The Vilcek Collection

I have known my wife since she was a student in 1969 and we married 6 years later.  At approximately the same time as that personal landmark, the Metropolitan Museum, in a so-called cost saving move, decided to eliminate its catalog department.  The reason this was a momentous event was that the catalog department recorded the basic information on any work of art that came into the museum and saw that a record photo was taken, not a photo for publication.  One card was kept in that department and another given to the department to which the work of art was destined to go.  Because Penelope was working and researching in several fields this was the place that she spent a great deal of time. 

Cost cutting always means people lose their jobs and in this case it included an art historian by the name of Marica Vilcek, who headed the department.  She was married to Dr. Jan Vilcek, a doctor and scientist whom she had met in Czechoslovakia, before they both immigrated to the United States.   Dr. Vilcek became a lead scientist in the invention of the powerful anti-inflammatory used in the treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis and Chrohn’s Disease, an inflammation of the bowel, Remicade.  With royalties from that drug Dr. Vilcek, a Professor of Microbiology at NYU School of Medicine, was able to make a major donation to the School for the study of biomedical research and education.  He and his wife also established The Vilcek Foundation devoted to increasing public awareness of the contribution of immigrants to professional, academic and artistic life in the United States.  The Foundation has given many grants to arts institutions, as well, and even to the Metropolitan Museum, which I find the ultimate in generosity.

Over a little more than a decade the Vilceks have built a first class collection of American Modernist Art, which will eventually be left to their Foundation.  A number of the works came from the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe and the Vilceks worked with the then head of the Modern Art Department there, Catherine Whitney.  Having developed a close relationship with them, when Catherine later became curator at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she encouraged them to do an exhibition from their collection.   The result is called, “From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks of American Modernism from the Vilcek Foundation Collection”.  It was also previously shown at the Phoenix Art Museum before ending its run here at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.  Every travelling show leaves installation and the possibility of adding images and interpretation to the exhibiting institution and Cody Hartley, Director of Curatorial Affairs at Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, has done that masterfully here.

So, when we went to the opening of the show, 40 years had past and Penelope again came face to face with Marica Vilcek and they recognized each other immediately!  We were invited thanks to a group of the Friends of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum who had come to see the exhibition and to whom we had given a tour of a couple of the other museums that afternoon. 

I have always struggled with the word “Modernism” but here it refers to a style started specifically in the United States to express the new energy of the 20th century.  The online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, however, says, “Modernism in the arts, is a radical break with the past and concurrent search for new forms of expressionism.  Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I”.

When I visit someone’s home I am always first attracted to their art and then to their books.  Both tell a lot about one’s hosts.  It is always interesting to see how someone collects.  There are those who are only interested in the best of the best, others who are trying to decorate their walls and those who buy because of the seller.  Someone once told me the only reason they bought in a specific field was because the dealer was their best friend!   We cannot know what attracts us to a certain field but we can look at a collection and see clear relationships.

The Vilceks came out regularly to the American Southwest and it is not surprising that Southwestern subject matter and landscape would attract them.  But of course, both of them having grown up in Czechoslovakia, they have interests in older art as well, and this has had an equal influence on their eye.  One of the paintings in their collection, which I found fascinating, is Marsden Hartley’s (1877-1943), “Mont Saint-Victoire” circa 1927.  Here you have a reminiscence of Paul Cezanne’s (1839-1906) beloved and oft painted “Mont Saint-Victoire” imbued with Southwest colors.  A similar case in the next generation is a favorite subject of Georgia O’Keeffe’s (1887-1906), Pendernal Mountain and the red hills at Ghost Ranch.

There are the Southwest still life subjects too, for instance the Marsden Hartley’s picture of Indian Pottery circa 1912 or the Mexican ceramic figure painted by Max Weber (1881-1961) It is titled Mexican Statuette but it is actually a ceramic figure from Cochiti Pueblo.  Georgia O’Keeffe would have seen many katsina dolls.  Though there is no evidence that she formally collected them, she did, however paint them, if rarely.

