Steve Jobs Redux

Even before we had seen the new Steve Jobs opera called “(R)evolution of Steve Jobs” my wife suggested that I should write about it. My reaction was, “Why should I?” I thought it would be very contemporary atonal music, which I usually hate and, even though I was definitely curious, I had just written about Jobs a couple of weeks ago.

Seeing the opera, however, I was totally bowled over. It has wonderful music, sometimes amusing and sometimes gut-wrenching lyrics and is produced in not only an original manner, but one that works perfectly!  From me it gets 5 stars!! 

The music is by Mason Bates and the libretto is by Mark Campbell.  It was co-commissioned with Seattle Opera and San Francisco Opera.  This is no surprise since Jobs lived and worked in the area.  The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music joined them as co-producers.  The world premier was right here at the Santa Fe Opera.

The conductor on the night we went was Michael Christie.  As was written by John Stege in our local weekly magazine, The Santa Fe Reporter, “Bate’s score works just fine on several levels.  Forget the fearsome, distant electronic days… Bates offers and performs a kinder, gentler use of electronica that works right along with his multi-hued and often brilliant orchestral patterns.”

At the beginning of the opera a 10 year old boy is given a work table made for him by his father so he will have, “a place to take things apart and put them together again”.  Panels that serve for projections, often of circuit boards, slide back and forth as the characters move along.  Soon a grown Jobs takes the boy’s place.  If you force me to critique anything it is that the plot jumps back and forth in Job’s short life from 1955 to 2011 and it is sometimes difficult to keep track.  Still by the time it is over, you feel you understand the story of his life.  Here is Edward Parks as Steve Jobs and Jonah Sorenson as the young Jobs.

Photo Credit: Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera

The opera gets going with an aria or really a song called “Tap, tap, tap” which imitates all of us pressing on the icons on our iPhones.  I believe I forgot to mention how good the entire cast was!  We have heard wonderful voices in the past and sometimes they were good actors as well, but one usually picks them out individually.  In this performance we found all were good in both categories and some excelled.  The chorus is made up of Santa Fe Opera apprentices who in other productions sometimes have been given solo roles.  Opera companies from all over come in the summer to hear then sing and make some choices.  A bit like job interviews at major universities.  Steve Jobs and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus.

Photo Credit; Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera

Every story comes from a different point of view: my Missive, “Fearless Genius” dealt with Jobs creativity from the positive perception of the photographer Doug Menuez; the opera has a far more personal and in some ways tragic point of view.  In fact my wife and I were both in tears by the time it was over.  The part of Laurene, Job’s wife, was played by Sasha Cooke, a fabulous mezzo-soprano and actor, though I would prefer actress, because she symbolized the most wonderful strong but sympathetic wife!  Others who stood out were Job’s original partner Steve Wozniak, Garrett Sorenson and Jobs’ Zen Priest, Kobun Otogawa sung by Wei Wu.

Photo Credit: Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera

Photo Credit: Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera

If you want quite contrary thoughts on the same opera we saw, read the New York Times review. It is hard to believe that Zachary Woolfe, the author of this piece, saw the same production. We stayed until the last hand was clapped.  It was at least a five-minute standing ovation with more Bravos, Bravas and Bravis than I have ever heard in Santa Fe.  Mr. Woolfe seems to also believe that people are either all black or all white.  I read the same book he did by Walter Isaacson revealing Steve Jobs as an often insensitive SOB who clearly had another extremely charismatic way of enveloping people and having many totally devoted to him.

Photo Credit: Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera

I have gone to an awful lot of opera in my 70 plus years, starting with Aida in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome when I was 11.  I can honestly say I have been bored out of my skull by many operas since.  However, when you see and hear an opera put together so expertly with music, story line and performers at their best, and even an amazing set that cast and stage crew slide through effortlessly, for me it counts as a success and wonderful evening!

Tom Joyce - Sculptor

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t drop out of school at 16 and be a success.  It just depends what you want to do with the rest of your life.  If perchance you decide you would like to forge hot steel for a living you may have a chance.  So it was with Tom Joyce (b.1956-) who picked up his first hammer when he was 14 and by the age of 16 he had made up his mind that was what he wanted to do.  When asked about how he learned, his response is always, “I had a classic black smith’s training.”.  Black smith for me always makes me think of horse-shoes not 3 ton sculptures.  Tom’s work has developed from practical items such as agricultural tools made from worn iron hand-me-downs, to a gate near our home on the old Santa Fe Trail, to major steel sculptures weighing many tons.

Whenever, I am asked about Tom Joyce I immediately say that I met him before he received the half million-dollar MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2003.  Why? So no one thinks it is because of the award we tried to meet him!  Around that time he invited us to breakfast at his home.  It was and is the only time I have been asked to fetch my own eggs from the hen house ... hey, I’m a city kid!

His work has been shown all over the world and can be found in the collections of the Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C., the Minneapolis and Detroit Institutes of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York among others.

