Collector’s Choice

I have, of course, written about collecting before, but after reading a couple of articles from Town & Country, which a friend sent me, I thought I would try again to answer the unanswerable.

The first was written over forty-five years ago by Russell Lynes (1910-1991). He was a photographer (though his brother George Platt Lynes was better known as such),  an educator, editor, and, in my world, best known as an art historian. The article I am referring to is called “The Romance of Collecting”. Lynes starts out by saying that a young couple asked him if they should buy a certain painting. They were not satisfied with his response, “Do you love it?” The couple probably wanted to have an affirmation of their taste. Today, I believe, the would-be collector would be calculating if it was worth the price, or worse yet, a good investment.

Everyone collects for different reasons, but the collectors I like best are those who can’t help themselves. That doesn’t mean that their tastes won’t change, just like your favorite food when you are young might not be the same when you are older.

My wife and I have acquired art in fields that we knew were against the market because we loved the objects, not because we believed they would be worth more, but because we wanted to live with them. Yet, over time, our tastes and circumstances changed, and one collection gave way to another.

As a kid, I had friends who collected baseball cards and spoke about their Topps Mickey Mantle card, which has today brought fortunes at auction. I had a Mickey Mantle card too, but it was not a Topps product, but I kept it because it was Mickey Mantle. Unfortunately, I did not take care of it and put it in an album. Condition matters, so my card today is not worth much, if anything at all. As a grown-up, I have not been swayed by others. When I see it, love it, and can afford it, I buy it, but I have learned to take care of it as well.

Lynes makes a distinction between collectors and accumulators. I believe there is a very fine line there, starting with why the work was bought in the first place. The job of the art dealer is often to help place a work in someone’s home after they have said they have no more room. One might suggest that they can put the inferior work away and replace it with their new masterpiece! Thus, the collector becomes an accumulator and has closets full of art. The advantage there is that they will have work that they can give away. In my case, I often enjoy that more than anything, especially if a museum thinks what I owned is worth adding to their collection!

I mentioned another article from Town and Country, and that one was written this month by Laura Neilson about when “Scandal Sells”. It addresses art that Jeffrey Epstein owned, which can bring a premium, not because of the quality of the art, but because of the previous owner. You have probably heard of the collectors who collect drawings and paintings created by Adolf Hitler. I would say, “whatever turns you on,” but that does not change the art. If you appreciate history, I can see the interest in having a token. But if you put it up on your wall and have it there only because of the creator, you, in my opinion, are not an art collector.

Epstein owned a Roman-style statue that was in an FBI auction in Palm Beach. It changed hands a couple of times until a dealer sold it to new buyers who put it in the center of their living room. They were said to have “an appreciation for the emancipation of the piece”. As it was placed front and center of the new owners’ home, not hidden away for salacious private viewing, perhaps the provenance has become just part of the story.

The article, however, makes an interesting distinction. Interviewing auctioneers, the author finds that auctioneers must make valuations of objects not including provenance, since they don’t know what the provenance will add or subtract from the valuation. They also wonder whether there are ethical boundaries that people will not want to cross, and therefore, it might take longer for people to sell a work that belonged to Epstein than Bernie Madoff. The latter’s crimes were of a financial nature, and Americans have a more difficult time with sex. (see last week’s Missive). But you never know, it only takes two bidders to bring a price at auction. The Madoff Mets baseball satin jacket, valued at $720, brought $14,500 at a U.S. Marshals Service auction.

While provenance from a celebrity may add temporary interest to a piece, a history of passage through renowned art collections gives it true pedigree.

Sex in Museums

“The Eroticism of Things” is the title of a 2018 exhibition at the Werkbundarchiv-Museum der Dinge in 2018. This museum in Berlin is an archive documenting 20th/21st-century industrial design and consumer culture with a collection of some 40,000 mass-produced objects. The exhibition website includes the following explanation: “While nudes have entered many living rooms as replicas of respectable works in the art-historical canon, erotica has often gotten censored, tabooed, and banned. The distinction between eroticism, art, and pornography has always been in constant flux and continues to sway people’s perception and categorization of sexually charged things.”

Nothing has changed throughout history, other than people’s perception. In 2023, parents complained that Michelangelo’s David, which was shown to students in a 6th-grade art class at a school in Tallahassee, Florida, was pornographic, causing quite a stir and the resignation of the principal. But this was not a unique event. Even when it was created, Leonardo da Vinci, while praising the artist and sculptor, suggested that Michelangelo might add a loincloth!

