Falling in Love with an Art Object

My children were out here for a birthday celebration, and we went with my daughter and her husband to Canyon Road (the street with the most galleries in Santa Fe) to look for a sculpture for their garden. Though I have been with my wife for a half-century, this search reminded me of a bronze I had bought with my first wife. That was a good memory, but I did not miss the object itself. Of course, one thought always leads to another, and it reminded me of a small painting acquired back then. I believe it was of a girl sitting by a pond, and suddenly I missed it. Why does that work and not the other?

That is what started me on this Missive. The painting was by an artist who is somewhat known, but the market value of this work would not be significant. It is a pretty picture but that’s it. So, why do I miss it? Because it was given to us by my father’s classmate from Frankfurt, who I thought of as a dear uncle.

There are lots of scientific reasons given as to why, as a species, humans love art. They all run along the same lines, more or less, and here is one example from the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine: “Why do people enjoy art? Scientific research shows that viewing art can release dopamine. This natural neurotransmitter creates a feeling of calmness and improves your overall feelings of well-being. As such, embracing art can serve as a natural pathway to alleviate stress and elevate your mood.”

On a personal level the scientific definition makes sense in terms of a certain category of art or a specific work. Many, new to the art world as well as seasoned veterans, love the Impressionists. Their works are easily accessible, and appeal to many. You can get lost in works painted in that genre. That is not what happens to me when I listen to atonal music. On the other hand, I can accept that definition when I hear folk music. For my wife, it is classical music.

I told the story at the beginning because I think what we often like about art is where it comes from or how old the object is. Would you like to own a cave painting? You may be able to draw a horse better than this one from the Lascaux caves in France estimated to be 17,000 years old. Putting it in context, however, you become in awe of it.

A great deal of the attraction of an object can be how you relate to it. Maybe a painting reminds you of your mother, your daughter, or an uncle. Then there are objects that relate to where you come from and other family members. These German Baroque gilt bronze lions were probably the feet of a clock or cabinet. Both my wife and I admire them as beautifully made imaginative creations from a historic period but for me, they are precious as they belonged to my parents.

Then there are works that relate to one’s own personal history. For instance, this Art Nouveau inkstand and the inkwell. (A removable wave crest covers the original glass inkwell.) It was part of the Art Nouveau collection we assembled over the years in our New York home. Most of it went to museums and auctions but there are always objects like this that you simply cannot part with.

Most of us buy souvenirs on a trip. You might have traveled to Kenya and bought a traditional gourd or a contemporary painting there. When you bring it home you not only enjoy the work for its own sake, but it is also a reminder of your enjoyable adventure in another world.

In a similar vein, there was a tradition in Europe of making a small purchase when an art dealer would visit another. In France that was known as “pour marqée le passage”, literally to mark the passage. It was a token of respect for the colleague whose time you took up. It was not required but often done.

In conclusion, we fall in love with a work of art in the same way we fall in love with an individual. Many factors combine to make each a different experience.

Discoveries

Everyone loves discoveries, preferably one’s own, but we can also enjoy the luck of others in the hopes that the same will happen to us. I don’t like to gamble, but a discovery is different, you were not looking to win, it just happened. What are usually called “discoveries” in the art world are misattributed works or rather works that some scholar in a specific field has researched and declares, to be by a famous artist and therefore worth further attention. More adventurous and fun is the serendipitous discovery which does not just rely on expertise but is an unexpected find.

A story that I just read, reported by Sarah Gascone on Artnet about Sally Robinson from Missouri who was interested in photo documentation of indigenous peoples. As she started to collect photos for her research, she fell in love with many of the black & white prints of Native Americans. In the process she bought photos from the granddaughter of a Santa Fe Railway advertising department employee who worked there in the 1940’s. The prints were unsigned, but she began her research and came to believe the prints were by the famed photographer, Ansel Adams. She consulted Adam’s grandson, Mathew Adams, at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite, California, who confirmed that Adams had done commercial work for the Santa Fe Railway. She believes she discovered 50 original lost prints Ansel Adams shot for the Santa Fe Railway. But their authenticity has still not been confirmed!

