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My partner’s art revelation occurred in 1968 at a
midtown gallery, Associated American Artists, where he’d viewed an
exhibition of prints made by American artists in the 1920s-30s. I hardly
knew what a fine art print was, so I rushed to the same gallery to look and
learn. The small catalogue explained that these were original
prints—that is, the artist had personally etched the copper plate or drawn
on the lithographic stone. The prints were made in a limited number (after
which the plate or stone was cancelled), and the prints were hand-signed in
pencil by the artist. My prints education had begun.
I was captivated by the images and the stories they
told. There were New York City scenes, burlesque dancers, and workers on
farms and in factories and construction. Many were for sale at $100 or
not much more, prices in my financial range. I didn’t buy anything on
this first visit, and I was too intimidated by my lack of knowledge to
question the proprietor, Sylvan Cole. Sylvan was a big bear of a man,
tall, broad-shouldered and craggy of face—think Mount Rushmore—and
reputed to be the reigning expert on American prints. I was to learn
that he was generous with his time and a patient teacher of novice
collectors.
Prior to this eye-and mind-opening experience, I had
visited sales previews at the New York City auction houses, and had
admired many paintings. But I was befuddled about what to do and
discouraged by 1960s prices for lesser quality art. I’d grown up in
Austin, Texas, where, in the 1940s to early-1950s, there wasn’t a museum
featuring paintings. No one in my family thought of taking me to a
museum in Houston or Dallas. I “discovered” art in the museums of
Europe, thanks to the U.S. Navy, and even bought a few amateurish
paintings from street artists in Paris and Amsterdam. But this didn’t
satisfy my collecting urge.
That desire to collect began early. While I was in
pre-school, my parents gave me a stamp album, and packets of cancelled
stamps with which to fill it. On summer visits to Beaumont, my
grandfather took me to the post office for his lumber mill’s daily mail
collection, and he often bought me a new issue stamp. This post office
was a recent product of the Works Progress Administration, or WPA,
decorated with murals painted by WPA artists. I was fascinated by the
images of heroic pioneers clearing the East Texas pine forests. I
remember images on old postage stamps, like the herd of elephants wading
in a river on the Ceylon 50c. I became hooked on images when I was four
years old.
For the image-addicted, prints are ideal to collect.
Nearly all prints made before the 1960s “print revival” are
small—frequently less than 12” in each dimension—so a wall will hold
many. Most are less expensive than paintings of equivalent quality by
the same artist. Because prints are editioned and come in multiples,
it’s usually possible to get the one you want. They are sold by dealers
and auction houses that publish catalogues, and museums hold regular
print exhibitions—it’s easy to learn by looking, reading, and asking.
That’s what I started doing in the late-1960s and into
the 1970s, and I slowly began buying prints. An early favorite was
Reginald Marsh’s Gaiety Burlesk of 1930 (Ill. 1), which I
framed and mounted on my desk at home. When I should have been reading
and editing our securities analysts’ research reports, I stared at
Marsh’s dancer and her male audience, and marveled at the artist’s
ability to capture the mood and the moment. The audience resembles
pallid moles crammed into a burrow. Every eye is focused on the dancer,
but the facial expressions vary. Some leer with lust, others frown with
disapproval. The stripper, enjoying her dominance, smiles. Reginald
Marsh shaped the two balconies like large, pendant breasts, complete
with nipples, a perfect stage setting for the highly anticipated moment
when the dancer uncovers her bosom.
Over the next few years, I acquired about twenty-five
prints. Then came the earthquake of divorce, property division and
settlement. I escaped with half of this collection, including Gaiety
Burlesk. This is the dowry I brought to our union when Reba and I
married in 1975, along with debts, alimony obligations, a ten-year-old
car, and tuition bills for two children in private schools.
Reba vowed to right my foundering financial ship, and
provided the down payment to buy our Greenwich Village home. This was in
the midst of New York City’s financial crisis, and real estate was
cheap. So were brokerage commissions on Wall Street, a result of the
historic May 1975 break-up of the New York Stock Exchange’s price-fixing
monopoly. The economic environment and the prospects for my employer and
my career were shaky.
I was forced to put print collecting in low gear. We
bought a couple of nineteenth-century posters for Reba’s Amagansett
cottage, but for the most part I restrained my collecting urge.
The Greenwich Village townhouse we bought in 1975, a
loft-like space with big, red-brick walls, tile floors and high
ceilings, was just made for big, contemporary prints. We splurged on
Andy Warhol’s Flowers of 1970, a portfolio of ten large, color
screenprints…a perfect fit, size-and color-wise, for our new space. We
had long coveted the portfolio but couldn’t afford it, nor hang it. We
saw no point in buying prints and storing them under the bed. Our new
home liberated us. Print dealer Brooke Alexander personally delivered
the Warhol portfolio, unframed, and never out of its original box. We
laid out these bright, beautiful flowers all over the floor, studying
and admiring them before framing and hanging them on the wall. We were
thrilled with our acquisition, despite the steep $6,000 price (recently
appraised at $500,000).
