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Big Porcelain and Outsider Art at Christie's
58 Plays6 years ago
Ever wondered how the otherwise-unremarkable locales of Meissen, Staffordshire, and Sèvres became Europe's porcelain-producing polestars? Or what outsider artists like Bill Traylor and William Edmondson, discovered by the art establishment in the 1930s and ‘40s, made of their newfound fame? The experts at Christie's have the answers!
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Transcript
Americana Week at Christie's
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Speaker
Support for curious objects comes from Christie's.
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This January 17th, 23rd, and 24th, Christie's New York will present Americana Week, a group of three auctions that curate the beginnings, diversity, and burgeoning patriotism of a country's identity.
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Speaker
The sales feature an array of artwork and objects that range from outsider art and Chinese export porcelain to furniture, folk art, and silver.
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So hello, and
Meet the Hosts: Ben Miller & Michael Dias-Groffitt
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welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the Magazine Antiques.
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I'm Ben Miller.
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With me is Michael Dias-Groffitt.
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Hello, everyone.
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And we are
Inside Christie's Auction House
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sitting in a little known auction house in Midtown Manhattan.
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What is it called?
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Christie Manson Woods?
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Yeah, something like that.
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They might have shortened it.
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Yeah, that's right.
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Christie's, Christie's.
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You might have heard of it.
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And we're getting ready for the Americana sales here in January of 2020, which is always an exciting time of year for antique dealers who look forward to bolstering our inventory.
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but also, of course, for private collectors.
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And there are two specialists who have worked here at Christie's on a couple of those sales who are with us here today.
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Kara Zimmerman,
Exploring Outsider Art and Folk Art
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who's a specialist in outsider and folk art, in American art, and Becky McGuire, who specializes in the China trade.
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So these are two very different subject matter, and we're talking about two separate sales, and yet I suspect we might find some interesting ways that these two categories communicate with one another.
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And Kara and Becky, you've selected a couple of really fascinating objects for us to talk about today, and Michael and I are really eager to hear their stories.
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So, Kara,
Spotlight on Bill Traylor's Unique Art
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I want to start with you and just ask you to first give us a quick description of the painting that you're telling us about, which I actually saw a blown-up version of it in the display glass on the ground floor here that was coming in.
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It's a pretty impressive thing.
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Yes.
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Today we're going to be talking about a fantastic double-sided piece by an artist named Bill Traylor, who's one of what I call the old master outsider artists.
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He started creating art late in his life, was actually born a slave, worked on plantations and as a farmhand for most of his life.
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In the late 1920s, moved to Montgomery, Alabama and started drawing at some point between then and 1939.
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And his work started to be collected by a younger artist named Charles Shannon between 1939 and 1942.
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The drawing that we're looking at today, which is a double-sided piece, which is man on white, woman on red on one side and man with a black dog on the other side,
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is actually from an incredibly interesting collection.
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To
The Mystery of Traylor's Double-Sided Piece
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begin just looking at the object, we have on one side of the piece a fabulous image of a woman in a polka dot shirt and brown skirt pointing, gesticulating, possibly angrily, at a man who's smoking a pipe and holding a umbrella on the other side of the work.
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Many people can relate to this kind of image.
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This is a fabulous piece by Trailer for a number of reasons.
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First of all, you have half of the image, which is the size the woman's on, which has a red-painted background, which is incredibly unusual for Trailer.
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We see this only a few times.
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Another element that's really exciting is that if you look at it very closely, you can see there's actually an underdrawing of a vertical exciting event, as we would call it, that is visible underneath this final image.
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So this piece is actually serving as a template for some of the work that Traylor does in terms of figuring out his composition,
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We can see a little bit about how he works out these scenes, how they're supposed to fit on his page, what he does when he doesn't like them.
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One thing that is...
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particularly special about this piece, though, is that it has an entirely separate second son, which was something that we didn't know about when it first arrived here at Christie's.
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And when I unframed it, which was actually on my birthday, I found a full second son.
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Happy birthday, Kara.
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I've gotten it a long time.
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And it was not the Declaration of Independence.
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It was not.
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But...
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But this was an incredibly exciting find to see the second side with this black dog with this bright red tongue and these sharp ferocious teeth and this man sort of gesticulating off the page next to him.
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The scale
Art and Storytelling: Spielberg, Walker, and Traylor
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of the two figures is totally out of whack.
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The dog is almost bigger than the man.
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It looks like he's either standing on him or about to pounce on him.
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And this energy that you see on this side, this much more direct, immediate mark-making.
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is such an interesting contrast to the front of the work that we're seeing really Bill Traylor at his best and most exciting.
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This work has an incredible story to it.
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in that it was a gift from Steven Spielberg to the author Alice Walker when they finished making his version of The Color Purple, which is her Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
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And at the conclusion of the filming, he gave her this work.
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And he said to her, basically, I hope when you see the final film, you're not as angry as the woman on Reddit.
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Gosh.
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So he understood the emotional valence.
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He got it.
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He got it.
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So it's really such a fascinating gift for him to give her in that the trailer was an African-American from the South.
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working in the 1930s, lived through, you know, obviously early 1900s and that whole period of time, much like the characters in The Color Purple.
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He lived in a similar period through similar circumstance.
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And so he clearly was thinking very hard when he selected this as a gift, thinking about the resonance perhaps between the novel, the film, and this piece of art.
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I was so charmed to read Alice Walker's quote about the gift she received from Steven Spielberg.
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And I mean, here's some gift ideas for you, Ben, when you're thinking about me on my birthday.
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Could you read that quote for us?
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Absolutely.
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After Steven Spielberg completed filming The Color Purple in 1985, he gave me as a gift, man on white, woman on red.
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He was hopeful, he said with a smile, that when I saw the film, I didn't feel like the angry woman on red.
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I answered with a laugh, I hope so too.
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On my first viewing, a private one in San Francisco, I did have some reservations, but I soon came to realize that overall Stephen's The Color Purple is a masterpiece.
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So there's a happy ending.
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There's a happy ending.
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Let's come back to this in just a minute, but I'm already starting to see some parallels, and so I want to jump over to Becky for a second.
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Okay, these are a little bit forced, but we're talking, you've just told us about a work of art that has two sides to it.
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Becky, you're about to tell us about a work of art that is actually a pair.
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It has two sides to it.
