Viewing Two Paths to Power Through Art

I am always looking for subject matter and inspiration for my Missives. This week I saw an announcement for a new wing at the New York Historical Museum (formerly known as the New-York Historical Society). It is the oldest museum in the city founded in 1804 by private individuals concerned with preserving the past. The title of the institution’s new wing, The Tang Wing for American Democracy, made me think of art created to stir in emotions to the cause of democracy and despotism.

Athens is regarded as the cradle of democracy and the Parthenon on the Acropolis its greatest architectural representation. It was commissioned by the statesman Pericles between 447 and 438 BC as a tribute to Athenian Democracy and its triumph over Persian invaders. The city’s radical experiment with rule by the people is represented in the Parthenon frieze with images of common people together with the gods as had never before been depicted in a major temple.

Two great cultures the Roman and Greek existed side by side for a time. In In times of crisis citizens of the Roman Republic elected a dictator giving him ultimate power, but only for a term of 6 months. Julius Caesar, however, had himself named dictator for life, which, of course, ended with his assassination on the Ides of March 44 BC. In 2007 a life size bust was discovered in the Rhone River near Arles. Dating it between 49 and 46 BC, researchers believe it to be the only surviving portrait of Julius Caesar sculpted during his lifetime. Subsequent Roman emperors continued to disseminate multiple copies of their portrait busts as propaganda throughout the Empire.

Centuries later another experiment in democracy was founded in the United States, and it did not start smoothly, especially on the frontier of this country. A good example of this in action is an 1854 in a painting by George Caleb Bingham, "The County Election", now in the St. Louis Art Museum. Bingham did a series of these paintings. You can see that the people did not vote in voting booths but out in the open where they had to declare their vote publicly.

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gerasimov (Russian, 1861-1963) painted Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) as an orator in “Lenin on the Tribune”. Lenin only ruled after the Russian Revolution in1917 until his death in 1924 but during that time He established a one-party state, dismantled democratic institutions, and used secret police to violently suppress political opponents.

Eugène Delacroix painted, probably his most famous painting, “Liberty Leading the People” aka “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” in 1830. The July Revolution toppled the despotic King Charles X. You can see the aristocrat with his top hat on the left of Liberty and the commoner youth on the right fighting together for the same cause.

I remember as a young boy watching military parades during and after the Korean war. They were exciting and even as a 10-year-old I felt great civic pride. Needless to say, dictators use parades to stir that feeling in the people. Here is the image by poster artist Ludwig Hohlwein (1874–1949) showing Hitler leading a parade disseminated by the German postal service as the cover of a telegram folder.

Why not end with the ultimate symbol of Democracy the Statue of liberty. It was created in the Greco-Roman style by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi as a gift from France in 1886. It was not only a symbol of friendship but also to celebrate the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The idea was conceived in 1865 but fund raising in France was delayed by the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), and then the Americans who were to build the pedestal struggled to raise those funds. Creating an icon takes time!

 

David Hockney

I often need to use the search engine of my Missives (upper left) to check what I have written about before. I did so as I thought of writing about David Hockney (1937-2026). I have mentioned him often, but never written solely about the artist himself. Hockney died earlier this month, and as always happens, a slew of articles have been written about him and his work now that he is gone.

Hockney was born in Yorkshire, England, and studied, lived, and worked there until he was in his forties. In the 1960’s, he visited the United States often and even came over to teach. Then in 1978, he moved to Los Angeles. He also acquired a studio in Normandy during the last years of his life, but always kept a home in England, and that is where he died. In 1994, Prince and now King Charles III, referred to Hockney as a dear friend, and when the artist died, the BBC headline read “King leads tributes to ‘giant of the art world’ David Hockney”.

What particularly captured my attention was the headline in the New York Times in an article by Alex Marshall, “With iPhones and Faxes, David Hockney Embraced Tech”. I have dwelled on the issue of keeping up with the advances in technology, particularly in the area of the arts. This article cited Hockney’s referring back to the 19th century, when the metal paint tube suddenly allowed artists to take their paints wherever they wished to work.

