Ingalls Library & Museum Archives

Did you know that one of the star objects offered for sale at the uber-prestigious New York Winter Antiques Show (January 22-January 31) has a Cleveland connection?

A seven- ton pink marble vase carved by the sculptor Paul Manship was commissioned in 1914 by the architect, Charles Platt, designer of William Gwinn Mather’s Bratenahl estate, “Gwinn.”

William Gwinn Mather president of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, and the first president of the Cleveland Stock Exchange also served as president of the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1933-1949. In 1929,he married Elizabeth Ring Ireland.

In 1912 Mather wrote Platt that an area near the entrance to the estate “looked a little weak and as if it needed some object. I believe one time you suggested a large urn or vase, and I do not want you to forget about this.” On May 15, 1914, Mather again wrote Platt, “I presume you think you are very busy, and consequently it may have escaped your mighty mind that you were going to have Mr. Manship prepare under your direction a design for a garden vase.” In the meantime, Manship was at work on a full-size plaster model which Mather ultimately approved. Once the vase was installed at Gwinn, Mather asked Platt to design a turntable for the urn so he could occasionally rotate the piece. Mather felt somewhat cheated since he could see only half of what he had paid Manship to create!

The urn depicts Native Americans on horseback, including battle and deer hunting Scenes, and is being offered for sale by the Gerald Peters Gallery of Santa Fe and New York for $6 million. It remained at Gwinn until 2007 when the estate was sold by Elizabeth Ring Ireland Mather’s heirs.

The magnificent estate on Lake Shore Boulevard occupies an exalted place in the history of American architecture and garden design. Designed by Charles Platt and landscaped first by Warren Manning and then redesigned by Ellen Shipman Biddle, Gwinn exemplifies the concept of gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, and the collaborative efforts of the Mathers, their architect, and landscape designers.

The renaissance of engraved bronze medals in late nineteenth century France was meteoric and vast. The renowned 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica states:

“It is in France that it has risen to the greatest perfection. Its popularity there is well-nigh universal; it is esteemed not only for memorials of popular events and of public men, but also for private celebrations of all kinds. No other nation approaches in excellence – in artistic feeling, treatment, and sensitiveness of execution – the artists and the achievements of France.”

The Exposition Universelle of 1889 provided thousands of reasons to create medals. Many of the artists achieved the highest public regard for both their glyptic skills and for creating very elaborate decorative items and jewelery, like René Lalique. Exposition winners received personally engraved medals, as seen by the one here created by Prix de Rome medallist, Louis Bottée, awarded to the metalworking enterprise Hurtu. Fame is seated on a branch blowing a trumpet, while the obverse reveals the layout of the exposition and the Eiffel tower. Its little leather case is original and is so cute that it makes me want to carry it in my pocket!

The smaller “Souvenir de L’Ascension” medal, either purchased or awarded to visitors arriving at the highest stage of the Eiffel Tower, is engraved by A. Charpentier. The 1889 date has been rubbed to a ghost, but the muscles in the worker’s back are clearly defined. The obverse has a view looking down on the top of the Tower’s peak, most likely a view from observed from an air balloon.

And Daniel Dupuis’ medal, so beautiful in its graceful rendering of La Republic Francaise, is testament to the Renaissance techniques the artists studied so well in Rome and Paris. Bottée and Dupuis were both recipients of the coveted Prix de Rome, a scholarship awarded by the French government to artists wishing to study in Rome.

The Library has put together a small display of these items in the Reference reading room, along with post cards of the Exposition Universelle and the Eiffel Tower. Come and see the last little bits of the exposition before Gauguin: Paris 1889 closes, and the Café des Arts moves on to Amsterdam.

The more you look, the more you find. Opening the rarely used volume, Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters, the reader is confronted first with a pair of ex libris pasted into the marbled end papers. Twin mottoes unfurl above and below the crest for The Lauder of Fountainhall Baronet, “Turis Prudentia Custos,” and, “Ut Migraturus Habita.” Translated from Latin, these read roughly, “Careful Watch over the Tower,” and, “Live, as if ready to leave.” The entry for Dick-Lauder in Burke’s Peerage and Barontage describes the arms as, “a griffin salient within a bordure argent,” and the crests, “a tower, porticullis down, the head and shoulders of a sentinel appearing above the battlements in a watching posture,” and finally the supporters, “two lions rampant.” Indeed, in the engraving we see all these, with the inclusion of a helmet from a suit of armor and the exclusion of a stags head. Perhaps the former belongs to the sentinel, presented above without his armor or weapon. The bookplate, engraved by William Home Lizars, is a fascinating example of how an artist might render the family crests and arms differently. To the right, a second bookplate is pasted in, for Antonin Natali-Seidel of Prague. Unfortunately the owners name eludes research, as well the artist signature is too small to be read.  The whimsical ex libris includes a nymph atop what appears to be winged pretzel. Interestingly, the nymph is poking the gentleman in front of him with an over-sized quill. The gentleman is surprised, but continues to walk, with a back scratcher over his shoulder and a medallion swinging about his neck, as he clutches his purse or perhaps the edge of his gown in the other hand. It is a comical scene, more common of personal bookplates. It might be assumed by the placement on the page of this second bookplate, that Mr. Seidel is the second owner of the book. This pair of ex libris, competing for the ownership of this biographical dictionary, are hidden in plain sight in the reference collection at ND35 .P6 1852.

