders and horses in approximately 10 days. Wells Fargo managed the Pony Express for just 6 months during 1861 and issued their own postage stamp. Celebrating the Centennial of the Pony Express the USPS issued a 4¢ stamp that is in the same spirit.

Things change for better and for worse. According to the USPS in 2024 it takes 2.5 days for mail to arrive from one destination to another across this country. That has not been our experience. Last year we ordered tickets to a show in Santa Fe. They were mailed a week before the show, a distance of 2.2 miles, and arrived a week after the performance. Happily, the theater had a record of the tickets, and we did not miss it.

More than once, I have said to my wife that I remember when we got two mail deliveries a day in New York. I was a little boy then who was so excited to run to the door at 9 am and 4 pm every day in our apartment building to pick up the mail in front of the door. This was in the second half of the 1940s. At that time if you mailed a letter on one day in a city it arrived across the city by the next day. In 1950 the USPS eliminated two mail deliveries a day, so it depended on what time of day you mailed your letter. Since email started the contents of our mailbox is a good deal less exciting as they are most often advertising catalogs or solicitations for donations!

Rate increases are so frequent that the Forever stamp has become popular. It was only in 1959 that the cost of first-class mail within the U.S. began to climb from the 3 cents rate established in 1932. A 3¢ stamp with 4 different images of Washington D.C. was issued to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Washington, D.C. as the capital of the United States.

Even though the U.S. transatlantic airmail service began in 1939, we tend to forget that most mail from the U.S. to Europe was still carried by boat. When I started flying to Europe in the mid to late 1950’s I remember the prop airplane had to take on fuel twice, in Shannon, Ireland and Gander, Newfoundland before reaching London. Of course, then it was more expensive to send a letter by air and it depended on the weight of the envelope as well. It was quite expensive to send mail by air early in the twentieth century and costs rose depending on the distance.

A British General Douglas Gumbley who was the director of Posts and Telegraphs in Mesopotamia (Iraq) is credited with introducing the concept of the single sheet “air letter” also known as an Aerogram in 1933. The USPS introduced them in 1947. They confused me probably until my early teenage years because I could not figure out how to fold them and lick the sides to close them or open them without cutting the writing in half! In 1955 it only cost 10¢ to mail an Aerogram to Europe while a letter in an envelope cost 15¢. The service was quick, however, because in the mid-1960’s I remember mailing on a Monday and actually getting a reply from either London or Paris by Friday. No, that was not usual, but the fact that it could happen was quite startling.

My wife recalls during her research of Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764)the thrill of finding at the Morgan Library letters Pompadour sent to her brother during his travels in Italy. The missives were limited to one side of a single sheet which was then folded and addressed like an Aerogram and the enthusiastic sister continued writing up the margins to finish her thoughts.

The delivery of mail, postage stamps and their history around the world is a fascinating subject that I have barely touched upon.

What To Do With All That Art

Although the question of what should be done with an art collection one has built, either before or after one has expired is something I have written about before, recent examples bring me to it again. In personal terms Penelope and I have given quite a bit of art to institutions as our circumstances and tastes changed and yes, we have sold some. The closets still have a lot of what we have no more room to hang or install. We are basically taking the lazy way out … let the kids deal with it.

Everyone looks at their treasures differently. The outstanding art collection of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, went to auction after he died, and it brought world record prices. Some said he should have given his collection to the Metropolitan Museum. That museum did not need it and Allen’s aim was to fund his and his wife’s foundation that supported organizations dealing with issues like climate change but with an emphasis on the arts and culture.

Aso Tavitian (1940-2020) though not a household name like Paul Alllen, was a computer technology developer who built a major collection of European paintings and sculpture. Born in Bulgaria of Armenian descent, he lived for a time in Lebanon before immigrating to the United States where he received a scholarship to Columbia University. In 1975 he co-founded SyncSort, Inc. an early software development company. He established a foundation to provide scholarships for students of Armenian and Bulgarian origin as well as projects for the Republic of Armenia. He served on several boards including that of the Clark Art Institute where he developed plans for the future of his collection.

Located in the Berkshire mountains the Clark is a relatively small museum with research and academic programs, including a major art history library. It has become a leading international center for research and discussion on the nature of art and art history with programs that bring together scholars from around the world.

Last month the Clark announced that the technology pioneer, through his foundation, had left 331 works of art and $45 million to endow a curatorial position to oversee the collection and take care of it in addition to funding an Aso. O. Tavitian Wing at the Museum. We so often read about museums receiving “transformative” gifts, and in this case, it is certainly true.

I will illustrate 3 works that give the sense of quality of the Tavitian collection.