Light eventually appeared at the end of my financial
tunnel, thanks in part to Paine Webber acquiring our company, and my
ownership converting to liquid assets. With a bit more financial
flexibility, we resumed our print collecting. An early choice was a big
color lithograph, European in origin, of swans…the first addition to our
walls since the Warhol Flowers.
Further salvation came in a job offer to run Alliance
Capital, the investment management subsidiary of Donaldson, Lufkin, &
Jenrette. 1978 was a new dawn, although the finances of Alliance
Capital, like all of the Wall Street securities firms and investment
management companies, were at a low ebb. The bear markets of the
mid-1970s, and the devastating decline in the price of stock brokerage
commissions had taken a severe toll. One of the results was the
deterioration of a financial firm’s physical plant. Alliance’s offices
were shabby, and the walls were empty but for a few dreadful abstract
paintings, which no one would admit selecting or owning. Reba suggested
that we use these empty walls to hang prints. Big prints seemed like the
answer to fill these big walls, so we gradually added contemporary works
by living artists. But they didn’t satisfy us. Contemporary prints were
expensive. Even worse, we were doing what most other collectors were
doing. In the late-70s, collectors sought the big, colorful prints that
living artists continued to make—the 1960s “print revival.” There were
few research opportunities with living artists and brand new work. What
could we contribute?
Then came the breakthrough. Reba proposed that we use
these walls to build a big, affordable American print collection,
emphasizing less-well-known artists from an earlier time. Less money,
more prints, a different direction. This was the real beginning of our
print collection.
Reba’s idea appealed to both of us. I, the avid
collector, had a reason to hunt and find. Reba had always had pictures
on her walls. But her real love, and forte, was research: librarian,
management consultant researcher, securities analyst, contributing
editor for Institutional Investor magazine. She saw an
opportunity to explore a new field for research. As print dealer David
Tunick told us early in this venture, “Spend a few hours researching any
aspect of American prints, and you’ll become the expert on that
topic.” Few collectors, curators, or dealers were interested in earlier
American work, from the 1950s all the way back into the nineteenth
century. We selected this near-virgin territory for acquiring,
researching and making discoveries…and used the Alliance Capital walls
to display the prints.
There was another element to this idea. Reba had
recently worked on Wall Street and was now writing about it. I was
deeply involved in trying to turn around an ailing investment firm. A
friend remarked “How wonderful it must be, the two of you can talk about
the stock market every evening after work.” Reba’s hackles rose. We
didn’t talk about the stock market every evening, and she was determined
that we wouldn’t.
“We’re in danger of becoming the most boring couple in
New York! Or at least people will think so,” she said.
I thought she was probably right.
“Let’s make this print collecting a big thing. It will
give us a common interest other than work. New horizons, new people. I
might even go back to school and take some art history courses,” she
said.
I nodded.
“We could build the best collection of American prints
outside of a few museums.”
I gulped. My formidable wife was getting up a head of
steam.
“One of my life ambitions has always been to get a
Ph.D. I’d love to write a dissertation. Remember what David Tunick said?
Loads of topics available.”
This train had left the station and was rapidly
gathering speed. Happily, we were “all aboard.”
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“The scales fell from my eyes. She saw things in
paintings I’d never known were there, let alone understood them. She’s
beautiful, smart, and attractive—small, slight, blond and with a droll
sense of humor. The audience hung on her every word.”
Reba was telling me about a lecture by Dr. Barbara
Guggenheim, art historian, that she’d attended at The Grey Gallery, New
York University’s art museum, just across Washington Square from our
home. This lecture and Barbara were decisive in Reba’s decision to go
back to school, study art history, and earn a Ph.D.
The lecture began a thirty-five-year friendship. At the
time, Barbara had her own company, Art Tours of Manhattan. She took
groups to studios, to see and to hear what artists had to say about
their work. We signed up for several, and engaged Barbara to take us on
private visits. She also lectured at Alliance Capital social events for
clients, sprinkling her talk with tidbits like, “While we were shopping
at the Sixth Avenue flea market, Andy [Warhol] said to me…” She knew all
the artists who were anybody, and had access to them and their studios.
We nicknamed Barbara our company art historian, an unusual affiliation
for an investment management firm. Today she’s a dealer in
multi-million-dollar paintings, living a celebrity life in Los Angeles,
and we see her in both California and New York.
At that time, Reba’s formal education in art history
consisted of a survey course at her alma mater, Duke, in the 1950s. She
would have to start again at the beginning. And it wasn’t easy to find a
New York area university that offered a graduate program in American
art. Columbia offered a few courses, while the Institute of Fine Arts
ignored the subject. This attitude, not unique to these institutions,
frustrating to the would-be student, underlined our belief in the
acquisition and research opportunity for our interest: pre-1960 American
prints.
