Are Collector and Researcher Driven by a Common Impulse?
Henry Gans
On a balmy Friday afternoon in May in the late
1960s, after having been in the city for almost a month, my wife and I took a
leisurely stroll down 3rd Avenue towards midtown Manhattan. The
streets were crowded with people leaving early from work. While walking down 50th
Street towards Madison Avenue we noted a building, across the street from St
Patrick’s Cathedral, with its doors wide open. Inside a sizable crowd had
gathered, people of all ages sitting in rows of chairs in what looked like a
convention or lecture hall. Finally it dawned on us, when we saw the auctioneer
calling out numbers, that we were watching an auction in progress. The building was the Savoy Auction Gallery
where a collection of American paintings were being sold.(1) We watched as
people bid on a painting clearly displayed on a stand on the front center
stage. Next to it, on an elevated platform, stood the auctioneer who steadily raised
the price by rapidly repeating the amount in a steady monotone, while an older
attendant by his side, with thick glasses resting on a large, crooked
nose, spotted any bids that the
auctioneer might have missed. “Let’s go in and watch it for a while,” I
suggested to my wife.
As we did, another picture, a small oil painting, was put up. Since I could just make out the outlines of a hilly landscape with a few tall pine trees, a scene that reminded me of some of the choice places in upstate Minnesota where we had, in recent years, spent so many of our weekends and vacations, away from the buzz, grime and action of the dense, crowded city that we had lived and worked in. I noticed, as I came closer, that the picture, because of its sudden uncanny association, greatly appealed to me. When the bidding started again I saw in an instant the large, unadorned, white walls of the brand new, spotless, three-bedroom apartment that we had just moved into with our three cats. Unwittingly, I raised my hand – and before I realized it – I had become the picture’s new owner for $30. Wouldn’t you know, my better half was quite upset. She didn’t approve of me buying on impulse.
Within a short time the sale ended. Evidently, we had arrived at the tail end of the auction. When a small crowd formed at the cashier’s window I joined it and paid, and picked up my new purchase, an attractive oil on board signed by an artist named Aloysius O’Kelly (2). Although I didn’t recognize the artist’s name, I thought the painting was very well done. We hung it in our dining area where it appeared as if it had always been there.
Much later it occurred to me that my desire to collect might have had something to do somehow with my involvement in medical research. Both are habit forming and tend to feed upon themselves. Just as collectors becomes smitten or obsessed with new objects that they want to own by hook or by crook for their personal enjoyment, so researchers get snared by new problems tempting enough to challenge them to spend the time, effort and funds to try to solve them. The desire, need, or wish to own or possess, or to find the answer to an alluring or burning new question, appears to be close, – and in my case apparently very close, – indeed.
A year or so after my spontaneous purchase at the New York City auction, my wife and I were in San Francisco to attend the annual American College of Surgeons meetings where I was to address the Symposium on Pre and Post-operative Care, (with a brief but comprehensive presentation ‘On Bleeding Problems during Surgery’). On our way to the meeting my wife and I passed, on our way to the meeting, an imposing-looking art gallery, the Maxwell Gallery on Sutter Street. We dropped in and saw among the attractive paintings on display another oil by Aloysius O’Kelly hanging just opposite the front door. It was about the same size as ours, so I asked for its price. I was told it was $2600. It turned out that my $30 impulse buy had been a good investment.
If I gave the impression that my wife objected to my collecting, nothing could be further from the truth. She soon became just as involved as I. However, she objected to purchasing on impulse. Hers was a salient argument, well taken, and I reluctantly had to agree. Hence, from then on we tried to establish beforehand what we liked well enough that we wished to own it and only then would we decide if and how we would try to obtain it.
Not long after these events, I came to know Harry, the Savoy Gallery employee whom I had first noticed standing next to the auctioneer, quite well. The gallery often sold major parts of a deceased person’s estate that the family didn’t want or had no use for, often much of it of limited value, appeal or usefulness. Such items rarely found bidders. When such a piece failed to sell, Harry would call out in his brash, heavy, Brooklyn accent, “Okay boys, call in the grinder!”
Much to my regret, this auction house closed its doors in 1971. However, shortly before, early in the summer while my wife was overseeing some work that needed to be done on a summer place that we had just acquired along a remote and isolated stretch of the Great South Bay on Long Island, it auctioned off a large, early Milton Avery gouache entitled, Three Equestrians on a Bridal Path in Central Park near 67th Street. After brief, but spirited bidding with someone in back in the audience, I became its new owner.
After the sale Harry took me aside and told me that my competitor was a young, new local art dealer, and he then revealed to me the name of the estate that the picture had come from. Six years later when Milton Avery’s widow, Sally, invited us to her apartment for afternoon tea, she authenticated this work, as well as our other Avery’s, naming, dating, and describing for us the circumstances that had lead her husband to paint each one. She remembered the equestrian gouache as one of four of her husband’s early works that a woman had bought sometime in 1930. She even remembered the buyer’s name, which happened to be the same one that Harry, the man from the auction gallery, had mentioned to me. We found her ability to recall these details amazing since she had to be well into her seventies.
Much later, I learned that there were several closely related examples of this particular picture. We saw one on display during a museum visit some time ago, I believe in Washington, D.C. and rather recently happened to see another, quite similar version to the one we own, but in oil, in the Vero Beach Museum, that exhibited a selection of Avery paintings from the Roy Neuburger collection. His Avery equestrian painting was the center-piece of that gallery’s show.
In New York City we were surrounded by art and drawn to it from the very start. We soon learned that there were other physicians and bio-medical investigators who were passionate art collectors(3). Of course, you had to have the means to meet the object’s price, for only those with extra cash on hand were able to follow this penchant. But you didn’t have to be wealthy. For example, during our gallery-hopping we would regularly run into the Vogels. He was a postal worker, and she, a librarian in the city’s library system. Although of modest means, the Vogels were steadily buying contemporary American art, mostly drawings. Over the years, they had formed a major art collection that was of extraordinary quality and filled every nook and cranny of their tiny apartment.(4)
To collect art it has to appeal to you. Art appeal is purely a personal experience. No two people looking at a work of art interpret or respond to what they see in the same way or undergo similar emotions. Where in the past we had shown a more than usual interest in art, going to museums in every city we visited, after we began collecting it became almost an obsession. We were not just looking for what was presented in the constantly changing gallery and museum exhibitions in New York, but also making a point of traveling to other places just because they were staging an unusual museum exhibition – especially if it threw new light on a certain artist’s work or it revealed him (or her) in a different context.
At the time New York lent itself to this better than any other city. It had numerous art galleries that showed every known artist and their works, each with their special interests and characteristic ways of expressing themselves, besides the many outstanding museums. And because the range of subjects and quality varied so widely, it allowed a steady observer the opportunity to become more discerning by developing a far more discriminating eye(5). Compared to Minneapolis, which we had left a short time before, we felt we were in hog heaven.
My wife and I made it a habit, every night that I wasn’t working, to take an after-dinner stroll. After crisscrossing our own eastside neighborhood between 60th and 86th Street, undoubtedly one of the most prosperous in the nation, we would invariably end up on Madison Avenue, where we zeroed in on the art galleries to look for any new and exciting installations. As members of the city’s various art museums, we attended outstanding lecture series on modern and contemporary art presented by experts, or we would drop in on Parke-Bernet (both before and after it became associated with Sotheby’s) whenever we were in the neighborhood.
Calvin Tomkins, in his history of the Metropolitan Museum, remarked that, “Collectors respond to works of art for a variety of reasons, most of which have little to do with aesthetic value. Only a few love art objects for their own sake and for those few, the majority respond to them through their visual senses.”(6) Although Tomkins may well have been correct on this point, we continued our pursuit for esthetic objects solely for their appeal and the pleasure they gave us.(7) We developed an almost insatiable appetite for these fascinating and exciting objects, always searching for new and different experiences, as if trying to make up for what we had missed while living in an environment that in the fifties and sixties had very little to offer in this respect. After this intense exposure and our initial reading on the subjects – we were rapidly acquiring a few basic books to guide us along – we realized, that not only did we like to look at pictures, irrespective of the medium, (drawings, watercolors, as well as paintings), but we also liked to live with them, and to own them, trying to fill those still large empty walls of our three bedroom apartment.
Prior to discovering this love of art I had been quite reluctant to collect anything of value, except for a few rare, historical significant medical books that dealt with the field of my particular interest. For a Jew, to survive the Nazi occupation of Holland and its hellish aftermath, required that you be able to walk away from whatever you owned and simply disappear. A lot of people were unable to do this. Too attached to their worldly possessions, they didn’t vanish when there was still time to do so. In periods of uncertainty, possessions offered a modicum of comfort and security. Maurice Rheim, the noted French auctioneer observed that “No one will ever quite conceive how many people perished in concentration camps through having tried to save a bed or a three glass fronted mahogany wardrobe with bronze fittings, a paltry possession in itself but representing wealth and success to its owner.”(8)
Of course, in the end all those unwilling to abandon their possessions were forced to do so anyway. They were permitted to take along only what they could carry on their backs and in their own two hands. Ever since, to possess nothing of value, to have no attachment to any worldly goods, represented to someone like me the ultimate symbol of freedom. Having nothing to lose, I felt free as a bird. And for a long time I managed to avoid any kind of entanglement with objects of value, just to preserve the sense of liberty that, once the Nazis were defeated and the war was over, had become so precious to me. Collecting art, major art in particular, had its own responsibilities, and hence it was against anything I stood for. Until the unexpected happened. After the initial, impetuous purchase of the small O’Kelly, some months later we happened to see a sizeable collection of attractive paintings from Hayley Lever’s estate come up for sale. The works appealed to us, and they appeared very suitable to fill those still empty wall spaces and pleasant to live with. Once we acquired those we were hooked.