Another Ansel Adams saga was traced by Alan Duke for CNN in 2010. Ten years earlier Rick Norsigian bought 2 old boxes of glass negatives in a garage sale while looking for antiques. Norsigian had worked at Yosemite and recognized the scenes. He just put them under his pool table where they languished for a couple of years. Eventually he realized that some of the images were very similar to others by Ansel Adams. They were all taken in Yosemite early in Adams’ career, between 1919 and the early 1930’s. In 1937 a fire in his dark room destroyed 5,000 of his plates. Norsigian spent years researching his treasure trove and believed that Adams used the surviving plates to demonstrate stages of photography and what fire damage can do and how to improve your work when he was teaching. Experts, not only in photography but also in forensics, weather, and even an FBI agent, testified to their age and similarity to Adam’s work. He planned to tour the plates to universities and museums and had begun selling prints from the negatives when the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust sued. In the resulting settlement,   he was allowed to continue selling the prints but could not use Adams’ name or likeness. The disclaimer of authenticity that was required does mention the artist’s name!

An example of Adams’ Yosemite series

In another article for Artnet Eileen Kinsella reported another discovery, this one with a known result. When he was 11 years old, Mat Winter found an old engraving in the back of a car at a rubbish dump. He just loved the intricate detail. When he asked the owner whether he could take it she readily agreed. Even though the image was the famed Knight, Death and the Devil and was signed by Albrecht Durer and dated 1513, he doubted it had value until years later when he showed it to experts who recognized it as an original Durer engraving. Eventually, the work brought $44,800 at auction. See how important an art history education is😊?

Knight Death and the Devil with its now older savior

I have kept an article, again from Artnet that has been sitting on my desk for over a year about a teacher in Israel who took her first-grade students to Tel Azekah a site that has been said is where David met Goliath. Picking up a piece of pottery she told her students that there were ancient objects on the ground. She noticed one of her students lagging behind to show a friend something she had found. Studying it herself the teacher saw that it had the incised marks of a scarab. In Israel found antiquities are considered as belonging to the State so the child agreed to give it up and the teacher got in touch with the Antiquities Authority. Determining that it was a scarab seal 3,500 years old that demonstrated Egyptian presence in ancient times, the education director of the Authority presented the child with a certificate of appreciation. (image Scarab)

There are more reports on archeological discoveries, and it is interesting how some discoveries take a long time to come to light… like 60 years! According to a Miami Herald article by Aspen Pflughoeft dated March 11, 2024, two Norwegian brothers, one being 7 years old, went treasure hunting back in 1964. Crawling in the dirt under their local church on an island 250 miles northwest of Oslo where they found some silver coins. They did not think other than that their discovery was cool and stashed them in their treasure box. When they finally showed them to archeologists this year the coins were identified as 600-700 years old and rare. The final disposition of their discovery has not been determined.

While I was writing this, yet another discovery appeared on my screen: a possible Picasso double portrait of himself and his mistress Dora Maar. The father of the present owner found it in the cellar of a villa on the island of Capri which Picasso had in fact visited in the 1930’s. Authentication studies have begun to determine if the picture that hung for decades in this Capri family home is original.

As they say, Seek and ye shall find … possibly!

All That Glitters

“The Incas called gold ‘tears of the sun’. The Egyptians knew it as ‘the flesh of the gods’”. Katie White continued in her Artnet column in 2021, “The hue has adorned tributes to deities, marked depictions of kings and queens, and symbolized opulence, power, and otherworldly spiritual splendor.”

Personally, gold for gold’s sake does not move me, though I appreciate artworks where gold has been used to enhance their beauty. The value of gold, however, was brought home to me in a very simple way. I own a few pieces of jewelry by arguably the most important jewelry maker of the Hopi tribe, Charles Loloma. I have seen prices of close to $20,000 for pieces that were nice, but not over the top. So, when an auctioneer who specialized in Native American jewelry was at one of the art fairs, I showed him a piece that I particularly prized and asked what it would bring at auction. He said, between $4,000 and $5,000. When I asked why, he replied that the stones are mounted in silver not gold. Yes, I was disappointed from the point of view of value, but it did not dampen my enjoyment of the work. In many cases, I like silver much more because it is subdued and not glitzy. I am not trying to prove anything. Here is a pendant and buckle by Charles Loloma.

I started to think about it and put “gold” in the search engine for my Missives. There was a string of Missives with the word, exceptional works like medieval objects made for the Church. The gilded silver Arm Reliquary of the Apostles, Hildesheim, ca. 1190 from the Guelph Treasure now in the Cleveland Museum of Art is an example.

Although gold is usually seen to signify wealth and greatness it has always been a source of greed that sometimes results in violence and death. Remember King Midas? When the god Dionysus offered him a wish for anything he wanted, he said he would like everything he touched to turn to gold. This delighted him until he touched his food and drink.