A piece of sculpture that owes a lot to the artists of France in the early part of the 20th century is Max Weber’s Figure in Rotation modeled in 1917 (this edition dates circa 1948).  I particularly relate to the John Storrs (1885-1956) sculpture “Study in Pure Form” that is similar to one in the Metropolitan Museum. Storrs evokes the skyscrapers of Manhattan which until recently was home to me.

 

Lastly, we must not forget that the Vilceks live in New York City so the painting by George Copeland Ault (1891-1948) “View from Brooklyn” 1927 which looks at the famous city skyline must have special meaning to them as well. I love how Ault captures the two boroughs so well in a single relatively small painting.

Only about a third of their collection (60 works of art) is in the show so all I have said is based on a sampling.  The exhibition will be up at the O’Keeffe until January 10, 2016 and I have hardly broken the surface of all that could be said about it.  I hope to go back and revisit it soon both in person and here in print.

All paintings mentioned are from the Jan T. and Marica Vilcek Collection and are promised gifts to the The Vilcek Foundation.  I want to thank the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum for supplying the images.

Life of a Blogger

I have put this blog off for a few years now but as “Missives from the Art World” completes its sixth year of publication, it seems as good a time as any!  The thought first came to me waiting for a train in Heidelberg, Germany, a beautiful university town, which was one of the places that my father studied.  I made a few short notes then but decided that two years was too short a time for that blog to be written.

It all started because my associate, Vince Hickman, said to me that people enjoyed my stories, so it was a way of staying in touch even if the gallery no longer existed and I was, already in transition to Santa Fe.

My wife also writes, but she is a scholar who finds a subject and delves deeply into it.  She will often work with original documents for which she must go to the library.  She can spend months on a single article while I am knocking these pieces out on a weekly basis, so they are naturally not as thorough.  But then we are not trying to achieve the same goals.  Penelope is trying to teach while I am looking merely to entertain and hopefully make my reader think or even gain a new world-view.

 Blogging began in the electronic age and became the phenomenon it has become with the Internet.  It is more personal and independent than any previous form of publication.  No matter its faults and there are many one can still get a lot more information on the internet on a lot more subjects than from any single encyclopedia of old.  When people talk to me about the errors on the Internet I point out that one can find errors in many books if one does not pick up the “right” one!

Looking back now I see that my weekly blog was an incredible discipline for structure but,
my problems in writing and subject matter have changed in the last years.  As I have cut way down on my European travel, my trips have become more U.S. oriented and less frequent so I sit at my computer almost every week thinking what is worth writing about.  Sometimes it is pretty late in the week until I have an idea. 

I have lots of help because after I write, my wife edits, which at times is stressful for both of us!  Then my text is sent off with images that I have received, taken or found and put in Dropbox for my Blog Guru, Vince Hickman in New Jersey.  He figures out how to insert the images, and sometimes edits them in Photoshop or splices the videos and publishes the blog at midnight Sunday, Eastern Standard Time.  Then early on Monday he corrects any mistakes I or someone else finds.

BTW, I have had a few friends point out mistakes that I have made on a regular basis. Thank goodness most of those corrections are of a grammatical nature.  I am extremely pleased with those who point out errors because, first of all it shows that someone has read the Missive, and second because what is posted on the Internet will not disappear.  If I write about a Rothschild for instance, Google or some other search engine will pick that up, so years from now someone might stumble on my piece and it will have been corrected.

Almost every week I think, why am I doing this?  I have continued even through a number of surgeries and so far I have done 52 a year every year. and every week I wonder whether I will, or want to, continue!  I realize, however, that I derive pleasure from getting new ideas and researching those simple subjects that turn out not to be so simple.  Learning more is always stimulating, if also frustrating at times.

There is another reason that I continue, there are people who seem to appreciate it and that makes it worth doing.   I was sitting in a lecture in New York last year when a curator from the Getty Museum tapped me on the shoulder and said,  “I read your blog and particularly enjoy it when you write about the old days.”  That is not only an ego booster but makes me realize maybe I should tell some of my old stories.  Then I will see someone who I have not seen in years and they tell me they have been following my blog.  I had a museum director, once, say hello and start to tell me all the places I had been recently.  I said, “how did you know that” … you know the answer.  Not long ago I was asked whether I was interested in joining a very important board in Santa Fe and discussed it with 2 good friends, an art person and a lawyer in town.  I said it would take so much time to do the work properly for this board that I would have to make a choice between the board and the blog.  Since they had both encouraged me to join the board I was totally surprised when they both said, “Do the blog”.