The star of the show is “The Madonna of the Fountain” by Jan van Eyck (Netherlandish, c. 1390–1441) and his workshop ...

A bronze of a model that I have always loved by Giovanni Francesco Susini (Italian, 1585–1653), “The Abduction of a Sabine Woman” ...

And these remarkable works in wax ...

I love collectors who study a field of art that interests them and learn a lot more by actually collecting and becoming experts in their own right. A Boston lawyer is one such person. George S. Abrams (1932-), and his late wife Maida, had been collecting Northern European art since 1960. He has been Knighted by The Kingdom of the Netherlands for his contribution to the study of Dutch art, especially in the area of drawings. In 2017, he gave 330 Dutch, Flemish, and Netherlandish drawings to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, his alma mater. Starting in the 1990s, he and his wife had already given 140 drawings before this larger gift.

Here is one of 9 Rembrandt drawings in the Abrams gift. It is of a farm possibly on the Amsteldijk.

Another Abrams gift is one of 4 studies of the tulips for which Holland is famous by another 17th-century Dutch artist, Jacob Marrel.

The “largest gift in its 170-year history” was recently reported by the British Museum. Sir Percival David (1892-1964) was a Bombay-born British financier who, over his lifetime, built a collection of Chinese ceramics. He established the Sir Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art in 1952 and was so passionate about China that he even studied the language “to a very high level.” Though his collection had been on public view at the British Museum since 2009, as they say, “it ain’t over til it's over," and almost exactly one year ago, his 1700 Chinese works of art, mostly ceramics, were formally given to the museum through the Foundation.

I found this pair of Funerary Urns with Celadon Glaze exciting.

Of particular significance is this Falangcai Bowl with Peonies. Falangcai refers to porcelain painted with enamels in the imperial workshops of the Forbidden City in Beijing, China.

I will be presumptuous enough to say that collections are formed by people who are passionate in their interests, and often, these include art. For various reasons, we want others to appreciate the works, and yes, our egos make us believe that our collections are important enough to be shared. Should the museums accept these donations is another question entirely. Both the Fogg and the Clark are already on the art map for scholars: not so much for the general public. These gifts give another reason for making them a destination. Whether a museum that already has one and a half million objects needs 1700 more is open to debate, but clearly stellar collections, like these above, enhance the institutions.

The display of the Tavitan donation will attract more visitors to the Clark. The Abrams gift makes the Fogg a must-go to for the study of Northern European drawing, for, it is now the largest collection outside of Europe. Similarly, the David collection makes the British Museum a permanent center for the study of Chinese art.

The Power of the Political Cartoon

Though subjects here will clearly be reminiscent of the current political climate they merely reflect life in America since the white man arrived from abroad.

My interest was sparked by the cover story, “Win, Lose & Draw: The Power of the Political Cartoon”, in our local newspaper’s Pasatiempo weekly magazine. The article was about the renowned cartoonist Pat Oliphant who is a long-time resident of Santa Fe. An Oliphant cartoon from 1970, when the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and rising inflation and unemployment as well as Nixon’s diminishing approval rating, shows numerous Democrats leapfrogging to be Presidential candidates.

When I set off researching, I found that the first political cartoon published in an American Newspaper is credited to the Pennsylvania Express of May 9, 1754. It was created by none other than Benjamin Franklin. It was his call to the British colonies to unite against their enemies the French and the Indians. It shows a snake cut in eight pieces each with the initial of a colony at the time.

Some 40 plus years later we are no longer fighting the French or the British but rather amongst ourselves. This was a fight on the floor of Congress between Vermont Representative Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold of Connecticut. The controversy was over the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. These were a series of laws passed by Congress in that year that restricted the free speech and the rights of non-citizens.

It is hard to find anything amusing from the Civil War, period, though I did have to chuckle at this image of General Ulysses S. Grant whooping the rear end of General Robert E. Lee. It refers to the Wilderness Battle during the Overland Campaign.

Illustrated in this 1924 cartoon is Senator William Borah giving a speech to Congress about corruption in campaign contributions which the Senate was investigating. Cartoonist Clifford Berryman responded thusly to his words.

In 1934 the country (not to mention the world) was still suffering the results of the Great Depression. FDR is shown as a doctor with a bag of New Deal remedies for an ailing Uncle Sam while Congress is a nurse wringing its hands with worry over whether Roosevelt’s grandiose plans can work.

The political cartoonists’ addition of humor to current controversy often allows us to consider two points of view. In this cartoon, the leaders of Israel and Egypt pointed their peace signs in opposite directions when President Jimmy Carter greeted them. Carter ultimately worked out a peace treaty between President Begin and President Sadat which was signed in 1979 known as the Camp David Accords.

