July 4th Weekend

Several people asked me last week whether I had a good Independence Day weekend. My first reaction was that we didn’t do much, and then I thought for 30 seconds and realized that was not correct. In Santa Fe, they have a tradition of pancakes on the Plaza and a vintage car show. The pancakes were not on my diet, but the old cars did not add any calories. I have written about it before, but this year there were many more cars and so many more people that it was impossible to get good photos, but here is the one I did take.

The city’s fireworks display could hardly be seen from our house, but real excitement was provided a few hours earlier with the opening of the Santa Fe Playhouse’s production of “Cabaret” in the theater of the Scottish Rite Temple. On stage through July 19, it is particularly apt for this 250th anniversary of Independence.

The concept for the play originated from Christopher Isherwood’s “Good Bye to Berlin” published in 1939 and later included in his 1945 book “Berlin Stories”. This inspired a 1951 play, “I am a Camera” by John van Druten and a 1955 film. This in turn inspired the present Musical “Cabaret” with a book by Joe Masteroff and music and lyrics by Kander &Ebb. The musical opened on Broadway in 1966 and was a great success, winning awards, with a 1998 revival also winning awards. However, it is probably best known through its 1972 movie choreographed by Bob Fosse starring Liza Minnelli and Michael York, with Joel Gray, originator of the role of the Emcee on Broadway, and here is the Emcee played by Jeffrey Barba in the Santa Fe production.

The story is the thing, all based on Isherwood’s contemporary notes during his time in Berlin from 1929, when he moved to visit his friend, the poet W.H. Auden, and stayed until 1933. During that period, Isherwood enjoyed the city’s decadent cabaret scene and homosexual opportunities. In the current version of the musical, the ambience is depicted through the Kit Kat Club and its emcee. We are shown the dark before the storm in these hedonistic times at the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic. Friendships were split as Jews were beginning to be discriminated against. In 1933, students in Munich burned books that were not approved of. That was the same year my father was thrown out of University there for being Jewish.

We all know where this ended, but it did not happen from one day to the next. Hitler did establish the first Concentration Camps as soon as he became Chancellor, but they were known as work camps in 1933. The “Final Solution” started slowly with Hitler’s 1939 "euthanasia" program. The gassing of those with disabilities progressed to the mass gassings of the Jews and others by late 1941.

The musical, however, does not go into all this horror but rather depicts what led up to it. Certain actions and phrases hit my wife and me very hard. The landlady in the show plans to marry the local fruit vendor, and she is warned that it “wouldn’t be wise”. The transition from the Weimar Republic to full throated Naziism is demonstrated when one of the characters throws off his jacket, revealing the swastika on his armband. As the play is coming to an end, the emcee pretends to have fallen for one of the girls in the Kit Kat Klub and sings a love song ending with the poignant line, “if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all”.

A personal story about people’s defense or excuses: In the late 1970’s I went with my wife, who was then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, to see a private art collection outside Berlin. The collector was old and bedridden, so her caretaker led us upstairs. When she brought us down to leave, she must have recognized me as Jewish, and to my astonishment she grabbed my arm with both her hands and said, “We didn’t know, we didn’t know”!

Leaving the theater on July 4, 2026, we were haunted by the relevance of the final line of the play:  “We were asleep”.

A Gallery Model Has Failed

Many of you know that my family gallery, known in the U.S. as Rosenberg & Stiebel, later Stiebel, Ltd., was founded around 1870 in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1939, when it became established in the U.S., it was run out of a one-bedroom apartment in New York and in 1944 moved to 32 East 57th Street. There were many galleries in the neighborhood, but in 1968 a contemporary gallery moved into “our” building.  I always teased the owner, Arne (pronounced Arnie) Glimcher, that we were there first😊. They were very nice and very generous in that when we celebrated our opening of a small contemporary section of our gallery, an artist represented by their gallery, Chuck Close, came to our opening luncheon.

Our venture (Stiebel Modern) into contemporary was brief, and as the years passed, the interest in European Old Master painting, drawings, and decorative arts also waned, and we closed our gallery in 2014. Meanwhile, the contemporary art field flourished, growing bigger and bigger all the time. Contemporary galleries added satellite galleries all over the world. Guess what? Nothing lasts forever, and that model also began to become shaky in the early 2020’s.

A few weeks ago, an article by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times announced, “A challenging art market is forcing even an established player to contract.” The focus was on Arne Glimcher’s son Marc, who has been running Pace since 2010, saying that the current model for galleries (meaning contemporary ones) was not working anymore.

Pace was therefore cutting 50 artists from their roster (30% of their representation) and 50 people from staff (representing 20%). Continued expansions with less foot traffic and fewer mega sales were not supporting the outlay. For instance, Pace moved to their new flagship location in 2019 on West 25th Street in Chelsea. They had renovated the 8-story building at a cost of $100 million, which the developer shared, but they must also pay an annual rent of $9 million on a 20-year lease. They are not giving up that space but contracting in other ways. Those are sums that I can hardly comprehend and certainly not compare with my former gallery.

We read how the art market is crashing, but that is based on the figures we get from the mega sales at a couple of auction houses and what is released by the few galleries that are asked and respond to journalists. According to an analysis by Julien Delagrange, a Belgian artist and art critic as well as Director of CAI Magazine (contemporaryartissue.com), the number of purchases of art has actually increased in the last few years but not their total dollar value. Much like a bubble, for a number of reasons including Covid, high-end sales above $10 million have diminished.

Needless to say, Pace is not alone. After 30 years, Tim Blum of the Blum gallery permanently shut down his public spaces, which included galleries in Los Angeles and Tokyo in addition to New York. Blum also pointed out that there were systemic issues such as the relentless pace of continuous exhibitions and fairs. Going with your inventory from art fair to art fair is obviously exhausting, no matter how large the staff. Note that his giving up public spaces does not mean that he is giving up on the art business, as he will continue to work privately. I know that he is not alone and have heard this from others in the world of old art as well.

I have just scratched the surface, as I always do. If it is of interest, I encourage you to read more online to properly understand what is behind all the hype about the “demise” of the art world. If you enjoy art world gossip, you can gain access by going to the online art magazine Hyperallergic, where you will find an article from June 23 by Valentina Di Liscia and Rebecca Schiffman titled “Pace Gallery’s Hall of Mirrors,” which goes into what artists and employees have to say about Pace’s downsizing.