There is presently an exhibition of Tom’s work called “Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand” at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Santa Fe.  It occupies their new sculpture garden as well as the entire museum gallery, and it will be up until the end of the year.  An unusual aspect of CCA that it is on an Armory campus and the building now housing the art gallery is the original Tank Garage -- a good thing for Tom since the floor and even the walls can hold thousands of pounds in weight, which would not work in a normal museum building.  This outdoor sculpture “Aureole VI” which is over 6 feet in diameter weighs 4,407 lbs was created this year surely for this space.

Tom is a celebrity artist who has not let it go to his head: he is a very modest guy.
Listening to Tom speak, which he did at the museum the other day, expecting 20 people to show up and ending with about 220.  We learned of his fascination with iron and steel and their unending challenges.

He has worked with forges both in this country and abroad.  He told us that he now pays by the minute to use a large industrial facility so he cannot afford too many mistakes.  Therefore, he works with models in his studio here in Santa Fe making sure that his ideas can work on a very large and heavy scale. He was speaking to us in front of two sculptures “Bloom IV and Bloom V done last year of forged high carbon steel.  The smaller sculpture weighing 15,750 pounds and the larger 26,815 lbs.  These very large pieces are a composite of several smaller pieces of steel.

His huge sculptures come from industrial manufacturing castoffs.  As he says, “It’s a sculpture now, but it’s a store of material, and in my eyes, always tied to it origins.  Its practical nature ensures that it will be used again for another purpose and that most assuredly it will be here long after I’m gone.”  When was the last time that you heard an artist admit that his work might be destroyed to be used for another purpose?  In history it is not unusual for metals to be melted down for better and for worse!  It’s all part of the continuum…  To demonstrate that he believes what he says, he created an installation of light.  The label says, “Untitled (3-D printed tools made and/used by the artist) 2017.  Stereolithography printed clear polycarbonate-like plastic, LED lights, dimensions variable”. The hanging elements are casts of the tools he used to make a living before turning to sculpture.

Some of his multi-ton sculptures actually have the appearance of being squishy.  Take a look at this one called ”Lignifact I” created this year in 4 pieces of forged stainless steel weighing 14,000 pounds.

CCA also has a marvelous film program with two movie theatres which gets top billing on their website so if you go to https://www.ccasantafe.org be sure to click on “Visual Arts” at the top of the page for museum hours and other practical information.

Fearless Genius

Can you guess to whom the title refers?  It is someone who can honestly be called a household name, Steve Jobs.  Where would we be today, virtually speaking, without him?   The title actually comes from a book, “Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley, 1985-2000”. It is a selection from the 250,000 photographs taken over those years in Silicon Valley by Doug Menuez. He has given the entire archive to Stanford.

We heard Menuez speak the other night at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe. He is an award winning documentary photographer who has photographed from the North Pole to the Amazon and the Sahara desert, covering subjects from sports to AIDS and famine. He said that when he was looking for some less harrowing experiences he began to focus on Silicon Valley.  He asked Steve Jobs if he could have unfettered access to him and his development of the Next computer, the project he was then working on.  To Menuez’s surprise Jobs said, yes.

In 1985 Jobs was 30 and Menuez was 28, trying to find a meaningful story in his world.  He said, “I wasn’t interested in technology per say, I was — and am — interested in those people who possess this amazing ability to change all of our lives.”  1985 was also a turning point for Jobs:  he had been fired by his former mentor and CEO at Apple, John Sculley and he wanted to move on to a new electronic wonder, the Next computer.

To Menuez surprise he found Jobs “was just loaded with charisma. He was the most inspiring person I ever met. By the time I met Steve, I had photographed presidents and movie stars, and I’d had life-and-death experiences in Africa, and I’d covered homelessness and AIDS, but nothing compared to being with Steve Jobs and listening to him telling what was coming in the future. It was electrifying.”

Over the years “I could walk into his office at any time, go into virtually any meeting — occasionally the engineers would get upset, but Steve would always tell them to let me shoot what I wanted. It was amazing freedom.” According to Menuez, Job’s bad rep came from the fact that he was incredibly demanding of his engineers but most of them liked the challenges.  If he yelled at them he wanted them to fight back and state their reasons for their decisions and if they made their case he was cool with it.

The lecture was part of the events leading up to the Santa Fe Opera world premiere of “The (R)Evolution of Steve Jobs”, composed by Mason Bates with a libretto by Mark Campbell.

At the Patina Gallery of contemporary Jewelry owned by Allison and Ivan Barnett, an exhibition of Menuez’ photographs was up.  They had been introduced to Menuez by Ivy Ross,  the jewelry designer whose work is in 12 International museums, went to Harvard Business school and is currently Vice President, Design and User Experience for Hardware Products at Google and head of Google Glass.