Hearing the word gold, one’s first thought is bullion, jewelry, or maybe a crown, certainly not a painting. But, of course, a painting using gold, on a subconscious level, attracts us by that vibrant color. A painting that has come to be famous as “The Woman in Gold” (1907) is the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt, now in the Neue Galerie in New York.

It resided at one time in the Belvedere in Viena, which has retained another great painting, “The Kiss” where Klimt also made use of gold. It is surmised that the painting is a self-portrait of the artist together with his lifelong partner, Emilie Flöge. It is also the last painting he did where he used gold leaf in his work. Picasso had his pink and blue periods but Klimt preferred gold!

If we think about it, this is nothing new. In fact, it is quite an old tradition in European imagery. In the late Medieval and early Renaissance era gold background was used to represent heaven and the proximity to God. A wonderful example of Italian gold ground painting is the panel in the Frick Collection “The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain” (1308-1311) by Duccio die Buoninsegna.

I wish I could explain why gold is a status symbol associated with wealth and power. Looking for reasons I just kept coming across the same answer… because it always has been so, over millennia.

Maybe it is because it glitters!

Art is Art is Art

Art is art, or it isn’t, why is it always necessary to categorize it ad infinitum?

The Metropolitan Museum has 17 departments the majority of which are art departments of one kind or another. A few of these include the Department of European Art, the American Wing, Ancient Near East, Arms and Armor, Asian Art, and the Costume Institute. Only recently has the Director, Max Holien, suggested that these fiefdoms cooperate with each other and “cross-fertilize” (my words) and have them possibly share their collections.

These departments include various sections and to pick on one, the American Wing includes Native American art together with American decorative arts, and paintings from the 17th through the 19th century. If the work is more recent it goes to another department that of Modern and Contemporary art.

There used to be a department of primitive art, and I am happy to tell you that today it is known as the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Some of it you might refer to as indigenous, so why was Native American art recently moved to the American Wing? It seems rather arbitrary to me.

Your head may already be spinning with all these categories but in recent times it seems we need to create new categories… Women Artists, Black Artists, and an even newer one Queer Artists. Different groups may or may not have their own style, different from one and another but as I said in the first place, art is art… or not. That IS subjective. You can have it all in one by artist Sarah Huny Young who is a Black, Female, Queer Photographer.

My family is Jewish but my father, who was in the art business his entire life said, “There is no such thing as Jewish art, it is either art or it is not!”. The first thing I would think of when I hear the name Louise Nevelson would not be that she is Jewish! This is her “Classic Column” (1967) at the Jewish Museum, New York.

I thought the idea of art was a means of expression where individuals could deliver their message in their own way. None the less we seem to have a need to pigeonhole everything we deal with.

If you want to make a point about diversity, that is great, but do it by comparison. In the same gallery put works of art, from religious objects to portraits, that relate to each other but come from various cultures created by a Black Artist, White Artists, Female Artists, and Queer Artists. Let the viewer see a difference, if there is one. Personally, I think it is insulting to have an exhibition of works by just one group, pigeonholed ethnically or worse sexually. Why is that necessary? If I were an artist, I would want to be identified as such without qualification.

If the curator feels it is important to explain something that will enhance the viewer's understanding of the work of art that information can go on the label, not be the theme of the presentation, be it in an exhibition or a museum gallery.

I don’t believe the idea of DEI is to separate one from the other but to bring them together as one, that goes for art as well as people.

If a curator is trying to teach how beading is different in various cultures, show beadwork from them. For instance, you might show a pair of moccasins by a Native American (Sioux circa 1900 at the Gilcrease Museum) and one from Nigeria (circa 1978 at the Fowler Museum, UCLA). If we don’t compare how can we learn the differences and maybe more important, the similarities.

The National Galleries

According to Wikipedia there are around 60 National Galleries worldwide. They are in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, The United Kingdom, Oceana, etc ...

Why create a national museum of art? It is meant to showcase a country's culture and preserve its historical past. It also is a way to show that the country has a national identity beyond possibly smaller institutions with more limited collections. Smaller countries may establish collections that more highly focus on the works of their own country but after a while realize that they wish to expand to the art of other countries to educate their public. One example is the National Gallery of South Africa.