The Significance of Chinese Export Porcelain
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You've told us, Kara, about a piece of what's deemed outsider art.
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Becky, you're going to tell us about a piece that comes from far outside the bounds of what...
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So specifically 18th century Chinese export porcelain.
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So tell us about this wonderful pair of objects coming up in the sale.
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I was actually thinking the same thing, listening to Mara's wonderful story about the trailer.
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In a funny way, there is a parallel, too, about the maker of the painting and the makers of this Chinese porcelain.
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What I sell in this sale is porcelain made in the heart of China.
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at Jingdezhen where the kilns were for European consumers and later American once we were a pep tree.
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Thousands and thousands of miles away, the two never met, and yet these highly sophisticated Chinese potters were creating these incredible works of art with incredible skill for their European and other Western consumers.
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And they were completely anonymous, a little bit like the outsider artists who
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although became well known later, were outside the academy, outside the established traditions.
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We really do not know any of the potters, painters, enamelers, even designers of these fabulous porcelains that were prized the world over because of course only in China could you make hard, true, white porcelain until well into the 18th century when
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We in the West finally caught up and they began making true porcelain at Meissen in Germany.
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So
Trading Soldiers for Vases: Augustus the Strong
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the Chinese potters were creating these incredible masterpieces like the vases you're referring to, which are almost the size of an average man in the 18th century.
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And still impressively large, make a huge statement when you walk in the room and see them beautiful baluster shaped with covers.
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They're often shown on stands.
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great halls or flanking a fireplace, flanking a doorway.
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They're known as soldier bosses, this form, this scale.
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And there is a real story to that.
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Augustus the Strong, the elector of Saxony and King of Poland, was a very, very rich man in the early 18th century and completely obsessed with Chinese porcelain.
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Saxony was very rich.
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They had mining.
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They had all the precious metals.
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control of them.
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They had tons and tons of money.
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And he would send agents scouring mostly to Amsterdam, where porcelain from China first arrived at the docks, looking for the best of Chinese porcelain.
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He accumulated thousands of pieces in his collection, much of which can still be seen at Brisbane in Germany today, where his palace was.
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He traded Frederick the Great of Prussia
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a regiment of soldiers for a group of Chinese porcelains which included a number of these giant vases.
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How did the soldiers feel about that?
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No, we don't really know that either.
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They were pretty anonymous for themselves.
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They were mercenaries, basically, and they belonged, in effect, to almost like slave.
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They belonged to the political leader who had their control.
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So bye-bye went the soldiers off to Prussia to fight for Frederick.
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They were also known as dragoons, so sometimes you hear the term.
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But today we call them soldier bosses, and everybody knows that these massive,
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Chinese porcelain boxes, which, by the way, were incredibly difficult to make.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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So take us back to China for a second, because as you mentioned, it took the Europeans a long time to figure out how to reproduce this technology.
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And that's because it wasn't easy.
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And especially it wasn't easy to make things that both looked good and wouldn't break.
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That's right.
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And that could be decorated properly.
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And my understanding is the larger the pieces, the harder it is to do that properly.
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And here we're talking about pieces on, as you said, really on an enormous scale.
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So how difficult exactly was it to produce a vase of that size?
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This is really
Crafting Complexity: The Porcelain Process
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about the largest thing you can produce in porcelain.
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It just won't stand up if it gets any bigger than this.
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And we know about this, how it occurred in the period because of it.
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French Jesuit priest who traveled to China, not only traveled to China and went to the court and so forth, but made his way to Ging de Genn, which was quite a journey.
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I don't know how many weeks or months it took him.
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He got there and he wrote these fabulous letters back to one of his Jesuit pals in France, which eventually were published.
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And actually, this was like corporate espionage.
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They actually were key to
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to Europeans finally, finally learning the secret of making truth for Islam.
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But that wasn't his intent.
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He had that wonderful Jesuit scientific mind and he really just wanted to know how everything was made and how everything was done.
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So his letters, which you can read online today, they were of course written in Latin, but you can read English translations.
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Thank you, Google.
00:13:17
Speaker
And they talk about things like how refined the clays were.
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There were specialists who dug up the clay out of the dry riverbeds.
00:13:25
Speaker
And that's secret number one of Jude Porcelain.
00:13:28
Speaker
You need the right clay.
00:13:30
Speaker
And it only comes from certain rivers.
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Speaker
Rivers around Leisland in Germany.
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Rivers around Seve in France.
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Speaker
Rivers around Staffordshire in England.
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So that's number one.
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Number two, you need to refine it like crazy.
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You sift it in all kinds of things.
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Get all the imperatives out.
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Number three, you need a particular combination of what they call in Chinese kaolin and potensa, which just means white bricks and hard stone.
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It's just two different kinds of basically broken down granite that you mix together with some slurry.
00:14:07
Speaker
And then the last secret is you have to, of course, you're going to fashion it into some sort of shape, and then you have to put it in the
00:14:15
Speaker
kiln at a very, very high temperature.
00:14:17
Speaker
And that's a really tough part.
00:14:19
Speaker
And of course, they did that without any kind of temperature control.
00:14:22
Speaker
You had to heat up that kiln for days.
00:14:24
Speaker
The kilns are made of brick.
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Speaker
You can walk into them.
00:14:27
Speaker
They're called beehive kilns.
00:14:28
Speaker
They're sort of like a, they look like a giant birthworm.
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Big lumpy things.
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They would
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put everything inside the kiln, light an enormous fire, wait for days to have it heat up to the right temperature.
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The way they checked for the temperature, they opened a hole in the top, like a chimney, and peered in.
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So the kiln masters always had their eyebrows and bangs burned off because they looked in to see the color of the coals.
00:14:57
Speaker
And then they let it cool off for a few days once it got hot enough to fuse the porcelain together, almost like the same way glasses make.
00:15:05
Speaker
And then they took it out again.
00:15:08
Speaker
And here in the catalog, you have quoted that Jesuit father saying, out of 24 attempted, only eight succeeded from a set of vases of this size.
00:15:20
Speaker
Correct?
00:15:21
Speaker
So he was specifically recording how difficult it was to make these things of very large scale.
00:15:27
Speaker
And of course, that was only the first step of the process, because then they had to, in that same journey from central China, all the way to the coast.
00:15:34
Speaker
Absolutely right.
00:15:34
Speaker
Barrels with straw going on donkeys or horses or in carts.
