Dealers’ Pop-Up Exhibition

I ended my last Missive recommending that everyone see the pop-up exhibition in New York, at the Academy Mansion at 2 East 63rd Street, which ended this past weekend.  In spite of it having closed, I feel it is worth talking about some more because I would love to see more exhibitions of this caliber. 

The three art dealers who put together the exhibition were Brimo from Paris, Di Castro from Rome and Kugel from Paris.  A greater treasure trove of old European art you could not see anywhere in the world. What is being exhibited is material from ancient Rome to the 19th century.  As much as the term has been abused one can honestly say all was of “Museum Quality”.  Brimo de Larousilhe deals in objects of the medieval and renaissance period,  Galleria Alessandra Di Castro has mainly Italian renaissance art in all media and Galerie J. Kugel has continental European works of art from the 16th to 19th century often of an unusual nature.

But first of all, what is a pop-up exhibition?  I found the following definition/explanation on line:   “A pop-up exhibition is a temporary art event, less formal than a gallery or museum but more formal than private artistic showing of work. The idea began in 2007 in New York City where space for exhibiting artistic work is very limited.”

While I can agree with some of this, the exhibition at 2 East 63rd Street was anything but informal.  While it has not been unusual that during active art seasons dealers did exhibitions in a foreign venue it is unheard of to be done with this size and quality.  The “Wow Factor” begins with the venue.  The location just off 5th avenue is incredible, the sort of private mansion one reads about owned by billionaires and Arab sheiks.

Recently I read a book by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark, Newell, Jr. called “Empty Mansions” about Huguette Clark who owned grand houses and apartments around the country but did not live in them.  From her own inherited fortune she could keep them up and always have them ready for her imminent arrival, though she never arrived.  Then there are those who buy houses as an investment and so it is with Leonard Blavatnik, who has invested heavily in New York real estate.  In 2001 a company belonging to him purchased the mansion that is the site of the Pop-up exhibition .  It was built by William Ziegler, Jr., heir to the Royal Baking Powder Company fortune.  Ziegler had commissioned the architect Frederick Sterner to design the building in 1919 for himself and his wife, Gladys.  It was on the site of 3 old brownstones.  Today, we are still lamenting the loss of such old buildings … nothing changes!  After divorcing his wife, however, Ziegler sold the building in 1929 to Norman Bailey Woolworth of the family that owned the eponymous stores.  Twenty years later Woolworth donated it to the New York Academy of Sciences, and it has since been known as the Academy Mansion.  In turn they sold it to Blavatnik.  He never planned to move in but has rented it out for parties, weddings and pop-up exhibitions!

Photo Credit: Christopher Gray

I asked Laura Kugel how come they took this space and she responded, “After looking at many places, including galleries, we chose it because it's really a house and gives us a unique opportunity to invite people in our temporary home. It wasn't fitted with professional lighting for works of art so we had to install all of it in the week prior to the opening.”   In the end they had to add some walls as well.   Here is an image of the temporary office that the dealers designed in which to greet clients.

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Lippman

Walking into the exhibition one was immediately transported to the Old World.   Of course, at the beginning of the last century wealthy Americans were imitating the luxury of the European living style.  Therefore, the building is perfect for making one feel that one was in one of the grand houses of the three dealers involved in the show.

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Lippman

Beyond the ground floor rooms of the pop-up installation and up a spiral staircase was another floor full of great treasures.  The gallery that looked most like an Old World Kunst Kammer was the one in which members of each gallery posed for a photo.  They are Alessandra Di Castro, Nicolas Kugel, Alexis Kugel, and Marie-Amélie Carlier.   They are standing at a marble Italian renaissance table and behind them you can see wonderful early vermeil pieces.  No objects were identified with a gallery in the installation so no judgments could be made for reasons of dealer prejudice.

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Lippman

One of the objects that all the dealers were particularly proud to show and is worth singling out is a large Roman 16th century bust of Emperor Caracalla (186-217 AD).

As if this all were not enough, by invitation, one could go to another floor in the Mansion’s small elevator where on display was a tapestry cycle: The Meersburg Hunts of Maximilian tapestries, a set of seven tapestries after cartoons designed by Bernard Van Orley from Brussels, circa 1550-70.