Here is another controversy over which a great deal of ink has been spilled and I fear may be coming up again. I do not believe it requires any more explanation.

To prove there is nothing new under the sun I will conclude with a cartoon about the currently hot issue of immigration. Of the many cartoons I found on the subject over our nation’s history, here is one from over 150 years ago.

Joni Mitchell’s song "The Circle Game" keeps coming to mind, as the chorus goes:

"And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game."

Putting It Together

I love it when people make suggestions of what to write about. After 15 years of weekly Missives, it is not always easy to come up with an idea. Recently a friend wrote, “… I was again reminded how difficult it must be to design the hoped for collection, get permissions to move the objects, packing those objects, moving them, insuring them, unpacking them, and displaying them, while assuring their safety. Then you must produce the catalogue and sell the tickets.”

All these issues are what goes into an exhibition, and I probably have answered the question over the past 15 years in bits and pieces but never in one Missive so here goes: Here is a list which covers the entire process so, obviously, there is no way to give the process its due:

-The Concept
-The List
-The Contact
-The In-Person view
-The Deal
-The Catalog
-The Packing and shipping
-The Installation
-The Opening
-Did I forget Funding?!
-The Crossed fingers

An idea is not enough. You need to think of how you turn it into the museum visitor experience. Is it possible to get the cooperation of those who will be involved which starts at your own institution? Possibly they will want to form a committee which makes the curator’s job more complicated but may or may not make the concept clearer. The larger the committee the greater the risks.

Then you make a list or, cull a list if it is a one artist show, for your ideal exhibition. Inevitably this will be adjusted along the way. Will the museum or collector lend the work you believe is the best work for your exhibition?

Most exhibitions, unless they are done exclusively from your institution’s collection, will require some travel. If possible, you need to see the works in real life. When my wife was doing international exhibitions, she was continuously flying abroad to deal with the art for the show and the possessors of it.

The desired work may be too fragile to travel or the insurance value the owner wants on the work sounds prohibitive. How long will the exhibition be on? Are there plans to travel it? Will there be a catalog? All considerations of the owner deciding if they will lend the work, and it is your job to convince them it is worth the risk and for that owner to be missing that work for that length of time. If you are dealing with another institution they may ask for a specific work from your museum when they do an exhibition two years from now. You can be sure there will be hiccups along the way, and you will have to compromise your original “ideal” list.

You will probably enlist outside experts to contribute to your catalog well ahead of time. You really want that catalog to arrive from the printer before the show opens. If the catalog happens to come from abroad you may have to deal with U.S. Customs which, of course, goes for the art works as well.

You will work with your registrar on the arrangements for packing, shipping and insurance. Is there a packer in Timbuctoo that you and the owner will trust with that work of art, or can you send a registrar to pick it up in person? Museums will sometimes ask to have a curator accompany the work of art even if it means flying on a cargo plane… an official escort. Works of art are installed and must be taken down again when the exhibition closes. This image from the Bowes Museum in County Durham, England.

Meanwhile, the installation must be worked out. The art must be fitted into the available gallery space and installed in a way that tells the story you wish to convey. You need to work with a museum exhibition designer, here I will refer you to a previous Missive.

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2021/06/the-designer.html

You have to prepare a schedule with your partners within the museum needed for the project. As the works of art arrive at your institution, a conservator will be needed to check their condition. Maybe you made a prior deal to have your conservator clean or restore a work for the owner in advance. Did you agree to have protective glazing on the picture before it was being shown? Damage during travel as minor as a chip on a frame has to be addressed. Skilled mount makers and additional art handlers may be needed. You may still be putting up the labels when the crew of lampers arrive for the critical final step of lighting.

Hopefully, your institution has left enough money in the till for advertising and a great opening… did I forget to say that the funds to do the exhibition have to be raised? You needed to have worked with your development department to accomplish this.

Obviously, each bit of what I have written could easily be a chapter in a book, so this is merely a gloss. I will leave it to you to think of all the issues that can come up in each circumstance!

Tacita Dean

We were in Houston, Texas a couple of weeks ago with an afternoon free, so we decided to go to The Menil Collection. In 1954 John and Dominique de Menil established a foundation whose stated purpose was “to foster greater public understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, culture, religion, and philosophy”. The museum, beautiful in its simplicity, built to house their collection by the famed architect Renzo Piano, opened in 1987.

It is designed with pods usually consisting of 2 exhibition rooms each. When we were there, in one was a wonderful show by surrealist Max Ernst and another of ancient as well as indigenous arts. However, what especially grabbed us on this visit was the exhibition of a contemporary artist, Tacita Dean.