One may ask why would anyone become so hepped up about art anyway, the way other people, – more normal folks, less committed or one-sided, – might get excited about sport, especially baseball, football or basketball. What was it about art that was so special, anyway?
Occasionally, I would ask my wife why we delighted in this mad pursuit, this fascination, this strange enchantment, this idiosyncratic behavior, this obsession, this need to chase after an object. For years this would remain a deep, dark mystery. Was it to dispel boredom, or as an escape from steadily building work-related tensions? Or, was it an addiction to the more common pleasures that everyone now and then succumbs to, such as the seductive gustatory delights that can easily turn you into a fat slob, or a pre-occupation with sex, or the habit of watching TV, or going on a shopping binge? Or was it a search for new insights to expand the mind, the kind of pursuits that makes you feel really alive? Seriously, – what drove us to this overarching, strange obsession? We certainly didn’t consider it as an investment. But we pursued it anyway, continuously and vigorously.
The easy way out would be to say that our preoccupation was a welcome reprieve from an unchanging, prosaic daily routine that, without it, might have been tiresome, repetitious and incomplete. However, boredom was really never one of our problems. We had far too many interests. Sure, we did indulge occasionally in tasty dishes and needed and delighted in sex, choices that were, in a sense, somehow predetermined by your genetics. But to place art appreciation in the same category would be utter nonsense. So what was this all about? Why pursue art to the extent that it would become such an integral part of our lives?(9)
When I was thirteen years, I spent a month long summer vacation with my aunt and uncle in The Hague. During that stay I visited, all by myself, that city’s major art museums. This was not because of any previous exposure to art or because of reading about it. I was from a small rural community that lacked all the big-city amenities. Nor did anyone ever suggest this kind of diversion to me. So why did I do it? And why, so many years later would a visit to the local museums become part of a regular routine whenever we visited a city for the first time, long before we succumbed to the compulsion to collect? Once we caught the bug, why did we religiously frequent those antique and consignment shops and auctions? These questions can only be answered by assuming that there was something in us, deep inside, that drew us to it. An urge to search for beautiful, startling or unusual, life-enhancing objects that some experience and others lack. Was it in our genes? Perhaps – but I am more convinced this behavior was somehow acquired somewhere. Yet, I’ll have to confess that I’m totally mystified as to where.(9).
In our case collecting art became an addiction. Once caught up in it, we readily succumbed. We began to amass in earnest and with a passion, pursuing an all-consuming need to find works by different artists, or by the same ones but better than what we already owned. Initially, at least, I was left with the ambivalent feeling of being both sad and guilty about losing my innocence and freedom from things – feelings that fortunately my wife lacked – but also elated that we were putting together a collection of extraordinary beauty and rarity.
Calvin Tomkin has commented on this issue as well. “Art collecting, after all, is a complex pursuit. Immortality, social status, vanity and other motives, both psychological and economic, enter into it in varying degrees, and many art dealers are convinced that the pure and selfish love of works of art for their own sake is so rare as to be considered almost non existent.”(10)
Rubbish! Most art dealers started out as collectors. Some loved their art treasures so much that they had a hard time parting with them: witness the size and quality of their estates on the rare occasions these would come up for sale.
We collected what we loved and chose to live with. Having done poorly in the stock market, we felt, that we might as well enjoy our hard-earned money by acquiring a few handpicked, treasured pictures to hang on the wall and live with, instead of locking stock and bond certificates in a safe deposit box. True collectors have a soft spot on the brain, or suffer from an unusual form of madness, that causes a weird, incomprehensible behavior, that drives them to do what they initially don’t want to do but then go ahead and do it anyway.
The introduction of photography in the early nineteenth century eliminated the need for exact, graphic, realistic, representation. Artists, finding their function diminished, superceded, or at least changed, began to search for more personal, unique ways to express themselves and their various subjects or the world around them. In particular, they began to explore ways of representing subjects in the singular manner in which they experienced them. As a result, the manner of painting, – initially in Europe, but then elsewhere as well – underwent a rapid succession of radical changes greatly inspired by the artists individual interpretation and experimentation. These expressions of personal perceptions of subjects, were influenced at times by appropriating something of older, even ancient, indigenous cultures. To us, being at the time heavily involved in medical research, discovering the scope and diversity of contemporary artists’ experimentation to find their personal idioms was of particular interest. In fact, we came to regard it as a manifestation of a common approach. Only through these kinds of trials could one expect progress in any field. We wanted to understand what the artists were expressing, and why and how they had arrived at their new and individual mannerism and then to attempt to determine how successful they had been in gaining their objectives.
The issue of esthetic judgment is center to every discussion of an artist whose work appeals sufficiently to one’s sensibilities that one wishes to own and live with it. After the O’Kelly, our next major purchase was the collection of Hayley Lever’s work. One evening about a dozen oils from his estate came up for sale at an auction house only ten blocks from where we lived. Even though we had never heard of the artist, we liked his work well enough that we acquired the entire lot. Later, after we had progressed a bit or had a change of taste, we sold all but one. Two of them were sold by a major New York City auction house. The one we held on to is a dramatic painting, 40 x 50 inches in size, that dates from the early 1930's judging from the antique trucks, surrounded by a small but dense crowd gathered at the end of a pier ready to board a ferry to cross the strip of water that separates the foreground from a hilly background across the bay. The movement of the rowboats anchored in the harbor suggest that the water is quite choppy. This rather appealing scene, presumably of Gloucester or Monhegan has, for many years, greatly enlivened the space above our livingroom’s fireplace.
Influenced by our slowly gained, newly acquired knowledge that there was more, – far more – to modern art than just the unique, personal interpretation and expression of a subjective experience, we decided to sit on our hands for a while and just watch, and read some more, before exploring this latest discovery in some greater depth. We knew we were way over our heads but had fun and gained great satisfaction doing it.
In the early 1960, our laboratory recognized a new, previously unknown relationship between the enhanced clotting activity of blood observed in patients with advanced liver cirrhosis, a fact first reported by us in Surgery in 1964. (11) This unusual clotting activity was attributed to the diseased liver’s failure to remove a toxic, presumably bacterial derived, product that escapes from the intestine. (We postulated it might be endotoxin, a component of the gram-negative microorganism E. coli), a fact confirmed some eight years later in two papers published back to back in a 1972 issue of Lancet, that reported the enhanced antibody response to E. coli in the blood of patients with advanced liver cirrhosis.(12) As is commonly the case, this confirmation of an earlier insight resulted in a flood of corroborating studies that appeared from all over the world.
After some serious reading on the latest developments in art, during our gallery hopping we zeroed in on the latest approach in artistic interpretation that had been developed by a small but diverse group of New York artists, a new kind of intuitive approach called Abstract Expressionism. These artists developed a unique style of expression, in which each one adopted his or her own, distinct, abstract idiom, one that clearly distinguished, even when seen from a distance, its creator.
The very first painting of that genre I saw that gave me a real jolt; – a deep, physical, in-the-gut reaction, one not unlike the kind I would experience on becoming privy to a previously unknown scientific insight. The occasion was both unexpected and quite prosaic. While wandering one day in the late 1960s through the Parke Bernet-Sotheby auction galleries, I came suddenly upon a small oil that hung against the purple, slightly grimy velvet background surrounded by a host of other pictures. Catching sight of it, — this 14 x 12 oil that showed only a few bold, black paint strokes on its small, raw canvas in addition to the vaguely off-center rough partial outlines of a house -- blew me away. Enclosed in a simple Kulicki frame, this little piece that continues to knock my socks off happened to be part of a routine, secondary sale. The collection’s major pictures, assembled by the legal advisor to some of the group’s artists had been sold the previous evening when we had paid far too much for a small, colorful, fascinating gouache(13) done by a prominent artist represented by Alfred Stieglitz and a study for one of his major paintings.
The items on view during the secondary sale were just the remains of that same collection. A few of the pieces on display were truly fine works by what were then still lesser-known newcomers and artists considered second-tier, men like Larry Rivers, whose work was only occasionally being shown. The work that caught my eye and made my heart go faster was by Jack Tworkov, an artist, I learned subsequently, who was head of the art department at Yale University and a friend of Willem deKooning, the Dutch house painter who had turned into a major abstract expressionist(14). Tworkov’s small painting was entitled House of the Sun. The moment I saw it I became a seriously committed collector of modern and contemporary American art.
Excited and determined to add it to our collection, we did so a few days later. We still love the little oil. And the Ortman and Stamos that we purchased that same day.(14) Tworkov’s painting made us really look and read, and read and look some more.
Once we decided to collect only works by twentieth-century American artists we found that just as in science, there was an extensive literature on the subject. So in the course of time we acquired our own, wide-ranging, comprehensive art library.