For whatever reason, or maybe it’s obvious, the discovery of an 8-inch carved-bone phallus has made the art news. I read the article in Hyperallergic, but it has appeared in publications around the world. The “discovery” was made in the collections of The Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which specializes in Roman archaeology and regional history. The phallus was found when a government-funded inventory of the museum’s 16,000 boxes of archeological specimens was carried out. At the point of discovery, only 300 of the boxes had been gone through! I don’t know how the story got out, but I would like to think it was a brilliant PR agent for the museum🙄

This made me curious about objects with a sexual orientation in other museums. The story of the “Secret Cabinet” in Naples is worthy of a Missive of its own. It is a collection of first-century Roman erotic art found in Pompeii and Herculaneum, today exhibited in a separate section at the National Archaeological Museum. It is called “Secret” because the gallery was closed and opened so many times as attitudes toward sex changed. In fact, at one time the room was bricked closed, and the current installation only dates from 2000. This sculpture of Pan and a Goat is a highlight of the Cabinet.

There have been allegations that the British Museum destroyed sexually related artifacts in its collections. The Museum reassures us, however, that this is not the case with the collection of around 400 such works donated in 1865. Known as the Secretum, the collection was, from time to time, removed from public display but has now been dispersed to the appropriate archeological departments, in effect, hidden in plain sight. It makes me think of a bored child being taken through room after room and case after case of the 8 million objects in the Museum’s collection, until he stops in front of one and calls out, “Mummie, Mummie, look what they have here, why does it look like a penis?” What parent has not been put in such a predicament in public?

In many ways, the U.S. is much more puritanical than other nations. Even in Canada, women can go topless. In Germany, I read about co-ed saunas where men and women are accepted totally naked, but it is not obligatory. However, there are some in the United States who seek to counter this puritanical attitude. In Miami, Florida, in the Art Deco district, you will find The World Erotic Art Museum, library, and education think tank. The museum was founded by Naomi Wilzig (1934-2015) in 2005 and includes 4,000 artworks from around the world, dating from 300 BCE to the present. She had come from an orthodox Jewish home and did not know about erotic art until a request from her son, who knew she loved prowling antique shops and thought they might be a good source. She found that many of the antique dealers kept erotic items off view but would slowly open up and show them to her. Finding the quest fascinating, she built a collection which led to a book, lectures, and finally the founding of a museum. After being turned down in many places by communities believing erotic was merely porn, her son found her a welcoming location in Miami. Here is an example from the collection.

I will end with what is probably an apocryphal story of a highly respected curator of Greek and Roman Art at a major museum. It was said that when she retired after many years, one of her desk drawers was found to contain many of the phalluses missing from sculptures that were on view.

An old friend used to say to me, “The evil is in the mind of the beholder.”

Thoughts on “Raphael: Sublime Poetry”

When there is a blockbuster exhibition, it is hard to avoid it even at a distance. On March 29, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Without seeing the show, I would not presume to review it, but the very fact that it is taking place gives much to think about since, after Leonardo and Michelangelo, there is no other Renaissance painter with more renown.

Blockbuster shows have been around for a long time, and museums love creating them because they bring in the crowds, acclaim, and, of course, revenue. On the other hand, they cost a bloody fortune and take a great deal of time and work on the part of the organizing museum’s staff. The curators and director must convince their counterparts at the potential lending institutions as well as private collectors, to give up and risk their beloved works of art, which, for a time, they cannot show to the public or friends. This exhibition will not travel to other venues, reducing the risk to the art and making more people to travel to see it. The added prestige is countered by the costs since there is no other institution to share them.

The total of 237 works exhibited includes 33 paintings and 142 drawings, as well as tapestries and decorative arts. The loans come from some 60 institutions and private collectors. From the photos of the installation, it seems much of the lighting is dim in order to preserve the works on paper.

For many years, the Raphael altarpiece described simply as "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints" was installed at the top of the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum. It is burned in my memory because I passed it so many times, but I could never get excited by it. Maybe that is because it was an early work, Raphael’s first altarpiece commissioned by the nuns of Sant’Antonio in Perugia for their private chapel. This was in 1504-1505, when Raphael was in his early 20’s and was not yet the great artist he would become over the short span of his life. At the time, the nuns knew he would not cost them as much as a better-known artist. In the seventeenth century, the nuns sold off the altar piece by piece. For this exhibition, the entire altarpiece was reconstituted, bringing together all the predella panels scattered far and wide.

In this painting, “The Holy Family with Infant Saint John the Baptist” (The Madonna of the Rose), 1517-18, done near the end of Raphael’s life, you can better understand the title of the show “Sublime Poetry”. However, art historians, through history, education, scientific analysis, and personal opinion, believe that parts of the painting are by the hand of Raphael’s star student and assistant Julio Romano (1499-1546).