00:15:39
Speaker
And then, once they got to the coast, they had to go on ships all the way back.
00:15:42
Speaker
So there was a lot that went into these.
00:15:45
Speaker
The other aspect that's interesting to people who are interested in any kind of ceramic, because this is true wherever you make something out of clay, is
00:15:56
Speaker
The colored enamels, like on these baas, which are painted with exotic birds and all kinds of flowers, really a profusion of flowers growing from a sort of grassy knoll all the way around the baas.
00:16:10
Speaker
And then those scenes are enclosed by a series of elaborate borders with all kinds of patterning and color and gilt and little detailed vignettes interspersed in the borders.
00:16:24
Speaker
Those colored enamels have to be added after the piece is first fired.
00:16:29
Speaker
All the colors come from mineral bases.
00:16:31
Speaker
Cobalt blue, you can fire at once.
00:16:33
Speaker
So that's obviously cheaper.
00:16:35
Speaker
Right.
00:16:35
Speaker
Whereas these have red, they have yellow, they have blue and green.
00:16:39
Speaker
Exactly.
00:16:41
Speaker
I think we've landed on another commonality or connection because it's almost as if it's a miracle that these things were produced and shipped and that any arrived in Europe in one piece.
00:16:54
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And I think we'll return to this question of how that process was enacted as we continue our discussion.
00:17:00
Speaker
But it was also
Preservation of Outsider Art
00:17:01
Speaker
a bit of a miracle that Traylor's work was preserved.
00:17:04
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:17:05
Speaker
And also that of some of his contemporaries, other so-called outsider artists who are working in similar conditions, including some who are in this sale.
00:17:15
Speaker
So could you tell us a bit about that moment when these artists were, quote, discovered, we might say, by outsiders who...
00:17:25
Speaker
in the sense of cosmopolitan elites or photographers from New York or museum folks who came to the South, saw the work, and knew that it was special.
00:17:37
Speaker
It's very interesting when you think about outsider art and art group, if you think about the European predecessor to the field, when you consider that all of this work really would have been lost, but for somebody coming along and deciding it was worth saving, as you say.
00:17:54
Speaker
It's so hard to use the term discoverer.
00:17:58
Speaker
But in many ways, it's the simplest way to sort of express this idea.
00:18:05
Speaker
When you think about how this field began in Europe in the 1920s, really, going into the 1940s, the work that comes out of that school really was preserved because it was almost an offshoot of asylum art.
00:18:19
Speaker
And you have these psychologists and psychiatrists who would save the material...
00:18:24
Speaker
Mostly so that they could use it as a didactic tool or learning tool to see, for example, with some of these artists like Adolf Wolfley, to see whether they could diagnose some sort of schizophrenia or mental disorder by looking at the work, thinking about how the art could explain some of these psychological issues.
00:18:45
Speaker
And so it was preserved for that reason.
00:18:47
Speaker
Then in the 1940s, you have someone like Jean Zubuffet, who started his company of art birth with the focus of trying to think about art in its raw and untainted state.
00:19:00
Speaker
He spent most of his career trying to untrain himself.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yes, the great modernist preoccupation with de-skilling.
00:19:08
Speaker
looking at the work of, at that point, often people who were institutionalized, was a way to see that sort of raw creation without the intermediary of an art school or a teacher.
00:19:22
Speaker
When you get to the U.S. and you start to think about artists like Bill Traylor, you're seeing a slightly different sort of framework for this, but
00:19:31
Speaker
an idea that sort of remains is this sense of someone with a position of authority finding and realizing that these works, finding these works and realizing that they were something worth keeping, something worth preserving.
00:19:46
Speaker
And for every great master like Traylor or Edmondson that we have, you have to wonder how many we don't have because no one came along and found them.
00:19:55
Speaker
and felt that they needed to be initiated into this high art realm.
00:20:03
Speaker
In the case of Trailer, you have an artist named Charles Shannon who was a younger white artist.
00:20:10
Speaker
He wasn't the person who first saw Trailer's work, but he was the person who collected it.
00:20:16
Speaker
Between 1939 and 1942, he was the one who really amassed the collection of Trailer's art that we now have.
00:20:25
Speaker
And he spent the rest of his life basically trying to find homes for this work, replacing it and making sure that it was preserved.
00:20:33
Speaker
So you have this trained white artist going in and seeing this value and this unbelievable output and spending his life trying to make sure that other people saw it too.
00:20:50
Speaker
With someone like William Edmondson,
00:20:52
Speaker
who's another artist in this auction, you have an interesting parallel because he was also working in the South, also African American, creating around the same time, mostly in the 1940s.
00:21:04
Speaker
And
William Edmondson's Artistic Journey
00:21:05
Speaker
he was one who really was discovered, quote unquote, by the New Yorkists quite early.
00:21:12
Speaker
And he was actually the first black artist, the first African American artist to have a solo show at the MoMA in 1937.
00:21:20
Speaker
So he had his moment in that regard and then was subsequently, unfortunately, sort of forgotten for some time.
00:21:28
Speaker
But he was part of that moment where Alfred Barr and other artists or other curators and artists and photographers who were really interested in this idea of expansion of the idea of modernism in the most primitive.
00:21:43
Speaker
He really was there at the center of that conversation.
00:21:48
Speaker
It's fascinating to see how...
00:21:51
Speaker
quickly the process of, quote, discovery carried Edmondson from total anonymity in Nashville to MoMA.
00:22:03
Speaker
I mean, it was like a couple of years, right?
00:22:05
Speaker
Could you... It was a very quick sort of turnaround.
00:22:09
Speaker
So basically, you know, it went from 1936 to 1937.
00:22:13
Speaker
In that time period, people became familiar with his work.
00:22:19
Speaker
the Starr family, Alfred and Elizabeth Starr, were big fans of Edmondson.
00:22:24
Speaker
They went to his yard in 1936-1937.
00:22:26
Speaker
They introduced Edmondson to Louise Dahlwold, the photographer, who in turn then...
00:22:37
Speaker
brought Alfred Barr into the conversation.
00:22:41
Speaker
So you have this sort of game of telephone of this interesting artist doing astounding things for his community in Nashville.
00:22:49
Speaker
I mean, essentially, he started carving in the early 1930s because he was carving tombstones and objects for his local congregation and community.