Furniture is not what comes to mind when thinking of artist Paul Gauguin. He worked in many mediums, including ceramics, and it is known that Gauguin lamented the demise of the importance of decorative arts in late nineteenth century France. He considered sculpture and furniture equally in stature calling them “intelligent sculpture.” One known cabinet, made for his home in Copenhagen, can be seen in Fonsmark’s essay, ”Gauguin Makes Objects,” from the exhibition catalog, Gauguin and Impressionism. This story, found in the Ingalls Library clipping files, begins in the South Seas.

Artist Cora Timken Burnett and her husband traveled to Tahiti in 1923, searching for any pictures or carvings by Gauguin. They found none, but did connect with Gauguin’s son. It was, “in the interior that we were able to procure from him the last of Gauguin’s possessions,” a table and a bench, or settee, made of apatong wood, an indigenous redwood. The furniture was given to Gauguin by a Tahitian Chief, and carved by Gauguin during his last stay there. Returning to their unique New York estate situated high above the Hudson, Cora fit the furniture into her art collection.  In 1929, Cora put her collection up for auction at American Art Association / Anderson Galleries, where the table and bench were photographed and described in the New York Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune.

Headlined as “Rare Tahitian Art Objects,” they held no appeal to buyers, and sold for the paltry sums of $325 and $375 respectively. Who bought them? December’s 1929 Art Digest describes “the buyer being a young woman who kept her name secret.”

And then, almost thirty years later the New York Times reveals that Cora bought them back!

The New York Times article, dated March 17, 1960 heralds “$15 Gauguin Table Put Up At $50, 000.” Now being displayed at the Hammer Galleries in New York City, the table resurfaced three years before at a small auction house in New York. Mr. Jon Streep, a Park Avenue art dealer, purchased it for $15. Cora died in 1956, and the furniture went to auction locally. Mr. Streep found Cora’s husband, who related the story of the furniture and the secret buyer before Dr. Burnett himself, died in 1959.

And that, dear reader, is where the story ends, at least for now. We know that the bench did not come to public attention again. The table sells for peanuts and ends up in the Hammer showrooms for 50K. Did it sell? I called Hammer Galleries and told this tale of woe, hoping that they might find the trail in their records. So far, not a word. But wouldn’t you just love to know where these priceless pieces of furniture, carved with Polynesian figures, animals and a spider web, reside? My wish, I hope they are loved.

Well, dear reader, the holidays are upon us just as we await the first snows and shows of twinkling lights.  Last week, our lanterns appeared in and out of the museum building, bringing us delightful shapes and colors.  I see tins of home-baked goods and holiday greeting cards on corners here and there, as well.  Leslie and Lou have arranged a display of original art holiday cards from the Ingalls Library Archives.  These seasonal artworks were sent to museum directors through the years by artists in the community, many recognizable from May Shows past.  They are arranged in the small display case in the library reference room.  Notice, too, the wrapping paper that lines the bottom – it was designed for the museum store some years ago using our copy of Clement Moore’s The Night Before Christmas. “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”  Come visit us, for a little trip down winter’s memory lane.

Author Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, on which he wrote for nearly 50 years, is up for auction at Christie’s in New York. The machine, an Olivetti Lettera 32 is an unassuming light blue, worn on the edges. The author claims, in a typed letter of authenticity, to have never cleaned it except, “blowing out the dust with a service station air hose.” The typewriter, purchased for fifty dollars in 1958 is estimated to bring fifteen to twenty thousand dollars at auction for the Santa Fe Institute, a transdisciplinary research community. In this same auction, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Americana, the index cards on which Vladimir Nabokov wrote his final novel, The Original of Laura, are also up for sale. The work finally is being published, reproduced as a set of index cards this year by Knopf. The original is estimated to garner between four hundred and six hundred thousand dollars. If you prefer your authors slightly older and taller, several letters of Abraham Lincoln are included in the auction as well. The correspondence, including two pardons, offer a fascinating glimpse at excutive order in the middle of the 19th century. The catalog is on display in the recent acquisition racks until the close of the auction.