What will I write about next week???

A Play Like No Other: DISGRACED

When you go to the theater and see a play you dream about afterwards, can’t stop thinking about it, and continue to debate its meanings ... that is a play worth writing about!

You may have heard of it, “Disgraced” by Ayad Akhtar.  It closed recently in New York and its very next stop was in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, produced by the Fusion Theater Company.  Ayad Akhtar is 45 years old, and a Pakistani-American actor and writer.  This is his first play written in 2012 and it won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The play deals with questions of identity and assimilation.  The focus is on Amir, a New York lawyer born to Muslim immigrants from Pakistan. He believes himself to be totally assimilated in the United States having shed all the prejudice and any extreme Islamic views that he learned from his mother as a child.  Through a series of events all the psychological protective armor that he has built up is slowly stripped away.  The main 4 characters and Fusion cast are Amir  (John San Nicolas) - Jory (Angela Littleton) - Emily (Celia Schaefer) – Isaak, the curator  (Gregory Wagrowski).

His American wife, an artist, is a bit of a free spirit, whose recent work is based on Islamic art. She sees the good side of the rich heritage brought to the world through so many years of the Persian Empire, which turned to Islam in the 7th century.  We can surmise that this is what attracts Amir to  Emily but it also intimidates him.

Amir’s cousin is a young Pakistani man still trying to find himself.  Although he is attracted to Islam he has Americanized his name to Abe (played by Samuel James Shoemaker-Trejo) in order to ease his way in society.  He wants Amir to help his friend, an Imam who has been accused of sending money to terrorists.  Over his protests that he is not a criminal lawyer, Emily persuades Amir to appear in court even if he does not serve as counsel to the Imam.  The press, however, portrays him as precisely that and Amir’s world begins to implode. 

It turns out that on his job application at his prestigious law firm he had said his parents were born in India since his father was born before that part of India became Pakistan, artificially, carved up by the British.  His mother, however, was born after that fateful date, August 14, 1947.  His law partners use the excuse to view him as anti-Semitic.  We learn that he has something of a chip on his shoulder making him a good litigator but scary as a partner.  He is infuriated when his black female friend and colleague at the firm is made partner when he feels he has worked far harder than she did.  I must add quickly before my children jump on me for describing his colleague as Black that this is a vital part of the story, the law firm being a white Jewish firm.  To add another ingredient to the pot his colleague is married to a white Jewish curator from the Whitney who has an affection for Emily and one wonders how far that might go.  Here is an image from the New Mexican of Jory and Amir still on good terms.

As the ingredients start to mix there is a dinner party with the four main characters, Jew, Black, former Muslim, Islamophile, who is also thrilled to learn her Muslim inspired work has made it into the Jewish curators exhibition.  Will the pot boil over? As the reviewer for The Guardian newspaper put it, “A stirring Greek Tragedy that will put you off your dinner”.

How would we react if we worked very hard to make it in another world culture and then were treated as an alien? It is quite recently that we would find a black person more in keeping with a white Jewish firm than an American-born Muslim who does not wish to be perceived as such.  Can one change one's DNA, or is it that certain precepts have been drilled into us since childhood and they are there to stay?  So many questions to think about.  I am not going to give away the entire plot because if I do you may not go to see or read the play.

To my surprise and delight I believe the Fusion’s cast to have been every bit as good and in some cases possibly superior to the one in New York, judging by the reviews.  Being from New York, I certainly recognized the curator who I may have placed at the Museum of Modern Art and not the Whitney but then the latter does do the Biennial.

