What Goes Round Comes Around

I love following how taste changes, how the younger generation looks at things differently than we did. No matter what age you are, you look at the younger people and don’t understand. I can give you an analogy that pertains to many areas of life: My mother took some medicine that had been declared bad for her at one time, and then later was told to take it. She said, “If I live long enough, what was bad for me is good for me again”!

Which brings me to this headline that I so enjoyed reading in an article by Vivienne Chow in the October 6 issue of Artnet, “Why are Young Collectors Buying Old Art?”. Needless to say, young people usually like the art of their day. Young collectors are dazzled by the hype that accompanies record prices; that same press attention is one reason some mega millionaires and billionaires compete to set records and bask in the publicity.

This article focuses on the Frieze Masters Fair for art before the 21st century. Started in 2012 by the organizers of the annual Frieze fair for contemporary art, which has been a fixture in the London art scene since 2003, the “Masters” Fair is now run by Emanuela Tarizzo. She was formerly director of the Tomasso Gallery in London, which sold European sculpture, old master paintings, and ancient art, with a specialty in Renaissance bronzes. Ms. Tarizzo speaks of the common language of art, how it can bring together various cultures and tell “the broader story of humanity”. The 2009 graduate of the Courtauld Institute looks forward to a “dialogue with contemporary audiences”. 

Tarizzo is hoping to bring knowledge and rigour to strengthen the fair's position as a bridge between the past and present.

Photo by Elaine YJ Zheng

The article points out that auction sales of Old Masters have grown by 24% globally during the first half of this year. What do you know, it says this is partly due to the material that is being offered! This is not to say that now the younger generation of collectors will suddenly abandon the contemporary and focus on collecting the old, but, as they are being introduced to it they are open to mixing older work in with their contemporary acquisitions.

In this respect, art fairs are so valuable as they present a broad range of available works without the pressure. If you visit an art gallery, you will see what the dealer specializes in. Auctions are organized around special areas of art. You have to understand what you are looking at, the context and condition of the work, whether the estimate is in line with similar work, and finally, what you are willing to pay for it. Here are illustrations of a gallery, which was once mine, an auction, and a Frieze fair.

I was trained that it was best to specialize, even in our private collection. When we bought our first Native American work of art by a Hopi Indian and I said to my wife, "Now we can start a collection of Indian art." She practically yelled at me, “NO”, we cannot learn about all Native American art. We need to focus on one of the many different cultures. We chose to stick with collecting Hopi, deepening our understanding by visiting the Reservation. Years later, we broke that rule but still concentrated on the Southwest Indians. Would it have been so bad to learn about the Indians of the Plains as well?

At an art fair such as TEFAF in Maastricht and FRIEZE in London, you can compare and contrast, seeing what the art dealers are showing and learn about various kinds of art. You will encounter serious collectors who have come to add to their collections. You will find that dealers are eager to talk to you, not just to sell but also to cultivate possibly a future client. One of my clients used to talk about being able to learn from dealers and getting an education in art and the market for free. The truth is that the best art dealers are passionate about what they deal in and love telling people why.

To be fair, it is intimidating to walk into a gallery if you are not well-versed in its specialty, and we never want to embarrass ourselves. But the dealers and auction houses now have a new ally, the internet. You can preview from home the offerings of auction sales and dealers’ stocks. Excellent images are available, and Google or Reddit may provide answers to questions. Today’s generation can go to a fair, a dealer, or an auction house with a new degree of confidence, better prepared to evaluate what they are looking at from eras and places that would previously have been foreign to them.

With 120 dealers from 26 countries, I will finish with three examples from a recent Frieze Masters Fair.

To The Holy Sepulcher

There is one advantage to writing every week ... getting Press privileges at various museums. On our recent trip to New York, I was able to take advantage of this perk for the press preview for “To The Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum” at the Frick Collection. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is Christianity’s most sacred building in that it is believed to be the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection. The title of the show starts with “To” in order to show that, quite naturally, the Holy Sepulcher has been a destination for pilgrims of several Christian denominations for over 2,000 years. Catholic rulers over centuries sent magnificent gifts, most in the form of liturgical objects, to this holy repository. They continue to be used in ceremonies, and, in that sense, they are part of a living museum where the collection is both permanent and itinerant.