Allison Barnett & Ivy Ross

Ivan got in touch with the Santa Fe Opera since they had cooperated before, and the result was the use of Menuez’ photos for promotion of the new Jobs opera.  Ivan then arranged for the lecture at the Lensic introduced by Ivy Ross who held a question and answer session at the end.

During the Q and A Menuez mentioned some of his concerns and, for me, there were a couple of eye openers.  One was that 75% of the engineers in this country are immigrants.   Menuez also pointed out the contrast between Ross Perot’s infusion of 20 million into the Next computer and the current impatience of venture capitalists who don’t want to wait 5 or 6 years for their profits, but just 2.  This is enough time for a new app, not a technological revolution.

Menuez concluded with what still echoes in my mind Jobs’ quote, “NEVER GIVE UP - EVER”.

Louis de Wohl (1903-1961)

It is always surprising to me that as I get older I start to think of and remember what happened and what I learned at a very young age.  My parents spoke German at home between themselves, but never with me, yet I think I know more German now than I did then.  Obviously, we learn subliminally so why didn’t it work when I slept on my history book before a test?!

I had a wild friend at school (happily nothing illegal beyond speeding tickets) and my mother compared him to her best girl friend from Frankfurt, Ruth Lorch.  Although she later became a Lady Commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre (a Roman Catholic order of knighthood under the protection of the Holy See), she was still pretty crazy when I met her in the 1950’s.  She lived in England and I remember she always smoked cigarillos.  When she was told by U.S. customs that they were banned in the U.S. she said she would stop importing them when they produced them in this country, and they let her take them in … the good old days .

Her husband, Louis de Wohl, born Ludwig von Wohl, was a German Roman Catholic. He smoked large cigars and carried a stick sword, getting both into the country without problem.  I guess being before metal detectors, no one thought anything of the normal looking cane carried by this extremely large man, which came apart to reveal a very lethal long blade!

De Wohl’s parents were of Jewish ancestry so he left Germany when Hitler came to power and moved to England.   He was a prolific writer of novels in German and later on in English. Turned on to astrology at an early age, he developed a reputation as a skilled fortuneteller. 

There is still debate today whether Hitler believed in astrology or not but clearly it had an influence on his high command.  For this reason British Intelligence, MI5 Special Operations,  recruited de Wohl.  His predictions were used as a cover for the deciphering of Nazi orders after their Enigma code was cracked.  In 1941 De Wohl was sent to the U.S. to lecture to astrological societies and managed to get a great deal of publicity.  The FCC lifted a ban on astrology to air an exclusive interview of the man heralded as “The Modern Nostradamus”.  A Pathé newsreel report on his prophecies was claimed to have a viewership of 39 million.  He also had a newspaper column where he predicted Hitler’s moves.  What no one knew on our side of the pond was that many of his predictions were crafted by MI5.  They wanted to convince the Americans to join the war effort and de Wohl was a major propaganda weapon in that regard.

According to what de Wohl told my family after the war, he had advised Churchill personally as to what Hitler was going to do based on the astrological signs.  This was indirectly true since he told MI5 what he believed Hitler was being told by his astrologers.  What seems to be missing from his Wikipedia bio is that he became rather difficult to handle due to his bombastic style and desire to impress people, so he was slowly sidelined and watched by the intelligence service until 1945.

He became more religious after the war, and like his wife, whom he had married in 1953, was a Knight Commander of the order of the Holy Sepuchre.  According to Wikipedia, “In an audience with Pope Pius XII he was told to ‘write about the history and mission of the Church in the World.’  The Cardinal of Milan, Ildefonso Schuster, came to de Wohl after reading some of his writings telling him ‘Let your writings be good. For your writings you will one day be judged."   He started writing about the Saints and shortly after it was published he gave me his book on St. Joan, which I remember enjoying as a teenager, though I hadn’t expected to.   His best known work was “The Spear: A novel of the Crucifixion” which I remember my father reading.

A final remembrance, De Wohl knew how to entertain a child.  The first time he came to our house he asked my father for a pad.  Dad produced a letter size yellow pad.  I was told to put 5 dots anywhere on the page and Louis would make a picture out of them using 2 dots for the arms, 2 for the legs and one for the head.  Well, I knew how to trick him; I place 5 dots a centimeter apart.  He looked for a moment and made a tiny stick figure, which stood on a stage with an audience in front.  I know I kept it somewhere, unless of course, my mother way back when, tossed it with the newspaper I found in an abandoned Vermont house from the day after Lincoln was shot!

Eric Stiebel, My Father

In July of 1911 a doctor and his wife had a little boy who grew up in their home town of Frankfurt am Main, Germany.  He went to school in Frankfurt and then, following the German system attended colleges in Frankfurt, Munich & Berlin.  One day in 1933 he was told that he would have to leave school because he was Jewish and shortly thereafter he left Germany.  When his American-born son asked him how he knew it was time to get out he replied, “when I was thrown out of school I knew that I was not wanted” and that was all I ever heard from him about that experience.