Clearly, we are not with it, as they say, because the artist was new to us. Ms. Dean is represented, for one, by the esteemed Marian Goodman Gallery. Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, England and the biography sent me by the Gallery refers to her as “British European”. Today she splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin. She received her MFA in painting from The Slade School of Fine Art in London. There is a long list of awards and solo exhibitions going back to 1994. In 1992 she created a 16mm, 16 mm, color, optical sound, 8 minutes; continuous loop called The Story of Beard.

This exhibit at The Menil is her first major museum survey in the U.S. though she has had shows at the National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, and also in Basel, Switzerland, in Mexico City and Sydney, Australia.

The show we saw was called “Blind Folly”. A short pamphlet that is available in the exhibition has a quote from the artist which says in part, “I have allowed the making of my work to be open to interpretation and redirection by chance …” and that is what I found particularly intriguing. My wife and I saw different but similar things in the works.

There was much more to the show than I will give examples of here, but these are images that really struck me. A fantastic (including all of that word’s meanings) work is The Montafon Letter, 2017, lent by the Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. It looks to be a photograph but it is actually a white chalk drawing on black board. It measures 12 by 24 feet. Montafon is a 39 km long valley in the westernmost Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg and Dean’s image is a scene of its icy Alpine peaks. The artist says she based it on an account of a fatal 17th century avalanche in the Austrian Alps in which 300 people died and one priest survived making it a symbol of hope. The story goes on and may be historically interesting, but for me, who lives in the mountains of New Mexico and has loved Switzerland since I was a child, I prefer to see mountains and not tragedy. Here you will see the image in the installation and a photograph of the work alone. (images gallery shot Montafon 1 and image solo Montafon 2)

One of my wife’s favorite works was the Delfern Tondo, 2024. Delfern refers to an estate in Los Angeles. The work is 10 feet in diameter and again looks like a photo but is not. It is chalk on blackboard and paint on Formica. In preparation, however, the artist did lie on the grass and point her camera upwards for inspiration. Living outside of town we often look up but at night we do not see clearly the cloud patterns we are able to see during the day. Dean evokes those magical moments that are so difficult if not impossible to capture with a camera. The close up is from the frontispiece to the catalog.

An image that the curator, Michelle White clearly loves since it is the cover of the museum brochure, and the press release, is “Beauty 2006” lent by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It represents a barren tree. Here Dean did use a photograph blown up to roughly 12 by 12 feet but she isolated the tree from its surroundings and enhanced its image by painting in gouache with a small brush around its limbs. This was one of her first in a series of what is called in the catalog “portraits of trees”, sometimes in color, that she found in different locations around the world. (image Beauty, 2006)

This is such a multifaceted artist! Dean has made 16mm films which are being shown in rotation at The Menil. She believes in creating works with found objects and her unusual surfaces include abandoned locomotive windows. One series in the show is composed of found postcards where she has painted mirror images to mount next to them. I was tantalized by the thoughts she left in partially erased notes in her larger drawings. She says she does not know what she will create until she serendipitously sees and does it. How do you capture that?

The exhibition will be on view at The Menil until April 19, 2025.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

When I received the press package from the Metropolitan Museum for “Siena:
The Rise of Painting 1300-1350. I immediately regretted not being able to get to New York to see it. For those who are or will be in New York, it opened October 13, 2024, and runs until January 26, 2025. The reviews since confirm my reaction.

According to Director, Max Hollein’s introduction to the catalog, “Siena was an epicenter of artistic innovation and ambition in the 14th and 15th century. Its impact on the development of European art and the development of painting cannot be emphasized enough.” Siena was also situated on a major route from Northern Europe to Rome and on to Naples and hence was a major artistic influence.

During the first half of the 14th century Siena became a hotbed of creativity, that is, until half the population of Siena perished in the plague of 1355.

The exhibition includes paintings by four of the greatest artists of their time. Duccio di Buoninsegna (1278-1319), Simone Martini (1284-1344) and the brothers Pietro Lorenzetti (1280-1348) and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290-1348). Though the Press Release emphasizes the Paintings, the over 300 page catalogue indicates categories including Sculpture, Goldsmiths’ Work, Illuminated Manuscripts and Textiles from over 40 lenders from at least 10 countries. With over a hundred works in the exhibition and most of them stellar examples, it is impossible to do full justice to the exhibition here.