What started me thinking about this was an email newsletter from the Simon Dickinson Gallery in London. The article focuses on the National Gallery in London which has just begun its third century serving the people of London, the United Kingdom, and the world. Mr. Dickinson points out that London’s National Gallery was not started by a donation from a Princely Collection such as the Uffizi in Florence which was created in order to show the collection of Medici treasures.

In 1777 there was an effort made to create a National Gallery when the Sir Robert Walpole collection was sold by his heirs in 1779. The British government would not acquire it. In the end, it was purchased by Catherine the Great and is now part of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Several more collections slipped through British hands until 1823 when the House of Commons finally agreed to purchase works from the collection of John Julius Angerstein, a friend of Sir Thomas Lawrence. The collection was, however, kept in the owner’s own home until the construction of the present building on Trafalgar Square designed by architect William Wilkins was completed. Its spacious galleries opened to the public in 1838. But that is another saga. The collection continues to grow and here is a painting I love by Henri-Pierre Danloux of the Baron de Besenval in his Salon, 1791, that Mr. Dickinson sold to his National Gallery.

Prime Minister Andrew Fisher accepted the idea of a National Gallery for Australia in 1910. What is the first thing any government does when it wishes to accomplish little? You guessed it, form a committee. This one was known as The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. One of the original ideas was to have portraits of important Australian personages painted by Australian Artists. By 1912 the Advisory Board decided there should be a building devoted to the collection in Canberra the new city being built as Australia’s capital. However, two world wars, the Great Depression, and building out Canberra’s infrastructure all delayed their efforts for another half-century. Only in 1967 did Prime Minister Harold Holt give the green light to the actual museum building. The collection has world stature today. Here is one work from the Museum in the Indigenous tradition, Charlie Djurritjini, Ganalbingu people, Skull, Bones, Bag, 1987-88.

The National Museum of Sweden was founded as the Royal Museum in 1792 with benefactors Gustav III and Carl Gustaf Tessin. Count Tessin (1695-1770), son of an architect, was a statesman who became an important patron of the arts while serving as ambassador to France from 1739 to 1742. He is credited with bringing the French Rococo style to Sweden. His collection on its own would make it worth visiting the Museum. Renamed the National Museum in 1866, the institution’s current building was designed by the German architect Friedrich August Stüler who also designed the Neues Museum in Berlin. This portrait of Tessin was painted by Jacques-André-Joseph Aved circa 1740.

The inaugural meeting of the South African Fine Arts Association founded by Sir Thomas Butterworth Bayleys and Abraham de Schmidt occurred in 1850. They arranged the first exhibition of fine art in South Africa in a school room with the hope of establishing a National Gallery. The National Collection was founded in Cape Town in 1872 when Bayleys left 45 paintings from his private collection to the nation. With the South African Art Gallery Act of 1895 the South African Government took over the collection in trust and a board of five trustees were elected in 1896 to manage the collection. The National Gallery Act also made provision for the building of new premises, but the foundation was only laid in 1914. Today, aside from works of art from their own and other countries in Africa, the collection consists of Dutch, French, and British works from the 17th to the 19th century.

What have I left out, aside from another 56 National Galleries, is our own. The National Gallery in Washington D.C. was conceived in 1928 by the financier and collector Andrew W. Mellon. He believed the country should have its own Museum like those established in other countries. In 1936 Mellon wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt offering his collection and an endowment to pay for the building of a National Museum. He stipulated that the museum not have his name on it, knowing that many more donors would be needed. In the same year that Mellon died, 1937, Roosevelt and Congress accepted the gift. In fact, the founding benefactors were, Samuel H. Kress, Rush Kress, P. A. B. Widener, Joseph Widener, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Chester Dale, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and Paul Mellon. Andrew Mellon ask the architect John Russel Pope to design the gallery. Although Pope died within 24 hours of Mellon the gallery was still built to their wishes and Pope’s design. When the Museum opened in 1941 Paul Mellon, Andrew’s son, gave the promised art in his father’s name. Our National Gallery is the only one, that I know of, which was built without government funds. Here is an image of Andrew Mellon with his painting by Meindert Hobbema from 1665 above the mantel.

As I have discussed before politics are part of museum life including and beyond the creation of the National Museums.

Salon des Réfusés

Already in 1667, the idea of a juried group exhibition came about. The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture held a semi-public exhibition of works of art by Academy members considered worthy of Royal Commissions ...  an interesting topic in and of itself. It won’t surprise you that besides members of the Academy,  the jury for these Salons included government officials.