00:22:58
Speaker
He then expanded to what he called his garden ornaments for these
00:23:02
Speaker
incredible sophisticated figures, burbaths, vessels that we now know him for.
00:23:10
Speaker
And it was this group that people really became enamored of.
00:23:15
Speaker
And this show, Pamoma in 37, while small, was certainly something that was reported on and part of the conversation.
00:23:27
Speaker
I can't say that the conversation around it was
00:23:31
Speaker
really addressed him as a peer.
00:23:33
Speaker
It was a very difficult sort of conversation that was happening then, the way people almost dismissed what he was doing as being this sort of, you know,
00:23:46
Speaker
spiritual sort of unknown artist who's making something but he doesn't realize what he's doing yeah you know it was a very dismissive tone to the conversation which then we've seen that approach with tribal art as well exactly exactly and so he you know he sort of fell victim to that for a while and the work really faded from hue for for a few decades before it became part of the conversation again and now we're seeing his work in
00:24:14
Speaker
all these great institutions.
00:24:18
Speaker
It's at every major museum that I can think of.
00:24:20
Speaker
Do we have accounts firsthand from Edmondson and from Traylor of how they personally responded to this explosion of fame and recognition?
00:24:34
Speaker
Well, Traylor never really saw that in his lifetime.
00:24:39
Speaker
We don't have any written accounts.
00:24:42
Speaker
He had a show, right?
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah, but that was a small show that was organized by a small artist collective.
00:24:51
Speaker
It wasn't... Nothing on the scale.
00:24:52
Speaker
Nothing on the scale of a MoMA exhibition.
00:24:55
Speaker
But he worked on his stoop
00:25:03
Speaker
in Montgomery.
00:25:06
Speaker
He was there for a few years.
00:25:08
Speaker
Shannon was collecting his work after that.
00:25:10
Speaker
We know that he went to live with a family member.
00:25:13
Speaker
We think he worked then, but no one saved the work, so we're not sure what happened to it.
00:25:18
Speaker
To him, it was never something that he saw fame for.
00:25:22
Speaker
For Edmondson, I think when people would speak to him about it, he would draw upon the spiritual side of things.
00:25:30
Speaker
saying that he was sort of visited and told to create this work in a way that I think a lot of people in a disenfranchised situation, a lot of folks would say that.
00:25:47
Speaker
I can't say whether he did or didn't believe that everything he did was due to
00:25:53
Speaker
his spirituality or whether it was a way for him to pass on agency or what his mindset was.
00:26:01
Speaker
But that's really what the conversation has been or was around his work when he was alive.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's interesting for me to just from a psychological perspective.
00:26:13
Speaker
I mean, if we were to draw a line between outsider versus insider artists, you know, it's tempting to think of insider artists with air quotes as people who...
00:26:28
Speaker
likely seek fame who are really interested that you know they maybe they go to art school and maybe they strive to have exhibitions from a young age and maybe they you know work to meet the right people and be represented by the right people and so on and then it's similarly tempting to think of outsider artists as people who have a sort of
00:26:50
Speaker
again, with air quotes, pure motivation, who are really just making things because they're driven to do it, and they don't expect the world to take note.
00:27:00
Speaker
And so it's a sort of a miracle one that does happen, and therefore the work seems to have this special aura around it.
00:27:09
Speaker
But I think that dichotomy might be problematic.
00:27:12
Speaker
Well, it seems as if their conceptions of agency are different, right?
00:27:17
Speaker
It's also an artist by artist thing.
00:27:20
Speaker
There are certainly some self-taught artists who created because they were seeking fame.
00:27:28
Speaker
They thought, this is my ticket to the big time.
00:27:31
Speaker
Justin McCarthy, for example, is one who saw himself as a well-known artist.
00:27:35
Speaker
Lee Godey, who's a brilliant one, called herself a French Impressionist and painted on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago.
00:27:42
Speaker
Some of these folks, for them, it wasn't
00:27:44
Speaker
was about the fame and the fortune that they perceived the art world to be in, albeit from their own vantage point outside of the Academy.
00:27:53
Speaker
For others, it was a way of coping with the world.
00:27:56
Speaker
For others, it was a way of documenting the world.
00:27:58
Speaker
Some artists, like Henry Darker, never wanted anyone to see their work.
00:28:03
Speaker
Some artists like William Edmondson were amused and bemused that people were seeing his work in New York.
00:28:11
Speaker
So it's really a spectrum of how involved these folks were with this concept of the art world.
00:28:19
Speaker
But I think for many of them, there's a permeation of popular culture in their art that allows for that sort of inching into the art world where they see fit, that sort of...
00:28:34
Speaker
That sort of ability to find a connection with what was happening at the MoMA, for example, from their, let's take someone like, you know, Pervis Young from their prison cell in Miami.
00:28:48
Speaker
And that conversation is an interesting one.
00:28:52
Speaker
And Edmondson called himself a disciple.
00:28:55
Speaker
So, you know, whatever his relationship to agency or his feelings about the origins of his gift, I mean, there's implied in that is a sense that he wants to get the work out into the world.
Edmondson's Birdbath: A Creative Vision
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:07
Speaker
And, you know, and he was very much creating for his community.
00:29:10
Speaker
And he was creating, you know, images of his community, images of popular culture, you know,
00:29:18
Speaker
figures, Eleanor Roosevelt, boxers, Joe Louis, all those folks, they were amongst the figures he created.
00:29:25
Speaker
He also carved people who he worked with in previous jobs, or at least he called them that when people would go to his yard and ask about it, whether or not they were just given that
00:29:39
Speaker
that feel because they were there and they knew this person and he thought it would be amusing or whether or not it was actually supposed to be Nurse Wooten, for example.
00:29:48
Speaker
We just don't know.
00:29:50
Speaker
But there is that idea.
00:29:53
Speaker
There is actually a figural birdbath in the sale.
00:29:57
Speaker
Could you describe it for us?
00:30:00
Speaker
It is a very unusual, cool thing.
00:30:04
Speaker
So you basically have a three-part object.
00:30:10
Speaker
It's actually in three separate parts.
00:30:11
Speaker
You have a basin, which is this fabulous, almost V-shaped basin with a carved out section in the center of it.
00:30:23
Speaker
that's resting on top of a very plain block of limestone.
00:30:30
Speaker
And that is resting on top of this fabulous column, which is in part repurposed and in part carved.
00:30:38
Speaker
So you have this great column and base that makes the majority of this birdbath.