Eric Stiebel ready for University

He did, however, impart another interesting lesson from his experience in his homeland.  He told me, “It can happen here” which was a shocking statement to a child growing up in the United States.  Frankly, I remembered it but could not fully comprehend or internalize it until the 21st century when I watched a fair percentage of my country turn on all Muslims.

The two senior partners in our family art dealership moved to establish the firm in Amsterdam. My father moved to Paris where his brother had already established a private art dealership in the 1920’s because he loved everything French.  There was one problem, however, visa issues.  You could only stay five months on a travel visa so every five months my father went from Paris to London and then back again.  My mother joined him in Paris where they were married in 1937.

As you may have gathered my father was the youngest member of the firm and Intelligently his cousin, Saemy Rosenberg, had set up a company in New York in anticipation of the necessity of leaving Europe and in 1939, seeing the writing on the wall they sent my father to New York, to wrest the firm from the lawyers who had ben the nominal officers and set up the business.  The “office” was my parents’ apartment and because it had to represent the new art dealers in town they were allocated enough for an apartment on Central Park South.  I was born in 1944 pushing the business out of our two-room abode to a gallery upstairs in an office building on 57th Street.  The original space on the back of the building eventually expanded to the entire fifth floor.

I asked my father what he did during the war and he said, “mostly work with lawyers to prove that my relatives were vital to this country’s interests.”  Soon, however, a great deal of art was pouring in from Europe and he and his partners, who he had gotten into the country via Mexico and various countries in South America, had to start to field all the requests from cash starved Europeans and the demands of the American Museums who were eager to collect old masters and other European art.

My father was the consummate European Gentleman.  Like in any store or gallery we usually gravitate to the person that we believe will be the greatest help and many clients gravitated to Eric Stiebel just because of his calm and dignified matter.

Whenever the doorbell rang in the 57th Street gallery our secretary (today known as an executive assistant) would go to the door and announce who was there.  The first thing that my father would do was pull a slip of paper out of his pocket and write down who it was, so that he could report to my mother that evening.  She usually demanded that he repeat the conversations verbatim!  Today he might have emailed.  I actually caught him taking the time to write his note when Jackie Kennedy was announced.  The Secret Service agent waited outside in the hall.

In the film we made of the history of the firm in 1989 in celebration of 50 years in the United States my father said,  “I definitely have enjoyed my life as an art dealer tremendously.  Whenever somebody asks me… I say that I don’t know any other profession which brings you in touch with beautiful objects and also with the most interesting people, constantly.”

Thomas P. F. Hoving (1931-2009)

In my opinion, Tom Hoving was a genius.  Now there are different kinds of genius but maybe if I tell a little bit about him, you will get my meaning.  Tom was the son of Walter Hoving, the head of Tiffany’s.  It is said he was something of a “cut-up” as a boy, being thrown out of various schools, but this seems to not be that unusual for above average students who are probably bored by the routine and teachers who did not inspire them.

At Princeton University, however, he excelled and got all his degrees there ending with a doctorate in Art History in 1959.  He went then to the Metropolitan Museum as a Fellow in the department of medieval art working at the Cloisters.  By 1965 he was running the department.  He was called upon by then New York Mayor John V. Lindsay to become Parks Commissioner in 1966.  He only stayed in that position for 14 months before returning to the Metropolitan as Director.  However, in that time he transformed Central Park.  When I went with my children a few years later to show them the secret places I rode my bike when I was young they were no longer secret.  There were people everywhere.  They came from the East Side, Harlem and Spanish Harlem all sharing this wonderful oasis in the center of Manhattan.

Ralph Blumenthal who was writing for the New York Times during that time wrote on December 11, 2009, after Tom’s death, “Remembering Hoving’s Service as Parks Commissioner”  “More than anyone, he put the actual fun in Fun City.  He was a natural showman and, as I quickly discovered, he didn’t much mind having his own Times reporter around to showcase his zany brilliance and flamboyance. Not for nothing did he joke that his middle initials stood for “Publicity Forever.”  Sure he used the press. But he was great copy and got one eager young reporter lots of space in the paper. He did not know the meaning of “no comment.’”  I am personally sure that if Tom were again at the helm of the Metropolitan he would put the present administration to shame as far as social media is concerned.  Unfortunately, it did not exist during his tenure (1967-1977).

When he first came to the Metropolitan he decided he had to learn the market and started by visiting the galleries in New York that had medieval and early Renaissance art.  In the transcript of Rosenberg & Stiebel’s 1989 film “Affairs of Art” I found how it all started with my family gallery.  He said the following:  “Some of the gallery owners I visited threw me out. They thought I could not be true.  I was too young and too disheveled to be truly a curatorial type….. I  approached Rosenberg & Stiebel with a sense of trepidation because I had heard that this was THE most elegant and the most sophisticated dealer of medieval art and I was allowed to see everything, and this was a unique experience because the other dealers I’d visited did not allow me to see everything…..”  “I learned right off one thing about Rosenberg & Stiebel, that the attitude of the establishment was such that they were partners with curators…”  So Tom became a good client on the basis of that first impression.