In the first half of the 14th century, the Pope created the Custody of the Holy Land, an organization of Franciscan monks entrusted with the care of its religious sites and these holy objects. The Custodians miraculously succeeded in hiding the treasures, protecting them from centuries of regional conflicts and upheaval. They were only discovered by art historians through the research of Alvar Gonzales Palacios in the 1980s. Xavier Salomon, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Frick, worked with Fra Stéphane Milovitch, Chairman of the board of directors of the Terra Sancta Museum, Director of the Cultural Heritage Office, Custody of the Holy Land to organize this exhibition. The Custodian spoke at the press preview, explaining the plans for a new museum at the site, open to the public.

Most of the photographs here are mine, taken at the press event, the only time that photography is permitted at the Frick, because in the relatively small spaces, particularly on the newly opened second floor, where the art would be at risk with people backing up and jostling each other.

A miniature 18th-century model of the Church introduces the exhibition.

From that point on, I was overwhelmed by the monumentality of the works, in every sense of the word. Many of the objects are over life size and obviously created by the foremost artists of their day. Moreover, most of the gold and silver work of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe was melted down, so many of these survivals are unique.

At the beginning of the show is an incredibly exciting object. This huge silver relief (67 5/16 X 78 9/16 inches) was created in 1736 in Naples and represents the essence of the site as Christ’s body rises between sleeping guards. The chased detail down to the mock wood frame becomes an integral part of the majestic whole. My second image, showing someone reading the label, is to give an idea of its scale.

Photo courtesy of the Frick

It was decided that the exhibition would focus on textiles and metalwork from the collection. Although I am concentrating on the metal work I cannot neglect examples of the textiles, that includes the set of vestments in the altar scene in front of you as you enter the show; one of the vestments with the Coat of Arms of Louis LXV, created in 1741 of Lampas, brocade liseré and satin ground; finally a detail of the coat of arms from a different vestment. All look as fresh and vibrant as when they were made, and the quality is incredible. (Images (3) Entry, Vestment and detail Coat)

Getting back to the metal work, this is one of a pair of Torchères made in Venice in 1762 from the Al San Lorenzo Giustinian Workshop. You can see how tall they are from the guard standing next to it. A detail shows the workmanship. Seeing them up close rather than from further back in a church or cathedral was incredibly exciting.

A singular, magnificent object, the Throne of Eucharistic Exposition, is given pride of place in the installation. The tour de force of gold, gilt copper, glass, and precious and semi-precious stones was made by the goldsmith Antonio de Luarentiis in 1754. Emblazoned with the arms of King Charles of Naples and his wife, Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, It was sent from the Kindgdom of Naples to Jerusalem the following year to serve as a setting for the presentation of the rulers’ gifts of a monstrance or this crucifix in gold, lapis lazuli, glass, quarts and jewels, alternating in place according to the religious occaision.

I am not sure if a museum exhibition can give you a spiritual experience, but this one certainly inspires awe.

Quotes for These Times

I collect quotes and have done so for decades. I do not collect on one subject, but just the quotes that have some special meaning to me. In the past, when I wrote on this subject, my Missives accentuated the arts. But these are difficult times, and what is happening in the world, and particularly in the United States, is not new, just more extreme. I have indicated the original authors when they were indicated in my original notes. My comments will be in italics.

Unfortunately, this is a truism:

"It's the nature of warning signs that they are ignored."

Books have been written on this subject, but do people listen?

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." 

(Archbishop Desmond Tutu).

A scary prospect for us all:

"It is dangerous to be right when the authorities are wrong." 

(Voltaire) 

We have seen this in so many places in recent times: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

(Nietzsche)

This one I had to think about for a while, but when I could think of examples, I understood:

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

(Voltaire)

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist." 

(Hannah Arendt)

This may not be true for all, but it is for me:

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that the nobody believes anything any longer” 

(Hannah Arendt)

When we read the news these days, we must remember that:

"The pen is only mightier than the sword if you are allowed to use the pen."

(Mark Steyn)

&

“Freedom of the Press is only guaranteed to those who own one."