00:30:45
Speaker
the bottom part of which was found or brought to him.
00:30:49
Speaker
He often used repurposed materials from around the city that people would bring to him.
00:30:53
Speaker
And then he carved out of that central portion of that column this fabulous face and this great hairstyle for this woman who looks as though she's balancing this basin on the top of her bun.
00:31:11
Speaker
And it's a really very interesting piece in that it is a perfect example of his garden ornaments.
00:31:20
Speaker
It's a bird bath.
00:31:23
Speaker
It is an example of his carved figures because you have this fabulous rendering of the face and the hair.
00:31:29
Speaker
It shows how he used repurposed materials because each of these separate blocks is clearly something that was brought to him.
00:31:38
Speaker
and he has fashioned it into this single object.
00:31:41
Speaker
But another element of this that I find particularly fascinating, and a question that I can't answer about this particular object, is to what extent is there a religious component to this?
00:31:50
Speaker
Obviously, you know, he was known for doing bird baths, and this has gone through his life as a bird bath.
00:31:56
Speaker
But to me, there's certainly something about a... It seems to have a kinship to a religious font, or perhaps a pulpit.
00:32:05
Speaker
There's something about the shape of that...
00:32:07
Speaker
top basin that to me seems a little more than secular.
00:32:13
Speaker
Yes.
00:32:13
Speaker
You could prop the Bible on there, no problem.
00:32:16
Speaker
No problem.
00:32:17
Speaker
And the Greco-Roman imagery really belies the notion that this is a naive rendition of
00:32:24
Speaker
And one thing that's very interesting about Edmondson is that we know he was looking at things.
00:32:30
Speaker
He was constantly looking at advertisements, things he found in his community.
00:32:34
Speaker
How much he knew of art history, we're not sure.
00:32:37
Speaker
What did he have access to?
00:32:39
Speaker
Clearly he wasn't formally trained in it.
00:32:42
Speaker
But to think that he wasn't aware of the world around him when we know that he was looking at images of people like Eleanor Roosevelt or these, as I was saying before, these boxers or other historical figures, it would make sense that he would have access to some of this imagery, whether or not he was using it in its sort of traditional Roman styling sense.
00:33:06
Speaker
It does seem to have a resonance.
00:33:17
Speaker
We'll be right back after this and a word from our sponsor.
00:33:20
Speaker
First, just a quick reminder that if you'd like to see pictures of Kara and Becky's Curious Objects, those are online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast, as well as on my Instagram at Objective Interest and Michael's at Michael Diaz Griffith.
00:33:34
Speaker
And if you'd like to support the podcast and help new listeners find us, it's really helpful if you leave a rating and a review on your podcast app.
00:33:41
Speaker
Much appreciated.
00:33:43
Speaker
Support for curious objects comes from Christie's.
00:33:46
Speaker
This January 17th, 23rd and 24th, Christie's New York will start the new year with Americana Week, a group of three auctions that speak to the beginnings, diversity and burgeoning patriotism of a country's identity.
00:33:58
Speaker
The sales feature an array of artwork and objects that range from outsider art with pieces from the William Lewis Dreyfus Foundation and Chinese export porcelain from the Tibor collection to furniture, folk art and silver from the period.
00:34:10
Speaker
Dive into curiosities such as artwork from Bill Traylor, sculpture from William Edmondson, Famille Rose Soldier Vases, and more at the Rockefeller Plaza Gallery starting January 11th.
00:34:20
Speaker
Viewings for the remaining two auctions open on January 15th.
00:34:24
Speaker
In the meantime, curate a story of discovery and reveal a history of unbridled creativity and unique style by exploring the sales online at christies.com slash curiousobjects.
00:34:35
Speaker
As long as we're talking about black boxes and trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes, I do want to ask Becky a little bit more about these workers that you've described to us, toiling away and singeing off their eyebrows in the kilns.
00:34:56
Speaker
people who were doing this work, were they revered and respected highly skilled craftsmen?
00:35:01
Speaker
Were they seen or did they consider themselves artisans?
00:35:05
Speaker
Were they laborers?
00:35:06
Speaker
Were they well paid?
00:35:09
Speaker
Were they scorned?
00:35:10
Speaker
What kind of station of society did they want to?
00:35:13
Speaker
What do we know about these?
00:35:14
Speaker
It would be so fascinating to know about them, but honestly, we don't know a thing.
00:35:20
Speaker
They really were
00:35:22
Speaker
highly valued members of society.
00:35:24
Speaker
They were artisans in the eyes of their own culture.
00:35:28
Speaker
Their work was revered, certainly.
00:35:30
Speaker
And as you know, the imperial court in China sought the best porcelains from Jing to Jin, which were made in the same kilns.
00:35:38
Speaker
Scholars used to think there were specific kilns dedicated to imperial works, and other kilns, lesser kilns, would be the implication dedicated to export.
00:35:48
Speaker
But really now, because of the discovery of shards and
00:35:52
Speaker
archaeological digging and so forth in Jingdezhen, we know that it was all kind of mixed up and it would depend on what the market would bear that particular season.
00:36:01
Speaker
The kiln masters were very entrepreneurial and they were going to provide whatever they could to make money.
00:36:07
Speaker
So there was that motivation, but obviously they were also very, very highly skilled and
00:36:14
Speaker
Eventually the decorating moves to the port city of Canton, which we call Guangzhou today, of course, near the coast of China, where it was much more accessible to the Westerners, so orders could be transmitted more easily.
00:36:30
Speaker
Originally you would send designs, drawings, you might send your coat of arms on a book plate, because every 18th century gentleman had a library, of course, and you had an engraved book plate.
00:36:41
Speaker
So that would go toddling off to China so that your coat of arms could be copied onto a whole dinner service.
00:36:48
Speaker
That was the grandest thing you could have in the first half of the 18th century.
00:36:51
Speaker
I'm always curious about the turnaround of those orders.
00:36:55
Speaker
It's a couple of years, right?
00:36:57
Speaker
That we do know because at the Western end, records were kept, particularly good records by the English and the Dutch, which is sort of like... Yes.
00:37:06
Speaker
Thank you, bureaucrats.
00:37:08
Speaker
You can still go to India House in London and find these fabulous things in their archives.
00:37:14
Speaker
The Dutch East India Company, in Dutch, known as the BNC, also kept scrupulous records.