In 1972 I became a member of an art association in New York and they immediately made me an officer.  This association was a member of an international organization of associations, which had done exhibitions in museums abroad but never in the United States.  Now they wanted an international dealer’s exhibition at the Met.  Still being in my 20’s I had the temerity to say, “My father knows Tom Hoving” (how naïve can one be!)  My colleagues jumped on it and so began a saga in which I was able to bring 300 works of art to the Metropolitan in an exhibition called, “The Grand Gallery” during the 1974-75 season.  Being nice to a novice medieval curator paid off in the long run!

Hoving was credited with being the originator of the ”blockbuster exhibition”.  His first was  “In The Presence of Kings” (1967) where they used turntables and red velvet to show off the art.  It was absolutely scandalous at the time but I loved it and so did many others as they started to pile into the Met.  Hoving was taking the first step toward the modern day museum where some institutions number their attendance in the millions.

Philippe de Montebello, his successor at the Met was quoted as saying, “People criticized him for his excesses, but you have to remember that it is not the timorous who climb life’s peaks. He has left us with a changed museum world.”

If you want to learn more about Tom Hoving in his own words pick up one the books he has authored, I counted close to 20 on Amazon and we have 8 in our library.  Probably the most fun and the one quoted the most often is “Making the Mummies Dance” and second in line is “Art for Dummies”.  One of the endorsements for the latter from dealers and museum directors says “As an art history student at Columbia University in the early 60’s, I often went to the Metropolitan Museum to be alone among the masterpieces.  That solitude ended when Tom Hoving became director.  Suddenly the place was hopping; art was no longer just for the elite.  Tom stripped away the veil of intimidation of a museum and with this book he has now done the same for everyone who ever considered learning about and collecting art."- Gerald G. Stiebel, Rosenberg & Stiebel Gallery (1999).

My Wife, Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, in her own words

From the transcript of the 1989 video celebrating Rosenberg & Stiebel gallery’s 50th anniversary in the United States.

“I first came to Rosenberg & Stiebel as a student.  The Institute of Fine Arts Museum Training program had a marvelous method of training you in the old days.  They said you had $1,000 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art to go out on the market and find something the Museum really needed.  Even then (1969) that was not a great deal of money and you were to reserve a piece and present it to the curators.  One of the pieces presented each year would be purchased.”

“I was given a list of the dealers in my field of French eighteenth century and Rosenberg & Stiebel was identified as the ladies and gentlemen’s dealer.  I came to their front door, very timid, very frightened.  I remember being greeted by the most gracious gentleman that I had ever seen, my ideal of civilized male humanity.  He, however, absolutely dashed all my hopes.  He turned me over to his son!  Fortunately he eventually became my father-in-law.”

“When I became a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art I was given the thankless task of organizing an international art dealers exhibition.  The only good part about it was that my fellow co-organizer on the dealers’ side was Gerald Stiebel.   We got very much involved and eventually married. And ten years later I joined the gallery.” 

“Being an art historian is, obviously, a value to the gallery.  It is part of my contribution but I think what’s more important than my academic studies was my experience of 13 years on the curatorial staff at the Metropolitan.  There I began to really deal with works of art in the original and become their advocate.  Finding great works of art, special works, speaking works and then interpreting them to other people whether they are the higher ups on the curatorial staff or the general public.  It’s very much the same thing we do at the gallery."

Penelope installing case at the Metropolitan Museum

“Scholarship is essential in the art field.   You have to be able to understand what the work of art is about.  You have to understand its context.  You can learn that at school or you can learn it on your own but you have to know it.”

“I don’t think that has really changed over the decades.  Perhaps the knowledge was more intuitive in the early days of the firm.  Now we back it up with more academic research perhaps than was available then but it’s still the intuition that is the basic guide.”

“The reason the gallery has survived and been successful for so many years (since the 1860’s) is the nature of the family itself.  Its members, each of them, have that intuitive eye of connoisseur ship but there is more than that.  The family revolves around objects of art.  Each child grows up with art as the daily conversation at the dinner table.  The way each member of the family relates to the outside world is through objects of art.  To the Stiebels art is more than business.  It’s more that we do, art is who we are.”

Conclusion from Gerald:  As you know we have moved on and closed the gallery a couple of years ago.  My daughter owns a bookstore, my older son is in Traverse City, Michigan in  real estate and our son is an actor but all retain interest to one degree or another in the arts.  Once there it doesn’t just disappear!

Penelope and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, “The City Different” and have exchanged our passions for European Art to Native American and Spanish Colonial art expanding our horizons in the art world.