Hunter College, uptown on East 68th Street, offered an
alternative. The admissions folks proposed that Reba enter as an
undergraduate, get the necessary credits to enter the masters program,
and after she obtained her MA, go on to the Graduate Center at City
University of New York, for her Ph.D. in American art. This looked
feasible. We were planning to move Alliance Capital from its Wall Street
location to midtown in a couple of years; we’d move, too. Our main
criterion for a new apartment: a wall large enough to hold the ten
Warhol Flowers, to which we were sentimentally attached: the
first prints we’d bought together. We found a space on Park Avenue with
a suitable wall and a short walk to Hunter (Ill. 2).
Reba signed up for three undergraduate art history
courses—Impressionism, Baroque and Renaissance—somewhat skeptical about
the quality of what was to come. Wouldn’t a highly qualified professor
prefer to teach at one of New York’s prestigious private universities,
rather than at city-supported Hunter, which had less stringent
acceptance standards?
But when classes began, Reba was dazzled by her
teachers. She raved about them so much that I sat in on some of her
classes, and soon became a registered auditor. These art history
lectures fascinated me, too, as super-star professors opened new worlds
of visual insights and observations.
Reba’s most admired professor was Dr. Janet Cox-Rearick,
renowned expert on Renaissance art, especially Mannerism, which we’d
find useful as we got further into American art. The topic was also of
interest, particularly solving the puzzle of the many symbols in
sixteenth-century religious paintings. Reba added more of Cox-Rearick’s
courses to her schedule and, as she began graduate work, started to
flirt with the idea of staying with Renaissance art, rather than
American. Partly as a test, but mostly for the fun of it, we decided to
spend two weeks living in Florence in the summer of 1985, immersing
ourselves in the Renaissance.
With Cox-Rearick’s help and that of friends and museum
curators, we covered the city and much of Tuscany, from the obvious
museums to remote churches and several Medici villas. On one occasion, I
chased a priest down a street, waving lire, begging him to reopen his
church (he’d closed it for lunch, sacred in Italy) so we could see a
particular painting. We visited Villa I Tatti, home of the famed
Renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson, now the headquarters of the
foundation established after his death. We became friends with the
director, Craig Smyth, who later invited Reba to join his board of
directors.
We luxuriated in a bath of Renaissance art and
wonderful restaurants. Sunny blue skies, the fantastic architecture. We
concluded that life in Italy is glorious. Why not Rome next year? Rome
would take us both forward and backward in art time from Florence: the
Greek and Roman statuary of B.C. and early A.D., and seventeenth-century
Italian Baroque painting and sculpture.
We were surprised by our nearly empty TWA flight to
Rome. It was the Chernobyl effect: the nuclear power plant in Ukraine
had recently exploded, and fallout covered much of Southern Europe.
Governments had issued warnings to tourists, and the Japanese were
forbidden to travel in these areas. Many feared the possibility of
polluted water and food.
Our Hotel D’Inghilterra, at the foot of the Spanish
Steps, was nearly empty. We were in Rome empty of tourists, an unheard
of condition in modern times. No lines at the museums—we just waltzed in
wherever we wanted to go. Nearly inaccessible embassies and private
palaces, housing rarely seen paintings, were welcoming. We’d slip a note
under a door requesting entry, and a call would come into our hotel in
an hour or less, with an invitation.
Our greatest adventure was in the Sistine Chapel, where
Michelangelo’s fresco was being painstakingly cleaned from a scaffold
that reached up to the ceiling. Thanks to the intervention of a curator
at the Metropolitan Museum, we were given access, which meant climbing a
ladder partway, then riding a small, open elevator up to the top.
Overcoming a fear of heights, up we went, and were nose to Noah who was
organizing his passengers amid the deluge. The restorer pointed out a
short bristle stuck in the painted plaster—Michelangelo didn’t bother to
clean up such minor imperfections in his huge masterpiece.
Thrilled by the art of Italy, and to continue working
with Professor Cox-Rearick, Reba decided to write her thesis on Italian
prints. Her plan was to identify all of the prints described or
mentioned by Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century artist and author, in
his series of books, known in shorthand as Le Vite, or The
Lives of the Artists, the most complete contemporary document of
this type. This was a complicated task, as there are no illustrations in
Vasari, and his descriptions are far from complete. Armed with a tall
stack of art texts and sales catalogues, Reba matched images and artists
with Vasari’s words. Slowly, pieces of the puzzle fell into place. A few
months later, Reba presented her “Vasari On Prints” thesis to Cox-Rearick,
who praised it, and said, “I don’t know how you did it. Now do it again
in Italian. Italian scholars will be interested.”
