Roberta and I were in Western New York a few days ago and took the opportunity to view the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University, a school which a friend who is a ceramic artist calls, “the established Mount Olympus in ceramic education in America.” It’s well worth a visit if you’re out that way. Susan Kowalczyk, the curator of collections, graciously gave a us a tour of the museum’s storage area whose shelves contained one treasure after another. Going through the objects, I saw a couple of works that took me back in time – ceramic pieces by Ruth Duckworth. I had met Ruth on several occasions when I was a graduate student in art history at the University of Chicago. She was only in her mid-50’s at the time, but she was considered by many of her colleagues in the studio art department there to be a dinosaur. Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1919 to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother, Ruth (née Windmuller) was 14 when Hitler came to power. Realizing the danger Jews were in, her family arranged for her to emigrate to England at the age of 17, where she joined a sister in Liverpool. She already knew that she wanted to be an artist, so she applied to the Liverpool School of Art. When asked in her interview what kind of art she wanted to make – painting, drawing, or sculpture – Duckworth said she wanted to do all three. The director protested that she couldn’t do both painting and sculpture, but Duckworth blithely pointed out that Michelangelo had done so....
Tchotchke: (Yiddish, of Slavic origin) a small object that is decorative rather than strictly functional; a trinket The kind of artworld story that the public loves popped up in the general press three weeks ago: a 22-year-old college student, browsing through his local Goodwill Store, spotted a tchotchke that took his fancy, an ashtray featuring an annoyed-looking girl smoking a cigarette. He bought it for $10. The ashtray turned out to be one of an edition done in 2002 called Too Young to Die by the noted contemporary Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. The ashtray had its original packaging, which added to its value. Knowing something about what he had, the student checked eBay and found other ashtrays from the edition for sale there. He subsequently sold the piece for $2,860. After reading the news story, I got to thinking about a tchotchke that our 8-year-old granddaughter, exploring the shelves of our basement, had recently retrieved: a multiple by Tom Otterness. Otterness (born 1952) has been called “the world’s best public sculptor” by critic Ken Johnson in the New York Times, and his whimsical sculptures have delighted New Yorkers for years. My tchotchke, however, is derived from a commission for another city: Lubbock, Texas, home of my alma mater, Texas Tech. Tech’s mascot is a mysterious figure on horseback who wears a flat-brimmed hat, a cape, and a mask, all derived from the folk hero Zorro. When Otterness was commissioned to make a statue of the mascot in 2003, he gave the horse a mask and hat as well, along with a pair of pants. Along with the bronze, the...
I once interviewed the artist Philip Pearlstein, who is well-known for his paintings of nudes. As a child growing up in Pittsburgh, Pearlstein was encouraged in his artistic leanings by his parents, who sent him to Saturday morning classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1942, at the age of 18, he won an art competition sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, and two of his paintings were reproduced in Life Magazine. He enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology the following year, but World War II was raging, and Pearlstein was soon drafted into the Army for the duration. He ended up in Florence, Italy, painting road signs for truck convoys. Released from the service, Pearlstein resumed his studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where one of his classmates was a pasty-faced 18-year-old named Andy Warhola, who would later drop the final letter from his last name. Pearlstein and Warhol became friends, and when the younger man learned about Pearlstein’s winning the national art competition four years earlier, he exclaimed, “Gee! You were famous!” “Yeah,” replied Pearlstein, “for 15 minutes.” Pearlstein looked at me, his interviewer, and added sardonically, “And that’s where it came from.” He was referring, of course, to Warhol’s much-quoted saying, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” I have been thinking about Warhol lately for two reasons. The first is the Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries, an entertaining if ultimately sad series that presents the artist as world-famous and yet unable to find the lasting love he privately longed for. The other reason is the upcoming sale (May 9) of...
One of the upsides to being friends with artists is that sometimes they give you works of art. One of the downsides to being friends with artists is that those works are often unframed. You’re glad to receive a work, but, if it’s unframed, you can’t hang it, and if you’re don’t have the time or money to get it framed, the work will end up in a closet or under a bed. You’ll subsequently find yourself hesitating to invite your friend for supper, fearing she will notice that the work is not on display. Which she will. Our artist friend Buzz Spector, being a prince of a fellow, has let that cup pass from us by making sure that every work he has given us over the years has come framed. As a result, Roberta and I are curators for what Buzz once described as the country’s largest permanent Buzz Spector exhibition. Buzz Spector Upshaw”s Auden, 2001 Collection Reagan and Roberta Upshaw Laying aside their function as protection for artwork, frames are important. “A good frame will make a gentleman out of a rascal,” art dealer David Findlay once declared. What constitutes a great frame, though, is a matter of constantly shifting opinion. I knew a frame dealer who got his start 50 years ago at a time when there was a vogue for reframing Hudson River School paintings in small frames that were “less gaudily Victorian.” The dealer acquired some of his early inventory by snatching discarded 19th century frames from trash set out on Park Avenue sidewalks. He sold them for tidy sums years later, when...
In March, 2020, I sent out a letter to clients and colleagues instead of posting my usual monthly blog. Covid was beginning to make itself felt on a serious scale. The country was entering uncharted territory, at least for non-centenarians. In my letter, I included an image of Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware and called for courage in uncertain times. It seemed trivial to talk about art in a period where so many were dying, but I hoped that a cure for the disease would be found relatively quickly and that things could get back to normal. The pandemic soon affected the ranks of my colleagues. In April, 2020, John Driscoll and William Gerdts, both noted scholars (and in John’s case, a major dealer as well) died of Covid. There was no vaccine yet, and the art market had gone into lockdown with the general economy. Auctions were postponed, and galleries were closed. How would the art business survive? And yet it did. More than that, it thrived. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and the artworld has had to adapt before. In the depths of the recession of the early 1990’s, a small group of dealers, unable to afford public galleries with a regular schedule of shows, rented rooms on one floor of a Manhattan hotel for a weekend and displayed art for sale on top of dressers and leaning on headboards. From that modest beginning, The Armory Show, one of New York’s major art fairs, evolved. In the same manner, dealers and auction houses over the past two years have upped their...
More years ago than I care to remember, a professor in a course I was taking on Baroque architecture told us how you could tell who had power in Italian cities during the 16th and 17th centuries. Buildings were normally erected to front the streets on which they were located; that is, they were built within the confines of the street grid. But families such as the Medici or the Farnese, who numbered popes and dukes among their members, were not bound by street grids. Their palaces did not conform to the grid; rather, the families built where they liked and made traffic circle around them. When Art Basel began its Miami Beach subsidiary about 20 years ago, the big New York auction houses still had major sales the first week in December, around the same time as Art Basel. After a few years, however, tired of watching all the major dealers, collectors, and curators leave New York for Miami during that period, Sotheby’s and Christie’s surrendered, moving their sales to November. Like the Medici, Art Basel Miami Beach made traffic conform to its desires. Art Basel’s success in Miami Beach acted as a magnet for satellite fairs, each with its own pitch to collectors. The scene, sprawling across Miami Beach and into Miami itself, was overwhelming – I’ve often said that no one could see all the artwork on display during those four days without the aid of amphetamines and a chauffeur waiting at the curb. Photo courtesy Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau The Miami fairs were cancelled last year due to the pandemic (there were on-line...
