It’s a Topsy-Turvy World!

I really do not know which end is up anymore when a Museum Director can get the loan of an El Greco and a painting from the circle of Poussin for his museum, from the collection of a member of his family, and this is called self-dealing.  Works by Poussin, and even his circle, are so prized by museums that I once lost a sale to the National Gallery in London because they had to use the money to buy their eleventh Poussin.  Personally, I though a museum did not need more than 10!

This was the headline on ArtNet and a number of other sites: “Current and former staff at the Detroit Institute of Arts are lodging complaints about director Salvador Salort-Pons.”  I may have met the man but never knew him and I cannot judge if he is a good director or not but, the article continues, “Among the more serious allegations against Salort-Pons is that he abused his authority to bolster personal relationships and the value of his family’s art collection.”

The museum has exhibited two paintings owned by Alan May, Salort-Pons’s father-in-law—El Greco’s St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata and a painting attributed to the circle of Nicolas Poussin, An Allegory of Autumn—leading a whistleblower to file a conflict-of-interest complaint with the IRS and the Michigan attorney general. (Showing a work at a prestigious museum can enhance its market value.)”

If we were speaking of a minor, or even a middle of the road, artist museum exhibition might help the value, but El Greco is one of the most important names in art history. If the circle of Poussin painting was exhibited as a Poussin, maybe one could make a case. Buying the paintings for the museum from a family member would be considered a conflict but obtaining their loan is to the benefit of the museum.

Then two of the best curators in the country, Keith Christiansen at the Metropolitan Museum and Gary Garrels at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have both been hauled over the coals recently. Mr. Garrels has even volunteered to resign over a few words considered to be not acceptable in today’s climate.  Statements that a few years ago would not have been given a second thought.  Mr. Garrel's unfortunate remark came after the acquisition of a work of art by a black artist, ““Don’t worry,” he said. “We will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” Failing to do so, he quipped, would be “reverse discrimination.” Not that funny in the best of times, but a joke in poor taste is not worthy of condemnation. 

Now if these two had a history of racial bias that would be valid but there is no such evidence.  I also know Keith rather well and never heard a prejudiced word out of him.  Objections were raised over his personal Instagram post of a drawing of an archeologist trying to save historic tombs of St. Denis during the French Revolution, and his thoughts centering on the observation “How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve.”

Another example of the world being turned upside down is, in my opinion, a positive one.  The Supreme Court has decided in a 5-4 decision, that the disputed area covering roughly half of the state of Oklahoma and most of the city of Tulsa belongs to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.  What was the case?  A criminal attorney has been working on an appeal in one of his sexual assault cases for years — arguing that his client, a Native American, can’t be legally prosecuted by the state of Oklahoma because the crime occurred on what has historically been Indian land.  The ramifications are far-reaching.  If you want to make a lawsuit do you sue in a state court or in a tribal court.  Who has the right to tax?  Can Indians in jail get a new trial? Who can regulate oil and gas production in the area?

Whether this is cause and effect or not I have also read that an Oregon arts organization has voluntarily given its building to a Native American group in recognition of historic tribal ownership of the land.  The Yale Union Building in Portland is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic places and has now changed hands and will become the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in 2021.

No matter, how you feel about these matters you have to admit our world is topsy-turvy!

Heists & Break-Ins

The last issue of Business Week Magazine that I received was called “The Heist Issue”. I thought, Wow! Not much business news.  Then I became more interested when they had an article on the Heist from The Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 where 13 works of art were stolen, 6 paintings including 3 Rembrandts and a Vermeer all cut out of their frames.  The works have never been found.   When Isabella Stewart Gardner made her gift to the City it was with the proviso that everything remains where it was.  What bothers Museum staff is that people come and stare at the empty frames rather than look at the 16,000 other works of art in the Museum.

That started me thinking of robberies that we have been the victim of.  Happily, nothing serious ever happened but in retrospect there were some interesting and even funny aspects to our personal experiences.

I will start with our most expensive attempted robbery that occurred at our home in Santa Fe when they broke our garden door getting in.  Then the alarm scared the perpetrator(s) off. Nothing was missing but it cost us $3,000 to replace the door.