While others bemoaned and feared all the advances, Hockney embraced them. He created art with the Polaroid Camera, the fax machine, photocopiers, iPads, and iPhones. I wonder how he felt about AI and how it affected his interests?

I was surprised to learn how he used faxes in his art. Apparently, he did not consider the fax the end product, but rather a vehicle to disseminate his art, sending friends images of drawings he had done. When he found that some of his faxes were in an auction sale, he objected, stating that they were made to be given away, adding, “How would I be paid?” They were sold anyway, and some have found their way into museums. The Met, for instance, has about 25 of these faxes in its collection. Here is an example that was sold in Los Angeles.

Defining Hockney’s style is not simple. Cubism had an influence, while flattened images and bright colors became staples of his work. He was certainly drawn to the bright sunlight of Southern California. Another article in the N.Y. Times by Jori Finkel is titled, “How David Hockney Taught Los Angeles to See Itself”. “A Brit, he became a symbol of the city’s culture, stylish and alienating, with his vivid swimming pool paintings and embrace of the SoCal (Southern California) light, hedonism and gay liberation.” Here are two illustrations: a photomontage Nude, 17th June 1984, and a painting, Mulholand Drive.

Finkel tells us that Hockney did not only use high tech. In 1988, he also used a broom. No, not to paint with but to put a brush on so that he could reach the bottom of a pool. The device allowed him to paint swooshes of bright blue on the bottom of the pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. This reminded me of half a century ago, my wife and I being stopped in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum by the head of the 20th century art department, Henry Geldzahler, who pulled out a Kodak envelope with prints from an entire roll of photographs Hockney had taken of Henry floating in a pool and Christopher, his life partner, diving in and swimming. Henry was so proud of those photos that he wanted us to see every last one of them.

Geldzahler became pivotal to the contemporary art world, having nearly daily phone calls with Andy Warhol. He also brought artists like Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and Willem de Kooning to the fore. But he was a close friend of Hockney for many years.  Henry and Christopher were the subject of one of his greatest paintings from 1969, which brought $49.5 million in 2019 at a Christie’s London sale.

In summing up, one might say that Hockney wore a coat of many colors. He did not concern himself with the tenets of an artist’s traditional tools and methods. Instead, he enjoyed exploring all the possibilities that technology offered him.

Buying with One’s Ears

We all do it, though we don’t always realize it… buy with our ears rather than our eyes, and sometimes without thinking. In our everyday lives, if we see the word “Sale,” we pay attention immediately. Another word that grabs our attention and the most magical word of all, or so it was explained to me by my advertising agent many years ago, is “Free”.

We don’t necessarily buy right away, but if we think we want it at some time or think maybe we can use it in the future, and it's on sale ... Do we want to go to that museum or exhibition, and if it is free admission today? Maybe this is an opportunity to take advantage of it being free.

Buying with our ears is also something we do as art collectors, though we have to be wary of it. You wouldn’t see the word “free” at an art gallery or auction house, but “sale” sometimes occurs in a gallery ad. That usually worries me, thinking there must be something wrong with the work of art or that the artist is surely not selling well. That is just my suspicious mind. It is quite possible that the gallery just wants to expose the artist more to the general public, or maybe, just maybe, the gallery can get a well-known but tight-fisted collector to buy it. Then the gallery can say, “You know the CEO of a major company bought one recently.”

The idea, of course, is to grab your attention but also to intrigue a potential buyer. I recently saw an ad announcing a “Newly Confirmed Lucien Freud Debuts in London”. If it was newly confirmed, it was either doubted before or found in someone’s attic. I prefer the latter to the former. Debates over authenticity always existed, but a consistent attribution is always preferable. Otherwise, one has to worry about what the next expert has to say.

Here is another one: “Rediscovered Constable Goes on View for First Time in Decades”. That is enticing, we love to learn about discoveries, kind of like unearthing a treasure, even if you did not do it personally.

A provenance from a well-known collector or personage is exciting because you can feel you have a relationship with that individual. Or in the case of a painting by Winston Churchill, you have touched a piece of history.

In the auction room or gallery, people want to hear why they should buy the work of art. Some people like scandal, and I heard of someone being proud they owned something that had belonged to Jeffrey Epstein … chacun à son goût.

