I’m Lost; Where Should I Go?

I am always asking for suggestions for a Missive and very rarely get them, but my daughter came up with this one. She sent me an article from the New York Times by Martha Schwendener about what apps there are for a gallery search on the internet.

  

Once upon a time, or as my mother used to say, “In Former Times”, there were not that many art galleries to visit. In the cities that I know well, they have proliferated. Needless to say, estimates always vary widely, but looking at the first replies on the web, London has the most at 1500 galleries, New York City comes in second with 1450, Santa Fe at 250, and, interestingly, Paris has the least with 230. But even with that “few,” you can’t cover them all in one visit, or, in the case of the first two, maybe even a lifetime, and you may not want to. (Image Map Caption: Galleries in Downtown Manhattan)

Galleries in Downtown Manhattan

How to narrow it down? We used to have magazines for that, and Art Associations had their booklets, but today, surprise, surprise, we have the internet and apps for your phone.

The first such app guide came out in 2014, the year I closed my gallery for good. I love the double entendre of the guide’s title, “See Saw”. It covers New York, Berlin, Paris, London, and Los Angeles. After a few years, however, it started to charge the galleries a fee. Not surprisingly, the magazines used to do the same, but it brings into question how objective they can be. Also, are they missing the top galleries that may have felt they don’t need that publicity?

“Showrunner” boldly claims that it “is the most comprehensive app for art discovery in New York City”, boasting “Showrunner makes it easy to explore all the art New York City has to offer”. I doubt it!

“Artwrld” takes a different tack, with “Exhibitions of the Day”, openings, and events as well as listings. That one sounds good to me because, as a gallerist, I would want to know what is going on and where I should show up to be in the know and be known.

What sounds more like the old magazines is “Exhibits in New York,” which has added art criticism. I think I would want to read that after I had seen an exhibition, so I could first make up my own mind.

“ArtRabbit” is London-based but has entered the New York market. It has the innovative idea of allowing galleries, museums, and even users to contribute information that is moderated by staff before being posted. If it is done well, I would like this, with no one individual telling me what to see.

These days, as a retired art dealer and a curator, we go to fewer galleries and more to museums. So, what is out there for us? Some years ago, we discovered “Bloomberg Connects” which covers 1200 “museums, galleries, gardens and cultural spaces”, internationally. As you would expect, that would be only the better-known in each category. The good news is that it is very helpful inside those institutions, as well as being free.

“Smartify” has information on museums and sites, often with audio about specific objects or places. It works with its limited number of supporting museums. If you are travelling, the app will certainly give you guidance on what you might want to see and learn about in a new city. A feature I like is that you can point your phone at an artwork and learn a lot about it. Obviously, however, all 1,500,000 works of art in the Metropolitan Museum will not be included.

“Museumfy” also offers the ability to take a photo and learn about a work of art. It is also multilingual and can learn your interests to supply more information along those lines.

As you might expect, “Google Arts and Culture” makes it sound like they can give it all to you. Obviously, no one site can. Not even all the apps put together can cover all the art in all its locations. But surveying which do exist, and there are certainly more that have been identified here, you can pick a number of free and fee apps that have a great advantage over what was available just a generation ago.

Indian Country/O’Keeffe Country

The actual title of the exhibition currently at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe is, “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country”. As you probably can guess these words have the same meaning, just the first is in the Tewa language. The Tewa are Native Americans who live in the Pueblos of the Southwest, mostly in New Mexico and Arizona and speak the Tewa language.

If you come from the East you may have heard the Southwest referred to as “O’Keeffe Country” in reference to the artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived much of her life in New Mexico. If, however, you have lived for any length of time in the Southwest you know full well that it was, and remains, Indian Country. There are 19 Indian Pueblos with independent governments in New Mexico alone, and they represent 12% of the population of the State. You also learn that Indian Country is not limited to the Southwest, because long before Europeans arrived, Native American nations inhabited all of what is known today as Canada and the United States. The Tewa people are located in this part of the Southwest. It has become customary to read a formal land acknowledgement of what was and remains Native Land before performing arts and other events in Santa Fe.