The play has already been produced in London and Vienna and it is on track to have the most productions around the U.S. with 18 venues.  I have also read an article about the banlieues (the outskirts or suburbs of Paris where most Muslims and blacks live).  It’s called “The Other France” by George Packer and appeared in the August 31st issue of The New Yorker.  The real story sounded like it was taken right out of the play.  I would not be surprised if “Disgraced” were soon translated into French and if not, it should be.  With all the xenophobia we are seeing yet again in this country, and the immigration issues all over the world, the play is a must see or at least must read.

2nd Annual Festival of the Drum

I remember a friend of ours who enjoyed bringing drums as gifts to children probably so that they could drive their parents mad when they played in the house.  My son, Danny’s, first torture of his parents was playing the violin, which drove his poor baby brother to distraction at a few months of age.  So Danny’s solution was to stuff cotton into Hunter’s his ears.

Therefore, I guess, it was perfectly logical for him to eventually take up the drums and that he did.  He did this more seriously and still plays today.  He even put together a small band called Pockets of Wonder in his town of Traverse City, Michigan.

When I told my wife I was going to write about the 2nd Annual Festival of the Drum,  she said, “Oh, you have done that before!”  True, see it here.  Then again, I have written about some art fairs annually for a period of time and I think the festival of the drum is more fun and a lot shorter!  Unfortunately, some of my favorite performers from last year did not make it this time but there was plenty to keep us entertained.  There also did not seem to be as big an audience as last year, but that may have been deceiving since everyone was trying to find shade under the portal or among the trees on this very hot autumn day.  The Museum Hill Café was also full, hiding a lot of people who were enjoying their lunch with entertainment.

We did not stay for the entire 4 hours of drums but we did see the majority of the players.  There were 2 sets by Native Americans, as well as one group playing Japanese drums and another Vietnamese group.  The latter was from Albuquerque.

We arrived when the Japanese drums were in their final frenzy, which was most exciting with its different sized drums.  Taiko Sol is a collaborative drumming project in Santa Fe.  The participants are born in the U.S. and their interpretations of the music are distinctly American.  Taiko in Japanese refers to various percussion instruments, but outside of Japan usually refers just to the drum.  Sol is the Spanish word for Sun.  Their teacher is of Lithuanian and French Canadian heritage. One of the performers, Alliyah Noor, who gave me the players backgrounds is of Pakistani and German heritage, and another performer’s family came from Japan.   American ensemble Taiko has evolved in the States from the older more traditional form.

There were two Native American Groups.  The first we saw was the Black Eagle Drum Group from Jemez Pueblo.  As it was put on line they”…brought honor, big time, to Jemez Pueblo and to all of New Mexico when they won a Grammy for Best Native American Music Album…, Flying Free”  They have also won other awards.  They are now writing their own songs in their ancient Towa language.  Their leader, Malcom Lepa, explained that when they started out in 1989, at first, they “sounded like a bunch of coyotes in the river”.   They have vastly improved but I was quite happy that we heard them outdoors since the sound of large drums can be very loud and all encompassing.  By the end of the set people were getting up to dance.

The other Indian group was from Pojoaque pueblo, the Red Turtle Dancers led by David Trujillo.  The group started about 6 years ago.  These were 4 young Native Americans, 2 boys and 2 girls who first did a Buffalo Dance and then a Butterfly Dance to traditional songs, which, of course included the drum.

Probably the most fun and exciting drum performance that we heard was founded by a Vietnamese group, called Van Hanh Lion Dance of Albuquerque.  The music was performed by drummers and cymbalists and the leader was about 10 years old.  He had to stand on small stand to be able to reach the drum but he was amazing.  I was told that he has been playing for two or three years.  The lions are formed by a taller young person as the head and a smaller child behind as the tail.  They would dance around and go up and nudge people.  I did not understand the purpose so one of the animals literally took my head into his mouth… thank goodness he did not bite it off!  The concept was to feed them money.  My wife really got into this and fed them several dollars during the dance.

The event was sponsored by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) but it was truly international in musical tastes.  I am going to keep writing about them in hopes that they come back every year and grow!

