The Della Robbia Family

From the social media posting by Judith Dobrzynski, a journalist and art critic whom I met when she was working at the New York Times, I learned of the exhibition, “Rediscovering Della Robbia”, taking place at the Metropolitan Museum. Since it had not received the usual hoopla that covers their major exhibitions, I had missed the announcement. It opened on August 10 of this year and will stay on view until January 17, 2028. You could almost call it a semi-permanent installation. The reason the show can be up for so long is that none of the works have to be returned to a lending institution, as all the works come from the Met’s collection.

The Met has assembled what they refer to as “the largest, most important della Robbia collection in the United States”. It covers three generations of the family: Luca, Andrea and Giovanni. Pater familias, Luca (1400-1482), invented a glazed terracotta technique which was so unique that products would be immediately associated with the family. Of course, the process was copied, but everyone knew who started and mastered it.

What the Met is additionally offering this time around is a deeper look into the scientific aspect of the technical advances. The installation gives pride of place to “The Assumption of the Virgin” by Andrea della Robbia, a massive piece, 10 by 7 feet. It was donated in 1882 by one of the founders of the museum, Henry G. Marquand, and is known as the Marquand Altarpiece. It consists of 66 individual panels. After that description, you might ask why, the Met admits, it has not been on view for the past 70 years. Who knows, maybe I saw it, but I would have been 12 at the time! The reason is that only half of the altarpiece is in the show, seen against a graphic rendering of the whole. It seems that while they have the entire object, due to damage caused over the years before the piece came to the Met, the conservation department has not been able to restore all the panels.

*The white ceramic is the original

If you like Renaissance sculpture, this seems a great opportunity to learn about a lesser-known aspect in a presentation one would think you could only see in Italy.

On a personal note, a photo I love of my son, Danny, shows him some 50 years ago at the Met. He was with my wife, Penelope, who was curator there at the time. He is peeking through the mock-up of the installation of the Lehman della Robbia, where it was going to be installed off the Great Hall.

The show also gives me an excuse to tell a story I told 16 years ago about the daughter of Henry Clay Frick, Helen, always referred to as “Miss Frick.” She lived for many years in an apartment over the Frick Art Reference Library. In fact, until her death, she insisted that in the library all women wear skirts and all men wear jackets, no matter the stifling heat in summer. In our time studying, there was no air conditioning! At the entrance to the Library there was a lunette by Andrea della Robbia.

Miss Frick came to the gallery one day and asked me to find another just like it. She wanted one that she could put in her museum, the Pittsburgh Frick. As luck would have it, I found the perfect piece almost immediately, very close in size and exemplary in provenance. It had belonged to the Vanderbilts in their house at the Breakers in Newport. I was really excited to have found just what she wanted so quickly. I was mystified when she turned it down. The religious subject was similar; it was the right format; it was just perfect! Finally, in frustration, I phoned her long-time secretary, Mrs. Egan, and said that I did not know where to look if she turned down the one I had found, so could she possibly enlighten me? “Well, Mr. Stiebel,” she said. “Frankly, Miss Frick is not going to buy anything that comes from the Vanderbilts”! I am sure therein lies another wonderful story. Eventually, I found Miss Frick another della Robbia which had been deaccessioned from the Met.

As they say, what goes around comes around!

"The Guys"

“The Guys” is a play telling the true story of a New York City Fire Captain who sought out a journalist to help him write eulogies for four of his command lost in their efforts to save lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. 9/11 is how we, in the U.S., refer to the 2001 event when the twin towers in New York were hit by the suicide mission of al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden. That journalist was Anne Nelson, who wrote the play, first produced shortly after the event off-off-Broadway. In 2002, she adapted it as a movie, starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia. Subsequently, it has been produced in all 50 States as well as abroad.

The impetus for the play is not to recount the action but rather the reaction to the events of 9/11. Everything depends on the two actors. In the Ironweed production we just saw, local actors Karen Leigh as Joan and Scott Harrison as Nick were superb in their roles. The play was directed by Emily Rankin. Unfortunately, it ended its very short run yesterday. Here are the actors in Santa Fe as Nick remembers one of his men.