The O’Keeffe Museum represented by its Director Cody Hartley, PhD. wished to acknowledge the fact that when O’Keeffe adopted this magical place, she did not live in a vacuum but was influenced by her surroundings and culture. Since turnabout is fair play, the curator Dr. Bess Murphy, Luce Curator of Art and Social Practice, asked 12 Tewa artists to explore their reaction to Okeefe’s work. Together with co-curator, artist Jason Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo) they created an exhibition that that puts the accent on works by the Native Americans and includes a few works by O’Keeffe that illustrate a relationship between them.

O’Keeffe talked about “her” land, and the Pedernal mountain she often painted as “her” mountain. The Tewa have taken her words literally and understandably object. Obviously, she didn’t mean it as literal ownership and I would liken her statements to the common expression, this is my country. What is interesting is that originally the Indians did not believe that anyone owned land but rather were stewards of that land, therefore no one could claim ownership.

Jason Garcia is known for his painted ceramic plaques, including a series in comic book style called Tewa Tales. A key work in the exhibition is his plaque showing O’Keeffe standing beside a sign where Tewa is painted over her name ...

Some artists took their assignment quite literally as did Martha Romero (Nambé Pueblo) who made this ceramic and called it “Tainted Lily” using clay gathered at Ghost Ranch, where O’Keeffe had lived, in response to O’Keeffe’s painting “Calla Lily in Tall Glass -No. 2”.

Clay is very important to the Native Americans. For thousands of years clay has been used to make utilitarian objects, as well as to make Adobe for their structures and ceremonial objects as well. Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) has a case to herself in the show with the title “Did Georgia Pray”. She explains her title in the label: “As potters when we gather our clay we pray – with our cornmeal, with our hands, with our hearts. … Every step is a conversation with the land…” She implies that O’Keeffe could not fully understand how sacred the land is to the Tewa people.

One of my favorite images is “The Sentinels Have Always Been Watching” by John Garcia, Sr. (Santa Clara Pueblo), father of the show’s co-curator Jason. He explains that the Sentinels are the Mountains and the Stars. The Morning Star is one of the major deities of Tewa Culture and cosmology.

You can enjoy O’Keeffe’s work without ever coming to the Southwest, but you cannot appreciate how she sees the world without coming out here. I always thought her clouds were stylized imagery, but we see them out here often. The same is true of the landscape which can look so barren with its little spots of green vegetation. It is captured in Eliza Naranjo Morse’s (Santa Clara Pueblo) painted installation called “Coming Home” that evokes the landscape as seen from the window of O’Keeffe’s home.

One of the most impactful works in the show is not an object or a painting but rather a series of four handwritten letters by Samuel Villarreal Catanach (Pueblo of Pojoaque). He states on the label that he felt a connection with O’Keeffe so close that it inspired him to write these letters. He continues on the label that in these letters, “I express what is important to me and how I perceive her as a visitor to Tewa Nangeh. If she were alive today, I believe she would be someone I would be eager to engage with and learn from. I wonder how she would respond to my thoughts about her.” This single page sums up my experience of the show.

Double Click on image to enlarge

Bonwit Teller Redux

In frustration and pride, I am reposting a Missive that I first published on November 15, 2020, 40 years after the event. Why? Because the New York Times published its basics on November 8 this year in an article about Trump’s destruction of the East Wing and other architectural ideas he has in tribute to himself around Washington, DC. Details were missing, and the one that was most important to me was my wife’s role in that story. So here is the blog, but first a preview photo:

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Missive 11-16-2020


WHAT HAPPENED AT BONWIT TELLER?

When the Biden victory was called that Saturday morning, my wife started crying and for many hours couldn’t stop. I had to explain to one person at the hospital that she was not in pain, but there were tears of joy. I was wrong!

Penelope told me later that when she heard Trump (I will never capitalize his name) was on his way out, she was reliving what he did to her and her institution 40 years earlier.

It was June 5, 1980, and Penelope called me totally frantic, “Get your camera and meet me at the Robert Miller gallery. My colleague’s gallery was right across the street from the Bonwit Teller department store, which was being demolished to make way for Trump Tower.