Since, for better or for worse, we have a pecking order for categories let us start with a couple of paintings. The Frick Collection, just half a mile away, lent their wonderful Duccio of the “Temptation of Christ” to the show, but this is a show with more than one Duccio! The exhibition created in conjunction with the National Gallery in London, lent this small tryptic by the artist representing The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Aurea, and Patriarchs and Prophets (ca. 1312-15). The first image is the picture from the Frick and the second from the National Gallery.

These four small panels by Simone Martini form the Orsini Polyptych (ca. 1335-1340) that are today split between the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, the Louvre in Paris and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin are reunited here. Each panel is painted on both sides. This one is my first choice, “Going to Calvary,” with Jerusalem depicted as a medieval city. The building has a central plan symbolizing the temple of Jerusalem. I love the individual faces where you can imagine what they are all thinking. Imagine these panels hinged and folded together so as to be portable for private devotion. A second illustration shows them installed at the Metropolitan.

A few fragments survive of a great wooden crucifix created by Lando di Pietro as a personal gift to a Sienna confraternity. The nearly life-size crucifix was all but destroyed in an Allied bombing of the Basilica di San Bernardino all’Osservanza in 1944. Exhibited in the show, a damaged head of Christ in polychromed wood was lent by the Museo Castelli in Siena. It was only through the destruction of the rest of this work that parchments secreted in its fragments were discovered, revealing its author, who had previously been known only as a goldsmith and architect, was a sculptor as well!

There are several amazing ivory pieces in the show. This Tabernacle Polyptych of the Virgin and Child and scenes from the infancy of Christ created in the 1280s in Paris is a great example, lent by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Some of the original polychrome and gilding remains. It too could be folded and taken along for private worship … today we carry our computers!

Oh, so many more riches to view but I am going to leave it at that. Hopefully, I have given you a taste of this artistic caviar.

Now, I have a surprise for you. The Met created a video tour of the exhibition with the curators responsible for putting it together and others who were involved with putting it on. The accent is on the paintings but some of the objects are visible along the way.

An Unfortunate Comparison

For those who have not voted early, within the next couple of weeks you will cast a vote that will affect our lives and possibly change our country irrevocably. Unfortunately, we seem to be taking history far less seriously in our schools. If it is seriously taught it is only U.S. history and, as we have heard, may only be history that will not upset our children. This leaves those on social media to teach whatever they want without fear of contradiction.

A well-educated friend recently told me that he did not understand the reference I made to how recent times in the U.S.A. mirrored what happened in the 1930s in Germany. I have a different background since I am Jewish and the product of German parents who had to leave the country they loved. I am writing what I could not have as of 1933 in Germany. My father was thrown out of university in that year. Every word I write below can be fully documented but if I included all the details this Missive would go on for many pages.

Here are a few examples of parallels that concern me. The Reichstag Fire,1933, a few weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, was used as an excuse to abolish a number of constitutional protections and this paved the way for Nazi dictatorship. In the U.S. right-wing protesters stormed the Capitol and looked to hang those they said were taking over the government because of what they saw as a crooked election.

In the same year, 1933, university students in Munich started the Book Burning. In the U.S. we don’t burn the books; we ban them by taking them off library shelves at schools and public libraries denying our students education in many areas including the history of our own country.

Hitler called for a nation of a pure Aryan race. In the U.S. there are calls for a Christian Nation. From day one Hitler worked to expel those who did not fit into the Nazi concept of a master race. While mainly about Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a few of the others that were to be expelled one way or the other were Black people, Gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with disabilities.

CNN reported regarding the 2024 race that Trump said of immigrants: “They’re poisoning the blood of our Country”. The former President also has said he wants to create “camps” where all immigrants should be kept until they can be sent out of the country. Starting in 1933, long before his use of the ovens for the “final solution”, Hitler created concentration camps for those he did not find fit or spoke against the Third Reich.

There are many examples of Trump’s contempt for the handicapped. Former Marine Corps General and one-time Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, said that Trump did not want to be photographed with military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.”

The Third Reich spoke of mainstream news as “Lügenpresse” (press of lies). Sound familiar? The term “fake news” comes directly from there. The former President recently has stated that he wishes CBS to lose its license because of the network’s interview of Kamala Harris, which he skipped out on. While he was still President in 2019 the New York Times wrote that he referred to it as “a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” That is fascism 101.

Hitler had his enablers who started planning already in the 1920’s. Here there is Project 25. The Fuhrer and the Maga party are in lock step in first delegitimizing existing government departments, and then forcing them to do their bidding.

In his rise to power Hitler affiliated militias with his Nazi Party, the SA (paramilitary “brown shirts”) and SS-( an elite Aryan sub-group). Trump encourages self-recruiting militias like the Proud Boys who he urged to “stand by!”.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS … VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT!