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Reba, much a preservationist since her days as
President of New York City’s
Art Commission, arranged for a faux stone sign, Print
Research Foundation, to cover the original. Future owners of the
building can remove it to expose the original sign. We knew Atlantic
Street in Stamford would not be the final home of our collection.
Renovation followed—clearing out a rabbit warren of
small offices to create galleries and viewing space. We hired a small
staff and established responsibilities. The move was difficult and
complicated – files, library, and all of the prints, artist files on all
the artists represented in the collection, and hundreds of books on
prints and printmaking. We hung about five hundred on the walls, and put
nearly five thousand into an accessible storage area.
The Print Research Foundation functioned as a center
for research on American prints. The files, the library and all the
prints were made available to scholars, print specialists, and museum
groups by appointment. Much of the information was put on-line with open
access for qualified persons. A staff member was available to deal with
telephone and written inquiries.
The Print Research Foundation was also a financial
supporter of print projects, underwriting , for example, an annual prize
sponsored by Print Quarterly for the best essay on American
prints, or donating illustrations of prints to be included in a
publication on the etching revival. But we were nearing a dead-end in
print collecting. Even with this big space in Stamford, our walls
couldn’t handle much expansion.
The frantic art boom, which lasted into the autumn of
2008, was also a deterrent to continued collecting. It wasn’t just the
prices, but the atmosphere: a successful hedge fund manager advised that
he was “going to take a position in Stella.” (That’s as in Frank Stella,
the artist). Art was traded like securities and commodities. A carnival
of excess. We wanted no part of this market.
Andy Warhol sometimes quoted Marshall McLuhan’s “Art is
anything you can get away with.” Pop art got away with a lot. There was
even more “getting away with” in the early twenty-first century. Art was
manufactured in factories, such as those of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst,
where the artists’ hands rarely touched the “product.” Just like other
retail products, artists organized marketing campaigns. Hirst is the
master marketer, to wit the September 15, 2008 sale at Sotheby’s of
exclusively Hirst works, 223 lots. The sale, which grossed $270 million,
was a great success for the seller. It might also mark the art market
high water mark, at least for awhile. The sale wasn’t such a success for
the buyers. The Economist reported that the average price of a
Hirst was $831,000 in 2008 down to $136,000 in 2010.
Museums joined in the hysteria. In our view, the proud
Metropolitan Museum lowered itself by accepting the loan of a Hirst
shark pickled in formaldehyde. Why would they do this, unless to
possibly curry favor from a benefactor? The contemporary art world
seemed to be all about money, “branding,” self-promoting PR, and social
climbing, with little intellectual content to the art (and, perhaps, in
some of the collectors). Maybe it was always so, and the early
twenty-first century just an exaggeration of past art bubbles. But it
wasn’t a comfortable place to be, even in the print world, which was
less booming but still infected with fever.
At the same time, Reba and I were developing other
interests, and spending more time away from the New York-Connecticut
area. In the summer of 2003 we spent six weeks at Oxford enjoying a
program called The Oxford Experience, and with add-on travel to Cornwall
and a stay in our house in France, we were away for six months. Our
print heroes were moving on, too. Antony Griffiths, Keeper of Prints at
the British Museum, was counting days until his retirement in 2011, and
looking forward to writing books. David Landau announced his impending
retirement as Editor of Print Quarterly, and moved from London
to Venice. Print Quarterly itself was to become an online
magazine. Our era in the print world seemed to be ending. It was time
for us to part with the collection.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington was a logical
place for our prints to go. The collections of the New York museums
overlapped too much with ours, or were oriented to other periods or
styles. The National Gallery had an outstanding old master print
collection, thanks to gifts from Lessing Rosenwald beginning in the
1940s and through his lifetime. Our collection meshed nicely, and we
liked the idea of so many American artists, new to the National Gallery,
going into the collection of the nation’s museum.
A quick trip to Washington was all it took to set up a
transfer, a partial sale and partial gift. A few months of lawyer time
followed, and the transaction was completed at year-end 2008: more than
5000 prints, the files, the library and the Stamford building. We
attached no strings: no named gallery, no limits on what the National
Gallery could or could not do with the prints or archives. A year later,
we were part of a panel at the Los Angeles fine art fair. A co-panelist,
the curator from the Huntington, was asked the type of gift, or
donation, he most liked to receive. The immediate answer:
“Unrestricted.”
Before we donated all of this, we made some special
gifts. James Rosenquist’s F-111, twenty-five feet in length and
framed in four panels, went to the British Museum to honor Antony
Griffiths and as a cornerstone for their next American print show. To
the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, our hometown, the Andy Warhol portfolio
of Flowers (black and white). We had already donated our
African American prints to the Metropolitan Museum. We were free to take
on some new challenges. One was the production of a film about prints.