Built in 1929 by the Stewart Company, it was meant to be the last word in elegance in the French-inspired Art Deco style. Bankrupted following the Wall Street crash, the Stewart store was purchased by Bonwit Teller, who engaged the well-known architect, Eli Jacques Kahn, to redo the building in an updated American style. The entrance was modernized with a 20x30-foot bronze grill, but two 15-foot-tall figural Art Deco relief sculptures remained at the top of the façade. Penelope felt that the two elements were a wonderful illustration of New York’s architectural transition from 1920s Art Deco to what was to become known in the 30’s as the Modern style.

At that time, Penelope was the curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of 20th Century Arts, building the decorative arts (today known as Design) collection. When she learned that Bonwit Teller was going to be torn down by the new owner, Donald Trump, she contacted his staff. Getting him a serious appraisal of $200,000, which could have served as a tax deduction, she also offered great PR for his debut as a developer in Manhattan. She vividly remembers the personal meeting where he agreed to donate the grill and reliefs to the museum, saying, “It will be a great deal!”

The entrance grill disappeared first. Penelope was told that it had gone to a salvage yard in New Jersey, so the Met sent out a truck and registrar’s crew, but the salvage company knew nothing about it. Lately, it has been rumored to be in the Trump Tower dining room, which, at a couple of stories high, could accommodate it.

Then, on June 5, Robert Miller, the art dealer whose gallery looked out directly on the Bonwit Teller reliefs and who had made the appraisal, called Penelope at the Met to say he believed that they were about to jackhammer the stonework. Penelope, 9 months pregnant, (our son was born on June 14) jumped into a cab only to get caught in a typical Fifth Avenue traffic jam. “She “got out and ran, as well as a pregnant woman can, the 10 blocks to the Miller gallery. I joined her at my colleague’s gallery as Penelope declared, “I am going over there,” but Robert cut her off, saying, “They will recognize you. I will go”. Gathering all the cash in the gallery, he rushed down to find the foreman of the crew, offering to pay if they would preserve the reliefs. When he came back fuming, he said, “They won’t do it. The foreman said that the young Donald told him personally that the reliefs must be destroyed because some crazy lady from a museum up town wanted them”.

The story received several articles in the New York Times and on television at the time. A photograph I took was panned over by ABC, making it look like a video, but Robert Miller’s gallery director, got most of the photographic play!

The story is included in a book by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher called “Trump Revealed,” published by Scribner in 2016. It was revived in the NY Times and Washington Post and even made it to our local paper, the New Mexican, when Trump posed as a defender of history and culture after Charlottesville.

Back in 1980 Trump, using a technique we have unfortunately come to know well, contacted the press as a “Mr. Baron” of the Trump organization, making up stories that ranged from their having had had the sculptures appraised by three art experts who had found they had no artistic merit, to it would have cost too much to take down the reliefs, to someone on the street below might have been hurt during their removal.

Today, it is just more of the same!

Losses to Our Culture

I am sure that some of my readers have not been happy with some of my political commentary. However, when politics obstruct our culture and the arts, left or right, we should care!

The most obvious case was highlighted in an article in The Guardian with the headline “Kennedy Center Ticket Sales Fall to Lowest in Years after Trump Takeover”. The Washington Post was cited on many of the details including the fact that 43% of ticket sales between September 3 and October 19 remained unsold! A year ago, over the same period 93% of tickets were sold or given on a complimentary basis. To be fair the fact that the President had called in the National Guard to Washington, DC. did not make people feel more secure, but Kennedy Center staff told the Post reporters that the week after Trump declared himself Chair and replaced the Board, sales had dropped by roughly 50%. We also know that some performers have bowed out of scheduled performances in protest. It becomes a downward spiral. With subscriptions way down, it discourages additional donations.

The administration’s directives to the National Smithsonian Institutions on what should be shown and emphasized and what not, has put pressure to fall in line on all 22,000 U.S. museums who have previously received grants for everything from exhibitions to updating their records.

Think about what it means to defund PBS (The Public Broadcasting Service). Some of the larger stations may find ways to survive but not those in smaller towns and rural areas. Children will miss out on PBS programs that provide free pre-school education. The beloved Sesame Street is just one of the PBS programs teaching basics like numbers and the alphabet, as well as social skills.