00:37:20
Speaker
It took about two years for most of the China trade period.
00:37:23
Speaker
Then when we get into the 19th century and the American trade...
00:37:26
Speaker
by which time the works of art had pretty much gone down in quality, really superseded by things in Europe that were more fashionable at the time, the clipper ships had come along.
00:37:39
Speaker
And that made it a faster thing than in the 18th century, 17th century when it all began in any volume.
00:37:47
Speaker
It was two years, so you really had to be patient.
00:37:49
Speaker
This is before the Swiss Canal, so everything is going around the Cape of Africa.
00:37:55
Speaker
You're going around more than half the world, right, to get there.
00:37:57
Speaker
And one with a lot of risk involved.
00:38:00
Speaker
Huge investment in the ships, the men, the supplies they needed.
00:38:05
Speaker
They would often stop.
00:38:07
Speaker
in South Africa.
00:38:08
Speaker
And there's some wonderful Chinese expert porcelains decorated with the famous Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.
00:38:18
Speaker
Because that was a watering place.
00:38:20
Speaker
You'd stop there, you'd be supplied, you'd get fresh water, more, I don't know, oranges or whatever you needed for the journey.
00:38:27
Speaker
And a lot of these periods, it wasn't just Canton and back again.
00:38:30
Speaker
You would encounter Chinese trading ships in Indonesia, what they called Batavia, which became Java.
00:38:36
Speaker
They had a huge outpost there.
00:38:39
Speaker
The English were later in India.
00:38:42
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:43
Speaker
have things in.
00:38:44
Speaker
That's why all the terms get mixed up like coromandel screens, card lacquer screens, because they were stored in India on their way from China back to England.
Economic Impact of the China Trade
00:38:53
Speaker
So there was all kinds of trade and commerce and people were encountering each other and the profit motive was great on all sides because if you did make this huge investment in the ship and it did come home laden with ceramics and works of art were a part of it, but there were other commodities that were much more
00:39:15
Speaker
much bigger value-wise, like a layer of tea, boring things like strong matting, all kinds of herbs and spices, all of that, come home with a successful cargo, you could make 200% profit.
00:39:28
Speaker
I like those margins.
00:39:29
Speaker
That's a bad one.
00:39:35
Speaker
To up the ante in this story of risk and adventure, I'd love to consider the reverse painting on mirror that's in the sale.
00:39:45
Speaker
Because I understand that although the imperial production facilities were producing very sophisticated objects in glass in the period we're discussing, they weren't producing flat sheets of glass.
00:40:00
Speaker
So when we look at reverse paintings on mirror, we're not looking at an object that wholly originated in the east and traveled west.
00:40:09
Speaker
I think the lines of flight are yet more complicated, correct?
00:40:13
Speaker
That's right.
00:40:14
Speaker
And it really is incredible to think that these plates of glass were sent from Europe to China.
00:40:20
Speaker
Because as you say, although the Chinese, there was an imperial glass factory actually in Beijing, making absolutely gorgeous glass.
00:40:27
Speaker
small glass vessels, very sophisticated carving techniques, all kinds of beautiful things.
00:40:33
Speaker
It didn't have the technology yet to make big, flat sheets of glass.
00:40:38
Speaker
And they were a little bit awed by this.
00:40:39
Speaker
In the same way we all learned in grammar school how in the colonies in America, you had to get your glass from England, and that's why you didn't have many windows in your house because it was so expensive.
00:40:51
Speaker
So this was a super high-end luxury good.
00:40:54
Speaker
And these plates of glass were sent out
00:40:57
Speaker
painted on the back so that the scene, you can make this incredibly detailed scene by painting the glass itself in the front where you view the image is smooth.
00:41:10
Speaker
And we have, as you said, we have two in particular, two or three really spectacular ones in this sale.
00:41:16
Speaker
It's a magical visual effect.
00:41:18
Speaker
They're just gorgeous.
00:41:20
Speaker
And then the Chinese sense of composition.
00:41:23
Speaker
They knew that their Western consumers wanted these very idyllic scenes of Chinese life, which of course were completely exotic to the Europeans who were the ultimate consumers of these things.
00:41:37
Speaker
So in the case of the picture you're mentioning, it's a Chinese music party taking place in a garden with a beautiful red lattice fence under the trees, and you have
00:41:49
Speaker
beautiful Chinese ladies in elegant costumes sitting at a table, one's playing food, I think, and gentlemen across the lawn are playing other instruments.
00:41:58
Speaker
It's a beautiful spring afternoon, and everybody's happy, and life is perfect.
00:42:05
Speaker
Before photography and before...
00:42:10
Speaker
any kind of transmitted imagery, of course.
00:42:12
Speaker
This was the way Europeans learned about what they thought life in China was.
00:42:16
Speaker
And maybe it was for the very, very weeks in China.
00:42:20
Speaker
So are you suggesting this is a different kind of picture than the Chinese would have produced for their own domestic use?
00:42:26
Speaker
They really didn't have
00:42:29
Speaker
big reverse paintings on glass like this.
00:42:31
Speaker
It wasn't a thing for them at this time.
00:42:33
Speaker
They were only producing it for European devices.
00:42:35
Speaker
Much more, the Chinese painting tradition, as we all know, is much more about the hanging scroll.
00:42:40
Speaker
Really fine.
00:42:41
Speaker
Europeans actually, again, introduced oil painting and perspective and some European...
00:42:49
Speaker
techniques that eventually influenced Chinese painting, but the Chinese painting tradition is very old and very strong, and that really is an ink painting tradition on paper.
00:43:02
Speaker
I'd like to just pivot from that music party to another one that's represented in the sale.
00:43:08
Speaker
And I'm thinking of one in particular represented on a blue and white musician's dish.
00:43:15
Speaker
And what's fascinating about this scene is that it does not represent Chinese imperial life.
00:43:22
Speaker
It represents a French courtly scene.
00:43:25
Speaker
And I think it speaks to what many of us associate with export ware, which is the sort of Eastern view of the West projected back to the consumer.
00:43:35
Speaker
So could you tell
Porcelain as a Cultural Bridge
00:43:36
Speaker
us a little bit about that relationship?
00:43:38
Speaker
Exactly.
00:43:39
Speaker
It's such a fun example because it's a really early one with all kinds of mix of East and West.
