Transcript
Speaker: I think I was walking through maybe in Berlin and saw this crying boy in marble and thought, wait a minute, he's almost like ours.
Speaker: And then I did a little more research and found another marble in Copenhagen.
Speaker: So I realized, okay, ours is a bronze cast of this original marble.
Speaker: The bust was purportedly Michelangelo.
Speaker: But it wasn't.
Speaker: Hello, welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: And I'm Michael Diaz Griffith.
Speaker: And how are you doing, Michael?
Speaker: I'm doing well.
Speaker: I'm healthy.
Speaker: I am on my sofa, which is a couple feet away from the other places I've been today.
Speaker: And I'm headed to my kitchen table after we chat.
Speaker: And that's just a few more feet to the right.
Speaker: So not a huge adventure in my apartment, but we're making it.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, I think that about describes the scope of my movement today, too.
Speaker: So three little rooms in a little Brooklyn apartment.
Speaker: And I'm sorry we can't be sitting across the table from each other like usual, but I really missed the wine in the silver cups.
Speaker: I mean, that's always a special part of our recording sessions.
Speaker: Well, you know, there's nothing stopping you from doing that right now either.
Speaker: That's a good point, Ben.
Speaker: I think I'll have to mosey over to my kitchen and pour glass.
Speaker: But it's a good thing that we have curious objects to talk about, even if it's over the phone.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And I have to say, you know, it's hard to talk these days about much of anything that isn't the coronavirus.
Speaker: And we are on Curious Objects.
Speaker: We're going to take a close look at that.
Speaker: We're actually doing a series of special episodes on
Speaker: involving conversations with people who are doing interesting things or reflecting in interesting ways on the effects of the virus on the antiques world.
Speaker: So a couple of days ago, if you didn't catch it, listeners, we published an episode.
Speaker: It's a conversation with the owner of the shop where I work about a series of storytelling emails that we're doing modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron.
Speaker: It's a
Speaker: a way to pass the time and to reflect on what makes our business interesting and different from other lines of work.
Speaker: And just to keep lines open with our clients and keep that conversation going and feel a little less isolated.
Speaker: And then we haven't released it yet, but in the coming days, Michael, we're going to put out a conversation that you had with the dealer, David Shorsch.
Speaker: Yeah, we had a great chat about the antiques world in previous times of crisis.
Speaker: So David, as many of our listeners know, grew up in a collecting family and had the privilege of knowing many of the great dealers of the 20th century.
Speaker: who endured all sorts of crises from the Great Depression through the Second World War and beyond, but managed to survive and thrive in their businesses.
Speaker: And David and I discussed how they did that.
Speaker: And I think it's inspiring to consider what the trade has been through as we think about where it's headed and what our future is in the coming months and years.
Speaker: Yeah, so definitely look forward to that episode in the coming days.
Speaker: And we have some other items on the cooker right now, including we're going to do an episode, I think, in the next week or two, Michael, where you and I are going to talk with...
Speaker: people around our world about the effects that the virus and its economic impacts are having on us, on our work, on our businesses, our research, our collecting.
Speaker: So we've actually put out a call to ask people to tell us their stories, to share their stories of how the virus is affecting their lives and their work in the antiques world.
Speaker: And I want to extend that call to listeners as well.
Speaker: So if any of you have stories about what you're doing these days, how you're staying sane, how you're filling your time, what you're able to do now that you weren't able to do before and vice versa,
Speaker: We'd love to hear those stories and maybe include them on the podcast in the coming weeks.
Speaker: So please get in touch with us.
Speaker: You can email us at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or you can get us on Instagram.
Speaker: I'm at Objective Interest and Michael is at Michael Diaz Griffith.
Speaker: But today we're actually diving into a conversation here that we recorded before this outbreak happened.
Speaker: When, Michael, you and I went down to the Morgan Library to talk with Jennifer Tonkovich, who's a curator there.
Speaker: And boy, it feels like a long time ago now, doesn't it?
Speaker: It feels like a different world.
Speaker: I mean, that day was snowy and particularly quiet in the city before the holidays, actually.
Speaker: And it was a Monday, right, Ben?
Speaker: And the museum... That's right.
Speaker: And the museum was... Yeah, they closed the museum on Monday.
Speaker: So we actually had the run of the place to ourselves, which is reminiscent of what the museum must look like today.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Particularly special as well because of the privileged access that Jennifer gave us.
Speaker: We recorded this in Morgan's study, and it was a really compelling atmosphere, right?
Speaker: in which to have a discussion about the great collector.
Speaker: We might've each taken a turn at his study desk too.
Speaker: Oh yeah, selfies were taken and a group shot or two.
Speaker: We're not barbarians.
Speaker: No, it was great fun.
Speaker: And Tonkovich is a wonderful scholar.
Speaker: And the story that she has to tell us about this bronze bust and its long history of misidentification is a really fascinating look into the historiography of antiques collecting.
Speaker: And J.P.
Speaker: Morgan is such a central figure in that history.
Speaker: So, you know, I really enjoyed that conversation.
Speaker: And what I think I enjoyed about it most in retrospect is the fact that it has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19.
Speaker: That's absolutely correct, Ben.
Speaker: You know, it's escapism.
Speaker: Jennifer is brilliantly funny, and I think that our listeners are going to really enjoy taking a dive into the past, thinking about the Gilded Age and the context of collecting then.
Speaker: And by the way, that was a period full of crises, but they did manage to continue collecting.
Speaker: So just to risk being topical for one second...
Speaker: Even though there were some problematic figures in that period, we might find some solace in the fact that in the antiques trade, at least, business did boom, even during some of the banking crises, etc., that figures like Morgan were involved in.
Speaker: So a lot to think about, but also just a lot of fun.
Speaker: Yeah, and a chance to get away from it all for about an hour.
Speaker: So listeners, I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.
Speaker: Stay tuned.
Speaker: We will be putting out an unusual amount of Curious Objects content in the coming weeks.
Speaker: So I hope you'll enjoy that.
Speaker: I hope you'll get in touch and let us know what you think.