The most fortuitous was probably also here in Santa Fe when potential thieves attempted to break in through a window. No one was in the house, the door was unlocked, and the alarm was not set, so they could have just opened the door and cleaned us out.  Instead they threw a rock managing to hit the window contact point and activating the alarm system. Happily, it scared them off.  Now we never leave without locking up and setting the alarm. 

We did once arrive home at our apartment on the top floor of a New York brownstone to see our wooden door broken through.  We lost cameras and a single fake cufflink from the Metropolitan Museum Shop.  What went through the thief’s mind?  I realized I had left my camera case with equipment in it on the chair in the living room so that was easy, but one cufflink???

Definitely the most bizarre break in was at that same apartment.  A thief running across the rooves from brownstone to brownstone to escape workmen who had discovered him jumped through our kitchen skylight.  In the next room was our baby son (he is 40 now) in the arms of his nanny.  The man did not grab anything, just ran out the front door.  But nanny, still holding baby, chased him down 5 flights of stairs and into the street.  When I heard the story, I thought thank goodness she did not catch up with the perp! 

There is no accounting for what people will do.  My gallery on 57th Street in New York was on the 5th floor of a 15-story business building. The building was locked at night, as were the elevator doors, and there was a watchman.  In this case, they placed a plank from the window of the next-door building to the ledge of the window of my wife’s office and got in. I don’t know what they thought they would find in our gallery. How could they get back over that plank with a piece of French 18th Century furniture or a large old master painting?  What did they take was a Louis XVI gilt bronze clock which was on the table in the elevator hall of the gallery?  They probably thought it was gold. Curiously they also took the $15 electric clock on my wife’s desk.  Guess the thief wanted to make sure he was in time for his next heist! The coda to this story is, when the police came one of the cops wanted to know whether we wanted them to say that the clock had been inside the gallery.  Not police violence but police corruption?  

Later that day I was speaking to a British colleague.  When he asked how things were, I told him fine, but we had been robbed.  He said congratulations and I didn’t understand.  He said, “well you were insured, weren’t you?  Then you made a sale!”  When was the last time you thought that would solve all your problems if the business caught on fire?  By accident, of course!

Development

I was taught in English class to “write about what I know about’.  That is always good advice, but I have always been a bit ornery, so I often do the opposite.  When my mother told me that if I stopped smoking cigarettes, she would give me a gift.  I waited until I was 21 to stop!  So today I thought I would write about an assignment I was given by a not-for-profit where I am a member of the Board. I was asked to come up with the Development Plan for the organization, something for which I have no expertise. Needless to say, I am part of a committee, but I made the mistake of raising my hand, virtually, of course, and was given the assignment to write it all up. 

A Development Committee is just a fancy way of saying Fund Raising Committee which is the lifeblood of any not-for-profit.  Why should people give to this cause instead of that one?  In my case, for the most part, I give to organizations in my adoptive State, New Mexico, before the rest of the country and the rest of the country before I give abroad.  We all make general rules because of all the choices we have.  Some only give to medical causes or educational causes while I focus on the arts. I never understood why really wealthy people such as Bill & Melinda Gates hire people to help them give their money away until we started trying to make meaningful donations with a tiny tiny fraction of what they have.

I learned from Jean Block, a consultant to not-for-profits, the most important question in the fund-raising business, “You need to ask”. If you don’t ask you don’t get.  Actually, I should have said I re-learned this. There is always pressure to succeed but it is also most rewarding when you meet the challenge. I figured I have raised funds before so I can do this.  Before the age of 30, I had to raise funds for an exhibition of works of art from art dealers in this country and abroad at the Metropolitan Museum - https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2019/02/the-grand-gallery-revisited.html

In the early 1970s, I knew a lot less than I know now. The people I knew who had money were those who could afford to buy at my art gallery!  I asked our clients a number of whom made token contributions.  Then I took the bull by the horns, screwed up my courage, and asked one of my most important clients, Henry Ford II. To my most pleasant surprise, he gave $5,000 but wished to remain anonymous in the catalog.  You can multiply that sum by approximately 5 to get today’s value and an exhibition at the Met also cost a great deal less than.  

I will digress to tell you how obstacles that you do not expect can get in the way.  One of those art dealers played golf with the director of the Metropolitan Museum every weekend and kept telling him that the dealers would never come up with their share of funds for the show.  So, every Monday my future wife, who was the Metropolitan’s curator for the show, was called by the director to ask what the situation was, and she would call me, and I would say we are fine and in the end we were.