(Journalist, A.J. Liebling)

I believe I remember an example of this from a few years ago:

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and holding a bible." -Generally attributed to Sinclair Lewis

Let us hope that Winston Churchill was right when he said:

"We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have exhausted all the other possibilities."

A Puppet Show

The artist Gustave Baumann (1881-1971) is celebrated for his woodblock prints that capture the essence of New Mexico, as I have written and illustrated a number of times in my Missives. The comprehensive holdings of Baumann’s work at The New Mexico Museum of Art here in Santa Fe have provided the material for a retrospective which features not only his prints and paintings but his rarely seen marionettes.

His daughter, Anne (1927-2011), was responsible for helping to keep her father’s legacy alive, donating around 1700 of his works to the New Mexico Museum of Art and the artist’s archive to the New Mexico Museum of History. Here is a photo from the late 1930s of puppets he made depicting his family.

The current exhibition, “Gustave Baumann: The Artist’s Environment,” which closes February 22, 2026, is curated by the former Museum Director, Mark White, and Thomas Leech, who salvaged the contents of the artist’s studio to recreate it in a permanent installation at the center of the history Museum’s historic printing press room. The exhibition is mostly about the prints for which the artist is best known, but it includes his paintings as well as the puppets. It is hard not to absorb some Native American culture living in the Southwest, and sharing this experience, my favorite puppet in the show is a figure of a Koshare, one of the sacred clowns in Hopi culture.

Baumann’s puppets are carved in the central European tradition. The artist was born in Magdeburg, Germany, but his family moved to Chicago when he was 10 years old. He mastered the art of wood carving in 1905 when he returned to Germany for a year of study at the Kunstgewerbe Schule in Munich.

On a 1918 visit to artist friends in Taos, he drove down to Santa Fe and fell in love with the place, and decided to make his home here. For the amusement of his daughter, he began carving marionettes for which his wife Jane (1892-1984) made the costumes. He wrote scripts based on local happenings and folk tales or stories by popular authors and built a puppet theater for their presentation. Here is his drawing for the theater.

Happily, the Museum has installed 3 stages with Baumann’s sets and complete puppet casts. This scene is from a 1933 melodrama called “Nambé Nell and the Golden Dragon Mine".

Another show, called “Birthday of the Infanta”, was based on Oscar Wilde’s story of the cruelty of a princess towards a hunchback dwarf. After the hunchback sees himself in the mirror for the first time and becomes so upset that he refuses to perform for the Infanta, who is most upset because her birthday party has been ruined... It is said that watching it, 8-year-old Ann burst into tears. The scene is clearly based on Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” featuring the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain.

Gala Chamberlain, a trustee of the Ann Baumann Trust and director of the Annex Galleries, has represented the estate since Baumann’s death. She quotes Baumann: "With the persistence of a kitten that decides to adopt you, marionettes seem always to have hovered around my studio door waiting for a favorable chance to slip in. While I was still in Nashville, they did get in for a time and diverted my attention long enough to cause several heads of Hoosier character... Marionettes, like actors, are a temperamental lot - they do talk back and scold the puppeteer if strings are not properly placed, but ultimately it becomes a one-sided argument that can be solved by better workmanship."

Baumann’s marionette shows took place between 1932 and 1941, but the Museum continues what has become a beloved tradition by using reproductions of original puppets in the collection for annual holiday shows. This last panorama is from one of Baumann’s Christmas Plays, which he created using figures from other plays he had done. Of course, they all had to include Santa Claus.

Although most of Gustave Baumann’s prints relate to the Southwest, his marionettes and their plays represent a fantasy world whose appeal is universal.

Jeffrey Gibson

Anyone who has been reading my Missives for a while knows my interest in the art of Native Americans. Having grown up in the world of Old Masters and European decorative arts, it was quite a transition for me. Because like all things, you cannot have a reasonable opinion until you know something about your subject, and I had no frame of reference for either the art of the Native American or them personally until I spent a lot of time in the Southwest.