Besides visiting art galleries, auction houses and museums, we became voracious and tireless sightseers of our city for which we had developed a deep affection and which we had come to admire for its cosmopolitan flavor and its enormous diversity. There was so much to see we delighted in these walks. At almost every turn we met with an unexpected surprise. For instance, during the Christmas season my wife and I would take the subway to the southern tip of Manhattan Island and then walk back from Battery Park to our apartment, more than a hundred city blocks, always by taking a different route. We had dinner along the way in one of the numerous, small, Eastern European basement restaurants, where the food was different and delicious. We never dropped in on the same place twice.
Around 10th Street, we would always head straight for Strand, the bookstore, at the corner of 12th and Broadway. It became part of our regular routine, – like a ritual, sacred, – because books, to us were both humankind’s proudest achievements and our main source of new information. Strand, its alleged claim to fame was its ”eighteen miles of books” – new, used and classical, representing literally every subject ever known. We didn’t know if the store’s claim of the number of miles was correct or not, but who cared? It had books galore, enough to keep us busy for the rest of the day and, hopefully, many still to come!
The shop, like the streets of New York, was a controlled chaos of a kind that was unusual for a book emporium of its size. It was located in an old, dilapidated building. Upon entering, you first encountered tables covered with books that had their spines turned up. People, young and old, men and women, would flock around these tables like a swarm of bees buzzing eagerly above their favorite flower patch. These tables held mostly review volumes, books sent by their authors to the book reviewers of New York’s many magazines, newspapers, and radio and TV stations for their comments and evaluation. Most were still unread, as those who had received them – in hopes of a review and positive publicity – had coldly and heartlessly sold them, often unopened, to the bookdealer instead. If you were unknown, you would likely stay that way unless by a fluke or a fortunate coincidence, someone happened to skim your work, and get caught up in its content. The few authors who made it were usually recognized by older, well-established colleagues who then recommended them to their own agents or publishers.
Everyone searched among those tables for those few books that had been reviewed favorably by the New Yorker, or the NY Review of Book. Those few choice items wouldn’t remain on the tables very long.
In addition, Strand featured numerous tall book-cases that occupied most of the store as well as a large crowded basement with stacks of books, a seemingly endless supply. Every category seemed to have its own appointed place. We usually headed sooner or later for the art book section, arranged neatly in tall cases flush against the far right-hand outside wall. This would keep us occupied for hours, – happy hours during which we read by ourselves or softly to each other, in the company of the numerous other searchers. All of us were looking for that rare nugget or the even more precious lucky find, the one that, unexpectedly, would turn the day into a truly memorable occasion.
When we found a book that we ‘couldn’t live without’, we carried it gingerly to the front desk where they kept it for us, added to those we had already put aside. The hours dwindled away as we moseyed along, moving slowly among the tables and bookcases before settling the bill and heading for home, schlepping our latest hoard along with a badly wrenched shoulder, as this well- protected ball joint was stretched painfully to its outer limits by our burgeoning book collection.
It’s hard to escape the notion that one’s captivation with a specific movement in the visual arts is somehow related to the conception of the creative process itself or, more specifically, with the impetus behind one’s own research. Inspiration or a new insight during one’s investigative work often comes when least expected. Albert Einstein expressed the opinion that science had an emotional or intuitive rather than a logical basis (15). These rare momentary new insights might redirect the work towards a different tangent than the one you were taking that moment. And where some bore fruit, others failed miserably. B. Croce wrote that art is an intuitive knowledge based on images, rather than on concepts.(16). In my own experience this is true for science as well.
Attempts to explain, in retrospect, how a new idea is arrived at are surely not quite as one remembers it. To quote from a report by T.H Maugh: “Innovations, for the majority of people, are essentially a pre-verbal process, and the necessity of translating that thought process into words almost certainly alters the perception of the process”. (17) Yet, on occasion one knows precisely how or what, or when and where the new insight occurred. For instance, in his autobiography: What Mad Pursuit. A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, Francis Crick remarks on Sidney Brenner’s sudden discovery, during a heated discussion, that RNA was added to the ribosome (as a short-lived messenger RNA intermediate) in protein production.: “Suddenly Brenner let out a loud yelp. He had seen the answer. The sudden flash of enlightenment when the idea was first glimpsed (the italics are mine) was so memorable that I can recall just where Sidney (Brenner), Francois (Jacob) and I were sitting in a room when it happened.”(18)
One has to assume that both scientists and artists receive their insights from the same source. That’s why it’s possible that the captivation of art, especially the art of one’s own time, follows a certain logic. It is exciting and just as fascinating as one’s own research, even if only a few people seem to appreciate it sufficiently yet.
What is striking to me is that art, or any particular artist’s expression of an evanescent experience, reflects on how you yourself perceived the reality that the artist is trying to depict. The art expresses an expectation, realized somehow, but also the recognition that it is as it should be represented, and yet imaged in a personal way. A painter has just paints and brushes and a flat surface with which to depict sensations or impressions of a multi-dimensional world into shapes and colors that speak to us. The personal vision, sensitivity, and sharpness of perception that he or she exhibits in the execution of the work has to converge to make it an unique reality.
The joy of discovery kept us searching for more and better examples. Both my research and my art appreciation fed on each other. They appeared to have the same wellspring.
During an extended trip in the summer of 1970 to present a paper on our latest work, my wife and I visited Mexico and Guatemala. After a busy week’s sight-seeing in Mexico City, we went by bus to Oaxaca, where we spent another week and made a one-day side trip to Monte Alban. From Oaxaca we took the 4 a.m. bus to St Cristobal de las Casas, where we spent another week. And from there we took an ancient rattletrap of a bus to Guatemala City. Farmers and their wives and children, whom the driver picked up at the side of the road, traveled inside this aged vehicle, while their livestock – mostly chickens, but occasionally also a pig or goat that they had in tow – traveled on top.
Having thus become broadly exposed to the local cultures, we became intrigued by the abundant pre-Columbian art we saw. Hence, in December 1971, on a cold but bright Saturday morning, we dropped in on Arte Primitivo, a second-floor gallery at the corner of Madison Avenue and 62nd Street, that dealt exclusively in pre-Columbian art. Inside, we found large wall cases that displayed strange, exotic pre-Columbian tomb pieces that formed a striking contrast to the tall contemporary bookcases containing a wide selection of volumes dealing with the many different pre-Columbian cultures. Easy chairs arranged around a low, glass top table invited a weary visitor to linger a while, pick up a book and leisurely browse in it. The owners, – the Kaplans, an elderly couple, – introduced themselves and encouraged us to ask questions. We were soon involved in a lively conversation. When the Kaplans learned that we knew very little about the artifacts they were dealing in but were greatly intrigued and found them fascinating, they convinced us to buy Hans von Winning’s book as the authoritative, up-to-date tome to take home and study as an introduction.(19) We took their advice.
This chance encounter blossomed into a friendship in the spring of 1972, when the Kaplans invited us, together with some of their more committed collectors who had bought from them before, to attend a series of ten private, three-hour lectures, one on each of the different pre-Columbian cultures. The lectures were in their gallery on successive Monday nights by a young, enthusiastic Mexican anthropologist who was finishing his Ph.D. at one of the state’s universities. Juan had discovered, during a dig in Teotiahuacan, the important “poco loco” duck pottery vessel that since has found a place in Mexico City’s famed Anthropological Museum, which houses a wide-ranging exhibition we so enjoyed that we had visited it several times. As a very knowledgeable and committed tutor, he brought this complex subject soon into a far clearer perspective, using artifacts displayed in the gallery as examples of each culture so that we developed a better understanding and deeper appreciation for these wonderful, mysterious and ancient pieces.
Initially, we collected in this new, totally different field like the proverbial amorous porcupine, – very slowly and cautiously. But as all experienced collectors know, the desire to possess grows very fast! And like the paintings we were acquiring, here, too, we tried to obtain the best and most outstanding, spectacular examples, spending whatever it took, since we felt that we might as well enjoy these new treasures. Just to be sure that each piece was authentic - there were at the time already many fakes in circulation - we had every new acquisition checked by Dr Gordon Eckholm, the curator of Meso-American Art at the American Museum of Natural History on West 77th Street, whom by then I would see so often that he occasionally took the time to teach me the finer points of our latest acquisition by comparing it with some of the numerous examples stored in its large wooden cabinets that lined the wide, high-ceilinged halls just outside his office.
Through the Kaplans and the seminars they offered, we soon befriended a number of other truly committed collectors. In their apartments we would meet occasionally major dealers in American paintings and other collectors whom we eventually befriended as well despite the fact that they were quite a bit older than us. From then on we would arrange to meet these new friends at special occasions in the city or visited with them in our own or in their apartments.
Besides the Kaplan’s we dropped in on the other major Pre-Columbian art dealers in New York, including Ed Merrin, Ken Bauer of the Land’s Beyond, and Mr. Komar, and later also Mr. van Rijn, the Amsterdam dentist-turned-dealer, whose spectacular, well-appointed establishment, Gallery Khepri, was located on Museum Plein just across the street from the Rijksmuseum. We bought a few uncommon items from each of them.