Robert Lynch and Americans for the Arts

I was only vaguely aware of Americans for the Arts until Robert Lynch, President and CEO of for the last 30 years came to speak in Santa Fe a short while ago … and people want to know what you can do with a BA in English from Amherst!

Robert Lynch and Sophia Loren

In the middle of its 6th decade Americans for the Arts, in their own words, “Our mission is to serve, advance, and lead the network of organizations and individuals who cultivate, promote, sustain, and support the arts in America. Connecting your best ideas and leaders from the arts, communities, and business, together we can work to ensure that every American has access to the transformative power of the arts.”

Americans for the Arts launched the New Community Visions Initiative last year.  It is a two-year program to explore the future of local arts in America and the role of community-based arts in enabling organizations, funders, cultural institutions, and artists in shaping that future.  This fits in very well with the effort that Estevan Rael-Gálvez and his group under the auspices of the Mayor, Javier Gonzalez, and the City Arts Commission is making to map culture in Santa Fe.  I wrote about this a few weeks ago.

The evening was sponsored by the National Endowment and came to Santa Fe through Creative Santa Fe, the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and New Mexico Arts.  My wife being on the Arts Commission we had seats reserved in the sold out auditorium.

It is easy to sum up Lynch’s talk: the purpose of his organization is to convince the world that ART IS IMPORTANT.   They work to help communities understand the importance of the arts in culture with an emphasis on encouraging using the arts in the schools.

Robert Lynch turns out to be a wonderful lecturer and the audience stayed totally with him.  I can easily tune out when I am sitting in a talk but Lynch kept me interested.  He clearly had a “stump speech” but it was not read but spoken from a true belief in what the arts can do for society.  They have done the statistics and it shows that it represents 704 billion dollars a year and makes up 4.7 percent of the U.S. Economy!  Also, I have known for sometime that the disciplines in the arts can be helpful to children’s school grades but I did not know that they are important in crime reduction as well.

Mr. Lynch confirmed something that I had long suspected but never heard articulated by a professional, the main reason people don’t contribute to the arts is because they are never asked.  I remember the first Mrs. Henry Ford II after her divorce from the auto magnate moved to Los Angeles.  She complained to me that she had been “out there” for some time and nobody from the Los Angeles County Museum had been in touch with her!

Lynch’s first trip to Santa Fe was in 1974 so he is well acquainted with our town. He spoke of the great cultural resources here, through our residents, and spoke of the contributions that Robert Redford has made and that he has worked on projects with Americans for the Arts often in the past.

Robert Lynch & Robert Redford

Someone asked Lynch how technology was affecting the arts and I had the impression that the questioner expected a negative answer but Lynch without missing a beat said it is enhancing the arts and the example he gave which we could all relate to was the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live from the Met” series which many of us enjoy at our very own Lensic Performing Arts Center.  It keeps us in classical music all winter long until the Santa Fe Opera is here live in July and August.

Lynch had a wonderful turn of phrase.  We all know that promotion is vital for arts organizations and he defined that marketing as “the creative framing of the truth! 

How wonderful that there is such an organization as American for the Arts that can proselytize for what many of us believe is so vital to life!

Rina’s Gone! (1939-2015)

“Rina Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo was known as an architect, a potter, a teacher, an author, a historian and a lecturer. She also was an activist for justice who wasn’t afraid to stand up to her own tribal council to argue for the rights of all people.” (Santa Fe New Mexican 10-31-2015)

Rina touched my life so profoundly as she did others and we recently attended a memorial for her at the school of architecture at the University of New Mexico. Filling the auditorium were members of her extended Native family as well as Anglos, academics and friends, who had all been touched by her.

 

Rina was born into the Naranjo family, an unbelievably talented family of artists many of them potters.  Rina started out similarly but she became inspired in a modeling class where she started to think about doing models of buildings and thus began a journey into the world of architecture.  She went to New Mexico Highlands University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in education and went on to The University of New Mexico, earning a Master of Art in architecture in 1976 and a doctorate in American studies in 1982.  Upset by the transformation of Santa Clara by the federal H.U.D. program of cookie cutter houses with no sense of place, she wrote her Master’s thesis on the architectural history of her pueblo.

Rina met her husband Ralph at Highlands and they moved to Santa Fe where Ralph taught at St. John’s College.  They were married for 40 years and lived in the house that they designed  bringing up 4 children, a boy and 3 girls.  When Ralph died in 2006, Rina moved back to the Pueblo where she and her family built her house in the traditional fashion.

I met Rina in 1997.  I had been on what was known as The President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) in Washington D.C. which had a very idealistic premise  to stop looting of archeological sights internationally.  Unfortunately, it had been rigged, first by U.S.I.A. and then by the State Department, to come out against the collecting community, which included American museums.  I quit when the CPAC seriously considered the request by Italy that the U.S. ban import of objects from the original Holy Roman Empire, which included most of Europe.  My story on CPAC would be a book in itself but suffice it to say there was a great deal of discontent about the Committee. 