Photo by Carrie McCarthy

It is the epitome of the “slice of life”, a literary genre I remember learning about in high school, --two people bonding over a tragedy felt by both from different vantage points.

It is a universal story of compassion. Like the playwright, the lady sitting next to me in the Santa Fe theater had volunteered to help in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, she was murmuring under her breath about how she related to the time and what she had done living near the firehouse that the play refers to. After the performance, we learned several others in the audience were in New York at the time, as were we.

That day in 2001 my wife was working on an exhibition for the Portland Art Museum titled “Stuff of Dreams” drawn from the collections of the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. They were going to have a national press event in New York at the LVMH building on 57th Street. She was pouring over galleys for the catalog with the publisher in the garden at our house on 68th Street when the building crescendo of sirens indicated something was seriously wrong. The designer for the show, who was working on the venue for the press event, came breathlessly through our door to say the event was off. We looked at him as if he were mad. Then he explained that a plane had hit one of the Trade Towers. We did not yet know about the second one. Just as in the play, we assumed it was probably a small plane and was undoubtedly an accident. We soon learned otherwise.

The Director and curator of the Paris museum and the chairwoman of their board, as well as the Director of the Portland Museum and his wife, had come to New York for the event. The French insisted they would drive to Canada immediately, and my wife had to persuade them not to give up their hotel rooms, explaining the border would be closed.

We obviously had to do something for these people who travelled so far. Penelope told them all to come to our house for dinner, but when she went marketing, she found store shelves were already bare. All that she could find was a turkey, so my brilliant wife made a typical Thanksgiving Day dinner! It was at least a symbol of hope on such a tragic day.

Scott Harrison, who was one of the duo in the show, is the artistic director and founder of Ironweed Productions, which produced “The Guys” in Santa Fe. I asked him why he decided to do this play now. Referring to 9/11, he replied, “Although that time was a very difficult time, I miss the connection I felt with other people and the softer, kinder hearts toward others that I feel like the experience engendered for many of us.” What could be more appropriate than to refer to that connection that seems to be missing today?

Labor Day

There is always something new to learn. I did not realize how far back the celebration of Labor Day went. Oregon was the first state to pass a law recognizing Labor Day in February of 1887. That same year, four more states passed laws creating Labor Day a holiday. 

By 1894, 23 more states adopted the holiday, and by June of that year Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September a legal holiday. Like everything else in politics, there were contradictions. Right after President Grover Cleveland used Federal Troops to crush the violent Pullman railway strike, he signed the 1894 act!

Already in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists began to pay attention to hard work in their creations, and art contributes to changes in society’s thinking. As factories proliferated and the union movement progressed, American Realist painters began to depict grueling and dangerous work conditions.

Even though painters abroad had been depicting peasants for quite some time, in the United States artists were painting pictures of the wealthy elites, tradesmen, and military events since that was the market. Members of the servant class might be included to show the wealth or civic standing of the sitter, but scenes of active toil only came to the fore in the 19th century.

Here we have Thomas Mifflin. He is a successful merchant and starting out as a politician. His wife Sarah is demonstrating her domestic industriousness by weaving a decorative fringe. The portrait is by John Singleton Copley, painted in 1773.

With the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), work was increasingly done in factories with machines, like the mechanical power loom. Artists were paying more attention to workers who could not afford the benefits and conveniences offered by progress. Still seen as a proud individual in this painting by John B. Neagle in 1829. It is still a true portrait, and the subject’s name is known: Pat Lyon. He and his work are presented as noble.

With the second industrial revolution (1870-1914), mass production became possible. American artists focused on how grueling work had become, as in the workman’s short break illustrated in The Ironworker's Noontime by Thomas Pollock Anschutz (1880) in the De Young Museum.

In 1920, famed photographer Lewis Hine took this photo, Power House Mechanic Working on a Steam Pump. It is obviously carefully posed to convey the nobility of hard work.

Unemployment rose to an unprecedented 20% during the continuing Depression that followed the crash of 1929. President Franklyn D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 to create jobs where there were none to be had. One of many artists who were looking for work, Martha Levy, received a WPA commission for a mural in a public building. She did one called Men Working in Slate Quarry (1939). Granville was a major slate-producing region along the New York/Vermont border. The mural was created for the local High School and is now displayed at the Slate Valley Museum in Granville, New York.