Well, it turns out that asking directly for money for a good cause is the easy part when you are just one individual but doing it for an organization involves so much more.

You need to come up with a reason for your organization’s existence and then create an appeal that will make people want to participate. Just saying I have a good cause is not good enough.

You need someone with marketing skills to get the word out because if a tree falls in the forest… you know the rest.

If you are lucky enough to get a challenge grant, how will you pitch it?  You will need a deadline or people will just think “mañana”.  Here In New Mexico, mañana does not mean tomorrow, it just means not today!

Lastly, or maybe not, you need to peg the people in your organization who can accomplish all this, and when they agree, to give them a deadline by which their task must be completed.

When I figure out how to complete these last paragraphs plus some more, I suspect I will get back to you.

Quotes For Our Time

As I have written before I love quotations and seeing them become a regular feature in The Week magazine, I decided to take up the theme.

Every week I have to think about the English playwright, George Bernard Shaw’s quote as I strive to be clear. "The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."  Most of these quotes have been pre-tested by those who published them!

Re: Politics

Maybe the most telling, at least for me presently, is credited to none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, “In Politics, stupidity is not a handicap”!

This is one to remember in the current movement to tear down historic monuments, “Nothing is Really Lost until it is Forgotten” by contemporary painter Patrick McGrath Muniz.  For me a prime case in question is the sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History by the noted American sculptor, James Earle Fraser (1876-1953).

I wish both sides of the aisle would recognize the message of a sign I saw in a hemp shop here in Santa Fe. “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in an American flag and carrying a cross” 

"If there isn't (a) vision it is hard to get others to follow" John D. Rockefeller on accepting an award from the World Monuments Fund 2009.

“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”  German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900)

Clarence Darrow, the great defense attorney, and Mark Twain are both credited with the statement that could relate  to our current political polarization, “"I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." 

Covid-19

The Week Magazine quotes a Canadian Health Official, Dr. Bonnie Henry, “We are all in the same storm.  But we are not all in the same boats.” How true is that?

From Republic World

There is an old German saying which I heard often from my father, "Ein Ende mit Schrecken is besser als ein Schrecken ohne Ende” An end with terror is better than terror without end.

The following  sentiment has been expressed in many a dire situation: David Lynch, the filmmaker and artist has said, “These so-called bleak times are necessary to go through in order to get to a much, much better place.”   We can all hope and pray that this will be true this time around. 

I will end with a quote from Anthony T Hincks, an author known for publishing a book of his own quotes. I would like it printed on all my next masks: 

“Don't practice 'Germ Warfare'. MASK UP!”

Peter Schjeldahl, Art Critic

Peter Schjeldahl has been the art critic for the New Yorker Magazine for the past 22 years and he is one of the few art critics that I have enjoyed reading.  His writing is not a lot of art speak or trying to show off how learned he is.  He just tells it like it is, but lyrically.  

I had wanted to write about him for some time but have not felt quite up to the task. Then I read that he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer 6 months ago.  If I do not write now when will I do it? After his diagnosis, he wrote a long piece about his life which appeared in the New Yorker “The Art of Dying” December 23, 2019.

Peter Scheldahl Now

Having such a Dutch name I always thought Schjedahl was born in The Netherlands, so I was surprised that his birthplace was Fargo, North Dakota.  I found it equally surprising that he grew up in Minnesota, which is also not a hotbed of culture.  But in 1964, at the age of 21 he traveled to Paris for a year before settling in New York.  He worked as an art critic for ArtNews, the Village Voice and the New York Times, and a bunch of other magazines.  He attended college for a couple of years, dropped out went back, and dropped out again, but nonetheless taught for 4 years at Harvard University in the department of Visual and Environmental studies.

His experience as a cub reporter in a corruption-rife New Jersey town would stay with him for a lifetime. “I acquired the most useful writing discipline of my life from fat, cigar-chewing Jersey Journal copy editors—burned-out reporters—at desks in a half-circle facing the city editor. With No. 1 pencils, like black crayons, they’d eviscerate my copy. I’d rewrite, and they’d do it again. Finally, they sent it down to the Linotype—the old racketing, reeking contraption for setting type from molten lead. Those men still sit by as I write, pencils in their itching paws."

He confesses, “I grew up with a craving for and a resentment of authority. This bedevils me still.” I am sure it is a sentiment many can relate to. Maybe, that is something that helps drive people to accomplish, just to prove that they can.