The Wine Taster

At breakfast every morning my parents, who were from Germany, and I would clink our orange juice glasses and say, “Prosit” or “Prost” (pronounced brost).   Many years later, I was corrected by a German aristocrat who told me that was an expression used in the beer hall and the correct saying (he did not say, in refined society) would be “Zum Wohl” or “To health”.  My wife and I have continued the tradition since we find it a very nice way to greet the day.

Obviously, our aristocratic friend was thinking more about clinking glasses of wine and not OJ!  Which brings me to the topic of the week.  My parents always had wine, usually red, on the table and I remember for years being given a few teaspoons of wine in my water glass so it would be red like my parents’.  I would guess that when I was a teenager they began to let me have it straight and, probably because I was never told not to drink, I never particularly cared if I had any wine or not.

Truth be told my parents drank "vin ordinaire", everyday wine, most of the time and I can not remember any that they considered especially important, though there may have been a few.  My education in wine was therefore quite limited.  Then I went to a lunch in Paris that opened a whole new world to me.

Celebrity to me has always been quite different than to most.  I was never much into the sports or entertainment celebrities that most people recognize.  In fact, my children are often in awe of how ignorant I can be about some of the celebrity names that they might mention.  For me celebrities were captains of industry such as Henry Ford, John Paul Getty or members of the Rothschild family that originated in my parents home town of Frankfurt Germany.  I have been lucky enough in my life time to have met all these people.

In my early 20’s, however, I had not met a Rothschild though I had met several who were cousins or relatives of the family.  Then, when visiting Paris one year, I received a phone call from Baroness Renée de Becker, a Rothschild cousin, who had actually crashed my first wedding since my parents would not have presumed to invite such a personage.  She wanted to know if my then wife and I would like to attend a luncheon that day at the home of Baron and Baroness Elie de Rothschild.  It was not an intimate affair but rather a luncheon for some society group.  My uncle, Hans Stiebel, a debonair gentleman also in the art business, had lived much of his life in Paris and was very popular with the Rothschild family.  It was through him that I was a known quantity to the Baroness Elie who sought me out after lunch.  I wanted to say something nice about lunch and I honestly said how good the wine was.  The response was, “Oh it’s just a little house wine”, something she would repeat at other more private lunches over the years.  From a video we made in 1989 here is Baroness Elie speaking of when she met my father’s partner and cousin, Saemy Rosenberg and my uncle, Hans Stiebel.

Believe it or not the penny did not drop immediately but the first time I repeated the quote it dawned on me that I was in the home of the proprietor of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, one of the most famous and best wines in the world, and suddenly I was interested in the subject.  Years later when I was joking with the Baroness Elie on the subject she told a story about her son Nathanial, when he was very little.  He had gone with his nanny overnight to a hotel and according to the Baroness the nanny was “a bit of a tippler”.  She had ordered wine with their dinner from room service.  Nathanial was given a taste at which point he pronounced “afite pas bien nana” “ Lafite not good, Nanny”.  Mind you that the family did not always dine on the best of the Lafite wines but one of the offshoots, in other words, “little house wines”.

I wanted to learn more so when I was back in New York I signed up for a wine course with Peter Morrell.  His boutique enterprise is now located at One Rockefeller Plaza and run by his sister Roberta since his retirement.  In the late 1960’s it was all the way east in the 50’s started by his father in a large all wood barn like structure that made you feel like you had gone down into an old wine cellar.  I remember learning about the different regions of wine in France, Germany and a bit about American wines.  Back then American wine was not yet considered serious, though Peter, the younger generation, at the time, was definitely promoting them. Here is a photo of a silver French 18th century tastevin that belonged to my father.  It was used for tasting wine and often hung around the neck of the sommelier.

Some time later, I worked on an appraisal for a member of the Rothschild family and was paid in wine.  Some of those little house wines as well as a bottle or two of Lafite.  At this point I bought a “wine cave” and collected some better French wines.   I did not have room for what amounted to a very large constant temperature refrigerator in our one bedroom apartment so I kept it at my gallery.  After moving to a larger apartment I installed the wine refrigerator there, but one year it became so hot during a New York summer the coils froze.  I boiled a lot of wine!  Interestingly, only the best wines with long corks survived, such as the Lafites.  They were no longer great but they were still drinkable.  I have never had a wine refrigerator since.  Happily in Santa Fe our basement remains at a pretty constant and suitably cool temperature.  But once burned twice shy and I have never since tried to really build a wine collection.  I no longer remember exactly which vintages I received and certainly hope one was not from 1969.  I just read the price of a bottle at $11,880… but for what occasion does one drink it.