Speaker: We'll be back with Jennifer Tarkovich right after this.
Speaker: Today's episode is brought to you by Freeman's Auction.
Speaker: Since 1805, Freeman's has been part of the fabric of Philadelphia, helping generations of clients in the buying and selling of fine and decorative arts, jewelry, design, and more.
Speaker: They host many auctions throughout the year, including sales of single-owner collections.
Speaker: They are always accepting consignments of suitable works across auctions and collecting categories.
Speaker: Interested to find out what your collection would bring at auction?
Speaker: Visit freemansauction.com to request a complimentary auction estimate.
Speaker: Freeman's, Philadelphia's auction house.
Speaker: Sharing the world of art, design, and jewelry with you, wherever you are.
Speaker: Welcome, Jennifer.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: We are in fact sitting in the Morgan Library and not just anywhere but in JPMorgan's own study, which I have to say, if you haven't been here before, make the visit.
Speaker: It's a hell of a room and a hell of a museum.
Speaker: That it is.
Speaker: And Jennifer, I want to just start by asking how you came to be working here and a little bit about your background.
Speaker: That's a great question.
Speaker: I've now been here almost 22 years, so almost all my adult life.
Speaker: When I was an undergraduate, I grew up in Chicago, I was an undergraduate, and I had a summer internship at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Speaker: And I knew I wanted to go into museum work.
Speaker: I was thrilled by objects.
Speaker: And at first I thought I wanted to study Southeast Asian art.
Speaker: And so I went in there and they said, well, what Southeast Asian languages do you speak?
Speaker: And I had to confess to none of them.
Speaker: And at that time they said, well, you know, we have two other internships open.
Speaker: One is in the crate building workshop and the other is in prints and drawings.
Speaker: I sort of envisioned myself for the summer wearing a tool belt and thought, you know, that may not be the smartest route.
Speaker: I'm not the most coordinated person.
Speaker: So I said, you know, prints and drawings sounds intriguing.
Speaker: And then I went to the prints and drawings department and met with one of the curators there, Martha Tedeschi, who's now the director
Speaker: of Harvard University Art Museums.
Speaker: And it took me about 30 seconds to think, yes, this is where I want to be.
Speaker: This is what I want to be.
Speaker: And she was just the most compelling professional.
Speaker: I had met at that point, and then I quickly met the others in the department, which was, it was such a wonderful group, including Suzanne McCullough, who was a great drawings curator and my mentor.
Speaker: and Laura Giles, who is now the curator in charge of drawings at Princeton.
Speaker: So people who've been with me since I was 17 on this journey.
Speaker: And it was actually Suzanne, when I was coming out east for graduate school, I was enrolling in the PhD program at Rutgers.
Speaker: She said, well, if you're going to be out east, you should look up my friend, Kara Dennison at the Morgan Library and see if she needs help on projects.
Speaker: I think you'd really like that.
Speaker: And make sure when you're there to see the Thaw collection.
Speaker: It's the greatest private collection of drawings in America.
Speaker: And so I sort of filed away these two facts and dutifully wrote a note, which funnily enough, my colleague Kara has saved.
Speaker: She's since retired.
Speaker: And it's so embarrassing.
Speaker: It's painful.
Speaker: Like I looked at it, I put it in a drawer.
Speaker: I can't even actually read it because it's my awkward young self trying to, you know, write and, you know,
Speaker: obviously I selected stationery for it.
Speaker: I mean it's really pretty dorky but... Well she's doing her curatorial duty.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And she took me on as an intern.
Speaker: And so while I was doing my graduate studies I would come in and work with Kara on various projects and then suddenly one day in 1998 one of the colleagues here, Stephanie Wiles, who's now the director of the Yale University Art Gallery was
Speaker: announced that she was leaving for another position.
Speaker: And at that point, she had been here, I think about 17 years.
Speaker: And it was a very small department of about three people.
Speaker: So they just lost a third of their staff.
Speaker: And so that's when they drafted me to come in.
Speaker: And they said, Oh, just just, you know, we really need to help, you know, just for a year, you know, because I was just at the point where I had
Speaker: I believe I had taken my PhD exams and had to work on my proposal.
Speaker: And my advisor was a little wary.
Speaker: He'd seen many people go down the route and never finish.
Speaker: I said, of course I will.
Speaker: And he said, well, and I thought the whole reason I'm pursuing this PhD is...
Speaker: is to work with a collection like this, is to do this work.
Speaker: So I just jumped at the chance.
Speaker: I did have the opportunity to meet Eugene Thaw, to work with him on several exhibitions of his collection, and then most importantly,
Speaker: when there was a lot of change of staff in the department to become sort of his primary contact here curatorially at the Morgan for the last years of his life.
Speaker: And so we came quite close to him.
Speaker: We were able to work together on the big show we did in 2017 of his collection.
Speaker: Which was spectacular.
Speaker: It's still extraordinary.
Speaker: So I did fulfill this, go full circle from being a 17-year-old told to go and see if they need any help and make sure you see the Thaw collection.
Speaker: And here I am, the Eugene and Claire Thaw curator.
Speaker: I mean, you couldn't have written this script.
Speaker: And so for me, it's just been remarkable.
Speaker: Well, and here we are in the midst of, as you say, a world-class museum and collection.
Speaker: And Morgan himself was the Ur collector in some ways.
Speaker: And we'll talk about him and his experience as a collector and how he helped to
Speaker: define the idea of collecting.
Speaker: But there is one particular object out of these many, many objects in this institution that we wanted to talk with you about today, Jennifer.
Speaker: And in fact, it's sitting right here in the room with us.
Speaker: And it's a small marble bust.
Speaker: It stands about maybe 10 inches high thereabouts.
Speaker: And J.B.
Speaker: Morgan himself purchased this, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And when he purchased it, what did he think he was buying?
Speaker: So when he purchased it, he thought he was buying a bronze bus by Michelangelo.
Speaker: And it's quite interesting because, you know, by the time the library was finished, he got the keys in November of 1906.
Speaker: And then he continued to collect and he collected objects to enrich his studies.
Speaker: They were sitting in his study, were surrounded by many of the objects that he collected that he chose for this space.
Speaker: And one of them is this bronze bust.
Speaker: But funnily enough, he bought it in 1909.
Speaker: And a few years later, there was a query that passed his desk that referred to a bronze by Michelangelo, bronze of a boy by Michelangelo.
Speaker: And he left a note for his librarian, Belda Costa-Green, saying, where is this?
Speaker: And she writes back, it's on the stand right next to your desk.
Speaker: And I think the interesting thing about that anecdote is
Speaker: The way we think about how Morgan thought about his collection and the things he collected, I think there's this tendency to paint collectors as always pursuing the finest and the best, the me plus ultra, a certain type of object.
Speaker: But Morgan liked to make acquisitions, and especially when it was things that were adorning his private study or even the things adorning his home.
Speaker: So not the things bought outright for the Met in which he was wearing his cap of civic responsibility.
Speaker: Yes, right.
Speaker: you know, he's applying different standards and they weren't always this has to be the finest.
Speaker: An inkwell that went on his desk, you know, that was interesting, you know, bronze, it was sufficient for him to buy something that he liked without worrying about it being
Speaker: you know, the finest of his kind.
Speaker: But in this case, so the bust was purportedly Michelangelo, but it wasn't.
Speaker: What was it really?
Speaker: But it wasn't.
Speaker: Who actually made this?
Speaker: Well, it's funny because it was a long story about the journey to figuring out what this actually is.
Speaker: Because, you know, so during Morgan's lifetime, he buys this as Michelangelo.
Speaker: And it's been in this room since 1909 when he bought it.
Speaker: on a stand first next to his desk, now it's atop a shelf.
Speaker: And so for most of its time, it was sort of thought of as Michelangelo for this first chunk of time
Speaker: Hans Varzynski came along in the 1940s, a German art historian who specialized in decorative arts.
Speaker: And he, at the bequest of Belle de Costa Greene, our director, did an inventory of all the art objects.
Speaker: Because really everyone on staff at the time was very bookish, looking at medieval manuscripts, more so than sculpture and painting.
Speaker: So she had Hans Varzynski come in and do the survey.
Speaker: And Svrasinski looked at it and said, well, that's not Michelangelo, but it could still be Florentine because it was very popular in Florence during the Renaissance to have these busts of children and weirdly enough, busts of children crying.
Speaker: So it
Speaker: Right, and we should say that is what this is.
Speaker: This isn't some Roman emperor with a laurel wreath.
Speaker: It is a sort of chubby-faced head of a boy, you know, a toddler, probably three years old, four years old maybe.
Speaker: You see his shoulders and the top of his chest, his curly hair, and he is making a very unpleasant, unhappy face.
Speaker: And sometimes it's been called crying or bad-tempered, but it's a child having a fit.
Speaker: Well, at least it's realistic.
Speaker: It's very realistic.
Speaker: So Sparsinski said, oh, it's probably Florentine, because it fits in with that penchant that they had in Florence for collecting busts of children.
Speaker: And then many years passed.
Speaker: This room that we're sitting in now in Morgan's study, we're now able to enter it to walk around.
Speaker: We have a visitor's guide, an audio guide, you can really engage.
Speaker: But for the majority of the Morgan Library's existence as a public institution, you could actually only walk in about 10, 12 feet from the door
Speaker: and look around.
Speaker: This used to be a closed-off room.
Speaker: And so part of our restoration campaign of the interior in 2010 was to make this, as well as the librarian's office, accessible so people could enter these spaces and engage with these objects, look at them more closely, read something about them, understand what's in here.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: I think we've done that very successfully and we're very proud of that.
Speaker: But it also meant the challenge of, okay, we have to make a booklet and we have to say what these things are because they're not just 10 feet away and people are keen to take a look.
Speaker: And so I started looking and I thought, is this really Italian?
Speaker: Let's take a look.
Speaker: It seemed close to me to an artist named Hendrik de Kaiser, who is a sculptor, a Dutch sculptor,
Speaker: And I thought, okay.
Speaker: From what period?
Speaker: So from the 17th century.
Speaker: So he's, let's see, he lives from 1565 to 1621.
Speaker: So still old, non-Renaissance Florence, but still, you know, very much an old master.
Speaker: And he made a lot of tomb sculptures of crying children.
Speaker: Naturally, you'd find weeping putti around a tomb.
Speaker: And then there were some independent sculptures that it seemed similar to.
Speaker: So we had that association, but it was only a few years later where I was walking through, I'm trying to think, I think I was walking through, it was either in, maybe in Berlin, and
Speaker: saw this crying boy in marble and thought, wait a minute, he's almost like ours.
Speaker: And then I did a little more research and found another marble in Copenhagen that really is, I think, the match.
Speaker: So I realized, okay, ours is a bronze cast of this original marble.
Speaker: And the marble is by Hendrick de Kaiser.
Speaker: It's in Copenhagen.
Speaker: And it entered the Danish collection in 1775.
Speaker: So it's a bit of a puzzle.
Speaker: When is this bronze cast made from the marble?
Speaker: It very well could be a 17th or 18th century cast.
Speaker: Because it's unclear where the marble was.
Speaker: Yes, it's unclear where the marble was before, but we know that it was in this collection in Copenhagen from 1775 on.
Speaker: So that could be very helpful.
Speaker: They don't know of any other time it could have been accessed to make a cast.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: What we're probably looking at is a cast, say from the 18th century of this earlier marble.
Speaker: That's a common thing.
Speaker: Now we replicate things all the time in so many different ways.
Speaker: Back then, if you had a marble bust you wanted to replicate, making a bronze cast of it.
Speaker: This isn't the only bronze cast after an earlier marble we have in the collection, which is interesting.
Speaker: We have an idea of when this cast might have been made, but then trying to
Speaker: trace its journey.
Speaker: So at some point a cast was made from a known sculpture, but then it got divorced from that context.
Speaker: And we don't really know much about this early journey of it.
Speaker: But what we do know is that eventually ends up in the hands of a very intriguing Italian named Michele Lazzaroni,
Speaker: or Baron Lazzaroni.
Speaker: He liked to adopt a rather fancy title.
Speaker: And he was a real bon vivant.
Speaker: He was a dealer.
Speaker: He was a collector.
Speaker: But most importantly, and I think recent scholarship is really uncovering this, he was what we would call a creative restorer.
Speaker: Well put.
Speaker: So we bumped into a few in our time.
Speaker: And it's interesting because you have these...
Speaker: You know, this creative restore, somebody who can create things out of whole cloth, which we would call forgeries, but who can also take things and reinvent them in a way, restore them, repair them, recontextualize them.
Speaker: You know, our little boy here had a spike added to him so he could be put on a pedestal.
Speaker: So, you know, something that you find and repurpose and then refashion.
Speaker: And Lacerani is known for doing that.
Speaker: And we know that there's...
Speaker: Was there a taboo during Lanzarone's lifetime?
Speaker: Was there a taboo against that in the way there is today?
Speaker: Would a work like that be considered a forgery and therefore condemned if it were known that it had been modified?
Speaker: Or would it just have been seen as a pretty object and you didn't really need to ask more than that about it?
Speaker: Well, I think some of it's accepted practice.
Speaker: Some of the repairing, restoring, preparing for display, for instance, you might have a bust, but then you would need a surround made for it, you need to elegantly present it, and that was certainly acceptable.
Speaker: But I think there's an interesting phenomenon that we see with a number of dealers during this period, which is
Speaker: the American market is in need of material.
Speaker: You do have dealers who are sourcing material from families that had things for generations and are ready to part with them, but they're pulling out everything they have.
Speaker: This could be somebody who had an 18th century bronze cast.
Speaker: This thing goes into the hands of the dealer.
Speaker: The thing about Lazzaroni is a lot of the things he was restoring, and he did painting, sculpture, you name it,
Speaker: He was really catering to contemporary taste.
Speaker: So even now, I think they did an exhibition of photographs and of works that he had restored and was involved with, and they all start looking the same.
Speaker: There's a real Lazzaroni look.
Speaker: And so there definitely is a degree of interpretation and involvement, but that also might be what helped these objects appeal.
Speaker: to the people who were purchasing them.
Speaker: You're speaking to this moment, I think of it as existing in the 1890s when Americans are finally beginning to collect at the level and with the scope of Europeans.
Speaker: And I'm thinking of Wilhelm von Boet's trip to America in that decade where he saw that collecting really isn't happening at our level yet.
Speaker: And he returns, I think, a decade later
Speaker: Berenson has hit the scene and he says, no, they're collecting now at the right level.
Speaker: And those two figures were obviously central in constructing ideas about connoisseurship that would have affected Morgan's collecting and all of his peers collecting.
Speaker: So I feel like we're going to hear a lot about Morgan's eye and his approach to connoisseurship.
Speaker: But could you set the scene a little bit in terms of the ideas about connoisseurship that form the background?
Speaker: Well, I think it's funny.
Speaker: Now we have a lot of technical means to examine things.
Speaker: We have much more information than was ever available before in terms of photographs and the history of objects.
Speaker: This was a time in the 1890s, around 1900, where
Speaker: Relationships with dealers were very much about trust because your reputation was what you had and that carried a lot of weight.
Speaker: Although what we're now finding is
Speaker: A lot of dealers certainly traded in things that were correct and what they purported to be.
Speaker: And then, you know, things that were also aspirational in attribution.
Speaker: And it's very hard to go back and think about.
Speaker: Well, you know, it's hard.
Speaker: It's so tempting to cast aspersions of people, but you also realize
Speaker: What's hard to grasp is the intentionality, you know, because the difference between, you know, when you really talk about a forgery, there's an effort to deceive, an attempt to deceive.
Speaker: And how much of this is people lacking information, making these aspirals?
Speaker: aspirational attributes to sell something, not being fully aware of what this object is and how much was actual intentional deception.
Speaker: Because even somebody like Boda also worked hand in hand with the Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini, who more and more information is coming out of that archive at his villa.
Speaker: But he was, you know, selling things that he actually obtained from old families, but he was also manufacturing things out back, it seems.
Speaker: And so there's
Speaker: The question of who knew what when is it's a real thriller in a sense, you know, how, you know, how savvy were they to what they were handling its authenticity or inauthenticity.
Speaker: Both the dealers and the clients.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Because even today, we are familiar with that spectrum between a disputed attribution and wishful thinking and deception.
Speaker: I mean, we still deal in those questions, as Ben and I have recently discussed on one of our episodes about the Caravaggio.
Speaker: About the Caravaggio and also the other thing that comes to mind.
Speaker: vis-a-vis these 18th century productions is the alabaster vase that we discussed with Philip Hewitt Jabbour a few months ago on the podcast, which is a Roman neoclassical alabaster vase.
Speaker: And Philip had an interesting theory about it.
Speaker: And he bought this from Alessandro de Castro, a very well-respected dealer.
Speaker: And at this point, we think we more or less understand what it is.
Speaker: But one interesting theory about it is that it was actually created out of a previously existing ancient Roman piece.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: that in the 18th century, some Roman dealer got excited about it and carved it into a piece that was more appealing to the contemporary eye.
Speaker: And in that period, you know, today that would be seen as a terrible sin.
Speaker: But at that time, it was perhaps seen as taking something with great potential and helping it to fill that potential.
Speaker: And it met a particular kind of demand because of the...
Speaker: requirements of grand tourists to acquire mementos from their journey.
Speaker: And now I would much rather have a bronze bust by Michelangelo than one that was made as a cast copy of Marvel by someone named Hendrik de Kayser.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Well, and you know, so much of this is, and I think you hit upon it, the idea of a memento.
Speaker: It's lifestyle collecting.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: because Morgan was such an important patron at the Metropolitan Museum and 8,000 of his objects went there and at the Wadsworth Athenaeum.
Speaker: And so he did collect very major, very important things.
Speaker: But the things he lived with and the things he kept around him were sometimes collected really as ornaments to a lifestyle.