As we get older, it gets harder to accept what is new to us, be it technology or art. We must cope with the former but not necessarily the latter. Therefore, it took some time until I could understand and enjoy 20th-century art, and I am still dealing with the issues of 21st-century art. Which brings me to a 21st century Native American artist by the name of Jeffrey Gibson (1972-), Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He was born in Colorado Springs and grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, and Korea. He received his BFA at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1995 and his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, England in 1998. Since then, he has worked in various places in New York State.

The renowned gallery Hauser & Wirth has represented Gibson since last year in collaboration with his longtime gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. They published his biography, credits, and exhibitions, which amount to 24 pages and start in 2005.

I must admit, however, that I first heard of him last year when it was announced that he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale becoming the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion for this international event.

Gibson with his Hawk Photo Eileen Travell

This multifaceted artist has recently been commissioned to create his first large-scale works cast in bronze, as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s program for the niches on its Fifth Avenue façade.

Photo by Jonah Rosenberg for the New York Times

The Met is calling this an exhibition because of its limited time on view and will end on June 9th. With the title “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, after a book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Gibson’s four sculptures, according to the Museum press release, “explore the metamorphic relationships between all thriving beings and the environment”, in other words, both are continually transformed by one another.

Photo by Isa Farfen for Hyperallergic

In 2015 Gibson started to assemble ancestral spirit figures of beadwork, textiles, and paint. His challenge for the Met commission was to translate his delicate structures into bronze weatherproof sculpture without losing their essence. Here is a photo by the artist from 2015 called, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” an ancestral spirit figure made from glazed ceramic and repurposed tipi pole, artificial sinew and copper jingles.

Each ten-foot bronze sculpture takes the form of an animal indigenous to the region; a hawk, a squirrel, a cayote and a deer, animals he has encountered where he lives in the Hudson River Valley and in the City’s Central Park. I was surprised to learn that you can find hawks in Central Park because all I remember are pigeons and squirrels! Here in the Southwest one can experience all four in a single week.

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

for the Metropolitan Museum

We like to pigeonhole everything, and it used to be argued that the Met should only have old art because there are modern art museums. By the same token, there is an element of surprise for museum goers in seeing indigenous artists presented outside an ethnographic context. To my mind art is art and categorizing original artistic creation as Black art, Jewish art or Indigenous art does an injustice to the artists and their work. I believe you should react directly to a work of art and only then deepen your understanding with information on the background of the artist.

The Art of the Greeting Card

I wonder how many of your grandparents got a greeting card or phone call last Sunday, September 7. I didn’t know it was Grandparents Day until it flashed across my screen on that day. It always seemed to me that it was the card companies that came up with some of these holidays, but in this case, it was a West Virginia housewife, concerned with the loneliness of the elderly. In 1970, she started the campaign, which resulted in President Jimmy Carter signing a Joint Resolution of Congress designating the first Sunday after Labor Day as a national holiday. So if you want to keep up, that is two cards in one week. Yes, there are Labor Day cards too.

This got me thinking about greeting cards. In all honesty, I send most of my greeting cards by email with e-cards. There is a better chance they will arrive on the right day, and even if I am willing to go to three stores, which I have done, searching for an appropriate card, I usually do not succeed. I end up with one that says “Thinking of you” or one for a different occasion that I adapt! However, if I go on one of the greeting card apps, I usually luck out.

In an article in the Michigan Daily by Kaya Ginsky under the title “The Unconventional Art in Greeting Cards” the author confesses “Greeting cards line my shelves and walls like artwork: a dog with a toilet joke from my sister, scoops of my favorite ice cream flavors falling from the sky from my parents, eight reasons my grandmother loves me (written by a copywriter), a joyful Yom Kippur message from a well-meaning Christian relative, a “drink up, it’s ur bday” from my hometown friends.”… art?

In our home, we leave them up on our dining table for a week and then store them so that when we are gone, our children can enjoy throwing them all out!

In the 19th century, artistic cards, first celebrating Valentine’s Day and later Christmas, were produced for sale.

ca. 1885

It was only in 1932 that Disney and Hallmark came together and corporatized the cards that we find in many varieties in pharmacies today. I don’t know if there are any stores left solely devoted to greeting cards, though there used to be. Still there are a few people who do publish their own photographs or designs on cards that can be found in specialty shops. No matter the talent of the maker, what is most appreciated is the extraordinary effort put into a hand-made card sent for a specific occasion.