Gauguin’s 1889 fresco, Breton Girl Spinning can be seen in the final gallery of our exhibition Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889. It was made as part of the “decorative ensemble” for the dining room of the Buvette de la Plage, an inn at the tiny seaside village of Le Pouldu, France. Analysis of the paintings and decoration by Gauguin and his fellow artists is well documented, but the story of the discovery revealed itself to this reader while preparing for a book discussion of Gauguin’s Noa Noa, his Tahitian memoir. The Ingalls Library maintains artist clipping files, and what follows is the story found in newspaper clippings published between 1926 and 1950, buried in the eight Gauguin files.

In 1924, an American artist traveling in Brittany missed his bus. This student, Isadore Levy (and according to some versions, also Abraham Rattner) stayed for refreshment at the Buvette de la Plage, once known as the Maison Marie Henry. While waiting for the patronne to serve him, he noticed brightly colored paint peeking from the part of the wall where wallpaper fell away. Levy couldn’t resist the temptation, and peeled more paper from the wall. He recognized the signature, “P. Go.” “You have here a real Gauguin!” he announced excitedly. “Who is Gauguin?” the old woman asked, a little frightened for her guest’s sanity. “He was a great artist, one of the greatest of modern times. This beautiful work on your wall is his.”

Levy and three other artists pooled their funds to purchase the two Gauguin paintings, the “Maid” and a small white goose. They paid $2,000.00 for the wall, plus the cost of replastering and wallpapering the dining room. The frescoes were removed by the Louvre’s expert, M. Chauffrey, by drilling and sawing the bricks and securing the paintings with iron bars, cement, and wood frames. The photograph here from the New York Herald Tribune of 20 June 1926 states that “the murals are to go to a state museum.”

In 1927 Gauguin follower/Boston Herald correspondent Francis Dickie, sees them in Paris, at the Levy studio. Located at 15 rue Cauchois and situated in the shadow of the Moulin Rouge, they’ve “just returned from the expert hands of a Parisian restorer.” Dickie notes that the “pictures will be shown to art-lovers in New York, and probably other American cities in the future.”

And sure enough, they turn up in New York in 1931 at the Fifty-Sixth Street Galleries. According to the Chicago Evening Post Art World, of Jan.13, 1931, they were discovered by an American named Jan Ravey (same romantic discovery). Ravey was one of the four artists! It is noted in this article that these four artists, having paid off their indebtness and procuring authenticity by the Louvre’s curator, M. Jamont (1928), as well as several experts (Rosenberg & Bernheim) refused European offers of purchase, preferring to bring them to New York.

“Breton Girl Spinning” (then known as “Jeanne d”Arc”) reappears in Life Magazine on May 1, 1950. Levy and Rattner (now a prominent New York artist) kept the fresco “hidden away in a storage house.” They reveal that it will be put up for sale. The price? $25,000.00. The Life article has two wonderful photographs: one of the mural in situ, and a contemporary one of the proprietress sitting in her remodeled dining room in full Breton coiffe.

The frescoes, still owned by Levy and Rattner, were exhibited in Houston and New York, and published by John Rewald in his ground-breaking book of 1956. Rewald tells us too, that Gauguin pursued the daughter—the infamous Marie Henry! Gauguin created one of his yellow zincographs for the Volpini Suite portfolio with her likeness, the raven-haired beauty with her swan. And more shocking, Marie Henry falls not for Gauguin, but for his friend and fellow painter at the inn, Meyer de Haan, bearing him a child. Rewald suggests an atmosphere of jealousy… oh, one can only imagine!

“Breton Girl Spinning” is finally brought to auction at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1965. The painting is still the property of Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Rattner, of New York, (with, we later found, Isadore Levy) and titled “Jeanne d’Arc.” It sold for $65,000.00. When brought to auction again in 2002 as property of the Frederic W. Ziv Trust, it carried an estimate of two million dollars. It remained unsold (or, bought in), but it is now owned by the Van Gogh Museum. In our galleries, when I stood in front of it knowing all the details, I couldn’t help but feel in awe of a wall carried through two countries and over the Atlantic ocean.

Our book sale group meeting ended today with a spirited discussion about green initiatives and the small monthly sale we maintain near the circulation desk. Besides books and auction catalogs, could we add book jackets and slipcase boxes? At first we were all rather negative about it, but then thought, well, if it would keep these items out of the trash, why not? Many are beautiful, too lovely to add to the nation’s huge trash problem. Some of us have used colorful book jackets as gift wrap. And, really, most every one of us library nerds has a slipcase box filled with our own personal flotsam & jetsam parked in a corner of our desk.