I am mystified by this war on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI). Maybe for once we should not be just using the letter abbreviations but rather what they stand for. What is left if you leave those words out of your life? Maybe the Left has gone to extremes with their wokeness but that is not a reason to censor plays, movies, books, and museum exhibitions, denying the foundation on which society is based and from which it learns. Happily, many arts organizations do not rely heavily on government funding, but even those will be strained to find private donations to cover any losses.

The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency to fund the arts and arts education nationwide and act as a catalyst for public and private support. It is the only organization that does so in all 50 states. Just one example is the Creative Writing Fellowship, created In 1966, which awarded up to $50,000 to published writers of prose and poetry. It was cancelled this past August. Many well-known writers, such as Louise Erdrich, Joys carol Oates and Isaac Bshevis Singer took advantage of the Fellowship early in their career and we are the richer for it.

The Greater Pittsburgh Art’s Council last month published an Art Blog on Cultural Policy reported, “On October 1, NPR reported on 550 celebrities who relaunched The Committee for the First Amendment a group first organized during the post-World War II Red Scare.” In the letter shared by NPR, the authors wrote: "This Committee was initially created during the McCarthy Era, a dark time when the federal government repressed and persecuted American citizens for their political beliefs. They targeted elected officials, government employees, academics, and artists. They were blacklisted, harassed, silenced, and even imprisoned. The McCarthy Era ended when Americans from across the political spectrum finally came together and stood up for the principles in the Constitution against the forces of repression."

As I have often said, history repeats itself …

The Heist

Need I say more? You already knew that I was going to write about the theft of the Napoleon III Jewels at the Louvre. I decided to write about it with the first announcement and then I could not avoid it, looking at French, U.S., British, and German press.

Everyone loves to read about art thefts, as I do. They seem to happen on a regular basis. Probably the most famous one being the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, which was, obviously, eventually recovered. There have been a number of less serious burglaries that have happened there since, the most recent being the theft of a small landscape by Corot in 1998.

Seizing on some interesting details by putting many of these articles together:

The value of the jewels was put at one hundred and two million dollars immediately after the robbery though they were not insured since the Louvre like many other major museums are self-insured since values of their collections would be too great for any commercial insurer.

One camera outside the Louvre was facing in the wrong direction. Does that mean there was help from the inside by either reporting this fact to the thieves beforehand or, actually moving it before the robbery?

The perpetrators wore yellow vests looking like construction workers reached the second floor using an electric ladder from a truck, though they had brought kerosene to burn the truck with any evidence, in their rush they neglected to do so.

They broke through a glass panel in the door into the Apollo Gallery, threatened visitors and two guards to clear the gallery, broke into the case got out with 8 pieces and escaped on motorcycles, in case you are interested they were Yamaha TMASX models.

In the process they dropped a crown during their escape. It was created in 1855 for Princess Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife with nearly 1,400 diamonds and 56 emeralds. which I would guess, though damaged, was both the most important, identifiable and valuable piece taken. The three other thieves were probably not happy with their colleague who dropped it!

The remaining pieces are so well known they would be most difficult to sell so there is the fear that the jewels will be removed and then still difficult to move as they have been cut in the manner of the 19th century. An expert diamond cutter would have to be found to make them look like modern cutting. Of course, any such desecration will erase some royal French history. Adding my two cents there are collectors with hidden collections who may have paid the thieves in advance. In that case how much less would they pay without the missing crown?

Immediately after the robbery occurred the excuses and blame commenced. The government had not funded enough guards; the cases for the jewels were new and not equipped with enough security devices; dysfunctional alarms (which has been contradicted by French officials); too few perimeter cameras as well as the afore mentioned misfocused camera. The Louvre Director, Laurence des Cars, then submitted her resignation but, refreshingly, it was not accepted. Because of the notoriety and it was, after all, the Louvre a government enquiry has naturally begun.

The police had taken 150 DNA samples and within days one suspect who had a record was apprehended at the airport, then another was arrested and shortly after another 5, though there was no sign of the missing jewels. One of the 5 was believed to be the third of the four thieves and, ostensibly the others were those behind the theft. According to the Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, the first two “partially confessed” with no explanation. I had to ask myself whether that was like being a little bit pregnant!

As of the end of last week she added, “Brick by brick, the investigation is taking shape and closing in on those who may be involved”. Interpret that as you may but there is no doubt we will be hearing more as the days and weeks go by.