This was a challenge. Reba studied French and Spanish
in high school and college, and later picked up enough German to squeeze
by art history requirements. But her Italian was limited to menus. So
back to the desk with an English-Italian dictionary, and Reba did her
own translation, again approved by Cox-Rearick. Time passed, the phone
rang one morning, and when Reba answered, a male voice said, “This is
John Pope-Hennessy. I wish to compliment you on your work on Vasari and
prints. Good day.” Reba barely got out “thank you” before the receiver
clicked.
The call was from “The Pope,” the most highly regarded
Renaissance art historian in the world, and all the more remarkable,
according to Cox-Rearick, because Pope-Hennessey had a telephone phobia,
and rarely used one.
Despite the love affair with Italy and the Renaissance,
Reba stayed with American art, our collecting interest, and transferred
to the CUNY Graduate Center for her Ph.D. A pleasant surprise was Dr.
Marlene Parks, specialist in American art of the twentieth century.
Marlene’s courses were a perfect overlap with our collection, and I
signed up “for credit”—for the enforced discipline—and attended
Marlene’s classes with Reba. New artists, new ideas, new collecting
opportunities.
Reba chose for her dissertation the history of a New
York gallery that, early in the twentieth century, did more than any
other to promote prints by American artists. Titled The Weyhe
Gallery Between the Wars, 1919-1940, the result was over
five-hundred text pages of meticulous research and seventy-seven
illustrations. The project was aided by Gertrude Weyhe Dennis, manager
of the gallery, located at 794 Lexington Avenue. Erhard Weyhe, founder
and father of Gertrude, had purchased the five story building in 1923,
four years after he had started the gallery. Weyhe remodeled the
building, installed distinctive, colorful tiles on the façade, created a
bookstore on the ground floor, a print gallery on the second, and moved
his family into the upper spaces. Little had changed in the building
when Reba began her work in the early-1990s.
Gertrude Dennis became a good friend to Reba, who was
fascinated by her appearance. Reba described her:
She looks like she should be head mistress at a girl’s
school. Tall, thin, and angular, with sharp facial features, emphasized
by gray hair pulled back severely into a bun. Her only concession to
fashion is hats. She always wears a hat, not just a hat, but a variety
of hats. She initially seemed intimidating, but she was kind and
generous with her time, and very helpful.
I had a different relationship with Gertrude. I would
go into Weyhe Gallery in a mood to acquire—we knew the gallery had a big
inventory of prints of our period. Gertrude was not forthcoming, hardly
responding to my queries or indication of interest. She seemed as if she
didn’t want to sell me anything. Why?
Reba subsequently discovered the “why.” Gertrude
explained to her that she was selling valuable paintings from her
father’s estate. She had a tax problem: too much income. Would that we
all had that problem!
Reba and Gertrude got on famously, to wit the
confession of the financial “problem.” Gertrude opened the gallery
scrapbooks to Reba. Erhard Weyhe and Carl Zigrosser, a director of the
gallery, maintained a clipping file and copies of gallery-issued sales
catalogues, an invaluable resource, supplemented by Gertrude’s memory.
The dissertation began before its titled start date,
1919, with a review of printmaking in America 1900-1918, including the
1913 Armory Show that brought Modernism to artists and collectors who
had not seen such work in Europe. The book ended in 1940, when Carl
Zigrosser, director of the gallery since 1919, left to become curator at
The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The “Years Between the Wars” were a glory time for
American printmaking artists, with the Weyhe Gallery frequently the
financial and artistic catalyst, buying editions of prints from artists
and commissioning artists to make prints. Reba’s book details the
Weyhe’s exhibitions (and those of other print sellers) and the work of
the artists active in printmaking in this period.
We thought the thesis would be a useful reference, so
we had it published in hard cover to give to dealers and curators. Its
only flaw is lack of an index. Computer programs available at the time
couldn’t deal with artists’ names, titles of pictures, and biographical
information. Time pressures wouldn’t allow for the tedious process of
human indexing. Print dealer Janice Connor explained how she did it
herself: “Post-its. My book looks like a yellow porcupine.”
The ultimate compliment came from Sinclair Hitchings,
Keeper of Prints at the Boston Public Library, who asked for three
copies: two for his office and the Library, and one for his bedside
table.
Reba defended her dissertation, and we left that same
day for a long, restful weekend on a nearly deserted small island near
Key West. A few months later, we gave a big celebratory party for Reba’s
sixtieth birthday, and her new title, Dr. White Williams.
We were also celebrating a milestone in our collecting.
By this date—1996—we had not only expanded our collection to many types
of prints we hadn’t originally considered, but had pretty much completed
the main focus of our collection, American prints of the first half of
the twentieth century. Our original goal had been achieved. We had
amassed the biggest and best print collection of this type and period in
private hands. And we’d enjoyed nearly every minute of it.
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