Everyone has a story about wine and the references in songs are legion. If you don’t believe me see: http://www.wineintro.com/quotes/songs/lyrics.html

A Painting in the Albuquerque Museum

I have been thinking about writing about this picture for some time.  It is by Patrick McGrath Muñiz and is called, “Disneyfication of a Hero”.

At the end of 2013 I wrote a piece on Muñiz, after we had bought a painting by the artist, and there you can learn more about his background.

But first things first, my spell checker doesn’t like the word "Disneyfication" yet one can find it in Wikipedia!  To me it is quite obvious that it is not a positive commentary and Muñiz is all about social satire.  If it’s Disney it must be about consumption, merchandising, taking the real world and sanitizing it to make it acceptable.  Other words that the artist suggested to me when I corresponded with him recently were “Cocacolonization” and “Walmartization. You get the idea. 

The picture was painted in 2010 and first shown at a gallery in Florida and in 2012 at the Jane Sauer Gallery in Santa Fe, now owned by Jen Tansey.  Announcing the exhibition at Jane Sauer the artist wrote: “Saints Heroes and Corporations is the title for my upcoming solo show … As the title suggests the work is about "larger than life" historical and contemporary figures, including Corporations that under the U.S. fourteenth amendment enjoy special "personhood" rights.”  Clearly from that statement alone we catch his drift.

According to the label in the Albuquerque Museum where the painting is now part of the permanent collection, “Muñiz creates historic puzzles linking disparate images from history and art history, popular culture, Christianity”.  The artist has clearly studied the Old Masters and he has updated the iconography in this picture.  The Hero of the piece is Hercules with his club being submitted to a neo-colonial consumer driven transformative process called, “Disneyfication”. 

Here is a legend to help you identify all the characters you might not recognize.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The only obscure character if you did not grow up in what Muñiz called “the oldest colony in the Western Hemisphere (Puerto Rico) claimed by Spain in 1493 and seized as a U.S. Territory in 1898, is #4 Diego de Landa who is shown destroying Mayan history.
 

There is so much Old Master in the picture and Donald Duck, lower left, sitting on the toilet reminds me of a Breughel figure pissing on the wall of a building.  Donald is being handed pages, torn from a book by a Renaissance boy to use as toilet paper.  Note that Hercules is heading toward the gypsy who has three Taro cards by her side showing the fool, the hanged man and death cards.  These represent part of the hero’s journey from the beginning of his quest to sacrifice and death.  You will note other figures in the painting representing death and father time behind the hero as well.

I asked both the artist and the curator of the Albuquerque Museum, Andrew Connors, why the former decided to donate and the latter accept this masterpiece.  Muñiz had decided early on that this was the kind of important painting that delivered his message better than many of the others he had done, and that people could learn from it what his message was.  Connors, a great admirer of the artist’s work, felt it would fit in well as supplement to a couple of exhibitions that the museum had planned.  It was first shown with the exhibition, “Behind Closed Doors” showing the art in the Spanish American Home between 1492 and 1898.  Then it was along side the exhibition of “Masterpieces from the École de Beaux Arts, Paris.”  Regarding the first show it is Spanish Colonial Art that might be shown in a contemporary home and in the second it shows that there are still today artists who paint in the style of the Old Masters but updating subject matter.  Quoting the curator, “Although the focus of the Albuquerque Museum’s art collection is ‘art of the American Southwest and its influences’ Muñiz provides such a complimentary vision of the world to that of a New Mexican perspective, we thought it had to be included in the collection… Since it was installed in early 2014 the painting has been a consistent favorite with our visitors, particularly young visitors (who get many of the pop culture references) and families (because the painting sparks so many intergenerational discussions with different generations understanding different historic or cultural iconography.)”