Another former member of CPAC was Eugene Victor Thaw.  He had moved from New York to Santa Fe and felt that more might be accomplished by what was then known as The School for American Research (today, The School for Advanced Research).  He sponsored a 5 day seminar where a diverse group of stake holders in culture would meet and discuss the topic of who owns culture.  There were about 10 of us including, representatives from the World Bank, a a preservationist from the J. Paul Getty Museum, a museum director, an archeologist who had written about subsistence digging, even a philosopher.  I was there representing the art dealing community and a Native American anthropologist by skill if not by trade, Rina Swentzell.  Here is an image of the late Marty Sullivan, then director of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, yours truly and Rina.

During the 5 days of the seminar we lived in the very comfortable “dorms” that were on SAR’s beautiful campus so we interacted socially as well as in our day long meetings.  Rina explained that Native Americans did not believe in collecting but rather believed from dust to dust and repeated her oft-told story:  Every day her grandmother walked her to school and they passed a house that was beginning to fall apart.  She told her grandmother that they needed to fix the house and her grandmother replied that when the house fell down they would build a new one.

I countered, that art can act as an ambassador for a culture:  In 1989 we found ourselves at The Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff right after their show of Hopi Indian Art and fell in love with what we saw.   We, then, set out on a quest to learn about the Hopi culture, which opened our eyes to a whole new world. 

There was an objective to the seminar and that was to write a book on who owns culture from our various perspectives (because of a change in administration at SAR shortly after the seminar it unfortunately did not happen.)  We were, therefore, all taking notes or at least had note pads at the ready.  Sitting next to Rina I saw that she was making notes but also doing wonderful drawings on her pages, which I believe she referred to as “doodles”.  At one point discussing collecting, I commented that I thought I would love to “collect” her so called “doodles” because I thought they were wonderful.  The conference closed, I went back to New York and two weeks later her “doodles” from that week arrived with a note shown here as well as one of her pages of “doodles”.

Rina spoke often of “World Views” and she certainly changed mine and I believe that maybe I gave her a glimpse of another one.

William Zeckendorf, Jr. (1929 - 2014)

We went to a Memorial Service for William Zeckendorf, Jr. the New York builder and developer who had moved to Santa Fe where his ancestors had come before. During the talks from all his friends, family and business partners I realized in how many ways he had touched my life though I had only met him once.

As I may have mentioned here before my best friend in grade school was T’ing Pei the eldest son of I.M. Pei.  I remember when T’ing came to school very excited -  we must have been in 6th or 7th grade at the time and announced that his father had won first prize at the Brussels World’s Fair.  I really did not know what that meant at the time but I knew that his father was an architect because I had stayed at his country house which his father, of course, had built and it was very contemporary.

At that time Pei was working for William Zeckendorf.   At the service, his son Will referred to Pei as his father’s in-house architect which, of course, he was.  Will went on to say that Pei had given his father an appreciation for quality architecture.

I also was aware of the Zeckendorf name as head of the board of trustees at Long Island University which I attended before going abroad and then to Columbia University.

The next time the Zeckendorf name touched my life was a direct invitation from the man himself for my father and me to have lunch with him.  Believe me, when I tell you, we were totally mystified.   We were served a very nice lunch which, if I remember correctly, was served on a platform raised above his office with a great view.  Not that we really had a chance to see the view as Mr. Zeckendorf was so intense.  We soon learned his objective.  He wanted to buy the apartment of a client of ours, Anita Young, the widow of Robert R. Young, the railroad magnate. My father and I looked at each other, what did we have to do with this?  Mr. Zeckendorf had the idea of making an offer on the apartment with its furnishings (very fine French 18th century pieces, many of which had come through our hands) and sell the collection to help offset his cost. Until I heard all the tributes at the Memorial Service, now probably 30-40 years later, I did not fully appreciate this minor intrigue.  What he might not have realized was that Mrs. Young had estates in Newport and Palm Beach and had no intention of selling the furniture.

 As an aside, one day when I asked Mrs. Young whether she might be interested in seeing some of our French 18^th century paintings, she replied that she was quite content with her sister’s paintings.  Her sister was Georgia O’Keeffe.

Of course, the reason that the Memorial Service was in Santa Fe is that Zeckendorf has been living here for more than twenty years and he and his wife, Nancy, have done untold wonders for this town.  His lawyer, who worked on the deal to build the Eldorado Hotel here, told us of the problem they had as to where they wanted to locate the hotel.  It seems that it was too close to a church to be able to obtain a liquor license.  Bill Zeckendorf’s solution… move the church.  This turned out to be of a double benefit to Santa Fe.  Not only was the church pleased with the move to a location with much needed parking space, but   the building  that took its place is today the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum!