Speaker: And we sit in a room where you look up at the ceiling and when this room was first finished, the idea was,
Speaker: He's taken a ceiling from a Renaissance villa and the faded paint.
Speaker: The reality is there's bits of this that are actually old, but most of it's 1905.
Speaker: Then they brought in the painter James Wall Finn, who opened a book of book plates and was going up there and aging and distressing that ceiling to give it that patina of age.
Speaker: But it didn't bother Morgan.
Speaker: The fireplace behind us has a lintel that could be Renaissance or it could be 1905, but then the surround is concrete and bluestone, all work done in 1905.
Speaker: And so it is very much a hybrid.
Speaker: It wasn't a sort of spare no expense, but he really had a practical sense about these things.
Speaker: Did you need to spare no expense and go to great lengths for some of this?
Speaker: Not really.
Speaker: You know, you actually could enrich your life and have objects around you.
Speaker: And whether or not everyone agreed on their attribution,
Speaker: I think if it gave him pleasure or he enjoyed the circumstances in which he acquired it, that also was a sufficient basis.
Speaker: Which is part of what that personality as a collector is what makes him great.
Speaker: It's what makes him so perennially fascinating because he did have peers not to cast dispersions on any sort of neighbors.
Speaker: who collected what they were supposed to.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And what they were supposed to collect might have changed from moment to moment.
Speaker: It was a fundamentally less creative approach to connoisseurship and collecting, right?
Speaker: Yeah, but Morgan also, I mean, he was the subject of a bit of, you know,
Speaker: scorn or derision by people who consider themselves connoisseurs, which is funny.
Speaker: Here he is making these decisions, collecting.
Speaker: But even in his obituary, the Burlington Magazine, in an unsigned obituary, he said, you know, he was a great collector.
Speaker: He was not a connoisseur.
Speaker: And there really is this pecking order, you know, between people who truly
Speaker: have an eye for objects.
Speaker: And Morgan wasn't contemplative enough.
Speaker: He was too busy being a financial titan and traveling the world to be the contemplative type.
Speaker: And even up to the end of his life, he's known as a banker and an aggressive financier.
Speaker: And that's his niche in contrast to certain other industrialists who turned more philanthropic.
Speaker: Well, not that he wasn't philanthropic, but who focused a greater portion of their time and energy on philanthropic and collecting endeavors.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And here we are talking about a piece that he bought apparently thinking was by Michelangelo.
Speaker: Well, it's Lazzaroni who, from a photograph in Lazzaroni's archive, calling in, you know, Michelangelo, that might be where that came from.
Speaker: So somehow he gets his hands on it and, you know, decides he's going to sell that.
Speaker: And he works with the dealers Cesare and Herculet Canessa, so the Canessa brothers, who are rather fascinating themselves.
Speaker: They found very clever ways to get things out of Italy and sell things in France.
Speaker: including there was a paper recently about like prohibitions that they had to get around.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And, and they would get things out, including they had, I guess, some silverware that they organized a bike race and had the people in the bike race conceal it in their clothing and I mean, it's so outrageous.
Speaker: You just, you know, Lance Armstrong.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I know, trying to find a good thing for an artian clothes, right?
Speaker: Yes, exactly, wink, wink.
Speaker: But these very creative ways about moving artwork and selling it in France.
Speaker: So he does acquire it from Canessa in Paris in 1909.
Speaker: But at that point, there's this Italian cabal in Lazzaroni, who then gives it to Canessa, who brings it into Paris, and it sells to Morgan in Paris.
Speaker: So rather a clever pipeline, but then takes the better part of a century for us to figure out what it actually is, which I think is, I mean, it's wonderful that with all of the information at our fingertips, we can pull together and make these connections and figure it out.
Speaker: But I also think
Speaker: it did not matter as much to Morgan.
Speaker: And I think this obsessive concern about, you know, is this object right or not right?
Speaker: You know, my concern now as a curator is, what is this actual thing?
Speaker: When is it made by whom?
Speaker: What do we know about it?
Speaker: You know, because I do think there's amazing stories behind every object in this room.
Speaker: And, you know, it's rather remarkable when, you know, I look around and, you know, there's yet another sculpture in here that was thought to be a Michelangelo at some point.
Speaker: And he's,
Speaker: How often does that happen?
Speaker: Well...
Speaker: We'll be back with Jennifer Tokovich right after this.
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Speaker: Every object in this building is significant in the context of interpreting Morgan's life, right?
Speaker: Which is a special dynamic that not every museum enjoys.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it is.
Speaker: And it's amazing how much work there is still to be done.
Speaker: I mean, Gene Strauss's wonderful biography is something, and it's like our Bible here, we turn to it all the time.
Speaker: But there's so, he was...
Speaker: a collector of so many, such a vast amount of works in so many different fields.
Speaker: So even when you talk about Morgan in the art market, it's all these micro markets, Italian bronzes, it's one thing unto itself, not to mention the paintings market and the object for- Near Eastern antiquities.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: It's so rich.
Speaker: We have pieces of silver ex-Morgan with something hilarious.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: What about modern art?
Speaker: Hot button topic during the period when he was collecting.
Speaker: Well, it's very funny because I was just reading in, I think when Art News covered his death in 1913, they said, well, he didn't collect any modern art and he basically spurned the contemporary artists aside from Henryson's Mowbray who painted the mural decorations in this building we're in.
Speaker: That is actually not true.
Speaker: Morgan did collect contemporary art and he was also a patron of contemporary art.
Speaker: not avant-garde contemporary art.
Speaker: But it's funny, when we say contemporary art, we think avant-garde.
Speaker: Who should he be a patron of?
Speaker: Was he buying Picasso in 1910?
Speaker: No, he was not.
Speaker: But he was still buying contemporary art.
Speaker: And it's quite interesting.
Speaker: I've worked a bit on the paintings that Morgan had in his home.
Speaker: So his home used to stand right next to us.
Speaker: It's where our exhibition galleries are now in this 1924 building.
Speaker: But he used to have a brownstone there, the 1850s brownstone.
Speaker: He moved in in 1880, and he had paintings by contemporary Hudson River School artists.
Speaker: He also had paintings by so many artists you've never heard of, but they were very often prominently placed, like the head of the academy in Antwerp, the head of the academy in Madrid, these very highly placed academic painters,
Speaker: in these cities where he traveled.
Speaker: We don't know any of their names.
Speaker: They are so obscure.
Speaker: I saw them.
Speaker: I came in a talk on them and the reactions on people's faces were pretty amazing because there's just this whole world of academic painters who were in charge of important, the Royal Academy in Spain, the Royal Academy in Antwerp.
Speaker: these major organizations in their home cities, but whose names are utterly lost because they're not part of the art historical canon because they are academic painters.
Speaker: Yet, this is what Morgan's home was filled with.
Speaker: All of this, some of them sentimental, some of them beautiful women, some of them landscapes.
Speaker: There's a wide range, social scenes, historical scenes.
Speaker: He had a handful of paintings by Roman contemporary artists in watercolors.
Speaker: But again, these names are ones that we don't know.
Speaker: And the other thing is that he did commission portraits.
Speaker: from contemporary artists of himself and his family.
Speaker: And so that's another way in which he interacted with the contemporary art world.
Speaker: So it's sort of unfair...
Speaker: that he's sort of maligned as somebody who wasn't engaged in the art of his own day.
Speaker: He was, it just wasn't the art we'd like him to be.
Speaker: Yes, a different current.
Speaker: Because it wasn't the avant-garde art.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And that material doesn't figure in our idea about what his taste was.
Speaker: So the institutionalization of one part of his taste
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: What we know.
Speaker: I'm sure you do a lot of work to undo that.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: Well, you know, it's funny in the years that I've been here, I can see and I certainly myself am trying to push a much more nuanced, subtle understanding because I think, you know,
Speaker: When I first started, people were still using the term robber baron.
Speaker: That's been dropped.
Speaker: We don't use that anymore.
Speaker: Happily.
Speaker: Is that an offensive term now?
Speaker: It's not like cancel culture offense.
Speaker: But it is one of those that kind of makes me always think of the monopoly man.
Speaker: And that's the image that it calls to mind for me.
Speaker: And you can cast this by knowing just a few bits and pieces as a caricature personality.
Speaker: But in fact, as you tease it apart and learn more,
Speaker: it's so much more interesting.
Speaker: There's so much more subtlety to what he did.
Speaker: As with this idea of, you know, in this building, these hybrid creations in the way of his collecting and he, you know, the fact that he wasn't always concerned about everyone's opinion.
Speaker: He would ask opinions.
Speaker: He'd make his own decision.
Speaker: And he seems to not have had a problem being wrong about things.
Speaker: At the time he died, the dealer Jacques Seligman had...
Speaker: a handful of bronzes and Morgan's son said, oh, well, we don't want anything that hasn't been invoiced and paid for yet.
Speaker: And he said, well, I do have some bronzes that are paid for, but they're fake, so I can keep those.
Speaker: He was thinking about opening a fake museum, which is another fascinating subject.
Speaker: But the idea that, yeah, Morgan knew some stuff he bought, he liked, it wasn't right, he trusted the judgment, he didn't take delivery of them.
Speaker: But the standards that we start applying
Speaker: and their decisions and their judgment, but it was happening in his own time.
Speaker: And now I think there's a much...
Speaker: a much more compassionate understanding of what he was doing as a collector and that it wasn't every object has to bear up in scrutiny.
Speaker: Sometimes he just wanted some bronze things on his desk.
Speaker: Sometimes he was just a rich guy looking to decorate a pretty house.
Speaker: A rich guy looking to buy exactly something nice.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And it's funny because with the contemporary paintings, we don't know those circumstances.
Speaker: And I'm really trying to investigate when he traveled, what was his relationship?
Speaker: How did these things come about?
Speaker: How were they recommended?
Speaker: But a lot of it has to do with your social set and...
Speaker: So a different sort of expectations.
Speaker: He didn't collect all the Barbizon paintings everyone else in New York was collecting.
Speaker: He was collecting something else, but I think it must have had to do with when he traveled.
Speaker: He was, you know, communing with heads of state.
Speaker: He was communing at that level.
Speaker: So if you were going to meet somebody in an arts establishment when you were in Madrid, you'd probably meet the head of the Royal Academy, right?
Speaker: And so understanding how that came about and how that shaped his personal taste, I think,
Speaker: adds another aspect to this story because he clearly made different decisions.
Speaker: What I want for myself, what I believe I should collect that will go into the Metropolitan Museum where I'm president.
Speaker: And I think that as he's looking at things, we can see from these long invoices, we'll get them, he would get an invoice and on it would be marked whether something was going to
Speaker: to the Met, to the library, to his house.
Speaker: So he really is collecting for so many different outlets.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: you can't apply the same standard to all of them.
Speaker: And tell us a little bit, give us a little bit of context around this idea of being a collector at the turn of the century.
Speaker: Because this is a time when I think collecting was a very different sort of undertaking than we think of it today.
Speaker: And in fact, I find in my conversations with people from outside of our world that often there's a sort of implicit idea that collecting is something that
Speaker: that people have always done in more or less the way that we do it today.
Speaker: That is, people have always appreciated old things.
Speaker: They've always wanted to own old things as reflective of the periods of time that they represent and that they come from and so on and so forth.
Speaker: And that's not necessarily entirely true.
Speaker: I mean, for much of human history, objects were valued, generally speaking, on aesthetic
Speaker: on an aesthetic basis.
Speaker: And the fact that it was 100 years old, 200 or 500 or 1,000 years old didn't necessarily make a whole lot of a difference.
Speaker: But by the time Morgan is collecting, that's been turned on its head and suddenly people want things that are associated with important historical names like Michelangelo.
Speaker: So how did that transition, how and when did that transition happen and how did somebody like Morgan, how were his collecting proclivities different from those of famous collectors from 50 or 100 years before him?
Speaker: Well, I think some interesting things happened in that latter half of the 19th century.
Speaker: One of them is the rise of the publishing industry.