What interests me here is the rebellion just under 200 years later in 1863 when out of 5,000 artist submissions only 2,000 were accepted for the Salon. There was such an uproar that the Emperor himself, Napoleon III, sanctioned an exhibition of the rejected artists in a different part of the Palais de l’Industrie and the Salon des Refusés was born. Fearing a backlash, or being seen as inferior, 1200 artists bowed out leaving an exhibition of only 800 works of art.

Needless to say, the Salon des Réfusés show of rejected artists work was panned, as anything new and innovative invariably is. Here is one of the rejects. Imagine how many millions, no hundreds of millions, it would bring if it were to come on the art market today.

It is not a stretch that nudity was one of the issues for its original rejection, but it was the setting in a major Paris park, Bois de Boulogne, that made the work totally unacceptable. The Emperor, himself, acquired The Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel, from the official Salon for his personal collection. Here a female nude was meticulously depicted in virtuoso technique in a lascivious pose, but the eroticism was cloaked in mythology!

As we all know history always repeats itself in one guise or another. Today we move from Paris to New York and the Brooklyn Museum. In an article in Hyperallergic, Rhea Nayyar announced “Opening on October 4, The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition will celebrate the museum’s 200th anniversary by spotlighting talent across the borough.” For this show, only 216 artists out of 4,000 submissions were accepted, a much smaller percentage than the Paris Salon about 150 years earlier. Do note from this how many artists must live and work in Brooklyn today. President of the Artists’ Coalition, Alicia Degener, said: “We didn’t want people to get rejected twice”.

Maybe not so surprisingly the “Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition” is presenting many of the rejected works in its own exhibition to be known as the “Salon des Réfusés 2024”. The rules are that there can only be one submission per artist, and it may not measure larger than 4x6 feet. A copy of the rejection letter from the museum must be submitted along with a $20 fee “to keep the lights on”. The plan is to include 200 artists and they have already been chosen. The show can be seen from September 21 to October 13 at the Artists Coalition in Redhook, Brooklyn.

To state the obvious, roughly 200 artists in both shows comes to 400, still only 10% of the original 4,000 submissions … can there be a Salon des Refusés des Refusés?!

Quotes for the Moment

First, let me wish you all a Happy Labor Day and as so many will say today, I cannot believe the summer is over. Now we have to again face reality.

I know this is an art blog, but it is also a platform where I can communicate with so many more people than I ever could speak with in person. I can think of few issues that are more important than what is happening in this country today. So, every once in a while, my writings will veer toward the political. For this Missive I have sought out images that for me complement favorite quotations that I have collected over the years.

Let’s start with none other than Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) who is quoted as saying “A Leader is a dealer in hope”. The idealized vision of Napoleon Crossing the Alps commissioned by Charles IV of Spain, from Jacques Louis David, now in the Napoleon Museum, Malmaison. It has been called propaganda. What do you expect in an election year? We learned from the recent Democratic Convention that one candidate is offering us hope at this time.

In this drawing by Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) called “The Accusation” from the Morgan Library let’s say the indignant Judge is yelling at the defendant. I could imagine him then quoting German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”

On the long-running series “Shark Tank, investor Rohan Oza said, “If you are not willing to break through the wall you are bound to end up behind it” We heard at the Democratic Convention the cry “We are not going back”. Both remind me of the surrealist painter, René Magritte’s, “False Mirror” (1928) in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. There have been varying interpretations of this work as there are meant to be for Surrealism. One is the eye is not just a window to the soul, but shapes reality according to our subjective experiences. For me, it is seeing beyond ourselves.

Looking way back the Greek Philosopher Plato (ca. 427 – 348 BC) said, “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools speak because they have to say something.” Looking not quite so far back the painter Quentin Masssys (1509-1575) created this masterpiece now in the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp. Its title, “The world feeds many fools,” was a popular Netherlandish saying.

In the 2005 film “The Interpreter”, Nicole Kidman has a wonderful line, “Vengeance is a lazy form of grief”. The works of art I could find were all about vengeance and not its insecurities, but I think a flag flown by some at the January 6th insurrection says it all, but no one has taken credit for being its creator.

One last quote, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Is attributed to the writer Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

In 1935 as the Nazi’s were gathering momentum, Lewis published a novel, “It Can’t Happen Here” which foresaw the U.S. past president. This image was posted on Facebook by a retired schoolteacher from the Southeast. Though she probably would not mind, in this climate I am not identifying her further.