People at work fell out of fashion as a subject with the art movements of the late 20th and 21st centuries, but earlier depictions remind us of the reason for today’s national holiday.

Strange Museums

Incredible but true: as I was reading the online publication artsjournal.com, I came across a brief notice called “Behold America’s First-Ever Jellyfish Museum.” The museum in Pompano Beach, Florida, was founded by a Ukrainian couple who had a similar institution in Kyiv before immigrating to the U.S. 

This started me thinking about other unusual museums. I started to look online and was amazed at subjects that people have thought worthwhile for starting a museum and that people would want to visit. Seems there are many on both sides of that coin. Maybe when we plan a trip, instead of just going to the major museums which we usually think of as art museums, museums of natural history, or sports museums, we should save time for one unusual one. I did just that with the DATALAND museum on our recent trip to L.A. 

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2026/08/what-i-did-on-my-summer-vacation.html

I am sure that if you go online, which obviously you do, you have come across lists of best restaurants, best movies on Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, etc., etc., etc. Looking for unusual museums, I expected 10 to 40 suggestions but found one such site with 1,214 listings. Never fear, I don’t plan on going through that list with you, but I thought I would select just a few in different states across the country.

If you like the macabre, I recommend the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. It is a medical museum, which may not be all that unusual. However, this one is not what I would have expected. It features a wall of 139 human skulls and over 2,300 foreign objects swallowed or inhaled by people and safely removed by a pioneering otolaryngologist (a specialist who diagnoses and treats conditions of the head and neck).

In Savannah, Georgia, you will find The American Prohibition Museum where, as their website states, you can “discover how the battle over booze changed the country forever … from antique cars and moonshine stills to unique flasks and flapper dresses.” If that doesn’t race your motor, maybe you will be more interested in their, for adults only, speakeasy tucked into the museum “with craft cocktails that capture the essence of the 1920’s”.

The Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, has over 1400 dummies used by ventriloquists to throw their voices, creating alter egos for the performers. These figures range from the 19th through the 21st century. There are also scripts, photographs, and playbills. The museum takes a serious approach to this slice of history with neither animation nor the voices of the dummies.

Passing through Vincennes, Indiana, you might want to have a laugh and visit the Red Skelton Museum of American Comedy. It turns out that Vincennes is the hometown of the vaudeville performer who became a movie star. As you would expect, the museum is devoted to the clown of many roles, with documents and films recording his life and contribution to American humor.

In Hastings, Nebraska, half a floor of their local museum is devoted to Kool-Aid. It seems that the small-town entrepreneur Edward Perkins came up with the drink in Hastings. Who knew?

There may even be a reason to visit the town of Gibsland, Louisiana, with its population of 773. It features the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum in the cafe where the outlaw couple ate their final meal, close to the road where they were finally ambushed. It features historical weapons, Clyde’s rifle and Bonnie’s hat!

The state of Idaho is best known for its potatoes, supplying 33% of those grown in this country. I guess it is not surprising that there is a museum devoted to this state’s primary export. The Idaho Potato Museum can be found in the town of Blackfoot. I doubt there are many museums where you can consume the product that they are exhibiting, but in this museum café, The Potato Station, you can “enjoy some wonderful potato treats created by our excellent café staff”.

When I was a kid, I loved the books about the defense lawyer Perry Mason as well as the TV series based on the character. The author was a lawyer, Erle Stanley Gardner, who lived on a ranch, Rancho del Paisano, in Temecula, California. Following my youthful enthusiasm, I visited the Temecula Valley Museum, which holds his archive and features a permanent exhibit about the author with objects that belonged to him installed in a recreation of his study.

Remind me to someday look at some of the odd museums in other parts of the world, such as The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia!

Is There Too Much Art Out There?

Recently, a friend sent me a Business Week article, “Boomers are Leaving Behind More Art than Anyone Wants” by Felix Salmon, making me aware of this concern. Who knows if the author or editor picked that title, but my reaction was that there are also too many clothes in some parts of the world, and too much of it is thrown out.