Speaker: And I think book publishing and books that were illustrated with photographs of works of art help start defining personalities and bringing them to the fore.
Speaker: So that's why around 1900, every bronze you find is called Rossellino or Sansovino.
Speaker: You could really trace this to the appearance of
Speaker: these books, you know, that come out.
Speaker: And so this rise of the art historical establishment, the discipline of art history, but also the outlet for that in book publishing, I think, is an important part of how this sort of culture of names really comes to dominate.
Speaker: Because, you know, you start getting people...
Speaker: putting names to things clearly and you start having distinct ideas even if they're completely wrong and so you look back at some of those publications and you realize you know it's a very complex web that gave rise to some of these attributions but they're trying to carve out these personalities so you at least have a structure a framework to hang things on and you can look through books and compare this looks like this there so I think that plays
Speaker: lays a role in the kind of
Speaker: change this transition to a way of collecting.
Speaker: There also, you could collect large bodies of works at that time.
Speaker: And I think for somebody like Morgan, that was critical.
Speaker: He's very civically minded.
Speaker: And again, this is- And we think, I mean, today, of course, so many of the great objects are in public institutions.
Speaker: Whereas 150 years ago, there were, as you say, incredible.
Speaker: I mean, you look at the
Speaker: the auction records.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's mind-blowing the amount of material.
Speaker: It's unbelievable what you could buy and at what prices.
Speaker: Yes, and in the case of, you know,
Speaker: in the U.S. and in New York, finally having museums that can receive this and our places for things to be put on public view, the novelty of that.
Speaker: And I think Morgan was very... Tax deductions.
Speaker: Yeah, tax deductions, and that's something that took a while.
Speaker: But Morgan was also very concerned about taxes and tariffs and importation of works of art, and that occupied a lot of...
Speaker: There's always this financial aspect.
Speaker: But the rise of museums and galleries is a place for the public to go.
Speaker: And he was very influenced by the Victorian Albert Museum, which was near his home.
Speaker: In fact, he had a lot of his collection collection.
Speaker: on view at the V&A before he withdrew it and brought it to the U.S. It's sort of a cruel move, but the V&A is plenty.
Speaker: I've been lost in their rooms I'll never find again.
Speaker: But that really impressed me, this idea of being able to create a narrative for the public, and especially here where the public would not
Speaker: necessarily be in a position to travel, to see these works, to learn this history in another way.
Speaker: So I think that drive, that narrative drive that comes with museums, and he was somebody who certainly supported Bode's vision of a Renaissance museum and creating this.
Speaker: feeling of history because he had a great historical imagination.
Speaker: He was somebody who comfortable in French and German.
Speaker: He had been educated abroad.
Speaker: I think he had a very vivid imagination in that sense.
Speaker: This time was also the rise of archaeological excavation, of course, in the 18th century, but it really
Speaker: gains a lot of momentum by the late 19th century.
Speaker: When he was a young man, the discovery of Nineveh and the excavation.
Speaker: He had a great passion for the biblical lands and this idea of things being unearthed and seen for the first time.
Speaker: We have a group of manuscripts here
Speaker: that are sort of 9th or 10th century that had been buried in a well and then rediscover this cache in the early years of the 20th century, but they hadn't been seen in 10th centuries.
Speaker: And that sort of thing, I think, was incredibly powerful, the idea of recovering this history, because I think
Speaker: He had a very privileged upbringing to be able to learn this and pursue this, but I think he was obviously aware that that was a special privilege.
Speaker: And so this consciousness of museum culture.
Speaker: We share that excitement today when things appear.
Speaker: I mean, you know, we're still...
Speaker: full of goosebumps over the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Speaker: Yeah, I know.
Speaker: Every time they put out a new scan where they put it in there, you're like, oh my gosh, how is that possible?
Speaker: They've just uncovered these Indonesian cave paintings and it gives you chills.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Not everything has been discovered still today.
Speaker: Yes, no, exactly.
Speaker: But it's certainly true at the time.
Speaker: Burial chambers in ancient Greece and Italy and Anatolia, they're being uncovered en masse and great Egyptian sites are being, I mean, what a time.
Speaker: It does, it makes the past feel so immediate, you know, and, and.
Speaker: I think for him, both the romance and the fascination of the archaeology and the biblical lands.
Speaker: His last journey in life before his death was through Egypt to Khartoum, and then he had to go back to Rome because of illness.
Speaker: But you can sense where you travel at that age is something he felt very passionate about.
Speaker: And how did his, if we can compare him to his own contemporaries, because there were other storied collectors of that time.
Speaker: You know, we think of people like Isabella Stewart Gardner and William Randolph Hearst.
Speaker: William Henry Walters.
Speaker: Walters and Frick.
Speaker: And Benjamin Altman.
Speaker: I mean, there's, you know, it's interesting because
Speaker: There's so many different personalities who pursued things in different ways.
Speaker: And Altman would get a painting and he'd study it and he'd read everything about it.
Speaker: And he was that sort of quiet scholar type, whereas Morgan was traveling and known for making clear decisions of his own, despite whatever advice he got.
Speaker: And just very instinctive.
Speaker: So I think there's certainly a whole range of personalities there, but I also think that the pleasure of collecting and them being in a position to collect and with the additional impetus of the civic component certainly drove a lot of those American collectors to, you know, also, we've got to put something on your wall.
Speaker: So there was...
Speaker: both private collecting for himself that Morgan did, and then also collecting with the larger sense of this is part of my legacy to enrich these institutions.
Speaker: I think one of the functional differences between collecting in that period and today is that these collectors were naming
Speaker: did buy entire collections as a mechanism for filling America with great works and not so great works.
Speaker: But I feel like between the 1890s and 1918,
Speaker: we saw this incredible sort of exponential increase, partly because people were buying in bulk.
Speaker: Yes, I think in bulk.
Speaker: It's not a fun thing to think about.
Speaker: The idea of having these contingents.
Speaker: But even I remember at one point Morgan was offered some material related to Yorktown.
Speaker: And I think Belle de Custer Green advised the dealer and said, oh, you
Speaker: He'd prefer if you put it together in a volume with all sorts of other related material, and then he would consider it, rather than just a pastel of letters.