So let’s get creative! Email or stop by and tell us what you think people might do with these paper items that we don’t keep. Bookends with pockets? Unusual coffee tables? Papier-mâché sculpture? For a dime or a quarter, what could you create to keep us green? Ooooooh, I know – THINKING CAPS!

One of the many joys found in the new East Wing is the establishment of the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries. For those of us keenly interested in the history of photography, as well as lovers of the contemporary photography scene, these three galleries provide a perfect venue. Currently on exhibit is France at the Dawn of Photography,” photographs taken contemporaneously with the life of Paul Gauguin, the subject of our current main exhibition. Curator Tom Hinson writes in our Members Magazine, “France at the Dawn of Photography is a snapshot record of France during the Second Empire: the grandeur of its capital city, the beauty of its natural resources, and the vitality of its population.”

Camille Dollard, "Self Portrait" 1997.56

The galleries beckon the viewer with portraits of celebrated French artists. The first image is a large daguerreotype, a self-portrait of artist Camille Dollard. He is, not surprisingly, posed with easel and brush but right next to him is a giant hookah! Oh, Orientalist man of romance and pleasure – what’s not to love? Pierre Petit’s Gustave Doré , looking sexy and cosmopolitan, leans toward the viewer with a bold stare. We see captured images of Paris before the “Haussmannization” of the city’s medieval streets in Charles Marville’s untitled cloud study. Here the distant dome of Les Invalides towers over the city, under a race of clouds that pattern light and gray. A rare snow scene in the forest by Eugène Cuvelier is a study of entwined winter branches creating an almost web-like image. And Behind the Troglodyte Barn – a title so intriguing that this viewer had to read the label before looking deep into the image (“troglodyte” is a medieval term used to describe political activists who found their way around property taxes by living in caves) is a stone arch and structure built into a rock formation. Tools litter the ground but no figures are present. Caves? I need more to this story.

Lastly, this viewer’s favorite photograph and the one that graces November’s Member’s Magazine cover: Courtyard with Painters, by an unidentified photographer. Tom Hinson describes it as, “a captured wealth of detail in an intimate slice of 19th century village life in northern France.”

And is it ever! Amid Normandy barns and coops, laundresses deal with overflowing baskets of laundry. Two artists are painting – one hugging a little girl with woman reading her letters at his side, and another working under bright umbrellas, his clay pipe clamped in his teeth. His canvas reveals a woman bent over her sewing. And to the right of our scene is the innkeeper with his fancy vest and bushy muttonchops. He looks like a character right out of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels. He faces the photographer, seeming to say: “Soyez le bienvenue! Qu’est-ce que vous voulez a boire?”

Yellow paper, yellow-back books, yellow prints. We are experiencing a tsunami of yellow for the opening of our exhibition, Gauguin: Paris 1889. The catalogue that curator Heather Lemonedes and Conservator Moyna Stanton labored over for years is finally here in the library! Their hard work has paid off handsomely, with groundbreaking scholarship and amazing loans from illustrious collections. The exhibition is beautiful – our museum staff is so talented.

The recreation of the exhibition installed in Monsieur Volpini’s Café des Arts, held on the grounds of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris is brilliant. Dr. Lemonedes tells us that the Volpini prints on canary yellow paper were available for sale, to be viewed upon request (none sold), but here, we have them all framed on view together. One may ask, why is this so important? For the museum visitor, it is an opportunity of a lifetime to see works of art on paper — our complete Volpini Suite (never before on public view) and compare them to other Volpini Suite prints and paintings from museum collections that live most of the time in temperature and light controlled security. Look at the hand colored version of “Dramas of the Sea” (Van Gogh Museum) — what exquisite detail! Below a calm blue sea, dangerous waves churn around a fisherman and his red boat, all constrained in its finite fan-shaped print. One has to see it in person to understand the effect Gauguin sought to convey. There is so much to discover here, so many works of art that the visitor might not see again. As our Chief Curator, Griff Mann says: “Don’t miss it — this is the only U.S. venue.”

The Ingalls Library had an opportunity to assist in procuring various works on paper in the exhibition: maps, books, and the rare poster announcing the Volpini exhibition. We found a 1901 treatise examining yellow dyes in paper pulp that was so helpful to our paper conservator. A gift book from the Butkin estate provides illustrated highlights of the 1889 Expo. And we used our antique postcards from France to add introductory images to the gallery walls. It was an opportunity to feel like an active, integral part of The Cleveland Museum of Art team.

Finally, mention should be made of the accompanying photography show in the East Building, “France at the Dawn of Photography.” Drawn mostly from The Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection of photographs, one has an opportunity to view three packed galleries with images taken during the lifetime of Paul Gauguin. And the admission is free! A follow-up post about the photography show will be forthcoming.