Scheldahl owns up to being, a recovering alcoholic, after being sober for 27 years, and a heavy smoker since the age of 16.  I too smoked, Gauloise and Gitanes which were fashionable in my time in Paris, but I stopped with the cigarettes in 1965 and took up a pipe until 1994 when I stopped, cold turkey. Schjeldahl never gave it up.  “Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway.”  I can relate to that though I have no reason to believe I am leaving soon but life is full of surprises.   I heard recently that when you are born, God gives you an expiration date, he just doesn’t tell you when that is.  I find that somehow reassuring.

Peter Schjeldahl, Then, by Nick Sturm

I was not surprised to learn that the art critic was also a post-modern poet.  According to his memoir, for him poetry preceded the visual arts:

“I was a kid crazy about language and an omnivorous reader. At breakfast, I’d pore over every word on a cereal box as if it were holy writ. The first poem I remember writing was at a class picnic on the last day of sixth grade. I lay back on the grass, looking up. A hawk soared overhead. This wasn’t unusual, but it gave me an odd feeling. I rolled over and wrote what I knew was a poem because it looked like one. All I recall of it is a chorus: “Winged avenger from the skies!” I’m not sure that I even knew what an avenger was. I took the poem to my teacher, who said, “Peter, this is very unpleasant.” That smothered my literary drive for some years.”

Even his art prose is poetic.  For instance, in a recent essay on Edward Hopper’s painting, “American Solitude”, he referred to that artist as, “the visual bard of solitude”. Further on he described Hopper’s work, “Though termed a realist, Hopper is more properly a Symbolist, investing objective appearance with clenched, melancholy subjectivity”.  

 

In this and so many of his essays, Peter Schjeldahl has made me see and better understand works of art through his words.

The Lamy Train Station

Our son Hunter decided, despite the pandemic, he wanted to come and visit us with his wife, Mallory, and our 8-month-old granddaughter, Boroughs, to celebrate his birthday and Father’s Day. Investigating the various methods of coming from Los Aneles they decided that the best and safest would be to take the train, which leaves Los Angeles around 7pm and arrives at Lamy, New Mexico the next day around 1pm.

To make sure we would find Lamy, we did a dry run and missed the turnoff. Why? Because I could not believe that the road to such a historic place, named after the first Bishop of Santa Fe, Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888) was so non-descript. What was little more than the width of a horse path led to the station and as we approached the station, we saw these signs ...

New Mexico became a State in 1912 and the 1920 Census shows Lamy’s population at 289 and in the last recorded census a population of 218 so Lamy was never a large town. We passed a scattering of well-tended adobe houses but little to indicate a town beyond an old boarded-up church and newly repainted 1880’s The Legal Tender Saloon. The small railroad depot was built in 1909 with the red tile roof and shady arcaded porch of the Spanish Mission Style then popular in California and the Southwest. 

Lamy was no more than a waystation for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line that was key to westward expansion. It originated in Kansas City, later extending to Chicago, and ran to Los Angeles.  The Harvey Company started building eateries and hotels along the route, but nothing remains of the Harvey hotel in Lamy, called El Otiz, which closed in 1938 and was torn down in 1943. Despite the name of the line, the railroad never made it to Santa Fe because engineers considered the grade to Santa Fe too steep. Eventually, an 18-mile spur line was constructed from Lamy to Santa Fe.

In 1943 Lamy figured in the recruitment of scientists by J. Robert Oppenheimer, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, to live in the top-secret facility of Los Alamos. They were let off the train with their families in the little village of Lamy. From there they were driven up to Santa Fe where they expected to live and work. In the office at 109 Palace Avenue, they were told they had another 35 miles to go before reaching the Atomic Labs. This short video will give you an idea of the Lamy station at the time.  The actual distance to Los Alamos is often quoted differently!  https://www.atomicheritage.org/tour-stop/lamy-train-station#.XuPewfJ7nJw

Today, Amtrak would like to cancel the stop at Lamy altogether but there is push back. In 2018 Allan Affelt acquired the Legal Tender Saloon and it had just re-opened when the Covid-19 hit. It will surely open again as it looks like Lamy has a future.  For more on Allan Affelt and his preservation of the Harvey Hotels ... https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2019/06/the-town-that-time-forgot.html

Just weeks ago, it was announced that three investors from Santa Fe lead by George R. R. Martin, known for the Game of Thrones series, have bought the bankrupt spur line. They plan to restore the track and the historic railroad cars making the line a center for entertainment with live music on the trip and a brewpub at the depot.