If you missed the show in New York, you will need to travel to Paris and Rome to visit these premier galleries… or maybe they will be coming back to New York next year.

A Visit to New York and Discovering Archibald Motley

Everyone wants to know if after half a century plus living in NYC whether I miss it since we decided to emigrate to New Mexico .  When I say definitely not and I wish I had done it earlier some act as if I have insulted them personally even if they never lived in New York.  We did, however, recently make a visit back and my amendment to my comment above is always that the culture there is over the top so when we go we overfill ourselves with the arts.

Our first day back we visited the warehouse where there is still some of my art and a great deal of paper consisting of catalogs, photographs and archives.  After checking in there and having lunch with our ever loyal friend, ally and former employee, Diana Nixon, we decided it was time to check out the not so new museum in town, The Whitney.

We used the new way to get there, Uber, which was perfect going down with our driver, Mohammed, but we had to cancel when we wanted to leave the museum as we watched on the Uber map our driver Kunga driving around in circles and could not find us.

It is amazing how soon one forgets the vicissitudes of the city!  As we approached the museum we saw a long line at the entrance.  I must say they got people in very quickly and smoothly, however.  Everyone was courteous and helpful.  As usual I had sticker shock when I found the entry fee was $22 but then I grew up in the era of free museums and, after all, we were in the building for the same amount of time as seeing a Shakespeare play.

We are a bit late coming to the party since the Whitney, having moved out of their Marcel Breuer space uptown, opened near the High Line last May.  It is a destination building by Renzo Piano, which, I expected to dislike but I was very pleasantly surprised.  The views from the outside and in are beautiful and the galleries are very thoughtfully installed.  Herewith, one of the modern galleries and a view from one of several balconies in the building.

We started as instructed on the top floor and here we lucked out.  There was an exhibition of the work of Archibald Motley (1891-1981), a Modernist who came to the fore in the 1920’s as part of the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz age.  It drew black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars to Harlem where culture flourished.  The Exhibition “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” was organized by the Nasher Museum at Duke University and curated by Professor Richard J. Powell.  It was installed and organized at the Whitney by Carter E. Foster, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing.

The show is divided into sections with the first being biographical and here there are many possible choices I could use to illustrate but, no surprise, the painting that does this best is already front and center.  It is called “Myself at Work” and comes from the collection of Mara Motley, MD and Valerie Gerard Browne as all the images do unless otherwise indicated.

Image Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum

A 1929 work “Blues” is a theme that Motley explored often during his life, in both dance and music. When he got a Guggenheim Fellowship to Paris a short while later he painted nightclub scenes and he also showed music and dancing in the streets. (Image Blues, Credit Line: Image Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum)

When further along, I saw “The Boys in the Back Room” circa 1934 from the Estate of Reginald L. Lewis, I immediately thought of Cezanne’s "The Card Players" in the Metropolitan Museum.

I so enjoyed the energetic gesture of the gentleman explaining to his girl friend.  A gesture that has been referred to in French as “Le Doigt d’Expert” the finger of the expert! Here we have two images, “Doigt d’Expert” and a straight on image.

The painting with the most social commentary is the last image in the show titled “The First 100 Years”.  It is a scathing look at race relations in this country.  Its strangely eerie blue sets off the blood red highlights of the Confederate flag, a burning cross and the devil.  There is a lynched black man near the Statue of Liberty.  If you look closely you can see the heads of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, three champions of racial equality.  Since this painting is not at all like the rest of Motley’s work it makes the image all the more powerful.

There seems to be an epidemic of Jazz Age Period Art in New York.  The Neue Galerie has an exhibition, “Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933”.  The International Center for Photography has a show called, “The Early Years of Rhythm & Blues” and the Cooper-Hewitt is planning an exhibition for the Spring of 2017.

Our last day we saw an exhibition that I wish I had seen on the first so I could have written about it for this week.  It closes at the end of this month but please go see for yourself.  It is a “Pop-Up” exhibition in a New York Mansion at 2 East 63rd Street by 3 art dealers, Brimo from Paris, Di Castro from Rome and Kugel from Paris.  A greater treasure trove of old European art you will not find in this town.  After you have explored the two chockablock floors ask to see the tapestry cycle upstairs.  Here is an image of the dealers in one of the treasure rooms.  I hope to write more about it but unfortunately by then it will have closed.

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