Image generated by A.I.

The author is a British/American financial journalist who writes about culture and money. He uses as an example for his thesis an artist to whom he is related by marriage, by the name of David A. Vaughan. Born in Selma, Alabama (1890-1975 Vaughan studied at Columbia University, the Art Students League of New York City, and in Paris at the Académie Colarossi. Reading his history, he seems an artist of some note but probably won’t make it into the lexicons of the great masters. No matter, there are and will be people who like his work. However, even if his art sells, is exhibited, or is donated to museums (one of his has been accepted into the collection of the LA County Museum but never put on view) or is just passed down through the generations, at some point the interest will slowly peter out. When this happens, his works will be stashed away, discarded, or lost.

One individual responding to the article online suggested giving old canvases away to artists who would be happy to use them. If an art historian resurrects Vaughan’s work, what was left would find the market, be prized, and the cycle would repeat itself. This is the normal cycle of life and art.

Artists need to create art, and many do a few exceptional works, but probably more of what they do you might not want to collect. Even Picasso will someday not be the icon he is today, and the doodle he created on a napkin for a friend or waiter as a tip will not be exhibited by a museum, but it also would not be thrown out. If there is a market, a museum may deaccession it, or a lesser work, and put it at auction in order to collect a work by a different artist.

People will always be inspired to make art, but the product has to be appreciated in order to be preserved, and that is not always the case. Painters, for their part, often discard what they have created or paint over it, which you can’t do with a drawing or a sculpture. The Brooklyn Museum, wishing to do something for the local artists’ community, announced an exhibition of artists currently living in Brooklyn. They received 4,000 submissions for the 200 spaces in the show. I have several friends who I consider good artists, and I appreciate their work, but most have not even been in one museum exhibition, much less in their collections.

There are about 35 paintings firmly identified as by the Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), with a few more attributed to him. Did he really paint only that number, or were some lost or actually thrown out by him or descendants of his 11 children?

In 2019, in Compiègne, France, an important 13th-century panel of Christ Mocked (c. 1280) by Cimabue was discovered in a kitchen during a house clearance. It had been considered just a nice religious icon until it brought almost 27 million dollars at auction. From this, you can draw various conclusions, but I like the idea that people thought it was worth preserving no matter the monetary value. If, on the other hand, it had been discarded and destroyed, no one would know that it had existed.

Remember, the worth of a painting is in the mind of the beholder. We don’t all like the same works, and taste may skip a generation or two. The work of art doesn’t change, just how we perceive it. In the process, there is always the hope of overlooked work being “rediscovered”.

Can A.I. Help Recover Nazi War Loot?

Here is a Missive that covers two of my interests ... 

Regarding A.I., I am fascinated by what it can do for the individual. Honestly, I am not sure how the advanced versions of A.I. work, but I marvel at all the advantages that can be derived from it. Yes, I know there is another side to it, but that is not for me to delve into now.

As far as Nazi war loot is concerned, my parents, their relatives, and art dealerships lost works of art during WW II. If you look on the internet for Guelph Treasure or Welfenschatz online, you will find a lot about my case that went to the Supreme Court (and lost).

Therefore, I became extremely interested when I saw an article titled “This New A.I. Chatbot Hunts Nazi-Looted Art” by Vittoria Benzine. The Center for Art Law estimates that during the Third Reich (1933-1945), Nazis stole or forced the sale of 650,000 works of art, though far more have been reported by other sources. You may have heard of the Monuments Men (and Women) who went into the salt mines and museums in search of Nazi-looted art. They identified a lot, but there was much more that was never found. It is estimated that roughly 100,000 works remain at large. Here is an image of an Édouard Manet discovered in a German salt mine.

Researchers at Santa Clara University (SCU) have created a Provenance Research Assistant, which is a chat box to help search through millions of records in order to figure out which items may be missing and where they are today. I can’t imagine how many works of art have changed hands over the past 81 years. So, individuals who have bought works of art in good faith might inadvertently have acquired Nazi War-Loot. Though many may have known, or come to suspect, that their families may still retain these works. Here is one such story which ended well ...