During a visit to his establishment, one dealer told us in strictest confidence that Dr. Dockstader, the director of the American Indian Museum on the Upper West side had been let go for allegedly selling objects from the vast museum collections stored in its warehouse in the Bronx, an allegation that was hard to substantiate since all the stored artifacts remained un-catalogued. He also mentioned that the present curator, Dr Wilcox, was starting to record their extensive collections and was anxiously looking for volunteers to help him in this endeavor.
When she learned about this, my wife offered her services one day a week and drove the first time to the museum’s Bronx warehouse in our car. When she returned in the evening she told excitedly about the incredible size and scope of this latest project – rooms, and more rooms, all filled with hundreds of Native American beaded dresses and vests, Navajo blankets, jewelry, baskets from all the different regions, Pueblo pottery, all so beautiful, different and intrinsic in form, size, shape, and design. There were also thousands of arrow heads, axes and shields, and rooms filled with moccasins, leggings, hide dresses, vests, kuchinas, tomahawks, clubs, drums, rattles, ornaments, parfeches, feather war bonnets, saddles, pouches, pipes, cradle boards, gun cases, holsters, spear heads, fetiches, knives, sheaths, dolls, masks, rattles – a collection so extensive that it was really too much to comprehend.
While she was telling me this, I happened to notice that the hubcaps of our car were missing. So the next week when she returned to the Bronx, she took the subway instead. She kept this up until a major part of the collection had been registered on IBM cards. She came to regard her time spent in those rooms as a great learning experience.
Antoinette Kraushaar, the highly regarded doyenne of New York’s art dealers was a tiny slip of a woman with a forceful but very pleasant personality.(20) She was in her late seventies when we befriended her. We dropped in at her second-floor corner gallery on Madison Avenue close to the Whitney Museum whenever we were in the neighborhood. Early on my wife had bought a Peggy Bacon water-color, the Haunted House, from her. Painted in 1971, just before the artist was going blind from macular degeneration, it would become one of her last works. In 1976 this picture was shown in the Peggy Bacon show at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.(21).
Whenever we visited the Kraushaar Gallery, Antoinette would engage us in a discussion of one of the pictures she was showing that week. Generously, she allowed us more than a brief glimpse into the workings of the art world, well before art collecting would become more popular(22). Later, she invited us to her apartment on East 79th Street for afternoon tea and a look at her marvelous collection of important oils by Glackens, Bellows, Henri, Shinn, Sloan, and Luks. An especially appealing full-length portrait of her, done by George Luks at the time of her highschool graduation, was prominently displayed above the fireplace. The painting is presently in the Brooklyn Museum.
Whenever we visited her gallery Antoinette would treat us almost like family. We cherished the engaging, vivid stories of her early experiences as an art dealer with her father; or how Pene du Bois had taught her in her youth about painting, and how much she had learned about art, – not from books, but from listening to the artists discuss their work among themselves. She also told about the hard times they had experienced during the Depression, of being unsure from one day to the next if the gallery would survive. She always showed us the latest pictures she had acquired either in a private sale or at auction. She was a candid, very gentle and sophisticated lady who was easy to love.
One night we had Antoinette over to our apartment for dinner together with the Levitts. Irv Levitt who, as a senior partner of the Kennedy Gallery was a friendly rival of hers, had known her for years.(23) Those two really hit it off. It became one of those evenings that you wished would never end. Had it not been for the Levitts leaving town a short time later to return to Detroit we would surely have repeated the occasion. After we left New York, we would see Antoinette whenever we visited the city. Amazingly, she lived well into her nineties, dying rather suddenly long after I had retired.
After placing it in its current context, I believe the question posed at the start of these brief and casual reflections based on fleeting, intimate reminiscences can be answered in the affirmative. It would seem from the admittedly limited examples that there is indeed some kind of correlation between collecting and the urge to pursue research. In certain instances, the one drive seems somehow to predispose to the other a fact that, to my knowledge, has never been recognized or acknowledged before.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- References:
1 Founded in 1928 by Samuel Spanierman at 5 E 59th Street, the Savoy Gallery moved later to E 50th Street. Today, Samuel’s son, Ira, operates a major American art gallery, the Spanierman Gallery, on Madison Avenue.
2 O’Kelly was born in Dublin in 1853 and studied art in Paris under Bonnat and Gerome. Initially, he painted landscapes in Brittany. Subsequently, he lived in London before settling in the United States where he died in 1926. A website entry indicates that in May 2010, Sotheby’s in London sold a 25 x 36 inch painting of his for 5,000 GBP.
3 In the course of time, we got to know in my days at New York Hospital several physicians on its staff who were ardent and proud collectors: Dr. Dragen Borovac, an anesthesiologist, collected: impressionist paintings, Dr. Russell Patterson, a neurosurgeon, collected Abstract Expressionists, Dr. Ferrarain a radiologist, collected F. Toledo’s drawings, the hand surgeon, Dr. Jim Smith, was known for his toy collection, the elderly pathologist, Dr. Ryan, had an mixed eclectic collection, and the Weksler, husband Mark and his wife Babette, collected rugs and paintings.
4 See T Paoletti: From Minimal to Conceptual Art: Works of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, Washington D.C.: National Endowment of the Arts, in association with the National Gallery of Art, 1994. Phoebe Hoban, called Herbert and Dorothy Vogel “postal-clerks-turned-art-mavens.” (see Basquiat (New York: Penguin, 1998, pg 65). According to a report in the Oct 28, 2008 issue of the Antiques and the Arts Weekly, the Vogels donated 50 works of their collection of 2500 contemporary art works to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, in Richmond.
5 Our unceasing interest in art would confirm the experts observation that, ”the visual system is refined by visual input.” Looking at art not only gratifies the senses, it also trains the eye to discriminate and judge, to develop the ability to learn and to appreciate art and recognize quality, beauty and meaning. Joseph Alsop in: The Rare Art Tradition, the History of Collecting and its Linked Phenomena.. Harper & Row Publishers, Cambridge et al, 1982, made similar observations.
6 Calvin Tomkins: Merchants and Masterpieces. (New York: Henry Holt, 1970).
7 Initially, we considered our collections as just a hobby, not as an investment. Only much later, after we stopped buying, and art prices started to escalate, did it occur to us that quality art might well be a safe and suitable hedge against inflation However, art prices, like the stock market, tend to reflect the state of the economy. A healthy, growing economy is accompanied by firm prices especially for the more unusual, rarer and outstanding items.
8 M Rheims: The Glorious Obsession. Memoirs of One of the World’s Greatest Auctioneers and Collectors. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975).
9 Art appreciation may have a definitive neurologic and genetic basis. To quote R.R.Grinke: “As Asperger put it , in the context of art:: “Autistic individuals can judge accurately the events represented in a picture, as well as what lies behind them, including the character of the people represented and the mood that pervades a painting. To paraphrase, these “abnormal” children had a skill for appreciating visual media that most “normal” adults do not achieve.” (Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, (New York: Basic Books, 2007, p 58).
10 Tomkins: Merchants and Masterpieces, 350.
11 H. Gans, “Study of Fibrinogen Turnover Rates after Total Hepatectomy in Dogs.“ Surgery 55 (1964):544.
12 H. Gans, K. Matsumoto, and K, Mori: “Antibodies and Intravascular Clotting in Liver Cirrhosis,” Lancet 1 (1972):1181.
13 S.P. Wilkinson, et al: “Relation of Renal Impairment and Haemorrhagic Diathesis to Endotoxaemia in Fulminant Hepatic Failure,” Lancet 1 (1974): 521. and many others.
14 Evening sales at Sotheby-Park Bernett’s were gala events, reserved for selling the most important art works. Those, who attended, both bidders and watchers, often dressed in formal attire and these occasions would occasionally turn into quite a show.
15 Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the New Yorker, rated de Kooning “the greatest of American painters, and lesser only than Picasso and Matisse among all artists of the twentieth century.” (New Yorker, Sept 26, 2011, p 122).
16 D. Overbye: Einstein in Love, (New York: Penguin Books, 2001,.p 337).
17 B. Croce (1866-1952): The Essence of Aesthetic. translated D. Ainslie. (Londo: Heinemann, 1921).
18 Hasso von Winning: Pre-Columbian Art of Mexico and Central America, (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1968).
19 Antoinette M Kraushaar (1900-1992), when we knew her, operated the Kraushaar gallery founded by her uncle Charles in 1885 and later joined by her father. She took it over after her father’s death in 1942. The gallery initially sold French art, but later took up American art instead, specializing in the members of the Ashcan group whose estates (Glackens, John Sloan, Jerome Meyers and Gifford Beal) she represented. Later, she also showed contemporary artists, mainly Karl Schrag, John Helliker, John Koch and William Kienbush (whose picture in the library of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical College we had greatly admired). Collectors who patronized the gallery included Duncan Phillips, Chester Dale, and the Rockefellers.
20 The exhibition catalogue, Peggy Bacon, Personalities and Places, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975, Washington DC, contained an illustration of Haunted House, the picture that Antoinette Kraushaar had sold to my wife. (on p 51, as fig 48).
21 The New York Times art critics at the time, principally Hilton Kramer, reported unchallenged on the visual arts as the ultimate (but arbitrary) tone setter and tone setter till Tom Wolff challenged them in: “The Painted Word,” Bantam Books, New York 1975, a satire that achieved rapidly many printings. According to Wolff’s tongue-in-cheek estimate the entire art world consisted at that time of 10,000 souls, with approximately 400 in the USA, a figure that probably wasn’t far off the mark.
