Terra Infirma

Frankly, it was the paintings not the patron, Daniel J. Terra, that prompted me to pitstop on Good Friday at his highly touted new museum on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. It was not the $36 million recycling of three commercial buildings into the vertical Museum of American Art I was after, but one-of-a-kind American masterpieces. When in 1980, Terra opened a recycled florist’s shop in Evanston, I found the several small but luminous loan exhibitions there well worth the fourteen mile hike.
 
Alas, the new Terra (the old one remains a satellite) is a vanquishing of esthetics by philanthropy. If there weren’t the 60 PAFA golden oldies there, Terra’s debut exhibition would be farcically unworthy of viewing—with a whole room of Maurice Prendergast’s depressing the median excellence of true masterworks like those of Daniel Garber and Charles Demuth.
 
What is going on here? I think I know. The level of sycophancy approaches nausea for a Walt Whitman lover like myself. It’s Ambassador this, Ambassador that, even when this Reaganated, self-appointed Ambassador-at-Large for Culture is now present to blush at the fawnery. I was reminded of another self-made autodidact, the late “General” David Sarnoff, who picked up his one-star for about three weeks service during World War II in a very far behind the lines Quartermaster Corps, but woe to the rising RCA exec who forgot Sarnoff’s infatuation with rank; that was the end of that forgetful exec’s career.
 
If Terra’s dottiness about being a honorary Ambassador were only the dotage of a man with wit and energy enough to amass a $350 million fortune in the printing ink business, then I would tee hee to myself and send him an inscribed copy of Leaves of Grass so that he could begin to educate himself about the American spirit which he so vociferously presumes to embody. But there is a down side to Terra’s enthusiastic dispersal of his fortune before IRS and Illinois death duties relieve him of it. He hunts “masterpieces” like Attila the Hun, and his willingness to pay inflated prices for what I found to be a plethora of mediocre works is wreaking havoc on a museum community with fewer and fewer bucks to bang around with.
 
Even the anecdotes he tells so beguilingly (when he can charm an old leftie like me you can easily see how he raised $21 million for President Reagan’s 1980 campaign!) have a subtext he seems blissfully unaware of. He took me with an altar boy soft voice to his roomful of Prendergasts and bid me stand in front of his absolute favorite (whose title he couldn’t recall!). He told me how when he saw this painting in the possession of Paul Mellon, he just had to have it, even though the primary patron of the National Gallery of Art told him ever so gently and firmly he had already promised the canvas to NGA.
 
No matter. What Terra wants, Terra gets. He proposed that each get independent appraisals, after which Terra would offer NGA the option of the cash or the canvas. Dramatically the scene shifts to the board room of NGA, where Carter Brown asks Mellon and Terra to absent themselves so that the committee can choose between the cash and the canvas. “Forty-five seconds later,” Terra recalls with a cherubic smile, “Carter Brown was in the hall telling me they wanted the cash.” As well they might. $800,000 (he whispered radiantly that it was already worth twice that much already!) bucks-in-hand worth much more than a bush league of Maurice. Methinks Mr. Terra needs a nay-saying mentor to protect him against a gallery / museum world quite willing to exploit his innocence.
 
I would not be so certain of his vulnerability had I not visited the National Museum for Women in Art three days after pitstopping in Chicago. There, another enthusiastic amateur, Mrs. Wilhelmina Holladay and her developer / architect husband Wallace, have taken another route to fill a gap in our artistic consciousness. For one thing, they have ingeniously involved the community (in the form of corporations—United Technologies is the patron of their luminous inaugural exhibition, “American Women Artists, 1830—1930”; Phillip Morris is picking up the tab for the splendid catalog published by Harry N. Abrams, a keepsake bargain in paper at $19.95; Martin-Marietta has kicked in $1.5 million to restore the Great Hall of the 1907 Masonic Temple). And they already have $16 million in their kitty, with 380 founders having given at least $5,000. Terra’s checkbook seems to be the only visible means of his museum’s support because, according to Chicago media reports, “it’s an ego trip for Dan, so let him pay for it.” NMWA already has 55,000 members—in every state and 15 foreign countries.
 
Still I was leery about the separatism involved, especially when their advance press kit listed 187 artists, only 38 of whom I had ever heard of. (I’m willing to learn, but I could have added fifty women they didn’t have on their holding list.)
 
But Holladay didn’t do a Terra—displaying the few good, many bad and untold indifferent pieces he had amassed in his crash course in collecting. (He told me that he has 800 pieces if you include paper, at least 300 paintings.)
 
Holladay went to a distinguished art historian from Southern Methodist University, Dr. Eleanor M. Tufts, to curate the show. I can’t remember when I have seen so many new names and works that pleased me. A strange effect came over me to seriously devalue the old chestnuts of American Women’s Art. Mary Cassatt and Cecelia Beaux? Ho hum! Show me more Sarah Peale, and discoveries like Susan Eakin’s remarkable portrait of her husband Thomas.
 
I was getting writer’s cramp taking notes on my epiphanies. Dr. Tufts has covered every collection in the country to assemble this remarkable chrestomathy. If you can’t see it in D.C. (where it will be at 12th and K Street, N.W. until June 14) or at stops in Minneapolis (July 5—August 30), Hartford (September 19—November 15), San Diego (December 5—January 31, 1988), and Dallas (February 20—April 17, 1988), console yourself with the catalog (4590 MacArthur Boulevard, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20007 / 202-337-2615.
 
What this serendipitous juxtaposition of two different styles of pioneering museology proves to me is that money is not everything; in fact, it’s an impediment if bad ideas distort it. GIGO!
 
Southwell, who will discuss preparing a manuscript for publication, and Dr. Patrick Hazard, who will speak on a reviewer’s approach to public art. Both Southwell and Hazard are former college professors whose commentaries on visual arts have been published in ART MATTERS and numerous other publications.
 
The conference is open to all art writers who are currently in print, as well as novice and prospective writers. Fine arts and journalism students who are interested in learning about this discipline are especially encouraged to attend. There is no fee for participation in the Art Writers’ Conference, however, advance registration is required. The deadline for registering is June 12, and those interested can register or obtain further information by calling the ART MATTERS office at 564-2340.
 
Reprinted from Art Matters, Vol. 6-No. 9, June 1987