Better, of course, if you can say it compares with this other important work. Even better if you can tell a story, a true one like this…. We had a good friend and client, Baroness Clarice de Rothschild, of the Vienna Rothschilds. After WWII, she went into the salt mine at Altaussee, Austria, where Hitler’s art squad had neatly placed her treasures all together. She didn’t get everything from their five palaces, but more than enough to furnish her Park Avenue apartment in New York. She sold much of the rest through our gallery, Rosenberg & Stiebel. I could have also added that she crashed my first wedding at the Plaza Hotel! My parents would not have dared to ask a Rothschild for a personal event. I mention this last part because if you tell the human story around a work of art, it brings the piece closer to the collector.

If you read my Missives regularly, you are probably tired of my repeating this, but I will continue to remind my readers to buy a work of art because you want to live with it or simply feel you can’t live without it!

Affairs of Art

Some weeks ago, an individual unknown to me got in touch to ask whether we had any drawings that might be of interest. His inquiry stemmed from finding a video we had made 37 years ago called “Affairs of Art”. When I told him that I was impressed that he had watched such an outdated video, he wrote back, “That video isn't outdated - it's history”. We had commissioned “Affairs of Art” to tell the history of our gallery, Rosenberg & Stiebel founded in Frankfurt am Main, Germany around 1870 and celebrating its 50th anniversary in the United States. This recent comment had me thinking and looking at it in a totally different light.

To go back to the beginning, Karl Katz who was a scholar, curator and a museum director, became head of the Department of Special Projects at the Metropolitan Museum in 1971. By 1980 he had established a department of film and television as a joint venture between the Met and the Getty. It’s first project was to create a database of all films that had been made about art. Karl then recruited teams of curators and videographers to pitch ideas for productions in the joint venture. One such team was between a young videographer, David Kutz and my wife, Penelope Hunter-Stiebel. They wrote a proposal for a short film recreating the aftermath of the fire that destroyed the Louvre workshop and art collection of the early 18th century French cabinet maker André Charles Boulle. Unfortunately, the project was not chosen for production.

This failure, however, introduced us to David Kutz and we hired him to create “Affairs of Art”. We had hired a PR firm as well to help us publicize our 50th anniversary but when the head of it saw the first cut of the film, she fired us! So much for a PR agent. By happenstance, Jim Rosenthal a film editor from LA, who had worked with David on a string of HBO projects, was staying with him. Rosenthal spent a few days of his New York visit re-editing the raw footage. We were thrilled with the results which you will see if you click on the link below.

We wanted to show what the gallery had accomplished over that past half century. Who would we want to help tell the gallery’s story? Of course, that had to include my mother and father, who were forced to leave Germany in the 1930’s, and my father being the only remaining participant in the firm in Frankfurt. I also wanted to have individuals from the museum world and collectors we had dealt with. We were lucky and very honored to put together a most illustrious group.

Liliane de Rothschild represented the French branch of the Rothschild family, fabled for their collections. Leonard Lauder heir to the cosmetics firm, Estée Lauder, is best known for his Cubist collection, which was to go the Metropolitan Museum, but, little know, he was also a collector of French 18th century furniture. Michel David-Weill being the third generation of his family as Chairman of the banking house Lazard as well as all being great art collectors. Patrick Gerschel was a New York investment banker, and his wife Elizabeth enjoyed surrounding themselves with French art of the 18th century. Sherman Lee and Tom Hovingwere directors of two of the most important museums in the country, The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum. I wanted to have both directors since their views of museology were quite different. Tom Hoving was a showman he literally opened the Metropolitan Museum to a far wider public with his populist approach and blockbuster exhibitions. His expanded museum shop included reproductions and souvenirs made by the museum and had branches around the city. Sherman Lee, however, was a quiet, serious scholar who kept his museum store small, within the museum building and focused on books relating to the museum’s collections. Still, they shared a deep love of art and made major acquisitions for their institutions.

All of these participants in our film had fascinating and influential lives and made a difference to the art world but unfortunately most are no longer with us. I believe it is seriously worthwhile listening to what they had to say about art and collecting.