.png)
Daphne Farago (not shown) was a "serious" art collector. My mother spent much of her adult life – and the lion’s share of the family fortune – achieving that distinction. She began her journey with African art.
I don’t remember much about my mother's initial foray into collecting, save the five-foot-tall African mask hanging over the entry to the kitchen/dining room.
The creepy AF showpiece served as both a proclamation of mother’s South African roots and a warning about her nonexistent culinary skills.
Years later, I discovered that Sigmund Freud shared DF’s fascination with tribal art. Given Siggy's fascination with incest, I don't want to think about what that mask "meant."
Anyway, I learned to cook for myself. And, at the same time, more than a little about art and artifacts.
Winging It
By the time I was ten, Mother had transitioned to collecting American antiques. She started by buying the kind of dusty chatkes you find in New England's roadside antique stores.
As my father’s income soared, so did mother's acquisitive aspirations. Guided by beak-wetted gurus, Daphne Farago began collecting museum-quality 17th and 18th Century American furniture, rugs, paintings and pottery.
We’re talking provenance-assured Holy Grail stuff, including a full set of Windsor chairs, early American portraiture and an immaculate highboy dresser, the ne plus ultra of American antique furniture. Not to mention all the rest.
As a teenager, I found myself living in a private museum masquerading as a family home. Admission wasn't free.
Learn back in a chair? Set a drink down without a coaster? Walk on a rug with muddy shoes? I faced less anger when I was expelled from school for kicking a plastic duckpin into David Wasserman's eye.
When Daphne Farago reached peak antique, when there was no more room in the house, it was time to kick her "children" out of the nest.
Sotheby's auctioned her entire collection. Mother donated the proceeds to the Rhode Island School of Design, who used the money to expand their Benefit Street museum. Big time.
Built in the “industrial aesthetic,” the two-story Daphne Farago Wing added five new galleries to the museum's footprint. The spaces are all dedicated to...
Contemporary Art
That was mother’s new bag. Well, not exactly.
The Farago family matriarch assembled a world-class collection of contemporary American crafts: furniture, glass, jewelry, metalwork and basketry.
As my mother entered her twilight years, facing the final curtain, she donated her second major collection to The Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The MFA dedicated a small gallery to the Daphne Farago Collection.
Like an adult piano player who only values childhood's painful practice in retrospect, mother's hunger for important art left me with an roving eye for – and an interest in – high-quality art.
So when my Ridiculously Random Motorcycle Tour rocked-up to Cincinnati, agiant robot standing guard outside the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) lured me within.
According to The Guardian, the Porkopolis art repository is an example of "cutting edge Deconstructivist architecture" filled with "acute and obtuse angles, open and compressed spaces."
In other words, it's a fantastically ugly building that relates to its neighbors with less grace than George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium.
Eye Candy
I'm not saying that the contemporary art scene is a scam, created and perpetuated by a circle-jerk of self-appointed insiders more concerned about political correctness and, of course money, than artistic skill or vision.
Oh wait. I am. That said...
Perched on a bench just inside CAC's entrance, Casey Millard's Shark Girl (top of post) is the exception that proves the rule.
It's a genuine artistic statement; a sculpture that forces us to re-examine our ideas about femininity. Or just have a good laugh.
A sound that was swallowed by the CAC's cold, cavernous lobby. The gateway to a white-walled gallery bisected by a carpet of striped candies. And nothing else.
This installation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (L.A.), 1991, consists of an endless supply of candy sprawled across the Contemporary Arts Center’s floor.
Visitors may select a piece, and choose to eat it, which allows their experience of the artwork to potentially engage all five senses.
Gonzalez-Torres avoided offering concrete explanations for the meanings behind his installations, instead preferring that his viewers develop their own interpretations, whether they choose to take a candy or not.
The candies may gradually deplete as time passes, encouraging repeat visitors to contemplate what meanings may be drawn from the installation’s evolution.
The work’s caption specifies an ‘endless supply’ of candies, indicating the possibility of replenishment, renewal, and perpetuity regardless of the physical installation.
A security guard sat across from candy carpet; no one even thought of eating one of the candies spread out across the floor. My interpretation of Sr. Gonzalez-Torres' ode to tooth decay? Yawn.
I didn't linger at any of the museum's other equally daffy (not taffy) exhibits. There was nothing inspiring or admirable on display.
Call me a philistine, but my visit to CAC reminded me of nothing so much as the British term "cack." A slang term for excrement.
I headed for the river, hankering for something completely different...
The Taft Museum
Charles Phelps Taft (not shown ) was President William Howard Taft's half-brother. Charles was a Cincinnati newspaper editor, baseball team owner (twice over) and U.S. Congressman.
Charles’ marriage to Anna Sinton, the daughter of Irish-born industrialist David Sinton, subsidized his pursuits.
Daddy Sinton made his fortune as a Civil War pig iron profiteer. In 1900, the old man popped his clogs.
Anna inherited an estate worth $20m ($750m in today's money). His bereaved daughter and her husband continued the old man's tradition of buying fine art and stashing it in their Cincinnati manse.
The mansion's now home to its former fam's "greatest hits" collection of pre-modern art. A Rembrandt, Ming vases, Limoges enamels – nothing that needs a museum label to fully appreciate or "understand.” With one exception...
Cincinnati painter Henry François Farny's 1904 word Song of the Talking Wire. Here's the museum label:
A Plains Indian man presses his ear against a telegraph pole. Wearing an eagle feather and holding a rifle, the lone hunter has slung three deer onto his packhorse. A skull in the snow represents the bison, once the lifeblood of the Plains peoples but nearly extinct by the 1880s.
The sun sets over the winter landscape, signaling the twilight of the man’s way of life. Long before Henry Farny painted this scene, Native Americans had already suffered for generations as the United States government forced group after group onto reservations.
What's the bet present-day visitors don't "get it"?
The Indian depicted isn't excessively chilled or chilling. He's trying to "hear" the signal carried by the white man's wires. Because he couldn't possibly understand the technology. Put that on your wall and smoke it!
A Benchmark?
I reckon my mother's crafts collection was informed by her early agglomeration of American art and artifacts. She chose objects whose modernity was firmly rooted in the skills and discipline of “traditional arts."
Daphne Farago somehow grokked the truth of Salvator Dali's quote "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." Nothing of great value, anyway.
Click here to follow The Wandering Jew on Instagram
Comentarios