22 Irv Leavitt was a Detroit pediatrician, whose art collection we had learned about from Lipman’s book: The Collector in America, (New York:: Viking Press, 1970) and whom we befriended after his two sons approached me to work in my research lab during summer vacation. He was a close friend of Larry Fleischman, the owner in the 1970s of the Kennedy Gallery of American Art, and founder and publisher of the Archives of American Art before the Smithsonian Institution took over its publication.
As we did, another picture, a small oil painting, was put up. Since I could just make out the outlines of a hilly landscape with a few tall pine trees, a scene that reminded me of some of the choice places in upstate Minnesota where we had, in recent years, spent so many of our weekends and vacations, away from the buzz, grime and action of the dense, crowded city that we had lived and worked in. I noticed, as I came closer, that the picture, because of its sudden uncanny association, greatly appealed to me. When the bidding started again I saw in an instant the large, unadorned, white walls of the brand new, spotless, three-bedroom apartment that we had just moved into with our three cats. Unwittingly, I raised my hand – and before I realized it – I had become the picture’s new owner for $30. Wouldn’t you know, my better half was quite upset. She didn’t approve of me buying on impulse.
Within a short time the sale ended. Evidently, we had arrived at the tail end of the auction. When a small crowd formed at the cashier’s window I joined it and paid, and picked up my new purchase, an attractive oil on board signed by an artist named Aloysius O’Kelly (2). Although I didn’t recognize the artist’s name, I thought the painting was very well done. We hung it in our dining area where it appeared as if it had always been there.
Much later it occurred to me that my desire to collect might have had something to do somehow with my involvement in medical research. Both are habit forming and tend to feed upon themselves. Just as collectors becomes smitten or obsessed with new objects that they want to own by hook or by crook for their personal enjoyment, so researchers get snared by new problems tempting enough to challenge them to spend the time, effort and funds to try to solve them. The desire, need, or wish to own or possess, or to find the answer to an alluring or burning new question, appears to be close, – and in my case apparently very close, – indeed.
A year or so after my spontaneous purchase at the New York City auction, my wife and I were in San Francisco to attend the annual American College of Surgeons meetings where I was to address the Symposium on Pre and Post-operative Care, (with a brief but comprehensive presentation ‘On Bleeding Problems during Surgery’). On our way to the meeting my wife and I passed, on our way to the meeting, an imposing-looking art gallery, the Maxwell Gallery on Sutter Street. We dropped in and saw among the attractive paintings on display another oil by Aloysius O’Kelly hanging just opposite the front door. It was about the same size as ours, so I asked for its price. I was told it was $2600. It turned out that my $30 impulse buy had been a good investment.
If I gave the impression that my wife objected to my collecting, nothing could be further from the truth. She soon became just as involved as I. However, she objected to purchasing on impulse. Hers was a salient argument, well taken, and I reluctantly had to agree. Hence, from then on we tried to establish beforehand what we liked well enough that we wished to own it and only then would we decide if and how we would try to obtain it.
Not long after these events, I came to know Harry, the Savoy Gallery employee whom I had first noticed standing next to the auctioneer, quite well. The gallery often sold major parts of a deceased person’s estate that the family didn’t want or had no use for, often much of it of limited value, appeal or usefulness. Such items rarely found bidders. When such a piece failed to sell, Harry would call out in his brash, heavy, Brooklyn accent, “Okay boys, call in the grinder!”
Much to my regret, this auction house closed its doors in 1971. However, shortly before, early in the summer while my wife was overseeing some work that needed to be done on a summer place that we had just acquired along a remote and isolated stretch of the Great South Bay on Long Island, it auctioned off a large, early Milton Avery gouache entitled, Three Equestrians on a Bridal Path in Central Park near 67th Street. After brief, but spirited bidding with someone in back in the audience, I became its new owner.
After the sale Harry took me aside and told me that my competitor was a young, new local art dealer, and he then revealed to me the name of the estate that the picture had come from. Six years later when Milton Avery’s widow, Sally, invited us to her apartment for afternoon tea, she authenticated this work, as well as our other Avery’s, naming, dating, and describing for us the circumstances that had lead her husband to paint each one. She remembered the equestrian gouache as one of four of her husband’s early works that a woman had bought sometime in 1930. She even remembered the buyer’s name, which happened to be the same one that Harry, the man from the auction gallery, had mentioned to me. We found her ability to recall these details amazing since she had to be well into her seventies.
Much later, I learned that there were several closely related examples of this particular picture. We saw one on display during a museum visit some time ago, I believe in Washington, D.C. and rather recently happened to see another, quite similar version to the one we own, but in oil, in the Vero Beach Museum, that exhibited a selection of Avery paintings from the Roy Neuburger collection. His Avery equestrian painting was the center-piece of that gallery’s show.
In New York City we were surrounded by art and drawn to it from the very start. We soon learned that there were other physicians and bio-medical investigators who were passionate art collectors(3). Of course, you had to have the means to meet the object’s price, for only those with extra cash on hand were able to follow this penchant. But you didn’t have to be wealthy. For example, during our gallery-hopping we would regularly run into the Vogels. He was a postal worker, and she, a librarian in the city’s library system. Although of modest means, the Vogels were steadily buying contemporary American art, mostly drawings. Over the years, they had formed a major art collection that was of extraordinary quality and filled every nook and cranny of their tiny apartment.(4)
To collect art it has to appeal to you. Art appeal is purely a personal experience. No two people looking at a work of art interpret or respond to what they see in the same way or undergo similar emotions. Where in the past we had shown a more than usual interest in art, going to museums in every city we visited, after we began collecting it became almost an obsession. We were not just looking for what was presented in the constantly changing gallery and museum exhibitions in New York, but also making a point of traveling to other places just because they were staging an unusual museum exhibition – especially if it threw new light on a certain artist’s work or it revealed him (or her) in a different context.
At the time New York lent itself to this better than any other city. It had numerous art galleries that showed every known artist and their works, each with their special interests and characteristic ways of expressing themselves, besides the many outstanding museums. And because the range of subjects and quality varied so widely, it allowed a steady observer the opportunity to become more discerning by developing a far more discriminating eye(5). Compared to Minneapolis, which we had left a short time before, we felt we were in hog heaven.
My wife and I made it a habit, every night that I wasn’t working, to take an after-dinner stroll. After crisscrossing our own eastside neighborhood between 60th and 86th Street, undoubtedly one of the most prosperous in the nation, we would invariably end up on Madison Avenue, where we zeroed in on the art galleries to look for any new and exciting installations. As members of the city’s various art museums, we attended outstanding lecture series on modern and contemporary art presented by experts, or we would drop in on Parke-Bernet (both before and after it became associated with Sotheby’s) whenever we were in the neighborhood.
Calvin Tomkins, in his history of the Metropolitan Museum, remarked that, “Collectors respond to works of art for a variety of reasons, most of which have little to do with aesthetic value. Only a few love art objects for their own sake and for those few, the majority respond to them through their visual senses.”(6) Although Tomkins may well have been correct on this point, we continued our pursuit for esthetic objects solely for their appeal and the pleasure they gave us.(7) We developed an almost insatiable appetite for these fascinating and exciting objects, always searching for new and different experiences, as if trying to make up for what we had missed while living in an environment that in the fifties and sixties had very little to offer in this respect. After this intense exposure and our initial reading on the subjects – we were rapidly acquiring a few basic books to guide us along – we realized, that not only did we like to look at pictures, irrespective of the medium, (drawings, watercolors, as well as paintings), but we also liked to live with them, and to own them, trying to fill those still large empty walls of our three bedroom apartment.
Prior to discovering this love of art I had been quite reluctant to collect anything of value, except for a few rare, historical significant medical books that dealt with the field of my particular interest. For a Jew, to survive the Nazi occupation of Holland and its hellish aftermath, required that you be able to walk away from whatever you owned and simply disappear. A lot of people were unable to do this. Too attached to their worldly possessions, they didn’t vanish when there was still time to do so. In periods of uncertainty, possessions offered a modicum of comfort and security. Maurice Rheim, the noted French auctioneer observed that “No one will ever quite conceive how many people perished in concentration camps through having tried to save a bed or a three glass fronted mahogany wardrobe with bronze fittings, a paltry possession in itself but representing wealth and success to its owner.”(8)
Of course, in the end all those unwilling to abandon their possessions were forced to do so anyway. They were permitted to take along only what they could carry on their backs and in their own two hands. Ever since, to possess nothing of value, to have no attachment to any worldly goods, represented to someone like me the ultimate symbol of freedom. Having nothing to lose, I felt free as a bird. And for a long time I managed to avoid any kind of entanglement with objects of value, just to preserve the sense of liberty that, once the Nazis were defeated and the war was over, had become so precious to me. Collecting art, major art in particular, had its own responsibilities, and hence it was against anything I stood for. Until the unexpected happened. After the initial, impetuous purchase of the small O’Kelly, some months later we happened to see a sizeable collection of attractive paintings from Hayley Lever’s estate come up for sale. The works appealed to us, and they appeared very suitable to fill those still empty wall spaces and pleasant to live with. Once we acquired those we were hooked.