Before I finish I want to point out the detail of the carving of the frame. With heraldry, soldiers, a cathedral … I could write a piece just on the symbolism in the frame!

Colors of New Mexico

I am going to end my coverage of Santa Fe’s group of shows under the rubric of “Summer of Color” with an exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art called, “Colors of the Southwest”. It is a show chosen by the museum’s new Curator of Art, Carmen Vendelin who comes to New Mexico from the LaSalle University Art Museum in Philadelphia.

What Carmen has done is pick out an exhibition from the museum’s own collections. Though less of a phenomenon than it used to be as a result of the recession, I find it most refreshing.  So many museums have vast storerooms of material but feel that they must borrow from all over the world at vast expense in order to attract an audience.  In my opinion it is all in the marketing.  A good title or lead line will bring an audience.  “Shown for the First Time,” “Discoveries Made At Home,” “Found Underneath our Museum”, these will all bring people in. I remember attracting visitors to my gallery with, “The Lion’s Share” , “Objects of Desire” and “Behind the Red Velvet Curtain.”

The exhibition concentrates on the art of the 20th century.  The title was chosen early on because all the museums in Santa Fe wanted to join the “Summer of Color” so the art museum decided just to take them all!  The PR concept has helped bring many more tourists who visit Santa Fe at this time of year to our eight museums.

Carmen was tasked with picking from 800 possibilities in the collection to come up with a cohesive exhibition.  She was aware of the catalog of the former curator, Joe Traugott’s, exhibition, “How the West is One”, but her idea was not to do a historical show but look at how various artists looked at color.

In this show we view color but also some history as well as the myth of the Southwest.  Ignoring the bloody history of the second half of the 19th century starting with the Civil War and the Indian wars and the lack of law and order, in the 20th century we have managed to glorify and mythologize our Western story.

In recent times, especially since the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997, the concept has developed that Georgia O'Keeffe was the first artist to discover the colors of the Southwest.  Though Ms. O’Keeffe often denied all influences ascribed to her work, I will dare to say that much of what came before was adapted in her work.

Gustave Baumann, (1881-1971) for instance, who came from Germany, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and returned to Germany to learn to make wood block prints, settled in Santa Fe and became a painter and print maker par excellence capturing the nuance of color like no other.  Here I found a guache he did in 1918 called “Day of the Deer Dance” showing mountains and trees as you might see at O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch.

Things change and after this show was set they decided to do another show in the Museum just on Baumann so the gouache was taken out of the “Colors” show and moved upstairs with the Baumann show so that it could be shown with the woodblock and print of the same subject.  Another picture now missing since my first viewing of the exhibition is a Georgia O’Keeffe because later this week it will be in a large O’Keeffe show at the art museum largely borrowed from the O’Keeffe Museum.   Why you may ask? Because the O’Keeffe Museum is small and they needed to make room for another show,“From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks of American Modernism from The Vilcek Foundation Collection.”

Another artist following a similar path as Baumann, E. Martin Hennings (1886-1956) was born in New Jersey and went to study at the Art Institute in Chicago and then did his further study in his parents’ native Germany.  The painting “The Rendezvous” represents a meeting among the Aspen Trees not that different from the Baumann gouache but was surely done later in the year.  It also shows the vivid colors of fall in New Mexico, which I have written about before.

B.J.O Nordfelt (Tullstorp, Sweden 1878- Henderson, Texas 1955) moved to the United States with his family in 1892.  He too studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later taught in many universities of the Southwest.  He made his first visit to Santa Fe around 1919 when he painted the picture, “Antelope Dance”.  He is known as an American Expressionist as he owes a lot to the likes of Cézanne and Gauguin.  Though not exactly Tahiti, the images of the Indians in this verdant scene are quite different from the reality of the dry high desert, which is the normal habitat of these dancers.

The last painting that I want to touch on brings both the Myth of the Southwest and the Kitsch of the Western film together to form a striking picture in Bill Schenk’s (1947-) 1993 painting, “Coming Down from the Mountain”.  We have all seen the Western film of the cowboy riding into the sunset and here he is in all his glory!

The show closes on September 20.