Looking Back to the Future

I am 75 years old having lived, to put in historic terms, ¾ of a century, from the 20th into the 21st. I no longer have the physical abilities I once had, nor the memory, but I do have many stories to tell of the past.

Have you ever thought that just a few decades ago if you told someone what life would be like today, they would have shaken their heads and dismissed it as total fantasy or even science fiction?

Although the Wright Brothers achieved flight in the first decade of the 20th century, the first milestone of space travel, according to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, took place on a New England farm field, where on March 16, 1926,  when a flimsy, liquid fuel-driven rocket lifted off and flew 41 feet into the sky.  Then in 1969, my 2-year-old daughter stood between my wife and me on the sofa to watch the first landing of a man on the moon. I don’t believe she was particularly interested!  Now we have a space-station and our quest continues.

I remember a flight with my parents from New York to Los Angeles on a prop plane with 5 stops in between.  I threw up on every single leg of that flight.  Then in 1959, I flew to Europe on my own on one of the early commercial jets.  Pan Am had inaugurated jet travel to Europe in the fall of 1958. My mother took me to the airport and was so happy that Archbishop Fulton Sheen was on the flight.  I guess she thought that God would be with me.  We did have to land twice to refuel but my stomach was fine … a very smooth trip!

When I was born in 1944 not only space travel, but things that are now part of our everyday life, belonged to science fiction.  My parents got their first TV in 1951 to watch the McCarthy hearings. Of course, I was more interested in the Howdy Doody Show.  When I became friendly with the son of Jack Gould, the television critic for the New York Times, I got see the first TV show in color.  I remember it well because it looked like watercolor to me.

In England, which was one of the countries my parents fled to from Germany, the radio was known as the wireless.  My father’s favorite joke was, “how do we know that they had the radio in ancient Egypt”.  Answer, “because they did not find any wires.” Today we can tell the television what we want: no need to turn a dial or push a button to switch the channel.  Here is a Native American Cartoonist’s take.

Ricardo Caté, Santa Domingo (Kewa) Pueblo

I remember very well the old dial phones which were metal, and your finger could get sore if you made a number of phone calls.  Then came the push button phone. What a relief! Around 1983 we went to Buenos Aires, Argentina to stay with a major art collector.  As I sat on the couch opposite her, I saw her suddenly start reaching into the crevices of the sofa and between her legs … I thought to myself, most strange behavior, until she finally pulled out what looked like a small black box that she put to her ear.  I realized it was a wireless telephone.  Then there were cell phones that weighed several pounds at first.  Later they became more easily portable and we no longer needed a phone booth to make a call from the street. Further you did not need to memorize phone numbers as your phone stored the numbers you frequently used and had a way of looking up any you might not have.  The last number I remember was CIrcle-6-2417 the home phone in the apartment I left at the end of my teens.

The marvels we all deal with every day are the smart phone and the computer.  The closest thing to a computer my father had in his early career was a secretary who could take shorthand.  To keep a copy of the letters she then typed either with carbon paper or retyped the letter.  When I came full time to the gallery in the mid-sixties, I bought the first copier which took two passes through the machine with an intermediary piece of paper.  Then with each new copier I expected it to be faster and the printer today still seems slow. Here is an image of the 1940’s typewriter of the kind that I was told I had wrecked by banging on the keys as a little boy!

We have become so spoiled. 

What else can you think of that would have been science fiction in your youth but that we now take for granted.

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NB: In my last Missive I wrote that the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian would be the first museum in Santa Fe to open its doors.  This was based on an email to that effect from the museum.

On reading my Missive an individual close to the museum wrote me the following:  “The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian opened briefly on June 3rd, in accordance with its interpretation of New Mexico’s pandemic policies for businesses, with all the precautions it could manage (masks, hand sanitizer, social distancing, reduced number of visitors, etc.)   The Museum was immediately notified that it was in violation of the Public Health Ordinance in that museums are considered “recreational activities,” not “businesses,” and had to remain closed until July.  The Museum immediately had to close again, reluctantly.  It remains so.”