00:43:47
Speaker
The scene in the center of this big dish, which is about 13 inches in diameter,
00:43:53
Speaker
So it's a nice sized serving dish.
00:43:56
Speaker
Is again a music party, but three Europeans in costume of the late 17th century French court.
00:44:03
Speaker
So the lady seated at the table has this incredibly high headdress with sort of ringlets coming down from it.
00:44:10
Speaker
The two gentlemen have the curly sort of wigs that were undoubtedly powdered white.
00:44:16
Speaker
One's playing the flute and one's strumming some kind of stringed instrument.
00:44:21
Speaker
Their faces do look, I think, a little Chinese.
00:44:26
Speaker
That they do.
00:44:27
Speaker
This would have been copied from a print, and we actually know the print was Nicolas Bonnard.
00:44:33
Speaker
Okay.
00:44:34
Speaker
It was titled something like Music and Love.
00:44:37
Speaker
It has a wonderful French inscription on it, the original print, which would have been taken again to China to be copied.
00:44:47
Speaker
And sometimes you can see, like you can see in the ladies' skirts,
00:44:51
Speaker
and a little bit of the men's costumes, that the Chinese artist has copied the hatch marks from the print, not really knowing that that was just the engraver's way of transmitting light and shadow, and they're copying that, thinking that's important to the design.
00:45:06
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:45:07
Speaker
Isn't it?
00:45:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:08
Speaker
So you have, as you say, it's kind of a reverse.
00:45:11
Speaker
You have here a Chinese artist drawing a European music party, but also, if you'll notice, the rim of this dish
00:45:19
Speaker
has a petal-shaped panel.
00:45:21
Speaker
It's a flower, and the scene's the center of the flower.
00:45:25
Speaker
And each petal has a fabulous Chinese landscape vignette in it, almost like one of those great Chinese ink paintings.
00:45:33
Speaker
Yes, these landscapes look much less like the sort of typified Western garden scene than the one we see on the reverse painting.
00:45:40
Speaker
They're not at all.
00:45:42
Speaker
They're completely Chinese.
00:45:42
Speaker
And this dish was made around 1700, which is
00:45:46
Speaker
very early for specifically dictated Western design on Chinese porcelain.
00:45:52
Speaker
There are very few examples before this time period when the designs were actually commissioned.
00:45:59
Speaker
The first armorial, there are few isolated pieces in earlier centuries, but the first armorials in any quantity are made in the very early 1700s.
00:46:10
Speaker
There's
00:46:12
Speaker
There are a couple of royals who had coats of arms on Chinese porcelains in earlier centuries.
00:46:20
Speaker
But it doesn't begin at all in any quantity until this time period.
00:46:23
Speaker
So with these early pieces, you do see a really fun mix of Chinese and Western.
00:46:30
Speaker
By the end of the 18th century, it looks entirely European.
00:46:33
Speaker
Across the country, you wouldn't know if it was made by Spode, Wedgwood, or in China.
00:46:37
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:46:38
Speaker
It says so much about what the consumers of this material valued, that they went to so much trouble and expense to attain these images of gaiety, frivolity, maybe decadence.
00:46:52
Speaker
And
The Role of American Collectors
00:46:53
Speaker
to think about this kind of imagery, in contrast to what we see in the work of Trailer, is rather striking to me.
00:47:02
Speaker
I mean, these are both...
00:47:04
Speaker
categories of objects that have been collected in America in very particular ways that relate to the American sensibility at different points in our history.
00:47:15
Speaker
And this one in particular has a really auspicious American collecting story, because as you can see in our photo, it was owned by James A. Garland, who was a
00:47:28
Speaker
big New York banker and one of the founders, the original patrons of the Metropolitan Museum, which of course was founded in the 1870s, moved to Fifth Avenue in the 1880s, I think it was.
00:47:39
Speaker
His collection of Chinese porcelain was a huge part of the early Met.
00:47:44
Speaker
He died, I think it was 1902,
00:47:48
Speaker
And Matt had assumed that we hear this story today.
00:47:51
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:47:54
Speaker
But he had changed his will and his estate.
00:47:56
Speaker
He went to his estate and said, so his children sold it in its entirety to the famous dealer Duveen, who then turned around and sold it almost immediately to J.P.
00:48:07
Speaker
Morgan.
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:09
Speaker
So this dish and many other Chinese porcelains that pass through our hands over time belong to Garland and Morgan and has each of their collector labels on the back.
00:48:19
Speaker
Wow.
00:48:20
Speaker
It's really very cool, I think.
00:48:22
Speaker
become part of the dishes history.
00:48:25
Speaker
So now that you're bringing in the dirty commercial side, let's get down to brass tacks.
00:48:31
Speaker
So we've talked about, I believe, five individual objects coming up in these two sales, which as listeners are hearing this are just around the corner.
00:48:39
Speaker
The Chinese export sale is on the 23rd, I believe.
00:48:43
Speaker
And the
00:48:45
Speaker
Outside art is the 17th.
00:48:47
Speaker
17th.
00:48:48
Speaker
Yeah, just around the bend.
00:48:49
Speaker
So get your bids in.
00:48:52
Speaker
What are the estimates on these five pieces?
00:48:56
Speaker
Cara, do you want to start with the trailer?
00:48:58
Speaker
The trailer is in at $200,000 to $400,000.
00:49:00
Speaker
And the Edmondson is at $250,000 to $500,000.
00:49:08
Speaker
And how is the Chinese ice porcelain?
00:49:09
Speaker
Well, that makes the porcelain look just like a big... The soldier bosses, which are really quite a special thing in Chinese porcelain, are 100,000 to 150,000.
00:49:20
Speaker
And the blue and white musician's dish is 8,000 to 12,000.
00:49:27
Speaker
Expected range.
00:49:29
Speaker
Are you listening, Ben?
00:49:30
Speaker
Remember my birthday coming up?
00:49:31
Speaker
We haven't forgotten.
00:49:32
Speaker
Could be yours.
00:49:34
Speaker
It actually may have to be.
00:49:37
Speaker
I also have my eye on the Clementine Hunter pictures in your sale.
00:49:41
Speaker
I'm admitting.
00:49:43
Speaker
Great favorite.
00:49:44
Speaker
Aside from Michael, who do you think is going to be bidding on these pieces?
00:49:48
Speaker
I'm not asking for names.
00:49:51
Speaker
What's the profile, for example, what's the profile, would you say, of a trailer collector?