One of our great loves in this town is the Lensic Performing Arts Center, an old movie palace which Bill and Nancy renovated into a state of the art theater giving Santa Fe a venue for theater and dance as well as simulcasts from the Metropolitan Opera and London’s National Theater.  For us as two New York transplants who love the arts, it is a great quality of life benefit.

Bill loved music and Nancy gave him full credit for the Lensic but it was clear that without her as lead fund-raiser, and the brilliant impresario, Bob Martin, whom they enlisted from the start, it would not have happened.  I am sure that Bill saw the benefit of having a performing arts center within one block of his grand hotel, the Eldorado.  Just like with Mrs. Young’s apartment he could see an issue from many different sides.

One more connection with the Zeckendorf family is that Bill’s son Will came into our New York gallery on a number of occasions with a keen interest in the arts of France, so I got to know another generation of Zeckendorfs.

Ralph T. Coe & his Foundation

We gave a party the other evening for an old friend who is unfortunately not with us anymore.  He did, however, leave a legacy, The Ralph T. Coe Foundation.  To all who knew him he preferred to be called Ted.

Ralph "Ted" Coe

He was born in Cleveland, Ohio.  Went to Oberlin college for his undergraduate degree and to Yale for his Master’s in Art History.  After a stint under the famous curator, director and art historian John Pope Hennessy at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, he was hired as a curator at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, where he went on to became director.

As a young art dealer I was introduced to Ted when he came to visit our gallery.  While he was somewhat older than I, he was a lot younger than my father and cousin who ran the firm, so we kind of hit it off.  The Nelson, as Kansas City’s art museum is known, bought many works of art from my family, including paintings, drawings, French 18th Century decorative arts as well as medieval objects.  

Ted w/ Gerald & Penelope

Years after meeting Ted I sent him to visit Eugene Victor Thaw a renowned art dealer more into modern fields where Ted bought a painting by Pissarro.  Ted’s father was a major collector of Impressionists so this was of great interest to Ted and as long as he lived Ted was an advisor to Henry Bloch of H&R Block who was a trustee of the museum and formed a great Impressionist collection.

Ted’s true love, however, was tribal art and particularly the art of the American Indians.  In 1976 he did the first international exhibition of Native American art called “Sacred Circles: Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art” and eventually decided that pursuing this interest was more interesting to him than being the director of a great museum.  Ted moved to Santa Fe where he continued working on his next show, “Lost & Found Traditions: Native American Art 1965-1985”.   He wanted to show that the creative abilities of the American Indian still existed as it had hundreds of years ago.  He travelled all over the continent collecting works made in recent years and commissioning works for the show from many different tribes.  He would come back home to Santa Fe having covered tens of thousands of miles in a single trip.  Around the time of the exhibition Gene Thaw moved to Santa Fe and Ted guided him in building his great collection of Native American Art now housed in a separate wing of the James Fennimore Cooper Museum in Cooperstown, New York

In 2003 just before Ted’s 75th birthday an exhibition opened at the Metropolitan  Museum in New York with  a couple of hundred Native American objects from his collection which were eventually bequeathed to the museum.  The exhibition was called, “The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art”.  There you will find much more about this unique scholar and collector written by his family, friends and colleagues.

Ted did not want his passing to interfere with his mission.  He, therefore, set up a Foundation to continue his effort to share in his love of life and the pleasure of collecting, transmitting to all who were willing to listen and learn about tribal heritage and cultures.

Before he died Ted asked his niece, Rachel Wixom, daughter of the distinguished medievalist, William Wixom, to become executive director of the Foundation.  She left New York and moved to Santa Fe.  She wanted the first event for the Foundation to be for those who knew and loved Ted.  As a member of the Foundation’s Advisory Committee and having known Ted over more years than anyone else in Santa Fe I asked that this event be held at our home where ultimately 40 of his friends and admirers gathered to learn about the Foundation.   Rachel told us about some of the goals of the Foundation.  We are establishing a fellowship which allows someone, probably an advanced student, to come to Santa Fe for two months with a generous stipend and work on their own project but also work on the two thousand pieces left in Ted’s collection and organize a small exhibition using some of them.

Rachel Wixom

What distinguished Ted from all the others who have studied native cultures is that he came to it, not as an anthropologist or an archeologist, but rather as an art historian.  He used that critical eye to distinguish quality in tribal art.  We hope that this discipline can be fostered through the fellowship.

Rachel is working out of her home at the moment and the Foundation needs a home of it’s own to receive visitors, house fellowship winners and allow any staff to work. One hope is to buy Ted’s adobe home where the collection was assembled and housed for so many years.  There it might also be possible to show some of the collection.

1701 Agua Fria, Santa Fe NM 

The website also needs to be developed and while Ted catalogued much of the collection it still needs to be made accessible on the internet which is another complicated and expensive project.

Rachel, the board of directors and the advisory committee have lots of work ahead of them in in order to realize Ted’s final dream.