Artists learn by studying the work of those who came before, and Rembrandt was no exception. Rembrandt never went to Italy, but he did collect prints and drawings by Raphael. Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514-1515) always brings to my mind Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1640, based on the Raphael painting he saw and sketched in a sale of the collector Lucas van Uffelen’s estate in Amsterdam.

I will mention just two other notable works: The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, has lent this wonderful drawing of the heads and hands of two Apostles (ca. 1519-1520). It was already in the Ashmolean collection in 1846. These are quoted as “auxiliary Cartoon” for the Transfiguration, which was the last painting created by the master.

From the selection of decorative arts is a tapestry after Raphael, credited to two Flemish tapestry makers, Jan van Tieghem and Frans Gheteels. Dated to the third quarter of the 16th century, the subject, Saint Paul and Saint Barnabas at Lystra, otherwise known as “The Sacrifice at Lystra is from the Acts of the Apostles Tapestry series. Lent by Colecciones Reales, Madrid, it illustrates the impact of the master’s designs.

This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition was curated by the Metropolitan’s own Museum Carmen Bambach, who wrote the much-praised catalog. The show closes June 28.

Resurrected Monuments

Time flies, and over six years ago, I wrote a Missive, “Addressing the Statue,” about the concept of taking down statues that do not fit in with the current thinking. 

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2019/12/addressing-statue.html

I have always been opposed to dismissing the past, in any sense. You might say that another word for the past is History. We learn from history. I am sure you have heard the expression said to a young person going off into the world, “Fail early and fail often”. Why would anyone, meaning well, say that? It is simply that this is how we learn, from our mistakes.

Artnet had an article recently by Eileen Kinsella titled, “Toppled Monuments are Reappearing Across the U.S. Under Trump”. Much as it pains me, I have to say that, in my opinion, this is at least one positive aspect of the current administration, though it is probably being done for all the wrong reasons.

At the time of George Floyd’s murder, among others, a statue of Christopher Columbus was toppled in Baltimore and dumped in Baltimore’s harbor, citing the latter’s history of enslaving and colonizing the Indigenous people. Yes, that is abhorrent to most people today, but that ignores the fact that he is credited with discovering this Continent. I know he did not actually land on our shores, but still, one constituency in particular, Italian immigrants, is proud of him. He also satisfies a question of who was the founding father! I would have encouraged those who objected to the sculpture to have a plaque created stating their issue, but not destroying it. In any event, a replica of the Baltimore Columbus has recently been installed on the White House grounds!

Monuments represent the emotions of the moment, and these often change during periods of upheaval and power shifts. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation challenged Catholicism, Papal authority, and clerical corruption. This led to the destruction and removal of statues in many European churches. Today, we would see beyond their religious symbolism to revere them as works of art, but with the wave of iconoclasm they have been lost forever. A block of stone that would have once separated the nave and quire of Durham Cathedral was reused and found in one of the buildings of the Cathedral College. The figures were probably defaced sometime after the death of Henry VIII (1547).

The Southern Poverty Law Center found that over 160 Confederate monuments were removed between 2015 and 2020. Here, the distinction is between destroyed and removed. Some have been relocated or relegated to a museum. The artistic or historic value may be preserved, but their story is no longer one you might pass every day and learn as you walk by.

Confederate statues in tribute to Southern pride or white supremacy are also being reinstalled after they had been taken down, so as not to offend one constituency or another. Again, I would say that is part of history and that those who forget will relive it. General Albert Pike has been described as “a racist Confederate Civil War general who defended slavery and wrote a militant variation of 'Dixie.” He has also been described as a Masonic leader, an author, a poet, a philosopher, and a philanthropist. His toppled statue has been reinstalled by order of the Trump administration.

Here in Santa Fe, the obelisk, known as Soldiers’ Monument, at the center of the Plaza (elsewhere it might be called the town square) has been a political issue for years. In 2020, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day (known elsewhere as Columbus Day), the obelisk was toppled by a small group of Indigenous demonstrators. It was erected in 1867 to honor the Union army soldiers, mostly local Hispanic volunteers who died in Civil War battles to keep the Confederacy from overtaking the New Mexico Territory. One of the plaques on the base referred to battles with "savage Indians" in reference to Apache raids on settlements. The offensive words, however, had been chiseled out in 1974. Today, the architectural plinth remains in place while an ongoing debate rages along with cost studies for razing, rebuilding, or moving the monument to the Military Cemetery. I believe it should be rebuilt or at least the pedestal left in place, accompanied by an explanation of the full history.