One may ask why would anyone become so hepped up about art anyway, the way other people, – more normal folks, less committed or one-sided, – might get excited about sport, especially baseball, football or basketball. What was it about art that was so special, anyway?
Occasionally, I would ask my wife why we delighted in this mad pursuit, this fascination, this strange enchantment, this idiosyncratic behavior, this obsession, this need to chase after an object. For years this would remain a deep, dark mystery. Was it to dispel boredom, or as an escape from steadily building work-related tensions? Or, was it an addiction to the more common pleasures that everyone now and then succumbs to, such as the seductive gustatory delights that can easily turn you into a fat slob, or a pre-occupation with sex, or the habit of watching TV, or going on a shopping binge? Or was it a search for new insights to expand the mind, the kind of pursuits that makes you feel really alive? Seriously, – what drove us to this overarching, strange obsession? We certainly didn’t consider it as an investment. But we pursued it anyway, continuously and vigorously.
The easy way out would be to say that our preoccupation was a welcome reprieve from an unchanging, prosaic daily routine that, without it, might have been tiresome, repetitious and incomplete. However, boredom was really never one of our problems. We had far too many interests. Sure, we did indulge occasionally in tasty dishes and needed and delighted in sex, choices that were, in a sense, somehow predetermined by your genetics. But to place art appreciation in the same category would be utter nonsense. So what was this all about? Why pursue art to the extent that it would become such an integral part of our lives?(9)
When I was thirteen years, I spent a month long summer vacation with my aunt and uncle in The Hague. During that stay I visited, all by myself, that city’s major art museums. This was not because of any previous exposure to art or because of reading about it. I was from a small rural community that lacked all the big-city amenities. Nor did anyone ever suggest this kind of diversion to me. So why did I do it? And why, so many years later would a visit to the local museums become part of a regular routine whenever we visited a city for the first time, long before we succumbed to the compulsion to collect? Once we caught the bug, why did we religiously frequent those antique and consignment shops and auctions? These questions can only be answered by assuming that there was something in us, deep inside, that drew us to it. An urge to search for beautiful, startling or unusual, life-enhancing objects that some experience and others lack. Was it in our genes? Perhaps – but I am more convinced this behavior was somehow acquired somewhere. Yet, I’ll have to confess that I’m totally mystified as to where.(9).
In our case collecting art became an addiction. Once caught up in it, we readily succumbed. We began to amass in earnest and with a passion, pursuing an all-consuming need to find works by different artists, or by the same ones but better than what we already owned. Initially, at least, I was left with the ambivalent feeling of being both sad and guilty about losing my innocence and freedom from things – feelings that fortunately my wife lacked – but also elated that we were putting together a collection of extraordinary beauty and rarity.
Calvin Tomkin has commented on this issue as well. “Art collecting, after all, is a complex pursuit. Immortality, social status, vanity and other motives, both psychological and economic, enter into it in varying degrees, and many art dealers are convinced that the pure and selfish love of works of art for their own sake is so rare as to be considered almost non existent.”(10)
Rubbish! Most art dealers started out as collectors. Some loved their art treasures so much that they had a hard time parting with them: witness the size and quality of their estates on the rare occasions these would come up for sale.
We collected what we loved and chose to live with. Having done poorly in the stock market, we felt, that we might as well enjoy our hard-earned money by acquiring a few handpicked, treasured pictures to hang on the wall and live with, instead of locking stock and bond certificates in a safe deposit box. True collectors have a soft spot on the brain, or suffer from an unusual form of madness, that causes a weird, incomprehensible behavior, that drives them to do what they initially don’t want to do but then go ahead and do it anyway.
The introduction of photography in the early nineteenth century eliminated the need for exact, graphic, realistic, representation. Artists, finding their function diminished, superceded, or at least changed, began to search for more personal, unique ways to express themselves and their various subjects or the world around them. In particular, they began to explore ways of representing subjects in the singular manner in which they experienced them. As a result, the manner of painting, – initially in Europe, but then elsewhere as well – underwent a rapid succession of radical changes greatly inspired by the artists individual interpretation and experimentation. These expressions of personal perceptions of subjects, were influenced at times by appropriating something of older, even ancient, indigenous cultures. To us, being at the time heavily involved in medical research, discovering the scope and diversity of contemporary artists’ experimentation to find their personal idioms was of particular interest. In fact, we came to regard it as a manifestation of a common approach. Only through these kinds of trials could one expect progress in any field. We wanted to understand what the artists were expressing, and why and how they had arrived at their new and individual mannerism and then to attempt to determine how successful they had been in gaining their objectives.
The issue of esthetic judgment is center to every discussion of an artist whose work appeals sufficiently to one’s sensibilities that one wishes to own and live with it. After the O’Kelly, our next major purchase was the collection of Hayley Lever’s work. One evening about a dozen oils from his estate came up for sale at an auction house only ten blocks from where we lived. Even though we had never heard of the artist, we liked his work well enough that we acquired the entire lot. Later, after we had progressed a bit or had a change of taste, we sold all but one. Two of them were sold by a major New York City auction house. The one we held on to is a dramatic painting, 40 x 50 inches in size, that dates from the early 1930's judging from the antique trucks, surrounded by a small but dense crowd gathered at the end of a pier ready to board a ferry to cross the strip of water that separates the foreground from a hilly background across the bay. The movement of the rowboats anchored in the harbor suggest that the water is quite choppy. This rather appealing scene, presumably of Gloucester or Monhegan has, for many years, greatly enlivened the space above our livingroom’s fireplace.
Influenced by our slowly gained, newly acquired knowledge that there was more, – far more – to modern art than just the unique, personal interpretation and expression of a subjective experience, we decided to sit on our hands for a while and just watch, and read some more, before exploring this latest discovery in some greater depth. We knew we were way over our heads but had fun and gained great satisfaction doing it.
In the early 1960, our laboratory recognized a new, previously unknown relationship between the enhanced clotting activity of blood observed in patients with advanced liver cirrhosis, a fact first reported by us in Surgery in 1964. (11) This unusual clotting activity was attributed to the diseased liver’s failure to remove a toxic, presumably bacterial derived, product that escapes from the intestine. (We postulated it might be endotoxin, a component of the gram-negative microorganism E. coli), a fact confirmed some eight years later in two papers published back to back in a 1972 issue of Lancet, that reported the enhanced antibody response to E. coli in the blood of patients with advanced liver cirrhosis.(12) As is commonly the case, this confirmation of an earlier insight resulted in a flood of corroborating studies that appeared from all over the world.
After some serious reading on the latest developments in art, during our gallery hopping we zeroed in on the latest approach in artistic interpretation that had been developed by a small but diverse group of New York artists, a new kind of intuitive approach called Abstract Expressionism. These artists developed a unique style of expression, in which each one adopted his or her own, distinct, abstract idiom, one that clearly distinguished, even when seen from a distance, its creator.
The very first painting of that genre I saw that gave me a real jolt; – a deep, physical, in-the-gut reaction, one not unlike the kind I would experience on becoming privy to a previously unknown scientific insight. The occasion was both unexpected and quite prosaic. While wandering one day in the late 1960s through the Parke Bernet-Sotheby auction galleries, I came suddenly upon a small oil that hung against the purple, slightly grimy velvet background surrounded by a host of other pictures. Catching sight of it, — this 14 x 12 oil that showed only a few bold, black paint strokes on its small, raw canvas in addition to the vaguely off-center rough partial outlines of a house -- blew me away. Enclosed in a simple Kulicki frame, this little piece that continues to knock my socks off happened to be part of a routine, secondary sale. The collection’s major pictures, assembled by the legal advisor to some of the group’s artists had been sold the previous evening when we had paid far too much for a small, colorful, fascinating gouache(13) done by a prominent artist represented by Alfred Stieglitz and a study for one of his major paintings.
The items on view during the secondary sale were just the remains of that same collection. A few of the pieces on display were truly fine works by what were then still lesser-known newcomers and artists considered second-tier, men like Larry Rivers, whose work was only occasionally being shown. The work that caught my eye and made my heart go faster was by Jack Tworkov, an artist, I learned subsequently, who was head of the art department at Yale University and a friend of Willem deKooning, the Dutch house painter who had turned into a major abstract expressionist(14). Tworkov’s small painting was entitled House of the Sun. The moment I saw it I became a seriously committed collector of modern and contemporary American art.
Excited and determined to add it to our collection, we did so a few days later. We still love the little oil. And the Ortman and Stamos that we purchased that same day.(14) Tworkov’s painting made us really look and read, and read and look some more.
Once we decided to collect only works by twentieth-century American artists we found that just as in science, there was an extensive literature on the subject. So in the course of time we acquired our own, wide-ranging, comprehensive art library.
Besides visiting art galleries, auction houses and museums, we became voracious and tireless sightseers of our city for which we had developed a deep affection and which we had come to admire for its cosmopolitan flavor and its enormous diversity. There was so much to see we delighted in these walks. At almost every turn we met with an unexpected surprise. For instance, during the Christmas season my wife and I would take the subway to the southern tip of Manhattan Island and then walk back from Battery Park to our apartment, more than a hundred city blocks, always by taking a different route. We had dinner along the way in one of the numerous, small, Eastern European basement restaurants, where the food was different and delicious. We never dropped in on the same place twice.