00:49:59
Speaker
Well, the trailer and the Edinson collectors are much more difficult to pinpoint than they used to be, which is a wonderful thing.
Profiles of Modern Collectors
00:50:08
Speaker
The people who are interested in collecting these artists now come from many different collecting areas.
00:50:15
Speaker
Used to be that these works were very much aligned with folk art collecting, the Americana collector.
00:50:21
Speaker
Now we're seeing, as there's been this increasing interest in black artists, in African American art, specifically within the modern and contemporary collecting spheres, we're seeing a lot more collectors coming out of those areas.
00:50:37
Speaker
Additionally, as I was saying before,
00:50:41
Speaker
A lot of these works were originally brought to the market by artists or people with artistic sensibilities and often artists or people with artistic sensibilities are collecting them now.
00:50:54
Speaker
So it's interesting that this is an arena in which many current contemporary artists are interested in collecting.
00:51:03
Speaker
So, yeah, if we cast back to the 80s and 90s, we could imagine, I think, the trailers in Jerry Lauren's apartment next to exquisite examples of, quote, American folk art, right?
00:51:15
Speaker
Weather vanes.
00:51:16
Speaker
And that still exists, literally, around the corner.
00:51:21
Speaker
But I think it's interesting to consider that a trailer will likely be hung next to, you know, an Amy Sherald portrait in 2019.
00:51:31
Speaker
Well, if you think about, for example, the reinstallations of some of these big museums, you think about the MoMA, you think about the Whitney, you think about what's happening at the Art Institute in Chicago or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you're seeing artists like Traylor and artists like Edmondson being...
00:51:48
Speaker
come in many different combinations with many different types of artists, whether it's with other self-taught artists or whether it's with, you know, completely different contemporary artists who have a visual connection or are, you know,
00:52:07
Speaker
coming from a similar landscape or part of the country or period of time, we're seeing that they are making many more cross connections than ever before and it's just going to continue.
00:52:21
Speaker
Let me put the same question to you, Becky.
00:52:25
Speaker
Who's buying Chinese export porcelain?
00:52:28
Speaker
One of the fun things about Chinese export is you find it all over the world, really, wherever there's been wealth.
00:52:34
Speaker
Chinese porcelain, when you think about it, was part of French furniture interior.
00:52:38
Speaker
It was part of English furniture.
00:52:40
Speaker
It was found in Philadelphia in the 18th century, in Charleston, in Latin America, in Mexico City, and so forth, where the great manila galleon trade passed through in the era of the Spanish possession.
00:53:01
Speaker
So that has remained steady.
00:53:04
Speaker
There are international collectors of Chinese, that's called Europeans, South Americans, Latin Americans, a lot of Americans.
00:53:10
Speaker
Within that, there are individual sort of preferences.
00:53:15
Speaker
There's a lot of nationalistic collecting.
00:53:17
Speaker
There are certain things we can say, well, perhaps the arms of Louis XIV, the Frenchman, is likely going to be very interested, or it was made for Thomas Jefferson, or we have a plate in here made for Ulysses Grant.
00:53:31
Speaker
See, an American is 90% going to buy that.
00:53:34
Speaker
That being said, I have a lot of Chinese collectors today.
00:53:39
Speaker
Chinese clients have become more and more interested, as they are interested in the art of all the world, and interested in the same way we are.
00:53:49
Speaker
Interested in cultural exchange, interested in what it says about what they were producing and how coveted it was all around the world.
00:53:58
Speaker
And they are buying across the board European subject, religious porcelain, armorial porcelain, the same exact way my Western collectors are buying, wanting to fill out the grapes, reading the books and wanting to have examples of some of the things with the particularly fun and quirky stories or particularly visually beautiful.
00:54:20
Speaker
So it's a really interesting and eclectic group for which I'm grateful.
00:54:23
Speaker
If you specialize in Dutch silver or...
00:54:28
Speaker
I can't think of many other examples.
00:54:31
Speaker
You're really talking to an entirely focused group.
00:54:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:54:34
Speaker
But for Chinese export, it's a broadly based community, and that makes it a lot of fun.
Americana Week: A Global Cultural Exchange
00:54:40
Speaker
And the community of collectors in China is rapidly growing, incredibly sophisticated.
00:54:46
Speaker
And I keep meeting collectors who just have...
00:54:49
Speaker
really visionary ideas about what they want to achieve in their collections.
00:54:53
Speaker
I think that, you know, the vanguard of collecting is actually in China right now.
00:54:58
Speaker
So to participate in that is exciting.
00:55:01
Speaker
And it kind of speaks to what you and I always say about Americana Week, which is that it's truly global in scope if we look at it through the more creative and, I think, interesting lens that we've been using today.
00:55:13
Speaker
Just by dint of American imperialism.
00:55:16
Speaker
Precisely.
00:55:16
Speaker
Thank you.
00:55:18
Speaker
Well, we wish you the best of luck with the sales.
00:55:20
Speaker
Thank you.
00:55:21
Speaker
And thank you very much for taking us on a tour.
00:55:25
Speaker
Thank you.
00:55:25
Speaker
It's been fun.
00:55:26
Speaker
You have to come in.
00:55:27
Speaker
Put it on a bed.
00:55:28
Speaker
You never know.
00:55:30
Speaker
You know.
00:55:31
Speaker
You've tempted us.
00:55:32
Speaker
That dish could be yours.
00:55:34
Speaker
No, I'm not.
00:55:35
Speaker
I'm looking at it with, you know, greedy eyes.
00:55:39
Speaker
I want to be in that music party.
00:55:40
Speaker
Thanks again.
00:55:42
Speaker
Well, Kara Zimmerman and Becky McGuire, thanks so much for being with us.
00:55:46
Speaker
Thank you.
00:55:50
Speaker
you
00:55:52
Speaker
That's it for today.
00:55:53
Speaker
Thank you so much to Becky McGuire and Kara Zimmerman and to Christie's for hosting us.
00:55:58
Speaker
If you're interested in bidding or just checking out the rest of the lots in those two sales, they are on Friday, January 17th for the Outsider Art sale and Thursday, January 23rd for the Chinese Export sale.
00:56:10
Speaker
Check them out.
00:56:11
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:56:14
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:56:16
Speaker
My co-host is Michael Diaz-Griffith and I'm your host, Ben Miller.