That same year, a statue of Don Diego de Vargas was removed from the Cathedral Park. De Vargas had led the Spanish retaking and resettlement of New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, but he also ordered the killing of 70 Pueblo Indians in 1693. After a man was killed in Albuquerque during a 2020 protest demonstration around a de Vargas monument, Santa Fe’s Mayor had our statue preemptively removed to a long-unknown location. A year later, a former city councilor said he saw it in the garden of a home/business where it had been placed by the contractor who moved the statue in the first place. In 2024, it was placed on temporary exhibition at t the New Mexico History Museum.

The destruction and/or the resurrection of a monument is more than a passing current event; it becomes part of our history. 

Artist in Training

I am getting emails every day about various art fairs. There is the European Art Fair known as TEFAF, there is a drawing fair in Paris and the Outsider art fair in New York. The latter term is usually in reference to artists who have had no formal training, but like everything else, there are exceptions to that as well. This had me thinking about how the visual arts were taught in Western European cultures through the ages.

Did the caveman have formal training? Of course not. One looked at the object drawn by another earlier and developed their own way of creating what they saw. Maybe if one drew a horse, the other thought, well, I could draw a deer, or even the image of my friend over there. It is thought that the first images of a person in drawing or sculpture were 40-50,000 years ago.

Through most of the history of European art, people learned their craft through an apprenticeship. The word comes from the French, ‘apprendre’, to learn or, further back, Latin “apprehendere’ meaning to take hold of or grasp. The word just puts a more formal name to do what we all do to get ahead,… we learn from others. You have to crawl before you walk, and then you can go your own way.

A formal guild system for all crafts, which included what we consider art, originated in the Middle Ages. You became an apprentice, then a journeyman, and then, if you were good enough, a master. The journeyman was employed by a skilled artist, and in another step along the way, often travelled to learn more on the road to becoming a master. A contemporary image of work being created at the sculpture guild.

During the Italian Renaissance, artists moved from rendering flat images to show depth and distance using geometry and perspective. They studied anatomy to learn how the human “machinery” worked. Leonardo and Michelangelo observed and performed human dissections, all in the advancement of their craft. Here is a drawing by Leonardo with his study notes.

Out of the guilds came the academies, the earliest being the Accademia del Disegno, the Academy of design, established in Florence in 1563. It was founded by Cosimo I de’Medici at the instigation of Giorgio Vasari and the co-founder Michelangelo. They wanted to oversee Florentine artistic activities and elevate the status of artists, who were defined as painters, draftsmen, and sculptors, so they would not be considered merely as craftsmen. It is an argument that continues to this day, where anyone creating furniture, ceramics, textiles, glass, and metal work, including gold and silver, is thought to be in a subcategory known as the “decorative” or “applied” arts!

In the twentieth century, paintings and sculpture departed from the academic tradition with Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism. In architecture, it was the Bauhaus. Later in the century, universities offered courses and Fine Arts degress. Today, the aspiring artist can take courses on how to use technology such as Photoshop and programs for 3D modelling and animation. Coming into these academic programs is that dreaded word, AI … not meaning that AI will create the art, but rather become a tool in creating it.

Through art, we communicate new ideas and emotions. The same work of art can be interpreted differently by every viewer. I like this opinion offered on OpenAI, which can be applied to art education:

If you only study, you stagnate ...

If you only create, you plateau ...

If you combine both, you accelerate ...

But I would add that if you want to stand out, you need to innovate ...

Introducing Children to Art

My wife tutors in one of the public elementary schools in Santa Fe, and she has students who struggle to master their ABC’s even in second grade, and those who are smarter than anyone in their class and are ready to skip a grade or maybe two.

As she was a museum curator her entire professional life, she likes to introduce kids to the world of Old Master paintings. She has a logical place to start in a book by Maria-Christina Sayn-Wittgenstein Nottenbohm called “Old Masters Rock” ...

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/search?q=puppa 

She asks the kids to pick a picture from the book to discuss and practice their reading skills on the serious but accessible text.

I remember the days when I was taken (dragged) from one museum to another because my parents enjoyed museums. As an art dealer, it was my father’s business as well. I do remember some highlights, like being told I was going to see the Mona Lisa at the age of 6 and my disappointment when my father pointed out this small dark picture in an underlit corridor at the Louvre, where it was hung at the time. This was circa 1950. A few years later, my father told me to lie down on a bench in the Sistine Chapel to stare up at Michelangelo’s ceiling … definitely memorable. Generally, however, I was bored.