Speaker: Like, actually craft this album that has the story and the depth and then can tell this narrative about Yorktown.
Speaker: So I think there's something about...
Speaker: collecting contingents of things, groups of things, something coherent was particularly appealing.
Speaker: And for Morgan, certainly, because the great libraries that he acquired gave him, rather than piecemeal one Caxton at a time, suddenly armfuls of Caxtons.
Speaker: It's something that, yes, is nearly impossible to do today simply because of the limitations of
Speaker: There's so little materials.
Speaker: Exactly, exactly.
Speaker: Well, Briggs, you've painted a very full picture for us, I think, of Morgan as a collector and a man of aesthetic interest.
Speaker: Can you bring us back home and come back to this bust?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Because now that we have a better sense of who Morgan was and what he was doing and why he was buying, just bring us back to Morgan's purchase of this piece.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: What was he doing with that?
Speaker: What brought that into the collection and why did he put that beside his desk in a prominent treasured place?
Speaker: I think that, so Morgan started using this building in late 1906.
Speaker: And in 1907, he retires from Wall Street.
Speaker: And he's spending most of the time that he's in New York, actually here in this room.
Speaker: His house is next door.
Speaker: He comes over.
Speaker: This is where he receives visitors.
Speaker: He dealt with the financial panic.
Speaker: So this building has seen a lot.
Speaker: Work had continued.
Speaker: Not everything you see here was finished in 1907.
Speaker: So in 1908, 1909,
Speaker: you know, they're taking out all the windows and putting the stained glass in them instead of clear panes.
Speaker: And they're finishing some of the construction details in some of the rooms.
Speaker: He's still getting the furniture, you know, deliveries.
Speaker: So this is a period where he's really thinking about
Speaker: How am I going to decorate this space?
Speaker: So he's got agents working with him, but he's also looking himself at objects.
Speaker: And it's a very clearly Italianate space.
Speaker: You have this, you know, villa style, all the...
Speaker: All the examples that inform the design and decoration of it are Italian examples.
Speaker: We're in this beautiful room with, you know, silk wall covering, which has the Kigi and Monte, the Monte and stars of the Kigi family of Siena, great Renaissance banking family.
Speaker: So there's a lot of thought that's gone into creating this environment.
Speaker: And he decides to start collecting
Speaker: works that he hasn't really collected before.
Speaker: He was not a big buyer of Italian paintings or sculpture before this.
Speaker: It wasn't really a demonstrated interest.
Speaker: We see him more and more buying these things for his study in particular, selecting individual paintings,
Speaker: sculpture and so I think by the time that he sees this bust with the Knesses in Paris in 1909 he's thinking about okay well you know it's Italian, it fits, it's bronze and there was such a passion for small bronzes.
Speaker: It was really kind of a phenomenon you know people are learning about them through publications
Speaker: it's the sign of a gentleman because in the Renaissance these small bronze sculptures were what scholars kept in their study, you know, their intimate objects, beautifully crafted.
Speaker: And so I think the idea he wants to evoke in this room
Speaker: that feeling of a Renaissance study, that calm, that hush, but you know, this being surrounded by beautiful objects you could contemplate.
Speaker: And even going back to an early Renaissance painting by Vittorio Carpaccio, you see in the background there's little
Speaker: Bronzes placed around the room of St.
Speaker: Jerome and his study.
Speaker: So the idea of how a study should look and how that should have artworks in it.
Speaker: I think this is informing his desire for the feeling of the room.
Speaker: So he starts acquiring things and bringing them in here where he can appreciate them, his visitors can appreciate them.
Speaker: And I think that this bus, you know, clearly has, it's animated, it's beautiful in the way it takes the light, this bronze.
Speaker: And so he must have had a spare pedestal to put it on, you know, by his desk.
Speaker: And of course, at the moment he acquired it was, you know, probably like, oh, well, it's Florentine Michelangelo, you know.
Speaker: But then, you know, before long sort of,
Speaker: He sort of, in his mind, must have separated out the reality of this object with how it looked on the invoice and was like, wait, where is this?
Speaker: And needed to be right.
Speaker: Proving his connoisseurship skills.
Speaker: He knew it wasn't Michelangelo.
Speaker: He saw it on the invoice.
Speaker: But I think part of that was his receptiveness to bronzes during this period is...
Speaker: adorn this room in a way that felt appropriate to the building and to everything else he had accomplished with this building and that Italianate focus.
Speaker: So it works very well with the paintings.
Speaker: Although, of course, it does then
Speaker: turn out to be cast after a 17th century Dutch.
Speaker: But it partakes of that same genre.
Speaker: And you can see there's other busts in the room of a young boy, of St.
Speaker: John the Baptist and the Christ child.
Speaker: It's very much a Florentine phenomenon to have these busts of children in a domestic environment.
Speaker: So it's definitely...
Speaker: creating even more of a feel of this Renaissance interior that he's trying to evoke in this space.
Speaker: Well, thank you very much for introducing us to the bust and to the space and to the man and the biography and the period and the era and the philosophy and everything else.
Speaker: It's been a fun journey.
Speaker: It certainly has been.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Jennifer.
Speaker: Oh, you're welcome.
Speaker: This is the best way I can think of to spend an afternoon sitting in Morgan's study talking about all the beautiful objects.
Speaker: With the snow falling beyond the stained glass windows.
Speaker: With the snow falling outside, yes.
Speaker: It is truly lovely.
Speaker: That's a wrap for today's episode.
Speaker: I hope you're doing well, staying healthy and happy.
Speaker: Do keep an eye on your podcast app.
Speaker: As I said, we'll be putting out some more special episodes in the coming days.
Speaker: That's a nice diversion for me, and I hope it can be for you too.
Speaker: Our next regularly scheduled episode will feature Jessica Kirchhoff, a specialist in arms and armor, who actually came into that field for blacksmithing.
Speaker: I'm really excited to bring you that conversation.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: My co-host is Michael Diaz-Griffith, and I'm your host, Ben Mambo.