Can a greeting card actually be considered a work of art? Certainly not if it is simply a reproduction of a known work. It might be, however, if it is an original artistic expression that goes beyond the occasion. The originals of cards sent to his friends by the renowned printmaker Gustave Baumann (1881-1971) have become valuable collector’s items.

Of course, a work of art created for you by a child or grandchild, no matter how young, may not be worthy of framing and putting up on your wall, but it is a treasure.

                        

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Master Works from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

It is most unusual to see an exhibition of older European Art in New Mexico, but a fabulous one has come to the Albuquerque Museum of Art. Two and a half years ago, Andrew Connors, Director of the Museum, got wind of the formation of the show and went to Germany to lobby for it.

Noting the dates that the show covers, you can see that it begins shortly before WW I and goes through the end of WW II. Though one cannot ignore the poignancy of the politics, the sheer quality of the art in the show is extraordinary. The works all come from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Berlin. Compared with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has 200,000 works of art, Berlin’s collection of 4,000 works is not large. However, judging by the 72 works they sent to Albuquerque, the collection is superb.

The exhibition opened at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and after the show closes in Albuquerque on January 4, 2026, it will go on to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I do recommend the catalog, which gives a fuller understanding of the period covered in the art, along with the background of each artist, accompanied by illustrations of remarkably high quality.

The exhibition here is installed in a totally comprehensible manner so that you can follow the periods and styles of the art. It gives emphasis to the politics while demonstrating the artistic achievements with some of the biggest names of the period.

In the Albuquerque venue, the show opens with a 1914 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) view of Berlin’s Belle-Alliance-Platz, later known as the Mehringplatz. At the center of the composition is the column that commemorates the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. By 1945, by the end of the bombing, only the column with the Goddess of Victory at the top remained.

In 1914, Kurt Gunther (1893-1955) painted the “Radio Enthusiast”. The sitter is wearing headphones to pick up foreign transmissions, as regular broadcasts only started in Germany 9 years later. The portrait brought back the image of a friend from my teenage years who was a ham radio operator, maybe minus the cigar. Gunther was a forerunner of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement that became the dominant style in reaction to German Expressionism and World War I, when everyone was sobering up to the realities of politics and the world.

In the section titled “Politics and War” is the George Grosz (1893-1959) “Pillars of Society” from 1926. I will leave it to you to find all the symbols of the coming Third Reich, such as the Swastika tie pin of the earless figure in the front with sword in hand.

The climax of the exhibition, as presented in Albuquerque, is a striking installation of two sculptures and a triptych.

The bronze on the left is by Georg Kolbe (1877-1947), called “Descending Man” (1939-40) and stands 7 feet high (without the pedestal). Commissioned by the City of Frankfurt am Main for a ring of statues in the city. It was in tribute to Hitler’s favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. I am fairly sure that he had Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” in mind. It was, of course, included in the 1940 edition of “The Great German Art Exhibition”. That took place every year from 1937 to 1944 to present the ideal of the Third Reich in contrast to the 1937 exhibition of “Degenerate Art”.

In the foreground is the bronze “Fallen Man” (1914-1916) by Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919) (see installation photo above). It was the artist’s response to the devastation of war, and soon after its creation, he committed suicide. In 1937, all his works were declared degenerate art and confiscated from German museum collections. It is in perfect contrast to Kolbe’s work and a foreshadowing of what was to come. 

The work with the greatest impact of the show occupies the center of the installation, a painting by Horst Strempel (1904-1975) appropriately titled “Night Over Germany” (1945-1946). This stunning triptych with a predella repeats the tradition of an altarpiece.

With Germany totally defeated, Strempel dealt with its shame of the preceding decade plus. The catalog entry states, “In the central panel, the artist processed his own experience of the concentration camps’ barbarism. The left wing depicts civilians’ fear during the nights of bombing; the right shows the terror of a hidden Jewish family. Only the lower panel, showing the resistance in the underground, hints at a vague hope of liberation.” Standing before it today, one shares the experience of its first public exhibition in 1947 when observers agreed it was a masterpiece “whose accusation stirs, whose silence speaks”.