Around 10th Street, we would always head straight for Strand, the bookstore, at the corner of 12th and Broadway. It became part of our regular routine, – like a ritual, sacred, – because books, to us were both humankind’s proudest achievements and our main source of new information. Strand, its alleged claim to fame was its ”eighteen miles of books” – new, used and classical, representing literally every subject ever known. We didn’t know if the store’s claim of the number of miles was correct or not, but who cared? It had books galore, enough to keep us busy for the rest of the day and, hopefully, many still to come!
The shop, like the streets of New York, was a controlled chaos of a kind that was unusual for a book emporium of its size. It was located in an old, dilapidated building. Upon entering, you first encountered tables covered with books that had their spines turned up. People, young and old, men and women, would flock around these tables like a swarm of bees buzzing eagerly above their favorite flower patch. These tables held mostly review volumes, books sent by their authors to the book reviewers of New York’s many magazines, newspapers, and radio and TV stations for their comments and evaluation. Most were still unread, as those who had received them – in hopes of a review and positive publicity – had coldly and heartlessly sold them, often unopened, to the bookdealer instead. If you were unknown, you would likely stay that way unless by a fluke or a fortunate coincidence, someone happened to skim your work, and get caught up in its content. The few authors who made it were usually recognized by older, well-established colleagues who then recommended them to their own agents or publishers.
Everyone searched among those tables for those few books that had been reviewed favorably by the New Yorker, or the NY Review of Book. Those few choice items wouldn’t remain on the tables very long.
In addition, Strand featured numerous tall book-cases that occupied most of the store as well as a large crowded basement with stacks of books, a seemingly endless supply. Every category seemed to have its own appointed place. We usually headed sooner or later for the art book section, arranged neatly in tall cases flush against the far right-hand outside wall. This would keep us occupied for hours, – happy hours during which we read by ourselves or softly to each other, in the company of the numerous other searchers. All of us were looking for that rare nugget or the even more precious lucky find, the one that, unexpectedly, would turn the day into a truly memorable occasion.
When we found a book that we ‘couldn’t live without’, we carried it gingerly to the front desk where they kept it for us, added to those we had already put aside. The hours dwindled away as we moseyed along, moving slowly among the tables and bookcases before settling the bill and heading for home, schlepping our latest hoard along with a badly wrenched shoulder, as this well- protected ball joint was stretched painfully to its outer limits by our burgeoning book collection.
It’s hard to escape the notion that one’s captivation with a specific movement in the visual arts is somehow related to the conception of the creative process itself or, more specifically, with the impetus behind one’s own research. Inspiration or a new insight during one’s investigative work often comes when least expected. Albert Einstein expressed the opinion that science had an emotional or intuitive rather than a logical basis (15). These rare momentary new insights might redirect the work towards a different tangent than the one you were taking that moment. And where some bore fruit, others failed miserably. B. Croce wrote that art is an intuitive knowledge based on images, rather than on concepts.(16). In my own experience this is true for science as well.
Attempts to explain, in retrospect, how a new idea is arrived at are surely not quite as one remembers it. To quote from a report by T.H Maugh: “Innovations, for the majority of people, are essentially a pre-verbal process, and the necessity of translating that thought process into words almost certainly alters the perception of the process”. (17) Yet, on occasion one knows precisely how or what, or when and where the new insight occurred. For instance, in his autobiography: What Mad Pursuit. A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, Francis Crick remarks on Sidney Brenner’s sudden discovery, during a heated discussion, that RNA was added to the ribosome (as a short-lived messenger RNA intermediate) in protein production.: “Suddenly Brenner let out a loud yelp. He had seen the answer. The sudden flash of enlightenment when the idea was first glimpsed (the italics are mine) was so memorable that I can recall just where Sidney (Brenner), Francois (Jacob) and I were sitting in a room when it happened.”(18)
One has to assume that both scientists and artists receive their insights from the same source. That’s why it’s possible that the captivation of art, especially the art of one’s own time, follows a certain logic. It is exciting and just as fascinating as one’s own research, even if only a few people seem to appreciate it sufficiently yet.
What is striking to me is that art, or any particular artist’s expression of an evanescent experience, reflects on how you yourself perceived the reality that the artist is trying to depict. The art expresses an expectation, realized somehow, but also the recognition that it is as it should be represented, and yet imaged in a personal way. A painter has just paints and brushes and a flat surface with which to depict sensations or impressions of a multi-dimensional world into shapes and colors that speak to us. The personal vision, sensitivity, and sharpness of perception that he or she exhibits in the execution of the work has to converge to make it an unique reality.
The joy of discovery kept us searching for more and better examples. Both my research and my art appreciation fed on each other. They appeared to have the same wellspring.
During an extended trip in the summer of 1970 to present a paper on our latest work, my wife and I visited Mexico and Guatemala. After a busy week’s sight-seeing in Mexico City, we went by bus to Oaxaca, where we spent another week and made a one-day side trip to Monte Alban. From Oaxaca we took the 4 a.m. bus to St Cristobal de las Casas, where we spent another week. And from there we took an ancient rattletrap of a bus to Guatemala City. Farmers and their wives and children, whom the driver picked up at the side of the road, traveled inside this aged vehicle, while their livestock – mostly chickens, but occasionally also a pig or goat that they had in tow – traveled on top.
Having thus become broadly exposed to the local cultures, we became intrigued by the abundant pre-Columbian art we saw. Hence, in December 1971, on a cold but bright Saturday morning, we dropped in on Arte Primitivo, a second-floor gallery at the corner of Madison Avenue and 62nd Street, that dealt exclusively in pre-Columbian art. Inside, we found large wall cases that displayed strange, exotic pre-Columbian tomb pieces that formed a striking contrast to the tall contemporary bookcases containing a wide selection of volumes dealing with the many different pre-Columbian cultures. Easy chairs arranged around a low, glass top table invited a weary visitor to linger a while, pick up a book and leisurely browse in it. The owners, – the Kaplans, an elderly couple, – introduced themselves and encouraged us to ask questions. We were soon involved in a lively conversation. When the Kaplans learned that we knew very little about the artifacts they were dealing in but were greatly intrigued and found them fascinating, they convinced us to buy Hans von Winning’s book as the authoritative, up-to-date tome to take home and study as an introduction.(19) We took their advice.
This chance encounter blossomed into a friendship in the spring of 1972, when the Kaplans invited us, together with some of their more committed collectors who had bought from them before, to attend a series of ten private, three-hour lectures, one on each of the different pre-Columbian cultures. The lectures were in their gallery on successive Monday nights by a young, enthusiastic Mexican anthropologist who was finishing his Ph.D. at one of the state’s universities. Juan had discovered, during a dig in Teotiahuacan, the important “poco loco” duck pottery vessel that since has found a place in Mexico City’s famed Anthropological Museum, which houses a wide-ranging exhibition we so enjoyed that we had visited it several times. As a very knowledgeable and committed tutor, he brought this complex subject soon into a far clearer perspective, using artifacts displayed in the gallery as examples of each culture so that we developed a better understanding and deeper appreciation for these wonderful, mysterious and ancient pieces.
Initially, we collected in this new, totally different field like the proverbial amorous porcupine, – very slowly and cautiously. But as all experienced collectors know, the desire to possess grows very fast! And like the paintings we were acquiring, here, too, we tried to obtain the best and most outstanding, spectacular examples, spending whatever it took, since we felt that we might as well enjoy these new treasures. Just to be sure that each piece was authentic - there were at the time already many fakes in circulation - we had every new acquisition checked by Dr Gordon Eckholm, the curator of Meso-American Art at the American Museum of Natural History on West 77th Street, whom by then I would see so often that he occasionally took the time to teach me the finer points of our latest acquisition by comparing it with some of the numerous examples stored in its large wooden cabinets that lined the wide, high-ceilinged halls just outside his office.
Through the Kaplans and the seminars they offered, we soon befriended a number of other truly committed collectors. In their apartments we would meet occasionally major dealers in American paintings and other collectors whom we eventually befriended as well despite the fact that they were quite a bit older than us. From then on we would arrange to meet these new friends at special occasions in the city or visited with them in our own or in their apartments.
Besides the Kaplan’s we dropped in on the other major Pre-Columbian art dealers in New York, including Ed Merrin, Ken Bauer of the Land’s Beyond, and Mr. Komar, and later also Mr. van Rijn, the Amsterdam dentist-turned-dealer, whose spectacular, well-appointed establishment, Gallery Khepri, was located on Museum Plein just across the street from the Rijksmuseum. We bought a few uncommon items from each of them.
During a visit to his establishment, one dealer told us in strictest confidence that Dr. Dockstader, the director of the American Indian Museum on the Upper West side had been let go for allegedly selling objects from the vast museum collections stored in its warehouse in the Bronx, an allegation that was hard to substantiate since all the stored artifacts remained un-catalogued. He also mentioned that the present curator, Dr Wilcox, was starting to record their extensive collections and was anxiously looking for volunteers to help him in this endeavor.
