If you asked a hundred urban twenty-somethings to describe themselves, a fair number would define themselves as artists of one sort or another. “I’m a painter,” a few would tell you. “I’m an actor,” others would say. Jazz saxophonist, dancer, standup comedian – the entire gamut of art forms would probably be found in the self-descriptions of those hundred young people. A tiny percentage of our hypothetical group will go on to achieve commercial and critical success in their fields. The vast majority will not. Of the also-rans, most will come to their senses sooner or later and take conventional jobs. But there are a few souls who carry their self-definition as artists with them despite their lack of commercial success. If you define yourself as a painter, then you paint, whether or not you can sell your paintings. Samuel Rothbort (1882-1971) was one of these artists. Rothbort was born in Vawkavysk (Polish: Wolkovisk), a town now part of Belarus. In keeping with Jewish life in the shtetl, his father was a Talmudic scholar, and his mother supported the family, selling flour and grain. Rothbort showed artistic leanings early, shaping little figures from the dough with which his mother made bread. If he found a pencil, he would draw on whatever paper was available, sometimes on the inside cover of a book, an act for which he remembered being punished by the rabbi. His activities gained him the Yiddish nickname Schmuel der Mahler (Samuel the Painter). He was entirely self-taught and never had formal artistic training. Revolution was in the air as the new century arrived, and as a...
All of us know someone with a seemingly effortless sense of style. It’s usually a woman, someone to whom you could give a man’s old tuxedo jacket, a peasant blouse, a tartan skirt, and combat boots and say, “Make an outfit out of this.” She would roll up the jacket’s sleeves, pick the perfect jewelry and accessories, and wear the resulting costume with such panache that she would be the embodiment of chic. Most women who tried to do something like that, however, would look like a walking rummage sale, while any attempt on my part to assemble some kind of male equivalent to that look would cause my daughters to have another of their increasingly frequent discussions on What To Do About Dad Before He Does Something Outright Dangerous. There are men, however, who can pull it off. I remember chatting with the painter Wolf Kahn at a gallery opening many years ago. He was wearing a linen suit of pale olive, paired with a dark purple shirt and a bright orange tie. The combination pushed right up to the edge of outrageousness but didn’t fall in, and the effect, coupled with his silver hair, was stunning. (A lesson here – artists can often get away with things that normal people cannot.) All of which is simply a lead-in to a discussion of style when it comes to collecting art. There are some combinations of styles which have a long history of going together. The exhibition of French cubist painting with African sculpture, for example, goes back to the earliest days of cubism. The pairing of folk sculpture...
In 1981, in an act of faith that today makes me shudder at its innocence, my wife and I moved with our baby to New York from Chicago. The passage of time has mercifully dulled the troubles of those first days – moving into half the space we’d had in Chicago for twice the rent, looking for a job, closer to family, but cut off from our good friends back “home.” Looking back, I am struck by the kindness and generosity of artist friends we had known in Chicago who had preceded us to New York. Michael Hurson and Ellen Lanyon invited us for dinner to their lofts almost as soon as we arrived and helped us deal with the inevitable culture shock at a time when we were struggling to find our feet. One other artist with a Chicago connection reached out to us – George Deem. The connection was more tenuous but just as real – we had published a piece by him in White Walls, a magazine of writings by artists that we had founded five years earlier with our friend Buzz Spector. George invited us to his loft on West 18th Street, the same loft in which he would die 27 years later, where we met his partner, Ronald Vance. The supper that night was the first of many we were to have over the years, simple yet sophisticated, full of good food and lively talk, with the seemingly effortless attention to detail that marked our hosts as masters of entertaining. The affection I feel for George and Ronald and those days surrounds me now...
One of the joys and nuisances of having been trained as an art historian is that you constantly see life imitating art. I was attending the opening of The Armory Show two weeks when I was struck by the sight of a young woman tending bar. “Excuse me, but would you let me take your picture?” I asked her. “You remind me of a famous painting.” She graciously agreed to pose, and I took the photo below. Some of you probably already know the painting I was thinking of, the Courtauld Gallery’s great Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The Folies-Bergère was not yet the home of the Can-Can and the nearly-nude revue in 1882, when Manet painted his picture, but it was already a popular night spot that featured operettas, popular music, and gymnastics, not to mention copious amounts of alcohol. The similarities between the two images above made me think about the similarities between their two venues. Openings of art exhibitions have been popular social occasions for over 250 years, since at least the heydays of the French Salon and the Royal Academy, and the art always seems to have taken a back seat to the opportunity for the fashionable crowd to see and be seen. Nevertheless, major art fair openings today have married glamour, fashion, and money in a way not seen since the hot nightclubs of the 1940’s and 50’s such as the Stork Club in Manhattan or the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Like those nightclubs, major art fair openings feature movie stars, tycoons, arm candy, and a well-established pecking order for who gets admitted...
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . . ~Robert Frost Last summer I visited the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It’s a terrific little museum and well worth taking time to visit when you’re in the Boston area. The Addison Gallery had mounted a retrospective exhibition of the work of Alfred Maurer (1868-1932), and I was eager to get a full view of the artist’s achievement. I was going through the exhibition as any art dealer would, i.e., reading the wall label credits and thinking, “Is this painting owned by an institution, or was it loaned by a private collector whom I can call to try and get it for sale?” I was particularly taken by Maurer’s work done in Paris during the first years of the 20th century, especially his portraits of women such as Model with a Japanese Fan, painted around 1903. The influence of Whistler is plainly there, of course, but there’s also something of the bold, new century. The woman is clearly not the languid Dame aux Camélias model beloved by the previous generation. Her gaze confronts the viewer directly, and for all her elegance, there’s something rather earthy in the cluttered interior with objects tossed upon or draped across the chair at the left. Looking at such paintings, I thought of a Maurer painting I knew in a private collection and made a mental note to call its owner when I got home and see if she might be willing to sell. When I got home and went through my notes, however, I realized I was thinking of...
I am ordinarily the soul of benevolence and good will toward all humanity, but there are occasional dark days, often caused by the failure of some museum curator to return my calls, when my spirit turns peevish and I entertain myself by playing a game of my own invention called “Catalogues Raisonnés in Hell.” Catalogue raisonné, a French term we have imported into English, literally means, “reasoned list.” The catalogue raisonné for an artist is a complete list of known works by that artist, along with the provenance of each painting, its exhibition history, and its current location if known. Inclusion in an artist’s catalogue raisonné is mandatory if a painting is to be accepted by the art market as genuine. Such reference books these days are often assembled by a committee of scholars, sometimes with the assistance of the artist’s family or heirs if the artist is recently deceased. Given the enormous amount of scholarly labor involved, it helps if the artist is a major artist whose work shows variety and artistic growth. Many artists, however, find a profitable subject and devote their artistic careers to a seemingly endless series of miniscule variants on a theme. In playing “Catalogues Raisonnés in Hell,” I weigh which of those artists I would like to assign to the miscreant who has not called me back. “Let me think,” I purr to myself, “Which artist should I assign to ____________? — Bruce Crane? Henry Pember Smith? Or what about Guy Wiggins?” Consider the case of Guy Wiggins (1883-1962), whose work appears below. The son of a respected American landscape painter, Wiggins studied...