The idea to make this film came from a college roommate
of fifty-plus years ago, who, following a visit to one of our
exhibitions, asked me if there was a good DVD on prints. I investigated,
and found there was not. Reba response, “Why don’t you make one?” I
didn’t hesitate. I was sure it would be an interesting experience.
The project took nearly a year. Thanks to the expertise
of our editor, producer and interviewer, Chris Noey, we had a polished
and professional 55-minute program, made to Public Broadcasting System
specs, with a DVD that could be divided into chapters for use in art
history classes. The film tells the story of printmaking and print
collecting, from the Renaissance artists in Europe to contemporary
printmakers in America, but its main focus is the history of prints in
the U.S. Thanks to the clever automation Chris employed, and anchorman
Antony Griffith’s charm and skill with words, the parts on how prints
are made are short and clear, not the usual eye-glazing explanations.
We were lucky to engage Chris Noey. He makes films for
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also freelances. He and I devoted a
lot of time to the film, which Reba titled All About Prints. I
wrote the original screenplay, which Chris reworked and improved. I
recruited most of the dealers, curators and artists that Chris
interviewed, traveling with a camera crew around the Eastern United
States and to London to conduct and record the sessions.
All went very smoothly until we ran into the Public
Broadcasting System bureaucracy. We were giving the film to
PBS, and maybe that made them suspicious. We were treated as if we were
ExxonMobil proposing to sponsor a show that advocated drilling for oil
in Washington, D.C. First, The Print Research Foundation, which financed
the film (meaning Reba and I) could not both have paid for the film and
hold the copyright. We were told “conflict of interest.” That seemed to
make no sense—what conflict? what interest?—but we went along with it,
and assigned the copyright to the National Gallery of Art. Next, Reba
couldn’t appear in the film. No matter that she’s Ph.D. art history and
one of only a few experts in the U.S.A. on the influence of the Mexican
muralists on American printmakers. This was bad news, as the film was
finished and Reba’s Mexican segment was right in the middle, the
linchpin for the whole story. Chris put on his diplomat suit, and
negotiated a deal with PBS. Reba’s picture could appear only once.
Otherwise her role had to be voiceover only—her face supplanted with
images from prints. This was hardly a disguise, given her distinctly
Southern accent. But that’s how the film shows when broadcast, only a
glimpse of Reba’s face, when All About Prints began appearing
on PBS stations nationwide during the summer of 2009. The DVD remains
the original take, with Reba’s segment in full. Our initial screening
was an invitation-only event during the New York print fair in the
autumn of 2008, then a month later in London. We have a distributor for
the DVD, and it’s being offered to schools and museum shops, and can be
bought on-line. Proceeds go to the distributing museum or the National
Gallery of Art.
Collecting didn’t completely die. We retained some
five-hundred prints, all on walls in our residences. As solace following
the disastrous sale of our Mexican prints right after 9/11, when the
most recognized sold, but the majority did not, we found another copy of
Diego Rivera’s Zapata. The remaining Mexican prints went to the
British Museum, and became the catalyst for a print exhibition to
accompany a major survey of early-Mexican art.
A last collecting fling was more playful than serious,
more interior decorating than obsessive collecting. American flags
sprouted everywhere after September 11, 2001. We were no exception to
this display of patriotism, inspired by the gift of a flag flown in
Afghanistan from an Air Force pilot cousin of Reba’s. Around this same
time we were abandoning our South Carolina beach house, and becoming New
England Yankees in the summer—in Stonington, Connecticut, site of a
historic battle against the British fleet—in the War of 1812. It all
added up. We’d decorate our new beach house with American flag images.
We weren’t choosy about medium or such print terms as
“original.” Our flag collection includes Navajo weavings of Old Glory,
Navajo carvings of Uncle Sam, World War I and II posters (original in
these cases), election banners and ephemera, reproductions of New
Yorker magazine covers, souvenir weavings from the Philippines,
brought home by Spanish American War sailors—anything with an American
flag. A particular favorite is The Spirit of ’76, artist
unknown and dated the 1950s, a guache probably prepared by an
advertising agency for the Campbell Soup Company. The Campbell Soup
kids, one each with fife, drum, and flag, march to music that must be
“Yankee Doodle Dandy.” It resonated with us. The Campbell Soup Kids were
ever-present on can labels and magazine pages in our youth.
So we continue to be surrounded by prints, with color
woodcuts in New York, posters in London, American flags in Stonington,
and favorite black-and-white images in Greenwich. But as collectors and
scholars, it’s all wrapped up.
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