When she learned about this, my wife offered her services one day a week and drove the first time to the museum’s Bronx warehouse in our car. When she returned in the evening she told excitedly about the incredible size and scope of this latest project – rooms, and more rooms, all filled with hundreds of Native American beaded dresses and vests, Navajo blankets, jewelry, baskets from all the different regions, Pueblo pottery, all so beautiful, different and intrinsic in form, size, shape, and design. There were also thousands of arrow heads, axes and shields, and rooms filled with moccasins, leggings, hide dresses, vests, kuchinas, tomahawks, clubs, drums, rattles, ornaments, parfeches, feather war bonnets, saddles, pouches, pipes, cradle boards, gun cases, holsters, spear heads, fetiches, knives, sheaths, dolls, masks, rattles – a collection so extensive that it was really too much to comprehend.
While she was telling me this, I happened to notice that the hubcaps of our car were missing. So the next week when she returned to the Bronx, she took the subway instead. She kept this up until a major part of the collection had been registered on IBM cards. She came to regard her time spent in those rooms as a great learning experience.
Antoinette Kraushaar, the highly regarded doyenne of New York’s art dealers was a tiny slip of a woman with a forceful but very pleasant personality.(20) She was in her late seventies when we befriended her. We dropped in at her second-floor corner gallery on Madison Avenue close to the Whitney Museum whenever we were in the neighborhood. Early on my wife had bought a Peggy Bacon water-color, the Haunted House, from her. Painted in 1971, just before the artist was going blind from macular degeneration, it would become one of her last works. In 1976 this picture was shown in the Peggy Bacon show at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.(21).
Whenever we visited the Kraushaar Gallery, Antoinette would engage us in a discussion of one of the pictures she was showing that week. Generously, she allowed us more than a brief glimpse into the workings of the art world, well before art collecting would become more popular(22). Later, she invited us to her apartment on East 79th Street for afternoon tea and a look at her marvelous collection of important oils by Glackens, Bellows, Henri, Shinn, Sloan, and Luks. An especially appealing full-length portrait of her, done by George Luks at the time of her highschool graduation, was prominently displayed above the fireplace. The painting is presently in the Brooklyn Museum.
Whenever we visited her gallery Antoinette would treat us almost like family. We cherished the engaging, vivid stories of her early experiences as an art dealer with her father; or how Pene du Bois had taught her in her youth about painting, and how much she had learned about art, – not from books, but from listening to the artists discuss their work among themselves. She also told about the hard times they had experienced during the Depression, of being unsure from one day to the next if the gallery would survive. She always showed us the latest pictures she had acquired either in a private sale or at auction. She was a candid, very gentle and sophisticated lady who was easy to love.
One night we had Antoinette over to our apartment for dinner together with the Levitts. Irv Levitt who, as a senior partner of the Kennedy Gallery was a friendly rival of hers, had known her for years.(23) Those two really hit it off. It became one of those evenings that you wished would never end. Had it not been for the Levitts leaving town a short time later to return to Detroit we would surely have repeated the occasion. After we left New York, we would see Antoinette whenever we visited the city. Amazingly, she lived well into her nineties, dying rather suddenly long after I had retired.
After placing it in its current context, I believe the question posed at the start of these brief and casual reflections based on fleeting, intimate reminiscences can be answered in the affirmative. It would seem from the admittedly limited examples that there is indeed some kind of correlation between collecting and the urge to pursue research. In certain instances, the one drive seems somehow to predispose to the other a fact that, to my knowledge, has never been recognized or acknowledged before.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- References:
1 Founded in 1928 by Samuel Spanierman at 5 E 59th Street, the Savoy Gallery moved later to E 50th Street. Today, Samuel’s son, Ira, operates a major American art gallery, the Spanierman Gallery, on Madison Avenue.
2 O’Kelly was born in Dublin in 1853 and studied art in Paris under Bonnat and Gerome. Initially, he painted landscapes in Brittany. Subsequently, he lived in London before settling in the United States where he died in 1926. A website entry indicates that in May 2010, Sotheby’s in London sold a 25 x 36 inch painting of his for 5,000 GBP.
3 In the course of time, we got to know in my days at New York Hospital several physicians on its staff who were ardent and proud collectors: Dr. Dragen Borovac, an anesthesiologist, collected: impressionist paintings, Dr. Russell Patterson, a neurosurgeon, collected Abstract Expressionists, Dr. Ferrarain a radiologist, collected F. Toledo’s drawings, the hand surgeon, Dr. Jim Smith, was known for his toy collection, the elderly pathologist, Dr. Ryan, had an mixed eclectic collection, and the Weksler, husband Mark and his wife Babette, collected rugs and paintings.
4 See T Paoletti: From Minimal to Conceptual Art: Works of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, Washington D.C.: National Endowment of the Arts, in association with the National Gallery of Art, 1994. Phoebe Hoban, called Herbert and Dorothy Vogel “postal-clerks-turned-art-mavens.” (see Basquiat (New York: Penguin, 1998, pg 65). According to a report in the Oct 28, 2008 issue of the Antiques and the Arts Weekly, the Vogels donated 50 works of their collection of 2500 contemporary art works to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, in Richmond.
5 Our unceasing interest in art would confirm the experts observation that, ”the visual system is refined by visual input.” Looking at art not only gratifies the senses, it also trains the eye to discriminate and judge, to develop the ability to learn and to appreciate art and recognize quality, beauty and meaning. Joseph Alsop in: The Rare Art Tradition, the History of Collecting and its Linked Phenomena.. Harper & Row Publishers, Cambridge et al, 1982, made similar observations.
6 Calvin Tomkins: Merchants and Masterpieces. (New York: Henry Holt, 1970).
7 Initially, we considered our collections as just a hobby, not as an investment. Only much later, after we stopped buying, and art prices started to escalate, did it occur to us that quality art might well be a safe and suitable hedge against inflation However, art prices, like the stock market, tend to reflect the state of the economy. A healthy, growing economy is accompanied by firm prices especially for the more unusual, rarer and outstanding items.
8 M Rheims: The Glorious Obsession. Memoirs of One of the World’s Greatest Auctioneers and Collectors. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975).
9 Art appreciation may have a definitive neurologic and genetic basis. To quote R.R.Grinke: “As Asperger put it , in the context of art:: “Autistic individuals can judge accurately the events represented in a picture, as well as what lies behind them, including the character of the people represented and the mood that pervades a painting. To paraphrase, these “abnormal” children had a skill for appreciating visual media that most “normal” adults do not achieve.” (Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, (New York: Basic Books, 2007, p 58).
10 Tomkins: Merchants and Masterpieces, 350.
11 H. Gans, “Study of Fibrinogen Turnover Rates after Total Hepatectomy in Dogs.“ Surgery 55 (1964):544.
12 H. Gans, K. Matsumoto, and K, Mori: “Antibodies and Intravascular Clotting in Liver Cirrhosis,” Lancet 1 (1972):1181.
13 S.P. Wilkinson, et al: “Relation of Renal Impairment and Haemorrhagic Diathesis to Endotoxaemia in Fulminant Hepatic Failure,” Lancet 1 (1974): 521. and many others.
14 Evening sales at Sotheby-Park Bernett’s were gala events, reserved for selling the most important art works. Those, who attended, both bidders and watchers, often dressed in formal attire and these occasions would occasionally turn into quite a show.
15 Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the New Yorker, rated de Kooning “the greatest of American painters, and lesser only than Picasso and Matisse among all artists of the twentieth century.” (New Yorker, Sept 26, 2011, p 122).
16 D. Overbye: Einstein in Love, (New York: Penguin Books, 2001,.p 337).
17 B. Croce (1866-1952): The Essence of Aesthetic. translated D. Ainslie. (Londo: Heinemann, 1921).
18 Hasso von Winning: Pre-Columbian Art of Mexico and Central America, (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1968).
19 Antoinette M Kraushaar (1900-1992), when we knew her, operated the Kraushaar gallery founded by her uncle Charles in 1885 and later joined by her father. She took it over after her father’s death in 1942. The gallery initially sold French art, but later took up American art instead, specializing in the members of the Ashcan group whose estates (Glackens, John Sloan, Jerome Meyers and Gifford Beal) she represented. Later, she also showed contemporary artists, mainly Karl Schrag, John Helliker, John Koch and William Kienbush (whose picture in the library of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical College we had greatly admired). Collectors who patronized the gallery included Duncan Phillips, Chester Dale, and the Rockefellers.
20 The exhibition catalogue, Peggy Bacon, Personalities and Places, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975, Washington DC, contained an illustration of Haunted House, the picture that Antoinette Kraushaar had sold to my wife. (on p 51, as fig 48).
21 The New York Times art critics at the time, principally Hilton Kramer, reported unchallenged on the visual arts as the ultimate (but arbitrary) tone setter and tone setter till Tom Wolff challenged them in: “The Painted Word,” Bantam Books, New York 1975, a satire that achieved rapidly many printings. According to Wolff’s tongue-in-cheek estimate the entire art world consisted at that time of 10,000 souls, with approximately 400 in the USA, a figure that probably wasn’t far off the mark.
22 Irv Leavitt was a Detroit pediatrician, whose art collection we had learned about from Lipman’s book: The Collector in America, (New York:: Viking Press, 1970) and whom we befriended after his two sons approached me to work in my research lab during summer vacation. He was a close friend of Larry Fleischman, the owner in the 1970s of the Kennedy Gallery of American Art, and founder and publisher of the Archives of American Art before the Smithsonian Institution took over its publication.