One of my favorite quotes is from Xun Kuang, a Chinese Confucian philosopher who lived from 312–230 BC, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. When Penelope took my older son, Danny, to a museum, she would stop him in front of a painting and ask him what the story was. There was no right or wrong answer. There was no one to worry about whether it was what the art historians said the subject was. The story was Danny’s own, and in creating it, he engaged directly with the painting. With our son, Hunter, his mother’s methodology for visiting exhibitions was first a cursory tour during which he had to pick a single work to return to and discuss at length.

Our granddaughter, Boroughs, was 4 years old. She came to visit us during the run of the exhibition “Grounded in Clay” at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. In advance, Penelope had sent her a letter with photos of several of the pots, saying that they would go together on a “treasure hunt” to find them in the show. Armed with the photos, she had no trouble in locating the pieces in the galleries. Watching a video of the artist who discussed one of the pots made by an ancestor she never had the chance to know, Boroughs memorably announced, “She is so sad she is about to cry. Where does she live? I want to visit her and make her feel better.”

Most children don’t have the opportunity to be introduced to the arts by an art historian, but today, there is another means that they may enjoy, and that is AI. Even for adults, the standard museum audio guide only covers “Tell me, and I forget, teach me and I may remember …”, but if AI can grab a child’s imagination, by answering questions or playing a game or actually seeing themselves in an old master painting, then “involve me and I learn” may happen.

Visit from Justice Amy Coney Barrett

The University of New Mexico Law School and St. John’s College invited Justice Amy Coney Barrett to come to Santa Fe on her speaking tour to promote her new book, “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution”. The event took place at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe. The students from the colleges and other distinguished members from the legal profession were invited, as well as a limited number of members of the general public. We were there, as I am a member of the Lensic Board of Directors and am very interested in the law and the workings of the Supreme Court.

Needless to say, there were a number of loud but peaceful demonstrators outside the theater. I have never seen such security. I cannot remember seeing it even in New York when I lived there. There were City and State Police, the sheriff’s department, and plainclothes men who were part of the court’s security staff.

The Executive Director of the Lensic, Joel Alberts, welcomed the audience and the guests for the afternoon. He said that he appreciated the protesters, saying that this was how democracy works and further that those in the audience were there to listen respectfully, and if any made a disturbance, they had very nice people to help them find their way out, gaining a laugh from all.


The Justice was interviewed about her book by Hon. David F. Levi (President of the American Law Institute) and Ben Allison (co-founder of Santa Fe firm Bardacke Allison Miller LLP), who had attended Notre Dame School of Law with Justice Barrett and asked a few softball questions submitted beforehand by the students at the school.

We learned that Justice Barrett had clerked for the former conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, then taught for 15 years at Notre Dame School of Law before her first judicial appointment as a Federal Appellate Judge. She stressed that an important aspect of being a judge is to write clearly, and I thought it was interesting that she always did a first draft of her opinions by longhand on a yellow pad.

Obviously, I came in the afternoon both with my own point of view and an effort for an open mind. I always want to try to understand the other side of any question, whether I agree with it or not. I would ask those who had said the Justice should not be allowed to speak in Santa Fe, how else would they have had an opportunity to protest her in person and get noticed?

Interestingly, Justice Barrett spoke about the efforts the court made for collegiality since they “were serving life terms, like an arranged marriage with no option of divorce”. After a case was presented, they all had lunch together, with no one allowed to discuss the case. Also, when a new Justice was appointed, a sitting justice gave a dinner in their honor, first finding out what their favorite foods were. Justice Barrett did so for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson when she was appointed under President Biden.

Justice Barrett spoke of how important it was to adhere to the law and the precedent of former decisions. She spoke of textualism and originalism as what the founders meant when they wrote the Constitution and the other document that Americans hold dear, the Declaration of Independence. She said that the court was part of the political process since the Justices were chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate, but not partisan once they came to the court. I will let the reader figure that one out!

Justice Barrett admitted that the court was also reacting to the extremely liberal Warren Court. Many have felt it went too far as Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court (1953-1969) was interested in social justice, equality, and civil liberties, and championed the rights of minorities. These were my heroes.

In their decisions, Justice Barrett said that the current Court was in 50% unanimous agreement, 15% along partisan lines, and 35%... I presume she meant it was up to each individual Justice, an interesting formula, you might say. Another contradiction in my opinion was that previous rulings should be respected unless they were unworkable or inherently wrong!

The protesters outside the Lensic were angriest about her siding with the majority in overturning Roe vs. Wade. Justice Barrett had already spoken of her deep religious background, and in her last few sentences of the afternoon, she answered the question very clearly when she said, “Of course, I would not do anything that went against my religion.”