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2018/10/nwl-nazi-war-loot.html

This image shows a trove of objects recovered ... the photo was probably taken in a museum storeroom. How can we know who they belonged to?

SCU professors Michael Santoro together with professors Haibing Lu and Michele Samorani have assembled this new data base using A.I. They began by mining the ERR’s database. The latter stood for Hitler’s art squad (1940-1945) which stored the loot from German, Austrian and French museums and private collections in the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. Then they added other information that they learned along the way and will continue to do so.

The database is already publicly available, and one can ask questions if one knows what one is looking for. I have not yet tried it out, but I look forward to doing so. 

http://ec2-18-222-187-17.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com:8501/ 

Here is an image of General Dwight D. Eisenhower viewing some of the art that was retrieved by the Monuments Men.

In her article, Ms. Benzine quotes Professor Lu, “Our goal wasn’t to replace provenance researchers. It was to make decades of complex archival records much easier to explore through natural conversation.” Remember, these culled records would be in several languages with abbreviations and terms that might not have been understood by the Nazi’s themselves.

Just believing that an object may have been taken is not the evidence needed to retrieve it. This is just the first step in repatriation. The database can only point the way to a long process I traced in the story included in the first link of this Missive.

The Lightning Boy Championships

Although I have mentioned Hoop Dancers over the years,

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2022/08/the-hoop-dance-and-lightning-boy.html

I want to look at it from a different perspective, i.e., what it takes to participate in the annual “Youth Hoop Dance Championship” in Santa Fe and how it works. I have posted a number of videos; understand some are brief and some are not. Watch as much as you wish of each.

The Lighting Boy Foundation offers aspiring Native Americans from ages 2 to 17 an opportunity to learn the art of hoop dancing. That not only requires the dedication of the teachers but that of the students who need energy, stamina, and a great deal of willpower. Training consists of the traditional hoop routines, rhythm, and basic footwork. What I would think would especially bond the young dancers to their craft is that they also get instruction in making their own hoops and regalia. The process introduces kids to their roots and traditions, and it is wonderful to see how the little ones take to it.

The Championship is organized by age into four divisions. The cutest are obviously the Tiny Tots, which are defined by the organizers as 0 to 5 years old, though I have yet to see any O-age dancers! Then there are Youth (6-12), Teen (13-18), and Collegiate (19-26) divisions. Cash prizes are awarded in the last three categories, ranging from $100 to $750 for the youth, $100 to $900 for the teens, and $500 to $1,000 for the Collegiate. The Tiny Tots prize is not competitive, but $300 is split among them so they have all won. The dancers come mostly, though not necessarily, from the Southwest, but the prizes won’t cover travel expenses for most. Here we have examples of the Tiny Tots and the Youth.

The event takes place for two consecutive days in Milner Plaza on Santa Fe’s Museum Hill. A team of drummers, who also sing, surrounds a huge drum to provide traditional music. An emcee introduces the dancers. Three judges are positioned around the circular sanded dance floor. They score all but the Tiny Tots on five criteria: Precision, Timing/Rhythm, Showmanship, Creativeness/Originality, and Speed.

Precision is important in the required moves. Hoops must not unintentionally fall to the ground. As an example, when a hoop is thrown in the air (which is common), it must be caught.

Timing/Rhythm counts as the dancers’ feet must continuously move with the drum beat. The dancers must have bells, tinklers, and deer hooves on their person to help the judges assess their rhythm. Transitions between movements must be smooth.

Showmanship is how the dancers present themselves to the audience. Of course, the more difficult the moves, the more they count.

Creativeness/Originality is credited for new designs that dancers come up with to make with their hoops

Finally, Speed is directly related to the rapid drum and dance coordination.

Each contestant has 5 or 7 minutes to dance, with the older dancers given more time. They may dance less, but points are deducted for dancing any longer. When you watch the dancers' faces when they have done a particularly tricky move or missed one, you can almost tell they already have a pretty good idea of what their score will be.

It is history, it is art, it is performance and sport. I can’t say that I understand it all, but the enthusiasm and dedication make one feel part of it all.

If you did not catch the best which was in the link at the beginning of this Missive, watch an entire dance by the champion who is sadly not with us anymore, referred to in first link.